"You get my drive?" the gangster repeated.
And I knew anger. Not ordinary anger, but cold anger. And I caught
a vision of the high place in which we had sat and ruled down the
ages in all lands, on all seas. I saw my kind, our women with us, in
forlorn hopes and lost endeavours, pent in hill fortresses, rotted in
jungle fastnesses, cut down to the last one on the decks of rocking
ships. And always, our women with us, had we ruled the beasts. We
might die, our women with us; but, living, we had ruled. It was a
royal vision I glimpsed. Ay, and in the purple of it I grasped the
ethic, which was the stuff of the fabric of which it was builded. It
was the sacred trust of the seed, the bequest of duty handed down
from all ancestors.
And I flamed more coldly. It was not red-brute anger. It was
intellectual. It was based on concept and history; it was the
philosophy of action of the strong and the pride of the strong in
their own strength. Now at last I knew Nietzsche. I knew the
rightness of the books, the relation of high thinking to high-
conduct, the transmutation of midnight thought into action in the
high place on the poop of a coal-carrier in the year nineteen-
thirteen, my woman beside me, my ancestors behind me, my slant-eyed
servitors under me, the beasts beneath me and beneath the heel of me.
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