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Title: Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life.
Author: Wolfe, Thomas Clayton (1900-1938)
Date of first publication: 1929
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: William Heinemann, 1930
   [first U.K. edition]
Date first posted: 15 July 2010
Date last updated: 15 July 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #573

This ebook was produced by: Delphine Lettau
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

A STORY _of the_ BURIED LIFE


BY
THOMAS WOLFE

  "_At one time the earth was probably a white-hot sphere like the sun._"
                                                    --TARR AND MCMURRY


LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD


_First Published_ 1930


_Printed in Great Britain at The Windmill Press_
_Kingswood, Surrey_


To A. B.

      _"Then, as all my soules bee,
  Emparadis'd in you (in whom alone
    I understand, and grow and see),
    The rafters of my body, bone
  Being still with you, the Muscle, Sinew, and Veine,
      Which tile this house, will come againe."_




TO THE READER

_This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience
which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric
of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is
"autobiographical" the writer has no answer for him: it seems to
him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical--that, for
instance, a more autobiographical work than "Gulliver's Travels" cannot
easily be imagined._

_This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the
writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these
persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that
this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the
writer's main concern was to give fullness, life, and intensity to the
actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be
published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he
meditated no man's portrait here._

_But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives--all that is ours is
in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay
of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none
can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected
and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr.
Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a
single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people
in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole
method, but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a
book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or
bitter intention._




PART I


_... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And
of all the forgotten faces._

_Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know
our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the
unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth._

_Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his
father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which
of us is not forever a stranger and alone?_

_O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most
weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great
forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an
unfound door. Where? When?_

_O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again._




_LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL_




I


A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one
that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that
shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft
stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which
makes new magic in a dusty world.

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into
nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four
thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin
of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a
Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is
the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies,
buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

This is a moment:

An Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he later changed to Gant (a
concession probably to Yankee phonetics), having come to Baltimore from
Bristol in 1837 on a sailing vessel, soon let the profits of a public
house which he had purchased roll down his improvident gullet. He
wandered westward into Pennsylvania, eking out a dangerous living by
matching fighting cocks against the champions of country barnyards, and
often escaping after a night spent in a village gaol, with his champion,
dead on the field of battle, without the clink of a coin in his pocket,
and sometimes with the print of a farmer's big knuckles on his reckless
face. But he always escaped, and coming at length among the Dutch at
harvest time he was so touched by the plenty of their land that he cast
out his anchors there. Within a year he married a rugged young widow
with a tidy farm who like all the other Dutch had been charmed by his
air of travel, and his grandiose speech, particularly when he did Hamlet
in the manner of the great Edmund Kean. Everyone said he should have
been an actor.

The Englishman begot children--a daughter and four sons--lived easily
and carelessly, and bore patiently the weight of his wife's harsh but
honest tongue. The years passed, his bright somewhat staring eyes grew
dull and bagged, the tall Englishman walked with a gouty shuffle: one
morning when she came to nag him out of sleep she found him dead of an
apoplexy. He left five children, a mortgage and--in his strange dark
eyes which now stared bright and open--something that had not died: a
passionate and obscure hunger for voyages.

So, with this legacy, we leave this Englishman and are concerned
hereafter with the heir to whom he bequeathed it, his second son, a boy
named Oliver. How this boy stood by the roadside near his mother's farm,
and saw the dusty Rebels march past on their way to Gettysburg, how his
cold eyes darkened when he heard the great name of Virginia, and how the
year the war had ended, when he was still fifteen, he had walked along
a street in Baltimore, and seen within a little shop smooth granite
slabs of death, carved lambs and cherubim, and an angel poised upon cold
phthisic feet, with a smile of soft stone idiocy--this is a longer tale.
But I know that his cold and shallow eyes had darkened with the obscure
and passionate hunger that had lived in a dead man's eyes, and that had
led from Fenchurch Street past Philadelphia. As the boy looked at the
big angel with the carved stipe of lilystalk, a cold and nameless
excitement possessed him. The long fingers of his big hands closed.
He felt that he wanted, more than anything in the world, to carve
delicately with a chisel. He wanted to wreak something dark and
unspeakable in him into cold stone. He wanted to carve an angel's head.

Oliver entered the shop and asked a big bearded man with a wooden mallet
for a job. He became the stone cutter's apprentice. He worked in that
dusty yard five years. He became a stone cutter. When his apprenticeship
was over he had become a man.

He never found it. He never learned to carve an angel's head. The dove,
the lamb, the smooth joined marble hands of death, and letters fair and
fine--but not the angel. And of all the years of waste and loss--the
riotous years in Baltimore, of work and savage drunkenness, and the
theatre of Booth and Salvini, which had a disastrous effect upon the
stone cutter, who memorised each accent of the noble rant, and strode
muttering through the streets, with rapid gestures of the enormous
talking hands--these are blind steps and gropings of our exile, the
painting of our hunger as, remembering speechlessly, we seek the great
forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a
door. Where? When?

He never found it, and he reeled down across the continent into the
Reconstruction South--a strange wild form of six feet four with cold
uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling tide of rhetoric, a
preposterous and comic invective, as formalised as classical epithet,
which he used seriously, but with a faint uneasy grin around the corners
of his thin wailing mouth.

He set up business in Sydney, the little capital city of one of the
middle Southern states, lived soberly and industriously under the
attentive eye of a folk still raw with defeat and hostility, and
finally, his good name founded and admission won, he married a gaunt,
tubercular spinstress, ten years his elder, but with a nest egg and an
unshakable will to matrimony. Within eighteen months he was a howling
maniac again, his little business went smash while his foot stayed on
the polished rail, and Cynthia, his wife--whose life, the natives said,
he had not helped to prolong--died suddenly one night after a
hmorrhage.

So all was gone again--Cynthia, the shop, the hard-bought praise of
soberness, the angel's head--he walked through the streets at dark,
yelling his pentameter curse at Rebel ways, and all their indolence;
but sick with fear and loss and penitence, he wilted under the town's
reproving stare, becoming convinced, as the flesh wasted on his own
gaunt frame, that Cynthia's scourge was doing vengeance now on him.

He was only past thirty, but he looked much older. His face was yellow
and sunken; the waxen blade of his nose looked like a beak. He had long
brown moustaches that hung straight down mournfully.

His tremendous bouts of drinking had wrecked his health. He was thin as
a rail and had a cough. He thought of Cynthia now, in the lonely and
hostile town, and he became afraid. He thought he had tuberculosis and
that he was going to die.

So, alone and lost again, having found neither order nor establishment
in the world, and with the earth cut away from his feet, Oliver resumed
his aimless drift along the continent. He turned westward toward the
great fortress of the hills, knowing that behind them his evil fame
would not be known, and hoping that he might find in them isolation,
a new life, and recovered health.

The eyes of the gaunt spectre darkened again, as they had in his youth.


All day, under a wet grey sky of October, Oliver rode westward across
the mighty state. As he stared mournfully out the window at the great
raw land so sparsely tilled by the futile and occasional little
farms, which seemed to have made only little grubbing patches in the
wilderness, his heart went cold and leaden in him. He thought of the
great barns of Pennsylvania, the ripe bending of golden grain, the
plenty, the order, the clean thrift of the people. And he thought of how
he had set out to get order and position for himself, and of the rioting
confusion of his life, the blot and blur of years, and the red waste of
his youth.

By God! he thought. I'm getting old! Why here?

The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped through his brain.
Suddenly, he saw that his life had been channelled by a series of
accidents: a mad Rebel singing of Armageddon, the sound of a bugle on
the road, the mule-hoofs of the army, the silly white face of an angel
in a dusty shop, a slut's pert wiggle of her hams as she passed by. He
had reeled out of warmth and plenty into this barren land: as he stared
out the window and saw the fallow unworked earth, the great raw lift of
the Piedmont, the muddy red clay roads, and the slattern people gaping
at the stations--a lean farmer gangling above his reins, a dawdling
negro, a gap-toothed yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby--the
strangeness of destiny stabbed him with fear. How came he here from the
clean Dutch thrift of his youth into this vast lost earth of rickets?

The train rattled on over the reeking earth. Rain fell steadily. A
brakeman came draughtily into the dirty plush coach and emptied a
scuttle of coal into the big stove at the end. High empty laughter
shook a group of yokels sprawled on two turned seats. The bell tolled
mournfully above the clacking wheels. There was a droning interminable
wait at a junction-town near the foot-hills. Then the train moved on
again across the vast rolling earth.

Dusk came. The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent. Small smoky
lights went up in the hillside shacks. The train crawled dizzily across
high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of water. Far up, far down,
plumed with wisps of smoke, toy cabins stuck to bank and gulch and
hillside. The train toiled sinuously up among gouged red cuts with slow
labour. As darkness came, Oliver descended at the little town of Old
Stockade where the rails ended. The last great wall of the hills lay
stark above him. As he left the dreary little station and stared into
the greasy lamplight of a country store, Oliver felt that he was
crawling, like a great beast, into the circle of those enormous hills
to die.

The next morning he resumed his journey by coach. His destination was
the little town of Altamont, twenty-four miles away beyond the rim of
the great outer wall of the hills. As the horses strained slowly up the
mountain road Oliver's spirit lifted a little. It was a grey-golden day
in late October, bright and windy. There was a sharp bite and sparkle in
the mountain air: the range soared above him, close, immense clean, and
barren. The trees rose gaunt and stark: they were almost leafless. The
sky was full of windy white rags of cloud; a thick blade of mist washed
slowly around the rampart of a mountain.

Below him a mountain stream foamed down its rocky bed, and he could
see little dots of men laying the track that would coil across the
hill toward Altamont. Then the sweating team lipped the gulch of the
mountain, and, among soaring and lordly ranges that melted away in
purple mist, they began the slow descent toward the high plateau on
which the town of Altamont was built.

In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed in their enormous
cup, he found sprawled out on its hundred hills and hollows a town of
four thousand people.

There were new lands. His heart lifted.


This town of Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary
war. It had been a convenient stopping-off place for cattle-drovers and
farmers in their swing eastward from Tennessee into South Carolina. And,
for several decades before the Civil war, it had enjoyed the summer
patronage of fashionable people from Charleston and the plantations
of the hot South. When Oliver first came to it it had begun to get
some reputation not only as a summer resort, but as a sanatorium for
tuberculars. Several rich men from the North had established hunting
lodges in the hills, and one of them had bought huge areas of mountain
land and, with an army of imported architects, carpenters and masons,
was planning the greatest country estate in America--something in
limestone, with pitched slate roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three
rooms. It was modelled on the chateau at Blois. There was also a vast
new hotel, a sumptuous wooden barn, rambling comfortably upon the summit
of a commanding hill.

But most of the population was still native, recruited from the hill
and country people in the surrounding districts. They were Scotch-Irish
mountaineers, rugged, provincial, intelligent, and industrious.

Oliver had about twelve hundred dollars saved from the wreckage of
Cynthia's estate. During the winter he rented a little shack at one
edge of the town's public square, acquired a small stock of marbles,
and set up business. But he had little to do at first save to think
of the prospect of his death. During the bitter and lonely winter,
while he thought he was dying, the gaunt scarecrow Yankee that flapped
muttering through the streets became an object of familiar gossip to the
townspeople. All the people at his boarding-house knew that at night he
walked his room with great caged strides, and that a long, low moan that
seemed wrung from his bowels quivered incessantly on his thin lips. But
he spoke to no one about it.

And then the marvellous hill Spring came, green-golden, with brief
spurting winds, the magic and fragrance of the blossoms, warm gusts of
balsam. The great wound in Oliver began to heal. His voice was heard in
the land once more, there were purple flashes of the old rhetoric, the
ghost of the old eagerness.

One day in April, as with fresh awakened senses, he stood before his
stoop, watching the flurry of life in the square, Oliver heard behind
him the voice of a man who was passing. And that voice, flat, drawling,
complacent, touched with sudden light a picture that had lain dead in
him for twenty years.

"Hit's a comin'! Accordin' to my figgers hit's due June 11, 1886."

Oliver turned and saw retreating the burly persuasive figure of the
prophet he had last seen vanishing down the dusty road that led to
Gettysburg and Armageddon.

"Who is that?" he asked a man.

The man looked and grinned.

"That's Bacchus Pentland," he said. "He's quite a character. There are a
lot of his folks around here."

Oliver wet his great thumb briefly. Then, with a thin grin, he said:

"Has Armageddon come yet?"

"He's expecting it any day now," said the man.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then Oliver met Eliza. He lay one afternoon in Spring upon the smooth
leather sofa of his little office, listening to the bright piping noises
in the Square. A restoring peace brooded over his great extended body.
He thought of the loamy black earth with its sudden young light of
flowers, of the beaded chill of beer, and of the plum-tree's dropping
blossoms. Then he heard the brisk heel-taps of a woman coming down among
the marbles, and he got hastily to his feet. He was drawing on his well
brushed coat of heavy black just as she entered.

"I tell you what," said Eliza, pursing her lips in reproachful banter,
"I wish I was a man and had nothing to do but lie around all day on a
good easy sofa."

"Good afternoon, madam," said Oliver with a flourishing bow. "Yes," he
said, as a faint sly grin bent the corners of his thin mouth, "I reckon
you've caught me taking my constitutional. As a matter of fact, I very
rarely lie down in the daytime, but I've been in bad health for the last
year now, and I'm not able to do the work I used to."

He was silent a moment; his face dropped in an expression of hangdog
dejection. "Ah, Lord! I don't know what's to become of me!"

"Pshaw!" said Eliza briskly and contemptuously. "There's nothing wrong
with you in my opinion. You're a big strapping fellow, in the prime of
life. Half of it's only imagination. Most of the time we think we're
sick it's all in the mind. I remember three years ago I was teaching
school in Hominy Township when I was taken down with pneumonia. Nobody
ever expected to see me come out of it alive, but I got through it
somehow; I well remember one day I was sitting down--as the fellow
says, I reckon I was convalescin'; the reason I remember is Old Doctor
Fletcher had just been and when he went out I saw him shake his head at
my cousin Sally. 'Why, Eliza, what on earth,' she said, just as soon as
he had gone, 'he tells me you're spitting up blood every time you cough;
you've got consumption as sure as you live.' 'Pshaw,' I said. I remember
I laughed just as big as you please, determined to make a big joke of it
all; I just thought to myself, I'm not going to give in to it, I'll fool
them all yet; 'I don't believe a word of it' (I said)," she nodded her
head smartly at him, and pursed her lips, "'and besides, Sally' (I said),
'we've all got to go some time, and there's no use worrying about what's
going to happen. It may come to-morrow, or it may come later, but it's
bound to come to all in the end.'"

"Ah, Lord!" said Oliver, shaking his head sadly. "You hit the nail on
the head that time. A truer word was never spoken."

Merciful God! he thought, with an anguished inner grin. How long is
this to keep up? But she's a pippin as sure as you're born. He looked
appreciatively at her trim erect figure, noting her milky white skin,
her black-brown eyes, with their quaint child's stare, and her jet black
hair drawn back tightly from her high white forehead. She had a curious
trick of pursing her lips reflectively before she spoke; she liked to
take her time, and came to the point after interminable divagations
down all the lane-ends of memory and overtone, feasting upon the golden
pageant of all she had ever said, done, felt, thought, seen or replied,
with egocentric delight.

Then, while he looked, she ceased speaking abruptly, put her neat gloved
hand to her chin, and stared off with a thoughtful, pursed mouth.

"Well," she said after a moment, "if you're getting your health back and
spend a good part of your time lying around, you ought to have something
to occupy your mind." She opened a leather portmanteau she was carrying
and produced a visiting card and two fat volumes. "My name," she said
portentously, with slow emphasis, "is Eliza Pentland, and I represent
the Larkin Publishing Company."

She spoke the words proudly, with dignified gusto. Merciful God! A
book-agent! thought Gant.

"We are offering," said Eliza, opening a huge yellow book with a fancy
design of spears and flags and laurel wreaths, "a book of poems called
_Gems of Verse for Hearth and Fireside_ as well as _Larkin's Domestic
Doctor and Book of Household Remedies_, giving directions for the cure
and prevention of over five hundred diseases."

"Well," said Gant, with a faint grin, wetting his big thumb briefly, "I
ought to find one that I've got out of that."

"Why, yes," said Eliza, nodding smartly, "as the fellow says, you can
read poetry for the good of your soul and Larkin for the good of your
body."

"I like poetry," said Gant, thumbing over the pages, and pausing with
interest at the section marked _Songs of the Spur and Sabre_. "In
my boyhood I could recite it by the hour."

He bought the books. Eliza packed her samples, and stood up, looking
sharply and curiously about the dusty little shop.

"Doing any business?" she said.

"Very little," said Oliver sadly. "Hardly enough to keep body and soul
together. I'm a stranger in a strange land."

"Pshaw!" said Eliza cheerfully. "You ought to get out and meet more
people. You need something to take your mind off yourself. If I were
you, I'd pitch right in and take an interest in the town's progress.
We've got everything here it takes to make a big town--scenery, climate,
and natural resources, and we all ought to work together. If I had
a few thousand dollars I know what I'd do"--she winked smartly at
him, and began to speak with a curiously masculine gesture of the
hand--forefinger extended, fist loosely clenched. "Do you see this
corner here--the one you're on? It'll double in value in the next few
years. Now, here!" she gestured before her with the loose masculine
gesture. "They're going to run a street through there some day as sure
as you live. And when they do--" she pursed her lips reflectively, "that
property is going to be worth money."

She continued to talk about property with a strange meditative hunger.
The town seemed to be an enormous blue-print to her: her head was
stuffed uncannily with figures and estimates--who owned a lot, who sold
it, the sale price, the real value, the future value, first and second
mortgages, and so on. When she had finished, Oliver said with the
emphasis of strong aversion, thinking of Sydney:

"I hope I never own another piece of property as long as I live--save
a house to live in. It is nothing but a curse and a care, and the
tax-collector gets it all in the end."

Eliza looked at him with a startled expression, as if he had uttered a
damnable heresy.

"Why, say! That's no way to talk!" she said. "You want to lay something
by for a rainy day, don't you?"

"I'm having my rainy day now," he said gloomily. "All the property I
need is eight feet of earth to be buried in."

Then, talking more cheerfully, he walked with her to the door of the
shop, and watched her as she marched primly away across the square,
holding her skirts at the curbs with ladylike nicety. Then he turned
back among his marbles again with a stirring in him of a joy he thought
he had lost for ever.


The Pentland family, of which Eliza was a member, was one of the
strangest tribes that ever came out of the hills. It had no clear title
to the name of Pentland: a Scotch-Englishman of that name, who was a
mining engineer, the grandfather of the present head of the family, had
come into the hills after the Revolution, looking for copper, and lived
there for several years, begetting several children by one of the
pioneer women. When he disappeared the woman took for herself and her
children the name of Pentland.

The present chieftain of the tribe was Eliza's father, the brother of the
prophet Bacchus, Major Thomas Pentland. Another brother had been killed
during the Seven Days. Major Pentland's military title was honestly if
inconspicuously earned. While Bacchus, who never rose above the rank
of corporal, was blistering his hard hands at Shiloh, the Major,
as commander of two companies of Home Volunteers, was guarding the
stronghold of the native hills. This stronghold was never threatened
until the closing days of the war, when the Volunteers, ambuscaded
behind convenient trees and rocks, fired three volleys into a detachment
of Sherman's stragglers, and quietly dispersed to the defence of their
attendant wives and children.

The Pentland family was as old as any in the community, but it had
always been poor, and had made few pretences to gentility. By marriage,
and by intermarriage among its own kinsmen, it could boast of some
connection with the great, of some insanity, and a modicum of idiocy.
But because of its obvious superiority, in intelligence and fibre, to
most of the mountain people it held a position of solid respect among
them.

The Pentlands bore a strong clan-marking. Like most rich personalities
in strange families their powerful group-stamp became more impressive
because of their differences. They had broad, powerful noses, with
fleshy, deeply scalloped wings, sensual mouths, extraordinarily mixed of
delicacy and coarseness, which in the process of thinking they convolved
with astonishing flexibility, broad, intelligent foreheads, and deep
flat cheeks, a trifle hollowed. The men were generally ruddy of face,
and their typical stature was meaty, strong, and of middling height,
although it varied into gangling cadaverousness.

Major Thomas Pentland was the father of a numerous family of which Eliza
was the only surviving girl. A younger sister had died a few years
before of a disease which the family identified sorrowfully as "poor
Jane's scrofula." There were six boys: Henry, the oldest, was now
thirty, Will was twenty-six, Jim was twenty-two, and Thaddeus, Elmer,
and Greeley were, in the order named, eighteen, fifteen and eleven.
Eliza was twenty-four.

The four older children, Henry, Will, Eliza and Jim, had passed their
childhood in the years following the war. The poverty and privation of
these years had been so terrible that none of them ever spoke of it now,
but the bitter steel had sheared into their hearts, leaving scars that
would not heal.

The effect of these years upon the older children was to develop in them
an insane niggardliness, an insatiate love of property, and a desire to
escape from the major's household as quickly as possible.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Father," Eliza had said with ladylike dignity, as she led Oliver for
the first time into the sitting-room of the cottage, "I want you to meet
Mr. Gant."

Major Pentland rose slowly from his rocker by the fire, folded a large
knife, and put the apple he had been peeling on the mantel. Bacchus
looked up benevolently from a whittled stick, and Will, glancing up from
his stubby nails which he was paring as usual, greeted the visitor with
a birdlike nod and wink. The men amused themselves constantly with
pocket knives.

Major Pentland advanced slowly toward Gant. He was a stocky, fleshy man
in the middle fifties, with a ruddy face, a patriarchal beard, and the
thick, complacent features of his tribe.

"It's W. O. Gant, isn't it?" he asked in a drawling, unctuous voice.

"Yes," said Oliver, "that's right."

"From what Eliza's been telling me about you," said the major, giving
the signal to his audience, "I was going to say it ought to be L. E.
Gant."

The room sounded with the fat, pleased laughter of the Pentlands.

"Whew!" cried Eliza, putting her hand to the wing of her broad nose.
"I'll vow, father! You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

Gant grinned with a thin false painting of mirth.

The miserable old scoundrel, he thought. He's had that one bottled up
for a week.

"You've met Will before," said Eliza.

"Both before and aft," said Will with a smart wink.

When their laughter had died down, Eliza said: "And this--as the fellow
says--is Uncle Bacchus."

"Yes, sir," said Bacchus beaming, "as large as life an' twice as sassy."

"They call him Back-us everywhere else," said Will, including them all
in a brisk wink, "but here in the family we call him Behind-us."

"I suppose," said Major Pentland deliberately, "that you've served on a
great many juries?"

"No," said Oliver, determined to endure the worst now with a frozen
grin. "Why?"

"Because," said the Major, looking around again, "I thought you were a
fellow who'd done a lot of _courtin'_."

Then, amid their laughter, the door opened, and several of the others
came in--Eliza's mother, a plain, worn Scotchwoman, and Jim, a ruddy
porcine young fellow, his father's beardless twin, and Thaddeus, mild,
ruddy, brown of hair and eye, bovine, and finally Greeley, the youngest,
a boy with lapping idiot grins, full of strange squealing noises at
which they laughed. He was eleven, degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but
his white moist hands could draw from a violin music that had in it
something unearthly and untaught.

And as they sat there in the hot little room with its warm odour of
mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the hills, there was a
roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the bare boughs clashed. And
as they peeled, or pared, or whittled, their talk slid from its rude
jocularity to death and burial: they drawled monotonously, with evil
hunger, their gossip of destiny, and of men but newly lain in the earth.
And as their talk wore on, and Gant heard the spectre moan of the wind,
he was entombed in loss and darkness, and his soul plunged downward in
the pit of night, for he saw that he must die a stranger--that all, all
but these triumphant Pentlands, who banqueted on death--must die.

And like a man who is perishing in the polar night, he thought of the
rich meadows of his youth: the corn, the plum tree, and ripe grain. Why
here? O lost!




II


Oliver married Eliza in May. After their wedding trip to Philadelphia,
they returned to the house he had built for her on Woodson Street. With
his great hands he had laid the foundations, burrowed out deep musty
cellars in the earth, and sheeted the tall sides over with smooth
trowellings of warm, brown plaster. He had very little money, but his
strange house grew to the rich modelling of his fantasy: when he had
finished he had something which leaned to the slope of his narrow uphill
yard, something with a high embracing porch in front, and warm rooms
where one stepped up and down to the tackings of his whim. He built his
house close to the quiet hilly street; he bedded the loamy soil with
flowers; he laid the short walk to the high veranda steps with great
square sheets of coloured marble; he put a fence of spiked iron between
his house and the world.

Then, in the cool long glade of yard that stretched four hundred feet
behind the house he planted trees and grape vines. And whatever he
touched in that rich fortress of his soul sprang into golden life: as
the years passed, the fruit trees--the peach, the plum, the cherry,
the apple--grew great and bent beneath their clusters. His grape vines
thickened into brawny ropes of brown and coiled down the high wire
fences of his lot, and hung in a dense fabric, upon his trellises,
roping his domain twice around. They climbed the porch end of the house
and framed the upper windows in thick bowers. And the flowers grew in
rioting glory in his yard--the velvet-leaved nasturtium, slashed with
a hundred tawny dyes, the rose, the snowball, the red-cupped tulip,
and the lily. The honeysuckle drooped its heavy mass upon the fence;
wherever his great hands touched the earth it grew fruitful for him.

