I followed into the old fashioned diningroom, with its table covered with a red cotton cloth, and there was the girl simpering and mock-shy, looking down after one appealing glance at me, and wanting to know if I wouldn’t please show her how to translate this sentence!
We sat down in adjoining chairs. It was well, for my knees were rapidly giving way. I was dunce enough to look at her book instead of her, but at that her head came so close that her hair brushed my cheek. My tongue by then was swollen to nine times its normal proportions. Nevertheless I managed to say something—God only knows what. My hands were shaking like leaves. She could not have failed to notice. Possibly she took pity on me, for she looked at me coyly, laughed off her alleged need, inquired if I was taking Latin, and wanted to know if I wasn’t from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She knew a boy who had been here the year before who looked like me, and he was from Fort Wayne.
With all these aids I could do nothing. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t think of a single blessed thing to say. It never occurred to me to tease her, or to tell her how pretty she looked, or frankly to confess that I knew nothing of Latin but that I liked her, and to jest with her about love and boys. That was years beyond me. I was actually so helpless that in pity, or disgust, she finally exclaimed, “Oh, well, I think I can get along now. I’m so much obliged to you”—and then jumped up and ran away.
I went back to my room to hide my head and to bemoan my cowardice and think over the things I should have said and done and the things I would do tomorrow or the next time I met her. But there never was any next time. She never troubled to look so teasingly out of her window. Thereafter when she passed the house she ran and seemed absorbed in something else. If, unavoidably, our eyes met, she nodded, but only in a neighborly way. And then in a few days, the aforesaid William Wadhams appeared upon the scene, gallant roysterer that he was, and made short work of her. One glance and there was a smile, a wave of the hand. The next afternoon he was leaning over her fence talking in the most gallant fashion. There was a gay chase a day or two later, in and out of bushes and around trees, in an attempt to kiss her, but she got away, leaving a slipper behind her which he captured and kept while he argued with her through her window. Later on there were other meetings. She went on a drive with him somewhere one Sunday afternoon. In my chagrined presence he discanted on having kissed her, and on what a peach she was. It was a pathetic, discouraging situation for me, but the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong, and so I told myself at the time. I really did not resent his victory. I liked him too much. But I developed a kind of horror of my own cowardice, a contempt for my ineptness, which in later years, year by year, finally built up a kind of courage.
There was another girl, fifteen or sixteen, across the street from me, the daughter of a doctor, living in a low, graceful, romantic cottage, fronted by trees and flowers. She inspired me with an entirely different kind of passion. The first was heavily admixed with desire—the girl who approached me inspired it. In the second case it was wholly sexless, something which sprang like a white flame at the sight of a delicate, romantic face, and while it tortured me for years, never went beyond the utmost outposts of romance. Although later I often fell in love with others, still I could never quite get her out of my mind. And though she colored this whole year for me, desperately, I never even spoke to her.
I first saw her coming home from school, a slim, delicate, tenuous type, her black hair smoothed back from her brow, her thin, slender white hands holding a few books, a long cape or mackintosh hung loosely about her shoulders, and—I adored her at sight. The fictional representations of Dante’s Beatrice are the only ones that have ever represented her to me. I looked after her day after day until finally she noticed me. Once she paused as she went into her home, her books under her arm, and picking a flower stood and held it to her face, glancing only once in my direction. Then she danced lightly up her steps and disappeared. At other times, as she would pass, she would glance at me furtively, and then seem to hurry on. She seemed terrorized by my admiration. I did my best to screw up my courage to the point of being able to address her, and yet I never did. There were so many opportunities, too! Daily she went to the post office or down town for something or other, nearly every afternoon she came home along the same street, and most often alone. With some girls, or her sister, who was learning to play the violin, she went to church of a Wednesday and Sunday evening. I followed her and attended that church—or waited outside. Once in January, right after the Christmas holidays, there was a heavy snow fall and we had sleighing on this very street. She came out with her sled one Saturday morning and looked over at me where I was sitting by my window, studying. I wanted to go forth and speak to her on this hill—there were so few there—but I was afraid. And she sledded alone!
Then as the year drifted toward spring, I wrote her a note. I composed fifteen before I wrote this one, asking her if she would not come down to the campus stile after she had put her books away—that I wanted to talk with her. It was a foolish note, quite an impossible proposition for a girl of her years—frightening. All I had to say I could have said, falling in step with her at some point, and beginning a friendly, innocent conversation. But I was too wrought up and too cowardly to be able to do the natural thing.
After days of preliminary meditation I finally met her in her accustomed path, and handed her the paper. She took it with a frightened, averted glance—there was a look of actual fear in her eyes—and hurried on. I went to the stile, but she did not come. I saw her afterward, but she turned away, not in opposition, I could see that, but in fright. That night I saw her come to the window and look over at my window, but when she saw me looking she quickly drew the blind. Thereafter she would look regularly, and one evening, after putting away her books, I saw her walk down to the stile, but now I was too frightened to follow. And so it went until the end of the second semester, when, because of room changes and most of the crowd I was familiar with moving to the district immediately south of the college, I felt obliged to move also. Besides, by now I had given up in despair. I felt that she must feel and see that I was without vitality—and as for my opinion of myself, it is beyond description.
I left, but often of an evening in the spring I used to come and look at her windows, the lighted lamp inside communicating a pale luster to them. I was miserably, painfully unhappy and sad. But I never spoke. The very last day of my stay but one, in the evening, I went again—just to see.
What better tribute could I pay to beauty in youth!