THE TRIP TO GALENA
791
the state prison. I soon stopped glancing out to see what she was
doing, so she wouldn't think I was trying to get her to come in and
take care of me. I didn't want to give her any further bother. I
couldn't have felt bitterer or more hopeless, or more bedraggled.
Still, I expected her to get on the train with me, finally. When she
didn't, I demoted her a few grades in my mind for going on with
Herb Neff and all that middling and ordinary stuff-taking her chips
to the cashier when she had the means to play for the highest stakes,
to do and be the exceptional, live in the high quality. While I, you
see, was still campaigning."
This was the hardest thing of all for Scampi to grasp, that Weyl,
by living as he did, by behaving as he did, believed that he was en–
gaged in a serious struggle. He thought it high time he said so.
"But what is this campaign of yours, exactly, Mr. Weyl?"
Weyl could not answer immediately, but his silence was not a
disappointed one; it was not as though he had assumed all along
that Scampi completely understood his motives or heard
him
out
with complete sympathy.
"I felt I was in a campaign," he said. "I was, and I guess I
am still. I behaved as if I were campaigning. In the name of what
was worth doing, though I never had any idea that what I was doing
was worthwhile. It was supposed to be preliminary to worthwhile,
in expectation of the important.
If
that's too high-flown, I was bored;
and not bored the way a man with less energy might be but, be–
cause I'm energetic, energetically bored, melancholy. And if there's
anything I hate, it's that romantic Hamlet-melancholy. I despise it.
I despised it in myself. It's nasty. You heard me tell myoid aunt
a while back when she asked me what I wanted, that I didn't want
to be sad any more. I meant it to the letter. That being sad is being
disfigured, and the first reply I feel like making to it is a good fast
kick in the wind.
As
far as I'm concerned it's a platitude and an
indecency. You damn well, in that condition, go on eating and drink–
ing, minding your lines and even cementing your social position,
but it's done as though you had gone over the knowledge of the
world and sounded out everything and had found out about every–
thing but joy. Ab, nobody knows that much. That's not knowledge,
that's sophistication. Just plain embarrassed then, you are, at being
insufficiently godlike and unable to live up to the noblest promise of
