678
PARTISAN REVIEW
once by one man
in
a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would
be
something. Here at least was
Q.
He dug his heels in at
Q. Q
he was
sure of.
Q
he could demonstrate.
If
Q
then is Q-R- ... R is then–
what is R?
A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the
intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness
he heard people saying-he was a failure- that R was beyond
him.
He would never reach R. . . .
Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the
snow has begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist, knows
that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole
upon him. . . . Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some
crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end
to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.
He was doomed to failure and he would die like a man. But
perhaps something, human sympathy or love, could be salvaged
from this wreck of an intellectual:
Who shall blame him,
if,
so standing for a moment, he dwells upon
fame, upon search parties, upon cairns, raised by grateful followers
over his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed ex–
pedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength
wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring
if
he wakes
or not, he now perceived by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and
does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky,
and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once?
Stephen had starved himself as an intellectual, thinking it would
make him a better man. He had emaciated his sensibility, constricted
his faith, stunted his imagination. When finally intellectual poverty
forced him to retreat to domesticity, his spirit was poor, hardened and
unyielding. But deep within him was a turbulence that erupted with
painful regularity and violence, always in the privacy of his family.
In the privacy of his home, the stoical, death-defying mountaineer
was revealed as a man who could not bear to hear the word dentist
mentioned, or to read newspaper accounts of the Boer War. The
critic who execrated sentimentality as morbid and unmanly luxuriated
in the sentimentality of his "Mausoleum Book," a diary in which
he recorded the grievances and griefs of his private life, the "hideous
morbid fancies" that he had been unkind to his wives ("fancies
