The Memoirs of a Failure (continued 2)

Meanwhile Tim, my setter, sat upon his haunches, watching us, his tongue hanging out, for the fire made him hot. I used to make an extra fuss about all this potato roasting in order that Tim might enjoy it the more. And as soon as I had dropped the potatoes in the ashes, I would go and lie lengthwise on Tim’s back, and fling my arms about his neck and hug him tight. I could go and see the turkeys driven to roost any evening, but this evening was peculiarly Tim’s and mine. I knew that Tim loved me, but not half so much as I loved Tim. I bumped his head, which was my most intimate term of affection with him. We two alone would sit there until the potatoes were cooked, watching the flames change into smoke, and the grey smoke rise and join the greyness of the winter sky. I was happy, so happy, dreaming with my arms about Tim, both of us gazing into the burning leaves, and, oh, their delicious odor, we both relished it, and I, full of affection and boyish glory, thinking strange, innocent thoughts. What would I not give to be that little brown-headed boy again, unfettered with the knowledge of evil?

When the potatoes were cooked to a mealy white, Uncle Robert came back from the turkey-house and pulled them out with his dextrous rake; and we three proceeded to the kitchen, where we found Aunt Maria, Sandy’s mother, sitting by the old brick oven. She gave us salt, and we ate the potatoes. Tim had some. No fairies ever dined like that, I was sure. Then my mother came out on the back veranda, and called:

“My son, my son, come into the house!”

“Doan’t you heah Mistus callin’?” demanded Uncle Robert.

“Yes,” I said, “but I didn’t want to go.”

I went. And I never came back.

That night tragedy was to begin in my life. When we were asleep, my father, mother and I, the son of our overseer trespassed across our lawn. Tim was on watch. No one ever knew exactly what happened; but Tim went at him, tore his pantaloons and bit him in the thigh. It was my certain belief that the boy had stoned Tim, for I found stones in the yard the next morning. And Uncle Robert intimated that Tim had guarded the turkey-house. But excuses were of no avail. Early in the day, the overseer brought the boy and his pantaloons and exhibited them to my father and was loud in his complaints. The brazen, whining boy was really proud of his wound. I do not know what my father said to them, for he took them into his office down by the grape-arbor; but that afternoon Tim was tied with a long trace to the big poplar tree. And I heard my father say that Tim must surely die. Die? What did that mean? Tim die? Dead! My father, a man, have the right to take my Tim’s life? No, no, that could not be. God would not stand for that. My mother had taught me to pray every night, and now in a quick impulse I rushed alone to the garret, secreted myself in a cuddy, knelt by an old black trunk, and prayed and wept; and I felt that God heard me and that my Tim was safe. Oh, what a relief! Then I went to the poplar tree. Tim looked into my eyes. He knew something was wrong. He gave me his paw. And I bumped his head. I whispered that he was safe; that I had prayed for him. I thought and still think that Tim’s eyes watered. We sat there under the poplar tree and watched the yellow leaves fall.

Presently I saw my father appear on the front porch. He had his shotgun under his arm, and came toward us. Child that I was, I thought he was going hunting and had come to get Tim. But when I saw him untie the trace and start to lead Tim, I understood. I screamed, I caught his trouser leg, I wept; he shook me off and had me taken into the house, screaming and kicking and yelling. Oh, I think those were the keenest pangs which I have ever endured. They put me on my play-counter, and offered me toys! I hoodwinked them. I behaved; and in a few minutes they let me go.

I stole up to my cuddy in the garret.

I knelt again by the old black trunk. They had gone back on Tim and therefore on me. But God would not go back on us. I wept and said every prayer that my mother had taught me. And I said this one of my own:

“Lord, save Tim. Don’t let pop make him die.”

Boom! the report of a gun rang across the woods. I shuddered. Had God, too, gone back on me? If so, why?

I went to the attic window and waited breathlessly. I stretched myself flat on the dusty floor, so that I could see and not be seen. After a little while I saw my father climb over the zig-zag fence, carrying the trace over his shoulders.

In the evening they found me stained with dusty tears, asleep on the attic floor. My mother kissed me and petted me and told me that I was her king. It did no good, for she had taught me futile prayers. She put me to bed, but I would not pray. I sobbed while she said the hollow words for me. Then I heard her tell my father that she feared that I was going to be ill.

“Pooh!” said my father, “a child’s sorrows are like a child’s joys, they soon pass away.”

