He smiled on me most genially.
What a shame to take his money, I thought. He looks as though food or decent clothes would be better for him, but what might one say? I recalled how when I was young and chronically ailing, how eagerly I clung to the thought of life, and would I not now if I were in his place? Here was I with a prescription of my own in my hand which I scarcely touched afterwards. But how near to his grave that man really was. And how futile and silly that advice about his blood sounded!
Without any special interest in Fort Wayne to delay us, and without any desire to see or do anything in particular, we made finally that memorable start for Warsaw toward which I had been looking ever since I stepped into the car in New York. Now in an hour or two or three, at the best, I would be seeing our old home, or one of them, at least, and gazing at the things which of all things identified with my youth appealed to me most. Here I had had my first taste of the public school as opposed to the Catholic or parochial school, and a delightful change it was. Warsaw was so beautiful, or seemed to me so at the time, a love of a place, with a river or small stream and several lakes and all the atmosphere of a prosperous and yet homey and home-loving resort. My mother and father and sisters and brothers were so interesting to me in those days. As in the poem of Davidson’s,
“The sounding cities, rich and warm
Smouldered and glittered in the plain.”
I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. The sun and the air and some responsive chemistry which I do not understand were making my blood into wine. Would I now be dreadfully disappointed?
Our way lay through a country more or less familiar as to its character, though I had never actually been through it except on a train. All about were small towns and lakes which I had heard of but never visited. Now it was my privilege to see them if I chose, and I felt very much elated over it all. I was interested, amused, curiosity stirred.
WITH THE OLD SETTLERS AT COLUMBIA CITY, INDIANA
But it was not until we reached Columbia City, only twenty miles from Warsaw, that my imagination was keenly aroused. Columbia City, small as it was, say fifteen or eighteen hundred at that time, and not much larger now, was another spot to which our small-town life-seeking gadabouts were wont to run on a Saturday night—for what purpose I scarcely know, since I never had sufficient means to accompany them. At that time, in that vigorously imaginative period, I conjured up all sorts of sybaritic delights, as being the end and aim of these expeditions, since the youths who comprised them were so keen in regard to all matters of sex. They seemed to be able to think of nothing else, and talked girls, girls, girls from morning to night, or made sly references to these jaunts which thereby became all the more exciting to me. Warsaw at that time was peculiarly favored with a bevy of attractive girls who kept all our youths on the qui vive as to love and their favor. With an imagination that probably far outran my years, I built up a fancy as to Columbia City which far exceeded its import, of course. To me it was a kind of Cairo of the Egyptians, with two horned Hathor in the skies, and what breaths of palms and dulcet quavers of strings and drums I know not.
These youths, who were quite smart and possessed of considerable pocket money, much more than I ever had or could get, would not have me as a companion. I was a betwixt and between soul at that time, not entirely debarred from certain phases of association and companionship with youths somewhat older than myself, and yet never included in these more private and intimate adventures to which they were constantly referring. They kept me on tenter hooks, as did the ravishing charms of so many girls about us, without my ever being satisfied. Besides, from this very town had come a girl to our Warsaw High School whom I used to contemplate with adoring eyes, she was so rounded and pink and gay. But that was all it ever came to, just that—I contemplated her from afar. I never had the courage to go near her. In the presence of most girls, especially the attractive ones, I was dumb, frozen by a nameless fear.