Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/393

 different periods, in so many, so various centers of civilization! Such a crowded graveyard of human endeavor might perhaps suggest a satisfactory motive (if one existed) for going on living.

For a long time he had made no headway, had discovered no general underlying motive—indeed much of what he saw filled him with utter astonishment at the things men had cared for, even to the point of giving their lives to win them.

He still remembered that morning during his first stay, when he had stared with stupefaction at the rows of portrait-busts in the Capitoline Museum. So many men, most of them apparently intelligent had schemed and plotted through long years—and what for? To be the conventional head of an unworkable Empire, top-heavy with administration; to endure the hideous tedium of ceremony and pompous ritual which the office had imposed; to be forced to work through sycophants and grafters, to be exiled from healthy human life into a region where in the nature of things you could never hope to see one spontaneous sincere expression on any human face; where your life, your work, your reputation hung on the whim of the Prætorian Guard or the disgruntled legions on a distant frontier—why, if you lay awake nights you couldn't think of a more thankless job than being a Roman Emperor! And yet for centuries men had sacrificed their friends, their honor, their very lives to hold the office. Those old Romans, for all they looked so like ordinary every-day men you meet in the street, must have had a queer notion of what was worth-while in life!

Then he had left Rome and gone away without plan, anywhere the train would take him; and wherever he had gone he had walked about, silently attentive to what men had done with their lives. That was what he had been looking for as he walked around on battle-fields, or gazed up at Cathedrals or looked seriously at the statues thick-sown as the sands of the sea all over European cities; that was what he had been looking for as he sat alone in a pension bed-room reading a history or a biography that helped him fit together into some sort of a system all the diverse objects he had been considering.