He had a way of checking off the events of life with some false axiom. And soon they thought I was asleep; and I heard him tell my mother how he had taken the trace off the dog after they reached the woods, how Tim had followed him to the great boulder down in the hollow, how Tim had wagged his tail when he told him to look for squirrels in the trees, and then when Tim looked up for the game, he shot him behind the ear, and the dog rolled over in the cave under the boulder.

That was the first night of my life when I did not close my eyes.

Our old house had a large spare room for guests, but what I remember about it is, that my mother used to take me in there every morning when the windows caught the sun. She would draw me up in her lap and read poetry to me. Naturally, I did not understand much of it, but that made no difference, I loved it just the same; for it made my mother, who was not a pretty woman, very beautiful to me. She was an impulsive woman, hugging me one moment, and boxing my ears the next. But those hours in the sunshine when she used to read aloud to me in the spare room, they were sacred. There was nothing then except deep affection.

When she was a girl, I have heard my father say in after years, my mother was as care-free as a meadow-lark. He used to tell me how at house-parties where they did their courting, she would keep all the company in gay spirits and laughter. They married; and a baby girl was born to them. She was my little sister, Louise. She grew to be four years old and was a remarkable child, a bundle of natural mirth and strong individuality. Then she took black diphtheria, and died.

My mother withdrew into herself, she became sad and more sad as time went on; and during this sorrow, she conceived and bore me. Is it any wonder that I, a man, should at times weep like a girl?

Now I am back to where I left off about Tim’s death. It was after he was gone that my mother used to take me daily into the spare room and console me with poetry. Then one day the blinds were drawn close in my mother’s room. She had another of her terrible heart attacks. O God, how I have seen her suffer! She seemed to get much better, indeed quite well, and I grew happy again, and I can see myself climb out of my crib and scramble into bed between her and my father. And she said jokingly to my father:

“If I should die, who will be your wife?”

“I’ll be pop’s schwife!” I exclaimed, as a matter of course, and I can hear their hearty laughter to this day; and my mother drew me over on her and covered me with kisses; and I remember that my father remarked something about my being “a precocious curiosity.” He had a bad habit of speaking about me before my face, never crediting that I would cherish his mysterious remarks until I understood them. Mark me, all children do this.

Autumn went by; and winter came. We had an unusually heavy fall of snow for Virginia. Only a redbird and some occasional sparrows could be seen in the leafless poplar. I remember it was the week before Christmas, because I received my sled in advance so that I would go down to the duck pond and not disturb my mother, who was very sick again. That night I was kept down in the kitchen with Uncle Robert and Aunt Maria. Sandy has told me that he was there too. We were all huddled about the brick oven; and my childish intuition perceived a hush over the old servants. Of a sudden, we heard way off down the plantation road the jingle, jingle of bells, coming nearer and nearer.

“It am the sleigh comin’ with those town doctors;” said Uncle Robert, and he went out to meet it with his lantern. Even Aunt Maria, who was usually the bulwark of our household, was uneasy and troubled.

“I doan’t lak to see them touch my young Mistus!” she said, defiantly, as she held my hand.

Jingle! jingle! the sleigh was at the door! I broke away from her and rushed out in the snow to see the doctors who had come from Richmond. I remember how my childish imagination was roused by the sight of three men in soft hats and storm coats, carrying small valises, as they hastened up the porch steps to where my father stood, holding a lamp aloft to light their way. Aunt Maria came and caught me and whisked me off to bed. That was all that I knew until the next morning when I was awakened by a strange white nurse, who had been with us a few days. She said that my father had sent for me “to come and kiss my mamma good-bye.”

I went with her without realizing what I was doing. I heard one of the doctors say that he had seen my mother’s father die of the same kind of heart failure. Die? There was that word again. My mother die? No, no, that could not be. I ran out of the room without their knowing that my child’s faith in God, which she had tried to restore in me, was now actually restored. I climbed again to the garret and knelt by the black trunk and held up my little hands in prayer. This time I did not cry. I made up my mind that I must be brave on my father’s account, for when I left the sick-room, I saw that his hands covered his face; and he spoke not a word; and I went and took down his hands, and when he looked at me, I saw his eyes film with tears.

Oh, dear, I do not want to tell the rest. I have heard others say that the sight of my father, holding my hand, as we stood beside my mother’s snow-bordered grave, was as bleak a scene as they ever cared to witness, that we both looked so utterly forlorn, and that I looked as though I tried to take my mother’s place.

