He gives Lubimoff's uniform a rapid glance, and admires his rough soldierly appearance.
"I have heard of the great deeds of your Highness; I always used to ask the Colonel about you ... a hero!"
Lubimoff has scarcely time to shake his head at this praise. Spadoni starts to talk about something more interesting. The war, heroes, and all that, are nebulous, meaningless things. He is for reality, and begins to talk about a new personage whom he admires, a Portuguese who plays big stakes, and whose name, because of his winnings, during the last few days, has been filling the gambling rooms.
"I am studying him; besides, he is a friend of mine and I think I have his secret. Imagine, Prince...."
The Prince grows uneasy, guessing that he is going to describe in all its details the combination of the Portuguese, which he already considers his own. But the pianist looks towards the Casino, stammers, and finally interrupts his account. Some one is coming and he wants to share his secret only with the Prince. He takes his leave with the promise that some time he will reveal the precious combination.
Lubimoff thinks of his life during the last few months, his adventures as a soldier, of his wound, of all that has happened to him and to the entire world, while that musician has remained stationary in Monte Carlo, admitting nothing as real save the hovering flight of the Great Delusion.
His friend Lewis holds out his hand to the Prince. It is he who, by his approach, has stopped the pianist's flow of eloquence. Gamblers, out of professional rivalry, avoid telling one another their secrets. Time, which seems to have forgotten Spadoni, leaving him the same as when Michael last saw him in his "Villa of theTomb," has laid its claws on Lewis, making him older, as though months for him have been years.
He is sad because of the losses he has been suffering, and because of his memories. That niece of his was all the family he had! Lubimoff knows through the Colonel that he has not inherited anything from her. The nurse spent her entire fortune on ambulances and hospitals. Her title is the one thing that has gone to Lewis. His prophecy has come true: he is now the third Lord Lewis, surnamed "the Worthless," the name he gave himself.
He gazes on the Prince for a long time, notices the rigid arm and then shakes his left hand effusively.
"You're a man, Lubimoff. You know how to do things."
And in these words there is a reproach for himself. Unable to tear himself away from Monte Carlo, he will live here and die here, doing the same things over and over.
Nevertheless, this is a great day for him. In the morning he received a visit from a friend who is coming to live with him, he does not know for how long, perhaps for two days, perhaps for two years; a great friend from whom he had had no news and whom he had often imagined dead; the Count, the famous Count.
He has come as far as the café with Lewis, who refuses to be separated from him; he has shaken hands with the Prince as though he had seen him the day before, without noticing his uniform or his mutilation. He sits silently in a chair, running his hand through his white, curly hair, fixing his round eyes, with a nocturnal fire, on the people who are walking about the "Camembert."
Lewis believes he ought to feel happy. What a dayof surprise it has been! First the Count, and then the Colonel telling him of Lubimoff's arrival.
He avoids talking about his niece: he sinks his sadness in the sadness of all the rest.... Peace has surprised him: who could have imagined it would come so soon, following immediately on the most anxious phase of the war?
The Count comes to life at this query.
"Every one," says he. "The great soothsayers, the great ones, announced at the very beginning, that the war would end in the Fall of 1918. It was well known to everybody. I have always said so. You have heard me say so many times yourself, Lewis."
Lewis makes a gesture of surprise. But he cannot doubt the science of his learned friend, and prefers to admit that it is he who has forgotten. He has such a bad memory! Perhaps, even, he may have misunderstood. These guardians of a knowledge of the future never express their truths clearly: they refuse to talk like ordinary mortals.
The conversation begins to lag. The Englishman is thinking of the Casino. He was just going in when Don Marcos gave him the news of the Prince's arrival. He keeps the Count by his side. The Count has just returned from a mysterious trip and has the devil's rosary safe in a certain pocket of his trousers, constantly feeling in it with his right hand.
"Later on we shall see each other at the Casino. I suppose you'll come in for a moment. We'll see if luck treats me well to-day after such pleasant meetings."
And he goes off with the Count in the direction of thePalacewhere he is destined, as though in prison, to spend the rest of his life.
Lubimoff notices two Italian soldiers who are lookingat him from the sidewalk around the "Camembert." They are a couple ofbersaglieri, dressed in gray, with little round hats decked out in cock's plumes. Noticing that the Prince is looking at them they become embarrassed, turn their backs as though ashamed, and walk away, but not without smiling first and raising their hands to their much beplumed hats.
