He stopped, and I had difficulty in restraining a tendency to cry a little myself. When one gets so old and a boy is so precious—!
He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, while I read the formal acknowledgments of Colonel Barclay Sattersley, D.S.O., of Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, K.G., Secretary of State for War, and of Their Majesties, the King and Queen, formal policy letters all, intended to assuage all brokenhearted contributors to the great war. But it all rang very futile and hollow to me. The phrases of the ruling classes of England rattle like whitening bones of dead souls, anyhow.
“You know,” he added, after a time, “I can’t help thinking that there’s been an awful mistake made about that whole thing down there. His letters told me what a hard time they had landing, and how the trenches were just full of dead boys after every charge. It seems to me they might have found some other way. It looks terribly heartless to let whole regiments be wiped out.”
I learned a great deal about Warsaw and its environs from this man, for he had lived in this county and near here all his life. This house, as he described it, had been here since 1848 or thereabouts. The original owner and builder had been a judge at one time, but a loss of fortune and ill health had compelled him to part with it. His oldest and most intelligent son had been a wastrel. He occasionally came to Warsaw to look at this very house, as he had once, in our day, and to my surprise he told me he was here now, in town, loafing about the place—an old man. The houses in front had been built only a year before, so if I had come a year earlier I would still have seen the ground space about as it was, all the old trees still standing. The trees had all been cut down thirteen months before! The Grant house, in which we had first lived here, had been moved over about five years before. The school yard had been cut away about seven years before, and so it went. I asked him about George and John Sharp, Odin Oldfather, Pet Wall, Vesta Switzer, Myrtle Taylor, Judson Morris, and so on—boys and girls with whom I had gone to school. Of some he knew a little something; of others he imagined his youngest boy Harry might know. Through his eyes and his words I began to see what a long way I had come, and how my life was rounding out into something different and disturbingly remote from all I had ever known. I felt as though I were in a tomb or a garden of wraiths and shadows.
But if I was depressed here, I was even more so when I came to study the Grant house and the school itself. The former having been inhabited when my mind was in its most formative period, I was struck by the fact that nearly all its then pleasing traces had been obliterated. There was a tree outside the kitchen door from which a swing had once been suspended, and where of a morning or an evening I used to sit and meditate, admiring the skies, the schoolhouse tower, the trees, the freshness of the year. Swing and tree were gone, the house having been moved, and even a longish, parallel window through which, so often, I could see my mother cooking or working at something in the kitchen, had been done over into something else and was now no more. There had been a medium sized, handsome spear pine in the shade of which I used to lie and read of a summer (“Water Babies,” “Westward Ho,” “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of the Seven Gables,” to say nothing of much of Irving and Goldsmith). It was gone. It was around this tree that once, of a late November evening not long after we had arrived here and I had been placed in the public school, that I was chased by Augusta Nueweiler (the daughter of the clothier who now owned the dry goods store once owned by Yaisley) in a determined desire to kiss me; which she succeeded in doing. If you will believe it, although I was thirteen years of age, I had never been kissed before. Why she had been attracted to me I do not know. She was plump and pretty, with a cap of short, dark ringlets swirling about her eyes and ears, and a red and brown complexion, and an open, pretty mouth. I thought she was very beautiful.
Back of this house had been a large garden or truck patch, which we planted richly that first summer, and back of that again, a grove of tall ash trees two acres in extent. To this, during that first summer and winter, I had been wont to repair in order to climb the trees and look out upon a large marsh (it seemed large to me at that time) which contained, as its principal feature, the winding Tippecanoe River or creek, making silvery S's between the tall sedges and their brown cat tails. It was a delightful sight to me then. I used to climb so high (all alone and often) that the wind would easily rock the tall spear to which I was clinging, and then it seemed as though I were a part of heaven and the winds and all rhythmic and colorful elements above man—elements which had no part or share with him.
It was to this grove that my brother Ed and I once repaired of a Saturday morning after a Friday night party—our very first—at which a kissing game had been played and we had been kissed. Life was just dawning upon us as a garden of flowers, in which girls were the flowers. We had already been commenting on various girls at school during the past two or three months, learning to talk about and discriminate between them, and now, at this party, given at the house of one girl whom I thought to be the most perfect of all, we had been able to see twenty or thirty, decked in fineries so delicate and entrancing, that I was quite beside myself. All the girls, really, that we had come to single out as beautiful were there—wonderful girls, to my entranced eyes—and each of us, as it happened, had been called in to be kissed by girls to whom we had scarce dared to lift our eyes before. It was all in the game, and not to be repeated afterward. The moralists tell us that such games are pernicious and infective in their influence, but to memory they are entrancing. Whatever it is that is making life—throwing us on a screen of ether quite as moving pictures are thrown on canvas, to strut through our little parts—its supremest achievements, so far, are occasions such as I have been describing—moments in which the blood of youth in a boy speaks to its fellow atoms in the body of a girl and produces that astonishing reaction which causes the cheeks to mantle, the eyes to sparkle or burn, the heart to beat faster, the lungs to become suffocatingly slow in their labors.
On this particular morning, sitting in this grove now no longer present and sawing a log of wood which was ours, Ed and I tried to recall how wonderful it had been and how we felt, but it was scarcely possible. It could not be done. Instead, we merely glowed and shivered with the memory of intense emotions. And today it comes back as astonishing and perfect as ever—a chemical state, a rich, phantasmagoric memory, and never to be recaptured. I have changed too much. All of us of that day have changed too much.
I saw Ed on the street not long ago and his hair was slightly grey and he was heavy and mature. Having been here, I was tempted to ask him whether he remembered, but I refrained because I half fancied that he would not, or that he would comment on it from a lately acquired religious point of view—and then we might have quarreled.