The door opened and in walked old Sandy, carrying a fresh pitcher of sangaree. I was startled into my senses.
“You drove them away, Sandy.”
“What I done do, maarstar?”
“You drove them away. I was out shopping with Miss Susan and the children.”
Sandy thinks that my brain is “addled,” as he calls it, and so he makes no further answer.
Children! My children! The dream children whom poor Charles Lamb saw. And how many other lonely folk have seen them?
Look at that shelf of books there; see that volume bound in limp leather? That was my first book. You did not know that I was a writer, did you, Sandy? Yes, but I was. And when I wrote that book I thought that I knew more than I did. It is about young love and interfering parents and selfish relatives and romantic folk who went astray. It is crude, very crude; but I love the book, for it was my first-born. I thought of recasting it, and then I found that one can not mangle his own child.
The volume next to it, that one in stiff boards, I am more proud, perhaps, of that one. I tried hard to tell the truth as I saw the truth in it, even though I knew that readers do not really want the truth. We live our life under a vast veil of mystery, humbug and fear. And so I wanted to tell young boys and growing girls why they felt strange feelings and had new thoughts as they gradually became men and women. I wanted them to know how simple, natural and beautiful the whole realm of being is; and above all, that their fresh, confused feelings and glowing thoughts are not abnormal, nothing to be ashamed of, perfectly healthy and vigorous, if only their parents would tell them so.
And as to humbug, I tried to show silly women and foolish men how unhappy and strained they make their lives by assuming emotions which they think they possess, and by expressing thoughts which mean nothing, because they have never thought them out. How easy this world would be if we could all of us simply be ourselves, as a dachshund is only a dog, a donkey a donkey, and a cat a cat. Then there would be no imitations, no misunderstandings, no mistakes, no subtle motives, no boring waste of time.
Lastly, I attempted to handle the broad, ever-present cloud of fear. Why do we fear to be frank? Why are we afraid to say things which all of us think and know? We even fear death, though each one has to realize deeply that we are every one of us dying men. With this homily and more too, I tried to help mankind in that second volume in stiff boards. And when it was finished and printed, I grasped the fact that the whole book was trite; that those same things had been said and resaid and said again from time out of mind, doing no good, as long as men are men, and women are women.