but I was as helpless as he. All I could do was to stand there, wrung through my vitals with an agony of pity and tenderness for anyone so oppressed. I felt that of all those who participated in the dreadful spectacle only the victim himself and I were good and would go to heaven—and with this thought, though then I knew it not, the devil tempted me and I fell.
My whole small person filled with self-esteem. I felt that the all-seeing Deity was personally looking down upon me with a sublime approval and that, although I couldn’t be of any use to the badgered creature before me, heaven would bless me for being the only person present with a noble heart. It seemed to me that God and the poor wild man and I were brought close together spiritually by my own goodness and that the three of us made a lonely light upon this earth.
Darkness was coming on deeper, and I walked away. When I left, the crowd still harried the unfortunate man; but I trudged homeward exalted. Never before—and I pray heaven never since—did I so praise myself. The supremacy of my virtue wrought a pathos about me; my holiness touched me to the quick. Lamplighters trotted whistling up the long streets, setting their slim ladders against the iron poles, then touching the glass boxes at the top into yellow illumination; and I passed beneath the lights with my hands in my pockets and my head down, my eyes wet with self-appreciation. I still felt excruciatingly sorry for the poor wild man; but the sorrier I was for him, the more credit I gave myself for it. I wept for him, and my tears were tribute to the just-discovered angelic quality of my own character. I was so good I just couldn’t bear it.
At home, when they asked me what I’d seen at the fair, I couldn’t tell them about my unhappy friend—or about me. I murmured of a Spotted Wild Boy in a side show, and went to my room to be alone with my sorrow and my perfection.
I was pretty much over it next day and just a dub again, but for grandeur of soul I’d made a great reputation with myself.
III. Snips and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails
Aged eleven, I was sometimes vaguely disturbed by hearing older people speak of what the world might be like in faraway times to come; though I’d accepted a prophecy that my own future was limited to the next nine years. I was to die that young.
At the beginning of the 1880s long fly brushes, sometimes beautifully of peacocks’ feathers, were waved over dining-room tables at mealtimes in warm weather; doors and windows had no fly screens then; and on a summer morning a swallow flew into our kitchen. Finding all doors open to encourage the breeze, the confused bird flew out of the kitchen and across a rear hallway into the library, darted aside through the drawing room, shot leftward into the front parlor, then dipped through the hall and out to the sunshine again by way of the open front doorway. Immediately there was great commotion within the house; my mother and sister couldn’t quiet our convulsively noisy fat colored cook.
“Sign o’ death!” she shouted. “Bird fly threw house true sign o’ death!” She pointed at me. “It’s him! Sign o’ death fer that chile. He ain’ go’ live to grow up. That chile never go’ live see twenty-one years ole! Bird done say so!”
My mother and sister of course laughed and reassured me; but the cook and the swallow made an impression upon me—I thought that most likely they knew. However, years were so long—in those days—that a possible nine of them, stretching ahead, offered a virtually interminable lifetime. I wasn’t much more bothered than if the cook had said I wouldn’t live to be a hundred; and I felt rather important because the swallow’s performance, and hers, were all about me.
Convinced that I’d never see twenty-one, I was, nevertheless, attentive when older people spoke of what I might see if I lived to be an old man. My grown-up relatives talked of times even farther ahead than that—especially when Uncle Newton stopped to visit us on his journeys between Washington and California. He laughed at himself for being a visionary, but insisted that someday carriages would move without horses to pull them, and he was even fantastic enough to believe that within the next hundred years or so men would fly. People would see them—actual human beings like ourselves—way up there in the sky and not just helplessly floating in balloons, but with made wings, dodging the clouds and as sure of themselves as birds are. He thought, too, that someday there’d be light from electricity, and hotels would no longer have to put up bedroom signs for country people, “Don’t blow out the gas.”
Few of his kinsfolk could seriously agree with him about men flying; though they all accepted the theoretical possibility that carriages and phaetons and buggies could be made to move, lacking horses. The thing might be done by means of steam engines stoked with coal, they thought; but the machines would always have to be kept off the public highways, of course, because they’d frighten the horses.
Such inventions, it was felt, wouldn’t be practical until the millennium, that Utopian era to arrive when everybody had become well-to-do, all-wise, and wholly good. By then all problems, including that of swift transportation, would have been solved, so we’d all live in a leisure devoted to literature, the fine arts, and religious observances. There would of course be no more war—but my mother was positive that already mankind had learned at least that one dreadful lesson. As a girl she’d lived through the Mexican War and as a young matron through the incomparably more heart-rending Civil War; she was sure that nothing so horrible as war could ever happen again. Perhaps this was why my father’s sword and a great-grandfather’s Revolutionary musket were kept in the attic, where I used them fiercely in many solitary wars against invisibles.
Thus I may have been in myself a demonstration that war wasn’t extinct; for doesn’t a child’s life repeat the history of his species, and aren’t most nations still controlled by child instincts? My father, gentlest of men, didn’t think the world old enough to be free of war. In fact, he thought it possible that life on this planet might become so torn with fighting that a man would be safest as a trained soldier; so his plan for me was West Point—an idea always quietly but emotionally opposed by my mother.
My father’s thought that war would come again he founded upon observation of the world and upon reason, of course; but he had also developed a queer idea. It was a fancifully speculative one, he admitted, and he didn’t believe in it—he was always discriminating in his use of the word “believe”—yet he thought the thing could be possible. In the unbounded range of his reading he’d included many books upon the esoteric philosophies; he corresponded with an English expert upon the Law of Karma, and he thought the doctrine of reincarnation so plausible that a quarter of a century later, after an Italian sojourn, he wrote his piquant book upon the question, The Hermit of Capri. In that work, however, he didn’t mention the odd bit of looking forward militarily that made me shiver once or twice in my boyhood.
The thought was that terrific hordes of the disembodied entities of ancient fighting men—Carthaginian mercenaries, Roman legionaries, turbulent Alamanni, and what not—had perhaps already been reincarnated, some of them killing their way across Asia and into Europe with Genghis Khan maybe, and that the Law of Karma seemed to indicate that they were just about due in quantity upon this earth again. Great numbers of them, he thought, might be born into various nations during the next fifty years—many might already be alive—and, as they were in very essence savage warriors, their presence among mankind would so tend to create prodigious wars that the efforts of civilized peacemakers would be of little avail. The disturbances would not be calculable nor could the world go peacefully forward again until the truculent had been destroyed and the wave of this incarnation of theirs had passed.
The Golden Age
Thus, to me, the far future seemed uncomfortable to think about—with its shadowy crowds of terrible warrior souls fighting, and its skies meteored with winged people flying, and its tooting steamy vehicles frightening horses and ponies into runaways—but, naturally, I didn’t think about it often or for long. The younger we are, the more vivaciously we’re engaged
