CHAPTER XII
TIM'S PARTICULAR ADVENTURE
Tim's "particular adventure" was of another kind. It was a self-
repeater--of some violence, moreover, when the smallness of the hero
is considered. Whether in after-life he become an astronomer-poet or a
"silver-and-mechanical engineer"--both dreams of his--he will ever be
sharp upon rescuing something. A lost star or a burning mine will be
his objective, but with the essential condition that it be--
unattainable. Achievement would mean lost interest. For Tim's desire
was, is, and ever will be insatiable. Profoundest mystery, insoluble
difficulty, and endless searching were what his soul demanded of life.
For him all ponds were bottomless, all gipsies older than the moon. He
felt the universe within him, and was born to seek its inexplicable
"explanation"--outside. The realisation of such passion, however, is
not necessarily confined to writers of epics and lyrics. Tim was a man
of action before he was a poet. "Forever questing" was his
unacknowledged motto. Besides asking questions about stars and other
inaccessible incidents of his Cosmos, he liked to "go busting about,"
as he called it--again with one essential condition that the thing
should never come to an end by merely happening.
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