The sympathy between the two was so perfect that Paul Mario knew the question to refer not to his private plans but to his part in the world drama.
"Beyond daily descending lower in my own esteem—nothing."
"Yet you might do so much."
"I know," said Paul Mario. "But—it awes me."
If his work had not already proved him, the genius of the man must have been rendered apparent by his entire lack of false modesty. Praise and censure alike left him uninfluenced—although few artists can exist without a modicum of the former: he knew himself born to sway the minds of millions and was half fearful of his self-knowledge. "I know," he said, and pipe in hand he gazed wistfully across the valley.
A faint breeze crept through the fir avenue, bearing with it a muffled booming sound which was sufficient to raise the curtain of distance—never truly opaque for such as he—and to display to that acute inner vision a reeking battlefield. Before his shuddering soul defiled men maimed, blind, bleeding from ghastly hurts; men long dead. Women he saw in lowly hovels, weeping over cots fashioned from rough boxes; women, dry-eyed, mutely tragic, surrounded by softness, luxury and servitude, wearing love gifts of a hand for ever stilled, dreaming of lover-words whispered in a voice for ever mute. He seemed to float spiritually over the whole world upon that wave of sound and to find the whole world stricken, desolate, its fairness mockery and its music a sob.
"At the moment, no doubt," said Don, "you feel as though you had been knocked out of the ring in the first round. But this phase will pass. The point is, that you never had any business in the ring at all. No quarrel ever actually begins with a blow, and no quarrel was ever terminated by one. Genius—perverted, I'll grant you, but nevertheless genius—started this war; and we are English enough to think that we can end it by brute force. Pass the matches."
"You are really of opinion," asked Paul dreamily, "that I should be doing my utmost if I stuck to my last?"
"Unquestionably. There are a thousand and one things of vital interest to all humanity which have not been said yet, which only you can say, a thousand and one aspects of the Deluge not yet presented to the world. Above all, Paul, there are millions of poor bereaved souls who suffer dumbly and vaguely wonder for what crime they are being punished."
"Would you have me tell them that their faith, their churches, are to blame?"