Levinas, Kant and the Problematic of

Temporality Adonis Frangeskou

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/levinas-kant-and-the-problematic-of-temporality-adoni
s-frangeskou/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/

Levinas and the trauma of responsibility the ethical

significance of time Coe

https://textbookfull.com/product/levinas-and-the-trauma-of-
responsibility-the-ethical-significance-of-time-coe/

Future Sounds The Temporality of Noise Stephen Kennedy

https://textbookfull.com/product/future-sounds-the-temporality-
of-noise-stephen-kennedy/

Thinking The Problematic Genealogies And Explorations

Between Philosophy And The Sciences Oliver Leistert

https://textbookfull.com/product/thinking-the-problematic-
genealogies-and-explorations-between-philosophy-and-the-sciences-
oliver-leistert/
The Trauma Golden Hour A Practical Guide Adonis Nasr

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-trauma-golden-hour-a-
practical-guide-adonis-nasr/

Adonis The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian

Renaissance 1st Edition Carlo Caruso

https://textbookfull.com/product/adonis-the-myth-of-the-dying-
god-in-the-italian-renaissance-1st-edition-carlo-caruso/

Temporality Shame and the Problem of Evil in Jungian

Psychology 1st Edition Stein

https://textbookfull.com/product/temporality-shame-and-the-
problem-of-evil-in-jungian-psychology-1st-edition-stein/

The Selfie Temporality and Contemporary Photography 1st

Edition Claire Raymond

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-selfie-temporality-and-
contemporary-photography-1st-edition-claire-raymond/

Kant Critique of Practical Reason Gregor

https://textbookfull.com/product/kant-critique-of-practical-
reason-gregor/
L E V I N A S , KA N T
A N D T H E P R O B L E M AT I C
O F T E M P O R A L I TY
A D O N I S F R A N G E S KO U
Levinas, Kant and the Problematic
of Temporality
 Adonis Frangeskou

Levinas, Kant
and the Problematic
of Temporality
Adonis Frangeskou
Alexander College
Larnaca, Cyprus

ISBN 978-1-137-59794-6 ISBN 978-1-137-59795-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59795-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945818

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein
or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to
jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover Illustration: Marilyn Nieves/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
FOR HARVEY
 Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Douglas Burnham, William Large, and David
Webb, who have aided me considerably by their philosophical expertise
and by their understanding of the problematic of Temporality. I would
also like to express my gratitude to my mother Maria Frangeskou, and
to Ann McGoun, for their continued guidance and support. Finally, I
wish to tell Lee Michael Badger how much his faithful friendship and
his example of intellectual integrity have sustained me in this difficult
enterprise called philosophy.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism 17

3 The Ground-Laying of Metaphysica Generalis

as Temporality of Dasein 47

4 Time, Temporality and the Opening up of Presence 77

5 From Presence to Absolute Presence: The Supreme

Diachronism 109

6 The Ground-Laying of Metaphysica Specialis

as Temporality of Being-for-the-Other 135

Bibliography 207

Index 211

ix
 Abbreviations

The list below provides the abbreviations of all primary texts cited in the
main body and endnotes of this book. The pages of the original language
versions will be referenced along with their corresponding English trans-
lations where this is possible. Those English translations that have occa-
sionally been modified and interpolated will be marked ‘mod.’ Successive
citations of the same text will exclude its abbreviation.

Texts by Heidegger
The original language texts are those numbered volumes of Heidegger’s
Gesamtausgabe [G] published in Frankfurt am Main by Vittorio
Klostermann. An exception is made for Sein und Zeit [SZ], which is
cited following the seventh edition published in Tübingen by Max
Niemeyer Verlag.

G3 1991. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik./Richard Taft, trans.

1990. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.

xi
xii   Abbreviations

G5 1977. Holzwege./Julian Young & Kenneth Haynes, eds. 2002. Off

the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
G9 1976. Wegmarken./William McNeill, ed. 1998. Pathmarks.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
G14 2007. Zur Sache des Denkens./Joan Stambaugh, trans. 1972. On
Time and Being. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press.
G15 1986. Seminare./Andrew Mitchell & Francois Raffoul, trans. 2003.
Four Seminars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
G21 1976. Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit./Thomas Sheehan, trans.
2010. Logic: The Question of Truth. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
G24 1975. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie./Albert Hofstadter,
trans. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
G25 1977. Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der
reinen Vernunft./Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly, trans. 1997.
Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
G26 1978. Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von
Leibniz./Michael Heim, trans. 1984. The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
G31 1982. Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die
Philosophie./Ted Sadler, trans. 2002. The Essence of Human Freedom:
An Introduction to Philosophy. London: Continuum.
G32 1980. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes./Parvis Emad & Kenneth
Maly, trans. 1994. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Bloomington &
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
G41 1984. Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von der transcen-
dentalen Grundsätzen./W.B. Barton, Jr. & Vera Deutsch, trans. 1967.
What is a Thing? Chicago: Henry Regency Company.
G42 1988. Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit./Joan
Stambaugh, trans. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human
Freedom. Athens: Ohio University Press.
G64 2004. Der Begriff der Zeit./William McNeill, trans. 1992. The
Concept of Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
SZ 1967. Sein und Zeit./John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, trans.
1962. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
 Abbreviations   xiii

Texts by Levinas
The original language texts marked with an asterix* refer to Le Livre de
Poche versions of those texts.

AEAE 1978. Autrement qu’être ou au-delá de l’essence. The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff Publishers*./Alphonso Lingis, trans. 1991. Otherwise
than Being or Beyond Essence. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
AT 1995. Altérité et Transcendance. Saint Clement: Fata Morgana*./
Michael B. Smith, trans. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. London:
The Athlone Press Ltd.
BI 1983. ‘Beyond Intentionality.’ Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin
in Philosophy in France Today, edited by Alan Montefiori. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 100-15. Reproduced in 2002. The
Phenomenology Reader. Edited by Dermot Moran & Timothy
Mooney. London: Routledge, 529–39.
BPW 1996. Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak,
Simon Critchley & Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
CPP 1998. Collected Philosophical Papers. Alphonso Lingis, trans.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
DEL 1984. ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.’ Translated by Richard
Kearney in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The
Phenomenological Heritage, edited by Richard Kearney. Manchester:
Manchester University Press. Reproduced in 1986. Face to Face with
Levinas. Edited by Richard Cohen. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 13–33.
DMT 1993. Dieu, la mort et le temps. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle*./
Bettina Bergo, trans. 2000. God, Death, and Time. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
DVI 1982. De Dieu qui vient á l’idée. Paris: Librairie Philosophique
J. VRIN./Bettina Bergo, trans, 1998. Of God Who Comes to Mind.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
EE 1998. De l’existence a l’existant. Paris: Librairie Philosophique
J. VRIN./Alphonso Lingis, trans. 2001. Existence and Existents.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
xiv   Abbreviations

EI 1981. Éthique et Infini. Librairie Arthème Fayard et Radio-France*./

Richard A. Cohen, trans. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press.
EN 1991. Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-á-l’autre, Paris: Grasset &
Fasquelle*./Michael B. Smith & Barbara Harshav, trans. 1998. Entre
Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, London: The Athlone Press Ltd.
HAH 1972. Humanisme de l’autre homme. Montpellier: Fata Morgana./
Nidra Poller, trans. 2003. Humanism of the Other. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
HS 1987. Hors Sujet. Saint Clement: Fata Morgana*./Michael B. Smith,
trans. 1993. Outside the Subject. London: The Athlone Press Ltd.
IRB 2001. Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas.
Edited by Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
ITN 2007. In the Time of the Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith.
London: Continuum.
ON 1982. ‘The Old and the New.’ Translated by Richard A. Cohen for
the English publication of Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press.
PPR 1994. ‘The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason.’ Translated by Blake
Billings in Man and World, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1994), 445–53.
TA 1979. Le temps et l’autre. Montpellier: Fata Morgana./Richard
A. Cohen, trans. 1987. Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press.
TI 1961. Totalité et Infini. Essais sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff Publishers*./Alphonso Lingis, trans. 1969. Totality and
Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press.

