Baron Fritz had heard this often, but he never heard it freshly without an inward shudder, such as a religious man feels before a blasphemy. Othmar, merely as a man, seemed to him a fanciful dreamer, an unsatisfactory anomaly, an unphilosophic thinker, whose theories were always playing the deuce with his interest, and whose sympathies ran away with him like half-broken horses. But Othmar, as the chief of his House, could do no wrong, and had to be obeyed, even if he rushed on his own destruction.
‘You should marry for sake of posterity,’ he reiterated. ‘You are so happily and exceptionally situated that you can choose wherever you please. No living woman would refuse you. You should seek physical charms for sake of your offspring and high lineage also; the rest is a mere matter of taste.’
‘The rest is only a trifle! Only character, mind, and feeling—the three things which determine happiness and influence life more than anything else.’
Baron Fritz made a little gesture of indifference: ‘I imagine anyone bien élevé would not err in any of these points. Happiness one usually finds with the wives of others. Not that I would discourage you if you be inclined——’
‘I am not inclined,’ said Othmar, brusquely. ‘I only say that character is never considered by men and women when they marry; yet it is what makes or mars a life. When a marriage is announced, what is discussed? The respective fortunes of those concerned, then their good looks or their lack of them; perhaps someone adds that he is bon garçon, or someone says sa taille est jolie, or, on the other hand, they may say he is a fool, or she has ugly feet; but you never hear a word as to their characters, their sympathies, or their principles. It is why all marriages are at best but a compromise between two ill-assorted dispositions.’
‘Make yours well-assorted,’ said Baron Fritz. ‘If you attach so much to character, let character be your study; myself, I have always considered that marriage is a means of continuing a race, so that it legally can continue to transmit property; I have never known why people imported fine sentiments into a legal transaction. It is taking a false view of a social duty to look for personal pleasure out of it; indeed, if a man be in love with his wife he will probably communicate his passion to her, which is undesirable, because it awakens her senses, and ultimately leads to her taking a lover, or lovers, which again introduces uncertainty into the legal enjoyment and transmission of property.’
Othmar smiled: ‘Really, Baron, you are the most profoundly immoral man I ever met. You would always, too, subordinate humanity to property. All human actions should, according to you, only tend to the consolidation and concentration of fortune; now, there is no possible theory of human action more demoralising.’
‘That is a matter of opinion,’ said the Baron. ‘But unless your forefathers had carried that theory into practice, you would now be taming wild horses in Croatia, or probably you—Otho Othmar in your entity as you are—would not exist at all, for certainly your father would not have wedded with an English aristocrat.’
‘It is a humiliating reflection,’ said Othmar, ‘that one’s existence depended on the accidental union of two persons; indeed, I decline to believe it. I am convinced that the real ego, the impersonal entity which has been called the soul for want of knowing what to call it, must have had its own independent existence; the envelope it is slipped into is the accident; let us think so at all events. It is more consoling than your notion that the entire life of A. depended on the chance of B. cohabiting with C.; and that if B. had wedded D. instead, A. would never have existed at all, but another and totally different being would have done so—say Z.’
The Baron shrugged his shoulders. Why, he wondered, why on earth should a man care about a pre-existence, or a spiritual existence, at all, who had everything that his heart could desire in his terrestrial life? He could imagine that starving poets or hungry theologians comforted themselves with those fancies, but Othmar!——