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That night, half-awake, half-adream, four figures passed before me, conjured up from the cauldron of my imagination, as the mystic sequence which greeted Macbeth.
The First: A boy, with the eyes of faith, believing in the good of the world, a scrubby, tousled little urchin, in and out of mischief, just beginning to penetrate beyond the borders of fairyland, passionately curious; a rich little mind exploring vast continents of treasured knowledge; a youngster who had already dared climb the magic walls of childhood and hesitated before the jump into the strange real world. What was I then? All of creation was within my imagination; society was expressed in three laws,—the rising bell, soap, and the Sunday prohibitions. The first two I comprehended (in my male’s instinct for order); the last I never did. What had happened to the world that periodically, at the end of each week, a sudden hush should fall in the household, that romping must cease and playthings be hidden away, and the body encased in starched shirts and shining black suits, and the young romping spirits should be led in leash to hard benches and the pointing finger. Father and mother were majestic, Olympian figures, never quite understood; authority was absolute, and the world black or white. My first love, a young lady of twenty years, was an angel stepping down out of the parted heavens, whose voice thrilled to the secret caverns of my heart. She stopped but a week at our home and I have never seen her since, yet in those short days I fell so desperately in love with her—greatest and most radiant of fairy princesses—that to this day I can feel my little heart stop as over the bed-covers I saw her come to my bedside, all fragrance and loveliness, to touch my eyelids with her lips. And then, they told me that she was to be married; that she had gone and I would see her no more. I remembered the child quivering under his first touch of sorrow, poignant and overwhelming. That first knowledge of sorrow, the utter loneliness, the incomprehension that such things could exist in the simplicity of the world! There was no refuge but in dreams and for months I lived for my dream,—for that moment when the candle wick glowed and dropped into the darkness and the shimmering stars came through the open window, and my dreams would begin anew, as out of the peopled dark, ogres and kings’ sons, Napoleons and presidents, Hercules and Ulysses, fairy godmothers and elves, and—always—the loveliest princess in the world came forth to fetch me into the fantasy of the future.
Sometimes now, thinking on that future, I wonder, should I have sons, if any of them will be as real to me as that boy. I think not. In the man, the first-born and the closest to his heart must ever be the boy that was. I see now that it was that first imagined sorrow which led me beyond the magic garden of childhood into the questioning of youth. There were nights, moonlit nights and starry nights, when I crept to my window and strove to pierce the riddle of the strange things above; when I stood and wondered and shivered, a little mind striving to penetrate the sky, pitting itself against Infinity. And, as I watched this young self there in the still of the covered night, I wondered. Now, I seldom dream or question: I have retreated behind my formulas. But what became of all the brave little thoughts, the fancy, the rich curiosity and the eagerness for first knowledge? Which is the true, abiding self,—this, or the pebble fashioned by the grinding, restless forces of Society?
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Second Figure: A young man of twenty, outwardly disciplined, walking, talking, dressing like ten thousand other well-groomed, mechanical products of the educational factories; inwardly, a turbulent appetite for life, a mind which had stopped functioning, an imagination buried, but with every impulse and curiosity vibrantly awake. Never have I been surer of myself, and never was I more worked upon by forces which I did not understand; I, a high-strung young animal suddenly released into the pastures of youth. Everything appealed to me; every broad way and byway in the vast forest of life sent me galloping down it in exploration. Each impulse, good or evil, was genuine and irresistible. I adored one woman as a saint, blushed and stumbled in her presence, trembled at the contact of her fingers and, in the full flush of this puppy-love, could feel my blood surge at a brazen glance. I drank too much, gambled outrageously: yet it was not from any desire for ugliness, but from the sheer joy of wrestling with invisible outer forces, in a strange belief that I, a privileged being, could affront the gods of chance and bind them to my way. I dissipated a month’s allowance in a day; fell into deep periods of religious speculation; rebelled at dogma and constituted authority; rejected all that was old and followed everything that was new. All this I did as hungrily as I sat down at table, without knowing in the slightest why I did it. Yet this is not quite true. Already, I had begun to be conscious of a dual self, a self that acted and a self that watched. Often, I went madly towards an infatuation which would have meant the end of all things, knowing all the time the fatality of it, powerless to resist and saved only by some trick of circumstance. The truth was that my blood ran too rapidly in my veins, the delight in every sense was too imperious, the joy of being alive too intoxicating.
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Still, in this period when everything was fermenting, fructifying, bubbling to the surface in me, my outlook was of the simplest. Black was still black, and white, white. Women were good or bad,—and both drew me to them. I broke the laws of society, but I believed in them, fully determined at some calmer, wiser period of my life to maintain and defend them. So, when I was most inconsistent, I had faith in inconsistency. I repented with the same ardor with which I transgressed.
I walked down the avenue, and my imagination took fire at the brilliant women in their speeding luxury. What did I feel? The need of exerting the supremacy of my youth over their shallow, sparkling little souls. I sat in a great Opera House and, before that insistent, imperious parade of society, dreamed of some future date when I who was now lost in the crowd would impose myself. Everything in me was force, faith, and desire, and all these young impulses tugged at my soul for the opportunity to express themselves. How confident, how wise, how convinced I was, and—I knew nothing. For, mentally, it was a period of arrested development, when I mistook hunger for strength, vanity for power, longing for capacity.