Texts by Kant
Citations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason will be listed convention-
ally according to the pagination of both A and B editions, as pre-
sented in Immanuel Kant: Werke, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Vols. 3 &
 Abbreviations   xv

4. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft./Werner S. Pluhar,

trans. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company Inc.
References to Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will
Be Able to Come Forward as Science will be cited according to the vol-
ume and page number of Immanuel Kant: Werke, Prolegomena zu einer
jeden kunftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können,
Vol. 5. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft [KW5], followed
by the English pagination in Gary Hatfield, trans. 2004. Prolegomena to
Any Future Metaphysics. With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 1
Introduction

The following book aims to introduce Levinas’s notion of ‘the Other’

into the very heart of the Kantian doctrine of the schematism, and
therefore of the Heideggerian problematic of Temporality. In this sense,
it will render possible an ethical interpretation of the Critique of Pure
Reason which departs substantially from Heidegger’s own ontologi-
cal interpretation of that text in his Kantbook (Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics) of 1929. More specifically, the book intends to establish
the historical connection between the retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality in the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas on the one
hand, and the laying of the ground for metaphysics in the schematism
of Kant’s critical philosophy on the other. It intends to show that this
connection is not simply to be established in the way that Heidegger,
who destroyed the doctrine of the schematism on the grounds of the
existential temporality of Dasein, establishes it. His destruction of
the doctrine of the schematism remains overly committed to a reso-
lute ontological interpretation of the Kantian ground-laying. Drawing
on Levinas’s ethical critique of the Heideggerian retrieval of the prob-
lematic of Temporality together with his destructive proposal to carry
out the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time in a manner

© The Author(s) 2017 1

A. Frangeskou, Levinas, Kant and the Problematic of Temporality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59795-3_1
2   A. Frangeskou

consistent with Rosenzweig’s philosophy, I will argue that the connec-

tion should be established at the point where Kant determines the ethi-
cal status of the schematism according to the regulative schemas of the
ideas of pure reason (God, man and world), and not, as in Heidegger’s
ontological destruction, at the point of his determination of the sensible
schemas of the pure concepts of understanding (the categories). For it
can almost certainly be argued that the destruction of the schematism
accomplished by Heidegger in 1929 remains extraordinarily limited
in its application, and for two reasons: first, because it limits the sche-
matism to the sensible schemas of the pure concepts of understanding
alone, so as to effectively restrict the Kantian doctrine of the schema-
tism as such; and then, above all, because it thereby retrieves the exis-
tential ground of Dasein’s temporality. Does not Heidegger’s historical
exhibition of Dasein’s existential temporality reveal to us the extreme
limitation that he imposes, and necessarily must impose, on the retrieval
of the problematic of Temporality from out of Kant’s 1st Critique? Does
not Heidegger’s historical clarification of the existential temporality
of Dasein allow us to call into question the projected task of his own
retrieval of the problematic of Temporality—that of destroying Kant’s
doctrine of the schematism? For it is by no means a foregone conclu-
sion that the Kantian doctrine of the schematism can be limited to the
sensible schemas of the pure concepts of understanding, and therefore
that it be destroyed only on the grounds of the existential temporality of
Dasein.
It will therefore be shown, with the aid of Levinas’s ethical
philosophy, that the retrieval of the problematic of Temporality
can no longer be limited to its previous task of destroying the doc-
trine of the schematism on the grounds of the existential temporality
of Dasein. The question raised by this book can thus be posed as fol-
lows: Does the task of destroying the doctrine of the schematism
retrieve the existential grounds of temporality or does it retrieve the
diachronic grounds of temporality? In other words, does the destruc-
tion of the doctrine of the schematism operate according to its retrieval
of the existential temporality of Dasein or according to its retrieval of
the diachronic temporality of ‘Being-for-the-Other’? [IRB 114]. It is
not only a matter here of renewing the retrieval of the problematic of
 1 Introduction    
3

Temporality, but much more originally of establishing whether and to

what extent the diachronic temporality of Being-for-the-Other oper-
ates another destruction of the Kantian schematism as such. For Levinas
doubtless did not accomplish what he nevertheless rendered possible
for destroying the doctrine of the schematism on the grounds of the
diachronic temporality of Being-for-the-Other. There are at least three
reasons that explain why this is the case: first, because Levinas’s under-
standing of the 1st Critique, and of the Kantian schematism in particu-
lar, is too often guided by a Heideggerian pre-understanding; second,
because the diachronic temporality of Being-for-the-Other, even in
the traditional form of the regulative schemas of the ideas of pure rea-
son, never even comes close to unveiling itself; and finally, because the
retrieval of the problematic of Temporality required for this unveil-
ing, never gets beyond either its preparatory status or its contradictory
formulation. But if, in spite of all this, the diachronic temporality of
Being-for-the-Other can indeed be shown to be fully operative within
the 1st Critique, then Heidegger’s ontological retrieval of the prob-
lematic of Temporality would have to concede—somewhat contradic-
torily—that its task of destroying the doctrine of the schematism can
no longer be limited to retrieving the existential temporality of Dasein.
There is every indication that Levinas has at least opened up the pos-
sibility of pursuing this alternative retrieval: the destruction of the
schematism—and therefore, of the regulative schemas of the ideas of
pure reason—rests solely on an ethical retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality, beyond both the sensible schemas of the pure concepts
of understanding and the existential temporality of Dasein.
In this book, then, I will endeavour to accomplish the ethical
retrieval of the problematic of Temporality in the 1st Critique, and
thus to carry out the task of destroying the doctrine of the schematism
by releasing this task from its fundamental ontological commitments.
If in Levinas’s claim that ethics is first philosophy, which is to say, in
his claim to oppose the project of fundamental ontology, the retrieval
of the problematic of Temporality can be shown to surpass the exis-
tential temporality of Dasein, then it becomes necessary to drive this
ethical retrieval forward to the point of exceeding the ontological
destruction of the schematism previously carried out by Heidegger. But
4   A. Frangeskou

in doing so, one is equally compelled to renew the Heideggerian task of

destruction by carrying it out ethically, equally bound to that uniquely
ethical task of destruction which exceeds the limits of fundamental
ontology. It is in conceiving of this ethical destruction of the schema-
tism that this book justifies its claim to offer an ethical interpretation of
the Critique of Pure Reason.
It is therefore an essential argument of this book that in claiming
ethics to be first philosophy, Levinas not only maintains the philo-
sophical priority of ethics over that of fundamental ontology, but also
renews its related task of destruction and of destroying the history of
ontology. To claim, as Levinas does, that ethics is first philosophy, is
not only to maintain that within philosophy ethics ‘signifies a certain
priority […] that ethics is,’ philosophically speaking, ‘before ontology’
[DVI 143/90].1 It is also to maintain the priority of ethics within the
history of ontology itself. In other words, it maintains a certain prior-
ity of ethics within the philosophical task of destroying the history of
ontology (to play on a title of Heidegger’s). Thus, to claim that ethics is
first philosophy is to maintain the historical priority of ethics in addi-
tion to its philosophical priority.2 For ‘it is at this level’ of priority—
the level of what Derrida, whom I have already begun to cite here, calls
‘the worldwide historico-philosophical situation’—‘that the thought of
Emmanuel Levinas can make us tremble. At the heart of the desert, in
the growing wasteland, this thought, which fundamentally no longer
seeks to be a thought of Being […] makes us dream of an inconceiv-
able process of dismantling and dispossession.’3 Derrida then qualifies
this oneiric process of dismantling the thought of Being by describing
it as ‘a necessity’ that will ‘finally impose itself upon Levinas,’ namely,
‘the necessity of lodging oneself in traditional conceptuality in order
to destroy it.’4 It is therefore Levinas himself who, when necessarily
lodged in this way, will enable me to establish the historical connection
between the laying of the ground for metaphysics in the schematism of
Kant’s 1st Critique on the one hand, and the retrieval of the problem-
atic of Temporality in his ethical thought on the other. It is he alone
who, when imposed upon by this necessity, will enable me to argue that
the destruction of the doctrine of the schematism leads to an ethical
retrieval of the problematic of Temporality, and thus renders possible an
 1 Introduction    
5

ethical interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. For it is by virtue of

its own historico-philosophical situation that Levinas’s ethical thought
is compelled to lead—through an almost inconceivable and necessary
process of its destruction—the doctrine of the schematism toward an
alternative retrieval of its temporal problematic, that of the diachronic
temporality of Being-for-the-Other.5 A more expansive ‘phenomenon
of a ‘transcendental determination of time’ in its own structure’ unveils
itself within this ethical retrieval than within Heidegger’s own ontologi-
cal retrieval of the existential temporality of Dasein [SZ 24/45]. This
more expansive phenomenon is no longer limited to a transcendental
determination of time which Heidegger destroyed on the grounds of
the existential temporality of Dasein, and which he therefore grounded
in the existential structures of temporality. I will show that Levinas’s
ethical thought renders possible an interpretation of the 1st Critique
which relieves the task of destruction from grounding the phenomenon
of a transcendental determination of time in the existential structures
of temporality alone. This ethical interpretation of the 1st Critique
destroys the phenomenon of a transcendental determination of time by
grounding it ultimately in the more expansive diachronic structures of
temporality. Destroyed on the grounds of the diachronic temporality of
Being-for-the-Other, the phenomenon of a transcendental determina-
tion of time therefore becomes conceivable in such a way as to free up a
strictly ethical interpretation of the 1st Critique.
The account of Levinas’s relation to Kant proposed here is natu-
rally very different from the more traditional accounts of this relation.
Given that Levinas prioritises ethics over ontology, and given that, as
Heidegger has shown, Kant’s 1st Critique originally unfolds as a project
of fundamental ontology, it is far from obvious how his ethical thought
could be utilised effectively in an interpretation—or indeed reinterpre-
tation—of the 1st Critique. Here it would be germane to recall a recent
argument made by Richard Cohen that: ‘While Heidegger’s “funda-
mental ontology” effects an ontological revision of Kant’s epistemologi-
cal account of the imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason, Levinas’s
intersubjective ethics effects a revision and unification of Kant’s account
of the ethical subject in the Critique of Practical Reason and the role of
religion in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.’6 Those traditional
6   A. Frangeskou