The Prince recalls what Don Marcos told him. Oh, yes! They are Estola and Pistola, changed into soldiers! They have come on leave to see their families. They are going up to the Colonel's house in the evening to pay their respects to their former "Lord." They seem taller, and more vigorous. A few months of war have been sufficient to transport them from adolescence into maturity. In every man there is a soldier!
Just as he is getting up to take a walk around the terraces, he sees hurrying toward the café a gentleman who is violently waving to him, and then has to stop to fasten his glasses more securely on his nose.
It takes some time for the Prince to recognize him. He guesses who it is more by the tone of his voice than by his features. Dear old Novoa! The months that have gone by have left a deeper imprint on him than on the rest. He is no longer the young man preoccupied with worldly pomp, who used to consult the Colonel about the merits of various tailors and hatters. He has returned to the slavery of baggy-kneed trousers and ready-made neckties. His beard is full grown and bushy. He is still as young as ever in his voice, his eyes, and his lively and clumsy gestures; but he is dressed, not to say disguised, as an old man.
The Professor is more effusive than the rest on seeing the Prince. He keeps blessing the happy chance, which brought Lubimoff to him, through his meeting with Don Marcos shortly before.
"If you had waited two days longer, Prince, I wouldn't have had the pleasure of seeing you. I am going back to my country day after to-morrow. I have had enough now of Monte Carlo. When I think of what I've lost here!... Money, dreams, everything."
Michael shows discretion. He suspects his friend has had some unexpected disillusionment, some deception, such as one must forget not to be continually tormented by it. He remembers Valeria, and sees nothing in the Professor's appearance to indicate the slightest trace of contact with that lady. He is a ruin, a dry dead tree; the bird that formerly sang in the branches must have flown away long since.
Novoa is equally discreet. He looks at the other man's uniform, and the sleeve with the artificial arm; but he speaks in a general way, with vague regrets, only of what has taken place during the last few months.
"What extraordinary things have taken place! How many friends of ours have died! Life has finally become one of those dramas in which one dies at the end of the last act."
The Prince guesses that Novoa is thinking of Alicia and in order not to give him pain, is refraining from mentioning her. As a matter of fact he is indeed thinking of the Duchess, but she is merely a point of departure before he comes to the other woman with whom his memory is constantly occupied.
At last he speaks, giving full rein to his melancholy. He can tell the Prince everything because he is the only man who knows his secret. (He has told the Colonel and even Spadoni the same thing, on lamenting his misfortune.) And he breaks into despairing recriminations against Valeria.
She has become a different woman. She is no longer interested in "lands of love," where women marry withoutdowries. Since the Duchess's death she has become a candidate for marriage. Her hand will bring with it more than three hundred thousand francs. The Professor has found himself jilted and forgotten. How he had grovelled before her when the truth was known; what shameful efforts he had made to remedy what he had considered at the outset a woman's passing whim! He hates to remember moments such as those.
"It is all ended, Prince. At present she is crazy about an American officer and will finally marry him. No one counts here except the Americans. Everything is for them: even love. The humblest little milliner considers herself disgraced if she hasn't a soldier from the United States to promenade with in the evening. Every afternoon she and the other man dance in the hotels of La Condamine, or right here in the Café de Paris."
He stops, as though some one had touched him on the shoulder. He does not see any one behind him, but his eyes, wandering over the groups sitting at the tables meet something which makes his voice tremble.
"It is she, Prince."
Michael would not have recognized her. He sees two ladies, escorted by two American officers, entering the Café. One of them is Valeria, dressed with gay and showy elegance, as though anxious to compensate in a moment for years of frugality and privation.
Against the soft twilight the café windows begin to gleam with a reddish glow. One after another, the large lamps within are lighted. To the Prince's ears come the voluptuous wailings of violins.
"Life has changed very greatly since you went away, Prince. Every one feels a desperate hunger for amusement. The first thing that peace brought back to life was the tango."
Then Novoa begins to think about himself:
"What can I do here? I am poor. Everything I possessed in my country I have dropped here in the Casino. I have studied the mysteries of the ocean enough. How dearly it has cost me! I have had my little dream, and now I am going to resume my ill-paid work back there as a day laborer in science."
He thinks once more of her.
