And it was literally true, so subtle are the ways by which one can come by what does not belong to him, even though partially paid for.
CHAPTER XXXV
WARSAW AT LAST!
Getting to Warsaw was a matter of an hour or so at most from here. I think my principal sensation on entering Indiana and getting thus far was one of disappointment that nothing had happened, and worse, nothing could happen. From here on it was even worse. It is all very well to dream of revisiting your native soil and finding at least traces, if no more, of your early world, but I tell you it is a dismal and painful business. Life is a shifting and changing thing. Not only your own thoughts and moods, but those of all others who endure, undergo a mighty alteration. Houses and landscapes and people go by and return no more. The very land itself changes. All that is left of what you were, or of what was, in your own brain, is a dwindling and spindling thing.
Not many miles out from Warsaw, we passed through the town of Pierceton, where lived two girls I barely knew at school, and here we picked up a typical Hoosier, who, because we asked the road of the principal storekeeper, volunteered to ride along and show us. “I’m going for a couple of miles in that direction. If you don’t mind I’ll get in and show you.”
Franklin welcomed him. I objected to the shrewd type, a cross between a country politician and a sales agent, who manages his errands in this way, but I said nothing. He made himself comfortable alongside Speed and talked to him principally the small change of country life.
As we sped along I began to feel an ugly resentment toward all life and change, and the driving, destroying urge of things. The remorselessness of time, how bitterly, irritatingly clear it stood out here! We talk about the hardness and cruelty of men! Contrast their sharpest, most brutal connivings with the slow, indifferent sapping of strength and hope and joy which nature practices upon each and every one of us. See the utter brutality with which every great dream is filched from the mind, all the delicate, tendril-like responsiveness of youth is taken away, your friends and pleasures and aspirations slain. I looked about me, and beginning to recognize familiar soil, such as a long stretch of white road ending in an old ice house, a railroad track out which I had walked, felt a sudden, overpowering, almost sickening depression at the lapse of time and all that had gone with it. Thirty years, nearly, had passed and with them all the people and all the atmosphere that surrounded them, or nearly so, and all my old intimacies and loves and romantic feelings. A dead world like this is such a compound—a stained-glass window at its best; a bone yard at its worst.
Approaching Warsaw after thirty years, my mind was busy gathering up a thousand threads long since fallen and even rotting in the grass of time. Here was the place, I said to myself, where we, the depleted portion of our family that constituted “we” at the time, came to stabilize our troubled fortunes and (it was my mother’s idea) to give the three youngest children, of whom I was one, an opportunity to get a sensible American free school education. Hitherto our family (to introduce a little private history) had been more or less under the domination of my dogmatic father, who was a Catholic and a bigot. I never knew a narrower, more hidebound religionist, nor one more tender and loving in his narrow way. He was a crank, a tenth rate Saint Simon or Francis of Assisi, and yet a charming person if it had been possible to get his mind off the subject of religion for more than three seconds at a time. He worked, ate, played, slept and dreamed religion. With no other thought than the sanctity and glory and joy of the Catholic Church, he was constantly attempting to drive a decidedly recalcitrant family into a similar point of view.
In the main (there were ten of us living) we would none of it. The majority, by some trick of chemistry which produces unheard of reactions in the strangest manner (though he and, to a much less extent, my mother, were religiously minded) were caught fast by the material, unreligious aspect of things. They were, one and all, mastered by the pagan life stream which flows fresh and clean under all our religions and all our views, moralistic and otherwise. It will have none of the petty, narrowing traps and gins wherewith the mistaken processes of the so-called minds of some would seek to enslave it. Life will not be boxed in boxes. It will not be wrapped and tied up with strings and set aside on a shelf to await a particular religious or moral use. As yet we do not understand life, we do not know what it is, what the laws are that govern it. At best we see ourselves hobbling along, responding to this dream and that lust and unable to compel ourselves to gainsay the fires and appetites and desires of our bodies and minds. Some of these, in some of us, strangely enough (and purely accidentally, of that I am convinced) conform to the current needs or beliefs of a given society; and if we should be so fortunate as to find ourselves in that society, we are by reason of these ideals, favorites, statesmen, children of fortune, poets of the race. On the other hand, others of us who do not and cannot conform (who are left-over phases of ancient streams, perhaps, or portentous striæ of new forces coming into play) are looked upon as horrific, and to be stabilized, or standardized, and brought into the normal systole-diastole of things. Those of us endowed with these things in mind and blood are truly terrible to the mass—pariahs, failures, shams, disgraces. Yet life is no better than its worst elements, no worse than its best. Its perfections are changing temporalities, illusions of perfection that will be something very different tomorrow. Again I say, we do not know what life is—not nearly enough to set forth a fixed code of any kind, religious or otherwise. But we do know that it sings and stings, that it has perfections, entrancements, shames—each according to his blood flux and its chemical character. Life is rich, gorgeous, an opium eater’s dream of something paradisiacal—but it is never the thin thing that thin blood and a weak, ill nourished, poorly responding brain would make it, and that is where the majority of our religions, morals, rules and safeguards come from. From thin, petered out blood, and poor, nervous, noncommanding weak brains.
Life is greater than anything we know.
It is stronger.