accounts which, in line with Cohen’s argument, simply neglect the

importance of Levinas’s ethical thought for interpreting the 1st Critique
usually insist on its relation to Kant’s 2nd Critique alone. Such insist-
ence is clearly evident in an earlier essay written by Paul Davies. In
attempting to clarify ‘the relation to Kant and Kantianism staged in
and by Levinas’s phenomenological project,’ Davies finds textual evi-
dence in the lecture courses God, Death, and Time and elsewhere to
support the general claim that Levinas affirms the necessity of such a
relation.7 He then suggests that ‘the Levinasian call for ‘ethics as first
philosophy’ [cannot] fail to bring to mind that earlier insistence on
the primacy of practical reason which crucially centred around the
description of reason’s being affected by the moral law, laid low by its
own imperative.’8 In other words, Levinas’s phenomenological project
stages the relation to Kant in and through the relation to the primacy
of practical reason, i.e., in and through the description of the moral
imperative. Consequently, on Davies’s account, the relation to Kant that
Levinas affirms in God, Death, and Time invites ‘us to begin to find in
Kant’s practical philosophy and in the announcement that the critical
philosophy is not limited to the conditions of theoretical knowledge,
something of a genuine ‘outside,’’ i.e., it invites us to begin to find in
Kant’s 2nd Critique something of that ‘sense of the subject ‘outside’
ontology’ and ‘the knowledge […] of any being whatsoever.’9
Catherine Chalier provides what is perhaps the most impressive
instance of this type of account. She understands Levinas’s relation
to Kant primarily in terms of ‘a shared admiration for practical rea-
son’s aptitude to exceed the bounds of speculative reason.’10 With this
in mind, she contends that ‘Levinas recognizes his proximity to that
[i.e., Kant’s practical] philosophy, since, “beside the theoretical access
to the being of the phenomenon,” Kant’s reflections examine how the
implications of moral action can be explained by the existence of a
reasonable subject “without becoming the object of any knowledge of
being.” That view corroborates his preoccupation with an ethics that
is not based on an ontology.’11 This ethical proximity to Kant, Chalier
argues, therefore makes it necessary for us to compare ‘these two phi-
losophies of the moral subject’ so as ‘to examine their common inter-
est in conceiving of a moral obligation beyond any possible theoretical
 1 Introduction    
7

knowledge [of being],’ and thus, beyond any possible ontology of the
subject.12 There are many interpreters who follow Chalier’s understand-
ing of what Levinas’s relation to Kant amounts to—i.e., their shared
admiration for the primacy of practical reason over theoretical rea-
son—and who also agree that Levinas maintains such a relation. Diane
Perpich, for instance, points out that: ‘In Kant’s insistence on the pri-
macy of pure practical reason, Levinas finds a parallel to his own philo-
sophical project, which he often sums up in the claim that ethics is “first
philosophy.”’13 This point is more fully developed by Peter Atterton,
who states that: ‘In his only essay dedicated entirely to Kant, pub-
lished in 1971 under the title “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason,”
Levinas applauded the “great novelty” of Kant’s practical philosophy.’14
For Atterton, there can be no doubt that ‘the practical philosophy of
Kant stands closest to his [i.e., Levinas’s] own thinking in ethics,’ since
‘Levinas finds in Kant’s practical philosophy “un sens” (meaning, sense,
direction) that is irreducible to ontology.’15 Indeed: ‘By subordinat-
ing the interests of theoretical reason to those of practical reason […]
Kant’s doctrine of primacy signifies for Levinas a reversal of philosophy’s
traditional vocation to ground thought and action in knowledge and
truth. The ontological problematic […] is in this instance subordinated
to ethics as an independent and preliminary praxis.’16
John Llewelyn, however, has managed to situate Levinas’s relation to
Kant in a quite different context. For just as it cannot be doubted that
Levinas’s own ethical thinking stands closest to Kant’s practical philoso-
phy, and thus to the 2nd Critique, so too one can hardly avoid seeing
that it also stands equally close to Kant’s theoretical philosophy, and
in particular, to ‘those few pages of the Critique of Pure Reason where
he writes of imagination as schematization.’17 The main argument that
Llewelyn hazards here no doubt comes from his attempt to interpret
‘the ethicality of face-to-face saying’ as precisely ‘that moment of imag-
ination when it is surprised by its own radical exteriority,’ a uniquely
ethical moment of imagination which Llewelyn goes on to describe as
‘a moment where the synchronizable and recuperable time of memory
and the Critical imagination that synthesizes what it analyses is crossed
by the unsychronizable time of being hypoCritically addressed […] by
the other.’18 It therefore becomes necessary to argue, as Llewelyn does,
8   A. Frangeskou

that ‘the Kantian account of the imagination must be reinterpreted

phenomenologically […] by going back through Kant, through a
Critical doctrine of the imagination catastrophized by the hypoCriti-
cal ethicality of what Levinas calls the face-to-face.’19 As for the ethical
moment of schematization, it is always a matter of ‘what Levinas calls
[…] the face,’ such as it is developed not only by taking the ‘French
word ‘figure’ […] to mean ‘face’,’ but also by ‘taking it back to the fig-
ura that are the diagrams that Kant calls the schemata of the imagina-
tion in the Critique of Pure Reason.’20 Without confusing the “figure” or
face of the other with the “figura” or schemata of the imagination, it is
nevertheless a matter of undertaking ‘a programme by which the hypo-
Critical responsibility that is Levinas’s great thought may welcome as its
recipients everything in space and time, including things that, on his
account of my welcoming the other into my home, get what ethical rel-
evance they have only by being donanda, that is to say […] as things to
be given to my guest.’21 According to this remarkable undertaking, not
only does Llewelyn accept the face of the other as perhaps the ultimate
figure or schema of space and time in the 1st Critique, but above all
even the recourse to responsibility, that is, to the great idea of Levinas’s
ethical thought, does not pass beyond that schema, but reinforces it by
“welcoming” those things received in space and time as things to be
given to the other.
In a certain respect, this book undertakes a similar programme by
which to situate Levinas’s ethical thought. It will assert that an ethical
reinterpretation of imagination as schematization is utterly indispensa-
ble to clarifying his relation to Kant. In opposition to those traditional
accounts which claim that Levinas’s ethical thought stands closest to
the 2nd Critique, my own account of this thought will argue in favour
of its equally close proximity to the 1st Critique. My own account of
Levinas will show that these traditional accounts neglect an idea of cru-
cial importance in his ethical thought, one that arises primarily from
out of his temporal explication of Rosenzweig. I am speaking of the
proposal announced in the final remarks to the interview ‘The Other,
Utopia, and Justice’, to carry out the deformalization of the notion of
time in the 1st Critique so as to unveil concretely those privileged situ-
ations or circumstances of ecstatic-horizonal temporality in which this
 1 Introduction    
9

notion of time is constituted. The historical development of this idea

in Levinas’s ethical thought strongly indicates a unique philosophi-
cal equivalence between the destruction of the Kantian schematism
in Heidegger’s retrieval of the problematic of Temporality on the one
hand, and the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time in his tem-
poral explication of Rosenzweig on the other. This equivalence will lead
me to advance a new notion (much more expansive than the ontologi-
cal notion) of the Kantian schematism—understood no longer as the
phenomenon of a transcendental determination of time by the catego-
ries of ontology, but as the phenomenon of a transcendental determina-
tion of time by the ideas of God, man and world. This ethical expansion
of the phenomenon of transcendental time-determination (from the
categories to the ideas) is precisely what motivates the present book to
work out and unveil an ideal notion of the schematism in Levinas’s tem-
poral explication of Rosenzweig. It then becomes necessary to reinter-
pret the notion of the Kantian schematism: Can it be unveiled as an
order of time according to a schema of ideas, and thus no longer as an
order of time according to a schema of categories? Confronted with
this ideal notion of the schematism, shouldn’t we distinguish essentially
between the phenomenon of a transcendental determination of time by
the ideas of God, man and world, and the phenomenon of a transcen-
dental determination of time by the categories of ontology? Here, an
essential question is posed about the possibility of unveiling the ideal
schemas of time concretely within Rosenzweig’s ecstatic-horizonal tem-
porality of the religious human being, and thus, within an ecstatic-hori-
zonal temporality that remains strictly irreducible to that of Heidegger’s
Dasein. Now, it is precisely in this first advance that the development of
an ethical destruction of the Kantian schematism also becomes equally
necessary: Is it still legitimate to carry out the task of destroying the
Kantian schematism by unveiling the schemas of time concretely in the
privileged circumstances of the human Dasein’s ecstatic-horizonal tem-
porality (from the perspective of the categories of ontology)? Could it
not be carried out instead by unveiling the schemas of time concretely
in the privileged circumstances of the ecstatic-horizonal temporality of
the religious human being (from the perspective of the ideas of God,
man and world)? I will therefore demonstrate that the development of
10   A. Frangeskou

