CHAPTER IX
1
In the Brailsford Junction Public Library where the youth of the town came to make love, look at classic nudes, peruse the stimulating success stories to be found in the Alger books, explore the jungles with Livingstone and Stanley, sigh and weep with the Victorian poets, wallow in Cooper, Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott and General Lew Wallace, and if special favorites of the Librarian to visit the restricted shelves where such infamous authors as Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Anatole France and Theodore Dreiser languished in sin....
In this den of vicarious iniquity Peter Brailsford found companions more in harmony with his spirit than in the town itself, which just now was banking around its houses with manure, putting up storm doors, and getting out long underwear, fur caps, and mackinaws.
Here were Hamlets who wandered brooding and mourning even as Peter brooded and mourned. Here were flaming young women who spoke in well-rounded phrases to dashing, intelligent young men who really got somewhere in life. Here were Poetic heroes off on their tremendous Odysseys through wine-dark seas. Soldiers of Fortune easily subduing whole South American Republics.
Reading had been something of a chore while he was still in high school. Now he read for the joy of reading, everything he could get his hands on from Dumas to Ibsen and from Rider Haggard to Shakespeare.
Haggard's terrific tales curdled his blood and started him off on the chain of episodes in his own life which bothered his dreams. The great men who had stood beside his bed at night bringing their huge faces closer and closer until he awoke in a cold sweat; the fear of God which had made his childhood miserable, the early fear of railroad trains which during his fourth and fifth years had sent him terrified into the cellar whenever he heard the distant whistle and the clanging of the bell; night fears as when he had gone down into the woods to find a calf and had heard the stealthy whisper of some unseen thing passing through the deep grass; the fear of death and the absolute finality of damnation.
Other authors started other trains of thought in his mind: nostalgic, wistful, lonely thoughts of the time when he had been lost and his mother and father had come hunting him with a lantern. He had heard them calling far off through the rain-wet woods. They had wrapped him in a blanket and they had driven for miles in the horse and buggy until at last they were at home again; thoughts of his mother coming to tuck him in at night and how desperately he wanted her to come and how fearful he was that she might forget; thoughts of the picnic to which he was not invited and how he had lain beneath the lilac bush watching the other children going by with their picnic baskets. (Often he was homesick for the farm.)