For him the house was the picture of his soul, the garment of his will.
But for Eliza it was a piece of property, whose value she shrewdly
appraised, a beginning for her hoard. Like all the older children
of Major Pentland she had, since her twentieth year, begun the slow
accretion of land: from the savings of her small wage as teacher and
book-agent, she had already purchased one or two pieces of earth. On one
of these, a small lot at the edge of the public square, she persuaded
him to build a shop. This he did with his own hands, and the labour of
two negro men: it was a two-storey shack of brick, with wide wooden
steps, leading down to the square from a marble porch. Upon this porch,
flanking the wooden doors, he placed some marbles; by the door, he put
the heavy simpering figure of an angel.

But Eliza was not content with his trade: there was no money in death.
People, she thought, died too slowly. And she foresaw that her brother,
Will, who had begun at fifteen as helper in a lumber yard, and was now
the owner of a tiny business, was destined to become a rich man. So she
persuaded Gant to go into partnership with Will Pentland: at the end of
a year, however, his patience broke, his tortured egotism leaped from
its restraint, he howled that Will, whose business hours were spent
chiefly in figuring upon a dirty envelope with a stub of a pencil,
paring reflectively his stubby nails, or punning endlessly with a
birdlike wink and nod, would ruin them all. Will therefore quietly
bought out his partner's interest, and moved on toward the accumulation
of a fortune, while Oliver returned to isolation and his grimy angels.

The strange figure of Oliver Gant cast its famous shadow through the
town. Men heard at night and morning the great formula of his curse to
Eliza. They saw him plunge to house and shop, they saw him bent above
his marbles, they saw him mould in his great hands--with curse, and
howl, with passionate devotion--the rich texture of his home. They
laughed at his wild excess of speech, of feeling, and of gesture. They
were silent before the maniac fury of his sprees, which occurred almost
punctually every two months, and lasted two or three days. They picked
him foul and witless from the cobbles, and brought him home--the banker,
the policeman, and a burly devoted Swiss named Jannadeau, a grimy
jeweller who rented a small fenced space among Gant's tombstones. And
always they handled him with tender care, feeling something strange and
proud and glorious lost in that drunken ruin of Babel. He was a stranger
to them: no one--not even Eliza--ever called him by his first name. He
was--and remained thereafter--"Mister" Gant.

And what Eliza endured in pain and fear and glory no one knew. He
breathed over them all his hot lion-breath of desire and fury: when he
was drunk, her white pursed face, and all the slow octopal movements of
her temper, stirred him to red madness. She was at such times in real
danger from his assault: she had to lock herself away from him. For from
the first, deeper than love, deeper than hate, as deep as the unfleshed
bones of life, an obscure and final warfare was being waged between
them. Eliza wept or was silent to his curse, nagged briefly in retort
to his rhetoric, gave like a punched pillow to his lunging drive--and
slowly, implacably had her way. Year by year, above his howl of protest,
he did not know how, they gathered in small bits of earth, paid the
hated taxes, and put the money that remained into more land. Over the
wife, over the mother, the woman of property, who was like a man, walked
slowly forth.

In eleven years she bore him nine children of whom six lived. The first,
a girl, died in her twentieth month, of infant cholera; two more died at
birth. The others outlived the grim and casual littering. The oldest,
a boy, was born in 1885. He was given the name of Steve. The second,
born fifteen months later, was a girl--Daisy. The next, likewise a
girl--Helen--came three years later. Then, in 1892, came twins--boys--to
whom Gant, always with a zest for politics, gave the names of Grover
Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. And the last, Luke, was born two years
later, in 1894.

Twice, during this period, at intervals of five years, Gant's periodic
spree lengthened into an unbroken drunkenness that lasted for weeks. He
was caught, drowning in the tides of his thirst. Each time Eliza sent
him away to take a cure for alcoholism at Richmond. Once, Eliza and four
of her children were sick at the same time with typhoid fever. But
during a weary convalescence she pursed her lips grimly and took them
off to Florida.

Eliza came through stolidly to victory. As she marched down these
enormous years of love and loss, stained with the rich dyes of pain
and pride and death, and with the great wild flare of his alien and
passionate life, her limbs faltered in the grip of ruin, but she came
on, through sickness and emaciation, to victorious strength. She knew
there had been glory in it: insensate and cruel as he had often been,
she remembered the enormous beating colour of his life, and the lost
and stricken thing in him which he would never find. And fear and a
speechless pity rose in her when at times she saw the small uneasy
eyes grow still and darken with the foiled and groping hunger of old
frustration. O lost!




III


In the great processional of the years through which the history of
the Gants was evolving, few years had borne a heavier weight of pain,
terror, and wretchedness, and none was destined to bring with it more
conclusive events than that year which marked the beginning of the
twentieth century. For Gant and his wife, the year 1900, in which
one day they found themselves, after growing to maturity in another
century--a transition which must have given, wherever it has happened,
a brief but poignant loneliness to thousands of imaginative people--had
coincidences, too striking to be unnoticed, with other boundaries in
their lives.

In that year Gant passed his fiftieth birthday: he knew he was half as
old as the century that had died, and that men do not often live as long
as centuries. And in that year, too, Eliza, big with the last child she
would ever have, went over the final hedge of terror and desperation
and, in the opulent darkness of the summer night, as she lay flat in her
bed with her hands upon her swollen belly, she began to design her life
for the years when she would cease to be a mother.

In the already opening gulf on whose separate shores their lives were
founded, she was beginning to look, with the infinite composure, the
tremendous patience which waits through half a lifetime for an event,
not so much with certain foresight, as with a prophetic, brooding
instinct. This quality, this almost Buddhistic complacency which, rooted
in the fundamental structure of her life, she could neither suppress nor
conceal, was the quality he could least understand, that infuriated him
most. He was fifty: he had a tragic consciousness of time--he saw the
passionate fullness of his life upon the wane, and he cast about him
like a senseless and infuriate beast. She had perhaps a greater reason
for quietude than he, for she had come on from the cruel openings of
her life, through disease, physical weakness, poverty, the constant
imminence of death and misery: she had lost her first child, and brought
the others safely through each succeeding plague; and now, at forty-two,
her last child stirring in her womb, she had a conviction, enforced by
her Scotch superstition, and the blind vanity of her family, which saw
extinction for others but not for itself, that she was being shaped to a
purpose.

As she lay in her bed, a great star burned across her vision in the
western quarter of the sky; she fancied it was climbing heaven slowly.
And although she could not have said toward what pinnacle her life
was moving, she saw in the future freedom that she had never known,
possession and power and wealth, the desire for which was mixed
inextinguishably with the current of her blood. Thinking of this in the
dark, she pursed her lips with thoughtful satisfaction, unhumorously
seeing herself at work in the carnival, taking away quite easily from
the hands of folly what it had never known how to keep.

"I'll get it!" she thought, "I'll get it. Will has it! Jim has it. And
I'm smarter than they are." And with regret, tinctured with pain and
bitterness, she thought of Gant:

"Pshaw! If I hadn't kept after him he wouldn't have a stick to call his
own to-day. What little we have got I've had to fight for; we wouldn't
have a roof over our heads; we'd spend the rest of our lives in a rented
house"--which was to her the final ignominy of shiftless and improvident
people.

And she resumed: "The money he squanders every year in licker would buy
a good lot: we could be well-to-do people now if we'd started at the
very beginning. But he's always hated the very idea of owning anything:
couldn't bear it, he told me once, since he lost his money in that trade
in Sydney. If I'd been there, you can bet your bottom dollar there'd
been no loss. Or, it'd be on the other side," she added grimly.

And lying there while the winds of early autumn swept down from the
Southern hills, filling the black air with dropping leaves, and making,
in intermittent rushes, a remote sad thunder in great trees, she thought
of the stranger who had come to live in her, and of that other stranger,
author of so much woe, who had lived with her for almost twenty years.
And thinking of Gant, she felt again an inchoate aching wonder,
recalling the savage strife between them, and the great submerged
struggle beneath, founded upon the hatred and the love of property, in
which she did not doubt of her victory, but which baffled her, foiled
her.

"I'll vow!" she whispered. "I'll vow! I never saw such a man!"

Gant, faced with the loss of sensuous delight, knowing the time had come
when all his Rabelaisian excess in eating, drinking, and loving must
come under the halter, knew of no gain that could compensate him for
the loss of libertinism; he felt, too, the sharp ache of regret,
feeling that he had possessed powers, had wasted chances, such as his
partnership with Will Pentland, that might have given him position and
wealth. He knew that the century had gone in which the best part of his
life had passed; he felt, more than ever, the strangeness and loneliness
of our little adventure upon the earth: he thought of his childhood
on the Dutch farm, the Baltimore days, the aimless drift down the
continent, the appalling fixation of his whole life upon a series of
accidents. The enormous tragedy of accident hung like a grey cloud over
his life. He saw more clearly than ever that he was a stranger in a
strange land among people who would always be alien to him. Strangest
of all, he thought was this union, by which he had begotten children,
created a life dependent on him, with a woman so remote from all he
understood.

He did not know whether the year 1900 marked for him a beginning or an
ending; but with the familiar weakness of the sensualist, he resolved
to make it an ending, burning the spent fire in him down to a guttering
flame. In the first half of the month of January, still penitently true
to the New Year's reformation, he begot a child: by Spring, when it was
evident that Eliza was again pregnant, he had hurled himself into an
orgy to which even a notable four months' drunk in 1896 could offer no
precedent. Day after day he became maniacally drunk, until he fixed
himself in a state of constant insanity: in May she sent him off again
to a sanatorium at Piedmont to take the "cure," which consisted simply
in feeding him plainly and cheaply, and keeping him away from alcohol
for six weeks, a regime which contributed no more ravenously to his
hunger than it did to his thirst. He returned, outwardly chastened, but
inwardly a raging furnace, toward the end of June: the day before he
came back, Eliza, obviously big with child, her white face compactly
set, walked sturdily into each of the town's fourteen saloons, calling
up the proprietor or the bar-man behind his counter, and speaking
clearly and loudly in the sodden company of bar clientry:

"See here: I just came in to tell you that Mr. Gant is coming back
to-morrow, and I want you all to know that if I hear of any of you
selling him a drink, I'll put you in the penitentiary."

The threat, they knew, was preposterous, but the white judicial face,
the thoughtful pursing of the lips, and the right hand, which she
held loosely clenched, like a man's, with the forefinger extended,
emphasising her proclamation with a calm, but somehow powerful gesture,
froze them with a terror no amount of fierce excoriation could have
produced. They received her announcement in beery stupefaction,
muttering at most a startled agreement as she walked out.

"By God," said a mountaineer, sending a brown inaccurate stream toward a
cuspidor, "she'll do it, too. That woman means business."

"Hell!" said Tim O'Donnel, thrusting his simian face comically above his
counter, "I wouldn't give W.O. a drink now if it was fifteen cents a
quart and we was alone in a privy. Is she gone yet?"

There was vast whisky laughter.

"Who is she?" some one asked.

"She's Will Pentland's sister."

"By God, she'll do it then," cried several; and the place trembled again
with their laughter.

Will Pentland was in Loughran's when she entered. She did not greet him.
When she had gone he turned to a man near him, prefacing his remark with
a birdlike nod and wink: "Bet you can't do that," he said.

Gant, when he returned, and was publicly refused at a bar, was wild with
rage and humiliation. He got whisky very easily, of course, by sending a
drayman from his steps, or some negro, in for it; but, in spite of the
notoriety of his conduct, which had, he knew, become a classic myth for
the children of the town, he shrank at each new advertisement of his
behaviour; he became, year by year, more, rather than less, sensitive to
it, and his shame, his quivering humiliation on mornings after, product
of rasped pride and jangled nerves, was pitiable. He felt bitterly that
Eliza had with deliberate malice publicly degraded him: he screamed
denunciation and abuse at her on his return home.

All through the summer Eliza walked with white boding placidity through
horror--she had by now the hunger for it, waiting with terrible quiet
the return of fear at night. Angered by her pregnancy, Gant went almost
daily to Elizabeth's house in Eagle Crescent, whence he was delivered
nightly by a band of exhausted and terrified prostitutes into the care
of his son Steve, his oldest child, by now pertly free with nearly all
the women in the district, who fondled him with good-natured vulgarity,
laughed heartily at his glib innuendoes, and suffered him, even, to slap
them smartly on their rumps, making for him roughly as he skipped nimbly
away.

"Son," said Elizabeth, shaking Gant's waggling head vigorously, "don't
you carry on, when you grow up, like the old rooster here. But he's a
nice old boy when he wants to be," she continued, kissing the bald spot
on his head, and deftly slipping into the boy's hand the wallet Gant
had, in a torrent of generosity, given to her. She was scrupulously
honest.

The boy was usually accompanied on these errands by Jannadeau and Tom
Flack, a negro hack-man, who waited in patient constraint outside the
latticed door of the brothel until the advancing tumult within announced
that Gant had been enticed to depart. And he would go, either struggling
clumsily and screaming eloquent abuse at his suppliant captors, or
jovially acquiescent, bellowing a wanton song of his youth along the
latticed crescent, and through the supper-silent highways of the town.

 "Up in that back room, boys,
  Up in _that_ back room,
  All among the fleas and bugs,
  I pit-tee your sad doom."

Home, he would be cajoled up the tall veranda stairs, enticed into
his bed; or, resisting all compulsion, he would seek out his wife,
shut usually in her room, howling taunts at her, and accusations of
unchastity, since there festered in him dark suspicion, fruit of his
age, his wasting energy. Timid Daisy, pale from fright, would have fled
to the neighbouring arms of Sudie Isaacs, or to the Tarkintons; Helen,
aged ten, even then his delight, would master him, feeding spoonfuls of
scalding soup into his mouth, and slapping him sharply with her small
hand when he became recalcitrant.

"You _drink_ this! You better!"

He was enormously pleased: they were both strung on the same wires.

Again, he was beyond all reason. Extravagantly mad, he built roaring
fires in his sitting-room, drenching the leaping fire with a can of oil;
spitting exultantly into the answering roar, and striking up, until he
was exhausted, a profane chant, set to a few recurrent bars of music,
which ran, for forty minutes, somewhat like this:

  "O-ho--Goddam,
   Goddam, Goddam,
   O-ho--Goddam,
   Goddam--Goddam."

--adopting usually the measure by which clock-chimes strike out the
hour.

And outside, strung like apes along the wide wires of the fence, Sandy
and Fergus Duncan, Seth Tarkinton, sometimes Ben and Grover themselves,
joining in the glee of their friends, kept up an answering chant:

  "Old man Gant
   Came home drunk!
   Old man Gant
   Came home drunk!"

Daisy, from a neighbour's sanctuary, wept in shame and fear. But Helen,
small thin fury, held on relentlessly: presently he would subside into a
chair, and receive hot soup and stinging slaps with a grin. Upstairs
Eliza lay, white-faced and watchfully.

So ran the summer by. The last grapes hung in dried and rotten clusters
to the vines; the wind roared distantly; September ended.

One night the dry doctor, Cardiac, said: "I think we'll be through with
this before to-morrow evening." He departed, leaving in the house a
middle-aged country woman. She was a hard-handed practical nurse.

At eight o'clock Gant returned alone. The boy Steve had stayed at home
for ready despatch at Eliza's need; for the moment the attention was
shifted from the master.

His great voice below, chanting obscenities, carried across the
neighbourhood: as she heard the sudden wild roar of flame up the
chimney, shaking the house in its flight, she called Steve to her side,
tensely: "Son, he'll burn us all up!" she whispered.

They heard a chair fall heavily below, his curse; they heard his heavy
reeling stride across the dining-room and up the hall; they heard the
sagging creak of the stair-rail as his body swung against it.

"He's coming!" she whispered, "He's coming! Lock the door, son!"

The boy locked the door.

"Are you there?" Gant roared, pounding the flimsy door heavily with his
great fist. "Miss Eliza: are you there?" howling at her the ironical
title by which he addressed her at moments like this.

And he screamed a sermon of profanity and woven invective:--

"Little did I reck," he began, getting at once into the swing of
preposterous rhetoric which he used half furiously, half comically,
"little did I reck the day I first saw her eighteen bitter years ago,
when she came wriggling around the corner at me like a snake on her
belly--[a stock epithet which from repetition was now heart-balm to
him]--little did I reck that--that--that it would come to this," he
finished lamely. He waited quietly, in the heavy silence, for some
answer, knowing that she lay in her white-faced calm behind the door,
and filled with the old choking fury because he knew she would not
answer.

"Are you there? I say, are you there, woman?" he howled, barking his big
knuckles in a furious bombardment.

There was nothing but the white living silence.

"Ah me! Ah me!" he sighed with strong self-pity, then burst into
forced snuffling sobs, which furnished a running accompaniment to his
denunciation. "Merciful God!" he wept, "it's fearful, it's awful, it's
croo-el. What have I ever done that God should punish me like this in my
old age?"

There was no answer.

"Cynthia! Cynthia!" he howled suddenly, invoking the memory of his
first wife, the gaunt tubercular spinstress whose life, it was said,
his conduct had done nothing to prolong, but whom he was fond of
supplicating now, realising the hurt, the anger he caused to Eliza by
doing so. "Cynthia! O Cynthia! Look down upon me in my hour of need!
Give me succour! Give me aid! Protect me against this fiend out of
Hell!"

And he continued, weeping in heavy snuffling burlesque: "O-boo-hoo-hoo!
Come down and save me, I beg of you, I entreat you, I implore you, or I
perish."

Silence answered.

"Ingratitude, more fierce than brutish beasts," Gant resumed, getting
off on another track, fruitful with mixed and mangled quotation. "You
will be punished, as sure as there's a just God in heaven. You will
all be punished. Kick the old man, strike him, throw him out on the
street: he's no good any more. He's no longer able to provide for
the family--send him over the hill to the poorhouse. That's where he
belongs. Rattle his bones over the stones. Honour thy father that thy
days may be long. Ah, Lord!

      "'Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through;
   See what a rent the envious Casca made;
   Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed;
   And, as he plucked his cursd steel away,
   Mark how the blood of Csar followed it----'"

"Jeemy," said Mrs. Duncan at this moment to her husband, "Ye'd better go
over. He's loose agin, an' she's wi' chile."

The Scotchman thrust back his chair, moved strongly out of the ordered
ritual of his life, and the warm fragrance of new-baked bread.

At the gate, outside Gant's, he found patient Jannadeau, fetched down
by Ben. They spoke matter-of-factly, and hastened up the steps as
they heard a crash upstairs, and a woman's cry. Eliza, in only her
night-dress, opened the door:

"Come quick!" she whispered. "Come quick!"

"By God, I'll kill her," Gant screamed, plunging down the stairs at
greater peril to his own life than to any other. "I'll kill her now,
and put an end to my misery."

He had a heavy poker in his hand. The two men seized him; the burly
jeweller took the poker from his hand with quiet strength.

"He cut his head on the bed-rail, mama," said Steve descending. It was
true: Gant bled.

"Go for your Uncle Will, son. Quick!" He was off like a hound.

"I think he meant it that time," she whispered.

Duncan shut the door against the gaping line of neighbours beyond the
gate.

"Ye'll be gettin' a cheel like that, Mrs. Gant."

"Keep him away from me! Keep him away!" she cried out strongly.

"Aye, I will that!" he answered in quiet Scotch.

She turned to go up the stairs, but on the second step she fell heavily
to her knees. The country nurse, returning from the bathroom, in which
she had locked herself, ran to her aid. She went up slowly then between
the woman and Grover. Outside Ben dropped nimbly from the low eave on
to the lily beds: Seth Tarkinton, clinging to fence wires, shouted
greetings.

Gant went off docilely, somewhat dazed, between his two guardians: as
his huge limbs sprawled brokenly in his rocker, they undressed him.
Helen had already been busy in the kitchen for some time: she appeared
now with boiling soup.

Gant's dead eyes lit with recognition as he saw her.

"Why, baby," he roared, making a vast maudlin circle with his arms, "how
are you?" She put the soup down; he swept her thin body crushingly
against him, brushing her cheek and neck with his stiff-bristled
moustache, breathing upon her the foul rank odour of rye whisky.

"Oh, he's cut himself!" the little girl thought she was going to cry.

"Look what they did to me, baby," he pointed to his wound and whimpered.

Will Pentland, true son of that clan who forgot one another never, and
who saw one another only in times of death, pestilence, and terror, came
in.

"Good evening, Mr. Pentland," said Duncan.

"Jus' tolable," he said, with his bird-like nod and wink, taking in both
men good-naturedly. He stood in front of the fire, paring meditatively
at his blunt nails with a dull knife. It was his familiar gesture when
in company: no one, he felt, could see what you thought about anything,
if you pared your nails.

The sight of him drew Gant instantly from his lethargy: he remembered
the dissolved partnership; the familiar attitude of Will Pentland, as he
stood before the fire, evoked all the markings he so heartily loathed in
the clan--its pert complacency, its incessant punning, its success.

"Mountain Grills!" he roared. "Mountain Grills! The lowest of the low!
The vilest of the vile!"

"Mr. Gant! Mr. Gant!" pleaded Jannadeau.

"What's the matter with you, W.O.?" asked Will Pentland, looking up
innocently from his fingers. "Had something to eat that didn't agree
with you?"--he winked pertly at Duncan, and went back to his fingers.

"Your miserable old father," howled Gant, "was horsewhipped on the
public square for not paying his debts." This was a purely imaginative
insult, which had secured itself as truth, however, in Gant's mind, as
had so many other stock epithets, because it gave him heart-cockle
satisfaction.

"Horsewhipped upon his public square, was he?" Will winked again, unable
to resist the opening. "They kept it mighty quiet, didn't they?" But
behind the intense good-humoured posture of his face, his eyes were
hard. He pursed his lips meditatively as he worked upon his fingers.

"But I'll tell you something about him, W.O.," he continued after a
moment, with calm but boding judiciousness. "He let his wife die a
natural death in her own bed. He didn't try to kill her."

"No, by God!" Gant rejoined. "He let her starve to death. If the old
woman ever got a square meal in her life she got it under my roof.
There's one thing sure: she could have gone to Hell and back, twice
over, before she got it from old Tom Pentland, or any of his sons."

Will Pentland closed his blunt knife and put it in his pocket.

"Old Major Pentland never did an honest day's work in his life," Gant
yelled as a happy afterthought.

"Come now, Mr. Gant!" said Duncan reproachfully.

"Hush! Hush!" whispered the girl fiercely, coming before him closely
with the soup. She thrust a smoking ladle at his mouth, but he turned
his head away to hurl another insult. She slapped him sharply across the
mouth.

"You _drink_ this!" she whispered. And grinning meekly as his eyes
rested upon her, he began to swallow soup.

Will Pentland looked at the girl attentively for a moment, then glanced
at Duncan and Jannadeau with a nod and wink. Without saying another
word, he left the room, and mounted the stairs. His sister lay quietly
extended on her back.

"How do you feel, Eliza?" The room was heavy with the rich odour of
mellowing pears; an unaccustomed fire of pine sticks burned in the
grate: he took up his place before it, and began to pare his nails.

"Nobody knows--nobody knows," she began, bursting quickly into a rapid
flow of tears, "what I've been through." She wiped her eyes in a moment
on a corner of the coverlid: her broad powerful nose, founded redly on
her white face, was like flame.

"What you got good to eat?" he said, winking at her with a comic
gluttony.

"There are some pears in there on the shelf, Will. I put them there last
week to mellow."

He went into the big closet and returned in a moment with a large yellow
pear; he came back to the hearth and opened the smaller blade of his
knife.

"I'll vow, Will," she said quietly after a moment. "I've had all I can
put up with. I don't know what's got into him. But you can bet your
bottom dollar I won't stand much more of it. I know how to shift for
myself," she said, nodding her head smartly. He recognised the tone.

He almost forgot himself: "See here, Eliza," he began, "if you were
thinking of building somewhere, I"--but he recovered himself in
time--"I'll--I'll make you the best price you can get on the material,"
he concluded. He thrust a slice of pear quickly into his mouth.

She pursed her mouth rapidly for some moments.

"No," she said. "I'm not ready for that yet, Will. I'll let you know."
The loose wood-coals crumbled on the hearth.

"I'll let you know," she said again. He clasped his knife and thrust it
in a trousers pocket.

"Good-night, Eliza," he said. "I reckon Pett will be in to see you. I'll
tell her you're all right."

He went down the stairs quietly, and let himself out through the front
door. As he descended the tall veranda steps, Duncan and Jannadeau came
quietly down the yard from the sitting-room.

"How's W.O.?" he asked.

"Ah, he'll be all right now," said Duncan cheerfully. "He's fast
asleep."

"The sleep of the righteous?" asked Will Pentland with a wink.

The Swiss resented the implied jeer at his Titan. "It is a gread bitty,"
began Jannadeau in a low guttural voice, "that Mr. Gant drinks. With his
mind he could go far. When he's sober a finer man doesn't live."

"When he's sober?" said Will, winking at him in the dark. "What about
when he's asleep?"

"He's all right the minute Helen gets hold of him," Mr. Duncan remarked
in his rich voice. "It's wonderful what that little girl can do to him."

"Ah, I tell you!" Jannadeau laughed with guttural pleasure. "That little
girl knows her daddy in and out."

The child sat in the big chair by the waning sitting-room fire: she read
until the flames had died to coals--then quietly she shovelled ashes on
them. Gant, fathoms deep in slumber, lay on the smooth leather sofa
against the wall. She had wrapped him well in a blanket; now she put a
pillow on a chair and placed his feet on it. He was rank with whisky
stench; the window rattled as he snored.

Thus, drowned in oblivion, ran his night; he slept when the great pangs
of birth began in Eliza at two o'clock; slept through all the patient
pain and care of doctor, nurse, and wife.




IV


The baby was, to reverse an epigram, an unconscionable time in getting
born; but when Gant finally awoke just after ten o'clock next morning,
whimpering from tangled nerves, and the quivering shame of dim
remembrance, he heard, as he drank the hot coffee Helen brought to
him, a loud, long lungy cry above.