an ethical destruction of the Kantian schematism in Levinas’s temporal

explication of Rosenzweig permits one to work out a phenomenon of tran-
scendental time-determination that clearly moves beyond that which was
worked out or unveiled by Heidegger’s ontological destruction, because
it unveils it concretely in the purely biblical—and thus, radically non-
ontological—circumstances of ecstatic-horizonal temporality. Moreover, a
destruction of the schematism that can be understood ethically is one
that succeeds in the task of unveiling concretely another phenomenon
of transcendental time-determination than that to which Heidegger,
and to a certain extent Rosenzweig, limited themselves: one that
becomes unveiled concretely in the privileged ethical circumstances
of the ecstatic-horizonal temporality of Being-for-the-Other. Finally,
the concrete unveiling of the phenomenon of transcendental time-
determination, if indeed it does exceed both the privileged ontological
and biblical circumstances of ecstatic-horizonal temporality, nonethe-
less always remains faithful to the ideal—and hence, non-ontological—
trajectory of Rosenzweig’s biblical conception of temporality. What
ideal notion of the schematism comes to be unveiled concretely after
Levinas’s temporal explication of Rosenzweig? Levinas refers to it
implicitly in his reading of the regulative use of the ideas in Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, an ideal notion of the Kantian schematism that
can actually be destroyed or deformalized, and thus, unveiled concretely
within the ethical temporality of Being-for-the-Other.
In short, Levinas’s proposed deformalization of the notion of time
in the 1st Critique is shown to be equivalent to the destruction of an
ideal notion of the Kantian schematism, and for this reason is absolutely
essential to clarifying Levinas’s relation to Kant.22 I shall therefore argue
that the relation to Kant and Kantianism in Levinas’s ethical thought
is not only staged in and through the description of the moral impera-
tive, as per the traditional accounts, but is also staged in and through
the doctrine of the schematism.23 In Levinas’s thought, everything tran-
spires as if there were indeed an ethical retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality that necessitated its own unique destruction of the doc-
trine of the schematism. Such an ethical retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality therefore invites those traditional interpreters who neglect
the importance of Levinas’s thought for interpreting the 1st Critique,
 1 Introduction    
11

to at least consider the possibility of interpreting that text from the

point of view of this thought, i.e., from the point of view of ethics as
first philosophy.
This ethical interpretation of Kant’s 1st Critique will be unfolded in
five chapters (Chaps. 2–6).
Chapters 2 and 3 endeavour to provide a detailed account of
Heidegger’s interpretation of the 1st Critique in his Kantbook of 1929.
Chapter 2 begins with Heidegger’s preparatory statement that: ‘The
following investigation is devoted to the task of interpreting Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason as a laying of the ground for metaphysics and
thus of placing the problem of metaphysics before us as a funda-
mental ontology’ [G3 1/1]. It then proceeds with an account of this
strictly ontological interpretation of the Kantian ground-laying itself
in terms of the schematism of the categories of Metaphysica Generalis.
Supplementing Heidegger’s Kantbook with relevant material taken from
his own 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, I then
outline in Chap. 3 a distinctively existential account of this text, thus
showing how Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of the 1st Critique
is already complicit with a certain retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality. Accordingly, I detail precisely how that which Heidegger
considers to be essential to the Kantian ground-laying of Metaphysica
Generalis, namely, the pure synthesis of imagination, can itself be
unveiled originally as the existential temporality of Dasein.
Chapters 4 and 5 seek to develop Levinas’s ethical thought on tem-
porality such as he presents this thought in his later texts. Both these
chapters are geared towards establishing the temporal grounds for an
ethical—as opposed to a strictly ontological—interpretation of the 1st
Critique. The later texts are historically and philosophically situated
within Heidegger’s own conception of time in the terms of temporal-
ity, and thus, within a conception of the opening up of time as such.
Chapter 4 intends to explore the ontological conception of temporality
as unveiled by Heidegger and then the ethical displacement of this tem-
porality as initiated by Levinas. The entire exploration in this chapter is
therefore unfolded as a successive commentary on the existential tem-
porality of Dasein which opens up the time of presence, and the dia-
chronic temporality of Being-for-the-Other which, in its displacement
12   A. Frangeskou

of the first opening, opens up the time of non-presence or absolute

presence. Chapter 5 then develops this commentary further in order
to explore how Levinas’s ethical thought alters the ecstatic-horizonal
constitution of temporality. As that which opens up the time of non-
presence and absolute presence, the diachronic temporality of Being-
for-the-Other already requires an ecstatic-horizonal constitution—since
the ecstatic-horizonal constitution of temporality bears above all on the
opening up of time itself. Henceforth, the ecstatic-horizonal constitu-
tion of temporality can no longer be conceived according to an opening
up of time in the existential temporality of Dasein, but far more origi-
nally, according to an opening up of time in the diachronic temporality
of Being-for-the-Other.
Chapter 6 aims to establish the historical connection between the
laying of the ground for metaphysics in the schematism of Kant’s
1st Critique on the one hand, and the retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality in Levinas’s ethical thought on the other. Having devel-
oped Levinas’s historical and philosophical situation within Heidegger’s
conception of temporality in the previous two chapters, Chap. 6
raises a question which Levinas himself did not ask, but which he
nevertheless anticipated to some extent in his destructive proposal to
carry out the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time in a man-
ner consistent with Rosenzweig’s philosophy. That question is the fol-
lowing: On the grounds of which problematic of Temporality can
the Kantian ground-laying of metaphysics in terms of the schema-
tism itself be originally unveiled? Can the problematic of Temporality
only be unveiled in the ontological terms of a schematism of the
categories of Metaphysica Generalis, or can it move beyond the limits
of this first unveiling so as to be unveiled more originally in the ethi-
cal terms of a schematism of the ideas of Metaphysica Specialis? Having
explored Levinas’s alteration of the ecstatic-horizonal constitution of
temporality as an opening up of time in Chap. 5, I show in Chap. 6
how this altered constitution accomplishes an ethical—as opposed to
Heidegger’s strictly ontological—interpretation of the 1st Critique.
Consequently, the interpretative task of unveiling the Kantian ground-
laying of metaphysics according to the problematic of Temporality no
longer consists in unveiling the pure synthesis of imagination as the
 1 Introduction    
13

existential temporality of Dasein, but rather, in unveiling it according

to its own essential negation by the differentiation of reason, and thus,
in unveiling it more originally as the diachronic temporality of Being-
for-the-Other. In this way, the question which Levinas himself antici-
pated is answered successfully, and the retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality is deployed ethically so as to unveil the Kantian ground-
laying of Metaphysica Specialis according to the diachronic temporality
of Being-for-the-Other. I conclude the book at the close of this final
chapter by reasserting that Levinas’s ethical retrieval of the problem-
atic of Temporality does indeed accomplish an ethical destruction of
the doctrine of the schematism, one that moves beyond the ontologi-
cal limits of Heidegger’s own destruction. I then end my conclusion
with a brief reflection on the significance of this destructive retrieval for
unveiling the diachronic ground of infinite time.

Notes
1. For an excellent discussion of the philosophical priority of eth-
ics over ontology, see Jean Griesch, ‘Ethics and Ontology: some
Hypocritical Reflections’, Irish Philosophical Journal, Vol. 4, Nos. 1−2
(1987), 64−75.
2. That ethics could have, in the last analysis, a historical priority equal
to that of its philosophical priority, that is, a priority within the his-
tory of ontology, is what Jacques Derrida does not fail to consider—
I shall come to this in a moment. What he does not fail to consider
is ‘whether history itself does not begin with this relationship to the
other which Levinas places beyond history.’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence
and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ in
Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul Ltd, 1978),
116.
3. Ibid., 101.
4. Ibid., 139. Interestingly enough, it was during the course of a discus-
sion held with Salomon Malka on the subject of Levinas’s antagonism
towards Heidegger, that Paul Ricoeur also highlighted the endur-
ing necessity of destruction in Levinas’s ethical thought. ‘Did you
notice,’ he asks, ‘that the last published series of lectures is the one on
14   A. Frangeskou

death [Ricoeur has in mind here of course the lectures entitled God,
Death, and Time], where Levinas is still confronting Heidegger? He
never stopped explaining himself in terms of Heidegger.’ He contin-
ues: ‘Because he was the closest stranger. This was an ontology with-
out ethics. And the problem, for Levinas, was to exit ontology and to
make ethics the first philosophy. To do that, it was always necessary,
as I have said, to continually deconstruct the hegemonic pretences of
Heideggerian ontology.’ Paul Ricoeur in Salomon Malka, Emmanuel
Levinas: His Life and Legacy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
2006), 198.
5. Jill Robbins alludes to the possibility of this ethical destruction when,
in her introduction to the English publication of a series of interviews
with Levinas, she states that: ‘Although nowhere do we find in Levinas
a systematic destruction in the Heideggerian style of the history of phi-
losophy from the vantage point of the forgetting of the ethical, we can
perhaps begin to envision—especially with regard to […] Kant—what
a “Levinasian” critical retrieval would look like’ [IRB 9].
6. Richard A. Cohen, Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and
Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 29.
7. Paul Davies, ‘Sincerity and the end of theodicy: three remarks on
Levinas and Kant’ in Simon Critchley & Robert Bernasconi (eds.), The
Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 162.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 168 & 165 respectively.
10. Catherine Chalier, What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas,
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 4–5.
11. Ibid., 5.
12. Ibid., The quotations in Chalier’s text are taken from DMT 75/64.
13. Diane Perpich, ‘Freedom Called into Question: Levinas’s Defence of
Heteronomy’ in Melvyn New with Robert Bernasconi & Richard A.
Cohen (eds.), In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the 18th Century,
(Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2001), 303.
14. Peter Atterton, ‘From Transcendental Freedom to the Other: Levinas
and Kant’ in In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the 18th Century,
327. The essay referred to here is PPR. The quoted phrase is taken from
p. 451.
15. Ibid., 328 & 347 respectively.
 1 Introduction    
15

