The capataz of the batey gang, a tall flushed Jamaican negro, passed on a cantering white pony. The American wives, the flowers of Utica and Ohio, went by in light afternoon dresses, one propelling a baby in a cart. The Field Superintendent, lank and sun-dark under a green palmetto hat, wearing a grotesquely large revolver, saluted Daniel from the open. “Trouble at the cantina barracon,” he called cheerfully.
“It was then,” Lee specified, “that all my loose ends were gathered up in Cytherea. I have, I think, explained her. She was a doll, but it is more useful, now, to picture her as a principle. I didn't realize that at first: I took her to be an individual, the image of a happy personal fate that, somehow, I had missed, but might still catch up with.
“The wildest kind of a dream,” Lee Randon proclaimed. “But when I became aware of Savina, or rather of her passion, I was sure I had been completely justified. She was, I believed, Cytherea. They looked alike. They were the same! However, I mistook that sameness. I can understand now, very clearly; it seems incredible that I had been so blind, so fatuous, Daniel. I actually thought that there was a choice, a special graciousness, existing and reserved for me.” He laughed, not bitterly, but in a wonderment that bordered on dismay. “I felt that I had found it in Savina. I did get a lot there—more than I should have hoped for—but not precisely that. At last I know.” His voice was grave, and he paused that Daniel might grasp the weight of what was to follow. “I had made the mistake of thinking that I, as an individual, had any importance. In my insane belief that a heavenly beauty, a celestial chorus girl, was kept for me, I pictured myself as an object of tender universal consideration.
“Damned anthropomorfic rot!
“It was a principle all the while,” he cried; “a principle that would fill the sky, as vast as space; and ignorant, careless, of me, it was moving to its own end. And that—do you see, Daniel?—had grown destructive. It had begun differently, naturally, in the healthy fertility of animals and simple lives; but the conceit of men, men like me, had opposed and antagonized it. Magnifying our sensibilities, we had come to demand the dignity of separate immortalities. Separate worms! We thought that the vitality in us was for the warming of our own hearts and the seduction of our nerves. And so I left the safety of a species, of Fanny and children, for the barrenness of Cytherea.
“That's her secret, what she's forever smiling at—her power, through men's vanity, to conquer the earth. She's the reward of all our fineness and visions and pleasure, the idol of our supreme accomplishment: the privilege of escaping from slavery into impotence, the doubtful privilege of repaying the indignities of our birth.” His rigid strained face was drenched with sweat. “We made her out of our longing and discontent, an idol of silk and gilt and perverse fingers, and put her above the other, above everything. She rewarded us, oh, yes—with promises of her loveliness. Why shouldn't she be lovely eternally in the dreams of men?
“Then, finally, Savina and Cytherea were merged again. In Savina her passion, always abnormal, hadn't been spent; there she was younger than the youngest girl I knew; incomparably more dangerous. She, too, had been constrained by the artificial, by conventionality; and when the moment of reality came it broke William Grove, Fanny, Helena and Gregory—all the threads that precariously held us. She was stronger than I, Savina was the goal and I was only the seeker—that was the difference between us—and in absorbing me she was content.”
“That is very ingenious,” Daniel told him. “Do you notice that the smoke is thicker in the east?”
“Not more in one direction than in another,” Lee answered indirectly; “in the east and south, the north and west, up above and underneath. It's a good thing for our comfort that there's so much of it we can't see the fires. If the books of physics are to be credited, the center of the earth is liquid flame; certainly it is hot enough here to suggest something of the sort.”