Jack London. Before Adam -
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mother. "He is hysterical," said my father. I never told them,
and they never knew. Already had I developed reticence
concerning this quality of mine, this semi-disassociation of
personality as I think I am justified in calling it.
I saw the snake-charmer, and no more of the circus did I
see that night. I was taken home, nervous and overwrought, sick
with the invasion of my real life by that other life of my
dreams.
I have mentioned my reticence. Only once did I confide the
strangeness of it all to another. He was a boy--my chum; and we
were eight years old. From my dreams I reconstructed for him
pictures of that vanished world in which I do believe I once
lived. I told him of the terrors of that early time, of Lop-Ear
and the pranks we played, of the gibbering councils, and of the
Fire People and their squatting places.
He laughed at me, and jeered, and told me tales of ghosts
and of the dead that walk at night. But mostly did he laugh at
my feeble fancy. I told him more, and he laughed the harder. I
swore in all earnestness that these things were so, and he
began to look upon me queerly. Also, he gave amazing garblings
of my tales to our playmates, until all began to look upon me
queerly.
It was a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I was
different from my kind. I was abnormal with something they
could not understand, and the telling of which would cause only
misunderstanding. When the stories of ghosts and goblins went
around, I kept quiet. I smiled grimly to myself. I thought of
my nights of fear, and knew that mine were the real
things--real as life itself, not attenuated vapors and surmised
shadows.
For me no terrors resided in the thought of bugaboos and