Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, page 370
“Congratulate?” he replied, with a shrug, as he took a seat beside her, under the roses, “Congratulate? In their hearts they all despise me.” Then with a smile,
“You see the blue devils have the upper hand of me tonight, Myra.”
“Well, they are fibbing devils if they tell you you are despised. Dick Ambler was over at your house looking for you a little while ago, and he stopped by and told me about your swim. He said he and the other boys that followed you in the boat had never seen anything so exciting in their lives. They were expecting you to give out any minute and so much afraid that if you did you would go under before they could get hold of you. When you won the wager they were so proud and happy that they were almost beside themselves.”
“Oh, I know Dick and the rest are the best and truest friends a fellow ever had — bless their hearts — but they are the exceptions.”
“Nonsense! There’s not a boy in town tonight who would not give his head to be in your shoes, and” (shyly) “the girls are all wild about you.”
The hero smiled indulgently. No woman was ever thrown with Edgar Poe, from his birth up, but in some fashion or degree, loved him, and to him all women were angels. He never, as boy or man, entertained a thought or wrote a line of one of them that was not reverent. He admired, in varying degree, all types of feminine loveliness, but Myra, though he liked her, was not the style that he most cared for. He had always thought her too “washed out.” The soul that shone through her rather prominent, light-blue eyes was too transparent, too easily read. He found more interesting the richer-hued brunette type, and the complex nature that goes with it; the flashes of starlight, the softness and the warmth, of brown eyes; the mysteries that lie in the shadow of dusky lashes; the variety of rich, warm tones in chestnut and auburn tresses.
But Myra was a revelation to him tonight. He had never dreamed that she could look so pretty — so very pretty — as she did now in her white dress, with the moonlight filtering through the foliage upon her fair hair and her face (turned full of liking and undisguised admiration upon him) and her lovely arms, bared to the elbow. She had an ethereal, fairy-like appearance that was bewitching, and in his despondent mood, her frank praise was more than sweet. Still his answer was as bitter as ever,
“Oh, well, what does it all amount to? They would say the same of any acrobat in a circus whose joints were a bit more limber than those of the rest of his tribe. That does not remove their contempt for me, personally.”
“I don’t feel contempt for you, Eddie,” she gently replied — just breathing it.
(Myra was really wonderful tonight. He had not known her voice could have so much color in it; and the white flower in her hair — a cape-jessamine, its excessively sweet fragrance told him — gave her pale beauty the touch of romance it had always lacked). The poetic eyes that looked into hers mellowed, the cynical voice softened:
“Don’t you Myra? Well, you’d better cultivate it. Its the fashion, and it’s the only feeling I’m worth.”
“Eddie,” she said earnestly — tenderly, “I want you to promise me that you won’t talk that way any more — at least not to me — it hurts me.”
Her hand, on his sleeve, was as fair as a petal from the jessamine flower in her hair. He took it gently in his.
“Dear little Myra, little playmate — “ he said. “You are my friend, I know, and have been since we were mere babies, in spite of knowing, as you do, what a naughty, idle, disobedient boy I’ve been, deserving every flogging and scolding I’ve gotten and utterly unworthy all the good things that have come my way — including your dear friendship.”
“You are breaking your promise already,” she said. “You shall not run yourself down to me. I think you are the nicest boy in town!”
There was nothing complex about Myra. Her mind was an open book, and he suddenly found he liked it so — liked it tremendously. Her unveiled avowal of preference for him was most soothing to his restless, dissatisfied mood.
“Thank you, Myra,” he said tenderly, kissing the flower-petal hand before he laid it down. He had a strong impulse to kiss her, but resisted it, with an effort, and abruptly changed the subject.
“Did you know that we are going to move?” he asked. “And that I’m going to the University next winter?”
“To move?” she questioned, aghast. “Where?”