"Oh, my God, my God," he groaned. And he pointed toward the sound. "Is
it a boy or a girl?"

"I haven't seen it yet, papa," Helen answered. "They won't let us in.
But Doctor Cardiac came out and told us if we were good he might bring
us a little boy."

There was a terrific clatter on the tin roof, the scolding country voice
of the nurse: Steve dropped like a cat from the porch roof to the lily
bed outside Gant's window.

"Steve, you damned scoundrel," roared the manor-lord with a momentary
return to health, "what in the name of Jesus are you doing?"

The boy was gone over the fence.

"I seen it! I seen it!" his voice came streaking back.

"I seen it too!" screamed Grover, racing through the room and out again
in simple exultancy.

"If I catch you younguns on this roof agin," yelled the country nurse
aloft, "I'll take your hide off you."

Gant had been momentarily cheered when he heard that his latest heir was
a male; but he walked the length of the room now, making endless plaint.

"Oh, my God, my God! Did this have to be put upon me in my old age?
Another mouth to feed! It's fearful, it's awful, it's croo-el," and he
began to weep affectedly. Then, realising presently that no one was near
enough to be touched by his sorrow, he paused suddenly and precipitated
himself toward the door, crossing the dining-room, and going up the
hall, making loud lament:

"Eliza! My wife! Oh, baby, say that you forgive me!" He went up the
stairs, sobbing laboriously.

"Don't you let him in here!" cried the object of this prayer sharply,
with quite remarkable energy.

"Tell him he can't come in now," said Cardiac, in his dry voice, to the
nurse, staring intently at the scales. "We've nothing but milk to drink,
anyway," he added.

Gant was outside.

"Eliza, my wife! Be merciful, I beg of you. If I had known."

"Yes," said the country nurse opening the door rudely, "if the dog
hadn't stopped to lift his leg he'd a-caught the rabbit! You get away
from here!" And she slammed it violently in his face.

He went downstairs with hang-dog head, but he grinned slyly as he
thought of the nurse's answer. He wet his big thumb quickly on his
tongue.

"Merciful God!" he said, and grinned. Then he set up his caged lament.

"I think this will do," said Cardiac, holding up something red, shiny,
and puckered by its heels, and smacking it briskly on its rump to liven
it a bit.

The heir apparent had, as a matter of fact, made his debut completely
equipped with all appurtenances, dependences, screws, cocks, faucets,
hooks, eyes, nails, considered necessary for completeness of appearance,
harmony of parts, and unity of effect in this most energetic, driving,
and competitive world. He was the complete male in miniature, the tiny
acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all the ages, the
inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of
the budding Golden Age, and what's more, Fortune and her Fairies, not
content with well-nigh smothering him with these blessings of time and
family, saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with
glory.

"Well, what are you going to call it?" inquired Dr. Cardiac, referring
thus, with shocking and medical coarseness, to this most royal imp.

Eliza was better tuned to cosmic vibrations. With a full, if inexact,
sense of what portended, she gave to Luck's Lad the title of Eugene, a
name which, beautifully, means "well born," but which, as any one will
be able to testify, does not mean, has never meant, "well bred."


This chosen incandescence, to whom a name had already been given, and
from whose centre most of the events in this chronicle must be seen, was
borne in, as we have said, upon the very spear-head of history. But
perhaps, reader, you have already thought of that? You _haven't_? Then
let us refresh your historical memory.

By 1900, Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler had almost finished
saying the things they were reported as saying, and that Eugene was
destined to hear, twenty years later; most of the Great Victorians had
died before the bombardment began; William McKinley was up for a second
term, the crew of the Spanish navy had returned home in a tugboat.

Abroad, grim old Britain had sent her ultimatum to the South Africans in
1899; Lord Roberts ("Little Bobs," as he was known affectionately to his
men) was appointed commander-in-chief after several British reverses;
the Transvaal Republic was annexed to Great Britain in September, 1900,
and formally annexed in the month of Eugene's birth. There was a Peace
Conference two years later.

Meanwhile, what was going on in Japan? I will tell you: the first
parliament met in 1891, there was a war with China in 1894-95, Formosa
was ceded in 1895. Moreover, Warren Hastings had been impeached and
tried; Pope Sixtus the Fifth had come and gone; Dalmatia had been
subdued by Tiberius; Belisarius had been blinded by Justinian; the
wedding and funeral ceremonies of Wilhelmina Charlotte Caroline of
Brandenburg-Ansbach and King George the Second had been solemnised,
while those of Berengaria of Navarre to King Richard the First were
hardly more than a distant memory; Diocletian, Charles the Fifth, and
Victor Amadeus of Sardinia, had all abdicated their thrones; Henry
James Pye, Poet Laureate of England, was with his fathers; Cassiodorus,
Quintilian, Juvenal, Lucretius, Martial, and Albert the Bear of
Brandenburg had answered the last great roll-call; the battles
of Antietam, Smolensko, Drumclog, Inkerman, Marengo, Cawnpore,
Killiecrankie, Sluys, Actium, Lepanto, Tewkesbury, Brandywine,
Hohenlinden, Salamis, and the Wilderness had been fought both by land
and by sea; Hippias had been expelled from Athens by the Alcmonid;
and the Lacedmonians; Simonides, Menander, Strabo, Moschus, and Pindar
had closed their earthly accounts; the beatified Eusebius, Athanasius,
and Chrysostom had gone to their celestial niches; Menkaura had built
the Third Pyramid; Aspalta had led victorious armies; the remote
Bermudas, Malta, and the Windward Isles had been colonised. In addition,
the Spanish Armada had been defeated; President Abraham Lincoln
assassinated, and the Halifax Fisheries Award had given $5,500,000 to
Britain for twelve-year fishing privileges. Finally, only thirty or
forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of
the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant,
crawled back in again.


Such was the state of history when Eugene entered the theatre of human
events in 1900.

We would give willingly some more extended account of the world his life
touched during the first few years, showing, in all its perspectives and
implications, the meaning of life as seen from the floor, or from the
crib, but these impressions are suppressed when they might be told, not
through any fault of intelligence, but through lack of muscular control,
the powers of articulation, and because of the recurring waves of
loneliness, weariness, depression, aberration, and utter blankness which
war against the order in a man's mind until he is three or four years
old.

Lying darkly in his crib, washed, powdered, and fed, he thought quietly
of many things before he dropped off to sleep--the interminable sleep
that obliterated time for him, and that gave him a sense of having
missed forever a day of sparkling life. At these moments, he was
heartsick with weary horror as he thought of the discomfort, weakness,
dumbness, the infinite misunderstanding he would have to endure before
he gained even physical freedom. He grew sick as he thought of the
weary distance before him, the lack of co-ordination of the centres of
control, the undisciplined and rowdy bladder, the helpless exhibition he
was forced to give in the company of his sniggering, pawing brothers and
sisters, dried, cleaned, revolved before them.

And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight
printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness
crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest
aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little
round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his
life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men
were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to
know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come
to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a
stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape
it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what
heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.

He saw that the great figures that came and went about him, the huge
leering heads that bent hideously into his crib, the great voices that
rolled incoherently above him, had for one another not much greater
understanding than they had for him: that even their speech, their
entire fluidity and ease of movement were but meagre communicants of
their thought or feeling, and served often not to promote understanding,
but to deepen and widen strife, bitterness, and prejudice.

His brain went black with terror. He saw himself an inarticulate
stranger, an amusing little clown, to be dandled and nursed by these
enormous and remote figures. He had been sent from one mystery into
another: somewhere within or without his consciousness he heard a great
bell ringing faintly, as if it sounded undersea, and as he listened, the
ghost of memory walked through his mind, and for a moment he felt that
he had almost recovered what he had lost.

Sometimes, pulling himself abreast the high walls of his crib, he
glanced down dizzily at the patterns of the carpet far below; the world
swam in and out of his mind like a tide, now printing its whole sharp
picture for an instant, again ebbing out dimly and sleepily, while he
pieced the puzzle of sensation together bit by bit, seeing only the
dancing fire-sheen on the poker, hearing then the elfin clucking of the
sun-warm hens, somewhere beyond in a distant and enchanted world. Again,
he heard their morning-wakeful crowing clear and loud, suddenly becoming
a substantial and alert citizen of life; or, going and coming in
alternate waves of fantasy and fact, he heard the loud, faery thunder of
Daisy's parlour music. Years later, he heard it again, a door opened in
his brain: she told him it was Paderewski's "Minuet."

His crib was a great woven basket, well mattressed and pillowed within;
as he grew stronger, he was able to perform extraordinary acrobatics in
it, tumbling, making a hoop of his body, and drawing himself easily and
strongly erect: with patient effort he could worm over the side on to
the floor. There, he would crawl on the vast design of the carpet, his
eyes intent upon great wooden blocks piled chaotically on the floor.
They had belonged to his brother Luke: all the letters of the alphabet,
in bright multi-coloured carving, were engraved upon them.

Holding them clumsily in his tiny hands, he studied for hours the
symbols of speech, knowing that he had here the stones of the temple of
language and striving desperately to find the key that would draw order
and intelligence from this anarchy. Great voices soared far above him,
vast shapes came and went, lifting him to dizzy heights, depositing him
with exhaustless strength. The bell rang under the sea.


One day when the opulent Southern Spring had richly unfolded, when the
spongy black earth of the yard was covered with sudden, tender grass,
and wet blossoms, the great cherry tree seethed slowly with a massive
gem of amber sap, and the cherries hung ripening in prodigal clusters,
Gant took him from his basket in the sun on the high front porch, and
went with him around the house by the lily beds, taking him back under
trees singing with hidden birds, to the far end of the lot.

Here the earth was unshaded, dry, clotted by the plough. Eugene knew by
the stillness that it was Sunday: against the high wire fence there was
the heavy smell of hot dock-weed. On the other side, Swain's cow was
wrenching the cool coarse grass, lifting her head from time to time,
and singing in her strong deep voice her Sunday exuberance. In the warm
washed air, Eugene heard with absolute clearness all the brisk backyard
sounds of the neighbourhood, he became acutely aware of the whole scene,
and as Swain's cow sang out again, he felt the flooded gates in him
swing open. He answered "Moo!" phrasing the sound timidly but perfectly,
and repeating it confidently in a moment when the cow answered.

Gant's delight was boundless. He turned and raced back toward the house
at the full stride of his legs. And as he went, he nuzzled his stiff
mustache into Eugene's tender neck, mooing industriously and always
getting an answer.

"Lord a' mercy!" cried Eliza, looking from the kitchen window as he
raced down the yard with breakneck strides, "He'll kill that child yet."

And as he rushed up the kitchen steps--all the house, save the upper
side, was off the ground--she came out on the little latticed veranda,
her hands floury, her nose stove-red.

"Why, what on earth are you doing, Mr. Gant?"

"Moo-o-o! He said 'Moo-o-o!' Yes he did!" Gant spoke to Eugene rather
than to Eliza.

Eugene answered him immediately: he felt it was all rather silly, and he
saw he would be kept busy imitating Swain's cow for several days, but he
was tremendously excited, nevertheless, feeling now that the wall had
been breached.

Eliza was likewise thrilled, but her way of showing it was to turn back
to the stove, hiding her pleasure, and saying: "I'll vow, Mr. Gant. I
never saw such an idiot with a child."

Later, Eugene lay wakefully in his basket on the sitting-room floor,
watching the smoking dishes go by in the eager hands of the combined
family, for Eliza at this time cooked magnificently, and a Sunday dinner
was something to remember. For two hours since their return from the
church, the little boys had been prowling hungrily around the kitchen:
Ben, frowning proudly, kept his dignity outside the screen, making
excursions frequently through the house to watch the progress of
cookery; Grover came in and watched with frank interest until he was
driven out; Luke, his broad humorous little face split by a wide
exultant smile, rushed through the house, squealing exultantly:

  "Weenie, weedie, weeky
   Weenie, weedie, weeky,
   Weenie, weedie, weeky,
   Wee, Wee, Wee."

He had heard Daisy and Josephine Brown doing Csar together, and his
chant was his own interpretation of Csar's brief boast: "Veni, Vidi,
Vici."

As Eugene lay in his crib, he heard through the open door the
dining-room clatter, the shrill excitement of the boys, the clangour of
steel and knife as Gant prepared to carve the roast, the repetition of
the morning's great event told over and over without variation, but with
increasing zest.

"Soon," he thought, as the heavy food fragrance floated in to him, "I
shall be in there with them." And he thought lusciously of mysterious
and succulent food.

All through the afternoon upon the veranda Gant told the story,
summoning the neighbours and calling upon Eugene to perform. Eugene
heard clearly all that was said that day: he was not able to answer, but
he saw now that speech was imminent.

Thus, later, he saw the first two years of his life in brilliant and
isolated flashes. His second Christmas he remembered vaguely as a period
of great festivity: it accustomed him to the third when it came. With
the miraculous habitude children acquire, it seemed that he had known
Christmas forever.

He was conscious of sunlight, rain, the leaping fire, his crib, the grim
jail of winter: the second Spring, one warm day, he saw Daisy go off to
school up the hill: it was the end of the noon recess, she had been home
for lunch. She went to Miss Ford's School For Girls; it was a red brick
residence on the corner at the top of the steep hill: he watched her
join Eleanor Duncan just below. Her hair was braided in two long hanks
down her back: she was demure, shy, maidenly, a timid and blushing girl;
but he feared her attentions to him, for she bathed him furiously,
wreaking whatever was explosive and violent beneath her placidity upon
his hide. She really scrubbed him almost raw. He howled piteously. As
she climbed the hill, he remembered her. He saw she was the same person.

He passed his second birthday with the light growing. Early in the
following Spring he became conscious of a period of neglect: the house
was deadly quiet; Gant's voice no longer roared around him, the boys
came and went on stealthy feet. Luke, the fourth to be attacked by the
pestilence, was desperately ill with typhoid: Eugene was entrusted
almost completely to a young slovenly negress. He remembered vividly her
tall slattern figure, her slapping lazy feet, her dirty white stockings,
and her strong smell, black and funky. One day she took him out on the
side porch to play: it was a young Spring morning, bursting moistly from
the thaw of the earth. The negress sat upon the side-steps and yawned
while he grubbed in his dirty little dress along the path, and upon the
lily bed. Presently, she went to sleep against the post. Craftily he
wormed his body through the wide wires of the fence into the cindered
alley that wound back to the Swains', and up to the ornate wooden palace
of the Hilliards.

They were among the highest aristocracy of the town: they had come from
South Carolina, "near Charleston," which in itself gave them at that
time a commanding prestige. The house, a huge gabled structure of
walnut-brown, which gave the effect of many angles and no plan, was
built upon the top of the hill which sloped down to Gant's; the level
ground on top before the house was tenanted by lordly towering oaks.
Below, along the cindered alley, flanking Gant's orchard, there were
high singing pines.

Mr. Hilliard's house was considered one of the finest residences in the
town. The neighbourhood was middle-class, but the situation was
magnificent, and the Hilliards carried on in the grand manner, lords of
the castle who descended into the village, but did not mix with its
people. All of their friends arrived by carriage from afar; every day
punctually at two o'clock, an old liveried negro drove briskly up the
winding alley behind two sleek brown mares, waiting under the carriage
entrance at the side until his master and mistress should come out. Five
minutes later they drove out, and were gone for two hours.

This ritual, followed closely from his father's sitting-room window,
fascinated Eugene for years after: the people and the life next door
were crudely and symbolically above him.

He felt a great satisfaction that morning in being at length in
Hilliard's alley: it was his first escape, and it had been made into a
forbidden and enhaloed region. He grubbed about in the middle of the
road, disappointed in the quality of the cinders. The booming
court-house bell struck eleven times.

Now, exactly at three minutes after eleven every morning, so unfailing
and perfect was the order of this great establishment, a huge grey horse
trotted slowly up the hill, drawing behind him a heavy grocery wagon,
musty, spicy, odorous with the fine smells of grocery-stores and
occupied exclusively by the Hilliard victuals, and the driver, a young
negro man who, at three minutes past eleven every morning, according to
ritual, was comfortably asleep. Nothing could possibly go wrong: the
horse could not have been tempted even by a pavement of oats to betray
his sacred mission.

Accordingly he trotted heavily up the hill, turned ponderously into the
alley ruts and advanced heavily until, feeling the great circle of his
right forefoot obstructed by some foreign particle, he looked down and
slowly removed his hoof from what had recently been the face of a little
boy.

Then, with his legs carefully straddled, he moved on, drawing the wagon
beyond Eugene's body, and stopping. Both negroes awoke simultaneously;
there were cries within the house, and Eliza and Gant rushed out of
doors. The frightened negro lifted Eugene, who was quite unconscious of
his sudden return to the stage, into the burly arms of Doctor McGuire,
who cursed the driver eloquently. His thick sensitive fingers moved
swiftly around the bloody little face and found no fracture.

He nodded briefly at their desperate faces: "He's being saved for
Congress," said he. "You have bad luck and hard heads, W.O."

"You Goddamned black scoundrel," yelled the master, turning with violent
relief upon the driver. "I'll put you behind the bars for this." He
thrust his great length of hands through the fence and choked the negro,
who mumbled prayers and had no idea what was happening to him, save that
he was the centre of a wild commotion.

The negro girl, blubbering, had fled inward.

"This looks worse than it is," observed Dr. McGuire, laying the hero
upon the lounge. "Some hot water, please." Nevertheless, it took two
hours to bring him round. Every one spoke highly of the horse.

"He had more sense than the nigger," said Gant, wetting his thumb.

But all this, as Eliza knew in her heart, was part of the plan of the
Dark Sisters. The entrails had been woven and read long since: the frail
shell of skull which guarded life, and which might have been crushed
as easily as a man breaks an egg, was kept intact. But Eugene carried
the mark of the centaur for many years, though the light had to fall
properly to reveal it.

When he was older, he wondered sometimes if the Hilliards had issued
from their high place when he had so impiously disturbed the order of
the manor. He never asked, but he thought not: he imagined them, at the
most, as standing superbly by a drawn curtain, not quite certain what
had happened, but feeling that it was something unpleasant with blood in
it.

Shortly after this, Mr. Hilliard had a "No-Trespassing" sign staked up
in the lot.




V


Luke got well after cursing doctor, nurse, and family for several weeks:
it was stubborn typhoid.

Gant was now head of a numerous family, which rose ladder-wise from
infancy to the adolescent Steve--who was eighteen--and the maidenly
Daisy. She was seventeen and in her last year at high school. She was
a timid, sensitive girl, looking like her name--Daisy-ish industrious
and thorough in her studies: her teachers thought her one of the best
students they had ever known. She had very little fire, or denial in
her; she responded dutifully to instructions; she gave back what had
been given to her. She played the piano without any passionate feeling
for the music; but she rendered it honestly with a beautiful rippling
touch. And she practised hours at a time.

It was apparent, however, that Steve was lacking in scholarship. When
he was fourteen, he was summoned by the school principal to his little
office, to take a thrashing for truancy and insubordination. But the
spirit of acquiescence was not in him: he snatched the rod from the
man's hand, broke it, smote him solidly in the eye, and dropped
gleefully eighteen feet to the ground.

This was one of the best things he ever did: his conduct in other
directions was less fortunate. Very early, as his truancy mounted,
and after he had been expelled, and as his life hardened rapidly in a
defiant viciousness, the antagonism between the boy and Gant grew open
and bitter. Gant recognised perhaps most of his son's vices as his own:
there was little, however, of his redeeming quality. Steve had a piece
of tough suet where his heart should have been.

Of them all, he had had very much the worst of it. Since his childhood
he had been the witness of his father's wildest debauches. He had not
forgotten. Also, as the oldest, he was left to shift for himself while
Eliza's attention focussed on her younger children. She was feeding
Eugene at her breast long after Steve had taken his first two dollars to
the ladies of Eagle Crescent.

He was inwardly sore at the abuse Gant heaped on him; he was not
insensitive to his faults, but to be called a "good-for-nothing bum," "a
worthless degenerate," "a pool-room loafer," hardened his outward manner
of swagger defiance. Cheaply and flashily dressed, with peg-top yellow
shoes, flaring striped trousers, and a broad-brimmed straw hat with a
coloured band, he would walk down the avenue with a preposterous lurch
and a smile of strained assurance on his face, saluting with servile
cordiality all who would notice him. And if a man of property greeted
him, his lacerated but overgrown vanity would seize the crumb and he
would boast pitifully at home: "They all know Little Stevie! He's got
the respect of all the big men in this town, all right, all right! Every
one has a good word for Little Stevie except his own people. Do you know
what J.T. Collins said to me to-day?"

"What say? Who's that? Who's that?" asked Eliza with comic rapidity,
looking up from her darning.

"J. T. Collins--that's who! He's only worth about two hundred thousand.
'Steve,' he said, just like that, 'if I had your brains'"--He would
continue in this way with moody self-satisfaction, painting a picture of
future success when all who scorned him now would flock to his standard.

"Oh, yes," said he, "they'll all be mighty anxious then to shake Little
Stevie's hand."

Gant, in a fury, gave him a hard beating when he had been expelled from
school. He had never forgotten. Finally, he was told to go to work and
support himself: he found desultory employment as a soda-jerker, or as
delivery boy for a morning paper. Once, with a crony, Gus Moody, son of
a foundry-man, he had gone off to see the world. Grimy from vagabondage
they had crawled off a freight-train at Knoxville, Tennessee, spent
their little money on food, and in a brothel, and returned, two days
later, coal-black but boastful of their exploit.

"I'll vow," Eliza fretted, "I don't know what's to become of that boy."
It was the tragic flaw of her temperament to get to the vital point
too late: she pursed her lips thoughtfully, wandered off in another
direction, and wept when misfortune came. She always waited. Moreover,
in her deepest heart, she had an affection for her oldest son, which, if
it was not greater, was at least different in kind from what she bore
for the others. His glib boastfulness, his pitiable brag, pleased
her: they were to her indications of his "smartness," and she often
infuriated her two studious girls by praising them. Thus, looking at a
specimen of his handwriting, she would say:

"There's one thing sure: he writes a better hand than any of the rest of
you, for all your schooling."

Steve had early tasted the joys of the bottle, stealing, during the days
when he was a young attendant of his father's debauch, a furtive swallow
from the strong rank whisky in a half-filled flask: the taste nauseated
him, but the experience made good boasting for his fellows.

At fifteen, he had found, while smoking cigarettes with Gus Moody,
in a neighbour's barn, a bottle wrapped in an oats sack by the worthy
citizen, against the too sharp examination of his wife. When the man
had come for secret potation some time later, and found his bottle
half-empty, he had grimly dosed the remainder with Croton oil: the two
boys were nauseously sick for several days.

One day, Steve forged a cheque on his father. It was some days before
Gant discovered it: the amount was only three dollars, but his anger was
bitter. In a pronouncement at home, delivered loudly enough to publish
the boy's offence to the neighbourhood, he spoke of the penitentiary, of
letting him go to jail, of being disgraced in his old age--a period of
his life at which he had not yet arrived, but which he used to his
advantage in times of strife.

He paid the cheque, of course, but another name--that of "forger"--was
added to the vocabulary of his abuse. Steve sneaked in and out of the
house, eating his meals alone for several days. When he met his father
little was said by either: behind the hard angry glaze of their eyes,
they both looked depthlessly into each other; they knew that they could
withhold nothing from each other, that the same sores festered in each,
the same hungers and desires, the same crawling appetites polluted
their blood. And knowing this, something in each of them turned away
in grievous shame.

Gant added this to his tirades against Eliza; all that was bad in the
boy his mother had given him.

"Mountain Blood! Mountain Blood!" he yelled. "He's Greeley Pentland all
over again. Mark my words," he continued, after striding feverishly
about the house, muttering to himself and bursting finally into the
kitchen, "mark my words, he'll wind up in the penitentiary."

And, her nose reddened by the spitting grease, she would purse her lips,
saying little, save, when goaded, to make some return calculated to
infuriate and antagonise him.

"Well, maybe if he hadn't been sent to every dive in town to pull his
daddy out, he would turn out better."

"You lie, Woman! By God, you lie!" he thundered magnificently but
illogically.


Gant drank less: save for a terrifying spree every six or eight weeks,
which bound them all in fear for two or three days, Eliza had little to
complain of on this score. But her enormous patience was wearing very
thin because of the daily cycle of abuse. They slept now in separate
rooms upstairs: he rose at six or six-thirty, dressed and went down to
build the fires. As he kindled a blaze in the range, and a roaring
fire in the sitting-room, he muttered constantly to himself, with
an occasional oratorical rise and fall of his voice. In this way he
composed and polished the flood of his invective: when the demands of
fluency and emphasis had been satisfied he would appear suddenly before
her in the kitchen, and deliver himself without preliminary, as the
grocer's negro entered with pork chops or a thick steak:

"Woman, would you have had a roof to shelter you to-day if it hadn't
been for me? Could you have depended on your worthless old father, Tom
Pentland, to give you one? Would Brother Will, or Brother Jim give you
one? Did you ever hear of them giving any one anything? Did you ever
hear of them caring for anything but their own miserable hides? _Did_
you? Would any of them give a starving beggar a crust of bread? By God,
no! Not even if he ran a bakery shop! Ah me! 'Twas a bitter day for me
when I first came into this accursed country: little did I know what it
would lead to. Mountain Grills! Mountain Grills!" and the tide would
reach its height.

At times, when she tried to reply to his attack, she would burst easily
into tears. This pleased him: he liked to see her cry. But usually
she made an occasional nagging retort: deep down, between their blind
antagonistic souls, an ugly and desperate war was being waged. Yet had
he known to what lengths these daily assaults might drive her, he would
have been astounded: they were part of the deep and feverish discontent
of his spirit, the rooted instinct to have an object for his abuse.

