VII
He read as he had never read before in his brief span of life--as, perhaps, he would never read again, no matter how wide a stretch of life that span might ultimately encompass.
He read of the anatomical differences between men and women. He read about the mechanism of love. He read about the mysteries of procreation. All of it was startlingly new to him, and yet he read with a sense of always having known it. He read with absolute acceptance, without a possibility of doubt.
It seemed a genuine revelation that must render all future questioning futile. And yet he seemed to know no more when he had finished than he knew before he started. It remained outside of himself, a structure of air, a series of shadowgraphs, and the craving within him burned as passionately as ever.
From now on he could grasp the points of the stories told by the boys at school, and he would know what Johan was hinting at in his boast about the secret doings of that attic. But of the reality of the thing he knew as little as before. In fact, the principal lesson brought home by his reading was that here he found himself in the presence of something that could not be learned out of books.
To begin with he did not go beyond the first part of the book. This he read over and over again. When at last he was sated with what that part had to give, a subtle chemical change had taken place in his mental make-up, one might say. It was not caused by any facts conveyed by the book. These seemed quite natural to him, and in themselves they would have had no more power over him than the information about flowers of various kinds imparted by the teacher of botany. It was the tone used that affected him in a manner reminding him of the Swedish Punch of which he had tested a few drops now and then. In every line there was a mixture of shamefaced apology and veiled desire that sent all the blood in his body rushing toward his head until the walls of the room about him reeled. Every inch of him was on fire, and in that flame body and soul were consumed together.
The sum and substance of it was that he had become conscious of that multitudinous impulse we call sex, and that from a vague, restless yearning this impulse suddenly had developed into an appetite as imperative as any hunger for food.