"
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 instinctively rejected
his wisdom.
Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst
had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the
humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. 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
disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness,
for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst
had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished 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 worthy.
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.
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