CHAPTER XXXIXTHE 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 tworooms 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.
“Come right up, neighbor,” he volunteered. “I’ll be only too glad to let you see. You’ll have to excuse the looks of the place. My son and I live here alone, bachelor style. I’ve been out in the country today with him hunting. He’s only fifteen years old.”
We ascended the stairs, and he unlocked the door to my old rooms and let me in—the rooms where Ed and I and Tillie (or whichever other brother or sister happened to be here at the time) were separately provided for. It was a suite of three rooms, one large and two small, opening out on the north, east, and south, via windows to the garden below. In summer, and even in winter,these rooms were always ideal, warmed as they were by an open fire, but in summer they were especially cool and refreshing, there being an attic above which broke the heat—delightful chambers in which to read or sleep. We never had much furniture (a blessing, I take it, because of the sense of space which results) but what we had was comfortable enough and ample for all our needs. In my day there was a bed and a dressing stand and mirror in each of these rooms, and then chairs, and in the larger room of the three, quite double the size of the other two, a square reading table of cheap oak by which I used to sit and work at times, getting my lessons. In the main it was a delight to sit here of a hot summer day, looking out on the surrounding world and the trees, and reading betimes. Here I read Shakespeare and a part of Macaulay’s “History of England” and Taine’s “History of English Literature” and a part of Guizot’s “History of France.” I was not an omnivorous reader—just a slow, idle, rambling one—but these rooms and these books, and the thought of happy days to come, made it all a wonder world to me. We had enough to live on. The problem of financing our lives was not as yet distracting me. I longed for a little money, but not much, and life, life, life—all its brilliant pyrotechnic meanings—was before me, still to come.
“It’s not very tidy in here,” said my host, apologetically, as he opened the door. “Take a chair, neighbor. We live as though we were camping out. Ever since my wife died and my oldest boy went into the navy, I stopped trying to keep house much. Me and Harry—that’s my youngest boy—take pot luck here. We do our own housekeeping. I’ve just suffered a great blow in the death of my oldest boy over at the Dardanelles. When he left the navy he went into the Australian Army, and they made him a captain and then when this war broke out his company was sent to the Dardanelles and he went along and has just been killed over there.”
“It’s very sad,” I said, looking about at the beggarly and disorderly furniture. In one room I could see ashabbily gotten up and unmade bed. In this room was an iron cook stove, pots and pans, a litter of guns, saws, fishing poles, and the like.
“Yes,” went on my host heavily, and with a keen narrative sense which was very pleasing to listen to, “he was an extra fine boy, really. He graduated here at the high school before he went into the marines, and stood high in all his classes. Everybody liked him,—a nice, straight-talking young fellow, if I do say it.”
He arose, crossed to an old yellow bureau, and took out a picture of a young fellow of about twentysix or twentyeight, in the uniform of an Australian captain of infantry.
“The way he came to get into the Australian Army,” he went on, looking fondly at the picture, “was—he was over there with one of our ships and they took a liking to him and offered him more pay. He was always a great fellow for athletics and he used to send me pictures of himself as amateur champion of this or that ship, boxing. They got his regiment over there on that peninsula, and just mowed it down, I hear. You know,” he said suddenly, his voice beginning to tremble and break, “I just can’t believe it. I had a letter from him only three weeks ago saying how fine he was feeling, and how interesting it all was.—And now he’s dead.”
A hot tear fell on a wrinkled hand.
“Yes, I know,” I replied, moved at last. I had been so interested in my own connection with this place and the memories that were swarming upon me that I had been overlooking his. I now felt very sorry for him.
“You know,” he persisted, surveying me with aged and wrinkled eyes, “he wasn’t just an ordinary boy. I have letters here”—and now he fumbled around for something else—"from Lord Kitchener and the King and Queen of England and the Colonel of his regiment." (His voice broke completely, but after a time he went on:) “They all said what a fine fellow he was and what a loss his death is. It’s pretty hard when you’re so fond of anybody.”
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, JudsonMorris, 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 browncomplexion, 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 throughour 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.