Warlock

by Oakley Hall

We are a race of tradition-lovers in a new land, of king-reverers in a Republic, of hero-worshipers in a society of mundane get-and-spend.

Yet it is only one side of us, and we are cynical and envious too. As one half of our nature seeks to create heroes to worship, the other must ceaselessly attempt to cast them down and discover evidence of feet of clay, in order to label them as mere lucky fellows, or as villains-were-the-facts-but-known, and the eminent and great are ground between the millstones of envy, and reduced again to common size.

It is a curious thought; how much do these legends, as they outstrip and supersede their originals, rest upon Truth, and how much upon some dark and impenetrable design within Man himself?

It seemed to him, as he considered it, more than an obsession, a disease of the spirit; and yet he wondered if this disease, this obsession, this struggle to pre-eminence, was not the reason for mankind’s triumph on the earth—the complex brain developed to plot for it, the opposing thumb to grasp at it—if it was not what set mankind apart from the animals. No animal cared what was its name.

He felt no urge to strive to be anything more than what, long ago, he had been content to be. He considered his freedom and his bondage, his own soul’s sickness and his own particular health, and wondered at the will he did not possess.

“Why, yes. If every man I shot down wrong had a brother, and every one came after me, I would have to die that many times.”

He felt the strain again, and he grimaced down at his hand. “I don’t say it is the killing that’s so bad in itself,” he went on. “I mean, when people wear guns like they do, they are going to use them. But it is that after some point the killing makes people turn against what was supposed to be done for them in the first place. It is hard, and it is unfair, but it is so. I guess I mean you, Marshal. You have stood for law and order here, so if they turn against you, they—”

The human animal is set apart from other beasts by his infinite capacity for creating fictions.