"Where?"
"Oh, in New York."
"Why in New York?"
"You don't know it?"
"No; but I mean to."
"I wish you joy."
"Tell me why in New York."
"You would n't understand."
"Would n't I? Try me."
I looked up at him as he stood there thoughtful, his forefinger between
the leaves of the book. _He_ had no living to earn. _He_ had not to
bear the burden and heat of an earned existence. How could he
understand? So I questioned in my narrowness of outlook.
"I felt the burden," I answered.
"What burden?"
"The burden of--oh, I can't tell exactly; the burden of just that
terrible weight of life as it is lived there. Before I was ill it
weighed on me so I felt old, sometimes centuries old--"
Jamie leaned forward eagerly, his face alive with feeling.
"Marcia, that's just the way I felt when I was in the hospital. I was
bowed down in spirit with it--"
"You?" I asked in amazement.
"Yes, I; why not? I can't help myself; I am a child of my time. Only,
I felt the burden of life as humanity lives it, not touched by locality
as you felt it."
"But you have n't really lived that life yet, Jamie."
"Yes, I have, Marcia."
"How?"
"I wonder now if _you_ will understand? I get it--I get all that
through the imagination."
"But imagination is n't reality."
"More real than reality itself sometimes. Look here, I 'm not a
philanthropic cad and I don't mean to say too much, but I can say this:
when a thinking man before he is twenty-five has run up hard against
the only solid fact in this world--death, he somehow gets a grip on
life and its meaning that others don't."
I waited for more. This was the Jamie of whom the depth of simplicity
in "Andre's Odyssey" had given me a glimpse.
He straightened himself suddenly. "I want to say right here and now
that if I have felt, and feel--as I can't help feeling, being the child
of my time and subject to its tendencies--the burden of this life of
ours as lived by all humankind, thank God, I can even when bowed in
spirit, feel at times the 'rhythm of the universe' that adjusts,
coordinates all--" He broke off abruptly, laughing at himself. "I 'm
getting beyond my depth, Marcia?"
I shook my head. He smiled. "Well, then, I 'll get down to bed rock
and say something more: you won't mind my mooning about and going off
by myself and acting, sometimes, as if I had patented an aeroplane and
could sustain myself for a few hours above the heads of all humanity--"