My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead. I didn't like
the looks of it, nor the life. I didn't care for the drinking, nor the
vagrancy of it, and I wandered back to the Oakland Free Library and read
the books with greater understanding. Then, too, my mother said I had
sown my wild oats and it was time I settled down to a regular job. Also,
the family needed the money. So I got a job at the jute mills--a
ten-hour day at ten cents an hour. Despite my increase in strength and
general efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked in the
cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promise of a rise
to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. And here, so far as
John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period of innocence. I did not
know what it was to take a drink from month end to month end. Not yet
eighteen years old, healthy and with labour-hardened but unhurt muscles,
like any young animal I needed diversion, excitement, something beyond
the books and the mechanical toil.
I strayed into Young Men's Christian Associations. The life there was
healthful and athletic, but too juvenile. For me it was too late. I was
not boy, nor youth, despite my paucity of years. I had bucked big with
men. I knew mysterious and violent things. I was from the other side of
life so far as concerned the young men I encountered in the Y.M.C.A. I
spoke another language, possessed a sadder and more terrible wisdom.
(When I come to think it over, I realise now that I have never had a
boyhood.) At any rate, the Y.M.C.A. young men were too juvenile for me,
too unsophisticated. This I would not have minded, could they have met
me and helped me mentally. But I had got more out of the books than
they. Their meagre physical experiences, plus their meagre intellectual
experiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced their
wholesome morality and healthful sports.
In short, I couldn't play with the pupils of a lower grade. All the
clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me--thanks to my
earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew too much too young. And
yet, in the good time coming when alcohol is eliminated from the needs
and the institutions of men, it will be the Y.M.C.A., and similar
unthinkably better and wiser and more virile congregating-places, that
will receive the men who now go to saloons to find themselves and one
another. In the meantime, we live to-day, here and now, and we discuss
to-day, here and now.
I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills. It was hum-drum machine
toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in other ways than at a
machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had had my fill of saloons. I
wanted something new. I was growing up. I was developing unguessed and
troubling potencies and proclivities. And at this very stage,
fortunately, I met Louis Shattuck and we became chums.
Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocently devilish
young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was a sophisticated town
boy. And I wasn't a town boy at all. Louis was handsome, and graceful,
and filled with love for the girls. With him it was an exciting and
all-absorbing pursuit. I didn't know anything about girls. I had been
too busy being a man. This was an entirely new phase of existence which
had escaped me. And when I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat
to a girl of his acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down the
sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to play this
game.
"Well, there's only one thing to do," said Louis, "and that is, you must
get a girl."
Which is more difficult than it sounds. Let me show you, at the expense
of a slight going aside. Louis did not know girls in their home life.
He had the entree to no girl's home. And of course, I, a stranger in
this new world, was similarly circumstanced. But, further, Louis and I
were unable to go to dancing-schools, or to public dances, which were
very good places for getting acquainted. We didn't have the money. He
was a blacksmith's apprentice, and was earning but slightly more than I.
We both lived at home and paid our way. When we had done this, and
bought our cigarettes, and the inevitable clothes and shoes, there
remained to each of us, for personal spending, a sum that varied between
seventy cents and a dollar for the week. We whacked this up, shared it,
and sometimes loaned all of what was left of it when one of us needed it
for some more gorgeous girl-adventure, such as car-fare out to Blair's
Park and back--twenty cents, bang, just like that; and ice-cream for
two--thirty cents; or tamales in a tamale-parlour, which came cheaper and
which for two cost only twenty cents.
I did not mind this money meagreness. The disdain I had learned for
money from the oyster pirates had never left me. I didn't care
over-weeningly for it for personal gratification; and in my philosophy I
completed the circle, finding myself as equable with the lack of a
ten-cent piece as I was with the squandering of scores of dollars in
calling all men and hangers-on up to the bar to drink with me.
But how to get a girl? There was no girl's home to which Louis could take
me and where I might be introduced to girls. I knew none. And Louis'
several girls he wanted for himself; and anyway, in the very human nature
of boys' and girls' ways, he couldn't turn any of them over to me. He
did persuade them to bring girl-friends for me; but I found them weak
sisters, pale and ineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had.
"You'll have to do like I did," he said finally. "I got these by getting
them. You'll have to get one the same way."
And he initiated me. It must be remembered that Louis and I were hard
situated. We really had to struggle to pay our board and maintain a
decent appearance. We met each other in the evening, after the day's
work, on the street corner, or in a little candy store on a side street,
our sole frequenting-place. Here we bought our cigarettes, and,
occasionally, a nickel's worth of "red-hots." (Oh, yes; Louis and I
unblushingly ate candy--all we could get. Neither of us drank. Neither
of us ever went into a saloon.)
But the girl. In quite primitive fashion, as Louis advised me, I was to
select her and make myself acquainted with her. We strolled the streets
in the early evenings. The girls, like us, strolled in pairs. And
strolling girls will look at strolling boys who look. (And to this day,
in any town, city, or village, in which I, in my middle age, find myself,
I look on with the eye trained of old experience, and watch the sweet
innocent game played by the strolling boys and girls who just must stroll
when the spring and summer evenings call.)
The trouble was that in this Arcadian phase of my history, I, who had
come through, case-hardened, from the other side of life, was timid and
bashful. Again and again Louis nerved me up. But I didn't know girls.
They were strange and wonderful to me after my precocious man's life. I
failed of the bold front and the necessary forwardness when the crucial
moment came.
