‘You knew nothing at all about me then, what I had done or where I had been?’
‘How should I?’ said John.
The other laughed a little.
‘How should you indeed? but I had a kind of a hope you might. You don’t even know what I did to get myself into such a scrape? It was nothing brutal like poor Joe’s.’
‘I wish,’ said John, ‘you would not tell me any more: if I can help you to work to keep out of the mire, I will do it; but if it is only how you fell in to it, why should I know? I don’t want to know.’
‘Why, indeed?’ echoed the stranger, ‘and yet one has a sort of desire to tell. After all, you know, after thinking it over in every possible light for fourteen years, I cannot see the absolute sin there is in writing another man’s name. On the face of it, it’s no great thing—not so much as telling a lie, which anybody does without thinking. It’s only a more formal sort of a lie. Offences against the person are evident crimes; to injure another man, to put him in danger of his life, to give him pain, that I can understand; or to rob him of what is perhaps his children’s bread. But to write his name instead of your own! I have had a great deal of time to think of it. I cannot see, after all, the criminality of that.’
‘It’s one of the worst of crimes,’ said John, ‘it strikes at the root of everything. Why, forgery——’
‘Yes, give a dog an ill name,’ said the other dispassionate thinker, ‘call it forgery, and it becomes a bogey and frightens everybody. And yet, after all, apart from the motive, it’s the simplest action. Then there’s the other thing, drink—which is so often the first step (I hope you have no leanings that way, though I seem to excuse it—for, right or wrong, it’s ruin)—well, there’s no sin, you know, in that. Wine’s not vice, nor even whisky. No one will tell me that to take two, three, or indeed any number of glasses of anything is vice.’
‘Excess is vice,’ cried John. He felt himself redden with indignant fervour. The idea that any man could sit by him calmly and look him in the face and defend the indefensible—take up the cause of vice and criminality: he could not believe his ears. The criminal generally (so far as he was aware, especially the drunkard, of which kind the young man had seen in the way of his work some fine examples) is too apt to be unctuous in his repentance and quite uncompromising in his denunciation of his vice. To hear a man in this calm and apparently reasonable way discuss it as an open question was entirely new to him.
‘Excess is—excess,’ said this philosopher, ‘very bad for you, in whatever way you consider it; for the stomach and the constitution, also for your prospects in life, to which it is destruction;—that’s indisputable. But how far you can be said to break the moral law— To be sure you may take higher ground or lower ground. You may say that whatever obscures your brain and makes you incapable of reflection and thought, which is the spiritual side of the question; or, on the other hand, whatever visibly interferes with your comfort and destroys your career— But that last is mercenary,’ he added, with a wave of his hand, ‘and things that are mercenary and based on self-interest belong to a lower class of motives altogether; not what we were discussing at all.’