Part 3 (2/2)

April 25th.

Would you like to know where I am, and how I am doing all these things?

I am in a lodging-house. I have one of three hall rooms in a kind of top half-story. There is room for me to take four steps; so it is that I ”walk up and down” when I am excited. I have tried--I have not kept count of how many places--and this is the quietest. The landlady's husband has a carpenter shop down-stairs, but he is always drunk and doesn't work; it has also been providentially arranged that the daughter, who sings, is sick for some time. Next door to me there is a man who plays the 'cello in a dance hall until I know not what hour of the night. He keeps his 'cello at the dance hall. Next to him is a pale woman who sits and sews all day and waits for her drunken husband to come home. In front there is some kind of foolish girl who leaves her door open in the hope that I'll look in at her, and a couple of inoffensive people not worth describing.

I get up--I never know the time in the morning; and sometimes I lie without moving for hours--thinking--thinking. Or sometimes I go out and roam around the streets; or sit perfectly motionless, gazing at the wall. When it will not come, I make it. I breakfast on bread and milk, and I eat bread and milk at all hours of the day when I am hungry. For dinner I cook a piece of meat on a little oil-stove, and for supper I eat bread and milk. The rest of the time I am sitting on the floor by the window, writing; or perhaps kneeling by the bed with my head buried in my arms, and thinking until the room reels. When I am not doing that I wander around like a lost soul; I can not think of anything else.--Sometimes when I am tired and must rest, I force myself to sit down and write some of this.

I have just forty dollars now. It costs me three dollars a week, not including paper and typewriting. Thus I have ten or twelve weeks in which to finish The Captive--that many and no more.

If I am not finished by that time it will kill me; to try to work and earn money in the state that I am in just at present would turn me into a maniac--I should kill some one, I know.

I am quivering with nervous tension--every faculty strained to breaking; the buzz of a fly is a roar to me. I build up these towering castles of emotion in my soul, castles that s.h.i.+mmer in the sunlight:

Banners yellow, glorious, golden!

And then something happens, and they fall upon me with the weight of mountains.

Ten weeks! And yet it is not that which goads me most.

What goads me most is that I am a captive in a dungeon, and am fighting for the life of my soul.

I shall win, I do not fear--the fountains of my being will not fail me. I saw my soul a second time to-day; it was no longer the bubble, blown large, palpitating. It was a bird resting upon a bough. The bough was tossed and flung about by a tempest; and a chasm yawned below; but the bough held, and the bird was master of its wings, and sang.

The name of the bough was Faith.

April 27th.

I have read a great deal of historical romance, and a great deal of local color fiction, and a great deal of original character-drawing--and I have wished to get away from these things.

There is no local color, and no character-drawing, in The Captive. You do not know the name of the hero; you do not know how old he is, or of what rank he is, at what period or in what land he lives. He is described but once. He is ”A Man.”

My philosophy is a philosophy of will. All virtue that I know is conditioned upon freedom. The object of all thinking and doing, as I see it, is to set men free.

There is the tyranny of kings--the tyranny of force; there is the tyranny of priests--the tyranny of ignorance; there is the tyranny of society--the tyranny of selfishness and indolence; and above all, and including all, and causing all--there is the tyranny of self--the tyranny of sin, the tyranny of the body. So it is that I see the world.

So it is that I see history; I can see nothing else in history. The tyranny of kings and n.o.bles, the tyranny of the ma.s.s and the inquisition, the tyranny of battle and murder and crime--how was a man to live in those ages?

How is a man to live in _this_ age? The tyranny of kings and of priests is gone, and from the tyranny of industrialism the individual can escape. But the lightning--is not that an inquisition? And if it comes after you, will it not find out all your secrets? And the tyranny of hurricane and s.h.i.+pwreck, of accident, disease, and death? Any tyranny is all tyranny, I say; and the existence of tyranny is its presence.

It is conceivable that some day the sovereign mind may shake off its shackles, and the tyranny of matter be at an end. But that day is not yet; and meanwhile, the thing existing, how shall a man be free? That has been the matter of my deepest brooding.

This much I have learned:

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