The Cords of Vanity | Page 9

In that case, I felt, I would, just then, have really
enjoyed sitting upon the back of her head, and grinding her nose into
the lawn, and otherwise persuading her to cry "'Nough." These virile
pleasures being denied me, I sought for comfort in discourteous speech.
"Umph-huh!" said I, "and you think you're mighty smart, don't you?
Well, I don't want you pawing around me any more, either. I won't have
it, do you understand! That was what I was going to tell you anyhow,
you kissing-bug, even if you hadn't acted so smart. And you can just
stick that right in your pipe and smoke it, you old Miss Smart Alec."
Thereupon I--wisely--departed without delay. A rock struck me rather
forcibly between the shoulder blades, but I did not deign to notice this
phenomenon.
"You can't fight girls with fists," I reflected. "You've just got to talk to
them in the right way."

2.
He Loves Extensively
I saw no more of Stella for a lengthy while, since within two days of
the events recorded it pleased my mother to seek out another summer
resort.
"For in September," she said, "I really must have perfect quiet and
unimpeachable butter, and falling leaves, and only a very few congenial

people to be melancholy with,--and that sort of thing, you know. I find
it freshens one up so against the winter."
It was a signal feature of my mother's conversation that you never
understood, precisely, what she was talking about.
Thus in her train the silly, pretty woman drew otherwhither her
hobbledehoy son, as indeed Claire Bulmer Townsend had aforetime
drawn an armament of more mature and stolid members of my sex. I
was always proud of my handsome mother, but without any aspirations,
however theoretical, toward intimacy; and her periods of conscientious
if vague affection, when she recollected its propriety, I endured with
consolatory foreknowledge of an impendent, more agreeable era of
neglect.
I fancy that at bottom I was without suspecting it lonely. I was an only
child; my father had died, as has been hinted, when I was in kilts.... No,
I must have graduated from kilts into "knee-pants" when the
Democracy of Lichfield celebrated Grover Cleveland's first election as
President, for I was seven years old then, and was allowed to stay up
ever so late after supper to watch the torchlight parade. I recollect being
rather pleasantly scared by the yells of all those marching people and
by the glistening of their faces as the irregular flaring torches heaved by;
and I recollect how delightfully the cold night air was flavored with
kerosene. In any event, it was on this generally festive November night
that my father again took too much to drink, and, coming home toward
morning, lay down and went to sleep in the vestibule between our
front-door and the storm-doors; and five days later died of
pneumonia...In that era I was accounted an odd boy; given to reading
and secretive ways, and, they record, to long silences throughout which
my lips would move noiselessly. "Just talking to one of my friends,"
they tell me I was used to explain; though it was not until my career at
King's College that I may be said to have pretended to intimacy with
anybody.
2
For in old Fairhaven I spent, of course, a period of ostensible study, as

four generations of my fathers had done aforetime. But in that leisured,
slatternly and ancient city I garnered a far larger harvest of
(comparatively) innocuous cakes and ale than of authentic learning, and
at my graduation carried little of moment from the place save many
memories of Bettie Hamlyn.... Her father taught me Latin at King's
College, while Bettie taught me human intimacy--almost. Looking back,
I have not ever been intimate with anybody....
Not but that I had my friends. In particular I remember those four of us
who always called ourselves--in flat defiance, just as Dumas did, of
mere arithmetic--"The Three Musketeers." I think that we loved one
another very greatly during the four years we spent together in our
youth. I like to believe we did, and to remember the boys who were
once unreasonably happy, even now. It does not seem to count,
somehow, that Aramis has taken to drink and every other inexpedient
course, I hear, and that I would not recognize him today, were we two
to encounter casually--or Athos, either, I suppose, now that he has been
so long in the Philippines.
And as for D'Artagnan--or Billy Woods, if you prefer the appellation
which his sponsors gave him,--why we are still good friends and
always will be, I suppose. But we are not particularly intimate; and
very certainly we will never again read Chastelard together and
declaim the more impassioned parts of