Don-A-Dreams/Part 2/Chapter 2
II
These are the commonplaces of young experience, the growing pains of any spiritual development; but they came on Don with a sudden violence that gave them a staggering weight. He was away from home: that is to say, he was away from the comfortable outlook on life which a man gets from the very permanence of familiar surroundings; he was facing the powers of life and death, alone and in the open; he was the more conscious of his own weakness, more exposed to the assault of doubt, and perhaps more inclined to be contemptuous of the fireside religions. He had been raised in those sheltered beliefs which are, in a way, feminine and sentimental; he had been, for the past few months, thrown upon his own unmothered masculinity in a world that despised the gentle moralities which it preached on one day in seven; and his mind had changed more than he had been aware.
When he woke next morning, it was to a dull acceptance of that loss which had come upon him, the previous night, in such a frantic revolt against bereavement. He looked out his window on the first soft fall of snow, and remembered that it was Saturday. His studies lay around him, dead of interest, like the ruins of an avocation. He went downstairs, listlessly, his hands in his pockets, and ate his breakfast with the mechanical appetite which follows a stress of emotion. And then he muffled himself up in his overcoat and winter gloves, and with his head bent against a mild wind he began to walk.
He had intended to walk in a comfortable daze, quite thoughtless, with the snow-flakes clogging his eyelashes and the wind crooning in his ears. But his mind was unusually alert, his observation greedy of every sight he passed; and when he came to the main business street of the town—turning northward in an unconscious habit of direction—he saw the life around him with an involuntary wonderment, as if it were suddenly new to him; and he watched the actions of the men and women on the sidewalks and in the shops as if they had been a race of animals whose cheerful acceptance of a brief and tragic lot was an inexplicable mystery to him. He saw them even with pity as they smiled and nodded and chattered to one another—with the pity which one would feel for the playfulness of a butcher's animals; and he did not at all confound himself in their fate, but walked among them as unconsciously self-superior as a philosopher who has just proved the nothingness of all things, and who feels the personal importance of his triumphant intellectuality and the great distinction of his act.
The feeling raised him to a lonely isolation, and as he neared the quieter suburbs he was reminded of the streets of Coulton and of the companion who had used to join him at the top of the Park. Nor was it so much of a reminding—for, of course, she had been dwelling in the painful background of his mind at all times. It was a sudden leaping of her image into the vacant interest which his studies had been occupying, a weaker yielding to the thoughts which he had kept resolutely out of his busy days. And he did not think of her with pity, as he did of these others. The mood is likely to be over-expressed in any words: but she took her place beside his own conception of himself and companioned him among these shadows of men and women like an immortal walking with him in a futile and passing world.
He began to chat with her, in an imaginary conversation, at first rather sadly, but without any reference to the cause of his tragic manner, for he had the same instinct to shield her from his doubts as he had had to protect Frankie from the discovery that Santa Claus was a myth. She asked him about his studies, about Conroy, about the life at college; and her questions were as unexpected as the conversation which one carries on in dreams. He saw her downward smile, the eyelash on her cheek, the quick side glance which she raised to him, rather shyly because of their long separation; and he looked down to see whether she wore her rubbers in the snow, and, while he replied to her, he watched her little feet appearing and disappearing below the hem of her skirt. The pleasure which he took out of it all was a thing not to be described. On top of his lonely misery, it was more real than any real joy could possibly have been, since it was outside of all halting actuality, purely ideal.
He turned with her into an open road that led up the side of a hill; and they stopped at the top of it to look back at the town, where it lay in the cup of a valley, facing the lake. He explained to her that, according to the geologists, this range of hills had been the shore-line in the "glacial period"; she wished that she had studied geology; he shook his head sadly. In order the better to see, they climbed the bank that edged the road, and stood together under a huge bare elm that raised above them its interweaved branches, fantastically touched with snow. He brushed off a great root that writhed up from the frozen ground; and they sat down on it to look over the city.
