Warlock

by Oakley Hall

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

Yet I wonder if Canning did not have a fearful vision of how Right carries the seeds of Wrong within it, and Wrong its particular precariousness for a man in his position. For what are Right & Wrong in the end, but opinion held to?

“Do you ever feel you were made for something, David? Made to do something—oh, something fine! But not know—” She stopped and shook her head, and the ringlets danced. “I think everyone feels that sometimes, Jessie.” “Oh, no! Oh, I don’t think everyone does. Most of them just live along. But there are a few who can do—I suppose I mean be something. Something that can go on even after them. And shouldn’t those people be trying every moment to be that? I mean, God gave it to them to do or be, and if they didn’t try I should think they would be very afraid of God.”

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.

Because times change, and will change, and are changing, Ike. If you will let them change like they are bound to do, why, they will change easy. But fight them like you do every time and they will change hard and grind you to dust like a millstone grinding.”

Nothing was ever clear, everything was incredibly difficult, complex, and suspect; there was no right way.

Now he is pitied, and pity is no more than contempt beribboned and scented.

He had deluded himself with his ideals of humanity and liberality, but peace came after war, not out of reason. They would have to have fire and blood to make their union. So it had always been, and revolutions were made by men who conquered, or who died, and not by gray thought in gray minds. Peace came with a sword, right with a sword, justice and freedom with swords, and the struggle to them must be led by men with swords rather than by ineffectual men counseling reason and moderation.