He felt that he stood face to face with a difficulty that could have been easily solved had he come fresh to the work, but that his tortured brain was too worn out to overcome.
But when an Arab horse is ready to drop with fatigue, then is the time when it breaks into a gallop.
He could not wait. There were the faces at the window again, staring and asking: “Not finished yet?” Merle, the children, Uthoug and his wife, the Bank Manager. And there were his competitors the world over. To-day he was a length ahead of them, but by to-morrow he might be left behind. Wait? Rest? No!
It was autumn now, and sleepless nights drove him to a doctor, who prescribed cold baths, perfect quiet, sleeping draughts, iron and arsenic. Ah, yes. Peer could swallow all the prescriptions—the one thing he could not do was rest or sleep.
He would sit late into the night, prostrate with exhaustion, watching the dying embers of the forge, the steel, the tools. And innumerable sparks would begin to fly before his eyes, and masses of molten iron to creep about like living things over walls and floor.—And over by the forge was something more defined, a misty shape, that grew in size and clearness and stood at last a bearded, naked demigod, with fire in one hand and sledgehammer in the other.
“What? Who is that?”
“Man, do you not know me?”
“Who are you, I ask?”
“I have a thing to tell you: it is vain for you to seek for any other faith than faith in the evolution of the universe. It will do no good to pray. You may dream yourself away from the steel and the fire, but you must offer yourself up to them at last. You are bound fast to these things. Outside them your soul is nothing. God? happiness? yourself? eternal life for you? All these are nothing. The will of the world rolls on towards its eternal goal, and the individual is but fuel for the fire.”
Peer would spring up, believing for a moment that someone was really there. But there was nothing, only the empty air.