“To the Gallego mansion, at Fifth and Main Streets. Mr. Allan has bought it. The dear little mother, who, I’d say, if you’d let me, is so much better to me than I deserve, is full of plans for furnishing it and is going to fit up a beautiful room in it for me. It will be a delightful home for us, and quite grand after our modest cottage, but do you know I’m goose enough to be homesick at the thought of giving up my little den under the roof? Myself and I have had such jolly times together in it!”
She had scarcely heard him, except the first words and the stunning facts they contained. There was a minute’s silence, then she spoke in a changed, quivering voice.
“Then that will be the end of our friendship, I suspect! When you get out of the neighborhood, and are off most of the time at the University, we will doubtless see little more of you.”
Her clear blue eyes were shining up at him through tears. Her mouth was tremulous as a distressed child’s. The appeal met an instant response from the tender-hearted poet. Both the flower-like hands were captured this time, and held fast, in spite of their fluttering. The excessively sweet fragrance of the blossom in her hair was in his nostrils. Her quick, short breaths told him of the tempest in her tender young bosom.
“Myra, little Myra, do you care like that?” he cried. “Then let the friendship go, and be my dear little sweetheart, won’t you? I’m dying of loneliness and the want of somebody to love and to love me — somebody who understands me — and you do, don’t you, Myra, darling?”
She was too happy to answer, but she suffered him to put his arms around her and kiss her soft pale hair — and her brow — and her tremulous mouth — the first kisses of love to him as well as to her. And ah, how sweet!
He laughed happily, lifted out of his gloom by this new, this deliriously sweet dream.
“Do you know, little sweetheart,” he said, in a voice that was bubbling with joy, “I feel that you have cast those devils out of me forever. It was you that I wanted all the time, and did not know it. Some of these days, when I’ve been through college and settled down, we will be married, and wherever our home is, we must always have a porch like this, with a rose on it, and” (kissing her brow) “you must always wear a jessamine in your hair.”
And so the boy-poet and his girl play-mate, very much to their own surprise, parted affianced lovers, and a long vista of sunlit days seemed to beckon The Dreamer.
CHAPTER X.
The session at the University did not begin until the middle of February, so love’s young dream was not to be interrupted too soon. Meantime, its sweetness was only enhanced by thought of the coming separation. The affair had too, the interest of secrecy, for the youthful lovers well knew the storm of opposition that would be raised, in both their homes, if it should be discovered. This need of secrecy made frequent meetings and exchange of vows impossible, but it gave to such as occurred the flavor of stolen sweets and kept the young sinners in a tantalized state which was excruciating and at the same time delightful, and which still further fed the flames and convinced them of the realness and intensity of their passion.
When they did meet, their awed, joyous confessions of mutual love charmed the lonely, romantic boy by their very novelty. In them his fairest dreams were fulfilled. How sweet it was in these rare, stolen moments, to crush the pure young creature, who would be his own some day, against his wildly beating heart — how passing sweet to hear against his ear her whispered, hesitating vows of deep, everlasting love!
In his pretty new room overlooking the terraced garden of the stately mansion which had become his home, Edgar Poe plunged headlong into Byron, and in the mood thus induced, penned many a verse, no worse and not much better than the rhymes of lovelorn youths the world over and time out of mind, to be copied into Myra’s album.
Between the love-making and preparation for college, time took wings. In what seemed an incredibly short space summer and fall were gone, Christmas, with its festivities, was over and the new year — the year 1826 — had opened.
It was upon St. Valentine’s Day that, with a feeling of solemnity worthy of the act, the seventeen year old lover and student wrote the name Edgar Allan Poe, and the date of his birth, upon the matriculation book of the University of Virginia — open for its second session. Upon the day before the beauty and the poetry — the inspiration — of the place had burst upon him, and this first impression still held his soul in thrall.
Here, in this fair Virginia vale, ringed about with the heaven-kissing hills of the Blue Ridge, the scholastic village conjured by Jefferson’s fertile imagination lay before him in the clear, winter sunshine. Its lawns and its gardens were just now white with an unbroken blanket of new-fallen snow; the young trees which had been planted in avenues along the lawns, but which were as yet hardly more than shrubs, glittered with icicles, and above them rose the classic columns of the colonnaded dormitories and professors’ houses; while at one end of the oblong square the majestic dome and columns of the Rotunda stood out against the sky. As the entranced Dreamer gazed and gazed, trying to imagine what it must be like by moonlight — what it would be in spring — what (a few years later, when the trees should have grown large enough to arch the walks) in summer — he told himself that surely in this garden-spot of the Old Dominion, bricks and mortar had sprung into immortal bloom, and he found himself quoting a line of his own:
“The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.”
Upon his earliest opportunity he sat down and wrote Myra a rhapsody upon it all. Her presence, he felt, and he wrote her, was all needed to make the place a paradise.
Under his name upon the matriculation book he had written, with confidence:
“Schools of Ancient and Modern Languages.” In the school of Ancient Languages were taught (according to the announcement for the year) “Hebrew, rhetoric, belles-lettres ancient history and geography;” in the school of Modern Languages, “French, Spanish, Italian, German, and the English language in its Anglo Saxon form; also modern history and modern geography.” A list, one would think, to daunt the courage of a seventeen year old student and make him feel that he had the world on his shoulders.
It was quite the contrary with The Dreamer. He felt instead that he had suddenly developed wings. Learning came easy to him. He was already a good French and Latin scholar, and the rest did not frighten him. Not only was he not in the least burdened by thought of the work he was cutting out for himself, but he was elated by a sense of freedom such as he had never known before. Always before, both at home and at school, he had been under surveillance. But now he was to be a partaker of the benefits of Mr. Jefferson’s theories of the treatment of students as men and gentlemen — letting their conduct be a matter of noblesse oblige.
In the youth of seventeen this sudden withdrawal of oversight and regulation produced an exhilaration that was indeed pleasurable. Among the unfrequented hills known as the “Ragged Mountains,” not far away, was a wild and romantic region that invited him to fascinating exploration — perhaps adventure. Instead of having to beg permission or to steal off upon the solitary rambles which he loved, to this enchanting country, he could, and did, go when he chose, openly, and with no questions asked or rebukes given.
He held up his head with a new confidence at the thought, and took his dreams of ambition and love, whenever he could allow himself time to do so, to the enticing new region (as unlike anything around Richmond as if it were in a different world) adjacent to which, for the time, his lot lay.
He did not neglect his classes, however. They were regularly attended and his standing was excellent; so the professors had no cause for making inquiry into the pursuits of his private hours. The library, too, in the beautiful Rotunda, was a new, if different, field for his exploration and one that gave him great delight, for he found there many volumes of quaint and curious lore whose acquaintance he had never before made.
His imaginary wings were soon enough to be clipped — his exhilaration to drop from him as suddenly as it had come.
He did not hear from Myra!
He watched eagerly for the mails, and as day after day passed without bringing him a letter, deep dejection claimed him. Finally he wrote to her again — and then again — and again — frantically appealing to her to write to him and assure him of her constancy if she would save his life.
Still, no word from her.
The truth was that Myra, at home in Richmond, was awaiting each mail-time as feverishly as he. The faint suggestion of rose her cheeks usually wore, had entirely disappeared and deep circles caused by lack of sleep and lost appetite made her light blue eyes appear more prominent than ever before. The ethereal look that had been her chief claim to beauty had become exaggerated into a ghastliness that was not in the least bewitching. She, like Edgar, had pocketed her pride and followed her first letter with others more and more expressive of her tender maiden passion; but her father, who had begun to suspect an affair between her and the players’ son a short time before Edgar left for the University, had kept diligent watch for the passage of letters, and had successfully intercepted them.
And so the unhappy pair pined and sighed and gloomed, each reckoning the other faithless and believing that life was forever robbed of joy.