I know that I wanted to do so. I know that where he went, I went; where he slept, I slept. We went North for a while. We came back in the spring when the fields were being plowed.

My little sister, Louise, was four years old when she died, before I was born. I was four years old when my mother died. How often have I envied little Louise, for at that age I reached the culmination of my happiness. In all this world there is one truth: a motherless son is a friendless child.

As I grew up, my father and I became more and more companionable, though we were totally different. Up to a certain point, my father was one of the most lovable of men, generous, unpretentious, true to the memory of my mother. He had a unique faith in mankind. He assumed that because he liked a man, that man was honest in all respects. Naturally, he was imposed upon, because he could not separate his affections from his observation; and therefore lacked discrimination. In like manner, he assumed that if his son had good in him, that good would come out; and if he thought that a child were bad, his favorite axiom was that no man could save his brother’s soul, or be his brother’s keeper. In fine, my father lived his whole existence upon assumption, and he never discovered whether his assumptions were sound or false. He brought me up on the theory of an ideal conception of human nature, very beautiful in its faith, but unfortunately not practical. He had faith in my developing only the bright and best side of myself; and here is the point: he assumed that I did so! He was proud of me and put me upon a pedestal and gave me sympathy at a distance, with the result that I could not leap into his arms and tell him that it was not so, that my little life was not bright! And so throughout my entire childhood I was hungry for the little details of affection which a man does not know how to give. The fact is, I never had any young boyhood. Fate also robbed me forever of the grand schemes and the unconscious fun which a few playmates give a child. My father and his club friends who came up from Richmond were my playmates. They used to sit at table, and sip their claret after dinner; and I would sit with them, too, “always looking and listening,” as I overheard one of them describe me. Then they would walk out over the plantation; and I would walk with them, too, and hear the stories at which they laughed, many of which I used to ponder over in order to find out what was so funny in them. One especially I used to remember, that my father would tell whenever we walked through the old red gate in the woods. It was told of my name-sake, the famous Mr. William Wirt. He told how Mr. Wirt used to visit in the neighborhood, and how one day at the time when my grandfather had just had that gate hung, Mr. Wirt passed by and said:

“Ah, sir, anybody can hang a gate, but only men can propagate!”

Then they would laugh. I puzzled for years over that story.

My father had a tutor for me whom they called “Doctor.” The truth is, he was a pensioner on us with whom my father liked to converse. He did not teach me one iota of the usual textbook knowledge. He did not believe in machine-made learning. But it was a general education for me to go about in his company and browse here and there in our library. Actually, I have not read thirty books in my life all told; but that good man taught me that if a book is worth reading at all, it is worth reading slowly.

“What conceit!” he used to say, “for one to try to digest in a few hours what has taken another years to think out!”

He told me that it took him a year to read “The Newcomes.”

I have to thank him for one inestimable heritage, which laid the foundation of my religion. He taught me concerning the Omnipotence of Truth. In this lies all my faith. He taught me ‘to dare to stand alone, to dare to have an opinion of my own and to dare to make it known.’

“Beware though,” said he, “it is the part or mark of youthful vigor to discover that things are not altogether right in this unintelligible world; and youth sets about to mould things over to his own satisfaction, only to find that he has himself been cast in a mould.”

I think that he and my father, who dearly loved to moralize, used to sit and talk and smoke on our back porch for fourteen hours out of many a day, calling out occasional suggestions to the negroes as they worked in the garden. So I used often to leave them and go fishing in the canal. I used to catch chub with a pin hook. Oh, to watch again those old canal boats as they glided under me, as I sat upon the bridge; oh, to dream again that they were moving fairy lands, going up and down to realms, marvelous and weird, to which I might some day travel and enjoy their unlimited pleasures. That was my chief source of delight.

The day when I was to take one of them came sooner than I had hoped. My father took me on a visit down in Goochland, and I met little Susanne, she was twelve and I was thirteen. A flood of warm light seemed to fall upon me and to thaw out my boyish spirit. But I am not going to write about her any more. I can not stand it. She had my mother’s eyes, “wistful and mild.” My father was as pleased as Punch over our fondness for each other. Poor man! I thank God that he was spared the end of that long attachment. He died even before I lost Susanne. He rode off one day on a new stallion. I climbed on the zig-zag fence and watched him disappear down the plantation road. When he reached the creek, the stallion threw him against the rocks and broke his neck. Uncle Robert and Sandy and I brought him home.

