Chapter 3

"--had to bring you out here ... the women are too chicken-hearted--they stop me too soon...."

"--Pity your pa's away ... don't do to leave a kid alone with women folks ... they don't make him walk the chalk enough!"

It was about an hour after sunrise. We had come to an open field among trees. Lan set down his gun against a tree-trunk.

"--needn't make to run ... I can catch you, no matter how fast you go."

He cut a heavy stick from a hickory.

"Come on and take your medicine ... I'm goin' away to-morrow to Halton, and I want to leave you something to remember me by--so that you'll obey Ma and Millie while I'm gone. If you don't, when I come back, you'll catch it all over again."

My heart was going like a steam engine. At the last moment I started to run, my legs sinking beneath me. He was upon me with my first few steps, and had me by the scruff of the neck, and brought down the cudgel over me.

Then an amazing thing happened inside me. It seemed that the blows were descending on someone else, not me. The pain of them was a dull, far-away thing. Weak, fragile child that I was (known among the other children as "Skinny Gregory" and "Spider-Legs") a man's slow fury was kindling in me ... let Lan beat me for a year. It didn't matter. When I grew up I would kill him for this.

I began to curse boldly at him, calling him by all the obscene terms I had ever learned or heard. This, and the astounding fact that I no longer squirmed nor cried out, but physically yielded to him, as limp as an empty sack, brought him to a puzzled stop. But he sent me an extra blow for good measure as he flung me aside. That blow rattled about my head, missing my shoulders at which it had been aimed. I saw a shower of hot sparks soaring upward into a black void.

I woke with water trickling down my face and all over me. I heard, far off, my uncle's voice calling, cajoling, coaxing, with great fright sounding through it....

"Johnnie, Johnnie ... I'm so sorry ... Johnnie, only speak to me!" He was behaving exactly like Aunt Millie when she had St. Vitus' dance.

He began tending me gently like a woman. He built a fire and made some coffee over it--he had brought coffee and some lunch. I crouched white and still, saying not a word.

Landon squatted with his back turned, watching the coffee. His shotgun, leaning against the tree-trunk, caught my eye. I crept toward that shotgun. I trembled with anticipatory pleasure. God, but now I would pay him back!...

But it was too heavy. I had struggled and brought it up, however, half to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan. He looked about.

He went as pale as a sheet of paper.

"--God, Johnnie!" he almost screamed my name.

I dropped the gun in the grass, sullenly, never speaking.

"Johnnie, were you--were you?" he faltered, unnerved.

"Yes, I was going to give you both barrels ... and I'm sorry I didn't."

All his desire to whip me had gone up like smoke.

"Yes, and I'll tell you what, you big, dirty ----, I'll kill you yet, when I grow big."

* * * * *

That night I fainted at supper. When Granma put me to bed she saw how bruised and wealed I was all over ... for the first time she went after Uncle Lan--turned into a furious thing.

* * * * *

Shortly after, I was taken sick with typhoid fever. They used the starvation cure for it, in those days. When they began to give me solid food, I chased single grains of rice that fell out of the plate, about the quilt, just as a jeweller would pearls, if a necklace of them broke.

* * * * *

With my recovery came news, after many days, of my father.

The Hunkies were pushing out the Irish from the mills--cheaper labour. My grandmother could not afford to board the Hunkies, they lived so cheaply. Renewed poverty was breaking our household up.

My grandmother was about to begin her living about from house to house with her married sons and daughters.

My father was sending for me to come East. He had a good job there in the Composite Works at Haberford. He was at last able to take care of his son--his only child.

* * * * *

My grandmother and my aunt Millie took me to the railroad station. I tried to be brave and not cry. I succeeded, till the train began to pull out. Then I cried very much.

The face of my grandmother pulled awry with grief and flowing tears. Aunt Millie wept, too.

No, I wouldn't leave them. I would stay with them, work till I was rich and prosperous, never marry, give all my life to taking care of them, to saving them from the bitter grinding poverty we had shared together.

I ran into the vestibule. But the train was gathering speed so rapidly that I did not dare jump off.

I took my seat again. Soon my tears dried.

The trees flapped by. The telegraph poles danced off in irregular lines. I became acquainted with my fellow passengers. I was happy.

I made romance out of every red and green lamp in the railroad yards we passed through, out of the dingy little restaurants in which I ate....

The mysterious swaying to and fro of the curtains in the sleeper thrilled me, as I looked out from my narrow berth.

In the smoker I listened till late to the talk of the drummers who clenched big black cigars between their teeth, or slender Pittsburgh stogies, expertly flicking off the grey ash with their little fingers, as they yarned.

I wore a tag on my coat lapel with my name and destination written on it. My grandmother had put it there in a painful, scrawling hand.

* * * * *

The swing out over wide, salt-bitten marshes, the Jersey marshes grey and smoky before dawn!... then, far off, on the horizon line, New York, serrate, mountainous, going upward great and shining in the still dawn!

