This was the face my fancy brought to go with me into every June garden
of familiar surprises. All of which meant that I was a poor thing of
clay and many dolors, who still perversely made himself believe that
somewhere between him and God was the one woman, breathing and
conscious, perhaps even longing. More plainly, it meant that I was a man
whose gift for self-fooling promised ably to survive his hair.
Gravitation would presently pull down my shoulders, my face would flaunt
"the wrinkled spoils of age", my voice would waver ominously, and I
should forfeit the dignities befitting even this decay by still playing
childish games of belief with some foolish dog. I would be a village
"character" of the sort that is justly said to "dodder." And the
judicious would shun observation by me, or, if it befell them, would
affect an intense preoccupation lest I halt and dodder to them of a past
unromantically barren.
There were moments in which I made no doubt of all this. But I fought
them off as foolishly as did Jim his own intervals of clear seeing.
Sometimes in a half doze he breathes a long, almost human sigh of
perfect and despairing comprehension, as if the whole dead weight of his
race's history flashed upon him; as if the woful failure of his species
to achieve anything worth while, and the daily futilities of himself as
an individual dog were suddenly revealed.
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