"But you have not explained why he should kill himself at all," he said. "A man as you say scared of losing his life."
"Well," said Mr. Spokesly slowly. "He may have seen himself.... I mean he may have realized he had lost his life already, as you might say."
"How, how?" demanded the young man, very much interested. "What do you mean by already?"
"You might call it that," muttered Mr. Spokesly, "with his ideas about women. Couldn't bear to talk about them. And he didn't like men much better. So I say he'd lost his life already. Nothing to live for, if a man hates women. And he did. That's one thing I am sure about."
"You are a psychologist," said the young man, very much amused. "You believe in the inspiration of love."
"Naturally," said Mr. Spokesly. "A man believes in what he understands."
The young man nodded and turned away with the slight smile of one who realizes he is dealing with a person of limited intelligence.
"You mean we believe in what we have cognition of," he amended in a harsh tone. "No doubt you are right. But your captain may have had beliefs and fidelities beyond your cognition. Perhaps he saw, suddenly, as in a flash, you understand, the ultimate futility of existence. He might. Englishmen don't as a rule. But if he had lived in the East a long while, he might."
"But surely you don't advance that as a tenable hypothesis," exclaimed Mr. Marsh. This man, who had contrived to retain the illusions and metaphysics of the comfortably fixed classes of England amid the magnificent scenery and human squalor of Ottoman life, was frankly appalled by the young man's ferocious gaiety while he advanced what he called his theory of philosophic nihilism. That was the disconcerting feature of the affair. This Herr Leutnant Lietherthal actually spoke with pleasure of a time when humanity should have ceased to exist! Mr. Marsh would almost have preferred a technical enemy to desire the extinction of Englishmen. It was more logical, and he said as much as they adjourned to a smaller room to supper.
"Oh, don't I?" exclaimed the Herr Leutnant, holding up his glass of Kümmel. That was his way of being revenged upon the country where he had lived many happy years. At Oxford, whither the munificence of Rhodes brought him, his sensuous mind had delighted in the apparently opposed but really identical studies of philosophy and philology. Following the example of his tutor at Leipzig, he had often neglected classrooms in his studies in English, and gone into the slums of great towns and on the dock-sides of London and Liverpool for idioms. And he got them. "Oh, don't I?" he exclaimed, laughing, and added: "I go the whole hog, my friend." And only that subtle under-twang, that strong humming of the vocal chords in his vowels remained to detect him. He was addicted to saying that he had discovered the secret of the English power, which was, he announced, their mongrel origin. "A nation of mongrels who think of nothing but thoroughbred horses and dogs," he had described them to Evanthia, who could not possibly gauge the accuracy of the sentence. Just now, as he set down his glass, he added that he went "the whole hog, my friend, as your graceful English expresses it." And then, in reply to Mr. Marsh's shocked comment, he said: