"Fact is," he said, as if talking about the same thing, "my eyes never were very good, but I didn't realize it till I was grown up. I used to press against my eyeball to see things when I was a kid, and then like as not I'd see two redskins where there was one, or my eyes would fill up and blur." Then one day during his courtship of Miss Sally Ann, he said, he'd brought her all the way to Great Mall for the annual Spring Carnival, and it was during their tour of the midway amusements that he'd lost his eye, in the following manner — which he confided in frank detail in order, he asserted, to correct the misrepresentations of malicious gossip. The courtship had been proceeding satisfactorily: pledges of love had been exchanged and intent declared to marry as soon as his position was more securely established, he being then scarcely past adolescence and only begun on his various enterprises. They had learned something of each other's history: on his part, that he was a rebellious orphan with an undistinguished past but great hope for the future, of small resource but large resoucefulness, short on tutoring but long on ambition, with a craving to Commence and make his mark on the campus, and eager to be married though with little experience of women — he confessed to her solemnly his youthful connection with Old Black George's daughter, whereof he was so contrite that, going it may be beyond the facts, he declared he was no virgin, the more severely to chastize himself. She had wept but forgiven him, and admitted sorrowfully that she too had something to confess, though not of a guilty nature: she was beset by a Peeping Tom and secret masher, who, though she had provoked him in no wise but by her general beauty, which no amount of modesty could veil, for some time had plagued her by night — peering in her windows, hissing obscenities from bushes, exposing his member to her moonlight view. She would have spoken of it earlier, she declared, but for her fear that Greene might think the man a beau of hers, present or past, and break their engagement.
Beside this disclosure (the more alarming because young Greene, after incarcerating O.B.G.'s daughter, had taken secretly to patrolling the area of Miss Sally Ann's cabin by night, to prevent exactly such molestation in the rough backwoods, and had seen nothing more sinister than deer and raccoons though his view of her windows was unobstructed) the other details of his financee's background were of no importance to him. Outraged at the mysterious interloper's effrontery — Miss Sally Ann had not seen his face, but was convinced of his reality and motive — Greene vowed to marry her at once, despite the insecurity of their position, the better to insure her maiden honor against mischance, and to thrash the masher if he caught him. He would have wed her that same day, but for one nagging detail…
"It's the simple Enochist Truth," he said; "I'm a shy one where the girls are concerned. Always have been! Always will be!" He blinked and winked. "That don't mean I ain't got an ace or two once the chips are down! But I'm slow to make my play, and the reason is, there weren't no girls around when I was growing up. O.B.G's daughter don't count; not just she's a darky, but she come on so fast and teased so much she'd scare the starch right out o' me, despite I'd love to shown the hussy a thing or two… I used to tell her she was lucky I was saving up for marriage, but the fact of the matter was, I'd get me in a state quick enough just a-thinking how she carried on, but once she was right there face to face — no spunk at all! Know what I mean?"
Naturally I did not, except by considerable effort of imagination — what could be more alien to life in the goat-barns than pusillanimity in the face so to speak of erotic provocation?
"You weren't able to service her?" I hazarded.
Greene blushed and glanced out of the booth. Croaker was asleep now in the aisle, my stick in his lap, and the flaring music-box broadcast above our voices a queer loud plaint:
Moreover, it was grown dark, and though the headlit motors came and went from the apron of the Pedal Inn, few noses pressed now to the plate-glass wall beside us.
"I was able!" Greene protested, in a vehement whisper. "I just never could get up nerve enough, is all!"
Yet he had hesitated to commit himself to husbandhood, he said, until his capacity was proved, and Miss Sally Ann (somewhat to his surprise) seeming not finally averse, he had fetched her to Great Mall with the understanding that they'd lose their innocence each to the other before they returned. They took separate rooms in a Great-Mall inn for the three nights of the Carnival, but slept together. On the first night he'd been doubled up with cramps and unable to move — an effect, he believed, less of fear than of shame at the notion of subjecting so passèd a lady girl to his carnal lusts. On the second, nonetheless, they had striven resolutely — but in vain, for failing to find himself in the studly way from the very first kiss, as he thought proper, he so furiously reproached himself that no subsequent ministrations of Miss Sally Ann's could turn the trick. She had better betake her to some callous stud, he had told her bitterly, who being less confounded by the architecture of her naked flesh could possess it like a master instead of trembling like a truant freshman before the Chancellor's Mansion. So saying — despite her protests that she was no Frumentian doxy who measured her lovers by the road, as it were; that for all her willingness to yield love's fruits to him she was content enough to sleep in his arms as on the previous night; that on the other hand if his pride would but permit him to see himself as curator instead of conqueror of that same Mansion, she was confident they could open its gate as well with a pass-key as with a batter — despite all this he cursed himself back to his room and drank himself into a solitary stupor.
On the third and final day of the Spring Carnival he'd groused about, uncertain whether to destroy himself or merely break their engagement. They watched the ritual Dance of the Freshman Co-eds around the shaft; the ceremonial Expulsion and Reinstatement of the Chancellor, commemorating Enos Enoch's weekend in the Nether Campus; the coronation of a new Miss University in white gown and mortarboard and her parade down Great Mall on a float of lilies. The more Miss Sally Ann endeavored to raise his spirits by feigning animation, the gloomier he grew: after dinner, when they went to the brilliant midway, he insisted she ride on ferris-wheel, carousel, and roller-coaster — of all which amusements she was shrieking fond — but would not accompany her; he even sent her, against her inclination, alone through the Tunnel of Love and the adjoining Chamber of Horrors. While she made her way reluctantly through the latter, he stood outside in the sawdust and brooded upon his reflection in a row of distorting mirrors near the entrance. In one his neck rose like a swan's above his body; in another his bulbous trunk perched high on stork-legs. They put him glumly in mind of certain of his dreams wherein a more pertinent piece of him had similarly been drawn out to miraculous length, with astonishing consequence. This memory led in turn to reveries of Miss Sally Ann disrobed, and he was roused in fact, though not beyond human proportions. To conceal his condition he was obliged to sit down on a bench near the exit and cross his legs.
His choice of seats, he discovered a moment later, was not in the best interest of detumescence: the last "horror" of the Chamber was a grating in the exit ramp-way, a few meters before him, through which when it was trod upon a blast of air blew, to the end of lifting the co-ed's skirts. I was far enough from goatdom to understand with no further explanation that the consequent brief exposure, not of actual escutcheons but of drawers and female harness, was by virtue of its involuntary nature mortifying to the victims and both amusing and arousing to human male onlookers, who might scarcely take notice of a more comprehensive and prolonged display under other circumstances — lady girls in swimsuits at a pool, say, or their own wives in the showerbath. Peter Greene watched erect, savoring of each blowee the squealing fluster, the vain endeavor to hold down her skirt, the half-second's glimpse of silk-snugged crotch. Thin girls, fat girls, pretty girls, plain — in his fancy he lusted shamefully for them all, every soft-thighed lass who ever was, had been, or would be; even the blushfullest, he reflected, would in her lifetime admit some man, or several, into that passèd private place: he could not bear that it should not in every instance be himself. How he should have enjoyed that the lot of them be in his power! In a vast subcampus chamber of his own devising, lit by flambeaux and known to none but himself, he would keep them prisoner, not a stitch among them, and perpetrate at his whim exquisitest carnalities upon whom he chose. Perhaps they would all be blindfolded, or bound at wrist and ankle…