This unhappy end of Will Yaisley was all the more startling when I contrasted it with what I had known of him (1884-1886). Then he was a youth of twenty or twentyone or two, clerking in his father’s store, which was the largest in town, and living in this fine house which was now a K. of P. Club. He was brisk and stocky and red-headed—his sister Dora had glints of red in her hair—and, like the rest of this family, was vain and supercilious.

Aphrodite had many devotees in this simple Christian village. The soil of the town, its lakes and groves, seemed to generate a kind of madness in us all. I recall that during the short time I was there, there was scandal after scandal, and seemingly innocent sex attractions, which sprang up between boys and girls whom I knew, ended disastrously after I had departed. One of the boys already referred to was found, after he was dead, to have left a pretty, oversexed school girl, whom I also knew, enceinte. The son of one of the richest land owners and a brother of a very pretty school girl who sat near me in first year high, was found, the year after I left, to have seduced a lovely tall girl with fair hair and blue eyes, who lived only two blocks from us. The story went round (it was retailed to me in Chicago) that she got down on her knees to him (how should anyone have seen her do that?) and on his refusing to marry her, committed suicide by swallowing poison. Her death by suicide, and the fact that he had been courting her, were true enough. I personally know of three other girls, all beauties, and all feverish with desire (how keen is the natural urge to sex!) who were easily persuaded, no doubt, and had to be sent away so that the scandal of having a child at home, without having a husband to vouch for it, might be hushed up.

Poor, dogma-bound humanity! How painfully we weave our way through the mysteries, once desire has trapped us!

CHAPTER XXXVII
THE OLD HOUSE

Dora Yaisley and her sister, insofar as I could learn this day, had fared no better than some of the others. Indeed, life had slipped along for all and made my generation, or many of the figures in it, at least, seem like the decaying leaves that one finds under the new green shoots and foliage of a later spring. Dora had married a lawyer from some other town, so my gossip believed, but later, talking to another old resident and one who remembered me, I was told that she had run away and turned up married—to leave again and live in another place. As for another beauty of my day, it was said that she had been seen in hotels in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne with some man not her husband. The book man with whom I first talked volunteered this information.

“But she’s working now right here in Warsaw,” he volunteered a little later. “If you know her, you might go to see her. I’m sure she’d be glad to see you. She hasn’t any relative around now.”

“You don’t say!” I exclaimed, astonished. “Is she as good looking as ever?”

“No,” he replied with a faint wryness of expression, “she’s not beautiful any more. She must be over forty. But she’s a very nice woman. I see her around here occasionally. She goes regularly to my church.”

After browsing here so long with this man, Franklin having gone to seek something else, I returned to the car and requested that we proceed out Centre Street to the second house in which we had lived—the Thralls Mansion—that having been the most important and the more picturesque of the two. On nearing it I was again surprised and indeed given a sharp, psychic wrench which endured for hours and subsequently gave me a splitting headache. It was not gone, oh, no, not the formal walls, but everything else was. Formerly, in my day, there had been a large grove of pines here, with interludes, in one of which flourished five chestnut trees, yielding us all the chestnuts we could use; in another a group of orchard trees, apples, pears, peaches, cherries. The house itself stood on a slope which led down to a pond of considerable size, on which of a moonlight night, when our parents would not permit us to go farther, we were wont to skate. On the other side of this pond, to the southeast of it, was a saw and furniture mill, and about it, on at least two sides, were scattered dozens upon dozens of oak, walnut and other varieties of logs, stored here pending their use in the mill. Jumping logs was a favorite sport of all us school boys from all parts of the town—getting poles and leaping from pile to pile like flying squirrels. It was a regular Saturday morning and week day evening performance, until our mother’s or sister’s or brother’s warning voices could be heard calling us hence. From my bedroom window on the second floor, I could contemplate this pond and field, hear the pleasant droning of the saw and planes of the mill, and see the face of the town clock in the court house tower, lighted at night, and hear the voice of its bell tolling the hours regularly day and night.

This house found and has retained a place in my affections which has never been disturbed by any other—and I have lived in many. It was so simple—two stories on the north side, three on the south, where the hill declined sharply, and containing eleven rooms and two cellar rooms, most convenient to our kitchen and dining-room.