“Pointless or not, emotions and reflections are responses just as much as actions. I can no more help engaging myself in the underground than I can help breathing, or my heart beating, or dying when the time comes. Nothing, they say, is certain but death and taxes; actually everything is certain. Everything,” he repeated firmly.
I went back to sorting some pamphlets which were to be sold for wastepaper, shaking my head. His theory was unassailable; every attack was discounted by the very nature of the thesis. That it was false I didnt doubt; its impregnability made its falseness still more terrifying.
There were fully as many imaginary discussions with Tyss as real ones. Yet even in these disembodied arguments I could gain no advantage. Why do you look back on the War of Southron Independence with regret for what might have been, if no might-have-been is possible? I asked him mentally, knowing his answer, I cannot help myself, was no answer at all.
The logical illogic of it was only one of the multitude of contradictions in him. The Grand Army to which he was devoted was a violent organization of violent men. He himself was an advocate and implement of violence—one illegal paper, the True American, came from his press and I often saw crumpled proofs of large type warnings to “Get Out of Town you Conf. TRAITOR or the GA will HANG YOU!” Yet cruelty, other than intellectually, was repugnant to him; his vindictiveness toward the Whigs and Confederates rose from commiseration for the condition into which they had plunged the country.
Pondible and the others who bore an indefinable resemblance to each other, bearded or not, came to the store on Grand Army business, and I was sure many of the errands I was sent on advanced or were supposed to advance the Grand Army’s cause. Those who signed receipts with an X—and in the beginning at least Tyss was strict about assurance of delivery—seemed unlikely customers for the sort of merchandise we handled.
I was relieved, but puzzled and perhaps a little piqued, that aside from the very first conversation with Pondible, no attempt was made to persuade me into the organization. Tyss must have perceived this, for he explained obliquely.
“There’s the formative type, Hodgins, and the spectator type. One acts, and the other is acted upon. One changes events, the other observes them. Of course,” he went on hastily, “I’m not talking metaphysical rubbish. When I say the formative type changes events I merely mean he reacts to a given stimulus in a positive way while the spectator reacts to the same circumstances negatively, both reactions being inevitable and inescapable. Naturally, events are never changed.”
“Why can’t one be one type sometimes and the other at other times? Ive certainly heard of men of action who have sat down to write their memoirs.”
“You are confusing the after-effect of action with nonaction, the dying ripples on a pond into which a stone has been tossed with the still surface of one which has never been disturbed. No, Hodgins, the two types are completely distinct and unchangeable. The Swiss police chief, Carl Jung, has refined and improved the classifications of Lombroso, showing how the formative type can always be detected.”
I felt he was talking pure nonsense, even though I had never read Lombroso or heard of Chief Jung.