The Titan 45 страница

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" You mean--? " he inquired, looking at her with vivid eyes. There

he paused.

" That I have made up my mind. Besides, I ought to pay some time. "

" Berenice! " be exclaimed, reproachfully.

" No, I don't mean that, either, " she replied. " I am sorry now.

I think I understand you better. Besides, " she added, with a sudden

gaiety that had a touch of self-consolation in it, " I want to. "

" Berenice! Truly? "

" Can't you tell? " she queried.

" Well, then, " he smiled, holding out his hands; and, to his

amazement, she came forward.

" I can't explain myself to myself quite, " she added, in a hurried

low, eager tone, " but I couldn't stay away any longer. I had the

feeling that you might be going to lose here for the present. But

I want you to go somewhere else if you have to--London or Paris.

The world won't understand us quite--but I do. "

" Berenice! " He smothered her cheek and hair.

" Not so close, please. And there aren't to be any other ladies,

unless you want me to change my mind. "

" Not another one, as I hope to keep you. You will share everything

I have. . . "

For answer--

How strange are realities as opposed to illusion!

In Retrospect

The world is dosed with too much religion. Life is to be learned

from life, and the professional moralist is at best but a manufacturer

of shoddy wares. At the ultimate remove, God or the life force,

if anything, is an equation, and at its nearest expression for man

--the contract social--it is that also. Its method of expression

appears to be that of generating the individual, in all his glittering

variety and scope, and through him progressing to the mass with its

problems. In the end a balance is invariably struck wherein the

mass subdues the individual or the individual the mass--for the

time being. For, behold, the sea is ever dancing or raging.

In the mean time there have sprung up social words and phrases

expressing a need of balance--of equation. These are right,

justice, truth, morality, an honest mind, a pure heart--all words

meaning: a balance must be struck. The strong must not be too

strong; the weak not too weak. But without variation how could

the balance be maintained? Nirvana! Nirvana! The ultimate, still,

equation.

Rushing like a great comet to the zenith, his path a blazing trail,

Cowperwood did for the hour illuminate the terrors and wonders of

individuality. But for him also the eternal equation--the pathos

of the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an

ultimate balance must be struck. Of the strange, tortured, terrified

reflection of those who, caught in his wake, were swept from the

normal and the commonplace, what shall we say? Legislators by the

hundred, who were hounded from politics into their graves; a

half-hundred aldermen of various councils who were driven grumbling

or whining into the limbo of the dull, the useless, the commonplace.

A splendid governor dreaming of an ideal on the one hand, succumbing

to material necessity on the other, traducing the spirit that aided

him the while he tortured himself with his own doubts. A second

governor, more amenable, was to be greeted by the hisses of the

populace, to retire brooding and discomfited, and finally to take

his own life. Schryhart and Hand, venomous men both, unable to

discover whether they had really triumphed, were to die eventually,

puzzled. A mayor whose greatest hour was in thwarting one who

contemned him, lived to say: " It is a great mystery. He was a

strange man. " A great city struggled for a score of years to

untangle that which was all but beyond the power of solution--a

true Gordian knot.

And this giant himself, rushing on to new struggles and new

difficulties in an older land, forever suffering the goad of a

restless heart--for him was no ultimate peace, no real understanding,

but only hunger and thirst and wonder. Wealth, wealth, wealth! A

new grasp of a new great problem and its eventual solution. Anew

the old urgent thirst for life, and only its partial quenchment.

In Dresden a palace for one woman, in Rome a second for another.

In London a third for his beloved Berenice, the lure of beauty

ever in his eye. The lives of two women wrecked, a score of victims

despoiled; Berenice herself weary, yet brilliant, turning to others

for recompense for her lost youth. And he resigned, and yet

not--loving, understanding, doubting, caught at last by the drug

of a personality which he could not gainsay.

What shall we say of life in the last analysis--" Peace, be still"?

Or shall we battle sternly for that equation which we know will

be maintained whether we battle or no, in order that the strong

become not too strong or the weak not too weak? Or perchance shall

we say (sick of dullness): " Enough of this. I will have strong

meat or die! " And die? Or live?

Each according to his temperament--that something which he has not

made and cannot always subdue, and which may not always be subdued

by others for him. Who plans the steps that lead lives on to

splendid glories, or twist them into gnarled sacrifices, or make

of them dark, disdainful, contentious tragedies? The soul within?

And whence comes it? Of God?

What thought engendered the spirit of Circe, or gave to a Helen

the lust of tragedy? What lit the walls of Troy? Or prepared the

woes of an Andromache? By what demon counsel was the fate of Hamlet

prepared? And why did the weird sisters plan ruin to the murderous

Scot?

Double, double toil and trouble,

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

In a mulch of darkness are bedded the roots of endless sorrows--and

of endless joys. Canst thou fix thine eye on the morning? Be glad.

And if in the ultimate it blind thee, be glad also! Thou hast lived.

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