CHAPTER IV
Adventures In Sex
When Marie returned to her home, she found that her father had died. It made little difference, practical or otherwise, to her or to her mother, except to make her stay in the house less dangerous, though quite as irksome, as formerly. Her mother had, of course, reproached her bitterly for her conduct in running away, and had kept up her complaint so constantly that Marie could hardly endure her home even for the night and early morning. So for that reason, as well as for the need of making her living, Marie went again into service, going quickly from one job to another in the city.
And now there came for her a period of wildness, in the ordinary sense of the word. It was not the simple joys of her Kenilworth experience. She had returned to her mother's home in a kind of despair. It seemed to her as if the innocent pleasures of life were not for her. She had been torn away from her happiness and had been compelled to go back to conditions she hated. Her passions were strong and her seventeen-year-old senses were highly developed by premature work and an irritating and ungenial home. So, in a kind of gloomy intensity, she let herself go in the ordinary way of unguarded young girlhood. She gave herself to a young fellow she met in the street one evening, without joy but with deep seriousness. She did not even explain to him that it was her first experience. She wanted nothing from him but the passionate illusion of sex. And she parted from him without tenderness and without explanations, to take up with other men and boys in the same spirit of serious recklessness. She had for the time lost hope, and therefore, of course, care for herself, and her intense and passionate nature strove to live itself out to the limit: an instinct for life and at the same time for destruction.
From this period of her life comes a story which she wrote for me, and which I quote as being typical of her attitude and as throwing light on her personality.
"The Southwest corner of State and Madison Streets is the regular rendezvous of all sorts of men. They can be seen standing there every afternoon and evening, gazing at the surging crowd which passes by. One sees day after day the same faces, and one wonders why they are there, for what they are looking. Some of these men have brutal, sensual faces; others are cynical-looking and sneer. These, it seems, nothing can move or surprise. They have a look which says: 'Oh, I know you, I have met your kind before. You do not move me, nothing can. I have tried everything, there is nothing new for me.' And yet they cannot tear themselves away from this corner, coming day after day and night after night, hoping against hope for some new adventure.
"Others stand there like owls, stupidly staring at the rushing tide of faces. They see nothing, and yet are seemingly hypnotised by the panorama of life. Here, too, pass the girls with the blond hair and the painted faces; they ogle the men, and as they cross the street raise their silken skirts a trifle, showing a bit of gay stocking. Here, too, is the secret meeting-place of lovers, who clasp hands furtively, glancing around with stealth. All this is seen by the sensual men, who glance enviously at the lovers, and by the cynical men whose cold smiles seem to say: 'Bah! how tiresome! wait, and your silly meetings will not be so charming!'
"On my evenings off I had sometimes stopped to gaze at this, to me, strangely moving sight. I saw in it then what I could not have seen a few months before; but not as much as I can see now. Then it excited me with the sense of a possible adventure. Strange, but I never went there when I was happy, only when I was uncommonly depressed.
"On a chilly Sunday evening in October I was waiting on this corner to take a car to the furnished room of a factory girl, named Alice, whom I knew was out of town. As I was out of a job and did not want to go home, I had availed myself of her place for a few days. As I was waiting on this corner, I saw a face in the crowd that attracted me. It was, as I afterward learned, the face of a club man, who had, on this Sunday evening, drifted with the crowd and landed at this spot. He, too, had stopped and gazed around him, idly. Several times he started as if to move on, but he apparently thought this place as good as any other, and so remained. He seemed not to know what to do, to be tired of himself. His face was quite the ordinary American type, clean-cut features, rather thin and cold, with honest grey eyes, but, in his case, a mouth rather sensuous and a general air of curiosity and life which interested me.