* * * * *
My father whisked me once more across the long Jersey marshes. To
Haberford. There, on the edge of the town, composed of a multitude of
stone-built, separate, tin-roofed houses, stood the Composite Works. My
father was foreman of the drying department, in which the highly
inflammable sheets of composite were hung to dry....
My father rented a large, front room, with a closet for clothes, of a
commuting feed merchant named Jenkins ... whose house stood three or
four blocks distant from the works.
So we, my father and I, lived in that one room. But I had it to myself
most of the time, excepting at night, when we shared the big double bed.
* * * * *
Still only a child, I was affectionate toward him. And, till he
discouraged me, I kissed him good night every night, I liked the smell
of the cigars he smoked.
I wanted my father to be more affectionate to me, to notice me more. I
thought that a father should be something intuitively understanding and
sympathetic. And mine was offish ... of a different species.. wearing
his trousers always neatly pressed ... and his neckties--he had them
hanging in a neat, perfect row, never disarranged. The ends of them were
always pulled even over the smooth stick on which they hung.
I can see my father yet, as he stands before the mirror, painstakingly
adjusting the tie he had chosen for the day's wear.
I was not at all like him. Where I took my knee britches off, there I
dropped them. They sprawled, as if half-alive, on the floor ... my
shirt, clinging with one arm over a chair, as if to keep from falling to
the floor.. my cap, flung hurriedly into a corner.
* * * * *
"Christ, Johnnie, won't you ever learn to be neat or civilised? What
kind of a boy are you, anyhow?"
He thought I was stubborn, was determined not to obey him, for again and
again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked.
But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person
under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions.
It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind
one after another in hurried heaps of confusion. I was lost ... groping
... in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous,
shapeless thoughts.
Strange involuntary rhythms swung through my spirit and body. Fantastic
imaginations took possession of me.
And I prayed at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going
over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt
awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a
childishness, an innocence toward him.
Jenkins, the little stringy feed merchant, had two daughters, one
thirteen, Alva, and another Silvia, who was fifteen or sixteen.. and a
son, Jimmy, about seven....
It was over Alva and Silvia that my father and Jenkins used to come
together, teasing me. And, though the girls drew me with an enchanting
curiosity, I would protest that I didn't like girls ... that when I
became full-grown I would never marry, but would study books and mind my
business, single....
After this close, crafty, lascivious joking between them, my father
would end proudly with--
"Johnnie's a strange boy, he really doesn't care about such things. All
he cares about is books."
So I succeeded in completely fooling my father as to the changes going
on within me.
* * * * *
Though I had not an atom of belief left in orthodox Christianity (or
thought I had not) I still possessed this all-pervasive need to pray to
God. A need as strong as physical hunger.
Torn with these curious, new, sweet tumults, I turned to Him. And I
prayed to be pure ... like Sir Galahad, or any of the old knights who
wore their lady's favour in chastity, a male maiden,--and yet achieved
great quests and were manly in their deeds....
* * * * *
The crying and singing of the multitudinous life of insects and animals
in the spring marshes under the stars almost made me weep, as I roamed
about, distracted yet exalted, alone, at night.
I was studying the stars, locating the constellations with a little book
of star-maps I possessed.
I wanted, was in search of, something ... something ... maybe other
worlds could give this something to me ... what vistas of infinite
imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!
Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with
strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading
books on astronomy ... Newcomb ... Proctor's _Other Worlds_ ... Camille
Flammarion ... Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers ... and
novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus....
During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and
prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His
shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching
blackness of night:
"O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for
humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will
love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed--till one
day, having kept myself wholly for _her_ as she has kept herself for
me,--give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will
be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and
alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by
watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."
Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in
sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the
core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not
understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.
* * * * *
The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with
the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly "touched,"
still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars ... and about
great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology
I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification
to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of
learning....
Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature. Alva was
gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and
long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles.
In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen
stove, alone, studying our lessons,--the place given over entirely to us
for our school work.
A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was
a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my
power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each
night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be
embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,--the thought of
their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to
bed.
I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think
luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn.
* * * * *
I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by
no means my last, I hopped a freight.