“Was it good?”
“It was horrible! The man’s mind is as agile and snaky as his hands!”
“I’d like to meet him again.”
“You never will with my aid,” said Paul, with a sudden dark sense of foreboding. He looked at Vanny, whose dark eyes gazed into his without their accustomed sauciness; there was a faint glimmer of anxiety in them.
“Why—Paul, I’ve never seen you so upset. How can any person affect you so?”
“Ugh!” said Paul, with a shudder. “He’s inhuman!”
CHAPTER IX
FUTILITY
FOR several weeks, with occasional breaks in routine, Paul and Edmond appeared often together. Together they visited the various havens of the pleasure-bound—the hotels, cabarets, and night-clubs. They listened to numberless dance orchestras, watched an endless parade of dancing couples, consumed a multitude of cigarettes and a not inconsiderable quantity of poor liquor. And Paul was still puzzled; certainly his employer was not seeking this alone in his search for atmosphere. Nor, to the best of Paul’s knowledge was he himself contributing much to this pursuit; occasionally, it is true, Edmond questioned him about certain phases of the panorama but for the most part their discussions ranged through theoretical and highly impersonal fields. As for example, one evening at Kelsey’s Venice. They had been discussing creative man, man the genius.
“Great men are great,” said Paul, “by virtue of an impulse that is overwhelming. No man is great simply because he desires to be. He must have in addition to a finely organized neural system and brain, an outlook and a sympathy that partakes of the universal. Genius is a oneness with life; expression follows inevitably. This is the greatest happiness possible to man.”
Edmond smiled in amused contempt.
“You are wrong in every premise save the biological,” he said. “Great men are great simply because they desire to be; that is your driving overwhelming impulse. Furthermore, genius is neither a oneness with life nor a universal outlook; far from this, it is a maladjustment to life and the most highly personal outlook imaginable. Nor is creation the greatest happiness possible to man; like its feminine counterpart, birth, it is the greatest misery. Genius is always unhappy, always out of place, always a misfit in its environment; and finally, genius is always psychopathic.”
“You believe with the crowd, then, that all geniuses are crazy.”
“I said psychopathic, which is to say abnormal by the standards of the crowd. To use your argot, genius is largely a gigantic inferiority complex. And it is always masculine.”
“That’s ridiculous. Schopenhauer was long ago discredited.”
“By a generation of feminists. How many great women can history recall, and of these few, how many live other than through their influence on men, or a man?”
Paul thought a moment.
“There is some truth here. Of course the thing is largely due to woman’s social and economic position in the past. She has been suppressed by lack of freedom, paucity of education, and being forced into youthful motherhood. These restraints are breaking down today.”
“Your premise is wrong. Men have overcome difficulties as great and greater. Lack of freedom, social and economic position, you yourself can recall a hundred men who have battered down these barriers.” Edmond paused, looked at Paul with his piercing eyes. “What restrains woman, the thing that prohibits the sex from greatness, is her physical organization.”
“You mean her more delicate make-up?”
“I mean her ovaries. Whatever creative genius she has flows into them.”
“Still,” said Paul, “one can mention Sappho.”
“Yes; Sappho, goddess of feminism, idol of feminists. Sappho, product of the dawn, dimly glimpsed through the dawn’s mists.”
“How do you explain her?”
“I do not.”
“Then what of your theory?”
“My theory stands. Do you or I, does any one now living know that Sappho actually produced the works we have? Do you know even that she was indeed a woman? Yet granting these things, granting that Sappho, with the abnormality that stamps genius, is the exception, it is still true that woman is on the average less creative than man. Less creative through media of art, I repeat, because more creative with the substance of life.”
Thus for this period Edmond pursued his researches into the character of Paul, leading him into argument, promulgating generalities he knew to be abhorrent, rasping his sharp intelligence across Paul’s nature like a file, to expose the metal of Paul’s ego below the oxide. And finally his analysis approached completion. He drew his conclusions, put them to the test of experiment, and was satisfied.
Paul, he decided, was no more than a complex mechanism motivated by desires and fears, and to a lesser extent by logical reasoning. He pushed metaphorical buttons, moved verbal levers, and observed the results; he was confident that out of his knowledge and powers, he could if he wished control Paul’s actions as easily as those of Homo in the days past.
He was increasingly unhappy. He was like a man in a Chinese torture-chamber, unable either to stand up or lie down; nothing in the world offered him an opportunity to exert himself to the utmost. Things yielded too easily; he had no worthy competition.
Knowledge! He could keep on pursuing it forever like one chasing the horizon; however far he drove it, it hemmed him in forever with the unknown. Now his knowledge of humanity was as futile as any other; what could he do with it? Paul had nothing to give him worth the taking. Once more he was brought face to face with his own conclusion: “Knowledge is the most barren of all illusions. It is a negative illusion, in that the more a man learns the less he knows.”
