I’ve tried to smother it

a bit sometimes–-”

“Have you?” I laughed.

“`Tried to,’ I said, because I’ve always been afraid of its

getting out too much and bustin’ my life all to pieces: —something

lonely and untamed and sort of outcast from cities and money and all

the thick suffocating civilization of to-day; and I’ve only saved

myself by getting off into wildernesses and free places where I could

give it a breathin’ chance without running the risk of being locked up

as a crazy man.” He laughed as he said it, but his heart was in the

words. “You know all that; haven’t I told you often enough? It’s not a

morbid egoism, or what their precious academic books so stupidly call

`degenerate,’ for in me it’s damned vital and terrific, and moves

always to action. It’s made me an alien and—and–-”

“Something far stronger than the Call of the Wild, isn’t it?”

He fairly snorted. “Sure as we’re both alive here sittin’ on this

sooty London grass,” he cried. “This Call of the Wild they prate about

is just the call a fellow hears to go on `the bust’ when he’s had too

much town and’s got bored—a call to a little bit of licence and

excess to safety-valve him down. What I feel,” his voice turned grave

and quiet again, “is quite a different affair. It’s the call of real

hunger—the call of food. They want to let off steam, but I want to

take in stuff to prevent—starvation.” He whispered the word, putting

his lips close to my face.

A pause fell between us, which I was the first to break.

“This is not your century! That’s what you really mean,” I

suggested patiently.

“Not my century!” he caught me up, flinging handfuls of faded

grass in the air between us and watching it fall; “why, it’s not even

my world! And I loathe, loathe the spirit of to-day with its

cheapjack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its

murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity, without enough real

sense of beauty left to see that a daisy is nearer heaven than an

airship–-”

“Especially when the airship falls,” I laughed. “Steady, steady,

old boy; don’t spoil your righteous case by overstatement.”

“Well, well, you know what I mean,” he laughed with me, though his

face at once turned earnest again, “and all that, and all that, and

all that… . And so this savagery that has burned in me all these

years unexplained, these Russian strangers made clear. I can’t tell

you how because I don’t know myself. The father did it—his proximity,

his silence stuffed with sympathy, his great vital personality

unclipped by contact with these little folk who left him alone. His

presence alone made me long for the earth and Nature. He seemed a

living part of it all. He was magnificent and enormous, but the devil

take me if I know how.”

“He said nothing—that referred to it directly?”

“Nothing but what I’ve told you,—blundering awkwardly with those

few modern words. But he had it in him a thousand to my one. He made

me feel I was right and natural, untrue to myself to suppress it and a

coward to fear it. The speech-centre in the brain, you know, is anyhow

a comparatively recent thing in evolution. They say that–-”

“It wasn’t his century either,” I checked him again.

“No, and he didn’t pretend it was, as I’ve tried to,” he cried,

sitting bolt upright beside me. “The fellow was genuine, never

dreamed of compromise. D’ye see what I mean? Only somehow he’d found

out where his world and century were, and was off to take possession.

And that’s what caught me. I felt it by some instinct in me stronger

than all else; only we couldn’t talk about it definitely

because—because—I hardly know how to put it—for the same reason,”

he added suddenly, “that I can’t talk about it to you now! There are

no words… . What we both sought was a state that passed away

before words came into use, and is therefore beyond intelligible

description. No one spoke to them on the ship for the same reason, I

felt sure, that no one spoke to them in the whole world—because no

one could manage even the alphabet of their language.