Moreover, his own feeling for order was so great that he had a
passionate aversion for what was slovenly, disorderly, diffuse. He was
goaded to actual fury at times when he saw how carefully she saved bits
of old string, empty cans and bottles, paper, trash of every
description: the mania for acquisition, as yet an undeveloped madness in
Eliza, enraged him.

"In God's name!" he would cry with genuine anger. "In God's name! Why
don't you get rid of some of this junk?" And he would move destructively
toward it.

"No you don't, Mr. Gant!" she would answer sharply. "You never know when
those things will come in handy."

It was, perhaps, a reversal of custom that the deep-hungering spirit
of quest belonged to the one with the greatest love of order, the most
pious regard for ritual, who wove into a pattern even his daily tirades
of abuse, and that the sprawling blot of chaos, animated by one
all-mastering desire for possession, belonged to the practical, the
daily person.

Gant had the passion of the true wanderer, of him who wanders from a
fixed point. He needed the order and the dependence of a home--he was
intensely a family man: their clustered warmth and strength about him
was life. After his punctual morning tirade at Eliza, he went about
the rousing of the slumbering children. Comically, he could not endure
feeling, in the morning, that he was the only one awake and about.

His waking cry, delivered by formula, with huge comic gruffness from the
foot of the stairs, took this form:

"Steve! Ben! Grover! Luke! You damned scoundrels: get up! In God's name,
what will become of you! You'll never amount to anything as long as you
live."

He would continue to roar at them from below as if they were wakefully
attentive above.

"When I was your age, I had milked four cows, done all the chores, and
walked eight miles through the snow by this time."

Indeed, when he described his early schooling, he furnished a landscape
that was constantly three feet deep in snow, and frozen hard. He seemed
never to have attended school save under polar conditions.

And fifteen minutes later, he would roar again: "You'll never amount to
anything, you good-for-nothing bums! If one side of the wall caved in,
you'd roll over to the other."

Presently now there would be the rapid thud of feet upstairs, and one by
one they would descend, rushing naked into the sitting-room with their
clothing bundled in their arms. Before his roaring fire they would
dress.

By breakfast, save for sporadic laments, Gant was in something
approaching good humour. They fed hugely: he stoked their plates for
them with great slabs of fried steak, grits fried in egg, hot biscuits,
jam, fried apples. He departed for his shop about the time the boys,
their throats still convulsively swallowing hot food and coffee, rushed
from the house at the warning signal of the mellow-tolling final
nine-o'clock school bell.

He returned for lunch--dinner, as they called it--briefly garrulous with
the morning's news; in the evening, as the family gathered in again,
he returned, built his great fire, and launched his supreme invective,
a ceremony which required a half hour in composition, and another
three-quarters, with repetition and additions, in delivery. They dined
then quite happily.

So passed the winter. Eugene was three; they bought him alphabet books,
and animal pictures, with rhymed fables below. Gant read them to him
indefatigably: in six weeks he knew them all by memory.

Through the late winter and spring he performed numberless times for the
neighbours: holding the book in his hands he pretended to read what he
knew by heart. Gant was delighted: he abetted the deception. Every one
thought it extraordinary that a child should read so young.

In the Spring Gant began to drink again; his thirst withered, however,
in two or three weeks, and shamefacedly he took up the routine of his
life. But Eliza was preparing for a change.

It was 1904; there was in preparation a great world's exposition at
Saint Louis: it was to be the visual history of civilisation, bigger,
better, and greater than anything of its kind ever known before. Many of
the Altamont people intended to go: Eliza was fascinated at the prospect
of combining travel with profit.

"Do you know what?" she began thoughtfully one night, as she laid down
the paper, "I've a good notion to pack up and go."

"Go? Go where?"

"To Saint Louis," she answered. "Why, say--if things work out all right,
we might simply pull out and settle down there." She knew that the
suggestion of a total disruption of the established life, a voyage to
new lands, a new quest of fortune fascinated him. It had been talked
of years before when he had broken his partnership with Will Pentland.

"What do you intend to do out there? How are the children going to get
along?"

"Why, sir," she began smugly, pursing her lips thoughtfully, and smiling
cunningly. "I'll simply get me a good big house and drum up a trade
among the Altamont people who are going."

"Merciful God, Mrs. Gant!" he howled tragically, "you surely wouldn't do
a thing like that. I beg you not to."

"Why, pshaw, Mr. Gant, don't be such a fool. There's nothing wrong in
keeping boarders. Some of the most respectable people in this town do
it." She knew what a tender thing his pride was: he could not bear to be
thought incapable of the support of his family--one of his most frequent
boasts was that he was "a good provider." Further, the residence of
any one under his roof not of his blood and bone sowed the air about
with menace, breached his castle walls. Finally, he had a particular
revulsion against lodgers: to earn one's living by accepting the
contempt, the scorn, and the money of what he called "cheap boarders"
was an almost unendurable ignominy.

She knew this but she could not understand his feeling. Not merely to
possess property, but to draw income from it was part of the religion of
her family, and she surpassed them all by her willingness to rent out a
part of her home. She alone, in fact, of all the Pentlands was willing
to relinquish the little moated castle of home; the particular secrecy
and privacy of their walls she alone did not seem to value greatly. And
she was the only one of them that wore a skirt.

Eugene had been fed from her breast until he was more than three years
old: during the winter he was weaned. Something in her stopped;
something began.

She had her way finally. Sometimes she would talk to Gant thoughtfully
and persuasively about the World's Fair venture. Sometimes, during his
evening tirades, she would snap back at him using the project as a
threat. Just what was to be achieved she did not know. But she felt it
was a beginning for her. And she had her way finally.

Gant succumbed to the lure of new lands. He was to remain at home: if
all went well he would come out later. The prospect, too, of release for
a time excited him. Something of the old thrill of youth touched him.
He was left behind, but the world lurked full of unseen shadows for a
lonely man. Daisy was in her last year at school: she stayed with him.
But it cost him more than a pang or two to see Helen go. She was almost
fourteen.

In early April, Eliza departed, bearing her excited brood about her, and
carrying Eugene in her arms. He was bewildered at this rapid commotion,
but he was electric with curiosity and activity.

The Tarkintons and Duncan streamed in: there were tears and kisses. Mrs.
Tarkinton regarded her with some awe. The whole neighbourhood was a bit
bewildered at this latest turn.

"Well, well--you never can tell," said Eliza, smiling tearfully and
enjoying the sensation she had provided. "If things go well we may
settle down out there."

"You'll come back," said Mrs. Tarkinton with cheerful loyalty. "There's
no place like Altamont."

They went to the station in the street-car: Ben and Grover gleefully sat
together, guarding a big luncheon hamper. Helen clutched nervously a
bundle of packages. Eliza glanced sharply at her long straight legs and
thought of the half-fare.

"Say," she began, laughing indefinitely behind her hand, and nudging
Gant, "she'll have to scrooch up, won't she? They'll think you're mighty
big to be under twelve," she went on, addressing the girl directly.

Helen stirred nervously.

"We shouldn't have done that," Gant muttered.

"Pshaw!" said Eliza, "no one will ever notice her."

He saw them into the train, disposed comfortably by the solicitous
Pullman porter.

"Keep your eye on them, George," he said, and gave the man a coin. Eliza
eyed it jealously.

He kissed them all roughly with his moustache, but he patted his little
girl's bony shoulders with his great hand, and hugged her to him.
Something stabbed sharply in Eliza.

They had an awkward moment. The strangeness, the absurdity of the whole
project, and the monstrous fumbling of all life, held them speechless.

"Well," he began, "I reckon you know what you're doing."

"Well, I tell you," she said, pursing her lips, and looking out the
window, "you don't know what may come out of this."

He was vaguely appeased. The train jerked, and moved off slowly. He
kissed her clumsily.

"Let me know as soon as you get there," he said, and he strode swiftly
down the aisle.

"Good-bye, good-bye," cried Eliza, waving Eugene's small hand at the
long figure on the platform. "Children," she said, "wave good-bye to
your papa." They all crowded to the window. Eliza wept.


Eugene watched the sun wane and redden on a rocky river, and on the
painted rocks of Tennessee gorges: the enchanted river wound into his
child's mind for ever. Years later, it was to be remembered in dreams
tenanted with elvish and mysterious beauty. Stilled in great wonder,
he went to sleep to the rhythmical pounding of the heavy wheels.

They lived in a white house on the corner. There was a small plot of
lawn in front, and a narrow strip on the side next to the pavement. He
realised vaguely that it was far from the great central web and roar of
the city--he thought he heard someone say four or five miles. Where was
the river?

Two little boys, twins, with straight very blond heads, and thin, mean
faces, raced up and down the sidewalk before the house incessantly on
tricycles. They wore white sailor-suits, with blue collars, and he hated
them very much. He felt vaguely that their father was a bad man who had
fallen down an elevator shaft, breaking his legs.

The house had a back yard, completely enclosed by a red board fence. At
the end was a red barn. Years later, Steve, returning home, said: "That
section's all built up out there now." Where?

One day in the hot barren back yard, two cots and mattresses had been
set up for airing. He lay upon one luxuriously, breathing the hot
mattress, and drawing his small legs up lazily. Luke lay upon the
other. They were eating peaches.

A fly grew sticky on Eugene's peach. He swallowed it. Luke howled with
laughter.

"Swallowed a fly! Swallowed a fly!"

He grew violently sick, vomited, and was unable to eat for some time. He
wondered why he had swallowed the fly when he had seen it all the time.

The summer came down blazing hot. Gant arrived for a few days, bringing
Daisy with him. One night they drank beer at the Delmar Gardens. In the
hot air, at a little table, he gazed thirstily at the beaded foaming
stein: he would thrust his face, he thought, in that chill foam and
drink deep of happiness. Eliza gave him a taste; they all shrieked at
his bitter surprised face.

Years later he remembered Gant, his moustache flecked with foam,
quaffing mightily at the glass: the magnificent gusto, the beautiful
thirst inspired in him the desire for emulation, and he wondered if all
beer were bitter, if there were not a period of initiation into the
pleasures of this great beverage.

Faces from the old half-forgotten world floated in from time to time.
Some of the Altamont people came and stayed at Eliza's house. One day,
with sudden recollective horror he looked up into the brutal shaven face
of Jim Lyda. He was the Altamont sheriff; he lived at the foot of the
hill below Gant. Once, when Eugene was past two, Eliza had gone to
Piedmont as witness in a trial. She was away two days; he was left in
care of Mrs. Lyda. He had never forgotten Lyda's playful cruelty the
first night.

Now, one day, this monster appeared again, by devilish sleight, and
Eugene looked up into the heavy evil of his face. Eugene saw Eliza
standing near Jim; and as the terror in the small face grew, Jim made as
if to put his hand violently upon her. At his cry of rage and fear, they
both laughed: for a blind moment or two Eugene for the first time hated
her: he was mad, impotent with jealousy and fear.

At night the boys, Steve, Ben and Grover, who had been sent out at once
to seek employment by Eliza, returned from the Fair Grounds, chattering
with the lively excitement of the day's bustle. Sniggering furtively,
they talked suggestively about the Hoochy-Koochy: Eugene understood it
was a dance. Steve hummed a monotonous, suggestive tune, and writhed
sensually. They sang a song; the plaintive, distant music haunted him.
He learned it:

  "Meet me in Saint--Lou--iss, Loo--ee,
   Meet me at the Fair,
   If you see the boys and girlies,
   Tell them I'll be there.
   We will dance the Hoochy-Koochy----"

and so on.

Sometimes, lying on a sunny quilt, Eugene grew conscious of a gentle
peering face, a soft caressing voice, unlike any of the others in
kind and quality, a tender olive skin, black hair, sloe-black eyes,
exquisite, rather sad, kindliness. He nuzzled his soft face next
to Eugene's, fondled and embraced him. On his brown neck he was
birth-marked with a raspberry: Eugene touched it again and again
with wonder. This was Grover--the gentlest and saddest of the boys.

Eliza sometimes allowed them to take him on excursions. Once, they made
a voyage on a river steamer: he went below and from the side-openings
looked closely upon the powerful yellow snake, coiling slowly and
resistlessly past.

The boys worked on the Fair Grounds. They were call-boys at a place
called the Inside Inn. The name charmed him: it flashed constantly
through his brain. Sometimes his sisters, sometimes Eliza, sometimes the
boys pulled him through the milling jungle of noise and figures, past
the rich opulence and variety of the life of the Fair. He was drugged
in phantasy as they passed the East India tea-house, and as he saw tall
turbaned men who walked about within and caught for the first time,
so that he never forgot, the slow incense of the East. Once in a huge
building roaring with sound, he was rooted before a mighty locomotive,
the greatest monster he had ever seen, whose wheels spun terrifically
in grooves, whose blazing furnaces, raining hot red coals into the pit
beneath, were fed incessantly by two grimed fire-painted stokers. The
scene burned in his brain like some huge splendour out of Hell: he was
appalled and fascinated by it.

Again, he stood at the edge of the slow, terrific orbit of the Ferris
Wheel, reeled down the blaring confusion of the midway, felt his
staggering mind converge helplessly into all the mad phantasmagoria
of the carnival; he heard Luke's wild story of the snake-eater, and
shrieked in agony when they threatened to take him in.

Once Daisy, yielding to the furtive cat-cruelty below her mild
placidity, took him with her through the insane horrors of the scenic
railway; they plunged bottomlessly from light into roaring blackness,
and as his first yell ceased with a slackening of the car, rolled gently
into a monstrous lighted gloom peopled with huge painted grotesques, the
red maws of fiendish heads, the cunning appearances of death, nightmare,
and madness. His unprepared mind was unrooted by insane fear: the car
rolled downward from one lighted cavern to another, and as his heart
withered to a pea, he heard from the people about him loud gusty
laughter, in which his sister joined. His mind, just emerging from the
unreal wilderness of childish fancy, gave way completely in this Fair,
and he was paralyzed by the conviction, which often returned to him
in later years, that his life was a fabulous nightmare and that, by
cunning and conspirate artifice, he had surrendered all his hope, belief
and confidence to the lewd torture of demons masked in human flesh.
Half-sensible, and purple with gasping terror, he came out finally into
the warm and practical sunlight.

His last remembrance of the Fair came from a night in early autumn: with
Daisy again he sat upon the driver's seat of a motor bus, listening for
the first time to the wonder of its laboured chugging, as they rolled,
through ploughing sheets of rain, around the gleaming roads, and by the
Cascades, pouring their water down before a white building jewelled with
ten thousand lights.


The summer had passed. There was the rustling of autumn winds, a
whispering breath of departed revelry: carnival was almost done.

And now the house grew very still: he saw his mother very little, he
did not leave the house, he was in the care of his sisters, and he was
constantly admonished to silence.

One day Gant came back a second time. Grover was down with typhoid.

"He said he ate a pear at the Fair grounds," Eliza repeated the story
for the hundredth time. "He came home and complained of feeling sick. I
put my hand on his head and he was burning up. 'Why, child,' I said,
'what on earth----?'"

Her black eyes brightened in her white face: she was afraid. She pursed
her lips and spoke hopefully.

"Hello, son," said Gant casually, entering the room; his heart
shrivelled as he saw the boy.

Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully after each visit the
doctor made; she seized every spare crumb of encouragement and magnified
it, but her heart was sick. Then one night, tearing away the mask
suddenly, she came swiftly from the boy's room.

"Mr. Gant," she said in a whisper, pursing her lips. She shook her
white face at him silently as if unable to speak. Then, rapidly, she
concluded: "He's gone, he's gone, he's gone!"

Eugene was deep in midnight slumber. Someone shook him, loosening him
slowly from his drowsiness. Presently he found himself in the arms of
Helen, who sat on the bed holding him, her morbid, stricken little face
fastened on him. She spoke to him distinctly and slowly in a subdued
voice, charged somehow with a terrible eagerness:

"Do you want to see Grover?" she whispered. "He's on the cooling board."

He wondered what a cooling board was; the house was full of menace. She
bore him out into the dimly lighted hall, and carried him to the room at
the front of the house. Behind the door he heard low voices. Quietly she
opened it; the light blazed brightly on the bed. Eugene looked, horror
swarmed like poison through his blood. Behind the little wasted shell
that lay there he remembered suddenly the warm brown face, the soft
eyes, that once had peered down at him: like one who has been mad, and
suddenly recovers reason, he remembered that forgotten face he had not
seen in weeks, that strange bright loneliness that would not return. O
lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Eliza sat heavily on a chair, her face bent sideways on her rested hand.
She was weeping, her face contorted by the comical and ugly grimace that
is far more terrible than any quiet beatitude of sorrow. Gant comforted
her awkwardly but, looking at the boy from time to time, he went out
into the hall and cast his arms forth in agony, in bewilderment.

The undertakers put the body in a basket and took it away.

"He was just twelve years and twenty days old," said Eliza over and
over, and this fact seemed to trouble her more than any other.

"You children go and get some sleep now," she commanded suddenly and, as
she spoke, her eye fell on Ben, who stood puzzled and scowling, gazing
in with his curious old-man's look. She thought of the severance of the
twins; they had entered life within twenty minutes of each other; her
heart was gripped with pity at the thought of the boy's loneliness.
She wept anew. The children went to bed. For some time Eliza and Gant
continued to sit alone in the room. Gant leaned his face in his powerful
hands. "The best boy I had," he muttered. "By God, he was the best of
the lot."

And in the ticking silence they recalled him, and in the heart of each
was fear and remorse, because he had been a quiet boy, and there were
many, and he had gone unnoticed.

"I'll never be able to forget his birthmark," Eliza whispered. "Never,
never."

Then presently each thought of the other; they felt suddenly the horror
and strangeness of their surroundings. They thought of the vine-bound
house in the distant mountains, of the roaring fires, the tumult, the
cursing, the pain, of their blind and tangled lives, and of blundering
destiny which brought them here now in this distant place, with death,
after the carnival's close.

Eliza wondered why she had come; she sought back through the hot and
desperate mazes for the answer:

"If I had known," she began presently, "if I had known how it would turn
out----"

"Never mind," he said, and he stroked her awkwardly. "By God!" he added
dumbly after a moment. "It's pretty strange when you come to think about
it."


And as they sat there more quietly now, swarming pity rose in them--not
for themselves, but for each other, and for the waste, the confusion,
the groping accident of life.

Gant thought briefly of his four and fifty years, his vanished youth,
his diminishing strength, the ugliness and badness of so much of it; and
he had the very quiet despair of a man who knows the forged chain may
not be unlinked, the threaded design unwound, the done undone.

"If I had known. If I had known," said Eliza. And then: "I'm sorry." But
he knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself,
or even for the boy whom idiot chance had thrust in the way of
pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant
Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretence for the first
time, upon the inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry
for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their
prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an
unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against
remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon the
spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth. O lost.

       *       *       *       *       *

They went home immediately. At every station Gant and Eliza made
restless expeditions to the baggage-car. It was grey autumnal November:
the mountain forests were quilted with dry brown leaves. They blew about
the streets of Altamont, they were deep in lane and gutter, they
scampered dryly along before the wind.

The car ground noisily around the curve at the hill-top. The Gants
descended: the body had already been sent on from the station. As Eliza
came slowly down the hill, Mrs. Tarkinton ran from her house sobbing.
Her eldest daughter had died a month before. The two women gave loud
cries as they saw each other, and rushed together.

In Gant's parlour, the coffin had already been placed on trestles, the
neighbours, funeral-faced and whispering, were assembled to greet them.
That was all.




VI


The death of Grover gave Eliza the most terrible wound of her life: her
courage was snapped, her slow but powerful adventure toward freedom was
abruptly stopped. Her flesh seemed to turn rotten when she thought of
the distant city and the Fair: she was appalled before the hidden
adversary who had struck her down.

With desperate sadness she encysted herself within her house and her
family, reclaimed that life she had been ready to renounce, lived
laborious days and tried to drink, in toil, oblivion. But the dark lost
face gleamed like a sudden and impalpable faun within the thickets of
memory: she thought of the mark on his brown neck and wept.

During the grim winter the shadows lifted slowly. Gant brought back the
roaring fires, the groaning succulent table, the lavish and explosive
ritual of the daily life. The old gusto surged back in their lives.

And, as the winter waned, the interspersed darkness in Eugene's brain
was lifted slowly; days, weeks, months began to emerge in consecutive
brightness; his mind came from the confusion of the Fair: life opened
practically.

Secure and conscious now in the guarded and sufficient strength of home,
he lay with well-lined belly before the roasting vitality of the fire,
poring insatiably over great volumes in the bookcase, exulting in the
musty odour of the leaves, and in the pungent smell of their hot hides.
The books he delighted in most were three huge calf-skin volumes
called _Ridpath's History of the World_. Their numberless pages were
illustrated with hundreds of drawings, engravings, wood-cuts: he
followed the progression of the centuries pictorially before he could
read. The pictures of battle delighted him most of all. Exulting in the
howl of the beaten wind about the house, the thunder of great trees,
he committed himself to the dark storm, releasing the mad devil's
hunger all men have in them, which lusts for darkness, the wind, and
incalculable speed. The past unrolled to him in separate and enormous
visions; he built unending legends upon the pictures of the Kings of
Egypt charioted swiftly by soaring horses, and something infinitely
old and recollective seemed to awaken in him as he looked on fabulous
monsters, the twined beards and huge beast-bodies of Assyrian kings, the
walls of Babylon. His brain swarmed with pictures--Cyrus directing the
charge, the spear-forest of the Macedonian phalanx, the splintered oars,
the numberless huddle of the ships at Salamis, the feasts of Alexander,
the terrific mle of the knights, the shattered lances, the axe and the
sword, the massed pikemen, the beleaguered walls, the scaling ladders
heavy with climbing men hurled backward, the Swiss who flung his body
on the lances, the press of horse and foot, the gloomy forests of Gaul
and Csarean conquests. Gant sat farther away, behind him, swinging
violently back and forth in a stout rocker, spitting clean and powerful
spurts of tobacco-juice over his son's head into the hissing fire.

Or again, Gant would read to him with sonorous and florid rhetoric
passages from Shakespeare, among which he heard most often Mark Antony's
funeral oration, Hamlet's soliloquy, the banquet scene in Macbeth, and
the scene between Desdemona and Othello before he strangles her. Or, he
would recite or read poetry, for which he had a capacious and retentive
memory. His favourites were: "O why should the spirit of mortal be
proud" ("Lincoln's favourite poem," he was fond of saying); "'We are
lost,' the captain shouted, As he staggered down the stairs"; "I
remember, I remember, the house where I was born"; "Ninety and nine with
their captain, Rode on the enemy's track, Rode in the grey light of
morning, Nine of the ninety came back"; "The boy stood on the burning
deck"; and "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward."

Sometimes he would get Helen to recite "Still sits the schoolhouse by
the road, a ragged beggar sunning; Around it still the sumachs grow, and
blackberry vines are running."

And when she had told how grasses had been growing over the girl's head
for forty years, and how the grey-haired man had found in life's harsh
school how few hated to go above him, because, you see, they love him,
Gant would sigh heavily, and say with a shake of his head:

"Ah, me! There was never a truer word spoken than that."

The family was at the very core and ripeness of its life together.
Gant lavished upon it his abuse, his affection, and his prodigal
provisioning. They came to look forward eagerly to his entrance, for he
brought with him the great gusto of living, of ritual. They would watch
him in the evening as he turned the corner below with eager strides,
follow carefully the processional of his movements from the time he
flung his provisions upon the kitchen table to the re-kindling of his
fire, with which he was always at odds when he entered, and on to which
he poured wood, coal and kerosene lavishly. This done, he would remove
his coat and wash himself at the basin vigorously, rubbing his great
hands across his shaven, tough-bearded face with the cleansing and male
sound of sand-paper. Then he would thrust his body against the door jamb
and scratch his back energetically by moving it violently to and fro.
This done, he would empty another half can of kerosene on the howling
flame, lunging savagely at it, and muttering to himself.

Then, biting off a good hunk of powerful apple tobacco, which lay ready
to his use on the mantel, he would pace back and forth across his room
fiercely, oblivious of his grinning family who followed these ceremonies
with exultant excitement, as he composed his tirade. Finally, he would
burst in on Eliza in the kitchen, plunging to the heart of denunciation
with a mad howl.

His turbulent and undisciplined rhetoric had acquired, by the regular
convention of its usage, something of the movement and directness of
classical epithet: his similes were preposterous, created really in a
spirit of vulgar mirth, and the great comic intelligence that was in the
family--down to the youngest--was shaken daily by it. The children grew
to await his return in the evening with a kind of exhilaration. Indeed,
Eliza herself, healing slowly and painfully her great hurt, got a
certain stimulation from it; but there was still in her a fear of
the periods of drunkenness, and latently, a stubborn and unforgiving
recollection of the past.

But, during that winter, as death, assaulted by the quick and healing
gaiety of children, those absolute little gods of the moment, lifted
itself slowly out of their hearts, something like hopefulness returned
to her. They were a life unto themselves--how lonely they were they did
not know, but they were known to everyone and friended by almost no
one. Their status was singular--if they could have been distinguished
by caste, they would probably have been called middle-class, but
the Duncans, the Tarkintons, all their neighbours, and all their
acquaintances throughout the town, never drew in to them, never came
into the strange rich colour of their lives, because they had twisted
the design of all orderly life, because there was in them a mad,
original, disturbing quality which they did not suspect. And
companionship with the elect--those like the Hilliards--was equally
impossible, even if they had had the gift or the desire for it. But
they hadn't.

Gant was a great man, and not a singular one, because singularity does
not hold life in unyielding devotion to it.