16. Ibid., 347.

17. John Llewelyn, The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas
(London: Routledge, 2000), 3.
18. Ibid., 7 & 200 respectively.
19. Ibid., 219.
20. Ibid., 218. Llewelyn is referring here implicitly to Heidegger’s own
interpretive account of the term ‘figura’ in his 1927–28 lecture course
on Kant’s 1st Critique. Thus, as Heidegger writes: ‘In the Critique,
Kant specifies the function of the power of imagination as follows:
“…imagination has to bring the manifold of intuition into the form
of an image.” Thus pure power of imagination must bring the pure
manifold of time into the form of a pure image. Productive synthesis
forms into “an image”; it offers productively a figura. Hence Kant also
calls productive synthesis “figurative synthesis”’ [G25 414–15/281].
See also A120 & B151-2.
21. Ibid., 218–19.
22. In the final chapter to his comprehensive examination of Levinas’s
ethical thinking of time, Eric Severson discusses various hitherto unex-
plored possibilities for its advancement. For Severson, two such pos-
sibilities would include exploring his proposed ‘deformalization of
time, which Levinas saw underway in Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger,
and Rosenzweig,’ as well as his increased ‘engagements of philosophi-
cal history’ in various later texts, thus ‘aligning Levinas’s diachrony
with understandings of time in Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and
many others.’ The question, raised in the present book, is whether or
not the deformalization of time is already equivalent to a destructive
engagement of philosophical history, that is, to a destruction of Kant’s
purely formalized notion of time in the schematism, as stated previ-
ously in reference to the philosophical equivalence between Heidegger’s
retrieval of the temporal problematic of the schematism and Levinas’s
renewal of this temporal problematic in his explication of Rosenzweig.
The attempt, proposed here, to show such an equivalence would then
suggest one possible avenue of exploration into ‘what it means to fur-
ther deformalize time’ in Levinas’s ethical thought. See Eric Severson,
Levinas’s Philosophy of Time: Gift, Responsibility, Diachrony, Hope
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2013), 267, 268, 337 n4 &
247 respectively.
16   A. Frangeskou

23. This argument is also characteristic of an essay written by Jere Paul

Surber. The difference, however, between his own destructive staging
of this relation to the Kantian schematism and the one I am propos-
ing here—to say this in the very briefest of terms—is that for Surber,
Levinas’s ethical thought of the Other is staged in and through the
categorial schemas of its otherness (and more specifically, according
to Kant’s categorial schematization of the nothing in ‘The Amphiboly
of the Concepts of Reflection’), whereas for me, the ethical thought of
the Other can only be staged in and through the ideal schemas of its
otherness (according to Kant’s ideal expansion of this schematization
contained within ‘The Regulative Use of the Ideas of Pure Reason’).
See Jere Paul Surber, ‘Kant, Levinas, and the Thought of the “Other”’,
Philosophy Today, Vol. 38, No. 3 (1994), 294–316.
 2
The Ontological Destruction
of the Schematism

Two Readings of the 1st Critique

‘The following investigation is devoted to the task of interpreting Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason as a laying of the ground for metaphysics and
thus of placing the problem of metaphysics before us as a fundamental
ontology’ [G3 1/1]. This is the opening statement to Heidegger’s 1929
interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, one that clearly announces
its utter devotion to the task of destroying this text. In 1927 Heidegger
published Being and Time, and if he interprets the 1st Critique in its
fundamental metaphysical significance, he nevertheless does so from the
vantage point of the newly disclosed ‘ontological analytic of Dasein,’
the metaphysical ground of the 1st Critique forever ruined in the wake
of this disclosure [1/1]. By 1929 Kant’s own laying of the ground for
metaphysics had already been destroyed by that which it rendered pos-
sible. Hence ‘the violence’ that does not cease to dominate Heidegger’s
interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason [xvii/xx]: the Kantian
ground-laying of metaphysics is placed before us as merely a harbin-
ger for his already accomplished fundamental ontology of Dasein.1
This violent appropriation of Kant can only be understood in the last

