In the presence of a virgin something like a dawn among mountains creeps over the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon and a gentle light comes into his eyes. If he has a dress suit anywhere about he goes and puts it on. Also he gets himself a shave and a hair cut, and you would be surprised to see how everything clears up after that.
* * * * *
I, however, digress. In my enthusiasm for my fellows I jerk myself too violently out of my boyhood. No boy could so wholeheartedly appreciate or understand our national traits.
The story I had set myself down to tell was that of my own birth into the world of fancy—as opposed to the rather too realistic birth already depicted—and that, as I have explained, took place in Camden, Ohio.
Very well, then, a year has passed and I am being born a second time, as it were, but this second birth is quite different from the one in the Ohio town. There is more punch to it. Reading of it will lift you, who have been patient enough to follow me so far, out of your common everyday humdrum existences.
And if you have read Freud you will find it of additional interest that, in my fanciful birth, I have retained the very form and substance of my earthly mother while getting an entirely new father, whom I set up—making anything but a hero of him—only to sling mud at him. I am giving myself away to the initiated, that is certain.
But be that as it may, however, there is mother lying in bed in a lonely cabin on another long sandy beach, also on the Gulf of Mexico. (In my fanciful life I have always had a hunger for the warm South.) Mother has been honorably married to my fanciful father on that very evening when she went with him from among her fellow-countrymen, sitting by the fire on that other beach, and after just such a metamorphosis of his character as she had come to expect through having read American novels and through having seen two or three American plays produced in the capital of her native land.
After having secured the horses from the stable of the oyster thief they had ridden off together and had come at last into a deep forest of magnolia trees in blossom. A southern moon came up into the sky and so soft was the night, so gentle the breezes from the now distant sea, and so sweet the hum of insect life under their horses’ feet, that mother found herself speaking of her lost home and of her mother.
To my fanciful father the combination—the deep forest, the scent of the magnolia blossoms and the word “mother”—together with the fact that he was alone in a dark place with a virgin, an innocent one, these things were all irresistible to him. The metamorphosis spoken of above took place, and he proposes marriage and on the spot proposed to live a better life.
And so they rode together out of the forest and were married, but, in his case, the metamorphosis did not hold.