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!” he 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?
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.