Alec had an encyclopaedic mind,especially well stocked with the kind of knowledge I now desired;first and last he taught me much,which I would better have got in another way.To him I appealed and got the story,my worst suspicions being confirmed.Mrs.Whitcomb's house had been across the alley from that of Mr.Jennings,but no one knew that anything was "going on,"though there had been signals from the windows--the neighbours afterwards remembered....
I listened shudderingly.
"But,"I cried,"they were both married!""What difference does that make when you love a woman?"Alec replied grandly."I could tell you much worse things than that."This he proceeded to do.Fascinated,I listened with a sickening sensation.It was a mild afternoon in spring,and we stood in the deep limestone gutter in front of the parsonage,a little Gothic wooden house set in a gloomy yard.
"I thought,"said I,"that people couldn't love any more after they were married,except each other."Alec looked at me pityingly.
"You'll get over that notion,"he assured me.
Thus another ingredient entered my character.Denied its food at home,good food,my soul eagerly consumed and made part of itself the fermenting stuff that Alec Pound so willing distributed.And it was fermenting stuff.Let us see what it did to me.Working slowly but surely,it changed for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil instead of a holy one.The knowledge of the tragedy of Grace Hollister started me to seeking restlessly,on bookshelves and elsewhere,for a secret that forever eluded me,and forever led me on.The word fermenting aptly describes the process begun,suggesting as it does something closed up,away from air and sunlight,continually working in secret,engendering forces that fascinated,yet inspired me with fear.Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due to the pernicious dualism of their orthodox Christianity,in which love was carnal and therefore evil,and the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit,but something to be deplored and condemned,exorcised and transformed by the miracle of grace.Now love had become a terrible power (gripping me)whose enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred to the uttermost parts of the earth....
It was long before I got to sleep that night after my talk with Alec Pound.I alternated between the horror and the romance of the story Ihad heard,supplying for myself the details he had omitted:I beheld the signals from the windows,the clandestine meetings,the sudden and desperate flight.And to think that all this could have happened in our city not five blocks from where I lay!
My consternation and horror were concentrated on the man,--and yet Irecall a curious bifurcation.Instead of experiencing that automatic righteous indignation which my father and mother had felt,which had animated old Mr.Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his daughter's name to be mentioned in his presence,which had made these people outcasts,there welled up within me an intense sympathy and pity.
By an instinctive process somehow linked with other experiences,I seemed to be able to enter into the feelings of these two outcasts,to understand the fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that had led them to elude the vigilance and probity of a world with which I myself was at odds.I pictured them in a remote land,shunned by mankind.Was there something within me that might eventually draw me to do likewise?
The desire in me to which my father had referred,which would brook no opposition,which twisted and squirmed until it found its way to its object?I recalled the words of Jarvis,the carpenter,that if I ever set my heart on another man's wife,God help him.God help me!
A wicked man!I had never beheld the handsome and fascinating Mr.
Jennings,but I visualised him now;dark,like all villains,with a black moustache and snapping black eyes.He carried a cane.I always associated canes with villains.Whereupon I arose,groped for the matches,lighted the gas,and gazing at myself in the mirror was a little reassured to find nothing sinister in my countenance....
Next to my father's faith in a Moral Governor of the Universe was his belief in the Tariff and the Republican Party.And this belief,among others,he handed on to me.On the cinder playground of the Academy we Republicans used to wage,during campaigns,pitched battles for the Tariff.It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican in our city,and I was brought up to believe that Democrats were irrational,inferior,and--with certain exceptions like the Hollisters--dirty beings.
There was only one degree lower,and that was to be a mugwump.It was no wonder that the Hollisters were Democrats,for they had a queer streak in them;owing,no doubt,to the fact that old Mr.Jules Hollister's mother had been a Frenchwoman.He looked like a Frenchman,by the way,and always wore a skullcap.
I remember one autumn afternoon having a violent quarrel with Gene Hollister that bade fair to end in blows,when he suddenly demanded:--"I'll bet you anything you don't know why you're a Republican.""It's because I'm for the Tariff,"I replied triumphantly.
But his next question floored me.What,for example,was the Tariff?Itried to bluster it out,but with no success.
"Do you know?"I cried finally,with sudden inspiration.
It turned out that he did not.
"Aren't we darned idiots,"he asked,"to get fighting over something we don't know anything about?"That was Gene's French blood,of course.But his question rankled.And how was I to know that he would have got as little satisfaction if he had hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light processions which sometimes passed our house at night,with drums beating and fifes screaming and torches waving,--thousands of citizens who were for the Tariff for the same reason as I:to wit,because they were Republicans.
