But he jumped up and threw his arms about her.
"It's sin, Oliver," she said, "you're a minister."
"I'm a man," he said, fiercely.
Then they went into the house. It was not till years afterwards, when I read Ebber's book—"Homo Sum" that I realized, in the story of that priest struggling with his manhood, what the moment must have meant to Oliver.
I tiptoed across the grass to the shade of the house. A blind had been hurriedly pulled down—too hurriedly. A thin ribbon of light streamed out below it.
I could not now write down what I saw through that window, if I tried. But in the frame of mind of those days, with my ignorance of life, it meant the utter desecration of all holiness. Oliver and Mary had stood on my highest pedestal, a god and goddess. I saw them in the dust. No. It seemed the veriest mire.
I turned away at last to drown myself. It was near the water's edge that they picked me up unconscious some hours later. The doctors called it brain fever. Almost a month passed before I became rational again. I was amazed to find that in my delirium I had not babbled of what I had seen. Neither Oliver nor Mary suspected their part in my sickness. More revolting to me than what they had done was the hypocrisy with which they hid it.
Above all things I dreaded any kind of an explanation and I developed an hypocrisy as gross as theirs. I smothered my repugnance to Mary's kisses and pretended to like to have Oliver read the Bible to me. And when I was able to get about again, I attended meetings as before. There was black hatred in my heart and the communion bread nauseated me. What was left of the summer was only a longing for the day when I should leave for school. Nothing mattered except to escape from these associations.
I am not sure what caused it—the weeks of religious hysteria which accompanied my conversion, what I saw through the crack below the window curtain, or the fever—but some time between the coming of "Salvation" Milton and my recovery, that little speck of gray matter, that minute ganglia of nerve-cells, with which we believe, ceased to function.
BOOK II