I took train for my friend Sandys' country place near Cleveland,
forbidding Woodruff or Burbank or my secretaries to communicate with me.
Sandys had no interest in politics--his fortune was in real estate and,
therefore, did not tempt or force him into relations with political
machines.
Early in the morning after my arrival I got away from the others and,
with a stag-hound who remembered me with favor from my last visit,
struck into woods that had never been despoiled by man. As I tramped on
and on, my mind seemed to revive, and I tried to take up the plots and
schemes that had been all-important yesterday. But I could not. Instead,
as any sane man must when he and nature are alone and face to face, I
fell to marveling that I could burn up myself, the best of me, the best
years of my one life, in such a fever of folly and fraud as this
political career of mine. I seemed to be in a lucid interval between
paroxysms of insanity. I reviewed the men and things of my world as one
recalls the absurd and repellent visions of a nightmare. I shrank from
passing from this mood of wakefulness and reason back into the unreal
reality of what had for years been my all-in-all. I wandered hour after
hour, sometimes imagining that I was flying from the life I loathed,
again that somewhere in those cool, green, golden-lighted mazes I should
find--my lost youth, and her. For, how could I think of _it_ without
thinking of _her_ also? It had been lighted by her; it had gone with
her; it lived in memory, illumined by her.
The beautiful, beautiful world-that-ought-to-be! The hideous, the
horrible world-that-is!
I did not return to the house until almost dinner-time. "I have to go
away to-morrow morning," I announced after dinner. For I felt that, if I
did not fly at once, I should lose all heart for the task which must be
finished.
"Why," protested Sandys, "you came to stay until we all started with you
for St. Louis."
"I must go," I repeated. I did not care to invent an excuse; I could
not give the reason. Had I followed my impulse, I should have gone at
once, that night.
By noon the next day I had again flung myself into the vexed political
ocean whose incessant buffetings give the swimmers small chance to think
of anything beyond the next oncoming wave.