Tramping on Life Part 10

Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_.

Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.

The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life, exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.

Whitman's _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ became my Bible.

It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been working evil on myself ... through an advertis.e.m.e.nt of a quack in a daily paper.

And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner still. I fell into a hacking cough.

And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.

Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....

I procured books about s.e.xual life. My most cherished volume was an old family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water, that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.

In the book was a picture of a nude woman, ent.i.tled _The Female Form Divine_. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my pillow.

I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind to me....

Again: my imagination grew to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns, skeletons. How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so enamoured of. The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he had done, to stay up all night, night after night, studying....

After the surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist, several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that s.p.a.ce I would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied ent.i.ty. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would come rus.h.i.+ng from my pen. I must hurry with them before my early death overtook me.

There were two visions I saw continually in my sleep:

One was of myself walking with a proud step down a vast hall, the usual wreath of fame on my head. I wore a sort of toga. And of course a great concourse of people stood apart in silent reverence on either side, gazing at me admiringly. With the thunder of their hand-clapping I would wake.

The other dream was of being buried alive.

I lay there, smelling the dark earth, and not being able to stir so much as the last joint of my little finger. Yet every nerve of me ached with sentience.. and I woke gasping, my face bathed with tears and the moisture of terror.

From head to foot hot flushes swept over me. And I was stung with the p.r.i.c.king of a million needles, going in sharply at every pore!... was bathed in cold sweats. And I hoped I was dying.

"Johnnie, what are you doing to yourself?" And my father fixed his eyes on me.

"Nothing, Father!"

"If you weren't such a good boy, I'd--" and he halted, to continue, "as it is, you're a clean boy, and I'm proud of you."

I struggled hard to speak with him, to make a confidant of him, but I could not.

"I wonder," he added with alarm in his voice, "I wonder if you're catching consumption, the disease your mother died of ... you must be careful of yourself."

I told him I would be careful....

"I think I'll send you back home to visit the folks this fall."

There was a restaurant just around the corner from where we lived in our second story flat--a restaurant which bore the legend stuck up in the window, "Home Cooking." The sign itself was of a dull, dirty, fly-specked white which ought to have been a sufficient warning to the nice palate.

The place was run by a family of three ... there was Mister Brown, the man, a huge-built, blotch-faced, retired stone-mason, his meagre little wife, Mrs. Brown, and their gra.s.s-widow daughter, Flora.... Flora did but little work, except to lean familiarly and with an air of unspoken intimacy, over the tables of the men, as she slouched up with their food ... and she liked to sit outside in the back yard when there was suns.h.i.+ne ... in the hammock for more comfort ... sh.e.l.ling peas or languidly peeling potatoes.

Flora's vibrant, little, wasplike mother whose nose was so sharp and red that it made me think of Paul's ferret--she bustled and buzzed about, doing most of the work.

Looking out from our back window, I could see Flora lolling, and I would read or write a little and then the unrest would become too strong and I would go down to her. Soon two potato knives would be working.

"Come and sit by me in the hammock."

I liked that invitation ... she was plump to heaviness and sitting in the hammock crushed us pleasantly together.

This almost daily propinquity goaded my adolescent hunger into an infatuation for her,--I thought I was in love with her,--though I never quite reconciled myself to the cowlikeness with which she chewed gum.

She was as free and frank of herself as I was curious and timid.

"Johnnie, what small feet and little hands you have ... you're a regular aristocrat."

A pause.

I give her a poem written to her. She reads it, letting her knife stick in a half-peeled potato. She looks up at me out of heavy-lidded eyes.

"I believe you're falling in love with me."

I trembled, answered nothing, was silent.

"Kiss me!"

Seeing me so a-tremble, she obeyed her own injunction. With slow deliberation she crushed her lips, full and voluptuous, into mine. The warmth of them seemed to catch hold of something deep down in me, and, with exquisite painfulness, draw it out. Blinded with emotion, I clutched close to her. She laughed. I put one hand over her full breast as infants do. She pushed me back.

"There, that's enough for one day--a promise of sweets to come!" and she laughed again, with a hearty purr like a cat that has a mouse at its mercy.