A man's mind is a tricky thing--or, speaking more exactly, a man's
emotions are tricky things. Love has come rushing to the beck of a
tip-tilted chin, or the tone of a voice, or the droop of an eyelid. It
has fled for cause as slight. Sometimes it runs before resentment for
a real or fancied wrong, but then, if you have observed it closely, you
will see that quite frequently, when anger grows slow of foot, or dies
of slow starvation, love steals back, all unsuspected and unbidden--and
mayhap causes much distress by his return. It is like a sudden
resurrection of all the loved, long-mourned dead that sleep so serenely
in their tended plots. Loved though they were and long mourned, think
of the consternation if they all came trooping back to take their old
places in life! The old places that have been filled, most of them, by
others who are loved as dearly, who would be mourned if they were taken
away.
Psychologists will tell us all about the subconscious mind, the
hidden loves and hates and longings which we believe are dead and long
forgotten. When one of those emotions suddenly comes alive and stands,
terribly real and intrusive, between our souls and our everyday lives,
the strongest and the best of us may stumble and grope blindly after
content, or reparation, or forgetfulness, or whatever seems most likely
to give relief.
I am apologizing now for Bud, who had spent a good many months in
pushing all thoughts of Marie out of his mind, all hunger for her out of
his heart. He had kept away from towns, from women, lest he be reminded
too keenly of his matrimonial wreck. He had stayed with Cash and had
hunted gold, partly because Cash never seemed conscious of any need of
a home or love or wife or children, and therefore never reminded Bud of
the home and the wife and the love and the child he had lost out of his
own life. Cash seldom mentioned women at all, and when he did it was
in a purely general way, as women touched some other subject he was
discussing. He never paid any attention to the children they met
casually in their travels. He seemed absolutely self-sufficient,
interested only in the prospect of finding a paying claim. What he would
do with wealth, if so be he attained it, he never seemed to know or
care. He never asked Bud any questions about his private affairs, never
seemed to care how Bud had lived, or where. And Bud thankfully left his
past behind the wall of silence. So he had come to believe that he was
almost as emotion-proof as Cash appeared to be, and had let it go at
that.
Now here he was, with his heart and his mind full of Marie--after more
than a year and a half of forgetting her! Getting drunk and playing
poker all night did not help him at all, for when he woke it was from a
sweet, intimate dream of her, and it was to a tormenting desire for her,
that gnawed at his mind as hunger gnaws at the stomach. Bud could not
understand it. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. By all
his simple rules of reckoning he ought to be "over it" by now. He had
been, until he saw that picture.