We are all, I suppose, more or less cases of arrested development. When a man ceases to inquire, to explore, and to wonder, when he is convinced of his knowledge, when he reaches the point where all his free and flexible opinions have settled into hardened convictions, at that moment his development is stopped, even as a little child whose mind cannot move beyond the A. B. C.
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This was what I was in the days when all within me was but an appetite for life. What shook my equanimity and violently freed me of my self-complacency? The first contact with evil, the knowledge and the mysterious reaction.
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Third Figure: A man approaching thirty, perhaps too near to be seen distinctly, and yet in such violent contrast that before its note of worldly knowledge boyhood and youth fled from the contact. I saw a man whose eyes had gone behind every scene, whose back had turned, he believed, on every illusion, tolerant of every frailty, amused at little hypocrisies and of those greater shams which an arrogant society imposes on the outsider and itself defies with impunity: steeped in this class cynicism, without realizing that in the strong nourishing forces of civilization this society is but the scum that rises to the surface and that in the old pot-au-feu below are the vital nourishments of the race. I had come eagerly into the brilliant cosmopolitan society of Europe with enough money and proper credentials, and I had come as how many young men of imagination and fire before me, believing in pleasure as the goal of life, pleasure, which I had seen in my ardent nature as in youth one sees and believes in the painted beauties and the paste jewels behind footlights. I recoiled, I grew accustomed to what I at first resented. I shrugged my shoulders, and, in the end, I did as those I lived with did. In the unconscious progression is the whole story. I became a flâneur of society. I knew the comedies and tragedies of a ballroom as an old collector on the quais recognizes and smiles over the titles whose stories he knows. I lived a life of crowded inconsequences. The days and nights were consumed in doing—what to-day is a blank of years. But how my world had narrowed! The limitless horizons and starry spaces of childhood, even the mysterious depths of youth, had contracted into confines so narrow that my daily run of life was more provincial than that of a buried village. Why did I not go on in the paths of worldly wisdom, with a cynical weighing of actual values? Why did I not continue steadfast, as my logic showed me? The truth lay, perhaps, in the heart of a child that we men can never quite kill. The first impulse is the abiding impulse; if you would know the man, know the child.
It was in vain I told myself that only the living was vital, and that in a world of sceptics and pagans only the fools cling to compunctions. I repeated to myself that the sum of all moralities is in the instinct of the man to believe what he wants to believe. It brought me no calm. I did wrong, saying to myself that it was not wrong, and yet all the time I knew in my restlessness that it was wrong. Madame de Tinquerville instilled into my veins this mental corruption and yet, at the end, when I believed that I had accepted everything, a nausea seized me and I flung this self violently aside. Then the mobilization, and a new self.
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Fourth Figure: I, myself,—if not the self of to-morrow, the self of to-day: an exile. For I had been that all these long embittered months,—an exile from all that life had been to me, a man grown suddenly taciturn, who smoked his pipe, lying in a mud hole behind a flap, and gazed up at the thin blue avenue of the trenches overhead; smoked, obeyed, questioned not, and was content to have found a meaning. Atavism, perhaps, the content to be just man again, following man’s instinct to survive among the fittest. I knew life as though I had been born to it again. Three times a day I thrilled with the delight of eating; I knew the ecstasy of sleep after fatigue; I wept at the loss of a comrade, and my whole heart rejoiced when in the exhaustion after battle with my closing vision I felt the rough hands of a convict drawing his coat over me with the tenderness of a woman. The world had no perplexities for me. The mask was discarded. I felt myself brute, Crusader, sinner, pagan and saint, and each mood was genuine. I saw men in the frenzy of combat swept into moments of unbelievable ferocity. I myself knew moments when there was nothing human in me, when courage was but the panic for existence. And out of the abnormal slaying self I would grope back into the man that reasoned over his actions and shivered at the animal that had run wild. I knew the pagan hour that comes so easily to those who have felt the breath of passing destruction continuously at their side. In the whirlpool and the whipping trenches I have seen my comrade at arms struck and strewn into unrecognizable matter and have felt but one instinctive thought:
“I live—I still live!”
Yet, later, in a more reasoning mood, deliberately and calmly, I have gone back as others went, into the certainty of destruction, to rescue a wounded stranger. I have returned with the living, singing, greedy of life,—a bed of hay paradise and a can of Pinard the ecstasy of forgetfulness. I have rebelled, hesitated, been caught with the cold nausea of fear, thrilled at a word from a peasant boy kneeling and crossing himself, and awakened to the call of leadership which was mine by noblesse oblige, become suddenly and disdainfully impersonal when responsibility had fallen to me and I could do no less than the least. Other moments there were, when I walked, a lone sentry in the night, among the sleeping and the dead, when a feeling of reverence and awe possessed my soul at the slow revolving stars, and I wondered at the futility of victors and vanquished under the things that change not. I knew moments of intense intellectual clarity when my mind seemed to take wing and lift me above the soiled reality of conflict into a mystic sense of my own loneliness in the scheme of things. At such moments, when only the questioning remained, I had a disdain of danger and of the death which went unseen and whining in the night,—a disdain that was absolute. Yet in the morning, cramped in a dugout, I heard above me the great shells shatter and felt the cold sweat rise in my back. After this can the other life be real? I wonder. Or will all this pass into a dim incredible memory?