DAY 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 of an 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
Chicago _Daily News_ or _Die Wahrheit’s Freund_, issued in Cincinnati,
or _Die 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 was always doubtful 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 were
_Leslie’s Magazine_ and _Godey’s Lady Book_, or some of the newer but
then not startlingly brilliant magazines—_Scribner’s_ or _Harper’s_. For
my part I preferred _Truth_, or _Life_, or _Puck_, or _Judge_,
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
the thought 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!