Chapter II: Part 2

"Johnnie, Johnnie ... I'm so sorry ... Johnnie, only speak to me!" He was behaving exactly like Aunt Millie when she had St. Vitus' dance.

He began tending me gently like a woman. He built a fire and made some coffee over it--he had brought coffee and some lunch. I crouched white and still, saying not a word.

Landon squatted with his back turned, watching the coffee. His shotgun, leaning against the tree-trunk, caught my eye. I crept toward that shotgun. I trembled with anticipatory pleasure. God, but now I would pay him back!...

But it was too heavy. I had struggled and brought it up, however, half to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan. He looked about.

He went as pale as a sheet of paper.

"--God, Johnnie!" he almost screamed my name.

I dropped the gun in the grass, sullenly, never speaking.

"Johnnie, were you--were you?" he faltered, unnerved.

"Yes, I was going to give you both barrels ... and I'm sorry I didn't."

All his desire to whip me had gone up like smoke.

"Yes, and I'll tell you what, you big, dirty ----, I'll kill you yet, when I grow big."

* * * * *

That night I fainted at supper. When Granma put me to bed she saw how bruised and wealed I was all over ... for the first time she went after Uncle Lan--turned into a furious thing.

* * * * *

Shortly after, I was taken sick with typhoid fever. They used the starvation cure for it, in those days. When they began to give me solid food, I chased single grains of rice that fell out of the plate, about the quilt, just as a jeweller would pearls, if a necklace of them broke.

* * * * *

With my recovery came news, after many days, of my father.

The Hunkies were pushing out the Irish from the mills--cheaper labour. My grandmother could not afford to board the Hunkies, they lived so cheaply. Renewed poverty was breaking our household up.

My grandmother was about to begin her living about from house to house with her married sons and daughters.

My father was sending for me to come East. He had a good job there in the Composite Works at Haberford. He was at last able to take care of his son--his only child.

* * * * *

My grandmother and my aunt Millie took me to the railroad station. I tried to be brave and not cry. I succeeded, till the train began to pull out. Then I cried very much.

The face of my grandmother pulled awry with grief and flowing tears. Aunt Millie wept, too.

No, I wouldn't leave them. I would stay with them, work till I was rich and prosperous, never marry, give all my life to taking care of them, to saving them from the bitter grinding poverty we had shared together.

I ran into the vestibule. But the train was gathering speed so rapidly that I did not dare jump off.

I took my seat again. Soon my tears dried.

The trees flapped by. The telegraph poles danced off in irregular lines. I became acquainted with my fellow passengers. I was happy.

I made romance out of every red and green lamp in the railroad yards we passed through, out of the dingy little restaurants in which I ate....

The mysterious swaying to and fro of the curtains in the sleeper thrilled me, as I looked out from my narrow berth.

In the smoker I listened till late to the talk of the drummers who clenched big black cigars between their teeth, or slender Pittsburgh stogies, expertly flicking off the grey ash with their little fingers, as they yarned.

I wore a tag on my coat lapel with my name and destination written on it. My grandmother had put it there in a painful, scrawling hand.

* * * * *

The swing out over wide, salt-bitten marshes, the Jersey marshes grey and smoky before dawn!... then, far off, on the horizon line, New York, serrate, mountainous, going upward great and shining in the still dawn!

* * * * *

Beneath a high, vast, clamorous roof of glass....

As I stepped down to the platform my father met me.

I knew him instantly though it had been years since I had seen him.

* * * * *

My father whisked me once more across the long Jersey marshes. To Haberford. There, on the edge of the town, composed of a multitude of stone-built, separate, tin-roofed houses, stood the Composite Works. My father was foreman of the drying department, in which the highly inflammable sheets of composite were hung to dry....

My father rented a large, front room, with a closet for clothes, of a commuting feed merchant named Jenkins ... whose house stood three or four blocks distant from the works.

So we, my father and I, lived in that one room. But I had it to myself most of the time, excepting at night, when we shared the big double bed.

* * * * *

Still only a child, I was affectionate toward him. And, till he discouraged me, I kissed him good night every night, I liked the smell of the cigars he smoked.