"Did you notice?... The poor Duchess, who made her what she is now, is lying up there in her grave, and here she is dancing, only a few months after her death."
He feels the harsh indignation, the sense of outraged morality, that all who have been scorned experience.
His anger grows so strong that he gets up from his chair. He cannot remain there. The woman has seen him, and might think that he is pursuing her, that he is waiting for her to come out, in order to entreat her. Never; he has had enough of certain humiliations which he does not care to remember.
He hurriedly says good-by. They will see each other again soon. Don Marcos has invited him to dinner at the little house in Beausoleil. The Colonel was sure that his visit would please the Prince.
He grasps Lubimoff's hand and does not seem to notice it is the wooden one. His eyes and his thoughts are on the café windows, ablaze in mid afternoon. Through them the cadenced murmur of the violins is passing. As he walks away he still repeats his protest.
"The poor Duchess up there forgotten.... And the other woman. What a scandal! I am glad I'm going away soon, and will never see her again."
On remaining alone, the Prince leaves his table. Don Marcos is doubtless telling the news of his arrival to every one he meets, and Michael is afraid that other less interesting persons will appear.
As he walks along he notices something which he had not seen before when he was with the Colonel. The United States flag is floating above all the buildings. In the city streets there are as many signs in English as in French. There are American soldiers everywhere. Lubimoff's uniform and that of the other French fighters are lost in the great flood of men dressed in mustard color. The light automobiles of the American army pass incessantly. They are everywhere. One meets them in the streets, on the roads along the coast and climbing the slopes of the Alps like buzzing, snorting ants. Everything seems animated by a robust, gay, self-confident life, the life of a twenty-year-old boy. The concert on the terraces is being given by an American band. The people walking in the streets absent-mindedly whistle dance tunes from across the ocean and marching songs of the soldiers from the States. People stop in the squares to admire the skill of the Americans in shirt sleeves throwing a ball and sending it back again after catching it in a kind of fencing glove.
Monaco seems to have been conquered by the troops of the Great Republic; a good-natured and kindly conquest, which makes the conquered smile. It is the same in Nice and everywhere on the Riviera. The Prince recalls his brief stay in Paris a few days before. There he saw Americans just as here. How many are they? What superhuman power has been able to create in a few months this army which though of recent birth, seems to fill all space?
A people has just risen above all the peoples of the earth. Never in history has such a rise been known. It dominates through friendliness, through its generous acts, and by the beneficent strength of its activities; not through terror, the base of all greatness in the past.
Lubimoff recalls his doubts of the year before. Noone would have believed that a people without armies could improvise a military force equal to those of old Europe. And in only a few months the United States had organized and transported two million men to decide the outcome of the struggle, and the world's fate.
Arriving at the last moment, they had liberally given their share of dead. In five months of campaign a hundred and twenty thousand Americans had perished, a huge proportion compared to the losses of the other nations during five years of fighting.
Michael, in his silent enthusiasm, enumerates what has just been done for humanity by this great people, which shortly before was considered utilitarian and selfish, and which now reveals itself as the most romantic and generous.
Two great wars are the most striking incidents in its history: one within, for the suppression of slavery; the other, without, to prevent the glorification of war, the brutal hegemony of one people over all, the exaltation of a mystic imperialism.
For the first time in history, a democracy has intervened in the fate of a world through the centuries subjected to the rule of kings. The modern republics had until now lived an inner and retiring life. The wars of the French Revolution were defensive. The Republic of the Convention fought to exist, since all the monarchs wanted to suppress it. The American Republic had voluntarily entered the struggle, without being threatened by any immediate danger, because of a mandate of its conscience, indignant at German crimes, because of the responsibility developing upon its greatness, its democratic strength.
Before arming, before intervening in the European crash while living in patient neutrality, battles were being won for it. This war was different from others.Against Germany, ready through long years of preparation for the struggle, and with all its industrial and commercial strength mobilized for war purposes, the Allies fought during the first few months, as a brave but backward people fights against a modern nation. They showed much bravery, and great heroism, sometimes in vain, against the blind mechanical force of industrial invention applied to destruction.
If this inequality kept diminishing, it was thanks in large part to the Republic beyond the sea. Its money barons made enormous loans to the Allies; its captains of industry facilitated the manufacture of the gigantic equipment demanded by the demon-like progress of military science; its ships defying the submarine menace, brought bread which had grown scarce in Europe through the war.
