i suppose that every one has made the acquaintance of the subject of this little biography at some time or other, though to others he may not have appeared as he has appeared to me, and, as i know, he has been called by many names. indeed, when i consider that there have been men and women who have sought his society with a passionate eagerness, it is clear to me that his disguises must be extremely subtle, and that he employs them with a just regard for the personalities of his companions. for while some have found in his society the ultimate splendour of life, for me he has always been wearisome and ridiculously mean.
of course it may be that i have known him too long, for even as a child i was accustomed to find him at my side, an unwelcome guest who came and went by no law that p. 100my youthful mind could determine. certainly in those days he was more capricious, and the method of argument by repetition, which he still employs, was only too well calculated to weary and distress a child. but for the rest, the harold whom i knew then was materially the harold whom i know now. conceive a small man so severely afflicted with st. vitus’s dance that his features are hardly definable, endow him with a fondness for clothes of dull colours grievously decorated with spots, and a habit of asking meaningless questions over and over again in an utterly unemotional voice, and you will be able to form a not unfair estimate of the joys of harold’s society. there have been exceptions, however, to the detestable colourlessness of harold’s appearance. i have seen him on occasion dressed in flaming red, like mephistopheles, and his shrill staccato voice has pierced my head like a corkscrew. but these manifestations have always been brief, and might even be considered enjoyable when compared with the unrestful monotony of harold’s society in general.
p. 101who taught me to call him by the name of harold i do not know, but in my youthful days the man’s character was oddly associated with the idea of virtue as expounded in the books i read on sunday afternoons. that i hated him was, i felt, merely a fitting attribute in one whose instincts were admittedly bad, but i did not allow the consideration to affect my rejoicings when i escaped from his company. curiously, too, i perceived that the olympians were with me in this, and since the moral soundness of those improving books was beyond question, i had grave doubts as to their ultimate welfare. but it was always an easy task to detect the olympians tripping in their own moralities; they had so many.
as time went on, and i grew out of the sunday books and all that they stood for, i came to believe that i was growing out of harold too. his appearances became rare, and, from his point of view, a little ineffective. it pleased me to consider with a schoolboy’s arrogance that he was little more than a child’s nightmare, and that if p. 102a man turned to fight him harold would vanish. for a while harold, in his cunning, played up to this idea. he would seek my side timidly, and fly at a word. the long, sleepless nights of childhood and the weary days were forgotten, and i made of him a jest. sometimes i wondered whether he really existed.
and then he came. at first i was only mildly astonished when i found that nothing i could say would make him leave me, but as the hours passed the old hatred asserted itself, and to fight the little man with the dull voice and the cruel spots on his clothes seemed all that there was in life to do. the hours passed into days and nights, and sometimes i was passive in the hope that he might weary, sometimes i shouted answers to his questions—the same answer to the same question—over and over again. i felt, too, that if i could only see his features plainly for a moment he would disappear, and i would stare at him until the sky grew red as my eyes. but i could not see him clearly, and the world became a thing of dull colours, terrible with spots. p. 103by now i was fighting him with a sense of my own fatuity, for i felt that nothing would make this man fight fairly. his voice had fallen to a passionless whisper and the spots on his clothes swelled into obscene blotches and burst like over-ripe fruit. it was then that the chloroform clutched me by the throat. i have never known anything on earth more sweet.
since then, it seems to me, harold has never been quite the same. he comes to see me now and again, and sometimes even he lingers by my side. but there is a note of doubt about him that i do not remember to have noticed before—some of his former spirit would seem to be lacking, and i am forced to wonder sometimes whether harold is not ageing. and, though it may appear strange, the thought inspires me with a certain regret. i do not like the man, and i should be mad to seek him of my own accord, but in fairness i must acknowledge that in a negative way he has contributed to all the pleasures i have enjoyed. sunsets and roses and the white light of the stars—i owe my appreciation of them all to harold; p. 104and i know that it is by aid of his keen realism that i have founded the city of my dreams. it will be a grey world when harold is no more.
