CHAPTER XXXVIIIDAY DREAMS
But I could not bear to tear myself away so swiftly. I went round to the side door on the north side, where often of a morning, before going to school, or of an afternoon, after school, or of a Saturday or Sunday, I was wont to sit and rock and look out at the grass and trees. As I see it now, I must have been a very peculiar youth, a dreamer, for I loved to sit and dream all the while. Just outside this door was the one best patch of lawn we possessed, very smooth and green. In late October and early November days it was most wonderful to me to sit and look at the leaves falling from the trees and think on the recurrent spectacles of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and wonder at the beauty and fragrance and hope of life. Everything was before me then. That is the great riches and advantage of youth. Experience was still to come—love, travel, knowledge, friends, the spectacle and stress of life. As age creeps on one says to one’s self, Well, I will never do that any more—or that—or that. I did it once, but now it would not be interesting. The joy of its being a new thing is gone once and for all.
And so now, as I looked at this door, the thought of all this came upon me most forcibly. I could actually see myself sitting there in an old rocking chair, with my books on my knees, waiting to hear the last school bell ring, which would give me just fifteen minutes in which to get to school. It was all so perfect. Knowledge was such a solution—were they not always telling me so? If one studied one could find out about life, I thought. Somebody must know. Somebody did know. Weren’t there books here on every hand, and schools and teachers to teach us?
And there was my mother, slipping about in her old grey dress working for us, for me, and wishing so wistfully that life might do better for us all. What a wonderful woman she was, and how I really adored her—only I think she never quite understood me, or what I represented. She was so truly earnest in her efforts for us all, so eager for more life for each and every one. I can see her now with her large, round grey eyes, her placid face, her hopeful, wistful, tender expression! Dear, dear soul! Sweet dreamer of vagrom dreams! In my heart is an altar. It is of jasper and chalcedony and set with precious stones. Before it hangs a light, the lamp of memory, and to that casket which holds your poet’s soul, I offer, daily, attar and bergamot and musk and myrrh. As I write, you must know. As I write, you must understand. Your shrine is ever fragrant here.
Inside this door, when I knocked, I found a two-room apartment not much better than that of my Slavic friends upstairs. Although the young married woman, a mere girl, who opened the door, spoke English plainly, she seemed of marked Hungarian extraction, an American revision of the European peasant, but with most of the old world worn off. I had never been familiar with this type in my day. There was a baby here and a clutter of nondescript things—colored calendars and chromos on the walls; clap-trap instalment-sold furniture and the like. I made my very best bow, which is never a very graceful one, and explained why I was here. The young woman was sympathetic. Wouldn’t I come right in?
“So this is the room,” I said, standing in the first one. “My mother used to use this as a living room, and this (I walked into the next one, looking south over the vanished pond to the courthouse tower) as a sewing room. There was always such a fine morning light here.”
“Yes, there is,” she replied.
As I stood here, a host of memories crowded upon me. I might as well have been surrounded by spirits ofan 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 ChicagoDaily NewsorDie Wahrheit’s Freund, issued in Cincinnati, orDie 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 wasalwaysalwaysdoubtful 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 wereLeslie’s MagazineandGodey’s Lady Book, or some of the newer but then not startlingly brilliant magazines—Scribner’sorHarper’s. For my part I preferredTruth, orLife, orPuck, orJudge, 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 thethought 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!