Don’t pity me. Call me a mad dog, say that I am a peculiar idiot, say that I have been a fool and wasted my life; but don’t pity me! And if there is one thing more abhorrent to me than self-praise, it is self-pity. I am disgusted with myself, who might have amounted to some one. Then I would not have been lonely, physically lonely. And there is mental loneliness, more galling, more gnawing, than murky solitude.

The following blames no one except myself:

“I felt myself pressed onward by an internal force, which I could not resist.—Let us look into this a little, and see whether the direction you gave to your life has not had for its object to make this force irresistible.”

That may be. But I prefer to know what I actually am, than to be proud and contented in a cul-de-sac. Tumble-bugs roll from rut to rut, clinging to their eggs, never knowing that they are tumble-bugs. I would rather be unhappy than be the man with illusions, snug in his own pettiness. If contentment comes only from rolling in a rut, then I choose discontent.

“Come, review your days and your years, call them to account! Tell us how much time you have allowed to be stolen from you by a creditor, by a mistress, by a patron, by a client.” Which of us can read those lines without blushing?

This night is my birth night. Nine and twenty years ago, at eleven o’clock, when the July sun had sunk out of the valley of the James, when the cattle were at rest, and the whippoorwills uttered forth their conscience-stricken notes, “Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!” the moon had arisen and shone upon the purple bloom of the fox-grapes, hidden above the brook, then a deep joy came over my mother and she was delivered of me. It must have been the blessed, unspeakable, sacred joy of labour, which men never know. My father told me once that she wept in the midst of her joy—that is how I know.

XIII

Suffering, suffering. Oh, mystery of pain! Then surcease from pain. And pain again. Oh, mystery of death, the sure relief. And yet I can not bring myself to do that.

“You must have sleep at any cost,” my doctor says, “or the mind will give.”

Courage! courage! Bring in the pitcher and the bowl, Sandy; I need more courage. My doctor is right. The mind is the whole thing. The memory and the imagination can conjure up the few supreme moments of my buried life when she sat beside me and rested over me, looking down into my eyes, as we were stretched at full length beneath the crab-tree blossoms. There is her father’s house upon the hill, a white house with the old balcony porch; there is the row of servants’ quarters, whitewashed in the sunshine, and the little negro children playing under the swaying hollyhocks—and here am I beside her, and she by my side. She wears a blue sun-bonnet, turned back, and a low collar, revealing her soft, delicate neck. Gently she tosses my hair, and smooths my eyebrows with her sensitive fingers. Ah me, my arms yearn forth, and I let my head fall in her lap, and almost—almost fall asleep.

“Dearest boy,” she whispers, her lips moistening my ear, and I catch the rare aroma of her hair, “my boy, my boy, the ecstasy ahead of us when I shall hold you close, so close! See the new moon in the day sky, dear? I think of a time when she will shine upon us two together, covering us with silvered light until I might just see you dimly enough to stroke your face. Twelve more moons and the thirteenth we will pledge together, and lie here under our crab-apple tree, you and I alone, you and I and the wind—oh, I mustn’t think of it. Sometimes it makes me almost wild.”

Then came the rapids and the whirlpools in the gulf of my development. And I sank. When I came up again, I had lost her.

“I can not stand this any longer, Sandy. My thoughts are running away with me. Let us go for a walk. You must always stay with me, Sandy, won’t you? I will leave all my money to you.”

“Maarstar, you hab no right to say such things to me. You knows I never did stay wid you for no money. You knows I doan’t reckon ’bout money. I only wants to see you get well, maarstar.”

“What is the use of trying to get well, Sandy, when Miss Susanne is gone?”

“She not gone, maarstar, no, ’deed, she not gone. Miss Susan’s just a-waitin’ and a-waitin’, an’ you’ll find Miss Susan over yonder, maarstar, you see if you doan’t, and then you hab to say to yerself, Sandy was right all the time. The Bible says so, maarstar, the Bible says so.”

XIV

Yes, this is a delightful toy-shop. Now we are going by a whole row of Noah’s Arks. I stop to raise the lid on one of them, and there are all the animals. Little Frances, who is holding my hand, notices particularly the giraffe, because he has such a long, spotted neck, and can look down upon the other animals with disdain. I inform her that the giraffe is the only animal that has never been heard to utter a sound.

“Isn’t-it-terrible!” says she, in one breath.

“No,” I said, “it must be blissful.”

Frances does not comprehend her cynical father; and so we move along. She says that her mother told her to tell me that we could take plenty of time to look at the toys, as mother had to be fitted for two gowns.