CHAPTER X
LUCIFER
“WHAT am I?” queried Edmond to himself. “I am certainly not a man such as Paul, and yet I am indubitably male. I am not human in the literal sense, for I possess qualities and capacities that pass the human. Yet I am very closely akin to humanity, since in appearance and in all physical attributes I am allied to them. Save for this, I should believe myself alien to this planet. Since I am unique among its occupants—I should think myself a changeling, a Martian smuggled here by some inconceivable art.
He sat before the skull of Homo, idling an afternoon away in his chair in the library. The empty stare of the little skull drew his attention.
“Your blood is in me, Homo,” he continued. “In all respects we show our common origin. My skull is yours grown more capacious, my hands are yours grown extremely agile, my soul is yours grown out of all nature, and my sadness is your joy become intelligent. You are my incontrovertible proof of my own earthly roots, there is no gainsaying our blood relationship when the family resemblance is so strong.” Again he posed his question, “Then what am I?” He turned the problem this way and that in his minds, seeking a point of departure for his line of rational argument. “If I am of human origin but not myself human, there are but three possibilities. The first of these is this: that I am a survival, a throw-back, a reincarnation of some ancient, great race that merged itself with humanity in the dawn before history. The second is this: that I am no more than an accident, utterly unique and without meaning, a sport, a product of chance, with neither origin nor effect beyond the domain of chance. And the third is that I prognosticate, that I foreshadow the great race to come, that I am indeed the superman born ahead of his appointed time. The solution of my enigma thus resolves itself into the problem of the past, the present, or the future.”
He continued, “I reject the first of these, the concept of the past, on grounds logical, since a mighty race in antiquity must certainly have left its impress on the planet that bore it, yet nowhere in the world do I see any ruins save those of human origins. Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, India, China, Yucatan—these remnants are those of human cultures.
“I reject the second possibility, the concept of the present, on grounds ethical, since I possess a strong pride of race and a bitter contempt for those aroun
d me. Were I a chance product in the world, should I not envy these other beings, placed here by nature under her own laws and protection? My differences then must be a source of shame rather than the inceptors of this strong pride, this derisive contempt.
“There remains the third possibility, the concept of the future. Since I reject the others, I must accept the last, and believe that I foreshadow the coming of my race, and that I am the harbinger of doom for humanity. I am the Enemy, that which will destroy; I am the replacer of mankind, and the future incarnate.”
He stared back at Homo with sombre eyes, meeting the eyeless, vacant, insolent gaze of the little skull.
“I am to man what man was to you, Homo. I am that which devil-worshippers adore, as perhaps your kind adored man, in fear and distrust of a power implacable and beyond understanding. For what else to man is his destroyer, his Enemy? I am all evil embodied to the human viewpoint. I am the Devil!”
BOOK II
POWER
CHAPTER I
THE BRIEF PURSUIT OF POWER
ONE afternoon Edmond drove his car aimlessly north, through the interminable suburbs of the sprawling city. For a time the effortless speed and vigor of the supple machine diverted him; it was as invigorating to him as if his own muscles thrust him forward, until this too palled. He slowed the swift vehicle, permitted it to idle aimlessly along the white highway, which here paralleled the lake, visible at intervals as a sharp flashing far to his right. A narrow semi-private lane sprung out of the road toward it; at random he drove his car along through a crowding cluster of trees. Now the lane passed just above the lake; a long slope inclined to the top of a little bluff below. Edmond slid his car to the side of the road, and stepped to the ground, walking casually toward the bluff that overlooked the lake.
He stared for a long while at the unresting surge of waters; the sound of the breaking wavelets hummed accompaniment to his mood of melancholy. He sat down, stretched himself on the grassy hill, and watched a tree etch patterns against the sky above him. He gave himself over to his mood. Futility, he thought, hemmed in his every effort; he felt that he could take whatever he might desire, but nothing was worth the taking. Even knowledge and its pursuit had failed him. There remained what? power? Any terrestrial power lay in his grasp for the using. For a few moments he toyed with the idea, visualizing the means, sketching the plan. Several courses lay open to him, within the limits of his ability—the financial or industrial, through the control of wealth. The martial coup, through the development of invincible weapons. The emotional control—such power as the great religious leaders wielded in more plastic ages. Or, he reflected, any combination of these three. The second plan held his interest somewhat more strongly than the others; it presented problems of technical difficulty—the design of a weapon and perfecting of an organization—to provide an outlet for his energies.
He entertained no doubt of his abilities. The thing he desired was foredone in his mind; there remained only the deciding to be accomplished. This presented no easy task, for behind the drive of his ennui, his frustration, he realized that he did not want power over human beings. He did not hate them enough to oppress, nor love them well enough to guide. He stared down at a little hill of busy red ants before his feet, watched the creatures scurry about the important business of living and perpetuating.
“As well call myself emperor of these,” he thought. He kicked a little sand across the openings, observing the ensuing excitement. .
“They fear me as much and know me as little as men. What satisfaction is there to me?”
He continued thoughtfully, “Yet certainly an intelligent ant would prize my power over his fellows; as a man would deride this, but prize that mastery of his own kind. Things devolve on the point of view; this is the only absolute in the universe, being the ultimate denial of absolutes.”