He was still sitting there when the sun came out, and he was smiling, with a rapt expression, at the horizon. She had her hands in a fur muff on her knees, and her cheeks were rosy with the wind. Without turning, he saw her so; and he listened to her with the face of a lover. Below him were all the houses of the town, and they had suddenly become the nests which love had built for its shelter. All the business of those streets—which had an hour before seemed so inexplicable to him—was now the joyful activity of men who were working to bring home the daily bread to their mates. All the misery and the sin of that city were the absence, the debasing, the denial of love. Geology, history—all the parched and sterile sciences of the lecture-room—were a study of the dry bones and fossils of a life from which love had departed. Beauty was the face of Love; Truth was the voice of Love. God Himself—and it came to him as a hope which he seized upon as a discovery—was the divine principle of Love which gave a meaning to the universe.
"Aren't your hands cold?" she asked.
"Not very."
"Put one in here," she said, and moved her muff across her knees to him.
He touched her gloved fingers in that warm nest of fur. She smiled. The sunlight swam with a sudden glory of light in the moist happiness that clouded his eyes. And Don-a-Dreams had found himself again in the love dream of youth and the poets.
She had come—like the imaginary playmate who had consoled him for the loss of his picnic on the 24th of May—to companion him in a world that had grown to be a place of doubt and terror to him; and she kept him from the thought of a darkness which he dared not think of. But he did not allow her to make any change in the outward manner of his days. As if he had been a criminal or a conspirator with some secret double life to conceal, he even frequented more than usual any crowded assemblies of the students, and watchfully applauded at the meetings of the debating society, and cheered the assaults at arms in the gymnasium, and listened with a diligent pretence of absorption in the lecture-rooms. Not that he did any of these things consciously, or by plan; it was instinctive with him to conceal the thought of this presence that hung around him like a ghost; and the instinct made him show an open interest in life and his acquaintances, at the same time that it made it impossible for him to come to terms of intimacy with any friends. He spent an occasional evening with Conroy in his room at Residence, and he listened silently, but with a smile, to the conversation of Conroy's new friends; and he was as nearly as possible unnoticed by them there. He particularly absented himself from the college "socials" in which young women participated; he studied less in the library, and took fewer books to his room at night. For the rest, he usually walked out for an hour before going to bed; and he invariably spent his Saturdays and his Sundays on the country roads or in that network of ravines and river bottoms which holds back the north-eastern suburbs of the city.
It was on one of these night walks—a frozen December night—that Conroy, on his way home from the theatre, saw Don ahead of him sauntering up the line of dark shop-windows towards his boarding-house—and stopped him with an over-eager hail of greeting. Since their separation, Conroy had had a guilty feeling that he had deserted an old friend treasonably; he had explained the incident, in a letter to his mother, as due to Don's inability to pay for anything better than a "beastly uncomfortable" boarding-house room in which it was unhealthful to live; and his mother had tactfully persuaded Don to accept an extra allowance from her on the easy condition that he should pay it back when he was able. Conroy was curious to know what his cousin was doing with his money—for he was obviously not spending it.
Don had started at his cousin's cheery shout, and jerked his hand out of the bosom of his coat, and let his arm—that had been crooked—swing ostentatiously at his side. He met Conroy with a curious expression which puzzled the boy. "What're you doing down here, anyway, Don?" he asked.
"Taking a walk. What're you?"
Conroy replied that he had been at the theatre, but he ended the explanation with a return to his curiosity regarding Don. "Working pretty hard?"
"Oh yes," Don laughed. "Plugging as hard as ever."
That reference to the unmentioned cause of their separation silenced Conroy. They walked along without a word, crunching the snow under their heels. Suddenly Conroy asked: "Do you ever hear from her now?"
Don turned, with a startled "Who?"
"Margaret—Miss Richardson."
"What made you ask that?"
There was again, in his face, that faint suggestion of guilty confusion which Conroy had noticed when they met. "I don't know," the cousin answered, embarrassed. "I'd seen so little of you lately. I thought that, perhaps Jessie wrote me the other day that she'd heard she was coming here, after Christmas, to study music at the Conservatory."
"Who?"
"Miss Richardson."
"Coming here?"
"Yes. To the Conservatory."
After an interval of thought, Don said: "Oh! I hadn't heard."
When they separated at a street corner, Don thrust both hands deep in his overcoat pockets and paced along alone in a slow absorption of thought; and when he came to the door of the boarding-house, he let himself in without any smiling pause for parting on the threshold.
She was coming back. His "imaginary playmate" was "coming true" again. The news had brought him down to real life with the bewildering shock of a sudden awakening.