Across the river from where I now live stands the old, old house where
the man of the wasted life was born. I did not know him as a boy, but the
old people of the neighborhood spoke of him as the handsomest boy on the
McElhattan side, and the place was noted for handsome people. He was a
full grown man when I first saw him, while I was yet a boy. How handsome
he was, standing six feet tall, with eyes and hair coal black and a face
that showed the brain force seething behind the beautiful mask.
His discontent was transparent to every reader of the human face. Even
the droop of his dark mustache reminded one of the weeping willow
branches hanging disconsolate over the tomb where sleeps the beloved dead.
When I first met him I was only just awakening to the hopeless condition
of my future life. Weak of body and with an untrained intellect, his
broad education and power of deep meditation made him to tower above me
like a mountain towering above a mouse; but he stooped to meet me half
way, showing me the interior of his disappointed soul and receiving my
sincere sympathy in exchange. At the hotel, where we many nights slept
together in the same bed, the people complained of us talking all night
long, to the annoyance of the other lodgers. And it was true. Many the
night we lay in the dark and discussed everything on top of the earth,
even going out of our sphere to discuss the orthodox dream of heaven.
One night he spoke of the words that should some time decorate his tomb,
and I still regret that I never mentioned his request to his relatives
and family, and that now his marker does not display these solemn words:
“I am what was, what is, and what is to be; and no living man shall ever
roll away the stone that closes the door to the mystery into which I go.
What is, is right or else the whole universe is wrong. I am not lost or
wasted, for the economy of Nature hoards all the wealth of the world in a
grasp that crushes life to get back her own.”
What made this sublime thinker a bit of flotsam on the sea of Time? He
told me once when in a confidential mood that the loss of the one woman
he loved darkened his life and drove him to drink. The woman married
another, and was still living when he told me his story, but he did not
tell me who she was, nor whose fault it was that she became lost to him.
How I pitied the big man, whose heart was as tender as that of a refined
woman. What a power he could have been in the intellectual world if
mated to the one woman he loved. When he lost her his grasp on ambition
and enthusiasm weakened and he folded the desires of his soul into a
shapeless mass and sat down upon them to brood over his loss.
Poor M——! Chained to his early disappointment, and intellectually so far
removed from his plodding neighbors that none thought it necessary to
offer him their sympathy. How little the average man knows the average
human heart. Education only strengthens the soul’s hunger for sympathy,
love and fellowship, and because I sympathized with the man of the wasted
life, and he sympathized with me in my almost hopeless struggles, a warm
friendship grew up between us, and he allowed me to see farther into the
shadows that shrouded his disappointed soul than any of his family ever
penetrated.
He was one of those retentive minds that could not forget, and he tried
to dull the pain at his heart with drink. Sometimes he would make a
strong effort to reform and rebuild his wasted resolutions, and for
several months he would toil on the farm like a hired man. But his mind
was too active for such a vegetable existence, and his books would take
him out of the fields of physical labor. Then the old discontent, the
memory of the old love would fill his soul and again he would drown
everything in liquor, like a second Edgar Allen Poe. In one of these
sprees he died, and his wasted life ended in a death that shocked his
many friends.