Aspirations were in the air all round, like a lot of hungry ghosts.
He realised that, if tongue be given to them, the flavour vanishes from ideas which haunt the soul.
Again the violinist played.
"Cock gracious!" said the Prussian poet, falling into English as the fiddle ceased: "Colossal! 'Aber, wie er ist grossartig'!""Have you read that thing of Besom's?" asked shrill voice behind.
"Oh, my dear fellow! too horrid for words; he ought to be hanged!""The man's dreadful," pursued the voice, shriller than ever; "nothing but a volcanic eruption would cure him."Shelton turned in alarm to look at the authors of these statements.
They were two men of letters talking of a third.
"'C'est un grand naif, vous savez,'" said the second speaker.
"These fellows don't exist," resumed the first; his small eyes gleamed with a green light, his whole face had a look as if he gnawed himself. Though not a man of letters, Shelton could not help recognising from those eyes what joy it was to say those words:
"These fellows don't exist!"
"Poor Besom! You know what Moulter said . . ."Shelton turned away, as if he had been too close to one whose hair smelt of cantharides; and, looking round the room, he frowned. With the exception of his cousin, he seemed the only person there of English blood. Americans, Mesopotamians, Irish, Italians, Germans, Scotch, and Russians. He was not contemptuous of them for being foreigners; it was simply that God and the climate had made him different by a skin or so.
But at this point his conclusions were denied (as will sometimes happen) by his introduction to an Englishman--a Major Somebody, who, with smooth hair and blond moustache, neat eyes and neater clothes, seemed a little anxious at his own presence there. Shelton took a liking to him, partly from a fellow-feeling, and partly because of the gentle smile with which he was looking at his wife. Almost before he had said "How do you do?" he was plunged into a discussion on imperialism.
"Admitting all that," said Shelton, " what I hate is the humbug with which we pride ourselves on benefiting the whole world by our so-called civilising methods."
The soldier turned his reasonable eyes.
"But is it humbug?"
Shelton saw his argument in peril. If we really thought it, was it humbug? He replied, however:
"Why should we, a small portion of the world's population, assume that our standards are the proper ones for every kind of race? If it 's not humbug, it 's sheer stupidity."The soldier, without taking his hands out of his pockets, but by a forward movement of his face showing that he was both sincere and just, re-replied:
"Well, it must be a good sort of stupidity; it makes us the nation that we are."Shelton felt dazed. The conversation buzzed around him; he heard the smiling prophet saying, "Altruism, altruism," and in his voice a something seemed to murmur, "Oh, I do so hope I make a good impression!"He looked at the soldier's clear-cut head with its well-opened eyes, the tiny crow's-feet at their corners, the conventional moustache; he envied the certainty of the convictions lying under that well-parted hair.
