A Man's World. Edwards Albert

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СКАЧАТЬ regret, except Margot. The memory of the former leave-taking, how with her I had found the first realization of love, the first vague sensing of the mystic forces of life, came back to me sharply. All through the two years she had been a constant point in my thinking. I had not mooned about her sentimentally, more often than not, in the rush of work or play, I had not thought of her at all. But the vision of her had always been there, back in the holy of holies of my brain, a thing which was not to change nor fade.

      The Episcopal Church was lit up, as we drove by I could hear some laughter. I knew they were decorating it for a wedding. Margot would be there, for she was one of the bride's maids. As soon as we were out of the village I told the negro boy I had forgotten something and jumping out, I walked back into the woods and circled round to the side of the church. I put a board up under a window and looked in. There were other people there, but I saw only Margot. She was sitting apart from the laughter, weaving a wreath of ground-pine for the lectern. Her face was very sad. Of course she knew I was going away, everyone knows such things in a little village. But she held her head high. If I had called her out onto the steps, she would have asked me once more to recant. I knew it was irrevocable. The fates had made us too proud.

      I slipped down from my perch and made my way back to the buckboard. There was a wild west wind blowing, it howled and shrieked through the pines and I caught some of its fierce exultation. The summer had been bitter beyond words. The full life before me called, the life without need of hypocrisy.

      When at last I was on the train, and felt the jar as it started, I walked forward into the smoking car. As a symbol of my new liberty, as reverently as if it had been a sacrament to the Goddess of Reason, I lit a cigarette. The tears were very close to my eyes as I sat there and smoked. But the pride of martyrdom held them back. Was I not giving up even Margot for the Cause of Truth?

      III

      The College was set on a hill top, overlooking a broad fair valley. There was none of the rugged grandeur of our Tennessee Mountains, it was a softer landscape than my home country offered. But the greatest difference lay in the close packed, well tilled fields. Here and there were patches of woods, but no forest. It was an agricultural country.

      If I should set out to construct a heaven, I would build it on the lines of that old campus. Whenever nowadays I am utterly tired and long for rest, the vision comes to me of those ivy grown buildings and the rows of scrawny poplars. It is my symbol for light-hearted joy and contentment. The doleful shadow of my home did not reach so far, and I was more carefree there than I have ever been elsewhere.

      I joined heartily in the student life, played a fair game of football and excelled in the new game of tennis. There is a period at the end of adolescence when if ever, you feel an exuberance of animal well-being, when it is a pride to be able to lift a heavier weight than your neighbor, when it is a joy to feel your muscles ache with fatigue, when your whole being is opening up to a new sensation for which you know no name. I remember glorious tramps in the deep winter snow, as I look back on them I know that the thrilling zest, which then seemed to me intimately connected with the muscles of my thighs and back, was the dawning realization of the sheer beauty of the world. I spent this period at college. I suppose that is why I love the place.

      From the first only one subject of study interested me. It was not on the freshman year's curriculum. By some twist of fate "Anglo-Saxon" appealed to me vividly. I suppose it was an outgrowth from my boyish fondness for Malory's "Morte d'Arthur." In the library I found many books in the crabbed Old English of the earliest chronicles. They still seem to me the most fascinating which have ever been written. I deciphered some of them with ease. Before I could get the meat out of the others I had to master a grammar of Anglo-Saxon. All my spare moments were spent among the shelves. My classroom work was poorly done. But among the books I came into close contact with Professor Meer, the librarian and head of the English Literature Department. His specialty was Chaucer, but my interest ran back to an even earlier date. He was my second adult friend and many an evening I spent in his home. But our talk was always of literature rather than of life, of the very early days, when there were no traditions nor conventions and each writer was also a discoverer.

      A phase of life which had never before troubled me began to occupy considerable of my thought. My attention was drawn to the women question by the talk of the football men. There were two very distinct groups among the athletes; the Y.M.C.A. men and the others. It was inevitable that I should feel hostile to the former. They used the phrases, spoke the language of the Camp Meeting. With great pain and travail I had fought my way free from all that. Many of them were perhaps estimable fellows, I do not know. I did not get well acquainted with any of them. But I was surprised to find myself often ill at ease with the others. Their talk was full of vague hints which I seldom understood. They had come to college very much more sophisticated than I. In the quest for manly wisdom, I read a book on sex-matters, which I found in my fraternity house.

      It taught me very little. I have seen dozens of such books since and I cannot understand the spirit in which they are written. In the effort to be clean spirited and scientific the authors have fallen over backwards and have told their readers almost nothing at all. It was like a book which described the mechanism of a printing press without one word about its use or place in life. A printing press is a very lifeless thing unless one has some comprehension that not so much in itself but in its vast utility it is the most wonderful thing which man has made. The book which fell into my hands, described in detail, in cold blooded and rather revolting phraseology, the physiology of sex, but it gave no hint of its psychologic or social significance, it did not even remotely suggest that sooner or later everyone who read it would have to deal with sex as a problem of personal ethics. It was a poor manual for one just entering manhood.

      I had never been told anything about sex. I judged from the witticisms of the gymnasium that the others had discussed these matters a great deal in their preparatory schools. And with the added knowledge of later years, I am persuaded that my school had been unusually clean spirited. I never heard the boys talking of such things, and if any of them were getting into bad habits, they did it privately.

      These college men boasted. Of course I hid my ignorance with shame. As the football season wore on the talk became more explicit. Some of the team, after the Thanksgiving Day game, with our rival college, which ended the season, were "going into town to raise hell." The Y.M.C.A. men expected to "come right home." A week or so before the last game, Bainbridge, our captain and a senior, showed some of us a letter which a girl in town had written him. The other fellows who saw the letter thought it hilariously funny. To me it seemed strange and curious. A woman, who could have written it was something entirely foreign to my experience.

      Thanksgiving night – we had won the game – all of us, but the Y.M.C.A. men, went into town for a dinner and celebration. I happened to be the only man from my fraternity on the football team, and, when the dinner broke up, I found myself alone. My head was swimming a bit and I remember walking down the main street, trying to recall whether or not I had decided to launch out on this woman adventure. I was sure I had not expected to be left to my own resources. I was making my way towards the station to catch a train back to college, when I fell in with some of the fellows. They annexed me at once. Down the street we went, roaring out the Battle Cry of Freedom. They had an objective but every barroom we passed distracted their attention. It was the first time I had ever approached the frontier of sobriety – that night I went far over the line. Out of the muddle of it all, I remember being persuaded to climb some dark stairs and being suddenly sobered by the sight of a roomful of women. I may have been so befuddled that I am doing them an injustice, but no women ever seemed to me so nauseatingly ugly. Despite the protest of my friends, I bolted.

      It is not a pleasant experience to relate, but it kept me from what might easily have been worse. I had missed the last train. Not wanting to spend the night in a hotel, nor to meet my fellows on the morning train, I walked the ten miles out to college. Somehow the sight of those abhorrent women had driven all the fumes of alcohol from my brain. In the cold, crisp night, under the low hanging lights СКАЧАТЬ