Sam declares that he wishes I would buy him that big boat over yonder. And he tugs me off by the other hand to examine it, but on the way our attention is diverted by a remarkable looking doll which Frances has discovered. Sam forgets his boat and decides to stand and stare at the doll. I confess this doll is attractive, for she seems to be precisely what she pretends to be. So I buy her and give her to Frances, and then the three of us make more headway. We get as far as the pop-gun counter. I never did like pop-guns. They are too symbolical. But Sam pulls me down to him and whispers:

“Dada, pease get me one. I need it.”

His little fat fingers stroke my face and persuade me in spite of myself. How often does he remind me of his mother! He has the same helpless, beseeching manner with which Susanne has always managed to get what she wanted.

Then we succeeded nicely. We got past the sleds and the hobby-horses and the moolley-cows and the dreary donkeys. I never knew how we did it. But Sam threw out an anchor when we reached the marbles. Those huge crystals and beautiful agates were too much for him.

“Dada, pease buy me some.”

“How many, my son?”

“All’s you can.”

“Well, give us a boxful;” I said to the indifferent clerk. Imagine being indifferent in a toy store, surrounded by little children. Here is certainly the one place where I would search for the Fountain of Eternal Youth. But now it is time to meet mother, and we picked up the doll and the pop-gun, and scurried off through the other shoppers. My two children snuggled close to me.

The door opened and in walked old Sandy, carrying a fresh pitcher of sangaree. I was startled into my senses.

“You drove them away, Sandy.”

“What I done do, maarstar?”

“You drove them away. I was out shopping with Miss Susan and the children.”

Sandy thinks that my brain is “addled,” as he calls it, and so he makes no further answer.

Children! My children! The dream children whom poor Charles Lamb saw. And how many other lonely folk have seen them?

Look at that shelf of books there; see that volume bound in limp leather? That was my first book. You did not know that I was a writer, did you, Sandy? Yes, but I was. And when I wrote that book I thought that I knew more than I did. It is about young love and interfering parents and selfish relatives and romantic folk who went astray. It is crude, very crude; but I love the book, for it was my first-born. I thought of recasting it, and then I found that one can not mangle his own child.

The volume next to it, that one in stiff boards, I am more proud, perhaps, of that one. I tried hard to tell the truth as I saw the truth in it, even though I knew that readers do not really want the truth. We live our life under a vast veil of mystery, humbug and fear. And so I wanted to tell young boys and growing girls why they felt strange feelings and had new thoughts as they gradually became men and women. I wanted them to know how simple, natural and beautiful the whole realm of being is; and above all, that their fresh, confused feelings and glowing thoughts are not abnormal, nothing to be ashamed of, perfectly healthy and vigorous, if only their parents would tell them so.

And as to humbug, I tried to show silly women and foolish men how unhappy and strained they make their lives by assuming emotions which they think they possess, and by expressing thoughts which mean nothing, because they have never thought them out. How easy this world would be if we could all of us simply be ourselves, as a dachshund is only a dog, a donkey a donkey, and a cat a cat. Then there would be no imitations, no misunderstandings, no mistakes, no subtle motives, no boring waste of time.

Lastly, I attempted to handle the broad, ever-present cloud of fear. Why do we fear to be frank? Why are we afraid to say things which all of us think and know? We even fear death, though each one has to realize deeply that we are every one of us dying men. With this homily and more too, I tried to help mankind in that second volume in stiff boards. And when it was finished and printed, I grasped the fact that the whole book was trite; that those same things had been said and resaid and said again from time out of mind, doing no good, as long as men are men, and women are women.

Bring me that book with the worn, sheepskin covers, Sandy. Ah, how I love this recent child, who longed to make people do their own thinking and their own believing by giving them bits of our vast heritage of philosophy which only a few have the time or the inclination to read. But readers will not endure moralizing, said my tactful self. Therefore, give them bits of philosophy in action! Alas, I know that it, too, is abortive.

What! I reach out now, and my dear, dear books are gone! My gold turned to crumpling, dead leaves. They, too, were dream children, were they? Children of my mind, as the others might have been children of my body. Farewell, little Frances and Samuel, concrete happiness that never was. Farewell, my books, visions of undone good.

XV

There is a mirror over the mantel-piece in my study. For months I have tried not to look in mirrors, except when I have finished dressing, and then only to see if I am normally presentable. But this night the room grew chilly past midnight, and I arose and went to hold open my dressing gown before the red logs in the grate. Sandy went to bed over an hour ago, and I did not care to rouse him to build a huge fire.

