As I stood here, a host of memories crowded upon me. I might as well have been surrounded by spirits of an older day suggesting former things. There sat my father by that window, reading, in the morning, when he was not working, the Lives of the Saints; in the evening the Chicago Daily News or Die Wahrheit’s Freund, issued in Cincinnati, or Die Waisenfreund, issued in Dayton. A hardy, industrious man he was, so religious that he was ridiculous to me even at that time. He carried no weight with me, though he had the power and authority to make me and nearly all the others obey. I was always[always] doubtful as to just how far his temper and fuming rages would carry him. As for my mother, she usually sat in a rocking chair close to this very north door, which looked out on the grass, to read. Her favorite publications were Leslie’s Magazine and Godey’s Lady Book, or some of the newer but then not startlingly brilliant magazines—Scribner’s or Harper’s. For my part I preferred Truth, or Life, or Puck, or Judge, publications which had been introduced into our family by my brother Paul when we were living in Evansville. At this time I had found Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Fielding, Defoe, and a score of others, and had been reading, reading, reading, swiftly and with enjoyment. Cooper, Irving and Lew Wallace (“Ben Hur” at least) were a part of my mental pabulum. From the public library I drew Dryden, Pope, Shakespeare, Herrick and a dozen other English and American poets, and brought them here. I was so keenly interested in love at this time—so inoculated with the virus of the ideal in the shape of physical beauty—that any least passage in Dryden, Herrick, Pope, Shakespeare, held me as in a vise. I loved the beauty of girls. A face piquant in its delicacy, with pink cheeks, light or dark eyes, long lashes—how I tingled at the import of it! Girlhood ravished me. It set my brain and my blood aflame. I was living in some ecstatic realm which had little if anything in common with the humdrum life about me, and yet it had. Any picture or paragraph anywhere which referred to or hinted at love lifted me up into the empyrean. I was like that nun in Davidson’s poem to whom the thought of how others sinned was so moving. I never tired of hauling out and secretly reading and rereading every thought and sentence that had a suggestive, poetic turn in relation to love.
I can see some asinine moralist now preparing to rise and make a few remarks. My comment is that I despise the frozen, perverted religiosity which would make a sin of sex. Imagine the torture, the pains, the miseries which have ensued since self immolation has been raised to a virtue and a duty. Think of it—healthy animals all of us, or we ought to be—and it is a crime to think of love and sex!
CHAPTER XXXIX
THE KISS OF FAIR GUSTA
Standing in this room, looking at the place where our open fire used to be, but which was now closed up and a cooking stove substituted, and at the window where I often sat of a morning “studying” history, physical geography, geography, physiology, botany, and waiting for breakfast, or if it were afternoon and after school, for dinner, I asked myself, if I could, would I restore it all—and my answer was unhesitatingly yes. I have seen a great many things in my time, done a lot of dull ones, suffered intense shames, disgraces and privations, but all taken into account and notwithstanding, I would gladly be born again and do it all over, so much have I loved the life I have been permitted to live. Here, at this time, I was suffering from a boyish bashfulness which made me afraid of every girl. I was following this girl and that, nearly every beautiful one of my own age, with hungry eyes, too timid to speak, and yet as much as I longed and suffered on that account, I now said to myself I would gladly have it all back. I asked myself would I have mother and father, and my sisters and brothers, and all our old relatives and friends back as I knew them here, and my answer was, if it would not be an injustice to them, and if I could be as I was then and stand in the same unwitting relationship, yes. Life was intensely beautiful to me here. For all its drawbacks of money and clothes and friends it was nearly perfect. I was all but too happy, ecstatic, drunk with the spirit of all young and new things. If I were to have even more pain than I had, I think I would undertake it all gladly again.
The woman who permitted me to linger in these two rooms a few minutes informed me that the man who occupied the rooms just overhead—those back of the day laborer—was the same whose sign, “Saws Filed,” protruded from the front door. “It’s Mr. Gridley and his boy. He isn’t in yet, I think. He usually comes in, though, about this time. If you want to wait, I’m sure he’ll be glad to let you see his rooms.”
She spoke as if she knew Mr. Gridley, and I had the feeling from her very assuring words that he must be a pleasant and accommodating character.
As I went out and around to the front door again to have one more look, I saw an old man approaching across the quondam pond, carrying a small saw, and I felt sure, at sight of him, that it was Mr. Gridley. He was tall, emaciated, stoop shouldered, a pleasant and even conciliatory type, whose leathern cheeks and sunken eyes combined with a simple, unaffected and somewhat tired manner seemed to suggest one to whom life had done much, but whose courage, gentleness and patience were not by any means as yet exhausted. As he came up I observed: “This isn’t Mr. Gridley, is it?”
“Yes, sir,” he smiled. “What can I do for you?”
“You live in the rear rooms upstairs, I believe. My family used to live here, years ago. I wonder if you would mind my looking in for a moment. I merely want to see—for old time’s sake.”
His face warmed sympathetically.