And when, its patience finally exhausted, it directly intervened, what generosity it showed!
The American combatants fought for simple and robust ideals: the rights of the weak to live, the dignity and freedom of mankind, the elimination of wars, understanding between peoples, sovereign right ruling the life of nations; things which shortly before had made the Old World skeptics smile.
All the countries of Europe had frontiers to reëstablish, strips of land to claim. The United States of America was not asking for anything, it did not want anything.
Each one of the contestants, on thinking of victory, calculated the indemnities it should collect to compensate for its endeavors and sacrifices. The American Republic spent more than all the other nations. The maintenance of each of its soldiers cost it as much as seven soldiers from the other countries, and nevertheless, itentered the war and withdrew from the war without demanding any particular reimbursement.
Lubimoff admired its enormous strength in victory: Never had any Empire in the past reached such greatness; not even Rome.
It was the only country, at once both industrial and agricultural, on earth. It formed a world apart within the world. It might, without suffering, isolate itself from the rest of the Globe; but the world would feel a sensation of emptiness if the Great Republic were to turn its back upon the other nations.
Its armed citizens were retiring without boasting and without commotion, just as they had come, and without asking anything for their great endeavor. They would disappear like the fairies and enchanters in ancient legends who, after doing good, need to return to their mysterious domains.
Years would pass: history would speak of this endeavor, unique in its intensity and its generous character, and on the Riviera and in other places there would remain of this great world a memory disfigured by time. The boys of to-day, grown old, would remember how they learned to play baseball from the soldiers who had come from a land of marvels beyond the sea, the girls, becoming grandmothers, would yearningly recall the American lovers they once had.
The Prince calculates again the greatness of this people, the only one capable of still working the miracles, that religions sometimes work in the early period of their exaltation.
The Great Republic is the world's creditor. All the victorious nations owe it fabulous sums; England is its debtor by thousands of millions, and France the same. The smaller countries, Belgium, Serbia, and the rest,have been able to live, thanks to its enormous loans. It is not all known as yet, years must pass before the full extent of these generosities is brought to light. This country, which likes advertisement and loud propaganda in its commercial affairs, is modest and concise in speaking of its disinterested acts.
"To go on freely living after the cataclysm, humanity is going to need America's support, or America's benevolence," thinks the Prince. "The political center of the world has shifted. It is no longer in Paris, nor is it in London. It remained for a while, trembling unsteadily on its base, in Berlin; but now it has leaped across the ocean."
The man, as yet unknown, who in the future is to take his place in the White House for four years, professor, lawyer, merchant, or farmer, as he may be, will sway the destiny of the world more than all the rulers who fill history with the din of warlike glory. His power will be based on something more permanent and solid than the strength of armies. It will have behind it industry and wealth, which create armies; democratic power, which the power of public opinion creates.
The irresistible strength of this power is clearly seen by the Prince.
Germany, in spite of her continual military triumphs in the first few years of the war, has finally fallen in defeat. Public opinion was against her. The democratic spirit of the entire world rose against the spirit of Empire.
This triumph of democracy is beginning to be manifest everywhere.
"There is no longer a single emperor left in Europe," Michael goes on thinking. "The vanquished empires want to be republics. All the kings are forgetting their ancestors with their divine rights, and are trying to havetheir crowns forgiven them, that they may imitate the simple life of a president."
This unexpected attitude of the world gives it a new love of life.
He has realized, for the last few months—since he gave up Villa Sirena—that Prince Michael Fedor Lubimoff has become an unfashionable personage. Perhaps, with the lapse of years, others will be as he was. History repeats itself. Times of peace and plenty inevitably produce men such as he had been. But at present humanity has been restored by grief and sacrifice, humanity is anxious to live, and longs for something new, without knowing exactly what, and is working to secure it.
Michael looks on himself with pity. What is he going to do? What can men like himself do for their fellow men?
He recalls the luncheon in the little house of Don Marcos. He is still offended by the attentions the Colonel shows him at table, cutting his meat, looking after him like a child, trying to make up for the absence of his arm. It is something disgraceful!
Farewell to Prince Lubimoff!... Even if he still wanted to continue his selfish existence, entirely given up to pleasure, it would be impossible for him. He is a cripple; he considers himself quite old. No one but Mado, who doesn't really know what she wants, would ever notice him.