As I was standing there, I leaned forward absent-mindedly on the mantel-piece and placed my head in the palms of my hands in such close proximity to the mirror that the fleshly features and the illusory features touched. I gazed upon my face intently.

The sight stirred the most profound depths within me, not for sorrow, not for pity, not for age, not for the changes, but the realization that it was I. Actually I! I, as I am. Look at these eyes, even they alone tell the story, a tale of trying to be what I was not to be; of trying to be good and pure and sinless, of wishing for a little success as other men succeed; of wanting a mate. My mate! to be by my side, she who could have steadied my passion, and have grown old as I grew old, she who could have kept me from all these wretched acts and thoughts; and then—then I lost! I slipped; I fell. And this face shows it. These eyes show it. They see failure, utter, bleak, barren failure. The Great Gambler gives us the dice to throw once, and only once. We lose or we win. I lost.

Ah God, must I once more be wakeful with hot tears? I think of the men and the women I know—of you—of you; how did the dice come up for you? What have the figures read?

As I am gazing thus in the mirror, my eyes wander to the other part of the reflection which shows the darkness of the opposite end of the room, for the lamp is beginning to flicker. Out of that darkness comes a boyish figure, and this new sight makes my eyes nearly start from their sockets.

But is he a new figure?

He advances a step out of the darkness. He is young and supple, about seventeen. I still have my eyes on him in the mirror. This moment he caught my glance! He steps nearer, keeping my eye and trying to laugh, and yet, oh, how wistful that look really is.

“Who the devil are you?” I asked, without turning from the mirror and half closing my eyes in an effort to search his countenance.

“Oh, I reckon you know who I am;” he said flippantly, with a Southern accent.

“Sit down, won’t you?” I said, without turning around to greet him. And then with impudence he sits himself down in the very chair which I had recently vacated. I still retain my position and watch him in the mirror.

Looking up at me, he began again:

“No one would think, from the manner in which you recognized me, that we are as closely related as father and son.”

“It’s a lie,” I answered, calmly, “why do you accuse me with a lie?”

“Oh, don’t excite yourself,” he came back, “I am the guilty party. I am the father and you are the son. Certainly you have often heard that the boy is father to the man?”

“Aye, and the child, sire to the boy.”

“Look at yourself. You are seeing you that are, while I am you that used to be. I reckon you know me now.”

I stared again at my misbegotten self in the mirror, the self that is, and I thought upon what had just been uttered by the self that was. A weird truth came to me, and I spoke this thought aloud:

“You have spoken correctly, for if the boy is father to the man, he may beget a legitimate self or an illegitimate self. You, damn you, you did not create the self that might have been, but begot me, a bastard self.”

“Well,” he said defiantly, “I admit it. What then?”

“Why did you do so—why did you ruin your future—why did you wish me to be a failure?”

“Why was I weak?—that is what you mean. Well, my son, I can not tell you. It was in me and it had to come out. Perhaps my ancestors were to blame; perhaps I alone was to blame. They say we are masters of our fate. I doubt it. Surely no more sensitive, passionate youth longed as actually as I did to make you noble and true and generous. Was there ever a grander wreck? Look at yourself. Gaze into the diorama of your mind, and what do you see?”

I looked and saw the dismal pomp unroll before my mental eyes. And I saw a mass of indecision.

“Behold! there come the Ghosts of Past Intentions. I was going to marry the love of my life—that is the saddest ghost of all. I intended to be industrious and win fame for her—and see what I have done—nothing—and my life is sailing away, growing dimmer and dimmer, until now my worthy craft is a weather-beaten derelict even before my prime. This ghost gets up with me in the morning, sits with me at meals, reads every book I hold in my hand, goes on all my walks, sips each glass of my sangaree, retires to bed with me at night. This ghost is Insomnia Incarnate.

“Here comes another procession—the Imps of Lost Opportunities. Why was I not able to grasp them? The next company of players tell the tale. They are the ever-present giants, tyrants—Weak Resolutions—weak, weak, weak—back to the word you spoke!”

But lo, as I spoke, the lad took his leave. He could stand the arraignment no longer, and hot tears welled his eyes.

“You were too hard on him,” a voice within me cried, “he did not mean to do what he did. It was not to his interest to ruin you. Do you not recall those lines he read in adolescence, and predicted that each syllable would come true of himself. He has not lied. He knew.”

“What were the lines?” I asked.

“Here they are: