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The terror of a great freedom caught him, a freedom most awfully remote from the smaller personal existence he knew Today ... for it suggested, with awe and wonder, the kind of primitive utterance that was before speech or the development of language; when emotions were still too vague and mighty to be caught by little words, but when beings, close to the heart of their great Mother, expressed the feelings, enormous and uncomplex, of the greater life they shared as portions of her projections of the Earth herself.
Each had indeed done badly enough before, but the industrial system on which they depended, being limited by the national borders, was comparatively simple and uncomplex, self-sustaining, and liable only to local and transient disturbances, the effect of which could be to some extent estimated, possibly remedied.
To Marylin, whose neck very often ached clear down into her shoulder blade and up into a bandeau around her brow, and to whom city walls were sometimes like slaps confronting her whichever way she turned, her enjoyment of Coney Island was as uncomplex as A B C. Untortured by any awarenesses of relative values, too simple to strive to keep simple, unself-conscious, and with a hungry heart, she was not a spectator, half ashamed of being amused.
Each day's awakening was a delight to her, and would probably be so to the end of her existence, absolutely because she was so sane and uncomplex a creature. To be deftly assisted in her dressing by Jane Cupp, and to know that each morning she might be fittingly and becomingly attired without anxiety as to where her next gown was to come from, was a lovely thing.
He was a man of a peculiarly uncomplex nature. When, on meeting Bettina, he for the first time fell deeply in love, he had looked upon the matter as a finality, and he had never ceased so to regard it. When she deserted him, without giving him a chance to speak, he had, in the overwhelming bitterness of his heart, forsworn all women. It had never occurred to him to put another in Bettina's place.
The mind, like the body, grows quickly hard, simple, uncomplex. And in a camp as primitive and close to nature as ours was, these effects became speedily visible. Some folk, of course, who talk glibly about the simple life when it is safely out of reach, betray themselves in camp by for ever peering about for the artificial excitements of civilisation which they miss.
But the core of it was always that same mass of common citizenship that gathered anciently in the Forum, that to-day goes orderly enough to the polls in New York or Chicago, plain men, rather young than old, who are so distinctly left on the outside of affairs, who must perforce turn to the newspaper for information and to the open street for expression, who relieve themselves of uncomplex emotions by shouting, and who symbolize the things they hate to the depth of their souls with personalities like Giolitti and occasionally shy bricks at the guarded home of authority.
If the first period of childhood delights in what is strange, this second period gives its allegiance to what is strong, by preference to primitive and simple strength, to uncomplex aims and marked characters; it appreciates courage and endurance, and can bear to hear of sufferings which daunt the fastidiousness of those who are a few years older; perhaps it can endure so much because it realizes so little, but the fact remains true.
The people were there, but did not show themselves. One went to a simple dinner a la guerre at an early hour. All, even purely fashionable persons, were too much occupied by grave realities and duties to make an effort for forms and ceremonies. Life suddenly had become terribly uncomplex, even for the sophisticated.
It is true that the expression of the uncomplex mind is infrequently articulate, but the record which would bring home the clearest truth would be the one unpremeditatedly depicting the effect produced upon the wholly unprepared and undramatic personality by the monstrous drama, as the Second Deluge rose for its apparent overwhelming, carrying upon its flood old civilisations broken from anchor and half submerged as they tossed on the rising and raging waves.
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