* * * * *

Beneath a high, vast, clamorous roof of glass....

As I stepped down to the platform my father met me.

I knew him instantly though it had been years since I had seen him.

* * * * *

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.

I was absent several weeks.

When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I grew talkative about my adventures, too.

I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips to dry.

In the Composite Works I discovered a new world--the world of factory life.

I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell as of rubbed amber--the characteristic smell of composite when subjected to friction....

And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social unease do.

They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong, sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts ... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.

Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding, squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with women.

They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it, laughing grimly with the "boys."

Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to themselves.

In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure to be hit as you passed through.

The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness, dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked, jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the eye-pits of a skull.

* * * * *

"Well, they don't _have_ to work in there unless they want to, do they?"

"Ah, they're only a lot of foreigners anyhow."

* * * * *

Three dollars a week was a lot of money for me ... a fortune, because I had never owned anything higher than nickles and dimes before.

And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned, to do with as I wished. Later on he made me save two dollars a week.

Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap, second hand ones, at Breasted's book store.

Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.

My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume. It was the only book he cared for, outside of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, together with, of course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret societies.

At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic learning that drew me to Byron. I became enamoured of the Latin and Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in _Hours of Idleness_, and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the lamp light. And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my own.

Then I began to read--_Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus_--the Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Prisoner of Chillon_.

The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my hair in the Byronic style.

"I see you're discovering Byron," my father laughed.

Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had evidently overlooked, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_. And he quoted me the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.

From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was beginning to devour my days.

I read and pondered, shaking with eagerness, the stories of Haidee, of Antonia and Julia--the tale of the dream of Dudu. I dwelt in a musk-scented room of imagination. Silver fountains played about me. Light forms flowed and undulated in white draperies over mosaiced pavements ... flashing dark eyes shone mysteriously and amorously, starry through curtains and veils.

My every thought was alert with naïve, speculative curiosity concerning the mystery of woman.

Through Byron I learned about Moore. I procured the latter's _Lalla Rookh_, his odes of Anacreon.

From Byron and Moore I built up an adolescent ideal of woman,--exquisitely sensual and sexual, and yet an angel, superior to men: an ideal of a fellow creature who was both a living, breathing mystery and a walking sweetmeat ... a white creation moved and actuated by instinct and intuition--a perpetually inexplicable ecstasy and madness to man.

I drew more and more apart to myself. Always looked upon as queer by the good, bourgeois families that surrounded us, I was now considered madder still.

* * * * *

How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side, wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the stars--or, maybe,--more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling minstrel--in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world--to have come to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in the world, one who was innocent of what man meant. And together we would learn the mystery of life, and live in mutual purity and innocence.

* * * * *

The strangeness of my physical person lured me. I marvelled at, scrutinised intimately the wonder of myself. I was insatiable in my curiosities.

* * * * *

My discovery of my body, and my books, held me in equal bondage. I neglected my work in the drying room. My father was vexed. He'd hunt me out of the obscure corners back of the hanging sheets of composite where I hid, absorbed in myself and the book I held, and would run me back to work.

* * * * *

One day, in the factory, two other boys on an errand from another department, came back where I sat, in a hidden nook, reading Thompson's _Seasons_. One of them spit over my shoulder, between the leaves. I leaped to my feet, infuriated, and a fight began. The desecration of my beloved poetry gave me such angry strength that I struck out lustily and dropped both of them....

Rushing in on the uproar and blaming me for it, my father seized me by the collar. He booted the other boys off, who were by this time on their feet again, took me up into the water-tower, and beat me with one of the heavy sticks, with metal clips on it, that was used for hanging the composite on.

Still trembling with the fight, I shook with a superadded ague of fear. My father's chastisement brought back to me with a chill the remembrance of the beatings Uncle Landon had given me.

* * * * *

"By God, Johnnie, this is the only thing there's left to do with you." He flung me aside. I lay there sobbing.

"Tell me, my boy, what _is_ the matter with you?" he asked, softening. Unlike Landon, he was usually gentle with me. He seldom treated me harshly.

"Father, I don't want to work any more."

"Don't want to work?... but you quit school just to _go_ to work, at your own wish!"

"I want to go back to school!"

"Back to school?... you'll be behind the rest by now."

"I've been studying a lot by myself," I replied, forgetting the feel of the stick already and absorbed in the new idea.

By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my father's desk. He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as composite). He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were smoking.

"Look here, my son, what _is_ the matter with you ... won't you tell your daddy?"

"Nothing's the matter with me, Pop!"

"You're getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?"

"No, Pop!"

"You're a queer little duck."

There was a long silence.

"You're always reading ... good books too ... yet you're no more good in school than you are at work ... I can't make you out, by the living God, I can't ... what is it you want to be?"

"I don't know, only I want to go back to school again."

"But what did you leave for?"

"I hated arithmetic."

"What do you want to study, then?"

"Languages."

"Would you like a special course in the high school?