The lids dropped just a shade over Sidwell's black eyes. "And why, if you please, should it be more remarkable that I am unhappy than another?"
This time Florence took him up quickly. "Because," she answered, "you seem to have everything one can think of that is needed to make a human being happy—wealth, position, health, ability—all the prizes other people work their lives out for or die for." Again the voice dropped. "I can't understand it." She was silent a moment. "I can't understand it," she repeated.
From the girl's face the man's eyes passed to the canvas, and rested there. "Yes," he said slowly, "I suppose it is difficult, almost impossible, for you to realize why I am—as I am. You have never had the personal experience—and we only understand what we have felt. The trouble with me is that I have experienced too much, felt too much. I've ceased to take things on trust. Like the youth and the key flower I've forgotten the best." The voice paused, but the eyes still kept to the canvas.
"That picture," he went on, "typifies it all. I painted it, not because I'm an artist, but because in a fashion it expresses something I couldn't put into words, or express in any other way. When I began to climb, the object above me was not happiness but ambition. Wealth and social place, as you say, I already had. They meant nothing to me. What I wanted was to make a name in another way—as a literary man." The dark eyes shifted back to the listener's face, the voice spoke more rapidly.
"I went after the thing that I wanted with all the power and tenacity that was in me. I worked with the one object in view; worked without resting, feverishly. I had successes and failures, failures and successes—a long line of both. At last, as the world puts it, I arrived. I got to a position where everything I wrote sold, and sold well; but in the meantime the thing above me, which had been ambition, gradually took on another shape. Perfection it was I longed for now, perfection in my art. It was not enough that the public had accepted me as I was; I was not satisfied with my work. Try as I might, nothing that I wrote ever reached my own standard in its execution. I worked harder than ever; but it was useless. I was confronting the blank wall—the wall of my natural limitations."
The voice paused, and for a moment lowered. "I won't say what I did then; I was—mad almost—the finger-marks of it are on the rock."
The girl could not look longer into the speaker's eyes. She felt as if she were gazing upon a naked human soul, and turned away.
"At last," he went on in his confession, "I came to myself, and was forced to see things as they were. I saw that as well as I thought I had understood life I had not even grasped its meaning. I had fancied the attainment of my object the supreme end, and by every human standard I had succeeded in my purpose; but the thing I had gained was trash. Wealth, power, notoriety—what were they? Bubbles, nothing more; bubbles that broke in the hand of him who clasped them. The real meaning and object of existence lay deeper, and had nothing whatever to do with the estimate of a person by his fellows. It was a frame of mind of the individual himself."
Florence's face turned farther away, but Sidwell did not notice. "Then, for the last time," he hurried on, "the unattainable changed form for me, and became what it seems now—happiness. For a little time I think I was happy—happy in merely having made the discovery. Then came the reaction. I was as I was, as I am now—a product of my past life, of a civilization essentially artificial. In striving for a false ideal I had unfitted myself for the real when at last I discovered it."
Unconsciously the man had come closer, and his eyes glowed. At last his apathy was shaken off, and his words came in a torrent. "What I was then I am to-day. Mentally, I am like an inebriate, who no longer finds satisfaction in plain food and drink, but craves stimulants. I demand activity, excitement, change. In every hour of my life I realize the narrowness and artificiality of it all; but without it I am unhappy. I sometimes think Mother Nature herself has disowned me; when I try to get near her she draws away—I fancy with a shudder. Solitude of desert, of forest, or of prairie is no longer solitude to me. It is filled with voices—accusing voices; and I rush back to the crowd and the unrest of the city. Even my former pleasures seem to have deserted me. You have spoke often of accomplishing big things, doing something better than anyone else can do it, as an example of pleasure supreme. If you realized what you were saying you would know its irony. You cannot do a thing better than anyone else. People, like water, strike a dead level. No matter how you strive, dozens of others can do the thing you are doing. Were you to die, your place would be filled to-morrow, and the world would wag on just the same. There is always someone just beneath you watchfully waiting, ready to seize your place if you relax your effort for a moment. The term 'big things' is relative. To speak it is merely to refer to something you do not personally understand. Nothing seems really big to the one who does it. Nothing is difficult when you understand it. The growing of potatoes in a backyard is just as wonderful a performance as the painting of one of these pictures; it would be more so were it not so common and so necessary. The construction of a steam-engine or an electric dynamo is incomparably more remarkable than the merging of separate thousands of capital into millions of combination, yet multitudes of men everywhere can do either of the former things and are unnoticed. We worship what we do not understand, and call it big; but the man in the secret realizes the mockery and smiles."