I wanted my father to be more affectionate to me, to notice me more. I thought that a father should be something intuitively understanding and sympathetic. And mine was offish ... of a different species.. wearing his trousers always neatly pressed ... and his neckties--he had them hanging in a neat, perfect row, never disarranged. The ends of them were always pulled even over the smooth stick on which they hung.

I can see my father yet, as he stands before the mirror, painstakingly adjusting the tie he had chosen for the day's wear.

I was not at all like him. Where I took my knee britches off, there I dropped them. They sprawled, as if half-alive, on the floor ... my shirt, clinging with one arm over a chair, as if to keep from falling to the floor.. my cap, flung hurriedly into a corner.

* * * * *

"Christ, Johnnie, won't you ever learn to be neat or civilised? What kind of a boy are you, anyhow?"

He thought I was stubborn, was determined not to obey him, for again and again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked. But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions. It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind one after another in hurried heaps of confusion. I was lost ... groping ... in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous, shapeless thoughts.

Strange involuntary rhythms swung through my spirit and body. Fantastic imaginations took possession of me.

And I prayed at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a childishness, an innocence toward him.

Jenkins, the little stringy feed merchant, had two daughters, one thirteen, Alva, and another Silvia, who was fifteen or sixteen.. and a son, Jimmy, about seven....

It was over Alva and Silvia that my father and Jenkins used to come together, teasing me. And, though the girls drew me with an enchanting curiosity, I would protest that I didn't like girls ... that when I became full-grown I would never marry, but would study books and mind my business, single....

After this close, crafty, lascivious joking between them, my father would end proudly with--

"Johnnie's a strange boy, he really doesn't care about such things. All he cares about is books."

So I succeeded in completely fooling my father as to the changes going on within me.

* * * * *

Though I had not an atom of belief left in orthodox Christianity (or thought I had not) I still possessed this all-pervasive need to pray to God. A need as strong as physical hunger.

Torn with these curious, new, sweet tumults, I turned to Him. And I prayed to be pure ... like Sir Galahad, or any of the old knights who wore their lady's favour in chastity, a male maiden,--and yet achieved great quests and were manly in their deeds....

* * * * *

The crying and singing of the multitudinous life of insects and animals in the spring marshes under the stars almost made me weep, as I roamed about, distracted yet exalted, alone, at night.

I was studying the stars, locating the constellations with a little book of star-maps I possessed.

I wanted, was in search of, something ... something ... maybe other worlds could give this something to me ... what vistas of infinite imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!

Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading books on astronomy ... Newcomb ... Proctor's _Other Worlds_ ... Camille Flammarion ... Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers ... and novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus....

During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching blackness of night:

"O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed--till one day, having kept myself wholly for _her_ as she has kept herself for me,--give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."

Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.

* * * * *

The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly "touched," still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars ... and about great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of learning....

Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature. Alva was gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles.

In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen stove, alone, studying our lessons,--the place given over entirely to us for our school work.

A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,--the thought of their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to bed.

I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn.

* * * * *

I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by no means my last, I hopped a freight.

I was absent several weeks.

When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I grew talkative about my adventures, too.

I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips to dry.

In the Composite Works I discovered a new world--the world of factory life.

I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell as of rubbed amber--the characteristic smell of composite when subjected to friction....

And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social unease do.

They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong, sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts ... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.

Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding, squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with women.

They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it, laughing grimly with the "boys."

Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to themselves.

In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure to be hit as you passed through.

The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness, dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked, jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the eye-pits of a skull.

* * * * *

"Well, they don't _have_ to work in there unless they want to, do they?"

"Ah, they're only a lot of foreigners anyhow."

* * * * *

Three dollars a week was a lot of money for me ... a fortune, because I had never owned anything higher than nickles and dimes before.

And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned, to do with as I wished. Later on he made me save two dollars a week.

Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap, second hand ones, at Breasted's book store.

Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.

My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume. It was the only book he cared for, outside of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, together with, of course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret societies.

At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic learning that drew me to Byron. I became enamoured of the Latin and Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in _Hours of Idleness_, and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the lamp light. And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my own.

Then I began to read--_Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus_--the Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Prisoner of Chillon_.

The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my hair in the Byronic style.

"I see you're discovering Byron," my father laughed.

Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had evidently overlooked, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_. And he quoted me the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.

From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was beginning to devour my days.

I read and pondered, shaking with eagerness, the stories of Haidee, of Antonia and Julia--the tale of the dream of Dudu. I dwelt in a musk-scented room of imagination. Silver fountains played about me. Light forms flowed and undulated in white draperies over mosaiced pavements ... flashing dark eyes shone mysteriously and amorously, starry through curtains and veils.

My every thought was alert with naive, speculative curiosity concerning the mystery of woman.

Through Byron I learned about Moore. I procured the latter's _Lalla Rookh_, his odes of Anacreon.

From Byron and Moore I built up an adolescent ideal of woman,--exquisitely sensual and sexual, and yet an angel, superior to men: an ideal of a fellow creature who was both a living, breathing mystery and a walking sweetmeat ... a white creation moved and actuated by instinct and intuition--a perpetually inexplicable ecstasy and madness to man.

I drew more and more apart to myself. Always looked upon as queer by the good, bourgeois families that surrounded us, I was now considered madder still.

* * * * *

How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side, wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the stars--or, maybe,--more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling minstrel--in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world--to have come to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in the world, one who was innocent of what man meant. And together we would learn the mystery of life, and live in mutual purity and innocence.

* * * * *

The strangeness of my physical person lured me. I marvelled at, scrutinised intimately the wonder of myself. I was insatiable in my curiosities.

* * * * *

My discovery of my body, and my books, held me in equal bondage. I neglected my work in the drying room. My father was vexed. He'd hunt me out of the obscure corners back of the hanging sheets of composite where I hid, absorbed in myself and the book I held, and would run me back to work.

* * * * *

One day, in the factory, two other boys on an errand from another department, came back where I sat, in a hidden nook, reading Thompson's _Seasons_. One of them spit over my shoulder, between the leaves. I leaped to my feet, infuriated, and a fight began. The desecration of my beloved poetry gave me such angry strength that I struck out lustily and dropped both of them....

Rushing in on the uproar and blaming me for it, my father seized me by the collar. He booted the other boys off, who were by this time on their feet again, took me up into the water-tower, and beat me with one of the heavy sticks, with metal clips on it, that was used for hanging the composite on.

Still trembling with the fight, I shook with a superadded ague of fear. My father's chastisement brought back to me with a chill the remembrance of the beatings Uncle Landon had given me.

* * * * *

"By God, Johnnie, this is the only thing there's left to do with you." He flung me aside. I lay there sobbing.

"Tell me, my boy, what _is_ the matter with you?" he asked, softening. Unlike Landon, he was usually gentle with me. He seldom treated me harshly.

"Father, I don't want to work any more."

"Don't want to work?... but you quit school just to _go_ to work, at your own wish!"

"I want to go back to school!"

"Back to school?... you'll be behind the rest by now."

"I've been studying a lot by myself," I replied, forgetting the feel of the stick already and absorbed in the new idea.

By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my father's desk. He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as composite). He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were smoking.

"Look here, my son, what _is_ the matter with you ... won't you tell your daddy?"

"Nothing's the matter with me, Pop!"

"You're getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?"

"No, Pop!"

"You're a queer little duck."

There was a long silence.

"You're always reading ... good books too ... yet you're no more good in school than you are at work ... I can't make you out, by the living God, I can't ... what is it you want to be?"

"I don't know, only I want to go back to school again."

"But what did you leave for?"

"I hated arithmetic."

"What do you want to study, then?"

"Languages."

"Would you like a special course in the high school?

"Principal Balling of the Keeley Heights High School might be able to work you in. He is a brother Mason of mine."

"I know some Latin and Greek and Ancient History already. I have been teaching myself."

"Well, you _are_ a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the family, except your mother. She used to read and read, and read. And once or twice she wrote a short story ... had one accepted, even, by the _Youth's Companion_ once, but never printed."

* * * * *

Though it was some months off till the Fall term began, on the strength of my desire to return to school my father let me throw up my job....

But we soon found out that, brother in the bond, or not, Principal Balling could not get me into high school because I was not well enough prepared. My studying and reading by myself, though it had been quite wide, had also been too desultory. The principal advised a winter in the night school where men and boys who had been delayed in their education went to learn.

I ran about that summer, with a gang of fellow adolescents; our headquarters, strange to say, being the front room and outside steps of an undertaker's establishment. This was because our leader was the undertaker's boy-of-all-work. Harry Mitchell was his name. Harry, a sort of young tramp, fat and pimply-faced, had jaunted into our town one day from New York, and had found work with the undertaker. Harry had watery blue eyes and a round, moon face. He was a whirlwind fighter but he never fought with us. It was only with the leaders of other gangs or with strangers that he fought.

Harry continued our education in the secrets and mysteries of life, in the stable-boy and gutter way,--by passing about among us books from a sort of underground library ... vile things, fluently conceived and made even more vivid and animal with obscene and unimaginable illustrations. And our minds were trailed black with slime.

And whole afternoons we stood about on the sidewalk jeering and fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to them in falsetto voices.

* * * * *

As a child my play had been strenuous and absorbing, like work that one is happy at, so that at night I fell asleep with all the pleasant fatigue of a labourer.

It is the adolescent who loafs and dawdles on street corners. For the cruel and fearful urge of sex stirs so powerfully in him, that he hardly knows what to do, and all his days and nights he writhes in the grip of terrible instincts.

* * * * *

Yet, in the midst of the turbidness of adolescence, I was still two distinct personalities. With my underground library of filth hidden away where my father could not find it, at the same time I kept and read my other books. The first were for the moments of madness and curious ecstasy I had learned how to induce.

But my better self periodically revolted. And I took oath that I would never again spew a filthy expression from my mouth or do an ill thing. I suffered all the agonies of the damned in hell. I believe hell to be the invention of adolescence.

Always, inevitably, I returned to my wallow and the gang.

* * * * *

We were not always loafing in front of the undertaker's shop. Sometimes we were quite active. Many windows and street lamps were smashed. And we derived great joy from being pursued by the "cops"--especially by a certain fat one, for whom we made life a continual burden.

Once we went in a body to the outskirts of the town and stoned a greenhouse. Its owner chased us across ploughed fields. We flung stones back at him. One hit him with a dull thud and made him cry out with pain, and he left off pursuing us. It was so dark we could not be identified.

One of our favourite diversions was to follow mature lovers as they strolled a-field, hoping to catch them in the midst of intimate endearments.

* * * * *

My father received a raise of a few dollars in salary. As it was they paid him too little, because he was easy-going. The additional weekly money warranted our leaving the Jenkinses and renting four rooms all our own, over the main street. This meant that I was to have a whole room to myself, and I was glad ... a whole room where I could stand a small writing desk and set up my books in rows. With an extreme effort I burned my underground books.

* * * * *

All the women liked my father. He dressed neatly and well. His trousers were never without their fresh crease. He was very vain of his neat appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole. This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his entirely bald head.

Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them. He, for this reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of just standing and talking with women.

Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in good English, with few curses and oaths in it.

* * * * *

Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_. Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.

The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life, exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.

Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ became my Bible.

* * * * *

It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a daily paper.

And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner still. I fell into a hacking cough.

And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension. Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....

I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water, that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.

In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled _The Female Form Divine_. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my pillow.

I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind to me....

* * * * *

Again: my imagination grew to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns, skeletons. How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so enamoured of. The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he had done, to stay up all night, night after night, studying....

* * * * *

After the surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist, several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied entity. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would come rushing from my pen. I must hurry with them before my early death overtook me.

* * * * *

There were two visions I saw continually in my sleep:

One was of myself walking with a proud step down a vast hall, the usual wreath of fame on my head. I wore a sort of toga. And of course a great concourse of people stood apart in silent reverence on either side, gazing at me admiringly. With the thunder of their hand-clapping I would wake.

The other dream was of being buried alive.

I lay there, smelling the dark earth, and not being able to stir so much as the last joint of my little finger. Yet every nerve of me ached with sentience.. and I woke gasping, my face bathed with tears and the moisture of terror.

* * * * *

From head to foot hot flushes swept over me. And I was stung with the pricking of a million needles, going in sharply at every pore!... was bathed in cold sweats. And I hoped I was dying.

* * * * *

"Johnnie, what are you doing to yourself?" And my father fixed his eyes on me.

"Nothing, Father!"

"If you weren't such a good boy, I'd--" and he halted, to continue, "as it is, you're a clean boy, and I'm proud of you."

I struggled hard to speak with him, to make a confidant of him, but I could not.

"I wonder," he added with alarm in his voice, "I wonder if you're catching consumption, the disease your mother died of ... you must be careful of yourself."

I told him I would be careful....

"I think I'll send you back home to visit the folks this fall."

* * * * *

There was a restaurant just around the corner from where we lived in our second story flat--a restaurant which bore the legend stuck up in the window, "Home Cooking." The sign itself was of a dull, dirty, fly-specked white which ought to have been a sufficient warning to the nice palate.

The place was run by a family of three ... there was Mister Brown, the man, a huge-built, blotch-faced, retired stone-mason, his meagre little wife, Mrs. Brown, and their grass-widow daughter, Flora.... Flora did but little work, except to lean familiarly and with an air of unspoken intimacy, over the tables of the men, as she slouched up with their food ... and she liked to sit outside in the back yard when there was sunshine ... in the hammock for more comfort ... shelling peas or languidly peeling potatoes.

Flora's vibrant, little, wasplike mother whose nose was so sharp and red that it made me think of Paul's ferret--she bustled and buzzed about, doing most of the work.

* * * * *

Looking out from our back window, I could see Flora lolling, and I would read or write a little and then the unrest would become too strong and I would go down to her. Soon two potato knives would be working.

"Come and sit by me in the hammock."

I liked that invitation ... she was plump to heaviness and sitting in the hammock crushed us pleasantly together.

This almost daily propinquity goaded my adolescent hunger into an infatuation for her,--I thought I was in love with her,--though I never quite reconciled myself to the cowlikeness with which she chewed gum.

She was as free and frank of herself as I was curious and timid.

"Johnnie, what small feet and little hands you have ... you're a regular aristocrat."

* * * * *

A pause.

I give her a poem written to her. She reads it, letting her knife stick in a half-peeled potato. She looks up at me out of heavy-lidded eyes.

* * * * *

"I believe you're falling in love with me."

I trembled, answered nothing, was silent.

"Kiss me!"

Seeing me so a-tremble, she obeyed her own injunction. With slow deliberation she crushed her lips, full and voluptuous, into mine. The warmth of them seemed to catch hold of something deep down in me, and, with exquisite painfulness, draw it out. Blinded with emotion, I clutched close to her. She laughed. I put one hand over her full breast as infants do. She pushed me back.

"There, that's enough for one day--a promise of sweets to come!" and she laughed again, with a hearty purr like a cat that has a mouse at its mercy.

She rose and carried in the pan of potatoes we had just finished peeling. And I saw her sturdy, but not unshapely ankles going from me as she went up the steps from the yard, her legs gleaming white through her half-silk hose (that were always coming down, and that she was always twisting up, just under her knees, before my abashed eyes). She wore shoes much too little for her plump feet ... and, when not abroad, let them yawn open unbuttoned. And her plump body was alive and bursting through her careless, half-fastened clothes.

She sang with a deep sultriness of voice as she walked away with the pan of potatoes.

* * * * *

"You ought to see my Florrie read books!" exclaimed the mother.

Flora did read a lot ... but chiefly the erotic near-society novels that Belford used to print....

"Yes, she's a smart girl, she is."

And the father....

"I won't work till the unions get better conditions for a man. I won't be no slave to no man."

* * * * *

One sultry afternoon I went into the restaurant and found Flora away. Poignantly disappointed, I asked where she was.

"--Gone on a trip!" her mother explained, without explaining.

From time to time Flora went on "trips."

* * * * *

And one morning, several mornings, Flora was not there to serve at the breakfast table ... and I was hurt when I learned that she had gone back to Newark to live, and had left no word for me. Her father told me she "had gone back to George," meaning her never-seen husband from whom she evidently enjoyed intervals of separation and grass-widowhood.

I was puzzled and hurt indeed, because she had not even said good-bye to me. But soon came this brief note from her:

"Dearest Boy:--

Do come up to Newark and see me some afternoon. And come more than
once. Bring your Tennyson that you was reading aloud to me. I love
to hear you read poetry. I think you are a dear and want to see
more of you. But I suppose you have already forgotten

Your loving

FLORA."

In the absurd and pitiful folly of youth I lifted the letter to my lips and kissed it. I trembled with eagerness till the paper rattled as I read it again and again. It seemed like some precious holy script.

I bolted my lunch nervously and it stuck half way down in a hard lump. I would go to her that very afternoon.

* * * * *

The car on which I rode was subject to too frequent stoppage for me. I leaped out and walked along with brisk strides. But the car sailed forth ahead of me now on a long stretch of roadway and I ran after it to catch it again. The conductor looked back at me in derisive scorn and made a significant whirling motion near his temple with his index finger, indicating that I had wheels there....

At last I found the street where Flora lived. I trailed from door to door till the number she had given me met my eye. It made my heart jump and my knees give in, to be so near the quarry. For the first time I was to be alone with a woman I desired.

At the bell, it took me a long time to gain courage to pull. But at last I reached out my hand. I had to stand my ground. I couldn't run away now. The bell made a tinkling sound far within.

* * * * *

The door opened cautiously. A head of touseled black hair crept out.

"Johnnie, dear! _You_!... you _are_ a surprise!"

Did I really detect an echo of disappointment in her deep, contralto voice?

Frightened in my heart like a trapped animal, I went in. Down a long, dusk, musty-smelling corridor and into a back-apartment on the first floor; she led me into a room which was bed-and-sitting room combined. In one part of it stood several upholstered chairs with covers on, cluttered about a plain table. In the other part stood a bureau heaped with promiscuous toilette articles, and a huge, brass-knobbed bed with a spread of lace over its great, semi-upright pillows.

"Shall I let in a little more light, dear?"

"Do."

For the blinds were two-thirds down.

"I like to sit and think in the dark," she explained, and her one dimple broke in a rich, brown-faced animal smile.

"Yes, but I--I want to see your lovely face," I stuttered, with much effort at gallantry....

* * * * *

"He's not at home ... he's off at Wilmington, on a job" (meaning her husband, though I had not asked about him). "But what made you come so soon? You must of just got my letter!"

"I--I wanted you," I blurted ... in the next moment I was at her feet in approved romantic fashion, following up my declaration of desire. Calmly she let me kneel there ... I put my arms about her plump legs ... I was almost fainting....

After a while she took me by the hair with both hands. She slowly bent my head back as I knelt. Leaning over, she kissed deliberately, deeply into my mouth ... then, gazing into my eyes with a puzzled expression, as I relaxed to her--almost like something inanimate....

"Why, you dear boy, I believe you're innocent like a child. And yet you know so much about books ... and you're so wise, too!"

As she spoke she pushed back my mad hands from their clutching and reaching. She held both of them in hers, and closed them in against her half-uncovered, full breasts, pressing them there.

"Do you mean to tell me that you've never gone out with the boys for a good time?... how old are you?"

I told her I was just sixteen.

"Do you think I'm ... I'm too young?" I asked.

"I feel as if I was your mother ... and I'm not much over twenty ... but do sit up on a chair, dear!"

She stood on her feet, shook out her dress, smiled curiously, and started out of the room. I was up and after her, my arms around her waist, desperate. She slid around in my arms, laughing quietly to herself till the back of her head was against my mouth. I kissed and kissed the top of her head. Then she turned slowly to face me, pressing all the contours of her body into me ... she crushed her bosom to mine. Already I was quite tall; and she was stocky and short ... she lifted her face up to me, a curious kindling light in her eyes ... of a phosphorescent, greenish lustre, like those chance gleams in a cat's eyes you catch at night....

