第33章

"Fr'm Ralph,"he replied,"says I wrote it.Can't remember...."After I had got him to bed,--a service I had learned to perform with more or less proficiency,--I sat down to consider the events of the evening,to attempt to get a proportional view.The intensity of my disgust was not hypocritical as I gazed through the open door into the bedroom and recalled the times when I,too,had been in that condition.Tom Peters drunk,and sleeping it off,was deplorable,without doubt;but Hugh Paret drunk was detestable,and had no excuse whatever.Nor did I mean by this to set myself on a higher ethical plane,for I felt nothing but despair and humility.In my state of clairvoyance I perceived that he was a better man,than I,and that his lapses proceeded from a love of liquor and the transcendent sense of good-fellowship that liquor brings.

VII.

The crisis through which I passed at Cambridge,inaugurated by the events I have just related,I find very difficult to portray.It was a religious crisis,of course,and my most pathetic memory concerning it is of the vain attempts to connect my yearnings and discontents with the theology I had been taught;I began in secret to read my Bible,yet nothing I hit upon seemed to point a way out of my present predicament,to give any definite clew to the solution of my life.I was not mature enough to reflect that orthodoxy was a Sunday religion unrelated to a world whose wheels were turned by the motives of self-interest;that it consisted of ideals not deemed practical,since no attempt was made to put them into practice in the only logical manner,--by reorganizing civilization to conform with them.The implication was that the Christ who had preached these ideals was not practical....There were undoubtedly men in the faculty of the University who might have helped me had I known of them;who might have given me,even at that time,a clew to the modern,logical explanation of the Bible as an immortal record of the thoughts and acts of men who had sought to do just what I was seeking to do,--connect the religious impulse to life and make it fruitful in life:an explanation,by the way,a thousand-fold more spiritual than the old.But I was hopelessly entangled in the meshes of the mystic,the miraculous and supernatural.If I had analyzed my yearnings,I might have realized that I wanted to renounce the life I had been leading,not because it was sinful,but because it was aimless.I had not learned that the Greek word for sin is "a missing of the mark."Just aimlessness!I had been stirred with the desire to perform some service for which the world would be grateful:to write great literature,perchance.But it had never been suggested to me that such swellings of the soul are religious,that religion is that kind of feeling,of motive power that drives the writer and the scientist,the statesman and the sculptor as well as the priest and the Prophet to serve mankind for the joy of serving:that religion is creative,or it is nothing:not mechanical,not a force imposed from without,but a driving power within.

The "religion"I had learned was salvation from sin by miracle:sin a deliberate rebellion,not a pathetic missing of the mark of life;useful service of man,not the wandering of untutored souls who had not been shown the way.I felt religious.I wanted to go to church,I wanted to maintain,when it was on me,that exaltation I dimly felt as communion with a higher power,with God,and which also was identical with my desire to write,to create....

I bought books,sets of Wordsworth and Keats,of Milton and Shelley and Shakespeare,and hid them away in my bureau drawers lest Tom and my friends should see them.These too I read secretly,making excuses for not joining in the usual amusements.Once I walked to Mrs.Bolton's and inquired rather shamefacedly for Hermann Krebs,only to be informed that he had gone out....There were lapses,of course,when I went off on the old excursions,--for the most part the usual undergraduate follies,though some were of a more serious nature;on these I do not care to dwell.Sex was still a mystery....Always I awoke afterwards to bitter self-hatred and despair....But my work in English improved,and Iearned the commendation and friendship of Mr.Cheyne.With a wisdom for which I was grateful he was careful not to give much sign of it in classes,but the fact that he was "getting soft on me"was evident enough to be regarded with suspicion.Indeed the state into which I had fallen became a matter of increasing concern to my companions,who tried every means from ridicule to sympathy,to discover its cause and shake me out of it.The theory most accepted was that I was in love.

"Come on now,Hughie--tell me who she is.I won't give you away,"Tom would beg.Once or twice,indeed,I had imagined I was in love with the sisters of Boston classmates whose dances I attended;to these parties Tom,not having overcome his diffidence in respect to what he called "social life,"never could be induced to go.