He saw himself winning Napoleonic triumphs in battle, falling, with his fierce picked men, like a thunderbolt upon an enemy’s flank, trapping, hemming, and annihilating.
He saw himself as the young captain of industry, dominant, victorious, rich; as the great criminal-lawyer bending to his eloquence a charmed court — but always he saw his return from the voyage wearing the great coronal of the world upon his modest brows.
The world was a phantasmal land of faery beyond the misted hem of the hills, a land of great reverberations, of genii-guarded orchards, wine-dark seas, chasmed and fantastical cities from which he would return into this substantial heart of life, his native town, with golden loot.
He quivered deliciously to temptation — he kept his titillated honor secure after subjecting it to the most trying inducements: the groomed beauty of the rich man’s wife, publicly humiliated by her brutal husband, defended by Bruce–Eugene, and melting toward him with all the pure ardor of her lonely and womanly heart, pouring the sad measure of her life into his sympathetic ears over the wineglasses of her candled, rich, but intimate table.
And as, in the shaded light, she moved yearningly toward him, sheathed plastically in her gown of rich velvet, he would detach gently the round arms that clung about his neck, the firm curved body that stuck gluily to his.
Or the blonde princess in the fabulous Balkans, the empress of gabled Toyland, and the Doll Hussars — he would renounce, in a great scene upon the frontiers, her proffered renunciation, drinking eternal farewell on her red mouth, but wedding her to himself and to the citizenship of freedom when revolution had levelled her fortune to his own.
But, steeping himself in ancient myths, where the will and the deed were not thought darkly on, he spent himself, quilted in golden meadows, or in the green light of woods, in pagan love.
Oh to be king, and see a fruity wide-hipped Jewess bathing on her roof, and to possess her; or a cragged and castled baron, to execute le droit de seigneur upon the choicest of the enfeoffed wives and wenches, in a vast chamber loud with the howling winds and lighted by the mad dancing flames of great logs!
But even more often, the shell of his morality broken to fragments by his desire, he would enact the bawdy fable of school-boys, and picture himself in hot romance with a handsome teacher.
In the fourth grade his teacher was a young, inexperienced, but well-built woman, with carrot-colored hair, and full of reckless laughter.
He saw himself, grown to the age of potency, a strong, heroic, brilliant boy, the one spot of incandescence in a backwoods school attended by snag-toothed children and hair-faced louts.
And, as the mellow autumn ripened, her interest in him would intensify, she would “keep him in” for imaginary offenses, setting him, in a somewhat confused way, to do some task, and gazing at him with steady yearning eyes when she thought he was not looking.
He would pretend to be stumped by the exercise: she would come eagerly and sit beside him, leaning over so that a few fine strands of carrot-colored hair brushed his nostrils, and so that he might feel the firm warmth of her white-waisted arms, and the swell of her tight-skirted thighs.
She would explain things to him at great length, guiding his fingers with her own warm, slightly moist hand, when he pretended not to find the place; then she would chide him gently, saying tenderly:
“Why are you such a bad boy?” or softly:
“Do you think you’re going to be better after this?”
And he, simulating boyish, inarticulate coyness, would say:
“Gosh, Miss Edith, I didn’t mean to do nothin’.”
Later, as the golden sun was waning redly, and there was nothing in the room but the smell of chalk and the heavy buzz of the old October flies, they would prepare to depart.
As he twisted carelessly into his overcoat, she would chide him, call him to her, arrange the lapels and his necktie, and smooth out his tousled hair, saying:
“You’re a good-looking boy.
I bet all the girls are wild about you.”
He would blush in a maidenly way and she, bitten with curiosity, would press him:
“Come on, now.
Who’s your girl?”
“I haven’t got one, honest, Miss Edith.”
“You don’t want one of these silly little girls, Eugene,” she would say, coaxingly.
“You’re too good for them — you’re a great deal older than your years.
You need the understanding a mature woman can give you.”
And they would walk away in the setting sun, skirting the pine-fresh woods, passing along the path red with maple leaves, past great ripening pumpkins in the fields, and under the golden autumnal odor of persimmons.
She would live alone with her mother, an old deaf woman, in a little cottage set back from the road against a shelter of lonely singing pines, with a few grand oaks and maples in the leaf-bedded yard.
Before they came to the house, crossing a field, it would be necessary to go over a stile; he would go over first, helping her down, looking ardently at the graceful curve of her long, deliberately exposed, silk-clad leg.
As the days shortened, they would come by dark, or under the heavy low-hanging autumnal moon.
She would pretend to be frightened as they passed the woods, press in to him and take his arm at imaginary sounds, until one night, crossing the stile, boldly resolved upon an issue, she would pretend difficulty in descending, and he would lift her down in his arms.
She would whisper:
“How strong you are, Eugene.”
Still holding her, his hand would shift under her knees.
And as he lowered her upon the frozen clotted earth, she would kiss him passionately, again and again, pressing him to her, caressing him, and under the frosted persimmon tree fulfilling and yielding herself up to his maiden and unfledged desire.
“That boy’s read books by the hundreds,” Gant boasted about the town.
“He’s read everything in the library by now.”
“By God, W.
O., you’ll have to make a lawyer out of him.
That’s what he’s cut out for.” Major Liddell spat accurately, out of his high cracked voice, across the pavement, and settled back in his chair below the library windows, smoothing his stained white pointed beard with a palsied hand.
He was a veteran.
10
But this freedom, this isolation in print, this dreaming and unlimited time of fantasy, was not to last unbroken.
Both Gant and Eliza were fluent apologists for economic independence: all the boys had been sent out to earn money at a very early age.
“It teaches a boy to be independent and self-reliant,” said Gant, feeling he had heard this somewhere before.
“Pshaw!” said Eliza.
“It won’t do them a bit of harm.