“For still night’s starry scroll unfurled,
And still the day came like a flood:
It was the greatness of the world
That made her long to use her blood.”
Somehow this region suggested this poem.
But, oh, these youngsters, the object of so much attention and solicitation, once they break away from these sheltering confines and precepts and enter the great world outside—then what? Do they fulfil any or all of the ideals here dreamed for them? I often think of them in the springtime going forth to the towns and the cities, their eyes lit with the sheen of new life. Ninetynine per cent. of them, as you and I know, end in the most humdrum fashion—not desperately or dramatically—just humdrum and nothing at all. Death, disease, the doldrums, small jobs, smaller ideas claim the majority of them. They grow up thinking that to be a drug clerk or a dentist or a shoe dealer is a great thing. Well, maybe it is—I don’t know. Spinoza was a watch repairer. But in youth all are so promising. They look so fine. And in a small town like this, they buzz about so ecstatically, dreaming and planning.
Seeing young boys walking through the streets of Napoleon and greeting each other and looking at the girls—sidewise or with a debonair security—brought back all the boys of my youth—all those who had been so promising and of such high hopes in my day. Where are they? Well, I do not need to guess. In most cases I know. They would make gloomy or dull tales. Why bother? In spring the sun-god breeds a new crop. Each autumn a new class enters school. Each spring time, at school’s end, a group break away to go to the city.
Oh bright young hopes! Oh visions! visions!—mirages of success that hang so alluringly in amethyst skies!
CHAPTER XXXIII
ACROSS THE BORDER OF BOYLAND
As we were looking in this same window, I saw a man who looked exactly like a man who used to be a lawyer politician in Warsaw, a small town lawyer politician, such as you find in every town of the kind, pettifogging their lives away, but doing it unconsciously, you may well believe. This one had that peculiar something about him which marks the citizen who would like to be a tribune of the people but lacks the capacity. His clothes, nondescript, durable garments, were worn with the air of one who says “It is good to dress plainly. That is what my clients expect. Besides, I am a poor man, a commoner, and proud of it. I know that my constituents are proud of it too.” He was standing at the foot of a law office stairs from which quite plainly he had just descended. This was not quite enough to confirm me in my idea that he was a country lawyer—he might have been a client—but I went further and asked him, in a roundabout way.