write this chapter at all is due, purely and simply, to the, I daresay, unjustified hope on my part that—by recording certain events—it may hurl a little additional light into a very tremendous darkness....
At the outset let me state that what occurred subsequent to the departure for Précigne of B. and Pete and The Sheeneys and Rockyfeller is shrouded in a rather ridiculous indistinctness; due, I have to admit, to the depression which this departure inflicted upon my altogether too human nature. The judgment of the Three Wise Men had—to use a peculiarly vigorous (not to say vital) expression of my own day and time—knocked me for a loop. I spent the days intervening between the separation from "votre camarade" and my somewhat supernatural departure for freedom in attempting to partially straighten myself. When finally I made my exit, the part of me popularly referred to as "mind" was still in a slightly bent if not twisted condition. Not until some weeks of American diet had revolutionized my exterior did my interior completely resume the contours of normality. I am particularly neither ashamed nor proud of this (one might nearly say) mental catastrophe. No more ashamed or proud, in fact, than of the infection of three fingers which I carried to America as a little token of La Ferté's good-will. In the latter case I certainly have no right to boast, even should I find myself so inclined; for B. took with him to Précigne a case of what his father, upon B.'s arrival in The Home of The Brave, diagnosed as scurvy—which scurvy made my mutilations look like thirty cents or even less. One of my vividest memories of La Ferté consists in a succession of crackling noises associated with the disrobing of my friend. I recall that we appealed to Monsieur Ree-chard together, B. in behalf of his scurvy and I in behalf of my hand plus a queer little row of sores, the latter having proceeded to adorn that part of my face which was trying hard to be graced with a moustache. I recall that Monsieur Ree-chard decreed a bain for B., which bain meant immersion in a large tin tub partially filled with not quite luke-warm water. I, on the contrary, obtained a