Then Louis would show me how--a certain, eloquent glance of eye, a smile,
a daring, a lifted hat, a spoken word, hesitancies, giggles, coy
nervousnesses--and, behold, Louis acquainted and nodding me up to be
introduced. But when we paired off to stroll along boy and girl
together, I noted that Louis had invariably picked the good-looker and
left to me the little lame sister.
I improved, of course, after experiences too numerous to enter upon, so
that there were divers girls to whom I could lift my hat and who would
walk beside me in the early evenings. But girl's love did not
immediately come to me. I was excited, interested, and I pursued the
quest. And the thought of drink never entered my mind. Some of Louis'
and my adventures have since given me serious pause when casting
sociological generalisations. But it was all good and innocently
youthful, and I learned one generalisation, biological rather than
sociological, namely, that the "Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are
sisters under their skins."
And before long I learned girl's love, all the dear fond deliciousness of
it, all the glory and the wonder. I shall call her Haydee. She was
between fifteen and sixteen. Her little skirt reached her shoe-tops. We
sat side by side in a Salvation Army meeting. She was not a convert, nor
was her aunt who sat on the other side of her, and who, visiting from the
country where at that time the Salvation Army was not, had dropped in to
the meeting for half an hour out of curiosity. And Louis sat beside me
and observed--I do believe he did no more than observe, because Haydee
was not his style of girl.
We did not speak, but in that great half-hour we glanced shyly at each
other, and shyly avoided or as shyly returned and met each other's
glances more than several times. She had a slender oval face. Her brown
eyes were beautiful. Her nose was a dream, as was her sweet-lipped,
petulant-hinting mouth. She wore a tam-o'-shanter, and I thought her
brown hair the prettiest shade of brown I had ever seen. And from that
single experience of half an hour I have ever since been convinced of the
reality of love at first sight.
All too soon the aunt and Haydee departed. (This is permissible at any
stage of a Salvation Army meeting.) I was no longer interested in the
meeting, and, after an appropriate interval of a couple of minutes or
less, started to leave with Louis. As we passed out, at the back of the
hall a woman recognised me with her eyes, arose, and followed me. I
shall not describe her. She was of my own kind and friendship of the old
time on the water-front. When Nelson was shot, he had died in her arms,
and she knew me as his one comrade. And she must tell me how Nelson had
died, and I did want to know; so I went with her across the width of life
from dawning boy's love for a brown-haired girl in a tam-o'-shanter back
to the old sad savagery I had known.
And when I had heard the tale, I hurried away to find Louis, fearing that
I had lost my first love with the first glimpse of her. But Louis was
dependable. Her name was--Haydee. He knew where she lived. Each day
she passed the blacksmith's shop where he worked, going to or from the
Lafayette School. Further, he had seen her on occasion with Ruth,
another schoolgirl, and, still further, Nita, who sold us red-hots at the
candy store, was a friend of Ruth. The thing to do was to go around to
the candy store and see if we could get Nita to give a note to Ruth to
give to Haydee. If this could be arranged, all I had to do was write the
note.
And it so happened. And in stolen half-hours of meeting I came to know
all the sweet madness of boy's love and girl's love. So far as it goes
it is not the biggest love in the world, but I do dare to assert that it
is the sweetest. Oh, as I look back on it! Never did girl have more
innocent boy-lover than I who had been so wicked-wise and violent beyond
my years. I didn't know the first thing about girls. I, who had been
hailed Prince of the Oyster Pirates, who could go anywhere in the world
as a man amongst men; who could sail boats, lay aloft in black and storm,
or go into the toughest hang-outs in sailor town and play my part in any
rough-house that started or call all hands to the bar--I didn't know the
first thing I might say or do with this slender little chit of a
girl-woman whose scant skirt just reached her shoe-tops and who was as
abysmally ignorant of life as I was, or thought I was, profoundly wise.
I remember we sat on a bench in the starlight. There was fully a foot of
space between us. We slightly faced each other, our near elbows on the
back of the bench; and once or twice our elbows just touched. And all
the time, deliriously happy, talking in the gentlest and most delicate
terms that might not offend her sensitive ears, I was cudgelling my
brains in an effort to divine what I was expected to do. What did girls
expect of boys, sitting on a bench and tentatively striving to find out
what love was? What did she expect me to do? Was I expected to kiss her?
Did she expect me to try? And if she did expect me, and I didn't what
would she think of me?
Ah, she was wiser than I--I know it now--the little innocent girl-woman
in her shoe-top skirt. She had known boys all her life. She encouraged
me in the ways a girl may. Her gloves were off and in one hand, and I
remember, lightly and daringly, in mock reproof for something I had said,
how she tapped my lips with a tiny flirt of those gloves. I was like to
swoon with delight. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever
happened to me. And I remember yet the faint scent that clung to those
gloves and that I breathed in the moment they touched my lips.
Then came the agony of apprehension and doubt. Should I imprison in my
hand that little hand with the dangling, scented gloves which had just
tapped my lips? Should I dare to kiss her there and then, or slip my arm
around her waist? Or dared I even sit closer?
Well, I didn't dare. I did nothing. I merely continued to sit there and
love with all my soul. And when we parted that evening I had not kissed
her. I do remember the first time I kissed her, on another evening, at
parting--a mighty moment, when I took all my heart of courage and dared.
We never succeeded in managing more than a dozen stolen meetings, and we
kissed perhaps a dozen times--as boys and girls kiss, briefly and
innocently, and wonderingly. We never went anywhere--not even to a
matinee. We once shared together five cents worth of red-hots. But I
have always fondly believed that she loved me. I know I loved her; and I
dreamed day-dreams of her for a year and more, and the memory of her is
very dear.