For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous¹ and unapproachable, and in return was generally considered a “queer chap.” He had started off on these travels of his after the death of his father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his country and angry with all the world, which had instinctively² rejected his wisdom.

Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst had begun by coveting³ all the joys, those of the great and those of the humble⁴, those of the fools and those of the sages⁵. For more than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of disillusion⁶ and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre⁷ souls. His mother Heyst had never known, but he kept his father’s pale, distinguished⁸ face in affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three years, after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy⁹.

Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are

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