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.
Beyond that, he could see destiny by interpreting his limited career. Through a sort of ontogenetic recapitulation he had survived his savage childhood, his barbaric youth, and the Greeces, Romes, Egypts, and Babylons of his early manhood, emerging into a present that was endowed with as much aspiration and engaged with the same futility as was his contemporary microcosm. No life span could observe anything but material progress, for so mean and inalterable is the gauge of man that his races topple before his soul expands, and the eventualities of his growth in space and time must remain a problem for thousands and tens of thousands of years.