THE 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 two rooms 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 a shabbily 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, Judson Morris, 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 brown complexion, 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 through our 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.