He lay back in the grass, watching a pale afternoon moon pursue the sun toward the west.
“I rest solidly here on the grass,” he thought. “The sun and moon revolve quietly about me; security and peace surround me. Let me alter my viewpoint.”
He gazed again at the moon, seeing it now as a hurtling sphere, trying to visualize his own relation to the immediate cosmos. And suddenly his viewpoint changed; no longer did he rest in safety on a grassy slope, but clung to the surface of a colossal globe that spun at fearful velocity—off at unimaginable distances whirled others in a gigantic frenzy of chaos—giant spheres whirling endlessly through infinity-lazing and dying and being re-born in fire. He clung to the side of his particular atom—a mite, an insect,—while vaster shapes whirled and danced under the blind play of the cosmos.
A leaf drifted from the tree before him. Edmond fixed his attention on it, won back to his normal viewpoint. The sun and moon dropped their mad dancing, moved slowly and majestically once more, and were only a little way above him. He found himself shaken, with his fingers and heels digging into the soft earth in a frenzy of effort to hold on. He sat up, lit a cigarette.
“That is the abyss in which all things dance. What is a dream of power before that?”
He thought for some time of his two vain attempts at happiness.
“The path of Knowledge,” he concluded, “while it starts apparently in the proper direction, loses itself and its traveler at last in an endless maze of meandering on an illimitable desert; and the path of Power ends in a blank wall, and is so short and straight that I see to its futile end from whatever point I stand, without the need of treading it.”
Thus he abandoned untried his scheme of conquest. The atom-disrupter, that had risen in his mind as a world-shaking weapon, sank again to the oblivion of an experiment that was finished. Colossal things died in the conceiving, like an untold infinity of potential human genius.
“A sort of intellectual masturbation,” thought Edmond, “in that I let the seeds of my thoughts die sterile.”
There remained nothing. Was every avenue forever barred? Must he struggle to the end against the old futility that hemmed him, like one who battles a fog that closes about his blows?
“One road is still untried, though I am by nature ill-fitted to travel it—
“Happiness through pleasure. The satisfaction of the senses. This presupposes the incidence of sex on my experience, and the pursuit of beauty. I find myself not reluctant.”
He rose and mounted the slope toward his car, a grotesque anachronism as he toiled upward, a being born out of his time.
“Paul must serve me here,” he reflected moodily. “He shall procure me a woman.”
BOOK III
THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE
CHAPTER I
THE SEED PLANTED
LISTEN to me a minute, Vanny!” Paul was expostulating. “I’m serious. You’ve got to answer me.”
Vanny stopped humming, turned her pert features toward him.
“All right. The answer is maybe.”
Paul stared at her a moment on the verge of anger, gave a gesture of exasperation, and strode to the window. Her laugh followed him. For a moment he stared down the street, where a bat whirled and circled the solitary arc light trying, no doubt, to look like a dragon. Paul spun about, faced the smiling girl.
“You’re certainly expert at die fine art of torture,” he said. Vanny wrinkled her nose at him, toying with the great black Persian cat beside her.
“Listen to him, Eblis! He’s accusing your mistress.” She turned back to Paul. “I’ve been studying Torquemado.”
“You could teach him a few tricks!”
“Don’t growl at me, Honey. All I’m suggesting is the use of a little intelligence.”
“Bah! What’s the matter with me, Vanny? God knows I love you, and sometimes you seem to care for me. Why won’t you marry me?”
“I thought we agreed last time to drop the discussion.”
“But why won’t you?”
She cast him another impish smile.
“Said then the little maid,
You have v
ery little said
To induce a little maid for to wed, toed, wed.
So pray say a little more,
Or produce a little ore,
’Ere I’ll make a little print in your bed, bed, bed!”
“Vanny, you’re impossible!”
“But I mean it, Paul. Two of us can’t live comfortably on what I’ve got, and your contribution would hardly suffice.”
Paul dropped to the davenport beside her, startling Eblis into an ebony flash to the floor.
“I guess you’re right,” he said, dropping his face to his hands. A tinge of sympathy passed over the girl’s face; she placed a hand on her companion’s shoulder, touched his light hair.
“Snap out or it, Honey,” she said. “All’s not lost save honor.”
Paul sat erect. “Very well, but I’m giving you fair warning, Vanny—this isn’t going on much longer! I’ll have you somehow.”
She dropped her shining black head to his shoulder. “You have my permission to try—try as hard as ever you can, Paul.”
For a time they were silent. Paul slipped his arm about her, drew her close, but he still brooded, morose and unhappy. Best start a new train of thought, reflected Vanny.
“How’s the night-work, Paul?”
“I’m through with it.”
“Fired?”
“No; I quit. Couldn’t stand it.”
“Why not?”
“Something’s wrong with that fellow, Vanny—something’s very wrong. Either he’s crazy, or—I don’t know, but there’s something unnatural about him. His snaky hands and all.”
“I used to think his hands were lovely, at school.”
Paul did not answer. He was still sullen; something weighed heavily on him. Vanny looked at him with a tinge of pity.
“What’s really the matter with you, Paul?”
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