As he stormed through the house, unleashing his gathered bolts, the
children followed him joyously, shrieking exultantly as he told Eliza he
had first seen her "wriggling around the corner like a snake on her
belly," or, as coming in from freezing weather he had charged her and
all the Pentlands with malevolent domination of the elements.

"We will freeze," he yelled, "we will freeze in this hellish, damnable,
cruel and God-forsaken climate. Does Brother Will care? Does Brother Jim
care? Did the Old Hog, your miserable old father, care? Merciful God! I
have fallen into the hands of fiends incarnate, more savage, more cruel,
more abominable than the beasts of the field. Hellhounds that they are,
they will sit by and gloat at my agony until I am done to death."

He paced rapidly about the adjacent wash-room for a moment, muttering to
himself, while grinning Luke stood watchfully near.

"But they can eat!" he shouted, plunging suddenly at the kitchen door.
"They can eat--when someone else will feed them. I shall never forget
the Old Hog as long as I live. Cr-unch, cr-unch, cr-unch"--they all
exploded with laughter as his face assumed an expression of insane
gluttony, and as he continued, in a slow, whining voice intended to
represent the speech of the late Major: "'Eliza, if you don't mind I'll
have some more of that chicken,' when the old scoundrel had shovelled
it down his throat so fast we had to carry him away from the table."

As his denunciation reached some high extravagance the boys would squeal
with laughter, and Gant, inwardly tickled, would glance around slyly
with a faint grin bending the corners of his thin mouth. Eliza herself
would laugh shortly, and then exclaim roughly: "Get out of here! I've
had enough of your goings-on for one night."

Sometimes, on these occasions, his good humour grew so victorious that
he would attempt clumsily to fondle her, putting one arm stiffly around
her waist, while she bridled, became confused, and half-attempted to
escape, saying: "Get away! Get away from me! It's too late for that
now." Her white embarrassed smile was at once painful and comic: tears
pressed closely behind it. At these rare, unnatural exhibitions of
affection, the children laughed with constraint, fidgeted restlessly,
and said: "Aw, papa, don't."

Eugene, when he first noticed an occurrence of this sort, was getting on
to his fifth year: shame gathered in him in tangled clots, aching in his
throat; he twisted his neck about convulsively, smiling desperately as
he did later when he saw poor buffoons or mawkish scenes in the theatre.
And he was never after able to see them touch each other with affection,
without the same inchoate and choking humiliation: they were so used to
the curse, the clamour, and the roughness, that any variation into
tenderness came as a cruel affectation.

But as the slow months, gummed with sorrow, dropped more clearly, the
powerful germinal instinct for property and freedom began to re-awaken
in Eliza, and the ancient submerged struggle between their natures began
again. The children were growing up--Eugene had found playmates--Harry
Tarkinton and Max Isaacs. Her sex was a fading coal.

Season by season, there began again the old strife of ownership and
taxes. Returning home, with the tax-collector's report in his hand, Gant
would be genuinely frantic with rage.

"In the name of God, Woman, what are we coming to? Before another year
we'll all go to the poorhouse. Ah, Lord! I see very well where it will
all end. I'll go to the wall, every penny we've got will go into the
pockets of those accursed swindlers, and the rest will come under the
sheriff's hammer. I curse the day I was ever fool enough to buy the
first stick. Mark my words, we'll be living in soup-kitchens before this
fearful, this awful, this hellish and damnable winter is finished."

She would purse her lips thoughtfully as she went over the list, while
he looked at her with a face of strained agony.

"Yes, it does look pretty bad," she would remark. And then: "It's a pity
you didn't listen to me last summer, Mr. Gant, when we had a chance
of trading in that worthless old Owenby place for those two houses on
Carter Street. We could have been getting forty dollars a month rent on
them ever since."

"I never want to own another foot of land as long as I live," he yelled.
"It's kept me a poor man all my life, and when I die they'll have
to give me six feet of earth in Pauper's Field." And he would grow
broodingly philosophic, speaking of the vanity of human effort, the last
resting-place in earth of rich and poor, the significant fact that we
could "take none of it with us," ending perhaps with "Ah, me! It all
comes to the same in the end, anyway."

Or, he would quote a few stanzas of Gray's _Elegy_, using that
encyclopdia of stock melancholy with rather indefinite application:

  "--Await alike th' inevitable hour,
   The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

But Eliza sat grimly on what they had.

Gant, for all his hatred of land ownership, was proud of living under
his own shelter, and indeed proud in the possession of anything that was
sanctified by his usage, and that gave him comfort. He would have liked
ready and unencumbered affluence--the possession of huge sums of money
in the bank and in his pocket, the freedom to travel grandly, to go
before the world spaciously. He liked to carry large sums of money in
his pocket, a practice of which Eliza disapproved, and for which she
reprimanded him frequently. Once or twice, when he was drunk, he
had been robbed: he would brandish a roll of bills about under the
stimulation of whisky, and dispense large sums to his children--ten,
twenty, fifty dollars to each, with maudlin injunctions to "take it all!
Take it all, God damn it!" But next day he was equally assiduous in his
demands for its return: Helen usually collected it from the sometimes
unwilling fingers of the boys. She would give it to him next day. She
was fifteen or sixteen years old, and almost six feet high: a tall thin
girl, with large hands and feet, big-boned, generous features, behind
which the hysteria of constant excitement lurked.

The bond between the girl and her father grew stronger every day: she
was nervous, intense, irritable, and abusive as he was. She adored him.
He had begun to suspect that this devotion, and his own response to it,
was a cause more and more of annoyance to Eliza, and he was inclined to
exaggerate and emphasize it, particularly when he was drunk, when his
furious distaste for his wife, his obscene complaint against her, was
crudely balanced by his maudlin docility to the girl.

And Eliza's hurt was deeper because she knew that just at this time,
when her slightest movement goaded him, did what was most rawly
essential in him reveal itself. She was forced to keep out of his way,
lock herself in her room, while her young daughter victoriously subdued
him.

The friction between Helen and Eliza was often acute: they spoke sharply
and curtly to each other, and were painfully aware of the other's
presence in cramped quarters. And, in addition to the unspoken rivalry
over Gant, the girl was in the same way, equally, rasped by the
temperamental difference of Eliza--driven to fury at times by her slow,
mouth-pursing speech, her placidity, the intonations of her voice, the
deep abiding patience of her nature.

They fed stupendously. Eugene began to observe the food and the seasons.
In the autumn, they barrelled huge frosty apples in the cellar. Gant
bought whole hogs from the butcher, returning home early to salt them,
wearing a long work-apron, and rolling his sleeves half up his lean
hairy arms. Smoked bacons hung in the pantry, the great bins were full
of flour, the dark recessed shelves groaned with preserved cherries,
peaches, plums, quinces, apples, pears. All that he touched waxed in
rich pungent life: his Spring gardens, wrought in the black wet earth
below the fruit trees, flourished in huge crinkled lettuces that
wrenched cleanly from the loamy soil with small black clots stuck to
their crisp stocks; fat red radishes; heavy tomatoes. The rich plums lay
bursted on the grass; his huge cherry trees oozed with heavy gum jewels;
his apple trees bent with thick green clusters. The earth was spermy for
him like a big woman.

Spring was full of cool dewy mornings, spurting winds, and storms of
intoxicating blossoms, and in this enchantment Eugene first felt the
mixed lonely ache and promise of the seasons.

In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery,
and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham,
hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey,
golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked
batter-cakes, rum-coloured molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of
wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. At the mid-day meal, they ate
heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima-beans, tender corn
smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory
spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and
apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes
piled with preserved fruits--cherries, pears, peaches. At night they
might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter,
pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.

For the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts four heavy turkeys were bought
and fattened for weeks: Eugene fed them with cans of shelled corn several
times a day, but he could not bear to be present at their executions,
because by that time their cheerful excited gobbles made echoes in his
heart. Eliza baked for weeks in advance: the whole energy of the family
focussed upon the great ritual of the feast. A day or two before, the
auxiliary dainties arrived in piled grocer's boxes--the magic of strange
foods and fruits was added to familiar fare: there were glossed sticky
dates, cold rich figs, cramped belly to belly in small boxes, dusty
raisins, mixed nuts--the almond, pecan, the meaty nigger-toe, the
walnut, sacks of assorted candies, piles of yellow Florida oranges,
tangerines, sharp, acrid, nostalgic odours.

Seated before a roast or a fowl, Gant began a heavy clangour on his
steel and carving knife, distributing thereafter Gargantuan portions
to each plate. Eugene feasted from a high chair by his father's side,
filled his distending belly until it was drum-tight, and was permitted
to stop eating by his watchful sire only when his stomach was
impregnable to the heavy prod of Gant's big finger.

"There's a soft place there," he would roar, and he would cover the
scoured plate of his infant son with another heavy slab of beef. That
their machinery withstood this hammer-handed treatment was a tribute to
their vitality and Eliza's cookery.

Gant ate ravenously and without caution. He was immoderately fond
of fish, and he invariably choked upon a bone while eating it. This
happened hundreds of times, but each time he would look up suddenly with
a howl of agony and terror, groaning and crying out strongly while a
half-dozen hands pounded violently on his back.

"Merciful God!" he would gasp finally, "I thought I was done for that
time."

"I'll vow, Mr. Gant," Eliza was vexed. "Why on earth don't you watch
what you're doing? If you didn't eat so fast you wouldn't always get
choked."

The children, staring, but relieved, settled slowly back in their
places.

He had a Dutch love of abundance: again and again he described the great
stored barns, the groaning plenty of the Pennsylvanians.

On his journey to California, he had been charmed in New Orleans by the
cheapness and profusion of tropical fruits: a peddler offered him a
great bunch of bananas for twenty-five cents, and Gant had taken them at
once, wondering desperately later, as they moved across the continent,
why, and what he was going to do with them.




VII


This journey to California was Gant's last great voyage. He made it two
years after Eliza's return from St. Louis, when he was fifty-six years
old. In the great frame was already stirring the chemistry of pain and
death. Unspoken and undefined there was in him the knowledge that he was
at length caught in the trap of life and fixity, that he was being borne
under in this struggle against the terrible will that wanted to own the
earth more than to explore it. This was the final flare of the old
hunger that had once darkened in the small grey eyes, leading a boy into
new lands and toward the soft stone smile of an angel.

And he returned from nine thousand miles of wandering, to the bleak bare
prison of the hills on a grey day late in winter.

In the more than eight thousand days and nights of this life with Eliza,
how often had he been wakefully, soberly and peripatetically conscious
of the world outside him between the hours of one and five a.m.? Wholly,
for not more than nineteen nights--one for the birth of Leslie, Eliza's
first daughter; one for her death twenty-six months later, cholera
infantilis; one for the death of Major Tom Pentland, Eliza's father, in
May, 1902; one for the birth of Luke; one, on the train westbound to
Saint Louis, en route to Grover's death; one for the death in the
Playhouse (1893) of Uncle Thaddeus Evans, an aged and devoted negro;
one, with Eliza, in the month of March, 1897, as death watch to the
corpse of old Major Isaacs; three at the end of the month of July, 1897,
when it was thought that Eliza, withered to a white sheeting of skin
upon a bone frame, must die of typhoid; again in early April, 1903, for
Luke, typhoid death near; one for the death of Greeley Pentland, aged
twenty-six, congenital scrofulous tubercular, violinist, Pentlandian
punster, petty cheque-forger, and six weeks' gaolbird; three nights,
from the eleventh to the fourteenth of January, 1905, by the rheumatic
crucifixion of his right side, participant in his own grief, accuser
of himself and his God; once in February, 1896, as deathwatch to
the remains of Sandy Duncan, aged eleven; once in September, 1895,
penitentially alert and shamefast in the City "calaboose"; in a room of
the Keeley Institute at Piedmont, North Carolina, June 7, 1896; on March
17, 1906, between Knoxville, Tennessee, and Altamont, at the conclusion
of a seven weeks' journey to California.


How looked the home-earth then to Gant the Far-Wanderer? Light crept
greyly, melting on the rocky river, the engine smoke streaked out on
dawn like a cold breath, the hills were big, but nearer, nearer than he
thought. And Altamont lay grey and withered in the hills, a bleak mean
wintry dot. He stepped carefully down in squalid Toytown, noting that
everything was low, near, and shrunken as he made his Gulliverian entry.
He had a roof-and-gulley high conviction; with careful tucked-in elbows
he weighted down the heated Toytown street-car, staring painfully at the
dirty pasteboard pebbledash of the Pisgah Hotel, the brick and board
cheap warehouses of Depot Street, the rusty clapboard flimsiness of the
Florence (Railway Men's) Hotel, quaking with beef-fed harlotry.

So small, so small, so small, he thought. I never believed it. Even the
hills here. I'll soon be sixty.

His sallow face, thin-flanked, was hang-dog and afraid. He stared
wistful-sullenly down at the rattan seat as the car screeched round into
the switch at the cut and stopped; the motor-man, smoke-throated, slid
the door back and entered with his handle. He closed the door and sat
down yawning.

"Where you been, Mr. Gant?"

"California," said Gant.

"Thought I hadn't seen you," said the motor-man.

There was a warm electric smell and one of hot burnt steel.

But two months dead! But two months dead! Ah, Lord! So it's come to
this. Merciful God, this fearful, awful, and damnable climate. Death,
death! Is it too late? A land of life, a flower land. How clear the
green clear sea was. And all the fishes swimming there. Santa Catalina.
Those in the East should always go West. How came I here? Down,
down--always down, did I know where? Baltimore, Sydney--In God's name,
why? The little boat glass-bottomed, so you could look down. She lifted
up her skirts as she stepped down. Where now? A pair of pippins.

"Jim Bowles died while you were gone, I reckon," said the motor-man.

"What!" howled Gant. "Merciful God!" He clucked mournfully downward.
"What did he die of?" he asked.

"Pneumonia," said the motor-man. "He was dead four days after he was
took down."

"Why, he was a big healthy man in the prime of life," said Gant. "I was
talking to him the day before I went away," he lied, convincing himself
permanently that this was true. "He looked as if he had never known a
day's sickness in his life."

"He went home one Friday night with a chill," said the motor-man, "and
the next Tuesday he was gone."

There was a crescent humming on the rails. With his thick glove finger
he pushed away a clearing in the window-coated ice scurf and looked
smokily out on the raw red cut-bank. The other car appeared abruptly at
the end of the cut and curved with a screeching jerk into the switch.

"No, sir," said the motor-man, sliding back the door, "you never know
who'll go next. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Hit gits the big 'uns
first sometimes."

He closed the door behind him and jerkily opened three notches of juice.
The car ground briskly off like a wound toy.

In the prime of life, thought Gant. Myself like that some day. No, for
others. Mother almost eighty-six. Eats like a horse, Augusta wrote. Must
send her twenty dollars. Now in the cold clay, frozen. Keep till Spring.
Rain, rot, ruin. Who got the job? Brock or Saul Gudger? Bread out of my
mouth. Do me to death--the stranger. Georgia marble, sandstone base,
forty dollars.

  "A gracious friend from us is gone,
   A voice we loved is fled,
   But faith and memory lead us on:
   He lives; he is not dead."

Four cents a letter. Little enough, God knows, for the work you do. My
letters the best. Could have been a writer. Like to draw too. And all of
mine! I would have heard if anything--he would have told me. I'll never
go that way. All right above the waist. If anything happens it will be
down below. Eaten away. Whisky holes through all your guts. Pictures in
Cardiac's office of man with cancer. But several doctors have to agree
on it. Criminal offence if they don't. But, if worst comes to worst--all
that's outside. Get it before it gets up in you. Still live. Old man
Haight had a flap in his belly. Ladled it out in a cup. McGuire--damned
butcher. But he can do anything. Cut off a piece here, sew it on there.
Made the Hominy man a nose with a piece of shinbone. Couldn't tell it.
Ought to be possible. Cut all the strings, tie them up again. While you
wait. Sort of job for McGuire--rough and ready. They'll do it some day.
After I'm gone. Things standing thus, unknown--but kill you maybe.
Bull's too big. Soon now the Spring. You'd die. Not big enough. All
bloody in her brain. Full filling fountains of bull-milk. Jupiter and
what's-her-name.


But westward now he caught a glimpse of Pisgah and the western range. It
was more spacious there. The hills climbed sunward to the sun. There was
width to the eye, a smoking sun-hazed amplitude, the world convoluting
and opening into the world, hill and plain, into the west. The West for
desire, the East for home. To the east the short near mile-away hills
reeked protectively above the town. Birdseye, Sunset. A straight plume
of smoke coiled thickly from Judge Buck Sevier's smut-white clapboard
residence on the decent side of Pisgah Avenue, thin smoke-wisps rose
from the nigger shacks in the ravine below. Breakfast. Fried brains and
eggs with streaky rashers of limp bacon. Wake, wake, wake, you mountain
grills! Sleeps she yet, wrapped dirtily in three old wrappers in stale,
airless yellow-shaded cold. The chapped hands sick-sweet glycerined.
Gum-headed bottles, hairpins, and the bits of string. No one may enter
now. Ashamed.

A paper-carrier, No. 7, finished his route on the corner of Vine Street,
as the car stopped, turned eastwards now from Pisgah Avenue toward the
town core. The boy folded, bent, and flattened the fresh sheets deftly,
throwing the block angularly thirty yards upon the porch of Shields the
jeweller; it struck the boarding and bounded back with a fresh plop.
Then he walked off with fatigued relief into time toward the twentieth
century, feeling gratefully the ghost-kiss of absent weight upon his now
free but still leaning right shoulder.

About fourteen, thought Gant. That would be Spring of 1864. The mule
camp at Harrisburg. Thirty a month and keep. Men stank worse than mules.
I was in third bunk on top. Gil in second. Keep your damned dirty hoof
out of my mouth. It's bigger than a mule's. That was the man. If it ever
lands on you, you bastard, you'll think it is a mule's, said Gil. Then
they had it. Mother made us go. Big enough to work, she said. Born at
the heart of the world, why here? Twelve miles from Gettysburg. Out of
the South they came. Stove-pipe hats they had stolen. No shoes. Give me
a drink, son. That was Fitzhugh Lee. After the third day we went over.
Devil's Den. Cemetery Ridge. Stinking piles of arms and legs. Some of it
done with meat-saws. Is the land richer now? The great barns bigger than
the houses. Big eaters, all of us. I hid the cattle in the thicket.
Belle Boyd, the Beautiful Rebel Spy. Sentenced to be shot four times.
Took the despatches from his pocket while they danced. Probably a little
chippie.

Hog-chitlings and hot cracklin' bread. Must get some. The whole hog or
none. Always been a good provider. Little I ever had done for me.

The car still climbing, mounted the flimsy cheap-boarded brown-grey
smuttiness of Skyland Avenue.

America's Switzerland. The Beautiful Land of the Sky. Jesus God! Old
Bowman said he'll be a rich man some day. Built up all the way to
Pasadena. Come on out. Too late now. Think he was in love with her. No
matter. Too old. Wants her out there. No fool like--White bellies of the
fish. A spring somewhere to wash me through. Clean as a baby once more.
New Orleans, the night Jim Corbett knocked out John L. Sullivan. The man
who tried to rob me. My clothes and my watch. Five blocks down Canal
Street in my nightgown. Two a.m. Threw them all in a heap--watch landed
on top. Fight in my room. Town full of crooks and pickpockets for
prize-fight. Make good story. Policeman half hour later. They come out
and beg you to come in. Frenchwomen. Creoles. Beautiful Creole heiress.
Steamboat race. Captain, they are gaining. I will not be beaten. Out of
wood. Use the bacon, she said proudly. There was a terrific explosion.
He got her as she sank the third time and swam to shore. They powder
in front of the window, smacking their lips at you. For old men better
maybe. Who gets the business there? Bury them all above ground. Water
two feet down. Rots them. Why not? All big jobs. Italy. Carrara and
Rome. Yet Brutus is an hon-or-able man. What's a Creole? French and
Spanish. Has she any nigger blood? Ask Cardiac?

The car paused briefly at the car-shed, in sight of its stabled
brothers. Then it moved reluctantly past the dynamic atmosphere of the
Power and Light Company, wheeling bluntly into the grey frozen ribbon
of Hatton Avenue, running gently up hill, nears its end into the frore
silence of the Square.

Ah, Lord! Well do I remember. The old man offered me the whole piece for
$1,000 three days after I arrived. Millionaire to-day if----

The car passed the Tuskegee on its eighty-yard climb into the Square.
The fat slick worn leather chairs marshalled between a fresh-rubbed
gleaming line of brass spittoons squatted massively on each side of the
entry door, before thick sheets of plate-glass that extended almost to
the sidewalks with indecent nearness.

Many a fat man's rump upon the leather. Like fish in a glass case.
Travelling man's wet chewed cigar, spit-limp on his greasy lips. Staring
at all the women. Can't look back long. Gives advantage.

A negro bellboy sleepily wafted a grey dust-cloth across the leather.
Within, before the replenished crackle-dance of the wood-fire, the
night-clerk sprawled out in the deep receiving belly of a leather divan.

The car reached the Square, jolted across the netting of north-south
lines, and came to a halt on the north side, facing east. Scurfing a
patch away from the glazed window, Gant looked out. The Square in
the wan-grey frozen morning walled round him with frozen unnatural
smallness. He felt suddenly the cramped mean fixity of the Square: this
was the one fixed spot in a world that writhed, evolved, and changed
constantly in his vision, and he felt a sick green fear, a frozen
constriction about his heart because the centre of his life now
looked so shrunken. He got very definitely the impression that if he
flung out his arms they would strike against the walls of the mean
three-and-four-storey brick-built buildings that flanked the Square
raggedly.

Anchored to earth at last, he was hit suddenly by the whole cumulation
of sight and movement, of eating, drinking, and acting that had gathered
in him for two months. The limitless land, wood, field, hill, prairie,
desert, mountain, the coast rushing away below his eyes, the ground
that swam before his eyes at stations, the remembered ghosts of gumbo,
oysters, huge Frisco seasteaks, tropical fruits swarmed with the
infinite life, the ceaseless pullulation of the sea. Here only, in this
unreal-reality, this unnatural vision of what he had known for twenty
years, did life lose its movement, change, colour.

The Square had the horrible concreteness of a dream. At the far
south-eastern edge he saw his shop: his name painted hugely in dirty
scaly white across the brick near the roof: W. O. Gant--Marbles,
Tombstones, Cemetery Fixtures. It was like a dream of hell, when a man
finds his own name staring at him from the Devil's ledger: like a dream
of death, when he who comes as mourner finds himself in the coffin, or
as witness to a hanging, the condemned upon the scaffold.

A sleepy negro employed at the Manor Hotel clambered heavily up and
slumped into one of the seats reserved for his race at the back. In a
moment he began to snore gently through his blubbered lips.

At the east end of the Square, Big Bill Messier, with his vest
half-unbuttoned over his girdled paunch-belly, descended slowly the
steps of the City Hall, and moved soundingly off with country leisure
along the cold-metallic sidewalk. The fountain, ringed with a thick
bracelet of ice, played at quarter-strength a sheening glut of ice-blue
water.

Cars droned separately into their focal positions; the car-men stamped
their feet and talked smokily together; there was a breath of beginning
life. Beside the City Hall, the firemen slept above their wagons: behind
the bolted door great hoofs drummed woodenly.

A dray rattled across the east end of the Square before the City Hall,
the old horse leaning back cautiously as he sloped down into the dray
market by the oblique cobbled passage at the south-east that cut Gant's
shop away from the market and "calaboose." As the car moved eastward
again, Gant caught an angular view of Niggertown across this passage.
The settlement was plumed delicately with a hundred tiny fumes of smoke.

The car sloped swiftly now down Academy Street, turned, as the upper
edge of the negro settlement impinged steeply from the valley upon the
white, into Ivy Street, and proceeded north along a street bordered on
one side by smutty pebble-dash cottages, and on the other by a grove of
lordly oaks, in which the large quaking plaster pile of old Professor
Bowman's deserted School for Young Ladies loomed desolately, turning and
stopping at the corner, at the top of the Woodson Street hill, by the
great wintry, wooden, and deserted barn of the Ivy Hotel. It had never
paid.

Gant kneed his heavy bag before him down the passage, depositing it for
a moment at the curbing before he descended the hill. The unpaved frozen
clay fell steeply and lumpily away. It was steeper, shorter, nearer than
he thought. Only the trees looked large. He saw Duncan come out on his
porch, shirtsleeved, and pick up the morning paper. Speak to him later.
Too long now. As he expected, there was a fat coil of morning smoke
above the Scotchman's chimney, but none from his own.

He went down the hill, opening his iron gate softly, and going around to
the side entrance by the yard, rather than ascend the steep veranda
steps. The grape vines, tough and barren, writhed about the house like
sinewy ropes. He entered the sitting-room quietly. There was a strong
odour of cold leather. Cold ashes were strewn thinly in the grate. He
put his bag down and went back through the wash-room into the kitchen.
Eliza, wearing one of his old coats, and a pair of fingerless woollen
gloves, poked among the embers of a crawling little fire.

"Well, I'm back," Gant said.

"Why, what on earth!" she cried as he knew she would, becoming flustered
and moving her arms indeterminately. He laid his hand clumsily on her
shoulder for a moment. They stood awkwardly without movement. Then he
seized the oil-can, and drenched the wood with kerosene. The flame
roared up out of the stove.

"Mercy, Mr. Gant," cried Eliza, "you'll burn us up!"

But, seizing a handful of cut sticks and the oil-can, he lunged
furiously toward the sitting-room.

