Victory | Page 2

tragic enough in all conscience, but even more cruel than tragic
and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to think
there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in
the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing the
truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp knife
at its throat.
The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his
power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems
to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too
mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last
Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his
piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and the
cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the
virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let
ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty our
ears and too awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck
suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the
book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty
of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and
which is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the
immortal gods.
It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our fate
that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly Mr.
Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the
man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine

attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of
stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a
remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this
minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.
Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit asserting
himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of
mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the
man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the matter
of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The
habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most
pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst.
I have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who stands
behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a
mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not
so certain. He himself never laid claim to that distinction. His
detachment was too great to make any claims, big or small, on one's
credulity. I will not say where I met him because I fear to give my
readers a wrong impression, since a marked incongruity between a man
and his surroundings is often a very misleading circumstance. We
became very friendly for a time, and I would not like to expose him to
unpleasant suspicions though, personally, I am sure he would have
been indifferent to suspicions as he was indifferent to all the other
disadvantages of life. He was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only
the physical and moral foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a
short acquaintance. That it was short was certainly not my fault for he
had charmed me by the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this
case, I cannot help thinking he had carried to excess. He went away
from his rooms without leaving a trace. I wondered where he had gone
to--but now I know. He vanished from my ken only to drift into this
adventure that, unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he
persisted in looking upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the
sunlight. Often in the course of years an expressed sentiment, the
particular sense of a phrase heard casually, would recall him to my
mind so that I have fastened on to him many words heard on other

men's lips and belonging to other men's less perfect, less pathetic
moods.
The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who is
built on a much slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or whatever his name
was) did not drift away from me. He turned his