Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/83

For a time, it can be amusing: exerting your own will, and resisting all the other people’s wills, that they try to put over you. But at a certain point, a nausea sets in at the very middle of me: my soul is nauseated. My soul is nauseated, and there is nothing but death ahead, unless I find something else.”

Kate listened in silence. She knew the road he had gone, but she herself had not yet come to the end of it. As yet she was still strong in the pride of her own—her very own will.

“Oh, people are repulsive!” she cried.

“My own will becomes even more repulsive at last,” he said. “My own will, merely as my own will, is even more distasteful to me than other people’s wills. From being the god in my own machine, I must either abdicate, or die of disgust—self-disgust, at that.”

“How amusing!” she cried.

“It is rather funny,” he said sardonically.

“And then?” she asked, looking at him with a certain malevolent challenge.

He looked back at her slowly, with an ironical light in his eyes.

“Then!” he repeated. “Then!—I ask, what else is there in the world, besides human will, human appetite? because ideas and ideals are only instruments of human will and appetite.”

“Not entirely,” said Kate. “They may be disinterested.”

“May they? If the appetite isn’t interested, the will is.”

“Why not?” she mocked. “We can’t be mere detached blocks.”

“It nauseates me—I look for something else.”

“And what do you find?”

“My own manhood!”

“What does that mean?” she cried, jeering.

“If you looked, and found your own womanhood, you would know.”

“But I have my own womanhood!” she cried.

“And then—when you find your own manhood—your womanhood,” he went on, smiling faintly at her—”then you know it is not your own, to do as you like with. You don’t have it of your own will. It comes from—from the