As the flame shot roaring up from the oiled pine sticks, and he felt the
fire-full chimney-throat tremble, he recovered joy. He brought back the
width of the desert; the vast yellow serpent of the river; alluvial with
the mined accretions of the continent; the rich vision of laden ships,
masted above the sea-walls, the world-nostalgic ships, bearing about
them the filtered and concentrated odours of the earth, sensual negroid
rum and molasses, tar, ripening guavas, bananas, tangerines, pineapples
in the warm holds of tropical boats, as cheap, as profuse, as abundant
as the lazy equatorial earth and all its women; the great names of
Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, California; the blasted fiend-world
of the desert, and the terrific boles of trees, tunnelled for the
passage of a coach; water that fell from a mountain-top in a smoking,
noiseless coil, internal boiling lakes flung skywards by the punctual
respiration of the earth, the multitudinous torture in form of granite
oceans, gouged depthlessly by canyons, and iridescent with the daily
chameleon-shift beyond man, beyond nature, of terrific colours, below
the un-human iridescence of the sky.

Eliza, still excited, recovering speech, followed him into the
sitting-room, holding her chapped gloved hands clasped before her
stomach while she talked.

"I was saying to Steve last night, 'It wouldn't surprise me if your papa
would come rolling in at any minute now'--I just had a feeling, I don't
know what you'd call it," she said, her face plucked inward by her
sudden fabrication of legend, "but it's pretty strange when you come to
think about it. I was in Garret's the other day ordering some things,
some vanilla extract, soda and a pound of coffee when Aleck Carter came
up to me. 'Eliza,' he said, 'when's Mr. Gant coming back--I think I may
have a job for him?' 'Why, Aleck,' I said, 'I don't much expect him
before the first of April.' Well, sir, what do you know--I had no sooner
got out on the street--I suppose I must have been thinking of something
else, because I remember Emma Aldrich came by and hollered to me and I
didn't think to answer her until she had gone on by, so I called out
just as big as you please to her, 'Emma!'--the thing flashed over me all
of a sudden--I was just as sure of it as I'm standing here--'what do you
think? Mr. Gant's on his way back home.'"

Jesus God! thought Gant. It's begun again.

Her memory moved over the ocean-bed of event like a great octopus,
blindly but completely feeling its way into every sea-cave, rill, and
estuary, focussed on all she had done, felt and thought, with sucking
Pentlandian intentness, for whom the sun shone, or grew dark, rain fell,
and mankind came, spoke, and died, shifted for a moment in time out of
its void into the Pentlandian core, pattern and heart of purpose.

Meanwhile, as he laid big gleaming lumps of coal upon the wood, he
muttered to himself, his mind ordering in a mounting sequence, with
balanced and climactic periods, his carefully punctuated rhetoric.

Yes, musty cotton, baled and piled under long sheds of railway sidings;
and odorous pine woodlands of the level South, saturated with brown
faery light, and broken by the tall straight leafless poles of trees; a
woman's leg below an elegantly lifted skirt mounting to a carriage in
Canal Street (French or Creole probably); a white arm curved reaching
for a window shade, French-olive faces window-glimmering, the Georgia
doctor's wife who slept above him going out, the unquenchable
fish-filled abundance of the unfenced, blue, slow cat-slapping lazy
Pacific; and the river, the all-drinking, yellow, slow-surging snake
that drained the continent. His life was like that river, rich with
its own deposited and onward-borne agglutinations, fecund with its
sedimental accretions, filled exhaustlessly by life in order to be more
richly itself, and this life, with the great purpose of a river, he
emptied now into the harbour of his house, the sufficient haven of
himself, for whom the gnarled vines wove round him thrice, the earth
burgeoned with abundant fruit and blossom, the fire burnt madly.

"What have you got for breakfast?" he said to Eliza.

"Why," she said, pursing her lips meditatively, "would you like some
eggs?"

"Yes," said he, "with a few rashers of bacon and a couple of pork
sausages."

He strode across the dining-room and went up the hall.

"Steve! Ben! Luke! You damned scoundrels!" he yelled. "Get up!"

Their feet thudded almost simultaneously upon the floor.

"Papa's home!" they shrieked.

Mr. Duncan watched butter soak through a new-baked roll. He looked
through his curtain angularly down, and saw thick acrid smoke biting
heavily into the air above Gant's house.

"He's back," said he, with satisfaction.

So, at the moment looking, Tarkinton of the paints said "W. O.'s back."


Thus came he home, who had put out to land westward, Gant the
Far-Wanderer.




VIII


Eugene was loose now in the limitless meadows of sensation: his sensory
equipment was so complete that at the moment of perception of a single
thing, the whole background of colour, warmth, odour, sound, taste
established itself, so that later, the breath of hot dandelion brought
back the grass-warm banks of Spring, a day, a place, the rustling of
young leaves, or the page of a book, the thin exotic smell of tangerine,
the wintry bite of great apples; or, as with _Gulliver's Travels_, a
bright windy day in March, the spurting moments of warmth, the drip and
reek of the earth-thaw, the feel of the fire.

He had won his first release from the fences of home--he was not quite
six, when, of his own insistence, he went to school. Eliza did not want
him to go, but his only close companion, Max Isaacs, a year his senior,
was going, and there was in his heart a constricting terror that he
would be left alone again. She told him he could not go: she felt,
somehow, that school began the slow, the final loosening of the cords
that held them together, but as she saw him slide craftily out the
gate one morning in September and run at top speed to the corner where
the other little boy was waiting, she did nothing to bring him back.
Something taut snapped in her: she remembered his furtive backward
glance, and she wept. And she did not weep for herself, but for him:
the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen
something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable
wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark
and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost
communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house,
lonely to himself and to the world. O lost.

Busy with the ache of their own growing-pains, his brothers and sisters
had little time for him: he was almost six years younger than Luke, the
youngest of them, but they exerted over him the occasional small
cruelties, petty tormentings by elder children of a younger, interested
and excited by the brief screaming insanity of his temper when, goaded
and taunted from some deep dream, he would seize a carving knife and
pursue them, or batter his head against the walls.

They felt that he was "queer"--the other boys preached the smug
cowardice of the child-herd, defending themselves, when their
persecutions were discovered, by saying they would make a "real boy"
of him. But there grew up in him a deep affection for Ben who stalked
occasionally and softly through the house, guarding even then with
scowling eyes, and surly speech, the secret life. Ben was a stranger:
some deep instinct drew him to his child-brother, a portion of his small
earnings as a paper-carrier he spent in gifts and amusement for Eugene,
admonishing him sullenly, cuffing him occasionally, but defending him
before the others.

Gant, as he watched his brooding face set for hours before a fire-lit
book of pictures, concluded that the boy liked books, more vaguely, that
he would make a lawyer of him, send him into politics, see him elected
to the governorship, the Senate, the presidency. And he unfolded to
him time after time all the rude American legendry of the country boys
who became great men because they were country boys, poor boys, and
hard-working farm boys. But Eliza thought of him as a scholar, a learned
man, a professor, and with that convenient after-thought that annoyed
Gant so deeply, but by which she firmly convinced herself, she saw in
this book-brooder the fruit of her own deliberate design.

"I read every moment I could get the chance the summer before he was
born," she said. And then, with a complacent and confidential smile
which, Gant knew, always preceded some reference to her family, she
said: "I tell you what: it may all come out in the Third Generation."

"The Third Generation be Goddamned!" answered Gant furiously.

"Now, I want to tell you," she went on thoughtfully, speaking with her
forefinger, "folks have always said that his grandfather would have made
a fine scholar if----"

"Merciful God!" said Gant, getting up suddenly and striding about the
room with an ironical laugh. "I might have known that it would come to
this! You may be sure," he exclaimed in high excitement, wetting his
thumb briefly on his tongue, "that if there's any credit to be given I
won't get it. Not from you! You'd rather die than admit it! No, but I'll
tell you what you will do! You'll brag about that miserable old freak
who never did a hard day's work in his life."

"Now, I wouldn't be so sure of that if I were you," Eliza began, her
lips working rapidly.

"Jesus God!" he cried, flinging about the room with his customary
indifference to reasoned debate. "Jesus God! What a travesty! A travesty
on Nature! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!" he exclaimed,
indefinitely but violently, and then as he strode about, he gave way to
loud, bitter, forced laughter.


Thus, pent in his dark soul, Eugene sat brooding on a fire-lit book, a
stranger in a noisy inn. The gates of his life were closing him in from
their knowledge, a vast aerial world of phantasy was erecting its fuming
and insubstantial fabric. He steeped his soul in streaming imagery,
rifling the book-shelves for pictures and finding there such treasures
as _With Stanley in Africa_, rich in the mystery of the jungle, alive
with combat, black battle, the hurled spear, vast snake-rooted forests,
thatched villages, gold and ivory; or Stoddard's _Lectures_, on whose
slick heavy pages were stamped the most visited scenes of Europe and
Asia; a Book of Wonder, with enchanting drawings of all the marvels of
the age--Santos Dumont in his balloon, liquid air poured from a kettle,
all the navies of the earth lifted two feet from the water by an ounce
of radium (Sir William Crookes), the building of the Eiffel Tower, the
Flatiron Building, the stick-steered automobile, the submarine. After
the earthquake in San Francisco there was a book describing it, its
cheap green cover lurid with crumbling towers, shaken spires, toppling
many-storied houses plunging into the splitting flame-jawed earth. And
there was another called _Palaces of Sin, or The Devil in Society_,
purporting to be the work of a pious millionaire, who had drained
his vast fortune in exposing the painted sores that blemish the
spotless-seeming hide of great position, and there were enticing
pictures showing the author walking in a silk hat down a street full of
magnificent palaces of sin.

Out of this strange jumbled gallery of pictures the pieced-out world was
expanding under the brooding power of his imagination: the lost dark
angels of the Dor "Milton" swooped into cavernous Hell beyond this
upper earth of soaring or toppling spires, machine wonder, maced and
mailed romance. And, as he thought of his future liberation into this
epic world, where all the colour of life blazed brightest far away from
home, his heart flooded his face with lakes of blood.

He had heard already the ringing of remote church bells over a
countryside on Sunday night; had listened to the earth steeped in the
brooding symphony of dark, and the million-noted little night things;
and he had heard thus the far retreating wail of a whistle in a distant
valley, and faint thunder on the rails; and he felt the infinite depth
and width of the golden world in the brief seductions of a thousand
multiplex and mixed mysterious odours and sensations, weaving, with a
blinding interplay and aural explosions, one into the other.

He remembered yet the East India Tea House at the Fair, the sandalwood,
the turbans, and the robes, the cool interior and the smell of India
tea; and he had felt now the nostalgic thrill of dew-wet mornings in
Spring, the cherry scent, the cool clarion earth, the wet loaminess
of the garden, the pungent breakfast smells and the floating snow of
blossoms. He knew the inchoate sharp excitement of hot dandelions in
young Spring grass at noon; the smell of cellars, cobwebs, and built-on
secret earth; in July, of watermelons bedded in sweet hay, inside a
farmer's covered wagon; of cantaloupe and crated peaches; and the scent
of orange rind, bitter-sweet, before a fire of coals. He knew the good
male smell of his father's sitting-room; of the smooth worn leather
sofa, with the gaping horse-hair rent; of the blistered varnished wood
upon the hearth; of the heated calf-skin bindings; of the flat moist
plug of apple tobacco, stuck with a red flag; of wood-smoke and burnt
leaves in October; of the brown tired autumn earth; of honeysuckle at
night; of warm nasturtiums; of a clean ruddy farmer who comes weekly
with printed butter, eggs and milk; of fat limp underdone bacon, and of
coffee; of a bakery-oven in the wind; of large deep-hued string-beans
smoking-hot and seasoned well with salt and butter; of a room of old
pine boards in which books and carpets have been stored, long closed; of
Concord grapes in their long white baskets.

Yes, and the exciting smell of chalk and varnished desks; the smell of
heavy bread-sandwiches of cold fried meat and butter; the smell of new
leather in a saddler's shop, or of a warm leather chair; of honey and
of unground coffee; of barrelled sweet-pickles and cheese and all the
fragrant compost of the grocer's; the smell of stored apples in the
cellar, and of orchard-apple smells, of pressed-cider pulp; of pears
ripening on a sunny shelf, and of ripe cherries stewing with sugar on
hot stoves before preserving; the smell of whittled wood, of all young
lumber, of sawdust and shavings; of peaches stuck with cloves and
pickled in brandy; of pine-sap, and green pine-needles; of a horse's
pared hoof; of chestnuts roasting, of bowls of nuts and raisins; of hot
crackling, and of young roast pork; of butter and cinnamon melting on
hot candied yams.

Yes, and of the rank slow river, and of tomatoes rotten on the vine; the
smell of rain-wet plums and boiling quinces; of rotten lily-pads; and of
foul weeds rotting in green marsh scum; and the exquisite smell of the
South, clean but funky, like a big woman; of soaking trees and the earth
after heavy rain.

Yes, and the smell of hot daisy-fields in the morning; of melted
puddling-iron in a foundry; the winter smell of horse-warm stables and
smoking dung; of old oak and walnut; and the butcher's smell of meat, of
strong slaughtered lamb, plump gouty liver, ground pasty sausages, and
red beef; and of brown sugar melted with slivered bitter chocolate; and
of crushed mint leaves, and of a wet lilac bush; of magnolia beneath the
heavy moon, of dogwood and laurel; of an old caked pipe and Bourbon rye,
aged in kegs of charred oak; the sharp smell of tobacco; of carbolic and
nitric acids; the coarse true smell of a dog; of old imprisoned books;
and the cool fern-smell near springs; of vanilla in cake-dough; and of
cloven ponderous cheeses.

Yes, and of a hardware store, but mostly the good smell of nails; of the
developing chemicals in a photographer's dark-room; and the young-life
smell of paint and turpentine; of buckwheat batter and black sorghum;
and of a negro and his horse, together; of boiling fudge; the brine
smell of pickling vats; and the lush undergrowth smell of southern
hills; of a slimy oyster-can, of chilled gutted fish; of a hot kitchen
negress; of kerosene and linoleum; of sarsaparilla and guavas; and of
ripe autumn persimmons; and the smell of the wind and the rain; and of
the acrid thunder; of cold starlight, and the brittle-bladed frozen
grass; of fog and the misted winter sun; of seed-time, bloom, and mellow
dropping harvest.


And now, whetted intemperately by what he had felt, he began, at school,
in that fecund romance, the geography to breathe the mixed odours of the
earth, sensing in every squat keg piled on a pier-head a treasure of
golden rum, rich port, fat Burgundy; smelling the jungle growth of
the tropics, the heavy odour of plantations, the salt-fish smell of
harbours, voyaging in the vast, enchanting, but unperplexing world.


Now the innumerable archipelago had been threaded, and he stood,
firm-planted, upon the unknown but waiting continent.

He learned to read almost at once, printing the shapes of words
immediately with his strong visual memory; but it was weeks later before
he learned to write, or even to copy, words. The ragged spume and wrack
of fantasy and the lost world still floated from time to time through
his clear schoolday morning brain, and although he followed accurately
all the other instruction of his teacher, he was walled in his ancient
unknowing world when they made letters. The children made their sprawling
alphabets below a line of models, but all he accomplished was a line of
jagged wavering spear-points on his sheet, which he repeated endlessly
and rapturously, unable to see or understand the difference.

"I have learned to write," he thought.

Then, one day, Max Isaacs looked suddenly, from his exercise, on
Eugene's sheet, and saw the jagged line.

"That ain't writin'," said he.

And clubbing his pencil in his warted grimy hand, he scrawled a copy of
the exercise across the page.

The line of life, that beautiful developing structure of language that
he saw flowing from his comrade's pencil, cut the knot in him that all
instruction failed to do, and instantly he seized the pencil, and wrote
the words in letters fairer and finer than his friend's. And he turned,
with a cry in his throat, to the next page, and copied it without
hesitation, and the next, the next. They looked at each other a moment
with that clear wonder by which children accept miracles, and they never
spoke of it again.

"That's writin' now," said Max. But they kept the mystery caged between
them.

Eugene thought of this event later; always he could feel the opening
gates in him, the plunge of the tide, the escape; but it happened like
this one day at once. Still midget-near the live pelt of the earth, he
saw many things that he kept in fearful secret, knowing that revelation
would be punished with ridicule. One Saturday in Spring, he stopped with
Max Isaacs above a deep pit in Central Avenue where city workmen were
patching a broken water main. The clay walls of their pit were much
higher than their heads; behind their huddled backs there was a wide
fissure, a window in the earth which opened on some dark subterranean
passage. And as the boys looked, they gripped each other suddenly, for
past the fissure slid the flat head of an enormous serpent; passed, and
was followed by a scaled body as thick as a man's: the monster slid
endlessly on into the deep earth and vanished behind the working and
unwitting men. Shaken with fear they went away, they talked about it
then and later in hushed voices, but they never revealed it.

He fell now easily into the School-Ritual; he choked his breakfast with
his brothers every morning, gulped scalding coffee, and rushed off at
the ominous warning of the final bell, clutching a hot paper-bag of
food, already spattered hungrily with grease blots. He pounded along
after his brothers, his heart hammering in his throat with excitement
and, as he raced into the hollow at the foot of the Central Avenue hill,
grew weak with nervousness, as he heard the bell ringing itself to
sleep, jerking the slatting rope about in its dying echoes.

Ben, grinning evilly and scowling, would thrust his hand against the
small of his back and rush him screaming, but unable to resist the
plunging force behind, up the hill.

In a gasping voice he would sing the morning song, coming in pantingly
on the last round of a song the quartered class took up at intervals:

  "--Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
   Life is but a dream."

Or, in the frosty Autumn mornings:

  "Waken, lords and ladies gay,
   On the mountain dawns the day."

Or the Contest of the West Wind and the South Wind. Or the Miller's
Song:

  "I envy no man, no, not I,
   And no one envies me."

He read quickly and easily; he spelled accurately. He did well with
figures. But he hated the drawing lesson, although the boxes of crayons
and paints delighted him. Sometimes the class would go into the woods,
returning with specimens of flowers and leaves--the bitten flaming red
of the maple, the brown pine comb, the brown oak leaf. These they
would paint; or in Spring a spray of cherry-blossom, a tulip. He sat
reverently before the authority of the plump woman who first taught him:
he was terrified lest he do anything common or mean in her eyes.

The class squirmed: the little boys invented tortures or scrawled
obscenities to the little girls. And the wilder and more indolent seized
every chance of leaving the room, thus: "Teacher, may I be excused?" And
they would go out into the lavatory, sniggering and dawdling about
restlessly.

He could never say it, because it would reveal to her the shame of
nature.

Once, deathly sick, but locked in silence and dumb nausea, he had
vomited finally upon his cupped hands.

He feared and hated the recess periods, trembled before the brawling
confusion of the mob and the playground, but his pride forbade that he
skulk within, or secrete himself away from them. Eliza had allowed his
hair to grow long; she wound it around her finger every morning into fat
Fauntleroy curls: the agony and humiliation it caused him was horrible,
but she was unable or unwilling to understand it, and mouth-pursingly
thoughtful and stubborn to all solicitation to cut it. She had the
garnered curls of Ben, Grover, and Luke stored in tiny boxes: she wept
sometimes when she saw Eugene's, they were the symbol of his babyhood
to her, and her sad heart, so keen in marking departures, refused to
surrender them. Even when his thick locks had become the luxuriant
colony of Harry Tarkinton's lice, she would not cut them: she held his
squirming body between her knees twice a day and ploughed his scalp with
a fine-toothed comb.

As he made to her his trembling passionate entreaties, she would smile
with an affectation of patronising humour, make a bantering humming
noise in her throat, and say: "Why, say--you can't grow up yet. You're
my baby." Suddenly baffled before the yielding inflexibility of her
nature, which could be driven to action only after incessant and
maddening prods, Eugene, screaming-mad with helpless fury, would
understand the cause of Gant's frenzy.

At school, he was a desperate and hunted little animal. The herd,
infallible in its banded instinct, knew at once that a stranger had been
thrust into it, and it was merciless at the hunt. As the lunch-time
recess came, Eugene, clutching his big grease-stained bag, would rush
for the playground pursued by the yelping pack. The leaders, two or
three big louts of advanced age and deficient mentality, pressed closely
about him, calling out suppliantly, "You know me, 'Gene. You know me";
and still racing for the far end, he would open his bag and hurl to them
one of his big sandwiches, which stayed them for a moment, as they fell
upon its possessor and clawed it to fragments, but they were upon him in
a moment more with the same yelping insistence, hunting him down into a
corner of the fence, and pressing in with outstretched paws and wild
entreaty. He would give them what he had, sometimes with a momentary
gust of fury, tearing away from a greedy hand half of a sandwich and
devouring it. When they saw he had no more to give, they went away.

The great fantasy of Christmas still kept him devout. Gant was his
unwearied comrade; night after night in the late autumn and early
winter, he would scrawl petitions to Santa Claus, listing interminably
the gifts he wanted most, and transmitting each, with perfect trust, to
the roaring chimney. As the flame took the paper from his hand and blew
its charred ghost away with a howl, Gant would rush with him to the
window, point to the stormy northern sky, and say: "There it goes! Do
you see it?"

He saw it. He saw his prayer, winged with the stanch convoying winds,
borne northward to the rimed quaint gables of Toyland, into frozen merry
Elfland: heard the tiny silver anvil-tones, the deep-lunged laughter of
the little men, the stabled cries of aerial reindeer. Gant saw and heard
them, too.

He was liberally dowered with bright-painted gimcracks upon Christmas
Day; and in his heart he hated those who advocated "useful" gifts.
Gant bought him wagons, sleds, drums, horns--best of all, a small
fireman's ladder wagon: it was the wonder, and finally the curse, of the
neighbourhood. During his unoccupied hours, he lived for months in the
cellar with Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs: they strung the ladders on
wires above the wagon, so that, at a touch, they would fall in accurate
stacks. They would pretend to doze in their quarters, as firemen do,
would leap to action suddenly, as one of them imitated the warning bell:
"Clang-a-lang-a-lang." Then, quite beyond reason, Harry and Max yoked
in a plunging team, Eugene in the driver's seat, they would leap out
through the narrow door, gallop perilously to a neighbour's house, throw
up ladders, open windows, effect entries, extinguish imaginary flames,
and return oblivious to the shrieking indictment of the housewife.

For months they lived completely in this fantasy, modelling their
actions on those of the town's firemen, and on Jannadeau, who was the
assistant chief, child-proud over it: they had seen him, at the sound of
the alarm, rush like a madman from his window in Gant's shop, leaving
the spattered fragments of a watch upon his desk, and arriving at his
duty just as the great wagon hurtled at full speed into the Square. The
firemen loved to stage the most daring exhibitions before the gaping
citizenry; helmeted magnificently, they hung from the wagons in
gymnastic postures, one man holding another over rushing space, while
number two caught in mid-air the diving heavy body of the Swiss, who
deliberately risked his neck as he leaped for the rail. Thus, for one
rapturous moment they stood poised triangularly over rocking speed: the
spine of the town was chilled ecstatically.

And when the bells broke through the drowning winds at night, his demon
rushed into his heart, bursting all cords that held him to the earth,
promising him isolation and dominance over sea and land, inhabitation of
the dark: he looked down on the whirling disk of dark forest and field,
sloped over singing pines upon a huddled town, and carried its grated
guarded fires against its own roofs, swerving and pouncing with his
haltered storm upon their doomed and flaming walls, howling with thin
laughter above their stricken heads and, fiend-voiced, calling down the
bullet wind.

Or, holding in fief the storm and the dark and all the black powers of
wizardry, to gaze, ghoul-visaged, through a storm-lashed window-pane,
briefly planting unutterable horror in grouped and sheltered life;
or, no more than a man, but holding, in your more than mortal heart,
demoniac ecstasy, to crouch against a lonely storm-swept house, to gaze
obliquely through the streaming glass upon a woman, or your enemy, and
while still exulting in your victorious dark all-seeing isolation,
to feel a touch upon your shoulder, and to look, haunter-haunted,
pursuer-pursued, into the green corrupted hell-face of malignant death.


Yes, and a world of bedded women, fair glimmers in the panting darkness,
while winds shook the house, and he arrived across the world between the
fragrant columns of delight. The great mystery of their bodies groped
darkly in him, but he had found there, at the school, instructors to
desire--the hair-faced louts of Doubleday. They struck fear and wonder
into the hearts of the smaller, gentler boys, for Doubleday was that
infested region of the town-grown mountaineers, who lurked viciously
through the night, and came at Hallowe'en to break the skulls of other
gangs in rock warfare.

There was a boy named Otto Krause, a cheese-nosed, hair-faced,
inch-browed German boy, lean and swift in the legs, hoarse-voiced and
full of idiot laughter, who showed him the gardens of delight. There was
a girl named Bessie Barnes, a black-haired, tall, bold-figured girl of
thirteen years who acted as model. Otto Krause was fourteen, Eugene was
eight: they were in the third grade. The German boy sat next to him,
drew obscenities on his books, and passed his furtive scrawled
indecencies across the aisle to Bessie.

And the nymph would answer with a lewd face, and a contemptuous blow
against her shapely lifted buttock, a gesture which Otto considered as
good as a promise, and which tickled him into hoarse sniggers.


Bessie walked in his brain.

In their furtive moments at school, he and Otto amused each other by
drawing obscenities in their geographies, bestowing on the
representations of tropical natives sagging breasts and huge organs. And
they composed on tiny scraps of paper dirty little rhymes about teachers
and principal. Their teacher was a gaunt red-faced spinster, with fierce
glaring eyes: Eugene thought always of the soldier and the tinder and
the dogs he had to pass, with eyes like saucers, windmills, the moon.
Her name was Miss Groody, and Otto, with the idiot vulgarity of little
boys, wrote of her:

  "Old Miss Groody
   Has Good Toody."

