The Recompense
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!" 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?
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.