She took my little finger and deliberately bit it ... then she leaned away from my seeking mouth, my convulsive arms....

"You want too much, all at once," she said, and, whirling about broke away....

With the table between me and her....

"Wouldn't you like a little beer, and some sandwiches? I have some in the ice box.... _Do_ let's have some beer and sandwiches."

I assented, though hating the bitter taste of beer, and hungry for her instead of sandwiches. And soon we were sitting down calmly at the table, or rather, she was sitting down calmly ... baffled, I pretended to be calm.

As she rose for something or other, I sprang around the table and caught her close to me once more, marvelling, at the same time, at my loss of shyness, my new-found audacity. Again she snuggled in close to me, her flesh like a warm, palpitating cushion.

"Flora, my darling ... help me!" I cried, half-sobbing.

"What do you mean?" laughing.

"I love you!"

"I know all _you_ want!"

"But I do love you ... see...."

And I prostrated myself, in a frenzy, at her feet.

"Say, you're the queerest kid I've ever known."

And she walked out of the room abruptly, while I rose to my feet and sat in a chair, dejected. She came in again, a twinkle in her eye.

"Don't torture me, Flora!" I pleaded, "either send me away, or--"

"Stop pestering me ... let's talk ... read me some of that Tennyson you gave me...." and I began reading aloud, for there was nothing else she would for the moment, have me do....

* * * * *

"You're a poet," whimsically, "I want you to write some letters to me because I know you must write beautiful."

"--if you will only let me love you!"

"Well, ain't I lettin' you love me?"

A perverse look came into her face, a thought, an idea that pleased her--

"I've lots and lots of letters from men," she began, "men that have been in love with me."

"Oh!" I exclaimed weakly ... she had just expressed a desire to add some of mine to the pack ... the next thing that she followed up with gave me a start--

"Your father--"

"My father?--" I echoed.

"He's written me the best letters of all ... wait a minute ... I'll read a little here and there to you." And, gloating and triumphant, and either not seeing or, in her vulgarity, not caring what effect the reading of my father's love letters would have on me, she began reading ardent passages aloud. "See!" She showed me a page to prove that it was in his handwriting. The letters told a tale easy to understand. She was so eager in her vanity that she read on and on without seeing in my face what, seen, would have made her stop.

A frightful trembling seized me, a loathing, a horror. This was my father's woman ... and ... I!...

I sat on, dumbfounded, paralysed. I remembered his stories of trips to T---- and other places on supposed lodge business ... unluckily, I also remembered that several times Flora had been off on trips at the same time.

"Just listen to this, will you!" and she began at another passage.

She was so absorbed in her reading that she did not see how I was on my feet ... had seized my hat ... was going.

"I'm sorry, Flora, but I've got to go!"

"What?" looking up and surprised, "--got to go?"

"Yes ... Yes ... I must--must go!" my lips trembled.

"Why, we're just getting acquainted ... I didn't mean for you to go yet."

She rose, dropping the letters all in a heap.

She was the aggressive one now. She drew me to her quickly, "Stay ... and I'll promise to be good to you!"

I pushed back, loathing ... loathing her and myself, but myself more, because in spite of all my disgust, my pulses leaped quick again to hers.

"Sit down again."

I did not listen, but stood.

"I was thinking that you would stay for supper and then we could go to some show and after come back here and I would give you a good time."

* * * * *

I staggered out, shocked beyond belief, the last animal flush had died out of me. All my body was ice-cold.

"Promise me you'll come again this day next week," she called after me persistently.

She drew the door softly shut and left me reeling down the dark corridor.

* * * * *

I could hardly speak to my father that night. I avoided him.

* * * * *

At the creeping edge of dawn I woke from a dream with a jerk as I slid down an endless black abyss. The abyss was my bed's edge and I found myself on the floor. When I went to rise again, I had to clutch things to stand up. I was so weak I sat on the bed breathing heavily. I tumbled backward into bed again and lay in a daze during which dream-objects mixed with reality and my room walked full of people from all the books I had read--all to evaporate as my father's face grew, from a cluster of white foreheads and myriads of eyes, into _him_.

