“With a million—the million their electrocution will bring from the outraged—we can accomplish more than saving two paltry lives. We must be hard, we must think ahead.”

“In thinking ahead, Skorvsky, do you not think of the closing of a switch and the burning of human flesh?”

“For every cause there must be martyrs. Their names will live eternally.”

“And they themselves—?”

“Bah! You are impractical.”

“Perhaps.” Hugo ate a slice of toast with outward calm. “I was hoping for a government that—did not weigh people against dollars—”

“Nor do we!”

“No?”

Skorvsky leaped to his feet. “Fool! Dreamer! Preposterous idealist! I must be going.”

Hugo sighed. “Suppose I went ahead?”

“One thing!” The Russian turned with a livid face. “One thing the chief bade me tell you. If those men escape—you die.”

“Oh,” Hugo said. He stared through the window. “And supposing I were to offer your chief a million—or nearly a million—for the privilege of freeing them?”

Skorvsky’s face returned to its look of transfiguration, the look that had accompanied his noblest words of the night before. “You would do that, comrade?” he whispered. “You would give us—give the cause—a million? Never since the days of our Saviour has a man like you walked on this—”

Hugo stood up suddenly. “Get out of here!” His voice was a cosmic menace. “Get out of here, you dirty swine. Get out of here before I break you to matchwood, before I rip out your guts and stuff them back through your filthy, lying throat. Get out, oh, God, get out!”

XXII

Hugo realized at last that there was no place in his world for him. Tides and tempest, volcanoes and lightning, all other majestic vehemences of the universe had a purpose, but he had none. Either because he was all those forces unnaturally locked in the body of a man, or because he was a giant compelled to stoop and pander to live at all among his feeble fellows, his anachronism was complete.

That much he perceived calmly. His tragedy lay in the lie he had told to his father: great deeds were always imminent and none of them could be accomplished because they involved humanity, humanity protecting its diseases, its pettiness, its miserable convictions and conventions, with the essence of itself—life. Life not misty and fecund for the future, but life clawing at the dollar in the hour, the security of platitudes, the relief of visible facts, the hope in rationalization, the needs of skin, belly, and womb.