and came in to shop and got caught in the snowstorm.”
“Splendid,” Sharpe said absently as though he did not hear.
“I’ve been looking over this paper again. You’ve done a brilliant job—really exciting. Ah, I hope I can be useful to you! I’m so sure you’ve a rare quality, Rann—I can’t tell exactly what direction it will take. I don’t know your center of interest. That’s what makes a creator—to have an eternal, unchanging interest in something and the capacity for dedication to it—a life interest, something you know you were born to do.”
“I want to know everything first,” Rann said.
He caught Sharpe’s look, a look yearning and strange, half-shy and half-bold.
“There is so much I don’t know,” Rann continued.
“There’s so much I don’t know about
“I don’t know any girls,” Rann said bluntly. “As for older women—” He shook his head. This discussion was distasteful to him.
Sharpe laughed. “Well, just let me know when and if, and I’ll come to your rescue!”
HE WENT TO BED THAT NIGHT with a warm sense of comfort and of mental and spiritual stimulation. Not since his father’s death had he spent such an evening. Perhaps never had he spent such an evening, for Sharpe had a sense of humor that even his father had lacked. Moreover, Sharpe had traveled in many parts of the world, in remote parts of India and China, in Thailand and Indonesia, and he had tales to tell of experiences amusing or perilous. He had spoken again and again of love.
“Those ancient people understand the arts of love as we will not in a thousand years. We are a very crude people, dear boy. Perhaps ‘simple’ would be a kinder word. As for sex, we have only a primitive notion of its full expression as a means of communication between two persons. Boy plus girl equals sex—that’s about as far as we go. We know nothing of the subtle interplay between two minds, two personalities, the art of physical approach and caress between two persons, whatever their sex. Sex itself is nothing—the lowest animals practice it. It is ennobled only by those who understand it as the Asians do—sex refined by centuries of experience, by poets and artists.”
When they parted for the night he had withdrawn somewhat shyly, lest Sharpe kiss his cheek again. But Sharpe had not done so. He had merely put out his right hand.
“Good night, dear boy. Sleep well in that vast old bed that belonged to my great-grandfather in Boston. By the bye, you’ll find the bath salts in your bath very refreshing. I put a bottle there for you. I use them myself— something I discovered in Paris last year. Dream sweetly, dear boy. Breakfast is at eight—just right for our nine o’clock class—if we can stagger through the snow in the quadrangle!”
He had tried the bath salts in his hot tub almost with embarrassment, unaccustomed to the heretofore feminine aspects of such pleasures, and had been surprised at the strong bittersweet fragrance that made him feel clean and stimulated. The soap, too, was unfamiliar, an English soap, generous with foam so that he soaped even his hair. When he was saturated with the hot fragrant bath he rubbed himself dry with an enormous brown towel and put on, somewhat hesitatingly, the white silk pajamas laid out on the bed. The silk against his skin, the smoothness of linen sheets when he drew the soft, light blankets over him, surrounded him with a sense of luxury. A wood fire burned under the white painted mantelpiece.
“I told my houseman to light a fire for you—it’s to sleep when the wood falls into embers,” Sharpe had said. “Besides, that room is large enough to be chilly on a snowy night like this—”
There was no chill now, however, and he put out the bedside light and lay watching the fire die while the snow beat softly against the windows and piled high upon the outer sills. He wanted to lie long awake so that he might think over all that Sharpe had talked of during the evening. He had felt his world enlarging, a wonderful world that he had seen heretofore only through books. But Sharpe had been everywhere himself. He had trod the streets of Indian bazaars, had lived in small inns in Japanese villages, had climbed Fujiyama and gazed into its sleeping crater. Yet later, on the isle of Oshima, he had looked into a living volcano and had felt the crust of earth tremble beneath his feet.
“Five days later the whole edge upon which I stood cracked off and fell into the smoking abyss,” Sharpe had said.
His memory, always ready to present the total picture of whatever his thought summoned, roamed in kaleidoscope about the world. Why did he stay here in this little town, a dot upon the map, his life buried in books, when reality waited for him everywhere in the world? Time enough for books when he grew too old to wander!
“You need to know everything,” Sharpe had said. “Whatever you can find in books is all to the good. Books are a shortcut to total knowledge. You can’t learn everything by your own experience. Use experience to test what you have already learned in books—”
But why shouldn’t he write books from experience? All his life he had read books. “I don’t remember when you learned to read,” his mother loved to tell him fondly. “I think you were born knowing how to read.”
To write books—that would give meaning and purpose to all that he might experience! When he was five, he had wanted to learn to play the piano, and he played it well now, but it was not his work. Composition, perhaps, might be, but not merely to play the works of others, however great, and he had composed music just as he had written poetry. But books, solid books, putting into permanent and lasting form what he knew by experiences and could therefore communicate. He saw books, already written, standing in a stately row upon a shelf, living their own life long after he was dead. With this solemn and imposing vision clear in his mind, he drifted into sleep. The coals in the fireplace died to ashes and outside the snow continued to fall.
HE WAS WAKENED, SLOWLY AND GENTLY sometime in the night, by a hand stroking his thighs and moving, ever so slowly, ever so gently to his genitals. At first he thought it a dream. He was beginning to have strange new dreams, not often, for his rapid and extraordinary physical growth, combined with his incessant reading and studying, his obsession with learning everything as quickly as possible, had consumed his energy. But he wakened suddenly when he felt his body respond to the moving hands. He sat up abruptly, and by the light of a newly lighted fire, he was face-to-face with Sharpe. They stared at each other for a long instant, Sharpe smiling, his eyes half-closed. He was wrapped in a red satin robe.
“Leave me alone!” Rann muttered between his teeth.
“Do I frighten you, dear boy?” Sharpe asked softly.
“Just leave me alone,” Rann repeated.
He pushed Sharpe from him and wrapped the blanket about his lower body.
“I introduce you to love,” Sharpe said gently. “There are many kinds of love. All love is good. I learned that in India.”
“I am going home,” Rann said sternly. “Kindly leave the room so that I can dress.”
Sharpe stood up. “Don’t be absurd. The snow is two feet deep.”
“I’ll walk it.”
“You are being childish,” Sharpe said. “We were talking of experience. All evening—we were talking of the necessity of experience. When I offer it to you in the form of a sophisticated love, as old as Greece itself and of Plato, you are afraid. You want to run home to your mother.”
“Perhaps you are right, Dr. Sharpe. Perhaps I am being childish. There is really no reason for me to go home in a snowstorm. It’s just that this has taken me quite by surprise and I do not wish to pursue the subject any further, so it seems best that I leave.”
Sharpe sat in the chair by the fireplace and watched Rann. “Again I say, don’t be absurd. The snow is nearly two feet deep. You have said you don’t wish to pursue the subject any further, so that’s all there is to it. I’ll go to bed and leave you quite alone. After all, I have my own pride, you know.”
