philosophy I completed the circle, finding myself as equable with
the lack of a ten-cent piece as I was with the squandering of
scores of dollars in calling all men and hangers-on up to the bar
to drink with me.
But how to get a girl? There was no girl’s home to which Louis
could take me and where I might be introduced to girls. I knew
none. And Louis’ several girls he wanted for himself; and anyway,
in the very human nature of boys’ and girls’ ways, he couldn’t
turn any of them over to me. He did persuade them to bring girl-
friends for me; but I found them weak sisters, pale and
ineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had.
“You’ll have to do like I did,” he said finally. “I got these by
getting them. You’ll have to get one the same way.”
And he initiated me. It must be remembered that Louis and I were
hard situated. We really had to struggle to pay our board and
maintain a decent appearance. We met each other in the evening,
after the day’s work, on the street corner, or in a little candy
store on a side street, our sole frequenting-place. Here we
bought our cigarettes, and, occasionally, a nickel’s worth of
“red-hots.” (Oh, yes; Louis and I unblushingly ate candy–all we
could get. Neither of us drank. Neither of us ever went into a
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saloon.)
But the girl. In quite primitive fashion, as Louis advised me, I
was to select her and make myself acquainted with her. We
strolled the streets in the early evenings. The girls, like us,
strolled in pairs. And strolling girls will look at strolling
boys who look. (And to this day, in any town, city, or village,
in which I, in my middle age, find myself, I look on with the eye
trained of old experience, and watch the sweet innocent game
played by the strolling boys and girls who just must stroll when
the spring and summer evenings call.)
The trouble was that in this Arcadian phase of my history, I, who
had come through, case-hardened, from the other side of life, was
timid and bashful. Again and again Louis nerved me up. But I
didn’t know girls. They were strange and wonderful to me after my
precocious man’s life. I failed of the bold front and the
necessary forwardness when the crucial moment came.
Then Louis would show me how–a certain, eloquent glance of eye, a
smile, a daring, a lifted hat, a spoken word, hesitancies,
giggles, coy nervousnesses–and, behold, Louis acquainted and
nodding me up to be introduced. But when we paired off to stroll
along boy and girl together, I noted that Louis had invariably
picked the good-looker and left to me the little lame sister.
I improved, of course, after experiences too numerous to enter
upon, so that there were divers girls to whom I could lift my hat
and who would walk beside me in the early evenings. But girl’s
love did not immediately come to me. I was excited, interested,
and I pursued the quest. And the thought of drink never entered
my mind. Some of Louis’ and my adventures have since given me
serious pause when casting sociological generalisations. But it
was all good and innocently youthful, and I learned one
generalisation, biological rather than sociological, namely, that
the “Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their
skins.”
And before long I learned girl’s love, all the dear fond
deliciousness of it, all the glory and the wonder. I shall call
her Haydee. She was between fifteen and sixteen. Her little
skirt reached her shoe-tops. We sat side by side in a Salvation
Army meeting. She was not a convert, nor was her aunt who sat on
the other side of her, and who, visiting from the country where at
that time the Salvation Army was not, had dropped in to the
meeting for half an hour out of curiosity. And Louis sat beside
me and observed–I do believe he did no more than observe, because
Haydee was not his style of girl.
We did not speak, but in that great half-hour we glanced shyly at
each other, and shyly avoided or as shyly returned and met each
other’s glances more than several times. She had a slender oval
face. Her brown eyes were beautiful. Her nose was a dream, as
was her sweet-lipped, petulant-hinting mouth. She wore a tam-o’-
shanter, and I thought her brown hair the prettiest shade of brown
I had ever seen. And from that single experience of half an hour
I have ever since been convinced of the reality of love at first
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sight.
All too soon the aunt and Haydee departed. (This is permissible
at any stage of a Salvation Army meeting.) I was no longer
interested in the meeting, and, after an appropriate interval of a
couple of minutes or less, started to leave with Louis. As we
passed out, at the back of the hall a woman recognised me with her
eyes, arose, and followed me. I shall not describe her. She was
of my own kind and friendship of the old time on the water-front.
When Nelson was shot, he had died in her arms, and she knew me as
his one comrade. And she must tell me how Nelson had died, and I
did want to know; so I went with her across the width of life from
dawning boy’s love for a brown-haired girl in a tam-o’-shanter
back to the old sad savagery I had known.
And when I had heard the tale, I hurried away to find Louis,
fearing that I had lost my first love with the first glimpse of
her. But Louis was dependable. Her name was–Haydee. He knew
where she lived. Each day she passed the blacksmith’s shop where
he worked, going to or from the Lafayette School. Further, he had
seen her on occasion with Ruth, another schoolgirl, and, still
further, Nita, who sold us red-hots at the candy store, was a
friend of Ruth. The thing to do was to go around to the candy
store and see if we could get Nita to give a note to Ruth to give
to Haydee. If this could be arranged, all I had to do was write
the note.
And it so happened. And in stolen half-hours of meeting I came to
know all the sweet madness of boy’s love and girl’s love. So far
as it goes it is not the biggest love in the world, but I do dare
to assert that it is the sweetest. Oh, as I look back on it!
Never did girl have more innocent boy-lover than I who had been so
wicked-wise and violent beyond my years. I didn’t know the first
thing about girls. I, who had been hailed Prince of the Oyster
Pirates, who could go anywhere in the world as a man amongst men;
who could sail boats, lay aloft in black and storm, or go into the
toughest hang-outs in sailor town and play my part in any rough-
house that started or call all hands to the bar–I didn’t know the
first thing I might say or do with this slender little chit of a
girl-woman whose scant skirt just reached her shoe-tops and who
was as abysmally ignorant of life as I was, or thought I was,
profoundly wise.
I remember we sat on a bench in the starlight. There was fully a
foot of space between us. We slightly faced each other, our near
elbows on the back of the bench; and once or twice our elbows just
touched. And all the time, deliriously happy, talking in the
gentlest and most delicate terms that might not offend her
sensitive ears, I was cudgelling my brains in an effort to divine
what I was expected to do. What did girls expect of boys, sitting
on a bench and tentatively striving to find out what love was?
What did she expect me to do? Was I expected to kiss her? Did she
expect me to try? And if she did expect me, and I didn’t what
would she think of me?
Ah, she was wiser than I–I know it now–the little innocent girl-
woman in her shoe-top skirt. She had known boys all her life.
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She encouraged me in the ways a girl may. Her gloves were off and
in one hand, and I remember, lightly and daringly, in mock reproof
for something I had said, how she tapped my lips with a tiny flirt
of those gloves. I was like to swoon with delight. It was the
most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. And I remember
yet the faint scent that clung to those gloves and that I breathed
in the moment they touched my lips.
Then came the agony of apprehension and doubt. Should I imprison