Was I, who thought of myself as a young man having no morality now face to face with a new morality? In the fifteenth century man had discovered man. Had man later been lost to man? Was Alonzo Berners simply one who loved his fellows and was he by that token stronger in his weakness, more notable in his obscure Illinois village life than all these great and powerful ones I had been following with my own mind across the pages of history?
There was no doubt I was in a magnificent mood and that I enjoyed it and when I got to the old town I went and stood by a small brick building that had once been a residence but was now a cowshed. In a near-by house a child cried and a man and a woman awoke from sleep and talked for a time in low hushed voices. Two dogs came and discovered me where I stood in the silence. As I remained unmoved they did not know what to make of their discovery. At first they barked and then they wagged their tails, and then, as I continued to ignore them, they went away looking offended. “You are not treating us fairly,” they seemed to be saying.
“And they are something like myself,” I thought, looking at the dusty road on which the soft moonlight was falling and smiling at nothingness.
I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming a ridiculous desire to abase myself before something not human and so stepping into the moonlit road I knelt in the dust. Having no God, the gods having been taken from me by the life about me, as a personal God has been taken from all modern men by a force within that man himself does not understand but that is called the intellect, I kept smiling at the figure I cut in my own eyes as I knelt in the road and as I had smiled at the figure I had cut in the Chicago saloon when I went with such an outward show of indifference to the rescue of Alonzo Berners.
There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myself that I had the power to believe in a God, and so I merely knelt in the dust in the silence and no words came to my lips.
Did I worship merely the dust under my knees? There was the coincidence as there is always the coincidence. The symbol flashed into my mind. A child cried again in a near-by house and I presume some traditional feeling come down from old tellers of tales took possession of me. My fancy played with the figure of myself in the ridiculous position into which I had got and I thought of the wise men of old times who were reputed to have come to worship at the feet of another crying babe in an obscure place. How grand! The wise men of an older time had followed a star to a cowshed. Was I becoming wise? Smiling at myself and with also a kind of contempt of myself and my own sentimentality I half decided I would try to devote myself to something, give my life a purpose. “Why not to another effort at the re-discovery of man by man?” I thought rather grandly, getting up and beating the dust off my knees, the while I continued the trick I had learned of pointing the laughing finger of scorn at myself. I laughed at myself but all the time kept thinking of the occasional flashes of laughter that came from the drawn lips of Alonzo Berners. Why was his laughter freer and more filled with joy than my own?
NOTE XIV
WAR, leisure and the South!
The leisure was not too much cut across by the hours spent in drills and manœuvres and the other duties of a soldier. Here was a life in which everything was physical, the mind on a vacation and the imagination having leisure to play while the body worked. One’s individuality became lost and one became part of something wholly physical, vast, strong, capable of being fine and heroic, capable of being brutal and cruel.
One’s body was a house in which had lived two, three, perhaps ten or twelve personalities. The fancy became the head of the house and swept the body away into some absurd adventure or the mind took charge and laid down laws. These then were in turn driven out of the house by physical desire, by the lustful self. Dumb nights of walking city streets, wanting women, wanting to touch with the hands lovely things.