Besides, he feels poor. For the first time he recalls with a certain satisfaction the heritage left him by Alicia. It was not worth anything at that moment, but who knows but what some day...! He dreams that perhaps those Mexican mines may replace his lost fortune in Russia; and then...! He feels a strong desire to regain his wealth in order to do good; a longingwhich is something like remorse. He knows the inefficiency of individual effort in remedying human misery: a mere drop lost in the ocean, a grain of sand on the beach. But what difference does that make? He is satisfied in giving happiness to some fifty unfortunate beings, among the hundreds of millions who people the earth.
Then he thinks of his present situation. That very morning he determined on his mode of life. He will flee from the poor Colonel, because of Mado. Others may take it upon themselves to bring misfortune to Don Marcos, but not he! He will take up his residence in Nice, in a Russianpensionrun by an impoverished noblewoman. In the evenings they will talk of the days when she was rich, beautiful, and desired; of the dances at the Petersburg Court, in which they danced together so often. Lubimoff even has a suspicion that one of his duels was over this boarding-house keeper.
The remnants of his fortune will bring him a sufficient income to live in modest comfort. He will swell the number of wrecks retiring to the Riviera, to recall, under the palm trees, their forgotten triumphs. His old valet will accompany him in his dethronement.
He already has an occupation to fill his hours. He wants to be a contemplator of life. He is glad to have been born in the most interesting of periods.
Something is going to happen; something new in history.
The smoke has not yet cleared away from the battlefields. It is a mist in which people lose their way and which does not allow them to see the complete outline of things. The very actors in the recent drama are blind. Years will pass, before the mist rises and vanishes, leaving the new world visible.
Will it be the same stage setting as of yore, merelywith a few lines changed? Will all these bloody efforts to suppress violence, selfishness, and pre-historic ferocity as the chief bases of society, turn out to have been in vain?
The Prince thinks bitterly of the possible disillusionment. How terrible to see primitive bestiality rise again unharmed after a cataclysm which has been accepted as a regeneration! How terrible to contemplate the failure of so many generous spirits, of so many noble minds, aspiring toward the triumph of good, anxious for peace among men, and the sweet association of people, working against war as medical societies labor to exterminate diseases!
Faith in the future suddenly animates him. The world cannot always be the same; great convulsions, when they have passed, never leave the soil the same as they found it. Will children always be annihilating each other just because their fathers and grandfathers did so? Must they look on each other with hostility because they were born on different sides of a mountain, a river, or a wood, which politics calls a frontier?
We all have two native lands! The place where we were born, and the State to which we belong. Why not generously broaden this conception to include a third country? Will not a blessed time come in which men will talk as fellow being to fellow being, without thinking whether or not History commands them to hate and kill each other? With deep love for one's land of birth, cannot they be at the same time citizens of the world?
The Prince is leaning on the balustrade, above the terraces and the harbor. His pensive walk has brought him thither, without his realizing it.
He turns his back on the sea and on the crowd which, after the concert, is beginning to thin out there below. The American musicians are passing close to him, followedby a swarm of small boys accompanying their retirement.
He looks at a gap on the horizon, between the Alps and the promontory of Monaco, where the sun has just gone down. Above the reddish expanse a star is shining with the brilliancy and luminous facets of a precious stone.
Lubimoff is thinking of the ancient fathers of poetry who sang about it three thousand years ago. Homer called itKalistos. Sometimes the morning star and at other times the evening star, Lucifer, Vesperus, or the "Shepherds' Star," it finally received the name of Venus, because of its shining whiteness, like that of a diamond on a woman's breast.
The Prince feels the sweet caress in his eyes as he gazes on the soft glow of the planet. Its name symbolizes beauty and love. He imagines the people who inhabit that celestial point of light lost in space. They must be of a purer essence than ours, entirely free from a past of primitive animality—ethereal beings, like the angels of all religions.
Then he smiles bitterly.
There is another star shining in the sky, more beautiful and larger than that one. It is blue instead of white, a soft blue: the color of poetry and dreams. It sparkles, in the dark depths of space, with the mysterious glow of the enormous bluish diamonds which Oriental monarchs place in their tiaras. Those who contemplate it feel in their eyes the velvety dew of divine mystery. Perhaps the poets of other worlds sing of it as a chosen refuge and a place of eternal beauty, where only the souls of the pure and the elect may go to rest. Perhaps it has given rise to religions and is the object of cults, having its altars, as the sun had in former times.
