He submitted to it all with a perfect unquestioning simplicity, never
even knowing that he suffered, that he must suffer disintegration from
the old life. He was moved entirely from within, he never questioned his
inevitable impulse.
'They say to me, "Don't go--don't go"--' he shook his head. 'But I say I
will go.'
And at that it was finished.
So we saw him off at the little quay, going down the lake. He would
return at evening, and be pulled up in his funicular basket. And in a
month's time he would be standing on the same lake steamer going
to America.
Nothing was more painful than to see him standing there in his degraded,
sordid American clothes, on the deck of the steamer, waving us good-bye,
belonging in his final desire to our world, the world of consciousness
and deliberate action. With his candid, open, unquestioning face, he
seemed like a prisoner being conveyed from one form of life to another,
or like a soul in trajectory, that has not yet found a resting-place.
What were wife and child to him?--they were the last steps of the past.
His father was the continent behind him; his wife and child the
foreshore of the past; but his face was set outwards, away from it
all--whither, neither he nor anybody knew, but he called it America.
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