"No, I have not forgotten John Ball, but I am not made of the stuff of martyrs. Malcolm, I love life and love, and the beautiful things still saved from the wreck of worlds. You would make me—an artist—forsake it all, and go shoulder a rifle, or carry a red flag. I have a life given me, let me live. I am not a fighter, let me be; let me live here in this happy oasis in the desert of men. I can't help you, I can only lay down my life on a barricade."
"That is brute selfishness!"
"No, it is reason. I know myself: I am of no use to you; I thought I might be once, and I tried. Everything sickens me,—every detail of the life that is now, the stock exchange and newspapers, alleged art and trade, and the whole false principle that is under it all. I can't fight them, the contest sickens me. It is all wrong, the principle of your reform; you are wrong yourself. I can't have hope, and if I can't have hope I can't fight. How can I fight for a reform that, if it were carried, would only take the power out of the hands of a sordid gang of capitalists and throw it into the hands of a sordid gang of emancipated slaves? Life would be as hideous under their régime as now. You would change the ownership of cities, but you would not destroy them. You would change the control of machinery, but you would not destroy it. You would, in a word, glorify the machine, magnify the details, ignore the soul of it all,—and the result? Stagnation. I have read your Utopias,—they are hopelessly Philistine; their remedies are stimulants that leave the disease untouched. Malcolm, you will fail, for you do not see far enough. 'Ill would change be at whiles, were it not for the change beyond the change.' They are the words of your own prophet; you will, if you succeed, bring in the change, and it will be ill indeed. I wait for 'the change beyond the change.'"
"I deny that the change that we shall bring will be ill; it will be the next step beyond where we are now. There is no turning back: the law of evolution drives us onward always; each new position won is nobler than the last."
"Ah, that 'law of evolution'—I knew you would quote it to me sooner or later. You hug the pleasant and cheerful theory to your hearts, and twist history to fit its fancied laws. You cannot see that the law of evolution works by a system of waves advancing and retreating; yet as you say the tide goes forward always. Civilisations have risen and fallen in the past as ours has risen and is falling now. Does not history repeat itself? Can you not see that this is one of the periods of decadence that alternate inevitably with the periods of advance? The tide—
'Was once too at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long-withdrawing roar
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.'
"Yes, it is the decadence, the Roman decadence over again. Were Lucian to come among us now he would be quite at ease—no, not that, for in one thing we are utterly changed; so sordid is our decadence, so gross, so contemptibly material, that we are denied the consolations of art vouchsafed to his own land. Even in the days of her death Rome could boast the splendour of a luxuriant literature, the glory of beauty of environment, the supremacy of an art-appreciation that blinded men's eyes to the shadow of the end. But for us, in the meanness of our fall, we have no rags of art wherewith to cover our nakedness. Wagner is dead, and Turner and Rossetti; Burne-Jones and Watts will go soon, and Pater will follow Newman and Arnold. The night is at hand."
He lifted a small hammer and struck a velvet-voiced bell that stood on the Arabian table of cedar inlaid with nacre and ivory. Murad came out of the darkness, and at a gesture from Aurelian filled the great hookah of jade and amber with the tobacco mingled with honey and opium and cinnamon, placed a bright coal in the cup, and gave the curling stem wound with gold thread to his master.
Malcolm watched it all as in a midsummer dream; for once he was succumbing to the subtle influences that were seducing his yielding senses. He could not reply to Aurelian, he lacked now even the desire. The slow and musical voice, so delicately cadenced, had grown infinitely pleasing to his unfamiliar ears, strangely fascinating in its mellow charm. Wondering, he found himself yielding to it,—at first defiantly, then sulkily, then with careless enjoyment, forgetful of everything save his new delight in his strange surroundings.
The rose-water gurgled and sobbed in the jade hookah; thin lines of odorous smoke rose sinuously to the silken awning that hung above the terrace, dead in the hot August night. For a time neither spoke; then at length Aurelian said, with a more sorrowful gravity than before,—