© The Author(s) 2017 17

A. Frangeskou, Levinas, Kant and the Problematic of Temporality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59795-3_2
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “Well, I’m glad you’ve got here. We’ve been having a picnic up at
the house. Julie’s been having the hysterics and MacDonald—you
never knew MacDonald, did you?”
Applegate listened politely. He had a curious feeling that Julie and
her hysterics were already very far away and unimportant to him, but
he did not wish to be so brutal as to show this.
“When did MacDonald return and where has he been?” he asked,
gravely.
“He got here yesterday. He says he had a shock or something in
that accident—anyhow, he just couldn’t remember anything, and
when he come to he didn’t know who he was, nor anything about
himself, and all his papers and clothes had been burnt, so there was
nothing to show anybody who he was. He could work, and he was all
right most ways. Says he was that way till about six months ago,
when a Frisco doctor got hold of him and did something to his head
that put him right. He has papers from the doctor to show it’s true.
His case attracted lots of attention out there. Of course he wrote to
Julie when he came to himself, but his letters went to our old
address and she never got them. So then he started East to see
about it. He says he’s got into a good business and is going to do
well.”
There was a long silence. Presently Hopson began again,
awkwardly:
“I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think Julie’d ought to go
back to him.”
Applegate’s heart began to beat in curious, irregular throbs; he
could feel the pulsing of the arteries in his neck and there was a
singing in his ears.
“Of course Julie agrees with you?” he said, thickly.
“Well, no; she don’t. That’s what she wanted me to talk to you
about. She can’t see it but one way. She says he died, or if he didn’t
it was the same thing to her, and she married you. She says nobody
can have two husbands, and it’s you who are hers. I told her the law
didn’t look at it that way, and she says then she must get a divorce
from MacDonald and remarry you. MacDonald says if she brings suit
on the ground of desertion he will fight it. He says he can prove it
ain’t been no wilful desertion. But probably he could be brought
round if he saw she wouldn’t go back to him anyhow. MacDonald
wouldn’t be spiteful. But he was pretty fond of Julie.”
Applegate had stopped suddenly in the middle of Hopson’s
speech. Now he went forward rapidly, but he made no answer.
Hopson scrutinized his face a moment before he continued:
“Julie says you won’t be spiteful either. She says maybe she was a
little hasty in what she said just before she came up here. But you
know Julie’s way.”
“Yes,” said Applegate, “I know Julie’s way.”
Hopson drew a breath of relief. He had at least discharged himself
of his intercessory mission.
“I tell Julie she’d better put up with it and go with MacDonald. The
life would be more the sort of thing she likes. But her head’s set and
she won’t hear to anything Henriette or I say. You see, that’s what
Julie holds by, what she thinks is respectable. And it’s about all she
does hold by.” He hesitated, groping blindly about in his
consciousness for words to express his feeling that this passionate,
reckless nature was only anchored to the better things of life by her
fervent belief in the righteousness of the established social order.
“Julie thinks everything of being respectable,” he concluded,
lamely.
“Is it much farther to your house?” asked Applegate, dully.
“Right here,” answered Hopson, pulling his key from his pocket.
They entered a crude little parlor whose carpet was too gaudy, and
whose plush furniture was too obviously purchased at a bargain, but
its air was none the less heavy with tragedy. A single gas-jet
flickered in the centre of the room. On one side a great, broad-
shouldered fellow sat doggedly with his elbows on his knees and his
face buried in his hands. There was resistance in every line of his
figure. On the sofa opposite was Julie in her crimson dress. As she
lifted her face eagerly, Applegate noticed traces of tears upon it. Mrs.
Hopson, who had been moving about the room aimlessly, a pale and
ineffective figure between these two vivid personalities, came to a
standstill and looked at Applegate breathlessly. For a moment no
one spoke. Then Julie, baffled by the eyes she could not read,
sprang to her feet and stretched out her hands with a vehement
gesture.
“John Applegate, you’ll put me right! You will. I know you will. I
can’t go back to him! How can I?” Her hungry eyes scrutinized his
still, inexpressive face.
“John, you aren’t going to turn me off?” Her voice had a despairing
passion in it. “You won’t refuse to marry me if I get the divorce?
Good God! You can’t be such a devil. John! oh, John!”
Applegate sat down and looked at her apathetically. He was not
used to being called a devil. Somehow it seemed to him the term
was misapplied.
“Don’t take on so, Julie,” he said, quietly. The room seemed to
whirl around him, and he added, with a palpable effort:
“I’ll think it over and try to do what is best for both of us.”
At that MacDonald lifted his sullen face from his hands for the first
time and glanced across at the other man with blood-shot eyes.
Then he rose slowly, his great bulk seeming to fill the room, and
walking over to Applegate’s chair stood in front of it looking down at
him. His scrutiny was long. Once Applegate looked up and met his
eyes, but he was too tired to bear their fierce light and dropped his
own lids wearily.
MacDonald turned from him contemptuously and faced his wife,
who averted her head.
“Look at me, Julie!” he cried, appealingly. “I am better worth it than
he is. Good Lord! I don’t see what you see in him. He’s so tame! Let
him go about his business. He’s nobody. He don’t want you. Come
along with me and we’ll lead a life! You shall cut a dash out there. I
can make money hand over fist. It’s the place for you. Come on!”
 For a moment Julie’s eyes glittered. The words allured her, but her
old gods prevailed. She threw out her arms as if to ward off his
proposal.
“No, no,” she said, shrilly. “I cannot make it seem right. You were
dead to me, and I married him. One does not go back to the dead. If
I am your wife, what am I to him? It puts me in the wrong these two
years. I cannot have it so, I tell you. I cannot have it so!”
Applegate felt faint and sick. Rising, he groped for the door. “I
must have air,” he said to Hopson, confusedly. “I will come back in a
minute.”
Once outside, the cool November night refreshed him. He dropped
down upon the doorstep and threw back his head, drinking in long
breaths as he looked up at the mocking stars.
When he found at last the courage to ask himself what he was
going to do, the answer was not ready. The decision lay entirely in
his hands. He might still be free if he said the word; and as he
thought of this he trembled. He had always tried to be what his
neighbors called a straight man, and he wanted to be straight in this
also. But where, in such a hideous tangle, was the real morality to be
found? Surely not in acceding to Julie’s demands! What claim had
she upon the home whose simple traditions of peace and happiness
she had trampled rudely under foot? Was it not a poor, cheap
convention of righteousness which demanded he should take such a
woman back to embitter the rest of his days and warp his children’s
lives? He rebelled hotly at the thought. That it was Julie’s view of the
ethical requirement of her position made it all the more improbable
that it was really right. Surely his duty was to his children first, and as
for Julie, let her reap the reward of her own temperament. The Lord
God Himself could not say that this was unjust, for it is so that He
deals with the souls of men.
It seemed to him that he had decided, but as he rose and turned to
the door a new thought stabbed him so sharply that he dropped his
lifted hand with a groan.
 Where had been that sense of duty to his children, just now so
imperative, in the days when he had yielded to Julie’s charm against
his better judgment? Had duty ever prevailed against inclination with
him? Was it prevailing now?
High over all the turmoil and desperation of his thoughts shone out
a fresh perception that mocked him as the winter stars had mocked.
For that hour at least, the crucial one of his decision, he felt assured
that in the relation of man and woman to each other lies the supreme
ethical test of each, and in that relation there is no room for
selfishness. It might be, indeed, that he owed Julie nothing, but
might it not also be that the consideration he owed all womankind
could only be paid through this woman he had called his wife? This
was an ideal with which he had never had to reckon.
He turned and sat him down again to fight the fight with a chill
suspicion in his heart of what the end would be.
Being a plain man he had only plain words in which to phrase his
decision when at last he came to it.
“I chose her and I’ll bear the consequences of my choice,” he said,
“but I’ll bear them by myself. His aunt will be glad to take Teddy, and
Dora is old enough to go away to school.” Then he opened the door.
Hopson and his wife had left the little parlor. Julie on the sofa had
fallen into the deep sleep of exhaustion. MacDonald still sat there,
with his head in his hands, and to him Applegate turned. At the
sound of his step the man lifted his massive head and shook it
impatiently.
“Well?” he demanded.
“The fact is, Mr. MacDonald, Julie and I don’t get along very well
together, but I don’t know as that is any reason why I should force
her to do anything that don’t seem right to her. She thinks it would be
more”—he hesitated for a word—“more nearly right to get a divorce
from you and remarry me. As I see it now, it’s for her to say what she
wants, and for you and me to do it.”
MacDonald looked at him piercingly.
 “You know you’d be glad of the chance to get rid of her!” he
exclaimed, excitedly. “In Heaven’s name, then, why don’t you make
her come to me? You know I suit her best. You know she’s my sort,
not yours. She’s as uncomfortable with you as you with her, and
she’d soon get over the feeling she has against me. Man! There’s no
use in it! Why can’t you give my own to me?”
“I can’t say I don’t agree with you,” said Applegate, and the words
seem to ooze painfully from his white lips, “but she thinks she’d
rather not, and—it’s for her to say.”
 A CONSUMING FIRE
He is a man who has failed in this life, and says he has no chance
of success in another; but out of the fragments of his failures he has
pieced together for himself a fabric of existence more satisfying than
most of us make of our successes. It is a kind of triumph to look as
he does, to have his manner, and to preserve his attitude toward
advancing years—those dreaded years which he faces with pale but
smiling lips.
If you would see my friend Hayden, commonly called by his friends
the connoisseur, figure to yourself a tall gentleman of sixty-five, very
erect still and graceful, gray-headed and gray-bearded, with fine gray
eyes that have the storm-tossed look of clouds on a windy March
day, and a bearing that somehow impresses you with an idea of the
gracious and pathetic dignity of his lonely age.
I myself am a quiet young man, with but one gift—I am a finished
and artistic listener. It is this talent of mine which wins for me a
degree of Hayden’s esteem and a place at his table when he has a
new story to tell. His connoisseurship extends to everything of
human interest, and his stories are often of the best.
The last time that I had the honor of dining with him, there was
present, besides the host and myself, only his close friend, that
vigorous and successful man, Dr. Richard Langworthy, the eminent
alienist and specialist in nervous diseases. The connoisseur
evidently had something to relate, but he refused to give it to us until
the pretty dinner was over. Hayden’s dinners are always pretty, and
he has ideals in the matter of china, glass, and napery which it would
require a woman to appreciate. It is one of his accomplishments that
he manages to live like a gentleman and entertain his friends on an
income which most people find quite inadequate for the purpose.
After dinner we took coffee and cigars in the library.
 On the table, full in the mellow light of the great lamp (Hayden has
a distaste for gas), was a bit of white plush on which two large opals
were lying. One was an intensely brilliant globe of broken gleaming
lights, in which the red flame burned strongest and most steadily; the
other was as large, but paler. You would have said that the prisoned
heart of fire within it had ceased to throb against the outer rim of ice.
Langworthy, who is wise in gems, bent over them with an
exclamation of delight.
“Fine stones,” he said; “where did you pick them up, Hayden?”
Hayden, standing with one hand on Langworthy’s shoulder, smiled