And this blue diamond of space, this world of softlight, which the populations of other planets contemplate as a poetic star, and as one in which all creatures lead a purely spiritual life, is the Earth, our poor globe, where twelve millions of men have just died on the battlefield, where as many more millions died of the emotion and plagues, which are the consequence of war; and where six hundred thousand millions of francs have been consumed in smoke, fire, and bursting steel.
Lubimoff remembers his impressions, a few hours before, standing beside a tomb which was beginning to be changed at the first halting words of Spring. The Infinite does not know us, nor does the very earth which maintains us know us either.
We are alone in the infinite, without other support than that of our own lives, our own illusions, and our own hopes. Man can rely only on man.
And he repeats what he had said of the earth that morning.
The sky knows nothing of our sorrows.
He slowly turns toward the square.
From all the cafés, restaurants, and hotels, comes the musical rise and fall of the cadenced violins. Behind the great windows, reddened by an inner light, he see couples passing intertwined, following the rhythm of the music. They are dancing, dancing, dancing.
Youth does nothing else. Dancing is a sort of sacred rite, prohibited during the war; and people are all devoting themselves in dancing now, with the fervor of zealots finally celebrating the triumphs of their persecuted religion.
The Prince recalls his recent passage through Paris. He had never seen the women better dressed, with so manifest a hunger for pleasure and luxury. The tango of the violins on the Boulevard is answered like anecho by the tango of the violins all along the Riviera, and at the summer resorts which are beginning to open. Woman's dearest wish, at the moment, is to dance the latest dance with a fighter from the United States!
The nightmare of war has vanished; everything has been forgotten. For many people nothing remains to recall the conflict save the uniforms, more numerous than formerly in thethés dansants.
Michael confines his meditation to this coast, which was always the domain of the blessed! For four long years war has turned Monaco upside down and filled it with darkness.
His imagination runs up and down the gulfs and promontories. There is a cemetery on each. In Mentone thousands and thousands of negroes lie under the earth. The combatants from Africa, whose fathers knew only the lance and the breech-clout, have chanced to perish like gladiators on this shore of European millionaires. In Cap-Martin the English have left their dead; in Monaco, there are some of every nationality; in Cap-Ferrat, the Belgians sleep, under wreaths already old; in Nice, are the bodies of the Americans; and everywhere, from Esterel to the Italian frontier, there are Frenchmen, Frenchmen, Frenchmen.
The dead are innumerable. Were they all to rise together, those who come to prolong their lives under the palm tree and the olive on the shores of the Violet Sea, would flee aghast.
But the aim of life is to live. Life is an endless Springtime, and covers everything it touches with the eager moss of pleasure, with the swiftly creeping ivy of dreams.
The cemeteries, strikingly white, seem to take on a duller tone, and are lost in the smiling landscape, like an unessential note in a song. The softness of the skiesand the surrounding country changes them to gardens. A body occupies so little space and the earth is so large!... The hotels which were hospitals, are regilding their signs, disinfecting their rooms and sending advertisements to the great newspapers of the world. Already people may come and dream between the walls which just now shook with cries of pain, or the rattle of death agonies. Music is beginning sweetly to moan along the happy coast, amid the murmur of the waves and the rustling of the orange trees, of epithalamial perfume. The old shepherd of the Alps, who, after sixty years, has not yet recovered from his amazement at the Monte Carlo which has arisen there below on the once deserted tableland, will see it grow with new palaces and new towers, further expanding its opulence like a city of dreams.
The passage of death has made love of life more keen. Every one, seeing the black banner of the Adversary vanish in the darkness, finds new zest in pleasure.
Lubimoff stops in the middle of the square. It is beginning to grow dark. With one ear he hears the musical swing of a dance invented by the negroes of North America for the enjoyment of the whites; and with the other he hears other negro music, the South American tango. In the adjoining streets new orchestras are playing wherever there is a public place, café, hotel, or restaurant—with a sign in English at the door, to attract the heroes of the hour:Dancing.
He gazes at the mountain which forms a background for the square and watches over the graves on its slopes. Then he looks on high....
The earth and the sky know nothing of our sorrows.
And neither does life.
THE END