ALL those summer days, while the Professor was sending cheerful accounts
of his activities to his family in France, he was really doing very
little. He had begun, in a desultory way, to annotate the diary that Tom
had kept on the mesa, in which he had noted down the details of each
day’s work among the ruins, along with the weather and anything unusual
in the routine of their life. There was a minute description of each
tool they found, of every piece of cloth and pottery, frequently
accompanied by a very suggestive pencil sketch of the object and a
surmise as to its use and the kind of life in which it had played a
part. To St. Peter this plain account was almost beautiful, because of
the stupidities it avoided and the things it did not say. If words had
cost money, Tom couldn’t have used them more sparingly. The adjectives
were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to
present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s
emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination,
the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when
the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only conventional
phrases.
When the first of August came round, the Professor realized that he had
pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have
taken little more than a week. But he had been doing a good deal
besides--something he had never before been able to do.
St. Peter had always laughed at people who talked about “day-dreams,”
just as he laughed at people who naively confessed that they had “an
imagination.” All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion.
When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He
had no twilight stage. But new he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with
his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth.
He found he could lie on his sand-spit by the lake for hours and watch
the seven motionless pines drink up the sun. In the evening, after
dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility.
He was cultivating a novel mental dissipation--and enjoying a new
friendship. Tom Outland had not come back again through the garden door
(as he had so often done in dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the
Professor had long ago left behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon
Valley--the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter.
This boy and he had meant, back in those faraway days, to live some sort
of life together and to share good and bad fortune. They had not shared
together, for the reason that they were unevenly matched. The young St.
Peter who went to France to try his luck, had a more active mind than
the twin he left behind in the Solomon Valley. After his adoption into
the Thierault household, he remembered that other boy very rarely, in
moments of home-sickness. After he met Lillian Ornsley, St. Peter forgot
that boy had ever lived.
But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back
to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as
there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the
years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His
career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of
events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do
with the person he was in the beginning.
The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow
strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always
consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb “to love”--in society
and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in
the lonesomeness of crowded city streets. When he met Lillian, it
reached its maturity. From that time to this, existence had been a
catching at handholds. One thing led to another and one development
brought on another, and the design of his life had been the work of this
secondary social man, the lover. It had been shaped by all the penalties
and responsibilities of being and having been a lover. Because there was
Lillian, there must be marriage and a salary. Because there was
marriage, there were children. Because there were children, and fervour
in the blood and brain, books were born as well as daughters. His
histories, he was convinced, had no more to do with his original ego
than his daughters had; they were a result of the high pressure of young
manhood.
The Kansas boy who had come back to St. Peter this summer was not a
scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods
and water. Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever
life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him. He was not nearly
so cultivated as Tom’s old cliff-dwellers must have been--and yet he was
terribly wise. He seemed to be at the root of the matter; Desire under
all desires, Truth under all truths. He seemed to know, among other
things, that he was solitary and must always be so; he had never
married, never been a father. He was earth, and would return to earth.
When white clouds blew over the lake like bellying sails, when the seven
pine-trees turned red in the declining sun, he felt satisfaction and
said to himself merely: “That is right.” Coming upon a curly root that
thrust itself across his path, he said: “That is it.” When the
maple-leaves along the street began to turn yellow and waxy, and were
soft to the touch,--like the skin on old faces,--he said: “That is true;
it is time.” All these recognitions gave him a kind of sad pleasure.
When he was not dumbly, deeply recognizing, he was bringing up out of
himself long-forgotten, unimportant memories of his early childhood, of
his mother, his father, his grandfather. His grandfather, old Napoleon
Godfrey, used to go about lost in profound, continuous meditation,
sometimes chuckling to himself. Occasionally, at the family
dinner-table, the old man would try to rouse himself, from motives of
politeness, and would ask some kindly question--nearly always absurd and
often the same one he had asked yesterday. The boys used to shout with
laughter and wonder what profound matters could require such deep
meditation, and make a man speak so foolishly about what was going on
under his very eyes. St. Peter thought he was beginning to understand
what the old man had been thinking about, though he himself was but
fifty-two, and Napoleon had been well on in his eighties. There are only
a few years, at the last, in which man can consider his estate, and he
thought he might be quite as near the end of his road as his grandfather
had been in those days.
The Professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature
into the original one, and that the complexion of a man’s life was
largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature
as modified by sex rubbed on together.
What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could
return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits and passions and
experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual
activities which have been strong enough to give him distinction among
his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a name in the world.
Perhaps this reversion did not often occur, but he knew it had happened
to him, and he suspected it had happened to his grandfather. He did not
regret his life, but he was indifferent to it. It seemed to him like the
life of another person.
Along with other states of mind which attended his realization of the
boy Godfrey, came a conviction (he did not see it coming, it was there
before he was aware of its approach) that he was nearing the end of his
life. This conviction took its place so quietly, seemed so
matter-of-fact, that he gave it little thought. But one day, when he
realized that all the while he was preparing for the fall term he didn’t
in the least believe he would be alive during the fall term, he thought
he might better see a doctor.