Note 28 — Part Three: The Fairie Boy

I was dogged only three times in my many years of leading a double life: (1) Several Stuyvesant Square club-men succeeded, unbeknown to me, in boarding the same elevated train. I discovered them only after I had descended to the street. My refusal to proceed to my lodgings so incensed them that they disfigured my face with blows. (2) I was dogged again by several other Stuyvesant Square club-men. I discovered them before I boarded the train. Again my refusal to proceed angered them to giving me a beating. [They beat me because they had been taught that androgynes are monsters of depravity. All were around twenty years old.] (3) I was dogged in 1918 by a ruffian of twenty-two, with whom I had talked confidentially, but finally forsook because my usual test had shown him untrustworthy. He followed me for more than a mile, although I turned several corners suddenly and stood in a doorway and watched. But he had reckoned on my doing just that, and in some mysterious way guarded against my discovering him. He was evidently a super-crafty criminal. On straight stretches of street, I looked back half-a-dozen times, but saw nothing of him. (Because he had always taken the opposite side of the street and kept such a distance behind I could not recognize him, while his own eyesight carried further than mine.) When I arrived at my goal (fortunately this time an amusement resort and not my home), he gave me one of the surprises of my life by coming up to me. I fled from him in irrational terror.