Part 16

For that infernal boy had drawn from me the truth: I really had got out of life what I most wanted. I had wanted to make the Biography: and I had made it, in just the way which seemed good to me. To do that had been, no doubt, my play and my diversion, in the corridors where men must find diversion, whether in trifling with bank notes or women, whether in clutching at straws or prayer-books, or else go mad: and my enlinked deductions held as far as the chain stretched. But one link more was needed. For it seemed to me, too, that I had somehow fulfilled, without unduly shirking, an obligation which had been laid upon me to make the Biography. I was not, heaven knew, claiming for myself any heavenly inspiration or even any heavenly countenance. Rather, it seemed to me that the ability and the body and the life which transiently were at my disposal had been really used: with these lent implements which were not ever properly speaking mine, and which presently would be taken away from me, I had made something which was actually mine. That something was the Biography....

§ 100

And still,--with all the bright day gone, and with the deepest gloom of midnight also an affair of the past,--still, I seem not quite to have found that final link, not wholly to have completed my epilogue. Some word, as yet unthought of, stays needed to round off all....

Here then, upon this shelf, in these brown volumes which make up the Biography, I can lay hand and eye upon just what precisely my life has amounted to: the upshot of my existence is here before me, a tangible and visible and entirely complete summing up, within humiliatingly few inches. And yet, as I consider these inadequate brown volumes, I suspect that the word I am looking for is "gratitude." It most certainly is not "pride": and, as I hastily admit, nobody else is called on to share in my suspicion.

But I at least, who have found human living and this world not wholly admirable, and who have here and there made formal admission of the fact, feel that in honor one ought to acknowledge all courtesies too. With life, then, I, upon the whole, have no personal quarrel: she has mauled, scratched and banged, she has in all ways damaged me: but she has permitted me to do that which I most wanted. So that I must be, I suppose, grateful.

--With which decision I very lightly pass my finger-tips across these fifteen book-backs; and touch in this small gesture, so didactically small, the whole of that to which, for good or ill, I have amounted. And thereafter (with a continuing sense of wholesome allegory) I go quietly to bed.

_Dumbarton Grange, 30 April, 1924._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 14: Nothing is known of him.]

[Footnote 15: Dr. Pattee is stated to have lectured professionally, at Pennsylvania State College, upon what patriotism described as American literature. He is known to have edited Shakespeare's _Macbeth_, and to have contributed to The American Mercury.]

[Footnote 16: Connected with Yale University.]

[Footnote 17: An English writer of some promise under the latter years of Victoria's reign.]

[Footnote 18: See note on Judge Leonard Doughty, page 288.]

EXPLICIT

Transcribers note: "Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_)."