V
The power of imagining returned to him slowly. There were whole days when his inner eyes and ears remained obstinately blind and deaf. When a
"Primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more"
(only there were no primroses at this season); when the southing birds in the ivy outside his window only made noises and were a nuisance; and when the burden of his thoughts was one long "done for—done for—done for." It was the affection of many people that he missed most, and the faith that so many people had had in him—shattered forever. But he missed their voices, too, and their faces; the cheerful sounds of "talking at once"; the massing of fresh, lovely gowns, the scintillation of jewels, the smell of gardenias, the music of violins, hidden by screens of palms and bay-trees.
What had he done to deserve exile and ostracism? He asked himself that question thousands of times. He knew, of course, what he was believed to have done, but he was in search of some committed sin, to account for his having been punished for one that had only been circumstantially alleged. And in the whole memory that he had of his life and acts he could not find an answer. Every life is full of little sins, but of major ones the Poor Boy had no recollection.
On the days when his imagination was "no good" he had the face of one who is worried over something important that has been lost and that can not be found. And, indeed, the gift was of tremendous importance to him, and he knew it. It was the weapon with which he must fight off insanity; the tongs with which he must snatch from the fires of experience whatever bright fragments of life were not yet consumed.
Now this imagination of the Poor Boy's was not a servant that came and went at command, but a master. He could not say to himself, "now I will lie back upon the wings of my imagination and fly a pleasant hour"—or rather he could say just that if he liked, but nothing would happen. It was he who served; he was an abode in which his imagination might lodge whenever it so pleased, and whence it might also fare forth. In the old days it had found lodgment in the Poor Boy's head decidedly comfortable, and had made long stays; but since society had wreaked its vengeance upon him, it seemed as if his head, as a dwelling-place, had lost its comforts and advantages.
His imagination was not of the kind which makes for literature or music. It could not, in other words, shake itself clear of experience, and journey into the unknown and the untried. It was not creative, but it was of a quality so intense and vivid as to wage, sometimes, successful disputes with the tangible and the real. Its action was a kind of dreaming of dreams, whose direction and outcome lay within the option of the dreamer.