Edgar Poe had never really loved the girl. He had merely loved the dream to which her tender words and timid caresses gave an adorable reality; but now in his disappointment at not hearing from her he felt that her love and loyalty to him were the only things in the world worth having and persuaded himself that without her there as no incentive to live or to strive. His misery was increased by an over-whelming homesickness, to escape from which, he wandered restlessly about, vainly seeking excitement and forgetfulness.
In this mood, he eagerly accepted an invitation to spend the evening from a class-mate whose room in “Rowdy Row” had a reputation for conviviality. His own room, shared by a quiet and steady Richmond boy with whom he had a slight acquaintance at home, was in one of the cloister-like dormitories opening upon the main lawn.
While Edgar Poe had been a somewhat wayward and at times a disobedient boy, at home, he had never been a bad boy except when judged by John Allan’s standards, and had never been in the least wild. Wines were used upon the table of his foster-father, as upon the tables of other gentlemen whose homes he had visited, and he had always been permitted to drink a small quantity at a time, at dinner, or to sip a little mint-julep from the goblet passed around before breakfast and supposed to be conducive to appetite and healthful digestion; but he had never thought of exceeding this allowance. As to cards, he knew nothing of them save as an innocent, social pastime in which he found pleasure, as in all other games and sports — especially such as required exercise of ingenuity or mental skill.
The evening in “Rowdy Row” was therefore a revelation, as well as a diversion to him. As he approached the end of this arcaded row in which his new friend’s room was situated his interest received a spur from the sounds of hilarity that greeted him, and his spirits began to rise. In a few moments more he found himself in the midst of a group of exceedingly jolly youths evidently prepared to make a night of it. Several of them were gathered about a huge bowl in which they were mixing a variety of punch which they called “peach-honey.” Others were seated around a card table while one of their number entertained the rest with what seemed to be almost magical tricks. These Edgar joined. His interest was immediately aroused and he fixed his eyes with intentness upon the juggler. The tricks were new to him, but he soon amazed the crowd by showing the solution of them all.
Finally, the punch was declared to be ready; other packs of cards were produced and the real sport of the evening began. It was Edgar’s first experience in drinking with boys and his conscience, not yet hardened to it, kept him in check without worrying him enough to destroy his pleasure. Somewhat of his old exhilaration returned to him at the bare thought, for he felt himself a man, following his own will and yet not disobeying any direct command.
In spite of much urging, he only drank one glass of the peach-honey, but thanks to a jovial ancestor of whom he had never heard, but of some of whose sins (in accordance with the ancient law) he bore the marks in his temperament, he was peculiarly susceptible to the influences of strong drink, and as he drained the glass at a gulp, a new freedom seemed to enter his soul. The dejection which had oppressed him dropped from him instantly, and with his great eyes glowing like lamps with new zest in life, he sat down at a card table to be initiated into the mysteries of the fascinating game of loo, which had lately become the fashion, and at the same time into his first experience in playing for money.
He had beginner’s luck — held good hands and won straight through the game. His success, with the effects of the punch, developed his wittiest vein and Edgar Goodfellow assumed complete ascendancy.
His new acquaintances were charmed, and encouraged his mood by loud applause and congratulated themselves upon having added to their number such good company.
From that night Edgar Poe’s new friends, who constituted what was known as the “fast set” at the University, became his boon companions. It was in the card-table, much more than the punch-bowl that the charm for him lay, for the gambling fever had entered his blood with his first winnings, but in the combination of the two he found, for the present, a sure cure for his “blue devils.”
Alas, Helen! Where was your sweet spirit that it did not hover, as guardian angel, about the head of this wayward child of genius in his hour of sore need, when temptations gathered thick around his pathway and there was no one to steer him into safer waters; no one to restrain his feet from their first blind steps toward that Disaster to which ruinous companionship invited him, with syren voice?
