I got up then, and we went downhill together towards the village lights. I danced—oh, I admit it—I sang as well. There was a flood of joy and power about me that beat anything I’d ever felt before. I didn’t think or hesitate; there was no self-consciousness; I just let it rip for all there was, and if there had been ten thousand people there in front of me, I could have made them feel it too. That was the kind of feeling—power and confidence and a sort of raging happiness. I think I know what it was too. I say this soberly, with reverence ... all wool and no fading. There was a bit of God in me, God’s power that drives the Earth and pours through Nature—the imperishable Beauty expressed in those old-world nature-deities!
And the fear I’d felt was nothing but the little tickling point of losing my ordinary two-cent self, the dread of letting go, the shrinking before the plunge—what a fellow feels when he’s falling in love, and hesitates, and tries to think it out and hold back, and is afraid to let the enormous tide flow in and drown him.
Oh, yes, I began to think it over a bit as we raced down the mountain-side that glorious night. I’ve read some in my day; my brain’s all right; I’ve heard of dual personality and subliminal uprush and conversion—no new line of goods, all that. But somehow these stunts of the psychologists and philosophers didn’t cut any ice with me just then, because I’d experienced what they merely explained. And explanation was just a bargain sale. The best things can’t be explained at all. There’s no real value in a bargain sale.
Arthur had trouble to keep up with me. We were running due east, and the Earth was turning, therefore, with us. We all three ran together at her pace—terrific! The moonlight danced along the summits, and the snow-fields flew like spreading robes, and the forests everywhere, far and near, hung watching us and booming like a thousand organs. There were uncaged winds about; you could hear them whistling among the precipices. But the great thing that I knew was—Beauty, a beauty of the common old familiar Earth, and a beauty that’s stayed with me ever since, and given me joy and strength and a source of power and delight I’d never guessed existed before.
As we dropped lower into the thicker air of the valley I sobered down. Gradually the ecstasy passed from me. We slowed up a bit. The lights and the houses and the sight of the hotel where people were dancing in a stuffy ballroom, all this put blotting-paper on something that had been flowing.
Now you’ll think this an odd thing too—but when we reached the village street, I just took Arthur’s hand and shook it and said good-night and went up to bed and slept like a two-year-old till morning. And from that day to this I’ve never set eyes on the boy again.
Perhaps it’s difficult to explain, and perhaps it isn’t. I can explain it to myself in two lines—I was afraid to see him. I was afraid he might “explain.” I was afraid he might explain “away.” I just left a note—he never replied to it—and went off by a morning train. Can you understand that? Because if you can’t you haven’t understood this account I’ve tried to give of the experience Arthur gave me. Well—anyway—I’ll just let it go at that.
Arthur’s a director now in his father’s wholesale chemical business, and I—well, I’m doing better than ever in the buying and selling of exchange between banks in New York City as before.
But when I said I was still drawing dividends on my Swiss investment, I meant it. And it’s not “scenery.” Everybody gets a thrill from “scenery.” It’s a darned sight more than that. It’s those little wayward patches of blue on a cloudy day; those blue pools in the sky just above Trinity Church steeple when I pass out of Wall Street into Lower Broadway; it’s the rustle of the sea-wind among the Battery trees; the wash of the waves when the Ferry’s starting for Staten Island, and the glint of the sun far down the Bay, or dropping a bit of pearl into the old East River. And sometimes it’s the strip of cloud in the west above the Jersey shore of the Hudson, the first star, the sickle of the new moon behind the masts and shipping. But usually it’s something nearer, bigger, simpler than all or any of these. It’s just the certainty that, when I hurry along the hard stone pavements from bank to bank, I’m walking on the—Earth. It’s just that—the Earth!