Pretty Ethel Beebe comes into the record of this winter, like a quaint illustration to an old-fashioned story, for she lived near us and went to school along the same sidewalk. Burton was always saying, "Some day I am going to brace up and ask Ethel to let me carry her books, and I'm going to walk beside her right down Main Street." But he never did. Ultimately I attained to that incredible boldness, but Burton only followed along behind.
Ethel was a slender, smiling, brown-eyed girl with a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, and I have no doubt she catalogued all our peculiarities, for she always seemed to be laughing at us, and I think it must have been her smiles that prevented any romantic attachment. We walked and talked without any deeper interest than good comradeship.
Mrs. Babcock was famous for her pies and cakes, and Burton always brought some delicious samples of her skill. As regularly as the clock, on every Tuesday evening he said, in precisely the same tone, "Well, now, we'll have to eat these pies right away or they'll spoil," and as I made no objection, we had pie for luncheon, pie and cake for supper, and cake and pie for breakfast until all these "goodies" which were intended to serve as dessert through the week were consumed. By Thursday morning we were usually down to dry bread and butter.
We simplified our housework in other ways in order that we might have time to study and Burton wasted a good deal of time at the fiddle, sawing away till I was obliged to fall upon him and roll him on the floor to silence him.
I still have our ledger which gives an itemized account of the cost of this experiment in self board, and its footings are incredibly small. Less than fifty cents a day for both of us! Of course our mothers, sisters and aunts were continually joking us about our housekeeping, and once or twice Mrs. Babcock called upon us unexpectedly and found the room "a sight." But we did not mind her very much. We only feared the bright eyes of Ethel and Maude and Carrie. Fortunately they could not properly call upon us, even if they had wished to do so, and we were safe. It is probable, moreover, that they fully understood our methods, for they often slyly hinted at hasty dish-washing and primitive cookery. All of this only amused us, so long as they did not actually discover the dirt and disorder of which our mothers complained.
Our school library at that time was pitifully small and ludicrously prescriptive, but its shelves held a few of the fine old classics, Scott, Dickens and Thackeray—the kind of books which can always be had in sets at very low prices—and in nosing about among these I fell, one day, upon two small red volumes called Mosses from an Old Manse. Of course I had read of the author, for these books were listed in my History of American Literature, but I had never, up to this moment, dared to open one of them. I was a discoverer.
I turned a page or two, and instantly my mental horizon widened. When I had finished the Artist of the Beautiful, the great Puritan romancer had laid his spell upon me everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I secured the other and devoted myself to it with almost equal intensity. The stately diction, the rich and glowing imagery, the mystical radiance, and the aloofness of the author's personality all united to create in me a worshipful admiration which made all other interests pale and faint. It was my first profound literary passion and I was dazzled by the glory of it.
It would be a pleasant task to say that this book determined my career—it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. On the contrary, I realized that this great poet (to me he was a poet) like Edgar Allan Poe, was a soul that dwelt apart from ordinary mortals.
To me he was a magician, a weaver of magic spells, a dreamer whose visions comprehended the half-lights, the borderlands, of the human soul. I loved the roll of his words in The March of Time and the quaint phrasing of the Rill from the Town Pump; Rappacini's Daughter whose breath poisoned the insects in the air, uplifted me. Drowne and His Wooden Image, the Great Stone Face—each story had its special appeal. For days I walked amid enchanted mist, my partner—(even the maidens I most admired), became less appealing, less necessary to me. Eager to know more of this necromancer I searched the town for others of his books, but found only American Notes and the Scarlet Letter.
Gradually I returned to something like my normal interests in baseball and my classmates, but never again did I fall to the low level of Jack Harkaway. I now possessed a literary touchstone with which I tested the quality of other books and other minds, and my intellectual arrogance, I fear, sometimes made me an unpleasant companion. The fact that Ethel did not "like" Hawthorne, sank her to a lower level in my estimation.