In a fenced plot a gardener was on his knees before a line of young rose-plants. A stray weed he pulled with eager hand. The soil around the roots, pulverized already from his diligence, he loosened yet again. Anxiously he lifted his eyes toward the electric sun, the while fanning with his trowel the drooping leaves.
“Soon the rain will fall. It must sometime,” he mumbled to this plant and to that, as though addressing conscient things. “If you’d bear me just one rose among you, even a half-blown rose——”
So the old dodderer was back to roses again! Thus Satan commented to the girl-shade. Roses were the gardener’s specialty. He had begun with them a thousand years before, trying between whiles to bring to bloom every known flower, from shrubs to lowly blue-bells. Interesting to keep count upon how often he would revert to the hopeless hope of that one rose!
Over his bench an inventor twenty years dead was about to try out a miniature airship over which he had spent the entire span of his endless workdays. As the moment of the test approached his hands twitched too spasmodically to turn the propeller. Glancing up into the censorious smile of the royal bystander, his face contorted by an expectancy painful to see, he gained control. Next moment the invention which he had quitted earth too soon to see perfected lay on the ground. At his touch the model had quitted the bench, hovered briefly in mid-air, then dropped.
An artist mixed paints on her palette. Over an impressionistic study of the lurid sky-scape she worked, inspired by sheer necessity. But the colors faded to a monotone, no matter how thickly she laid them on.
Long before the end of the Lane, Dolores had begun to understand. That one rose never would bloom. The model plane could not fly. No paint squeezed from Avernian tubes might express the genius of the artist-shade for even one short hour. It was too late for the most ambitious spirit to achieve.
Shadows from her somber thoughts were in the glance uplifted to her guide.
“You have the askingest eyes,” observed he. “Very well. I’ll give you a lift through the Lane of Labors. Of course it is all illusion. The gardener imagines the weeds, the inventor the crash of his plane, the artist her chromatic pigments. And what we see in them is what they believe of themselves. Just as well might they imagine success, except for—For what now, do you suppose?”
“For fear?”
Satan nodded. “Thought you’d get the idea if I gave you time. A singer fears that her voice will fail. It fails. A woman with child fears for its inheritance. She bears a defective. A sea captain fears that he cannot manage his crew. From his weakness springs their mutiny. Except for fear in the heart you earthlings could become a race of gods.”