Thus grappled, they seemed to sway as a double monster heroically proportioned, a Herculean group against the flat light of the pale-brown windows. So superbly matched were they in physique that they remained almost motionless, swaying very slightly and with difficulty under the strain of their utmost effort. That stillness and that silence accompanying so supreme a struggle, were startling, portentous, and unnaturally impressive, as though the contained violence within were too mighty, too self-sufficient, to seek the relief of any visible outlet whether of noise or movement. Their meeting was a muffled encounter of force with force; it had notthe crash of a collision. So they remained, arrested, stirred only by that almost imperceptible rocking, until doubt might have arisen whether they so held one another grasped with deadly intent, or, as the likeness between them more palpably emerged, in a brotherly welding against some danger imminent and extraneous. Their feet yielded not at all from their original planting upon the boards, their arms flung around one another had neither relaxed nor shifted, the slight angle at which their bodies were bent remained the same. The group they formed was of bronze beneath the spanning iron girders. But indeed the question became one of endurance, while the body’s tension, flung on the hollowed hips, the quivering thighs, the knotted calves, and lean ankles, strained and cracked under the sustained tautening of human sinew. The one who was first to yield, by so much as the stagger of a foot, would find the advantage narrowly pursued, his opponent weighing down upon him, pressing him hard across their meagre margin.—Yet, were they meeting in alliance or hostility, the two brothers, so alike in their carved features, in the duplication of torso and huge opposing members?
Very slowly they bent together, straining; veryslowly straightened themselves again to their formation of deadlock. All this strife took place without a sound, and seemed to occupy a long period of time, as though that group were permanent in the gallery, taking on the dingy monochrome and adapting itself to the proportions of the gallery’s enormous setting. Nan, the impotent onlooker, could foresee no ending, no outcome. She saw that Gregory stared into his brother’s face with a concentration of hatred. There was very little to indicate the intense pressure of strength that each was putting forth. But a difference was creeping in,—certainly a difference was creeping in. Gregory’s determination was becoming the determination of misgiving, Silas’s that of ultimate mastery. He did not appear triumphant, but quietly sure. Throughout, he had been guided by that security of vouchsafed insight.
Nan dared not stir. She continued to kneel beside Linnet, who still lay with his eyes closed, and the mark of a bruise blackening rapidly on his temple. She was deeply thankful for his unconsciousness.
The other two held her eyes. Gregory shifted a foot backwards to steady his balance; it was their first definite movement. Their faces were close;not angry, but concentrated, and Silas’s was like a cast mask of unflinching patience. It frightened Nan to look at Silas’s face, he was so immeasurably beyond both the greatness and the smallness of things human. He was like an incarnation of purpose, summoned for one set, finite task. His pressure was beginning to tell upon Gregory, who sought to improve his grip, but lost ground in so doing, and, staggering backwards, was driven to prop himself against the side of a vat. Here their grapple became more desperate, more final, in the same unbroken silence. Nan’s imagination could not extend to reasons or to outcome; it did not extend beyond the struggle of the moment. She was numbed; all energy was absorbed by that group of wrestling Titans.
She bent down to Linnet, whose eyes had opened dazedly upon her. When she looked up again she saw a change. Silas had stooped until his arms clasped his brother below the waist. For one terrible moment she saw Gregory lifted off his feet, his arms flung impotently up, his body bent back in its supreme effort, his throat extended, to give vent to the most hideous sound she had ever heard uttered. Silas bore him up for a moment in that gesture of appallingravishment, rearing like a centaur in the full magnificence of his strength; and with one mighty heave cast the burden from him into the boiling yellow slime of the vat.