A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

by a door which opened directly on the porch. Carl was gone. Two unattractive girls on a sofa were telling secrets. Some boys were playing poker on the floor; paper flowers and streamers lay all about them, crumpled and untwisted. The remaining costumes were also torn and trodden upon. Philip stood there, miserably excited.
    Out in the dark, as usual, couples mixed up with the time of night and the porches and the flowering shrubs, one girl laughing under a tree with a shrouded sound (a hard hand was over her mouth), someone trying to play a stringed instrument, secrets being told and being felt, no more misery in the kisses, no more self-consciousness in such games as were being played … Carl was there with his Irish friend.
    Everyone had forgotten Philip; he might as well not have come. He could not make up his mind where to sit down. His dress hung askew; he straightened it with boyish jerks under which the corrupted silk gave way. Their hostess, Rita, dressed as a queen, was sitting loosely on a sofa; the other Indian, a slow fellow, held her hand and seemed to be studying it. She looked feverish and disappointed.
    Philip decided to go home, and wondered why he had not done so before. He did not want to say goodbye or see the boy in the hall again. So he slipped into the dining room as if to look at the refreshments, thence into the kitchen, from the back porch to the pitch-dark alley, and down the alley to the street.
    There he felt frightened for a few moments. Men might be coming home from the saloons, the billiard parlor; some of them were capable of anything; they would think the worst of a woman alone at that hour, in such clothes, and tear off the clothes if he told them who he was. He walked as fast as he could. A boy’s stride went badly in Lucy’s shoes. He stumbled over the dress and tore it. Now he did not mind taking it back to the sisters in bad condition. He would tell them, he thought vindictively, that he had not had a good time—they would be sorry.
    The wide sky, he saw, was dappled with stars. He was angry as well as tired. Carl had played a trick on him, neglected him, deserted him. He did not know whether that would bring an end to their friendship or make it more substantial, equalize it. He would make another friend if this one failed …
    Under the street lights the lawns foamed with flowering plants. From Rita’s back door he had turned down a side-street to avoid passing her garden, and he did not see anybody in the others.
    Perhaps if he had talked to the pseudo-soldier they would have made friends, and laughed at the fraud of the one, the error of the other. Soon he would be enough older for there to be no more disguises, nor need to be taken care of, nor harm in being neglected. He hated women’s clothes; by a deliberate step he tore the ruffled skirt again.
    Out of the evening’s misery in retrospect faded all willingness to be unhappy. The only good time had been up in the tree at twilight, the pink satin amid the green leaves forming a world of their own, without excitement or humiliation; then being disguised as a woman had been like being a large flustered bird guarded by the branches. How long ago—it might have been sometime in his childhood. Never, he resolved, would he have such fairy-tale ideas again.
    He had to cross the river on a little echoing foot-bridge to get to the part of town in which he lived. An odor similar to that of cucumbers rose from the water and the mud. There down below the brown currents were trickling, the green willows with gentle boughs caressing themselves. He no longer envied the caresses in Rita’s garden. He was sick of the age he had been too long, the age of envy and masquerades, of petty martyrdoms which have a savor of joy, when nothing is satisfactory in solitude; and tried not to think that some of this youthfulness might be natural to himself and so permanent, for he wanted that night to mark plainly an end …
    There was no one on Main