“We walked about under the trees along the residence streets of the
town and when I was lucky I sometimes induced one of them to go with me
to a little cheap hotel or into the darkness of the fields at the edge
of the towns.
“At such times we talked of love and sometimes I was a good deal moved,
but after all not really moved.
“The whole thing started me thinking of the slender naked girl I had
seen on the bed and of the look in her eyes at the moment when she
came up out of sleep and her eyes met mine.
“I knew her name and address and so one day I grew bold and wrote her a
long letter. You must understand that by this time I felt I had become
quite a sensible fellow and so I tried to write in a sensible way.
“I remember I was sitting in the writing-room of a small hotel in an
Indiana town when I did it. The desk where I sat was by a window near
the town’s Main Street and, as it was evening, people were going along
the street to their houses, I suppose going home to the evening meal.
“I don’t deny I grew pretty romantic. As I sat there, feeling lonely
and I suppose filled with self-pity, I looked up and saw a little
drama acted out in a hallway across the street. There was a rather old
tumble-down building with a stairway at the side running to an upper
story where it was evident some one lived, as there were white curtains
at the window.
“I sat looking across at the place, and I suppose I was dreaming of the
long slender body of the girl on the bed upstairs in another house. It
was evening and growing dusk, you understand, and just such a light
as had fallen over us at the moment we looked into each other’s eyes,
at the moment when there was no one but just our two selves, before
we had time to think and remember the others in that house, when I
was coming out of a daydream and she was coming out of the dreams of
sleep, at the moment when we accepted each other and the complete and
momentary loveliness of each other--well, you see, just such a light as
I had stood in and she had lain in as one might lie on the soft waters
of some southern sea, just such another light was now lying over the
little bare writing-room of the foul little hotel in that town and
across the street a woman came down the stairway and stood in just such
another light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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