down on the opals with a singular expression. It was as if he looked
into beloved eyes for an answering smile.
“They came into my possession in a singular way, very singular. It
interested me immensely, and I want to tell you about it, and ask
your advice on something connected with it. I am afraid you people
will hardly care for the story as much as I do. It’s—it’s a little too
rococo and sublimated to please you, Langworthy. But here it is:
“When I was in the West last summer, I spent some time in a city
on the Pacific slope which has more pawnbrokers’ shops and that
sort of thing in full sight on the prominent streets than any other town
of the same size and respectability that I have ever seen. One day,
when I had been looking in the bazaars for something a little out of
the regular line in Chinese curios and didn’t find it, it occurred to me
that in such a cosmopolitan town there might possibly be some
interesting things in the pawn-shops, so I went into one to look. It
was a common, dingy place, kept by a common, dingy man with
shrewd eyes and a coarse mouth. Talking to him across the counter
was a man of another type. Distinction in good clothes, you know,
one is never sure of. It may be only that a man’s tailor is
distinguished. But distinction in indifferent garments is distinction
indeed, and there before me I saw it. A young, slight, carelessly
dressed man, his bearing was attractive and noteworthy beyond
anything I can express. His appearance was perhaps a little too
unusual, for the contrast between his soft, straw-colored hair and
wine-brown eyes was such a striking one that it attracted attention
from the real beauty of his face. The delicacy of a cameo is rough,”
added the connoisseur, parenthetically, “compared to the delicacy of
outline and feature in a face that thought, and perhaps suffering,
have worn away, but this is one of the distinctive attractions of the
old. You do not look for it in young faces such as this.
“On the desk between the two men lay a fine opal—this one,” said
Hayden, touching the more brilliant of the two stones. “The younger
man was talking eagerly, fingering the gem lightly as he spoke. I
inferred that he was offering to sell or pawn it.
“The proprietor, seeing that I waited, apparently cut the young man
short. He started, and caught up the stone. ‘I’ll give you—’ I heard
the other say, but the young man shook his head, and departed
abruptly. I found nothing that I wanted in the place, and soon passed
out.
“In front of a shop-window a little farther down the street stood the
other man, looking in listlessly with eyes that evidently saw nothing.
As I came by he turned and looked into my face. His eyes fixed me
as the Ancient Mariner’s did the Wedding Guest. It was an appealing
yet commanding look, and I—I felt constrained to stop. I couldn’t
help it, you know. Even at my age one is not beyond feeling the force
of an imperious attraction, and when you are past sixty you ought to
be thankful on your knees for any emotion that is imperative in its
nature. So I stopped beside him. I said: ‘It is a fine stone you were
showing that man. I have a great fondness for opals. May I ask if you
were offering it for sale?’
“He continued to look at me, inspecting me calmly, with a
fastidious expression. Upon my word, I felt singularly honored when,
at the end of a minute or two, he said: ‘I should like to show it to you.
If you will come to my room with me, you may see that, and another;’
and he turned and led the way, I following quite humbly and gladly,
though surprised at myself.
“The room, somewhat to my astonishment, proved to be a large
apartment—a front room high up in one of the best hotels. There
were a good many things lying about which obviously were not hotel
furnishings, and the walls, the bed, and even the floor were covered
with a litter of water-color sketches. Those that I could see were
admirable, being chiefly impressions of delicate and fleeting
atmospheric effects.
“I took the chair he offered. He stood, still looking at me,
apparently not in haste to show me the opals. I looked about the
room.
“‘You are an artist?’ I said.
“‘Oh, I used to be, when I was alive,’ he answered, drearily. ‘I am
nothing now.’ And then turning away he fetched a little leather case,
and placed the two opals on the table before me.
“‘This is the one I have always worn,’ he said, indicating the more
brilliant. ‘That chillier one I gave once to the woman whom I loved. It
was more vivid then. They are strange stones—strange stones.’
“He said nothing more, and I sat in perfect silence, only dreading
that he should not speak again. I am not making you understand
how he impressed me. In the delicate, hopeless patience of his face,
in the refined, uninsistent accents of his voice, there was somehow
struck a note of self-abnegation, of aloofness from the world,
pathetic in any one so young.
“I am old. There is little in life that I care for. My interests are
largely affected. Wine does not warm me now, and beauty seems no
longer beautiful; but I thank Heaven I am not beyond the reach of a
penetrating human personality. I have at least the ordinary instincts
for convention in social matters, but I assure you it seemed not in the
least strange to me that I should be sitting in the private apartment of
a man whom I had met only half an hour before, and then in a
pawnbroker’s shop, listening eagerly for his account of matters
wholly personal to himself. It struck me as the most natural and
charming thing in the world. It was just such chance passing
intercourse as I expect to hold with wandering spirits on the green
hills of paradise.
“It was some time before he spoke again.
“‘I saw her first,’ he said, looking at the paler opal, as if it was of
that he spoke, ‘on the street in Florence. It was a day in April, and
the air was liquid gold. She was looking at the Campanile, as if she
were akin to it. It was the friendly grace of one lily looking at another.
Later, I met her as one meets other people, and was presented to
her. And after that the days went fast. I think she was the sweetest
woman God ever made. I sometimes wonder how He came to think
of her. Whatever you may have missed in life,’ he said, lifting calm
eyes to mine, and smiling a little, ‘you whose aspect is so sweet,
decorous, and depressing, whose griefs, if you have griefs, are the
subtle sorrows of the old and unimpassioned’—I remember his
phrases literally. I thought them striking and descriptive,” confessed
Hayden—“‘I hope you have not missed that last touch of exaltation
which I knew then. It is the most exquisite thing in life. The Fates
must hate those from whose lips they keep that cup.’ He mused
awhile and added, ‘There is only one real want in life, and that is
comradeship—comradeship with the divine, and that we call religion;
with the human, and that we call love.’
“‘Your definitions are literature,’ I ventured to suggest, ‘but they are
not fact. Believe me, neither love nor religion is exactly what you call
it. And there are other things almost as good in life, as surely you
must know. There is art, and there is work which is work only, and
yet is good.’
“‘You speak from your own experience?’ he said, simply.
“It was a home thrust. I did not, and I knew I did not. I am sixty-five
years old, and I have never known just that complete satisfaction
which I believe arises from the perfect performance of distasteful
work. I said so. He smiled.
“‘I knew it when I set my eyes upon you, and I knew you would
listen to me and my vaporing. Your sympathy with me is what you
feel toward all forms of weakness, and in the last analysis it is self-
sympathy. You are beautiful, not strong,’ he added, with an air of
finality, ‘and I—I am like you. If I had been a strong man.... Christ!’
“I enjoyed this singular analysis of myself, but I wanted something
else.
“‘You were telling me of the opals,’ I suggested.
 “‘The opals, yes. Opals always made me happy, you know. While I
wore one, I felt a friend was near. My father found these in Hungary,
and sent them to me—two perfect jewels. He said they were the twin
halves of a single stone. I believe it to be true. Their mutual relation
is an odd one. One has paled as the other brightened. You see them
now. When they were both mine, they were of almost equal
brilliancy. This,’ touching the paler, ‘is the one I gave to her. You see
the difference in them now. Hers began to pale before she had worn
it a month. I do not try to explain it, not even on the ground of the old
superstition. It was not her fault that they made her send it back to
me. But the fact remains; her opal is fading slowly; mine is burning to
a deeper red. Some day hers will be frozen quite, while mine—mine
—’ his voice wavered and fell on silence, as the flame of a candle
fighting against the wind flickers and goes out.
“I waited many minutes for him to speak again, but the silence was
unbroken. At last I rose. ‘Surely you did not mean to part with either
stone?’ I said.
“He looked up as if from a dream. ‘Part with them? Why should I
sell my soul? I would not part with them if I were starving. I had a
minute’s temptation, but that is past now.’ Then, with a change of
manner, ‘You are going?’ He rose with a gesture that I felt then and
still feel as a benediction. ‘Good-by. I wish for your own sake that
you had not been so like my poor self that I knew you for a friend.’
“We had exchanged cards, but I did not see or hear of him again.
Last week these stones came to me, sent by some one here in New
York of his own name—his executor. He is dead, and left me these.
“It is here that I want your counsel. These stones do not belong to
me, you know. It is true that we are like, as like as blue and violet.
But there is that woman somewhere—I don’t know where; and I
know no more of their story than he told me. I have not cared to be
curious regarding it or him. But they loved once, and these belong to
her. Do you suppose they would be a comfort or a curse to her? If—if
—” the connoisseur evidently found difficulty in stating his position.
“Of course I do not mean to say that I believe one of the stones
waned while the other grew more brilliant. I simply say nothing of it;
but I know that he believed it, and I, even I, feel a superstition about
it. I do not want the light in that stone to go out; or if it should, or
could, I do not want to see it. And, besides, if I were a woman, and
that man had loved me so, I should wish those opals.” Here Hayden
looked up and caught Langworthy’s amused, tolerant smile. He
stopped, and there was almost a flush upon his cheek.
“You think I am maudlin—doting—I see,” he said. “Langworthy, I
do hope the Lord will kindly let you die in the harness. You haven’t
any taste for these innocent, green pastures where we old fellows
must disport ourselves, if we disport at all. Now, I want to know if it
would be—er—indelicate to attempt to find out who she is, and to
restore the stones to her?”
Langworthy, who had preserved throughout his usual air of strict
scientific attention, jumped up and began to pace the room.
“His name?” he said.
Hayden gave it.
“I know the man,” said Langworthy, almost reluctantly. “Did any
one who ever saw him forget him? He was on the verge of
melancholia, but what a mind he had!”
“How did you know him, Langworthy?” asked Hayden, with
pathetic eagerness.
“As a patient. It’s a sad story. You won’t like it. You had better keep
your fancies without the addition of any of the facts.”
“Go on,” said Hayden, briefly.
“They live here, you know. He was the only son. He unconsciously
acquired the morphine habit from taking quantities of the stuff for
neuralgic symptoms during a severe protracted illness. After he got
better, and found what had happened to him, he came to me. I had
to tell him he would die if he didn’t break it off, and would probably
die if he did. ‘Oh, no matter,’ he said. ‘What disgusts me is the idea
that it has taken such hold of me.’ He did break it off directly and
absolutely. I never knew but one other man who did that thing. But
between the pain and the shock from the sudden cessation of the
drug, his mind was unbalanced for awhile. Of course the girl’s
parents broke off the engagement. I knew they were travelling with
him last summer. It was a trying case, and the way he accepted his
own weakness touched me. At his own request he carried no money
with him. It was a temptation when he wanted the drug, you see. It
must have been at some such moment, when he contemplated
giving up the struggle, that you met him in the pawn-shop.”
“I am glad I knew enough to respect him even there,” murmured
Hayden, in his beard.
“Oh, you may respect him, and love him if you like. He died a
moral hero, if a mental and physical wreck. That is as good a way as
any, or ought to be, to enter another life—if there is another life.”
“And the woman?” asked the connoisseur.
“Keep the opals, Hayden; they and he are more to you than to her.
She—in fact it is very soon—is to marry another man.”
“Who is—”
“A gilded cad. That’s all.”
Langworthy took out his watch and looked at it. I turned to the
table. What had happened to the dreaming stones? Did a light flash
across from one to the other, or did my eyes deceive me? I looked
down, not trusting what I saw. One opal lay as pale, as pure, as
lifeless, as a moon-stone is. The other glowed with a yet fierier
spark; instead of coming from within, the color seemed to play over
its surface in unrestricted flame.
“See here!” I said.
Langworthy looked, then turned his head away sharply. The
distaste of the scientific man for the inexplicable and irrational was
very strong within him.
But the old man bent forward, the lamp-light shining on his white
hair, and with a womanish gesture caught the gleaming opal to his
lips.
“A human soul!” he said. “A human soul!”
 AN UNEARNED REWARD
It is the very last corner of the world in which you would expect to
find a sermon. Overhead hang the Colorado skies, curtains of
deepest, dullest cobalt, against which the unthreatening white clouds
stand out with a certain solidity, a tangible look seen nowhere else
save in that clear air. All around are the great upland swells of the
mountains, rising endlessly, ridge beyond ridge, like the waves of the
sea. In a hollow beside the glittering track is the one sign of human
existence in sight—the sun-scorched, brown railway station. It is an
insignificant structure planted on a high platform. There is a red tool-
chest standing against the wall; a tin advertisement of somebody’s
yeast-cakes is nailed to the clap-boards; three buffalo hides, with
horns still on them, hang over a beam by the coal-shed, and across
the side of the platform, visible only to those approaching from the
west, is written, in great, black letters:
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
This legend had no place there on the September afternoon, some
years ago, when Carroll Forbes stepped off the west-bound express
as it halted a minute at the desolate spot. Because it looked to him
like the loneliest place in all the world the notion seized him
suddenly, as the train drew up beside the high platform, to catch up
his valise and leave the car. He was looking for a lonely place, and
looking helplessly. He snatched at the idea that here might be what
he sought, as a drowning man at the proverbial straw.
When the train had gone on and left him there, already repenting
tremulously of what might prove his disastrous folly, a man, who was
possibly the station agent—if this were indeed a station—came
limping toward him with an inquiring look.
Forbes was a handsome man himself, and thoroughly aware of
the value of beauty as an endowment. He was conscious of a half-
envious pang as he faced the blonde giant halting across the
platform. This was, or had been, a singularly perfect specimen of the
physical man. Over six feet in height, muscular, finely proportioned,
fair-haired and fair-skinned, with a curling, blonde beard, and big,
expressionless blue eyes, he looked as one might who had been
made when the world was young, and there was more room for
mighty men than now.
The slight, olive-skinned young man who faced him was conscious
of the sudden feeling of physical disadvantage that comes upon one
in the presence of imposing natural objects, for the man was as
august in his way as the cliffs and canyons.
“I am a—an artist,” said Carroll Forbes. “Is there any place
hereabouts where I can get my meals and sometimes a bed, while I
am sketching in the mountains?”
The man stared at him.
“Would it have been better if I had said I was a surveyor?” asked
Forbes of his confused inner consciousness.
“We feed folks here sometimes—that is, my wife does. Mebbe you
could have a shake-down in the loft. Or there’s Connor’s ranch off
north a ways. But they don’t care about taking in folks up there.”
“Then, if you would ask your wife?” ventured Forbes, politely. “I
shall not trouble you long,” he added.
“Ellen!”
A woman appeared at the door, then moving slowly forward, stood
at her husband’s side, and the admiration Forbes had felt at the sight
of the man flamed into sudden enthusiasm as he watched the wife.
She was tall, with heavy, black hair, great eyes like unpolished jet,
one of the thick white, smooth, perfectly colorless skins, which
neither the sun nor the wind affect, and clear-cut, perfect features.
Standing so, side by side, the two were singularly well worth looking
at.
“What a regal pair!” was Forbes’s internal comment; and while
they conferred together he watched them idly, wondering what their
history was, for of course they had one. It is safe to affirm that every
human creature cast in the mould of the beautiful has, or is to have,
one.
“She says you c’n stay,” announced the man. “Just put those traps
of yours inside, will you?” and, turning, he limped off the length of the
platform at a call from somebody who had ridden up with jingling
spurs.
Forbes, left to his own devices, picked up his valise, then set it
down again and looked around him helplessly, wondering if there
was a night train by which he could get away from this heaven-
forsaken spot.
“If you want to see where you can sleep,” said a voice at his side,
“I will show you.” It was the woman. She bent as she spoke to pick
up some of his impedimenta, but he hastily forestalled her with a
murmur of deprecation.
She turned and looked at him, and as he met her eyes it occurred
to him that the indifference of her face was the indifference of the
desert—arid and hopeless. The look she gave him was searching
and impersonal; he saw no reason for it, nor for the slow, dark color
that spread over her face, and there was less than no excuse for the
way she set her lips and stretched a peremptory hand, saying, “Give
me those,” in tones that could not be disobeyed. To his own
astonishment he surrendered them, and followed her meekly up a
ladder-like flight of steps to the rough loft over the station. It was
unfinished, but partitioned into two rooms. She opened the door of
one of these apartments, silently set his luggage inside, and
vanished down the stairs.
Forbes sat down on the edge of a broken chair and looked about
him.
“Now, in heaven’s name,” he demanded of the barren walls, “what
have I let myself in for, and why did I do it?”
To this question there seemed no sufficient answer, and for awhile
he sat there fretting with the futile anxiety of a man who knows that
his fate pursues him, who hopes that this turning or that may help
him to evade it, yet always feels the benumbing certainty that the
path he has taken is the shortest road to that he would avoid. When
at last—recognizing that his meditations were unprofitable—he rose
and went down the stairs, it was supper-time.
The woman was uncommunicative, but he could feel that her eyes
were on him. The man—it occurred to Forbes that he had probably
been drinking—was talkative. After the meal was over they went
outside. Forbes, by way of supporting his pretence of being an artist,
took out a pocket sketch-book and made notes of the values of the
clouds and the outlines of the hills against the sky in a sort of artistic
short-hand. The man Wilson sat down on a bench and began to talk.
Between the exciting effects of the whiskey he had taken, the
soothing influence of the cigar Forbes proffered him, and a natural
talent for communicativeness, he presently went on to tell his own
story. Forbes listened attentively. It seemed a part of the melodrama
of the whole situation and was as unreal to him as the flaming
miracle of the western skies or his own presence here.
“So the upshot of it all was that we just skipped out. She ran away
with me.”
It was a curious story. As Forbes listened he became aware that it
was one with which he had occasionally met in the newspapers, but
never in real life before. It was, apparently, the story of a girl
belonging to a family of wealth and possibly of high social traditions
—naturally he did not know what importance to attach to Wilson’s
boast that his wife belonged “to the top of the heap”—who had
eloped with the man who drove her father’s carriage.
The reasons for this revolt against the natural order of her life was
obscure; there was, perhaps, too high a temper on her side and too
strict a restraint on the part of her guardians. There was necessarily
a total absence of knowledge of life; there was also the fact that the
coachman was undoubtedly a fine creature to look at; there might
have been a momentary yielding on the part of a naturally dramatic
temperament to the impulse for the spectacular in her life.
But whatever the reasons, the result was the same. She had
married this man and gone away with him, and they had drifted
westward. And when they had gone so far west that coachmen of his
stamp were no longer in demand, he took to railroading, and from
brakeman became engineer; and finally, being maimed in an
accident in which he had stood by his engine while the fireman
jumped—breaking his neck thereby—he had picked up enough
knowledge of telegraphy to qualify him for this post among the
mountains. He and his handsome wife lived here and shared the
everlasting solitude of the spot together, and occasionally fed stray
travellers like this one who had dropped down on them to-day.
“He drinks over-freely and he swears profusely,” mused Forbes,
scrutinizing him, “but he is too big to be cruel, and he still worships
her beauty as she, perhaps, once worshipped his; and he still feels
an uncouth pride in all that she gave up for his sake.”
It had never occurred to him before to wonder what the after-life of
a girl who eloped with her father’s servant might be like. He
speculated upon it now. By just what process does a woman so
utterly déclassée adjust herself to her altered position? Would she
make it a point to forget, or would every reminder of lives, such as
her own had been, be a turning of the knife in her wound? Would not
a saving recollection of the little refinements of life cling longer to a
weak nature than to a strong one under such circumstances?
This woman apparently gave tongue to no vain regrets, for her
husband was exulting in the “grit” with which she had taken the
fortunes of their life. “No whine about her,” was his way of expressing
his conviction that the courage of the thoroughbred was in her.
“No, sir; there’s no whine about her. Un she’s never been sorry,
un, s’help me, she sha’n’t never be,” concluded Wilson. There were
maudlin tears in his eyes.
“Few men can say that of their wives,” said Forbes’s smooth,
sympathetic voice. “You are indeed fortunate.”
While her husband was repeating the oft-told tale of their conjugal
happiness, Ellen Wilson had done her after-supper work, and,
slipping out of the door, climbed the short, rocky spur to the north of
the station. Beyond the summit, completely out of sight and hearing,
there was a little hollow that knew her well, but never had it seen her
as it saw her now, when, throwing herself down, her face to the
earth, she shed the most scalding tears of all her wretched years.
They were such little things this stranger had done—things so
slight, so involuntary, so unconscious that they did not deserve the
name of courtesies, but they were enough to open the flood-gates of
an embittered heart. There was a world where all the men were
deferential and all the women’s lives were wrapped about with the
fine, small courtesies of life—formal, but not meaningless. It had
been her world once and now was so no longer.
Good or bad, she knew little and cared less, this man had come
from that lost world of hers, as she was made aware by a thousand
small signs, whose very existence she had forgotten; and silently,
fiercely she claimed him as an equal.
“I—I too was—” Slow tears drowned the rest.
She could have told him how a déclassée grows used to it. She
knew how the mind can adjust itself to any phase of experience, and
had learned that what woman has undergone, woman can undergo
—yes, and be strong about it. She knew how, under the impulse of
necessity, the once impossible grows to be the accepted life, and the
food that could not be swallowed becomes the daily bread.
When the struggle for existence becomes a hand-to-hand fight,
traditions of one’s ancestry do not matter, except, possibly, that some
traditions bind you to strength and silence, while others leave you
free to scream. She knew what it was to forget the past and ignore
the future, and survey the present with the single-hearted purpose of
securing three meals a day, if possible; two, if it were not.
She had forgotten with what facility she might the faces and
scenes that once were dear to her. She had nothing to do with them
any longer, as she knew. She might, perhaps, have heard their
names without emotion. But, even in this day and generation and
among this democratic people, in the soul of a woman bred as she
had been the feeling for her caste is the last feeling that dies. And to
her anguish she found that in her it was not yet dead.
The color died from the sky, and the stars came swiftly out.