He realized that the emotion felt was nearer to the centre of life than all thought. He cast from him the devil of mere intellect, and it went out of him demurely into the darkness, like some poor thin-souled nun, who crushes down into barrenness the splendid emotions of the life within her which are her very godhood, in fantastic hope to win an eternity of vague bliss, she who by the very act shows her inability to enjoy bliss—for, heaven and hell and all the eternities shall yield her no such bliss as the dear human loves may do—the æons of immortality shall never bring her the delight that she might know in an hour of a lover’s embrace or the dear touch of a nestling child at her lean breasts.
As the awakened youth stood there, the black night passed over the edge of the populous city, and its smoky shadow slowly followed it. The lights of the lamps paled in the dawn; the stars went out; and out of the daffodil east the day came up—and there was light in the world.
Before the day was well begun, Noll went home.
******
In the still grey dawn, in dripping drizzle, Gavroche the anarchist slouched forth from prison-cell to his harsh doom.
He was dejected.
He missed the band, the public eye, the shouts of the comrades.
What, Gavroche! this is thy dramatic moment—thou hast the stage all to thy sole swaggering self—and though thou roused at daybreak from thy broodings to lilt a braggart song with all thy best intent to play the reckless swashbuckler, the florid eager pressman can only report that thou didst sing “somewhat palsily.”
Tush, man! Is it thus thou goest to thy end? Hath thy desire to be Ruthless Overman brought only this about—that thou art to become no better than manure? Where is now thy dream of Ruthless Overman? Nay, what avails at all now thy Overmanhood, Gavroche? does not thy neck feel rather with unpleasant shiver of discomfort the overlordship of the Commonweal? The aristocrat despised it yesterday, and thou to-day. Hast thou, even thus late, a glimmering that thy vaunted Ruthless Brutality is to be snipped by the might of this Commonweal, thy unspeakable windpipe slit at a stroke of the ordered shear that falls on the bidding of that overwhelming force which is the public good—the power of that sneered-at race that is to thy silly little individual hand’s strength as the might of the sea to the spite of some flab stinging medusa!
Yet, if the insignificance of thy little petty self irk thy conceit at this moment, what of the scented, gloved, and dandified gentlemen who write the anarchic words that have led thy conceit to seek some shabby fame in flinging a bomb amongst innocent people! What of them whose lyric pens have pointed the way to the Uselessness of the old and sick and far-too-many and superfluous ones! What of them that go scot-free—whose philosophies led thee to kill the old miser-woman and to slay the drunken carter to thine own Egoism’s enrichment? Tsh! thou wert but a tool after all, thou with all thy strange gabble of Ruthless Overman, putting to the touch of practice what the gloved gentlemen were content to prate of—Might being Right and the rest.