She hesitated a moment,—then raised her eyes, blue and steady in their wistful, half-tender expression.
“It is nothing against you,” she said, quietly. “It is only sorrow that you who have lived so long and seen so much, and studied such deep and clever things, should be so hard and unfeeling for poor humanity. You show such indifference to the sufferings of the men in this terrible war—you never seem to consider the heart-break and agony of the women left at home—the mothers, the wives, the sweethearts—and so—you see”—she paused, with a slight tremble in her voice—“I am disappointed, because when I heard you were considered a very great man in your own line of learning, I thought you would probably be great in other things as well.”
He looked at her in a kind of quizzical amusement.
“Dear child, that does not follow by any means!” he said. “Most unfortunately for yourself you are an idealist, which means that you put your own mind’s colour on a world’s common grey canvas. When the colour comes off and the dull grey is seen, you are disappointed, and you feel you will not try putting on the same tint again. I’m afraid your life will be a repetition of this tiresome experience! And I’m sorry—yes, very sorry, you have attempted to idealise me, for I couldn’t live up to it!”
He rose from his chair and stood with his back to the fire, pipe in hand.
“You find me indifferent to the war,” he went on. “I am. I freely confess it. The war is a result of arrogance and stupidity—two human defects for which I have unbounded contempt. The war also exhibits in the most glaring manner the sheep-like tendency of men—they follow where they are led without seeking to know the reason why. If every male creature in every country flatly refused to be a soldier, tyrants and governments would be at a loss for material wherewith to fall upon each other—they could not coerce a whole world that had once made up its mind. It is because there is no strength of will in the blind majority that war is allowed still to exist—and you are right—I have no sympathy with it. To me the ‘roll of honour’ is all bunkum!—and I have no patience with people who smirk their thanks for a medal from the king in exchange for the life of a slaughtered man. Pooh! Talk of the car of the Juggernaut! The abbatoir in Flanders is a thousand times worse, because we are supposed to be a civilised, not a savage, people, though to my notion we are more savage than the primal men who broke each other’s skulls with stone hatchets. I can see no improvement—we are the same old blood-thirsty, greedy race!”
He spoke with a fervour that was almost eloquence, and knocking the ashes of his pipe out, he placed it on the mantel-shelf. Then bending his eyes on the Sentimentalist, he smiled.
“There! Now you know!” he said. “I am perfectly indifferent to the war. I don’t care how many fools kill each other! I haven’t the least sympathy with men who go to have themselves hacked about and disfigured for life, or blown into atoms by shells. They would have shown much better sense by treating the members of their stupid Governments to the same sort of fate.”
“But”—and here the Sentimentalist plucked up courage to speak—“if we did not fight, Germany would dominate the world!”
“And why didn’t we see that before?” he demanded. “Germany was dominating the world in every corner of trade—‘peaceful penetration’ as it was called,—and if the stagey Kaiser hadn’t jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, under the demented notion that he was a new sort of Charlemagne she would have dominated it. And we should have gone on in our comfortable idleness and luxury, getting lazier and lazier, and allowing Germany to do everything for us, because it’s so much trouble to do anything for ourselves—except—play tennis and football!”