What a thing is youth! That sunny morning in Hempfield Nort thought that he was drinking the uttermost dregs of life—they were pretty bitter—and yet, somehow, he was able to stand a little aside and enjoy it all. Black as it was, it had yet the mystical quality of a new adventure, new possibilities. At one moment Nort was hating himself, hating his whole life, hating the town in which fate had dropped him, with all the passion of a naturally robust nature; and at the next he was peeping around the corner of the next adventure to see what he might see. The suffering of youth with honey in its mouth!
Oh, to be twenty-four! To feel that one has sounded all the chords of life, known every bitterness, to have become entirely disillusioned, wholly cynical, utterly reckless—and not to know that life and illusion have only just begun!
The hard, bristling, painful thing in his insides which Nort couldn't identify, wrongly attributing it to certain things he had been eating and drinking now for several days past, was in fact his soul.
How I love to think of Nort at that moment, that wonderful, fertile, despondent, hopeful, passionate moment. How I love to think of him, who is now so dear a friend, quite miserable, but with a half smile on his lips, his vigorous nature full of every conceivable possibility of good or evil, of success or failure, every capability of great love or great bitterness——Nort, arm in arm with Life, tugged at by both God and Satan, standing there, aimless, in the sunny street of Hempfield.
CHAPTER VI
A MAN TO HELP FERGUS
It was really a moment of vast potentialities when Nort turned down the street toward the town instead of up toward the railroad station and the open road. For down the street was the way to the printing-office and the old Captain and Anthy and Fergus and me, and all the things, big and little, I am about to relate. I tremble sometimes when I think how narrowly this story escaped not coming into existence at all.