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_ You have seen, perhaps, a man whose heart was weighted by a great
woe. You have seen the eye darken, the soul fag, and the spirit
congeal under the breath of an icy disaster. At ten-thirty of
this particular evening Cowperwood, sitting alone in the library
of his Michigan Avenue house, was brought face to face with the
fact that he had lost. He had built so much on the cast of this
single die. It was useless to say to himself that he could go
into the council a week later with a modified ordinance or could
wait until the storm had died out. He refused himself these
consolations. Already he had battled so long and so vigorously,
by every resource and subtlety which his mind had been able to
devise. All week long on divers occasions he had stood in the
council-chamber where the committee had been conducting its hearings.
Small comfort to know that by suits, injunctions, appeals, and
writs to intervene he could tie up this transit situation and leave
it for years and years the prey of lawyers, the despair of the
city, a hopeless muddle which would not be unraveled until he and
his enemies should long be dead. This contest had been so long
in the brewing, he had gone about it with such care years before.
And now the enemy had been heartened by a great victory. His
aldermen, powerful, hungry, fighting men all--like those picked
soldiers of the ancient Roman emperors--ruthless, conscienceless,
as desperate as himself, had in their last redoubt of personal
privilege fallen, weakened, yielded. How could he hearten them to
another struggle--how face the blazing wrath of a mighty populace
that had once learned how to win? Others might enter here
--Haeckelheimer, Fishel, any one of a half-dozen Eastern giants
--and smooth out the ruffled surface of the angry sea that he had
blown to fury. But as for him, he was tired, sick of Chicago,
sick of this interminable contest. Only recently he had promised
himself that if he were to turn this great trick he would never
again attempt anything so desperate or requiring so much effort.
He would not need to. The size of his fortune made it of little
worth. Besides, in spite of his tremendous vigor, he was getting
on.
Since he had alienated Aileen he was quite alone, out of touch
with any one identified with the earlier years of his life. His
all-desired Berenice still evaded him. True, she had shown lately
a kind of warming sympathy; but what was it? Gracious tolerance,
perhaps--a sense of obligation? Certainly little more, he felt.
He looked into the future, deciding heavily that he must fight on,
whatever happened, and then--
While he sat thus drearily pondering, answering a telephone call
now and then, the door-bell rang and the servant brought a card
which he said had been presented by a young woman who declared
that it would bring immediate recognition. Glancing at it,
Cowperwood jumped to his feet and hurried down-stairs into the one
presence he most craved.
There are compromises of the spirit too elusive and subtle to be
traced in all their involute windings. From that earliest day
when Berenice Fleming had first set eyes on Cowperwood she had
been moved by a sense of power, an amazing and fascinating
individuality. Since then by degrees he had familiarized her with
a thought of individual freedom of action and a disregard of current
social standards which were destructive to an earlier conventional
view of things. Following him through this Chicago fight, she had
been caught by the wonder of his dreams; he was on the way toward
being one of the world's greatest money giants. During his recent
trips East she had sometimes felt that she was able to read in the
cast of his face the intensity of this great ambition, which had
for its ultimate aim--herself. So he had once assured her. Always
with her he had been so handsome, so pleading, so patient.
So here she was in Chicago to-night, the guest of friends at the
Richelieu, and standing in Cowperwood's presence.
"Why, Berenice!" he said, extending a cordial hand.
"When did you arrive in town? Whatever brings you here?" He had
once tried to make her promise that if ever her feeling toward him
changed she would let him know of it in some way. And here she
was to-night--on what errand? He noted her costume of brown silk
and velvet--how well it seemed to suggest her cat-like grace!
"You bring me here," she replied, with an indefinable something
in her voice which was at once a challenge and a confession. "I
thought from what I had just been reading that you might really
need me now."
"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.
THE END.
The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser. _
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