THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND

Jasper Ewold was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one’s own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer express them with the simple directness of our ancestors.  He kept a diary with what he called a perfect regularity of intermittency.  A week might pass without his writing a single word, and again he might indulge freely for a dozen nights running.  He wrote as much or as little as he pleased.  He wrote when he had something to tell and when he was in the mood to tell it.

“It is facing yourself in your own ink,” he said.  “It is confessing that you are an egoist and providing an antidote for your egoism.  Firstly, you will never be bored by your own past if you can appreciate your errors and inconsistencies.  Secondly, you will never be tempted to bore others with your past as long as you wish to pose as a wise man.”

He must have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to form a powerful current.

On the evening that Jack took to the trail again, Jasper Ewold had a number of thick notebooks out of the box in the library which he always kept locked, and placed them on the living-room table beside his easy chair, in which he settled himself.  Mary was sewing while he pored over his life in review as written by his own hand.  Her knowledge of the secrets of that chronicle from wandering student days to desert exile was limited to glimpses of the close lines of fine-written pages across the breadth of the circle of the lamp’s reflection.  He surrounded his diary with a line of mystery which she never attempted to cross.  On occasions he would read to her certain portions which struck his recollection happily; but these were invariably limited to his impressions of some city or some work of art that he was seeing for the first time in the geniality of the unadulterated joy of living in what she guessed was the period of youth before she was born; and never did they throw any light on his story except that of his views as a traveller and a personality.  But he did not break out into a single quotation to-night.  It seemed as if he were following the thread of some reference from year to year; for he ran his fingers through the leaves of certain parts hastily and became studiously intense at other parts as he gloomily pondered over them.

Neither she nor her father had mentioned Jack since the scene by the hedge.  This was entirely in keeping with custom.  It seemed a matter of instinct with both that they never talked to each other of him.  Yet she was conscious that he had been in her father’s mind all through the evening meal, and she was equally certain that her father realized that he was in her mind.