musement. We live for something--do not
merely live. The wage-slave lives for the evening's liberty, the
business man for his wealth, the preacher for his church. I used to live
for my school. Then a moment like the one I was living through arrives.
Nature strips down our pretences with a relentless finger, and we stand,
bare of disguises, as helpless failures. We have lost the childlike
power of living without conscious aims. Sometimes, when the aims have
faded already in the gathering dusk, we still go on by the momentum
acquired. Inertia carries us over the dead points--till a cog breaks
somewhere, and our whole machinery of life comes to with a jar. If no
such awakening supervenes, since we never live in the present, we
are always looking forward to what never comes; and so life slips by,
unlived.

If my child was taken from me, it meant that my future was made
meaningless. I felt that I might just as well lie down and die.

There was injustice in this, I know I was reasoning, as it were, in a
phantom world. Actualities, outlooks, retrospections--my view of them
had been jarred and distorted by an unexpected, stunning blow. For that
it did not really matter how things actually were up north. I had never
yet faced such possibilities; they opened up like an abyss which I had
skirted in the dark, unknowingly. True, my wife was something like a
child to me. I was old enough to be her father, older even in mind than
in actual years. But she, too, by marrying an aging man, had limited her
own development, as it were, by mine. Nor was she I, after all. My child
was. The outlook without her was night. Such a life was not to be lived.

There was the lash of a scourge in these thoughts, so that I became
nervous, impatient, and unjust--even to the horses. Peter stumbled, and
I came near punishing him with my whip. But I caught myself just before
I yielded to the impulse. I was doing exactly what I should not do. If
Peter stumbled, it was more my own fault than his. I should have
watched the road more carefully instead of giving in to the trend of my
thoughts. A stumble every five minutes, and over a drive of forty-five
miles: that might mean a delay of half an hour--it might mean the
difference between "in time" and "too late." I did not know what waited
at the other end of the road. It was my business to find out, not to
indulge in mere surmises and forebodings.

So, with an effort, I forced my attention to revert to the t