Thus grappled, they seemed to sway as a double monster heroically
proportioned, a Herculean group against the flat light of the pale-brown
windows. So superbly matched were they in physique that they remained
almost motionless, swaying very slightly and with difficulty under the
strain of their utmost effort. That stillness and that silence
accompanying so supreme a struggle, were startling, portentous, and
unnaturally impressive, as though the contained violence within were too
mighty, too self-sufficient, to seek the relief of any visible outlet
whether of noise or movement. Their meeting was a muffled encounter of
force with force; it had not the crash of a collision. So they remained,
arrested, stirred only by that almost imperceptible rocking, until doubt
might have arisen whether they so held one another grasped with deadly
intent, or, as the likeness between them more palpably emerged, in a
brotherly welding against some danger imminent and extraneous. Their
feet yielded not at all from their original planting upon the boards,
their arms flung around one another had neither relaxed nor shifted, the
slight angle at which their bodies were bent remained the same. The
group they formed was of bronze beneath the spanning iron girders. But
indeed the question became one of endurance, while the body’s tension,
flung on the hollowed hips, the quivering thighs, the knotted calves,
and lean ankles, strained and cracked under the sustained tautening of
human sinew. The one who was first to yield, by so much as the stagger
of a foot, would find the advantage narrowly pursued, his opponent
weighing down upon him, pressing him hard across their meagre
margin.—Yet, were they meeting in alliance or hostility, the two
brothers, so alike in their carved features, in the duplication of torso
and huge opposing members?
Very slowly they bent together, straining; very slowly straightened
themselves again to their formation of deadlock. All this strife took
place without a sound, and seemed to occupy a long period of time, as
though that group were permanent in the gallery, taking on the dingy
monochrome and adapting itself to the proportions of the gallery’s
enormous setting. Nan, the impotent onlooker, could foresee no ending,
no outcome. She saw that Gregory stared into his brother’s face with a
concentration of hatred. There was very little to indicate the intense
pressure of strength that each was putting forth. But a difference was
creeping in,—certainly a difference was creeping in. Gregory’s
determination was becoming the determination of misgiving, Silas’s that
of ultimate mastery. He did not appear triumphant, but quietly sure.
Throughout, he had been guided by that security of vouchsafed insight.
Nan dared not stir. She continued to kneel beside Linnet, who still lay
with his eyes closed, and the mark of a bruise blackening rapidly on his
temple. She was deeply thankful for his unconsciousness.
The other two held her eyes. Gregory shifted a foot backwards to steady
his balance; it was their first definite movement. Their faces were
close; not angry, but concentrated, and Silas’s was like a cast mask of
unflinching patience. It frightened Nan to look at Silas’s face, he was
so immeasurably beyond both the greatness and the smallness of things
human. He was like an incarnation of purpose, summoned for one set,
finite task. His pressure was beginning to tell upon Gregory, who sought
to improve his grip, but lost ground in so doing, and, staggering
backwards, was driven to prop himself against the side of a vat. Here
their grapple became more desperate, more final, in the same unbroken
silence. Nan’s imagination could not extend to reasons or to outcome; it
did not extend beyond the struggle of the moment. She was numbed; all
energy was absorbed by that group of wrestling Titans.
She bent down to Linnet, whose eyes had opened dazedly upon her. When
she looked up again she saw a change. Silas had stooped until his arms
clasped his brother below the waist. For one terrible moment she saw
Gregory lifted off his feet, his arms flung impotently up, his body bent
back in its supreme effort, his throat extended, to give vent to the
most hideous sound she had ever heard uttered. Silas bore him up for a
moment in that gesture of appalling ravishment, rearing like a centaur
in the full magnificence of his strength; and with one mighty heave cast
the burden from him into the boiling yellow slime of the vat.