I can remember how I used to feel there, how beautiful
everything about me was, and what life and power and freedom I felt in
myself. When the window opens I know exactly how it would feel to be out
there. But that garden is closed to me. How is it, I ask myself, that
everything can be so different with me when nothing here has changed?
I am in my own house, in my own study, in the midst of all these quiet
streets where my friends live. They are all safe and at peace with
themselves. But I am never at peace. I feel always on the edge of danger
and change.
I keep remembering locoed horses I used to see on the range when I was
a boy. They changed like that. We used to catch them and put them up in
the corral, and they developed great cunning. They would pretend to eat
their oats like the other horses, but we knew they were always scheming
to get back at the loco.
It seems that a man is meant to live only one life in this world. When
he tries to live a second, he develops another nature. I feel as if
a second man had been grafted into me. At first he seemed only a
pleasure-loving simpleton, of whose company I was rather ashamed, and
whom I used to hide under my coat when I walked the Embankment, in
London. But now he is strong and sullen, and he is fighting for his
life at the cost of mine. That is his one activity: to grow strong. No
creature ever wanted so much to live. Eventually, I suppose, he will
absorb me altogether. Believe me, you will hate me then.
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