And Eugene, directing his fire against the principal, a plump, soft,
foppish young man whose name was Armstrong, and who wore always a
carnation in his coat, which, after whipping an offending boy, he was
accustomed to hold delicately between his fingers, sniffing it with
sensitive nostrils and lidded eyes, produced in the first rich joy of
creation scores of rhymes, all to the discredit of Armstrong, his
parentage, and his relations with Miss Groody.

He was obsessed; he spent the entire day now in the composition of
poetry--all bawdy variations of a theme. And he could not bring himself
to destroy them. His desk was stuffed with tiny crumpled balls of
writing: one day, during the geography lesson, the woman caught him. His
bones turned to rubber as she bore down on him glaring, and took from
the concealing pages of his book the paper on which he had been writing.
At recess she cleared his desk, read the sequence, and, with boding
quietness, bade him to see the principal after school.

"What does it mean? What do you reckon it means?" he whispered dryly to
Otto Krause.

"Oh, you'll ketch it now!" said Otto Krause, laughing hoarsely.

And the class tormented him slily, rubbing their bottoms when they
caught his eye, and making grimaces of agony.

He was sick through to his guts. He had a loathing of physical
humiliation which was not based on fear, from which he never recovered.
The brazen insensitive spirit of the boys he envied but could not
imitate: they would howl loudly under punishment, in order to mitigate
it, and they were vaingloriously unconcerned ten minutes later. He did
not think he could endure being whipped by the fat young man with the
flower: at three o'clock, white-faced, he went to the man's office.

Armstrong, slit-eyed and thin lipped, began to swish the cane he held in
his hand through the air as Eugene entered. Behind him, smoothed and
flattened on his desk, was stacked the damning pile of rhymed insult.

"Did you write these?" he demanded, narrowing his eyes to little points
in order to frighten his victim.

"Yes," said Eugene.

The principal cut the air again with his cane. He had visited Daisy
several times, had eaten at Gant's plenteous board. He remembered very
well.

"What have I ever done to you, son, that you should feel this way?" he
said, with a sudden change to whining magnanimity.

"N-n-nothing," said Eugene.

"Do you think you'll ever do it again?" said he, becoming ominous again.

"N-no, sir," Eugene answered, in the ghost of a voice.

"All right," said God, grandly throwing away his cane. "You can go."

His legs found themselves only when he had reached the playground.


But oh, the brave autumn and the songs they sang; harvest, and the
painting of a leaf; and "half-holiday to-day"; and "up in the air so
high"; and the other one about the train--"the stations go whistling
past"; the mellow days, the opening gates of desire, the smoky sun, the
dropping patter of dead leaves.

"Every little snowflake is different in shape from every other."

"Good grashus! _All_ of them, Miss Pratt?"

"All of the little snowflakes that ever were. Nature never repeats
herself."

"Aw!"


Ben's beard was growing: he had shaved. He tumbled Eugene on the leather
sofa, played with him for hours, scraped his stubble chin against the
soft face of his brother. Eugene shrieked.

"When you can do that you'll be a man," said Ben.

And he sang softly, in his thin humming ghost's voice:

  "The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse door,
   He pecked and he pecked till his pecker got sore.
   The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse bell,
   He pecked and he pecked till his pecker got well."

They laughed--Eugene with rocking throatness, Ben with a quiet snicker.
He had aqueous grey eyes, and a sallow bumpy skin. His head was shapely,
the forehead high and bony. His hair was crisp, maple-brown. Below
his perpetual scowl, his face was small, converging to a point: his
extraordinarily sensitive mouth, smiled, briefly, flickeringly,
inwardly--like a flash of light along a blade. And he always gave a
cuff instead of a caress: he was full of pride and tenderness.




IX


Yes, and in that month when Proserpine comes back, and Ceres' dead heart
rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no
bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when
odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon
their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles; and
there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking million-footed
rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of
cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying
fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the
valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangour of a
bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seem closer, nearer, for he
has heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that
sharp knife.

And life unscales its rusty weathered pelt, and earth wells out in
tender exhaustless strength, and the cup of a man's heart runs over with
dateless expectancy, tongueless promise, indefinable desire. Something
gathers in the throat, something blinds him in the eyes, and faint and
valorous horns sound through the earth.

The little girls trot pigtailed primly on their dutiful way to school;
but the young gods loiter: they hear the reed, the oatenstop, the
running goathoofs in the spongy wood, here, there, everywhere: they
dawdle, listen, fleetest when they wait, go vaguely on to their one
fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient rumour and they cannot
find the way. All of the gods have lost the way.


But they guarded what they had against the barbarians. Eugene, Max, and
Harry ruled their little neighbourhood: they made war upon the negroes
and the Jews, who amused them, and upon the Pigtail Alley people, whom
they hated and despised. Catlike they prowled about in the dark promise
of night, sitting at times upon a wall in the exciting glare of the
corner lamp, which flared gaseously, winking noisily from time to time.

Or, crouched in the concealing shrubbery of Gant's yard, they waited for
romantic negro couples climbing homeward, jerking by a cord, as their
victims came upon the spot, a stuffed black snake-appearing stocking.
And the dark was shrill with laughter as the loud rich comic voices
stammered, stopped, and screamed.

Or they stoned the cycling black boy of the markets, as he swerved down
gracefully into an alley. Nor did they hate them: clowns are black. They
had learned, as well, that it was proper to cuff these people kindly,
curse them cheerfully, feed them magnanimously. Men are kind to a
faithful wagging dog, but he must not walk habitually upon two legs.
They knew that they must "take nothin' off a nigger," and that the
beginnings of argument could best be scotched with a club and a broken
head. Only, you couldn't break a nigger's head.

They spat joyously upon the Jews. Drown a Jew and hit a nigger.

The boys would wait on the Jews, follow them home shouting "Goose
Grease! Goose Grease!" which, they were convinced, was the chief staple
of Semitic diet; or with the blind acceptance of little boys of some
traditional, or mangled, or imaginary catchword of abuse, they would
yell after their muttering and tormented victim: "Veeshamadye!
Veeshamadye!" confident that they had pronounced the most unspeakable,
to Jewish ears, of affronts.

Eugene had no interest in pogroms, but it was a fetish with Max. The
chief object of their torture was a little furtive-faced boy, whose name
was Isaac Lipinski. They pounced cattishly at him when he appeared,
harried him down alleys, over fences, across yards, into barns, stables,
and his own house; he moved with amazing speed and stealth, escaping
fantastically, teasing them to the pursuit, thumbing his fingers at
them, and grinning with wide Kike constant derision.

Or, steeped catlike in the wickedness of darkness, adrift in the
brooding promise of the neighbourhood, they would cluster silently under
a Jew's home, grouped in a sniggering huddle as they listened to the
rich excited voices, the throaty accentuation of the women; or convulsed
at the hysterical quarrels which shook the Jew-walls almost nightly.

Once, shrieking with laughter, they followed a running fight through the
streets between a young Jew and his father-in-law, in which each was
pursued and pummelled, or pursuing and pummelling; and on the day when
Louis Greenberg, a pale Jew returned from college, had killed himself by
drinking carbolic acid, they stood curiously outside the dingy wailing
house, shaken by sudden glee as they saw his father, a bearded orthodox
old Jew, clothed in rusty greasy black, and wearing a scarred derby,
approach running up the hill to his home, shaking his hands in the air,
and wailing rhythmically:

  "Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi,
   Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi,
   Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi."

But the white-headed children of Pigtail Alley they hated without
humour, without any mitigation of a most bitter and alienate hate.
Pigtail Alley was a muddy rut which sprawled down hill off the lower end
of Woodson Street, ending vaguely in the rank stench of a green-scummed
marsh bottom. On one side of this vile road there was a ragged line of
whitewashed shacks, inhabited by poor whites, whose children were
almost always white-haired, and who, snuff-mouthed bony women, and
tobacco-jawed men, sprawled stupidly in the sun-stench of their rude
wide-boarded porches. At night a smoky lamp burned dismally in the dark
interiors, there was a smell of frying cookery and of unclean flesh,
strident rasping shrews' cries, the drunken maniacal mountain drawl of
men: a scream and a curse.

Once, in the cherry time, when Gant's great White Wax was loaded with
its clusters, and the pliant and enduring boughs were dotted thickly by
the neighbour children, Jews and Gentiles alike, who had been herded
under the captaincy of Luke, and picked one quart of every four for
their own, one of these white-haired children had come doubtfully,
mournfully, up the yard.

"All right, son," Luke, who was fifteen, called out in his hearty voice.
"Get a basket and come on up."

The child came up the gummed trunk like a cat: Eugene rocked from the
slender spiral topmost bough, exulting in his lightness, the tree's
resilient strength, and the great morning-clarion fragrant backyard
world. The Alley picked his bucket with miraculous speed, skinned spryly
to the ground and emptied it into the heaping pan, and was half-way up
the trunk again when his gaunt mother streaked up the yard toward him.

"You, Reese," she shrilled, "what're you doin' hyar?" She jerked him
roughly to the ground and cut across his brown legs with a switch. He
howled.

"You git along home," she ordered, giving him another cut.

She drove him along, upbraiding him in her harsh voice, cutting him
sharply with the switch from moment to moment when, desperate with pride
and humiliation, he slackened his retreat to a slow walk, or balked
mulishly, howling again, and speeding a few paces on his short legs,
when cut by the switch.

The treed boys sniggered, but Eugene, who had seen the pain upon the
gaunt hard face of the woman, the furious pity of her blazing eyes, felt
something open and burst stabbingly in him like an abscess.


One day as they pressed round a trapped alley boy, who backed slowly,
fearfully, resentfully into a reeking wall, Willie Isaacs, the younger
brother of Max, pointing with sniggering laughter, said:

"His mother takes in washin'."

And then, almost bent double by a soaring touch of humour, he added:

"His mother takes in washin' from an ole nigger."

Harry Tarkinton laughed hoarsely. Eugene turned away indefinitely,
craned his neck convulsively, lifted one foot sharply from the ground.

"She don't!" he screamed suddenly into their astounded faces. "She
don't!"


Harry Tarkinton's parents were English. He was three or four years older
than Eugene, an awkward, heavy, muscular boy, smelling always of his
father's paints and oils, coarse-featured, meaty sloping jaw and a thick
catarrhal look about his nose and mouth. He was the breaker of visions;
the proposer of iniquities. In the cool thick evening grass of Gant's
yard one sunset, he smashed forever, as they lay there talking, the
enchantment of Christmas; but he brought in its stead the smell of
paint, the gaseous ripstink, the unadorned, sweating, and imageless
passion of the vulgar. But Eugene couldn't follow his barn-yard passion:
the strong hen-stench, the Tarkintonian paint-smell, and the rank-mired
branch-smell which mined under the filthy shambles of the backyard,
stopped him.

Once, in the deserted afternoon, as he and Harry plundered through the
vacant upper floor of Gant's house, they found a half-filled bottle of
hair-restorer.

"Have you any hairs on your belly?" said Harry.

Eugene hemmed; hinted timidly at shagginess; confessed. They undid their
buttons, smeared oily hands upon their bellies, and waited through
rapturous days for the golden fleece.

"Hair makes a man of you," said Harry.


More often, as Spring deepened, he went now to Gant's shop on the
Square. He loved the scene: the bright hill-cooled sun, the blown sheets
of spray from the fountain, the garrulous firemen emerging from the
winter, the lazy sprawling draymen on his father's wooden steps, snaking
their whips deftly across the pavement, wrestling in heavy horseplay,
Jannadeau in his dirty fly-specked window prying with delicate monocled
intentness into the entrails of a watch, the reeking mossiness of Gant's
fantastical brick shack, the great interior dustiness of the main room
in front, sagging with gravestones--small polished slabs from Georgia,
blunt ugly masses of Vermont granite, modest monuments with an urn, a
cherub figure, or a couchant lamb, ponderous fly-specked angels from
Carrara in Italy which he bought at great cost, and never sold--they
were the joy of his heart.

Behind a wooden partition was his wash-room, layered with
stonedust--coarse wooden trestles on which he carved inscriptions,
stacked tool-shelves filled with chisels, drills, mallets, a pedalled
emery wheel which Eugene worked furiously for hours, exulting in its
mounting roar, piled sandstone bases, a small heat-blasted cast-iron
stove, loose piled coal and wood.

Between the workroom and the ware-room, on the left as one entered, was
Gant's office, a small room, deep in the dust of twenty years, with an
old-fashioned desk, sheaves of banded dirty papers, a leather sofa,
a smaller desk layered with round and square samples of marble and
granite. The dirty window, which was never opened, looked out on the
sloping market square, pocketed obliquely off the public Square and
filled with the wagons of draymen and county peddlers, and on the lower
side on a few Poor White houses and on the warehouse and office of Will
Pentland.

Eugene would find his father, leaning perilously on Jannadeau's dirty
glass showcase, or on the creaking little fence that marked him off,
talking politics, war, death, and famine, denouncing the Democrats, with
references to the bad weather, taxation, and soup-kitchens that attended
their administration, and eulogising all the acts, utterances, and
policies of Theodore Roosevelt. Jannadeau, guttural, judiciously
reasonable, statistically argumentative, would consult, in all disputed
areas, his library--a greasy edition of the World Almanac, three years
old, saying, triumphantly, after a moment of dirty thumbing: "Ah--just
as I thought: the muni_cip_al taxation of Milwaukee under De_moc_ratic
administration in 1905 was $2.25 the hundred, the lowest it had been in
years. I cannot ima_gine_ why the total revenue is not given." And he
would argue with animation, picking his nose with his blunt black
fingers, his broad yellow face breaking into flaccid creases, as he
laughed gutturally at Gant's unreason.

"And you may mark my words," proceeded Gant, as if he had never been
interrupted, and had heard no dissenting judgment, "if they get in again
we'll have soup-kitchens, the banks will go to the wall, and your guts
will grease your backbone before another winter's over."

Or, he would find his father in the workroom, bending over a trestle,
using the heavy wooden mallet with delicate care, as he guided the
chisel through the mazes of an inscription. He never wore workclothes;
he worked dressed in well brushed garments of heavy black, his coat
removed, and a long striped apron covering all his front. As Eugene saw
him, he felt that this was no common craftsman, but a master, picking up
his tools briefly for a _chef-d'oevre_.

"He is better at this than any one in all the world," Eugene thought,
and his dark vision burned in him for a moment, as he thought that his
father's work would never, as men reckon years, be extinguished, but
that when that great skeleton lay powdered in earth, in many a tangled
undergrowth, in the rank wilderness of forgotten churchyards, these
letters would endure.

And he thought with pity of all the grocers and brewers and clothiers
who had come and gone, with their perishable work a forgotten excrement,
or a rotted fabric; or of plumbers, like Max's father, whose work rusted
under ground, or of painters, like Harry's, whose work scaled with the
seasons, or was obliterated with newer brighter paint; and the high
horror of death and oblivion, the decomposition of life, memory, desire,
in the huge burial-ground of the earth stormed through his heart. He
mourned for all the men who had gone because they had not scored their
name upon a rock, blasted their mark upon a cliff, sought out the most
imperishable objects of the world and graven there some token, some
emblem that utterly they might not be forgotten.

Again, Eugene would find Gant moving with bent strides across the depth
of the building, tearing madly along between the sentinel marbles that
aisled the ware-room, muttering, with hands gripped behind him, with
ominous ebb and flow. Eugene waited. Presently, when he had shuttled
thus across his shop some eighty times, he would leap, with a furious
howl, to his front door, storming out upon the porch, and delivering his
Jeremiad to the offending draymen:

"You are the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. You lousy
good-for-nothing bums: you have brought me to the verge of starvation,
you have frightened away the little business that might have put bread
in my mouth, and kept the wolf from my door. By God, I hate you, for
you stink a mile off. You low degenerates, you accursed reprobates; you
would steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes, as you have from mine,
fearful, awful, and bloodthirsty mountain grills that you are!"

He would tear back into the shop muttering, to return almost at once,
with a strained pretence at calmness, which ended in a howl:

"Now I want to tell you: I give you fair warning once and for all. If I
find you on my steps again, I'll put you all in jail."

They would disperse sheepishly to their wagons, flicking their whips
aimlessly along the pavements.

"By God, somethin's sure upset the ole man."

An hour later, like heavy buzzing flies, they would drift back, settling
from nowhere on the broad steps.

As he emerged from the shop into the Square, they would greet him
cheerfully, with a certain affection.

"'Day, Mr. Gant."

"Good day, boys," he would answer kindly, absently. And he would be away
with his gaunt devouring strides.

As Eugene entered, if Gant were busy on a stone, he would say gruffly,
"Hello, son," and continue with his work, until he had polished the
surface of the marble with pumice and water. Then he would take off his
apron, put on his coat, and say to the dawdling, expectant boy: "Come
on. I guess you're thirsty."

And they would go across the Square to the cool depth of the drug-store,
stand before the onyx splendour of the fountain, under the revolving
wooden fans, and drink chill gaseous beverages, limeade so cold it made
the head ache, or foaming ice-cream soda, which returned in sharp
delicious belches down his tender nostrils.

Eugene, richer by twenty-five cents, would leave Gant then, and spend
the remainder of the day in the library on the Square. He read now
rapidly and easily; he read romantic and adventurous novels, with a
tearing hunger. At home he devoured Luke's piled shelves of five-cent
novels: he was deep in the weekly adventures of _Young Wild West_,
fantasied in bed at night of virtuous and heroic relations with the
beautiful Arietta, followed Nick Carter, through all the mazes of
metropolitan crime, Frank Merriwell's athletic triumphs, Fred Fearnot,
and the interminable victories of _The Liberty Boys of '76_ over the
hated Redcoats.

He cared not so much for love at first as he did for material success:
the straw figures of women in boys' books, something with hair, dancing
eyes, and virtuous opinions, impeccably good and vacant, satisfied him
completely: they were the guerdon of heroism, something to be freed from
villainy on the nick by a blow or a shot, and to be enjoyed along with a
fat income.

At the library he ravaged the shelves of boys' books, going unweariedly
through all the infinite monotony of the Algers--_Pluck and Luck_, _Sink
or Swim_, _Grit_, _Jack's Ward_, _Jed the Poor-house Boy_--and dozens
more. He gloated over the fat money-getting of these books (a motif in
boys' books that has never been sufficiently recognised); all of the
devices of fortune, the loose rail, the signalled train, the rich reward
for heroism; or the full wallet found and restored to its owner; or the
value of the supposedly worthless bonds; or the discovery of a rich
patron in the city, sunk so deeply into his desires that he was never
after able to quench them.

And all the details of money--the value of the estate usurped by the
scoundrelly guardian and his caddish son, he feasted upon, reckoning
up the amount of income, if it were not given, or if it were, dividing
the annual sum into monthly and weekly portions, and dreaming on its
purchasing power. His desires were not modest--no fortune under $250,000
satisfied him: the income of $100,000 at six per cent would pinch one,
he felt, from lavishness; and if the reward of virtue was only twenty
thousand dollars, he felt bitter chagrin, reckoning life insecure, and
comfort a present warmth.

He built up a constant exchange of books among his companions, borrowing
and lending in an intricate web, from Max Isaacs, from "Nosey" Schmidt,
the butcher's son, who had all the rich adventures of the _Rover Boys_;
he ransacked Gant's shelves at home, reading translations of the _Iliad_
and the _Odyssey_ at the same time as _Diamond Dick_, _Buffalo Bill_,
and the Algers, and for the same reason; then, as the first years waned
and the erotic gropings became more intelligible, he turned passionately
to all romantic legendry, looking for women in whom blood ran hotly,
whose breath was honey, and whose soft touch a spurting train of fire.

And in this pillage of the loaded shelves, he found himself wedged
firmly into the grotesque pattern of Protestant fiction which yields
the rewards of Dionysus to the loyal disciples of John Calvin, panting
and praying in a breath, guarding the plumtree with the altar fires,
outdoing the pagan harlot with the sanctified hussy.

Aye, thought he, he would have his cake and eat it too--but it would be
a wedding-cake. He was devout in his desire to be a good man; he would
bestow the accolade of his love upon nothing but a Virgin; he would
marry himself to none but a Pure Woman. This, he saw from the books,
would cause no renunciation of delight, for the good women were
physically the most attractive.

He had learned unknowingly what the exquisite voluptuary finds, after
weary toil, much later--that no condition of life is so favourable to
his enjoyment as that one which is rigidly conventionalised. He had all
the passionate fidelity of a child to the laws of the community: all the
filtered deposit of Sunday Morning Presbyterianism had its effect.

He entombed himself in the flesh of a thousand fictional heroes, giving
his favourites extension in life beyond their books, carrying their
banners into the grey places of actuality, seeing himself now as the
militant young clergyman, arrayed, in his war on slum conditions,
against all the moneyed hostility of his fashionable church, aided in
his hour of greatest travail by the lovely daughter of the millionaire
tenement owner, and winning finally a victory for God, the poor, and
himself.


... They stood silently a moment in the vast deserted nave of Saint
Thomas'. Far in the depth of the vast church Old Michael's slender hands
pressed softly on the organ-keys. The last rays of the setting sun
poured in a golden shaft down through the western windows, falling for a
moment, in a cloud of glory, as if in benediction, on Mainwaring's tired
face.

"I am going," he said presently.

"Going?" she whispered. "Where?"

The organ music deepened.

"Out there," he gestured briefly to the West. "Out there--among His
people."

"Going?" She could not conceal the tremor of her voice. "Going? Alone?"

He smiled sadly. The sun had set. The gathering darkness hid the
suspicious moisture in his grey eyes.

"Yes, alone," he said. "Did not One greater than I go out alone some
nineteen centuries ago?"

"Alone? Alone?" A sob rose in her throat and choked her.

"But before I go," he said, after a moment, in a voice which he strove
in vain to render steady. "I want to tell you----" He paused a moment,
struggling for mastery of his feelings.

"Yes?" she whispered.

"----That I shall never forget you, little girl, as long as I live.
Never." He turned abruptly to depart.

"No, not alone! You shall not go alone!" she stopped him with a sudden
cry.

He whirled as if he had been shot.

"What do you mean? What do you mean?" he cried hoarsely.

"Oh, can't you see! Can't you see!" She threw out her little hands
imploringly, and her voice broke.

"Grace! Grace! Dear heaven, do you mean it!"

"You silly man! Oh, you dear blind foolish boy! Haven't you known for
ages--since the day I first heard you preach at the Murphy Street
settlement?"

He crushed her to him in a fierce embrace; her slender body yielded to
his touch as he bent over her; and her round arms stole softly across
his broad shoulders, around his neck, drawing his dark head to her as he
planted hungry kisses on her closed eyes, the column of her throat, the
parted petals of her fresh young lips.

"Not alone," she whispered. "Forever together."

"Forever," he answered solemnly. "So help me God."

The organ music swelled now into a triumphant pan, filling with its
exultant melody the vast darkness of the church. And as old Michael
cast his heart into the music, the tears flowed unrestrained across his
withered cheeks, but smiling happily through his tears, as dimly through
his old eyes he saw the two young figures enacting again the age-old
tale of youth and love, he murmured,

"I am the resurrection and the life, Alpha and Omega, the first and the
last, the beginning and the end" ...


Eugene turned his wet eyes to the light that streamed through the
library windows, winked rapidly, gulped and blew his nose heavily. Ah,
yes! Ah, yes!


... The band of natives, seeing now that they had no more to fear, and
wild with rage at the losses they had suffered, began to advance slowly
toward the foot of the cliff, led by Taomi, who, dancing with fury, and
hideous with warpaint, urged them on, exhorting them in a shrill voice.

Glendenning cursed softly under his breath as he looked once more at the
empty cartridge belts, then grimly, as he gazed at the yelling horde
below, slipped his two remaining cartridges into his Colt.

"For us?" she said, quietly. He nodded.

"It is the end?" she whispered, but without a trace of fear.

Again he nodded, and turned his head away for a moment. Presently he
lifted his grey face to her.

"It is death, Veronica," he said, "and now I may speak."

"Yes, Bruce," she answered softly.

It was the first time he had ever heard her use his name, and his heart
thrilled to it.

"I love you, Veronica," he said. "I have loved you ever since I found
your almost lifeless body on the beach, during all the nights I lay
outside your tent, listening to your quiet breathing within, love you
most of all now in this hour of death when the obligation to keep
silence no longer rests upon me."

"Dearest, dearest," she whispered, and he saw her face was wet with
tears. "Why didn't you speak? I have loved you from the first."

She leaned toward him, her lips half-parted and tremulous, her breathing
short and uncertain, and as his bare arms circled her fiercely their
lips met in one long moment of rapture, one final moment of life and
ecstasy, in which all the pent longing of their lives found release and
consummation now at this triumphant moment of their death.

A distant reverberation shook the air. Glendenning looked up quickly,
and rubbed his eyes with astonishment. There, in the island's little
harbour were turning slowly the lean sides of a destroyer, and even as
he looked, there was another burst of flame and smoke, and a whistling
five-inch shell burst forty yards from where the natives had stopped.
With a yell of mingled fear and baffled rage, they turned and fled off
toward their canoes. Already, a boat, manned by the lusty arms of a
blue-jacketed crew, had put off from the destroyer's side, and was
coming in toward shore.

"Saved! We are saved!" cried Glendenning and leaping to his feet he
signalled the approaching boat. Suddenly he paused.

"Damn!" he muttered bitterly. "Oh, damn!"

"What is it, Bruce?" she asked.

He answered her in a cold harsh voice.

"A destroyer has just entered the harbour. We are saved, Miss Mullins.
Saved!" And he laughed bitterly.

"Bruce! Dearest! What is it? Aren't you glad? Why do you act so
strangely? We shall have all our life together."

