Nothing happened at all during my visit and Alonzo Berners did not during the whole time say a notable thing that I could later remember and that I can now quote to explain my feeling for him.
Nothing happened but that I was puzzled as I had never been before. There was something in the very walls of the Berners house that excited and when I had gone to bed at night I did not sleep. Notions came. Odd exciting fancies kept me awake. As I have explained I was then young and had quite made up my mind about men and life. Men and women were divided into two classes containing a few shrewd wise people and many fools. I was trying very hard to place myself among the wise and shrewd ones. The Berners family I could not place in either of these classifications and in particular Alonzo Berners puzzled and disconcerted me.
Was there a force in life of which I knew nothing at all and was this force exemplified in the person of the man I had picked up in a Chicago saloon?
At night as I lay in my bed new ideas, new impulses, came flocking. There was a man in the house with me, a man fairly worshiped by others and for no reason I could understand but wanted to understand. His very living in the house had done something to it, to the very wall of the house, so that anyone coming into the place, sleeping between the walls, was affected. Could it be that the man Alonzo Berners simply loved the people about him and the places in which they lived and had that love become a force in itself affecting the very air people breathed? Sometimes in the afternoons when there was no one about I went through the rooms of the house looking curiously about. There was a chair here and a table there. On the table lay a book. Was there also in the house a kind of fragrance? Why did the sunlight fall with such a pronounced golden glory on the faded carpet on the floor of Alonzo Berners’ room?
Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and in others.
Was I afraid also of people who had the power of loving, of giving themselves? Was I afraid of the power of unasking love in myself and in others?
That I should be afraid of anything in the realm of the spirit, that there should perhaps be a force in the world I did not understand, could not understand, irritated me profoundly.
As the week advanced my irritation grew and I have never had any doubt at all that Alonzo Berners knew of it. He said nothing and when I went away he had nothing to say. I spent the days of that week in his presence, saw the men who came to visit him and whom I thought I understood well enough and then at night went to my bed and did not sleep. I was like one tortured by a desire for conversion to something like the love of God, by a desire to love and be loved and sometimes in the night I lay in my bed like a very lovelorn maiden and sometimes I grew angry and walked up and down in the moonlight in my room swearing and shaking my fist at the shadows that flitted across the walls in the moonlight.
It was two o’clock of the morning of one of the last nights I spent in the house and I let myself out at the kitchen door and went for a walk, going down along the hillside to the town and through the newer town to the older place by the river. The moon was shining and all was hushed and silent. What a quiet night! “I will give myself over to these new impulses,” I thought, and so went along thinking thoughts that had never before come into my head.
Could it be that force, all power was disease, that man on his way up from savagery and having discovered the mind and its uses had gone a little off his head in using his new toy? I had always been drawn toward horses dogs and other animals and among people had cared most for simple folk who made no pretense of having an intellect, workmen who in spite of the handicaps put in their way by modern life still loved the materials in which they worked, who loved the play of hands over materials, who followed instinctively a force outside themselves—they felt to be greater and more worthy than themselves—women who gave themselves to physical experiences with grave and fine abandon, all people in fact who lived for something outside themselves, for materials in which they worked, for people other than themselves, things over which they made no claim of ownership.