My Life. Flynt Josiah
sensation." The other man laughed, and thought no more about it. A week later Flynt came to him with an official document; he had been appointed a private detective. He was set on the track of a famous criminal (whom, as it happened, he had known as a tramp); he made his plans, worked them out successfully, and the criminal was caught. To have done it was enough: he had had the sensation; he had no need, at that moment, to do any more work as a detective. Is there not, in this curiosity in action, this game mastered and then cast aside, a wonderful promptness, sureness, a moral quality which is itself success in life?
To desire so much, and what is so human; to make one's life out of the very fact of living it as one chooses; to create a unique personal satisfaction out of discontent and curiosity; to be so much oneself in learning so much from other people: is not this, in its way, an ideal, and has not this man achieved it? He had the soul and the feet of a vagabond. He cared passionately for men and women, where they are most vividly themselves, because they are no longer a part of society. He wandered across much of the earth, but he did not care for the beauty or strangeness of what he saw, only for the people. Writing to me once from Samarcand, he said: "I have seen the tomb of the Prophet Daniel; I have seen the tomb of Tamerlane." But Tamerlane was nothing to him, the Prophet Daniel was nothing to him. He mentioned them only because they would interest me. He was trying to puzzle out and piece together the psychology of the Persian beggar whom he had left at the corner of the way.
Arthur Symons.
FOREWORD
This book explains itself in most ways, I hope, and a prefatory portico almost seems superfluous. In general, such addenda are distasteful to me; they look like an apology for what the author has to offer later on. No portico would be attached to the edifice I have now constructed were it not that there are two points I want to make clear and have failed to do so sufficiently to my satisfaction in the narrative proper.
First, it is fair to state at the outset that an autobiography coming from a man under forty is, to say the least, an unconventional performance which requires some explanation. I believe it was no less a genius than Goethe, however, who hazarded the remark that what a man is going to do that's worth while he does before thirty. Goethe's own life gives the lie to the statement, but there is a kernel of truth in its suggestiveness. In my case there happens to be much more than a mere kernel of truth in the remark. What I am going to do as a passionate explorer of Die Ferne—the ever-disappearing Beyond—has been done for all time, so far as the Under World is concerned. The game is over and the dealer retires. My dead Self I herewith put aside, and begin afresh with a new world. The old Self died hard. I can hear its bones rattling yet. But there came a time when it had to go, and now that I know that it is really and truly gone, that to-morrow morning, for instance, to find peace and contentment for the day it will not be necessary for me to take up my staff and go nervously through the same antics and searchings as of old, a sweet satisfaction steals over me and I am glad to be alive. This book puts a finish for the present, at any rate, on all that I have heretofore written about the Under World, and sums up what I won and lost during my wanderings.
The second point to be cleared up I will put interrogatively—Was it worth while, after living the life, finishing with it, and passing on to pastures new and green, to tell the story? Benvenuto Cellini, that cheerful romancer, declares that a man, on reaching forty, if he has done anything of value and importance, is justified in putting his exploits down in writing, that he is morally bound to do so indeed if he would hold up his head among his fellows. For nearly forty years I chased the Beyond—that misty and slippery sorceress, ever beckoning onward to the wanderer, yet never satisfying, never showing herself in her true deceitful colors, until after long years of acquaintance. The chase is made by many travelers of the Upper World, hypnotized as I was, but by me perforce in that strange Under World from which so many explorers never return. This, it seems to me, is worth telling about. I have made the story as simple and direct as possible. May he who reads it, if perchance the sorceress is tempting him, too, hold fast to a better ideal, although his life be narrow and his task to fulfill a tiresome routine.
MY LIFE
CHAPTER I
EARLIEST REMINISCENCES
My old nurse once told me that I came into this world with a "cowl," which had to be snatched off quickly, else I should have laid there to be a prophet. Why a state of blindness at one's birth should premise extraordinary vision, spiritual or otherwise, later on, is not clear. No such vision has ever been vouchsafed to me; on the contrary, as my story will reveal, that early blindness continued in one form or another all through my search for Die Ferne.
My very earliest remembrance is a runaway trip, culminating in the village lockup. Although my mother declares that I was at least five years old when this happened, I have always believed that I was nearer four; at any rate, I remember that I wore dresses. The circumstances of the truancy and imprisonment were as follows: My parents were in the neighboring city for the day, and I had been left at home with the nurse. She had punished me pretty severely for some slight offense, and had then gone to the lake for water, leaving me in a lane in front of the house, very much disquieted. A sudden impulse to run took hold of me—anywhere, it did not matter, so long as the nurse could not find me.[Pg 3]
[Pg 4] So off I started with a rush for the main street of the village, my little white panties dangling along after me. That was my first conscious and determined effort to see the world in my own way and at my own discretion. It was the beginning of that long series of runaway excursions which have blessed or marred my life ever since. No child ever had a greater measure of unalloyed joy in his soul than I did when I dashed down that village lane, and no later escapade has ever brought me quite the same fine shade of satisfaction.
In the main street the village police officer stopped me, and on learning who I was, took me to the lockup for safe-keeping until my parents returned in the evening. I was not actually put in a cell—the lockup was fire station and village prison in one, and I was given the freedom of the so-called engine room. I remember that I spent most of the time sucking a stick of candy and marveling at the fire apparatus. Nevertheless it was imprisonment of a kind, and I knew it. It was the only punishment I received. My parents picked me up in the evening, apparently much amused. Could my father have realized what that initial truancy was to lead to I should probably have received one of his whippings, but fortunately he was in a mood to consider it humorously.
My father died at the early age of forty-two, when I was eight years old (1877). He was a tall, slender man, lithe, nervous and possessed of a long brown beard which always impressed me when looking at him. He was the editor-in-chief of a Chicago daily newspaper, which died six months after his demise. I have heard it said that he was the only man who could have made the paper a success, and trying to do this probably wore him out. He had experimented with various activities before taking the newspaper position, but he thought that he had at last found his life-work when he developed into an editor. The last year of his life he became very much interested in church matters. He came of good New England stock, his American progenitor helping to found the town of Concord, Mass.
I have often heard it said that my father was a brilliant man gifted with a remarkable sense of humor. He did not favor me with his humorous side very often, but I do recall a funny incident in which he revealed to all of us children a phase of his character which my mother probably knew much more about. Although my father had to leave the old brown house early in the morning in order to catch his