Bokelskere.no

I began to interest you. I sensed that, as we were walking along, you glanced sideways at me with a kind of astonishment while we talked. Your feelings, your magically sure sense of all that is human, immediately scented something unusual here, a secret in this pretty, compliant girl.

To love, or even merely play at love with anyone but you was so inexplicable to me, so unimaginably strange an idea, that merely feeling tempted to indulge in it would have seemed to me a crime.

– but I rejected all their advances with passionate defiance. I didn't want to live happy and content away from you, I entrenched myself in a dark world of self-torment and loneliness.

The hot blood rose to my heart: I had only one thought in answer to what she said, the thought of you.

– but with that one glimpe I took in the whole atmosphere, and now I had nourishment for never-ending dreams of you both waking and sleeping.

I ought to have been ashamed of them, but I was not, for my love for you was never purer and more passionate than in those childish excesses.

In that first second I clearly felt what I, like everyone else, am surprised to find is a unique trait in your character: somehow you are two men at once: one a hot-blooded young man who takes life easily, delighting in games and adventure, but at the same time, in your art, an implacably serious man, conscious of your duty, extremely well read and highly educated. I unconsciously sensed, again like everyone else, that you lead a double life, one side of it bright and open to the world, the other very dark, known to you alone.

I myself owned only a dozen cheap books with shabby board covers, but I loved them more than anything and read them again and again.

I stayed standing by the doorway so that I could marvel at everything, because all your possessions were so interestingly different from anything I had ever seen before. There were Indian idols, Italian sculptures, large pictures in very bright colours, and then, finally, came the books, so many of them, and more beautiful than I would ever have thought possible.

Even before you yourself came into my life, there was an aura around you redolent of riches, of something out of the ordinary, of mystery — all of us in that little suburban apartment building were waiting impatiently for you to move in (those who live narrow lives are always curious about any novelty on their doorsteps).