"Johnnie, wake up ... are you sick?"

"Please go away from me and let me alone." I turned my face to the wall in loathing.

"I'll call a doctor."

* * * * *

The doctor came. He felt my pulse. Put something under my tongue. Whispered my father in a room, apart. Left.

My father returned, dejected, yet trying to act light and merry.

"What did the doctor say?" I forced myself to ask of him.

"To be frank, Johnnie ... you're old enough to learn the truth ... he thinks you're taken down with consumption."

"That's what my mother died of."

My father shuddered and put his face down in his hands. I felt a little sorry for him, then.

"Well you've got to go West now ... and work on a farm ... or something."

* * * * *

I began to get ready for my trip West. Surely enough, I had consumption, if symptoms counted ... pains under the shoulder blades ... spitting of blood ... night-sweats....

But my mind was quickened: I read Morley's _History of English Literature_ ... Chaucer all through ... Spenser ... even Gower's _Confessio Amantis_ and Lydgate's ballads ... my recent discovery of Chatterton having made me Old English-mad.

As I read the life of young Chatterton I envied him, his fame and his early death and more than ever, I too desired to die young.

* * * * *

The week before I was to set out my father calmly discovered to me that he intended I should work on a farm as a hand for the next four years, when I reached Ohio ... was even willing to pay the farmer something to employ me. This is what the doctor had prescribed as the only thing that would save my life--work in the open air. My father had written Uncle Beck to see that this program was inaugurated.

"I won't become a clod-hopper," I exclaimed, seeing the dreary, endless monotony of such a life.

"But it will do you good. It will be a fine experience for you."

"If it's such a fine experience why don't you go and do it?"

"I won't stand any nonsense."

"I'd rather die.... I'm going to die anyhow."

"Yes, if you don't do what I tell you."

"I won't."

"We'll see."

"Very well, father, we _will_ see."

"If you weren't such a sick kid I'd trounce you."

* * * * *

You could approach Antonville by surrey, buggy or foot ... along a winding length of dusty road ... or muddy ... according to rain or shine.

My Uncle Beck drove me out in a buggy.

Aunt Alice, so patient-faced and pretty and sweet-eyed in her neat poverty--greeted me with a warm kiss.

"Well, you'll soon be well now."

"But I won't work on a farm."

"Never mind, dear ... don't worry about that just yet."

* * * * *

That afternoon I sat with Aunt Alice in the kitchen, watching her make bread. Everyone else was out: Uncle Beck, on a case ... Cousin Anders, over helping with the harvest on a neighbouring farm ... Cousin Anna was also with the harvesters, helping cook for the hands ... for the Doctor's family needed all the outside money they could earn.

For Uncle Beck was a dreamer. He thought more of his variorum Shakespeare than he did of his medical practice. And he was slow-going and slow-speaking and so conscientious that he told patients the truth ... all which did not help him toward success and solid emolument. He would take eggs in payment for his visits ... or jars of preserves ... or fresh meat, if the farmer happened to be slaughtering.

* * * * *

"Where's Granma?" I asked Aunt Alice, as she shoved a batch of bread in the oven.

"She's out Halton way ... she'll go crazy with joy when she gets word you're back home. She'll start for here right off as soon as she hears the news. She's visiting with Lan and his folks."

When I heard Lan mentioned I couldn't help giving a savage look.

Aunt Alice misinterpreted.

"What, Johnnie--won't you be glad to see her!... you ought to ... she's said over and over again that she loved you more than she did any of her own children."

"It isn't that--I hate Landon. I wish he was dead or someone would kill him for me."

"Johnnie, you ought to forgive and forget. It ain't Christian."

"I don't care. I'm not a Christian."

"O Johnnie!" shocked ... then, after a pause of reproach which I enjoyed--"your Uncle Lan's toned down a lot since then ... married ... has four children ... one every year." And Alice laughed whimsically.