"Together?" he said with a harsh laugh. "Oh no, Miss Mullins. I know my
place. Do you think old J. T. Mullins would let his daughter marry Bruce
Glendenning, international vagabond, jack of all trades, and good at
none of them? Oh no. That's over now, and it's good-bye. I suppose,"
he said, with a wry smile, "I'll hear of your marriage to some Duke
or Lord, or some of those foreigners some day. Well, good-bye, Miss
Mullins. Good luck. We'll both have to go our own way, I suppose." He
turned away.

"You foolish boy! You dear bad silly boy!" She threw her arms around his
neck, clasped him to her tightly, and scolded him tenderly. "Do you
think I'll ever let you leave me now?"

"Veronica," he gasped. "Do you _mean_ it?"

She tried to meet his adoring eyes, but couldn't: a rich wave of rosy
red mantled her cheek, he drew her rapturously to him and, for the
second time, but this time with the prophecy of eternal and abundant
life before them, their lips met in sweet oblivion....


Ah, me! Ah, me! Eugene's heart was filled with joy and sadness--with
sorrow because the book was done. He pulled his clotted handkerchief
from his pocket and blew the contents of his loaded heart into it in one
mighty, triumphant and ecstatic blast of glory and sentiment. Ah me!
Good old Bruce-Eugene.


Lifted, by his fantasy, into a high interior world, he scored off
briefly and entirely all the grimy smudges of life; he existed nobly in
a heroic world with lovely and virtuous creatures. He saw himself in
exalted circumstances with Bessie Barnes, her pure eyes dim with tears,
her sweet lips tremulous with desire: he felt the strong handgrip of
Honest Jack, her brother, his truehearted fidelity, the deep eternal
locking of their brave souls, as they looked dumbly at each other with
misty eyes, and thought of the pact of danger, the shoulder-to-shoulder
drive through death and terror which had soldered them silently but
implacably.

Eugene wanted the two things all men want: he wanted to be loved, and he
wanted to be famous. His fame was chameleon, but its fruit and triumph
lay at home, among the people of Altamont. The mountain town had for him
enormous authority: with a child's egotism it was for him the centre
of the earth, the small but dynamic core of all life. He saw himself
winning Napoleonic triumphs in battle, falling, with his fierce picked
men, like a thunderbolt upon an enemy's flank, trapping, hemming, and
annihilating. He saw himself as the young captain of industry, dominant,
victorious, rich; as the great criminal-lawyer bending to his eloquence
a charmed court--but always he saw his return from the voyage wearing
the great coronal of the world upon his modest brows.

The world was a phantasmal land of faery beyond the misted hem of the
hills, a land of great reverberations, of genii-guarded orchards,
wine-dark seas, chasmed and fantastical cities from which he would
return into this substantial heart of life, his native town, with golden
loot.

He quivered deliciously to temptation--he kept his titillated honour
secure after subjecting it to the most trying inducements: the groomed
beauty of the rich man's wife, publicly humiliated by her brutal
husband, defended by Bruce-Eugene, and melting toward him with all the
pure ardour of her lonely and womanly heart, pouring the sad measure of
her life into his sympathetic ears over the wineglasses of her candled,
rich, but intimate table. And as, in the shaded light, she moved
yearningly toward him, sheathed plastically in her gown of rich velvet,
he would detach gently the round arms that clung about his neck, the
firm curved body that stuck gluily to his. Or the blonde princess in
the fabulous Balkans, the empress of gabled Toyland, and the Doll
Hussars--he would renounce, in a great scene upon the frontiers, her
proffered renunciation, drinking eternal farewell on her red mouth but
wedding her to himself and to the citizenship of freedom when revolution
had levelled her fortune to his own.

But, steeping himself in ancient myths, where the will and the deed were
not thought darkly on, he spent himself, quilted in golden meadows, or
in the green light of woods, in pagan love. Oh, to be king, and see a
fruity wide-hipped Jewess bathing on her roof, and to possess her; or a
cragged and castled baron, to execute _le droit de seigneur_ upon the
choicest of the enfeoffed wives and wenches, in a vast chamber loud with
the howling winds and lighted by the mad dancing flames of great logs!


But even more often, the shell of his morality broken to fragments by
his desire, he would enact the bawdy fable of schoolboys, and picture
himself in hot romance with a handsome teacher. In the fourth grade
his teacher was a young, inexperienced, but well-built woman, with
carrot-coloured hair, and full of reckless laughter.

He saw himself, grown to the age of potency, a strong, heroic, brilliant
boy, the one spot of incandescence in a backwoods school attended by
snag-toothed children and hair-faced louts. And, as the mellow autumn
ripened, her interest in him would intensify, she would "keep him in"
for imaginary offences, setting him, in a somewhat confused way, to do
some task, and gazing at him with steady yearning eyes when she thought
he was not looking.

He would pretend to be stumped by the exercise: she would come eagerly
and sit beside him, leaning over so that a few fine strands of
carrot-coloured hair brushed his nostrils, and so that he might feel
the firm warmth of her white-waisted arms, and the swell of her
tight-skirted thighs. She would explain things to him at great length,
guiding his fingers with her own warm, slightly moist hand, when he
pretended not to find the place; then she would chide him gently, saying
tenderly:

"Why are you such a bad boy?" or softly: "Do you think you're going to
be better after this?"

And he, simulating boyish, inarticulate coyness, would say: "Gosh, Miss
Edith, I didn't mean to do nothin'."

Later as the golden sun was waning redly, and there was nothing in the
room but the smell of chalk and the heavy buzz of the old October
flies, they would prepare to depart. As he twisted carelessly into his
overcoat, she would chide him, call him to her, arrange the lapels and
his necktie, and smooth out his tousled hair, saying:

"You're a good-looking boy. I bet all the girls are wild about you."

He would blush in a maidenly way and she, bitten with curiosity, would
press him:

"Come on, now. Who's your girl?"

"I haven't got one, honest, Miss Edith."

"You don't want one of these silly little girls, Eugene," she would say,
coaxingly. "You're too good for them--you're a great deal older than
your years. You need the understanding a mature woman can give you."

And they would walk away in the setting sun, skirting the pine-fresh
woods, passing along the path red with maple leaves, past great ripening
pumpkins in the fields, and under the golden autumnal odour of
persimmons.

She would live alone with her mother, an old deaf woman, in a little
cottage set back from the road against a shelter of lonely singing
pines, with a few grand oaks and maples in the leaf-bedded yard.

Before they came to the house, crossing a field, it would be necessary
to go over a stile; he would go over first, helping her down, looking
ardently at the graceful curve of her long, deliberately exposed,
silk-clad leg.

As the days shortened, they would come by dark, or under the heavy
low-hanging autumnal moon. She would pretend to be frightened as they
passed the woods, press in to him and take his arm at imaginary sounds,
until one night, crossing the stile, boldly resolved upon an issue, she
would pretend difficulty in descending, and he would lift her down in
his arms. She would whisper:

"How strong you are, Eugene." Still holding her, his hand would shift
under her knees. And as he lowered her upon the frozen clotted earth,
she would kiss him passionately, again and again, pressing him to her,
caressing him, and under the frosted persimmon tree fulfilling and
yielding herself up to his maiden and unfledged desire.


"That boy's read books by the hundreds," Gant boasted about the town.
"He's read everything in the library by now."

"By God, W.O., you'll have to make a lawyer out of him. That's what he's
cut out for." Major Liddell spat accurately, out of his high cracked
voice, across the pavement, and settled back in his chair below the
library windows, smoothing his stained white pointed beard with a
palsied hand. He was a veteran.




X


But this freedom, this isolation in print, this dreaming and unlimited
time of fantasy, was not to last unbroken. Both Gant and Eliza were
fluent apologists for economic independence: all the boys had been sent
out to earn money at a very early age.

"It teaches a boy to be independent and self-reliant," said Gant,
feeling he had heard this somewhere before.

"Pshaw!" said Eliza. "It won't do them a bit of harm. If they don't
learn now, they won't do a stroke of work later on. Besides, they can
earn their own pocket money." This, undoubtedly, was a consideration of
the greatest importance.

Thus, the boys had gone out to work, after school hours, and in the
vacations, since they were very young. Unhappily, neither Eliza nor
Gant were at any pains to examine the kind of work their children did,
contenting themselves vaguely with the comfortable assurance that all
work which earned money was honest, commendable, and formative of
character.

By this time, Ben, sullen, silent, alone, had withdrawn more closely
than ever into his heart: in the brawling house he came and went, and
was remembered, like a phantom. Each morning at three o'clock, when his
fragile unfurnished body should have been soaked in sleep, he got up
under the morning stars, departed silently from the sleeping house,
and went down to the roaring morning presses and the ink smell that he
loved, to begin the delivery of his route. Almost without consideration
by Gant and Eliza he slipped quietly away from school after the eighth
grade, took on extra duties at the paper's office and lived, in
sufficient bitter pride, upon his earnings. He slept at home, ate
perhaps one meal a day there, loping home gauntly at night, with his
father's stride, thin long shoulders, bent prematurely by the weight of
the heavy paper bag, pathetically, hungrily Gantian.

He bore encysted in him the evidence of their tragic fault: he walked
alone in the darkness, death and the dark angels hovered, and no one saw
him. At three-thirty in the morning, with his loaded bag beside him, he
sat with other route boys in a lunch room, with a cup of coffee in one
hand and a cigarette in the other, laughing softly, almost noiselessly,
with his flickering exquisitely sensitive mouth, his scowling grey eyes.

At home, he spent hours quietly absorbed in his life with Eugene,
playing with him, cuffing him with his white hard hands from time to
time, establishing with him a secret communication to which the life of
the family had neither access nor understanding. From his small wages he
gave the boy sums of spending-money, bought him expensive presents on
his birthdays, at Christmas, or some special occasion; inwardly moved
and pleased when he saw how like Mcenas he seemed to Eugene, how deep
and inexhaustible to the younger boy were his meagre resources. What he
earned, all the history of his life away from home, he kept in jealous
secrecy.

"It's nobody's business but my own. By God, I'm not asking any of you
for anything," he said, sullenly and irritably, when Eliza pressed him
curiously. He had a deep scowling affection for them all: he never
forgot their birthdays, he always placed where they might find it, some
gift, small, inexpensive, selected with the most discriminating taste.
When, with their fervent over-emphasis, they went through long ecstasies
of admiration, embroidering their thanks with florid decorations, he
would jerk his head sideways to some imaginary listener, laughing softly
and irritably, as he said:

"Oh for God's sake! Listen to this, won't you!"

Perhaps, as pigeon-toed, well creased, brushed, white-collared, Ben
loped through the streets, or prowled softly and restlessly about the
house, his dark angel wept, but no one else saw, and no one knew. He was
a stranger, and as he sought through the house, he was always aprowl to
find some entrance into life, some secret undiscovered door--a stone, a
leaf--that might admit him into light and fellowship. His passion for
home was fundamental, in that jangled and clamorous household his sullen
and contained quiet was like some soothing opiate on their nerves: with
quiet authority, white-handed skill, he sought about repairing old
scars, joining with delicate carpentry old broken things, prying quietly
about a circuited wire, a defective socket.

"That boy's a born electrical engineer," said Gant. "I've a good notion
to send him off to school." And he would paint a romantic picture of the
prosperity of Mr. Charles Liddell, the Major's worthy son, who earned
thousands by his electrical wizardry and supported his father. And he
would reproach them bitterly, as he dwelt on his own merit and the
worthlessness of his sons:

"Other men's sons support their fathers in their old age--not mine! Not
mine! Ah Lord--it will be a bitter day for me when I have to depend on
one of mine. Tarkinton told me the other day that Rafe has given him
five dollars a week for his food ever since he was sixteen. Do you think
I could look for such treatment from one of mine? Do you? Not until Hell
freezes over--and not then!" And he would refer to the hardships of
his own youth, cast out, so he said, to earn his living, at an age
which varied, according to his temper, at from six to eleven years,
contrasting his poverty to the luxury in which his own children
wallowed.

"No one ever did anything for me," he howled. "But everything's been
done for you. And what gratitude do I get from you? Do you ever think of
the old man who slaves up there in his cold shop in order to give you
food and shelter? Do you? Ingratitude, more fierce than brutish beasts!"
Remorseful food stuck vengefully in Eugene's throat.

Eugene was initiated to the ethics of success. It was not enough that a
man work, though work was fundamental; it was even more important that
he make money--a great deal if he was to be a great success--but at
least enough to "support himself." This was for both Gant and Eliza
the base of worth. Of so and so, they might say:

"He's not worth powder enough to kill him. He's never been able to
support himself," to which Eliza, but not Gant, might add:

"He hasn't a stick of property to his name." This crowned him with
infamy.

In the fresh sweet mornings of Spring now, Eugene was howled out of bed
at six-thirty by his father, descended to the cool garden, and there,
assisted by Gant, filled small strawberry baskets with great crinkled
lettuces, radishes, plums, and green apples--somewhat later, with
cherries. With these packed in a great hamper, he would peddle his wares
through the neighbourhood, selling them easily and delightfully, in a
world of fragrant morning cookery, at five or ten cents a basket. He
would return home gleefully with empty hamper in time for breakfast; he
liked the work, the smell of gardens, of fresh wet vegetables; he loved
the romantic structure of the earth which filled his pocket with
chinking coins.

He was permitted to keep the money of his sales, although Eliza was
annoyingly insistent that he should not squander it, but open a bank
account with it with which, one day, he might establish himself in
business, or buy a good piece of property. And she bought him a little
bank, into which his reluctant fingers dropped a portion of his
earnings, and from which he got a certain dreary satisfaction from time
to time by shaking it close to his ear and dwelling hungrily on all the
purchasable delight that was locked away from him in the small heavy
bullion-chinking vault. There was a key, but Eliza kept it.

But, as the months passed, and the sturdy child's body of his infancy
lengthened rapidly to some interior chemical expansion, and he became
fragile, thin, pallid, but remarkably tall for his age, Eliza began to
say: "That boy's big enough to do a little work."

Every Thursday afternoon now during the school months, and thence until
Saturday, he was sent out upon the streets to sell _The Saturday Evening
Post_, of which Luke held the local agency. Eugene hated the work with a
deadly sweltering hatred; he watched the approach of Thursday with sick
horror.

Luke had been the agent since his twelfth year: his reputation for
salesmanship was sown through the town; he came with wide grin,
exuberant vitality, wagging and witty tongue, hurling all his bursting
energy into an insane extraversion. He lived absolutely in event: there
was in him no secret place, nothing withheld and guarded--he had an
instinctive horror of all loneliness.

He wanted above all else to be esteemed and liked by the world, and
the need for the affection and esteem of his family was desperately
essential. The fulsome praise, the heartiness of hand and tongue, the
liberal display of sentiment were as the breath of life to him: he was
overwhelmingly insistent in the payment of drinks at the fountain, the
bringer-home of packed ice-cream for Eliza, and of cigars to Gant and,
as Gant gave publication to his generosity, the boy's need for it
increased--he built up an image of himself as the Good Fellow, witty,
unselfish, laughed at but liked by all--as Big-Hearted Unselfish Luke.
And this was the opinion people had of him.

Many times in the years that followed, when Eugene's pockets were empty,
Luke thrust a coin roughly and impatiently in them, but, hard as the
younger boy's need might be, there was always an awkward scene--painful,
embarrassed protestations, a distressful confusion because Eugene,
having accurately and intuitively gauged his brother's hunger for
gratitude and esteem, felt sharply that he was yielding up his
independence to a bludgeoning desire.

He had never felt the slightest shame at Ben's bounty: his enormously
sensitized perception had told him long since that he might get the
curse of annoyance, the cuff of anger, from his brother, but that past
indulgences would not be brandished over him, and that even the thought
of having bestowed gifts would give Ben inward shame. In this, he was
like Ben: the thought of a gift he made, with its self-congratulatory
implications, made him writhe.

Thus, before he was ten, Eugene's brooding spirit was netted in the
complexity of truth and seeming. He could find no words, no answers to
the puzzles that baffled and maddened him: he found himself loathing
that which bore the stamp of virtue, sick with weariness and horror at
what was considered noble. He was hurled, at eight years, against the
torturing paradox of the ungenerous-generous, the selfish-unselfish, the
noble-base, and unable to fathom or define those deep springs of desire
in the human spirit that seek public gratification by virtuous
pretension, he was made wretched by the conviction of his own
sinfulness.

There was in him a savage honesty, which exercised an uncontrollable
domination over him when his heart or head were deeply involved. Thus,
at the funeral of some remote kinsman, or of some acquaintance of the
family, for whom he had never acquired any considerable affection, he
would grow bitterly shamefast if, while listening to the solemn drone
of the minister, or the sorrowful chanting of the singers, he felt his
face had assumed an expression of unfelt and counterfeited grief: as a
consequence he would shift about matter-of-factly, cross his legs, gaze
indifferently at the ceiling, or look out of the window with a smile,
until he was conscious his conduct had attracted the attention of
people, and that they were looking on him with disfavour. Then, he felt
a certain grim satisfaction as if, although having lost esteem, he had
recorded his life.

But Luke flourished hardily in all the absurd mummery of the village:
he gave heaping weight to every simulation of affection, grief, pity,
good-will, and modesty--there was no excess that he did not underscore
heavily, and the world's dull eye read him kindly.

He spun himself outward with ceaseless exuberance: he was genuinely and
wholeheartedly involved. There was in him no toilsome web that might
have checked him, no balancing or restraining weight--he had enormous
energy, hungry gregariousness, the passion to pool his life.

In the family, where a simple brutal tag was enough for the appraisal of
all fine consciences, Ben went simply as "the quiet one," Luke as the
generous and unselfish one, Eugene as the "scholar." It served. The
generous one, who had never in all his life had the power to fasten his
mind upon the pages of a book, or the logic of number, for an hour
together, resented, as he see-sawed comically from one leg to another,
stammering quaintly, whistling for the word that stuck in his throat,
the brooding abstraction of the youngest.

"Come on, this is no time for day-dreaming," he would stammer
ironically. "The early bird catches the worm--it's time we went out on
the street."

And although his reference to day-dreams was only part of the axiomatic
mosaic of his speech, Eugene was startled and confused, feeling that his
secret world, so fearfully guarded, had been revealed to ridicule. And
the older boy, too, smarting from his own dismal performances at school,
convinced himself that the deep inward turning of the spirit, the
brooding retreat into the secret place, which he recognized in the
mysterious hypnotic power of language over Eugene, was not only a
species of indolence, for the only work he recognized was that which
strained at weight or sweated in the facile waggery of the tongue, but
that it was moreover the indulgence of a "selfish" family-forgetting
spirit. He was determined to occupy alone the throne of goodness.

Thus, Eugene gathered vaguely but poignantly, that other boys of his age
were not only self-supporting, but had for years kept their decrepit
parents in luxury by their earnings as electrical engineers, presidents
of banks, or members of Congress. There was, in fact, no excess
of suggestion that Gant did not use upon his youngest son--he had
felt, long since, the vibration to every tremor of feeling of the
million-noted little instrument, and it pleased him to see the child
wince, gulp, tortured with remorse. Thus, while he piled high with
succulent meat the boy's platter, he would say sentimentally:

"I tell you what: there are not many boys who have what you have. What's
going to become of you when your old father's dead and gone?" And he
would paint a ghastly picture of himself lying cold in death, lowered
forever into the damp rot of the earth, buried, forgotten--an event
which, he hinted sorrowfully, was not remote.

"You'll remember the old man then," he would say. "Ah, Lord! You never
miss the water till the well goes dry," noting with keen pleasure the
inward convulsion of the childish throat, the winking eyes, the tense
constricted face.

"I'll vow, Mr. Gant," Eliza bridled, also pleased, "you oughtn't to do
that to the child."

Or, he would speak sadly of "Little Jimmy," a legless little boy whom he
had often pointed out to Eugene, who lived across the river from
Riverside, the amusement park, and around whom he had woven a pathetic
fable of poverty and orphanage which was desperately real now to his
son. When Eugene was six, Gant had promised him carelessly a pony for
Christmas, without any intention of fulfilling his promise. As Christmas
neared he had begun to speak touchingly of "Little Jimmy," of the
countless advantages of Eugene's lot and, after a mighty struggle, the
boy had renounced the pony, in a scrawled message to Elfland, in favour
of the cripple. Eugene never forgot: even when he had reached manhood
the deception of "Little Jimmy" returned to him, without rancour,
without ugliness, only with pain for all the blind waste, the stupid
perjury, the thoughtless dishonour, the crippling dull deceit.

Luke parroted all of his father's sermon, but earnestly and witlessly,
without Gant's humour, without his chicanery, only with his
sentimentality. He lived in a world of symbols, large, crude, and
gaudily painted, labelled "Father," "Mother," "Home," "Family,"
"Generosity," "Honour," "Unselfishness," made of sugar and molasses,
and gummed glutinously with tear-shaped syrup.

"He's one good boy," the neighbours said.

"He's the cutest thing," said the ladies, who were charmed by his
stutter, his wit, his good nature, his devout attendance on them.

"That boy's a hustler. He'll make his mark," said all the men in town.

And it was as the smiling hustler that he wanted to be known. He read
piously all the circulars the Curtis Publishing Company sent to its
agents: he posed himself in the various descriptive attitudes that were
supposed to promote business--the proper manner of "approach," the most
persuasive manner of drawing the journal from the bag, the animated
description of its contents, in which he was supposed to be steeped as a
result of his faithful reading--"the good salesman," the circulars said,
"should know in and out the article he is selling"--a knowledge that
Luke avoided, but which he replaced with eloquent invention of his own.

The literal digestion of these instructions resulted in one of the most
fantastical exhibitions of print-vending ever seen: fortified by his
own unlimited cheek, and by the pious axioms of the exhortations that
"the good salesman will never take no for his answer," that he should
"stick to his prospect" even if rebuffed, that he should "try to
get the customer's psychology," the boy would fall into step with an
unsuspecting pedestrian, open the broad sheets of _The Post_ under the
man's nose, and in a torrential harangue, sown thickly with stuttering
speech, buffoonery, and ingratiation, delivered so rapidly that the
man could neither accept nor reject the magazine, hound him before a
grinning public down the length of a street, backing him defensively
into a wall, and taking from the victim's eager fingers the five-cent
coin that purchased his freedom.

"Yes, sir. Yes, sir," he would begin in a sonorous voice, dropping
wide-leggedly into the "prospect's" stride. "This week's edition of
_The Saturday Evening Post_, five cents, only a nickel, p-p-p-purchased
weekly by t-t-two million readers. In this week's issue you have
eighty-six pages of f-f-fact and fiction, to say n-n-nothing of the
advertisements. If you c-c-c-can't read you'll get m-m-more than your
money's worth out of the p-p-pictures. On page thirteen this week, we
have a very fine article, by I-I-I-Isaac F. Marcosson, the f-f-f-famous
traveller and writer on politics; on page twenty-nine, you have a story
by Irvin S. Cobb, the g-g-g-greatest living humorist, and a new story of
the prize-ring by J-J-Jack London. If you b-b-bought it in a book, it'd
c-c-cost you a d-d-dollar-and-a-half."

He had, besides these chance victims, an extensive clientry among the
townsfolk. Swinging briskly and cheerily down the street, full of
greetings and glib repartee, he would accost each of the grinning men by
a new title, in a rich stammering tenor voice:

"Colonel, how are you! Major--here you are, a week's reading hot off the
press. Captain, how's the boy?"

"How are you, son?"

"Couldn't be better, General--slick as a puppy's belly!"

And they would roar with wheezing, red-faced, Southern laughter:

"By God, he's a good 'un. Here, son, give me one of the damn things. I
don't want it, but I'll buy it just to hear you talk."

He was full of pungent and racy vulgarity: he had, more than any of the
family, a Rabelaisian earthiness that surged in him with limitless
energy, charging his tongue with unpremeditated comparisons, Gargantuan
metaphors. Finally, he wet the bed every night in spite of Eliza's
fretting complaints: it was the final touch of his stuttering,
whistling, cheerful, vital, and comic personality--he was Luke, the
unique, Luke, the incomparable: he was, in spite of his garrulous and
fidgeting nervousness, an intensely likeable person--and he really had
in him a bottomless well of affection. He wanted bounteous praise for
his acts, but he had a deep, genuine kindliness and tenderness.

Every week, on Thursday, in Gant's dusty little office, he would gather
the grinning cluster of small boys who bought _The Post_ from him, and
harangue them before he sent them out on their duties:

"Well, have you thought of what you're going to tell them yet? You know
you can't sit around on your little tails and expect them to look you
up. Have you got a spiel worked out yet? How do you approach 'em, eh?"
he said, turning fiercely to a stricken small boy. "Speak up, speak up,
G-G-G-God-damn it--don't s-s-stand there looking at me. Haw!" he said,
laughing with sudden wild idiocy, "look at that face, won't you?"

Gant surveyed the proceedings from afar with Jannadeau, grinning.

"All right, Christopher Columbus," continued Luke, good-humouredly,
"What do you tell 'em, son?"

The boy cleared his throat timidly: "Mister, do you want to buy a copy
of _The Saturday Evening Post_?"

"Oh, twah-twah," said Luke, with mincing delicacy, as the boys
sniggered, "sweet twah-twah! Do you expect them to buy with a spiel like
that? My God, where are your brains? Sail into them. Tackle them, and
don't take no for an answer. Don't ask them if they _want_ to buy. Dive
into them: 'Here you are, sir--hot off the press.' Jesus Christ," he
yelled, looking at the distant court-house clock with sudden fidget, "we
should have been out an hour ago. Come on--don't stand there: here are
your papers. How many do you want, you little Kike?"--for he had several
Jews in his employ: they worshipped him and he was very fond of them--he
liked their warmth, richness, humour.

"Twenty."

"Twenty!" he yelled. "You little loafer--you'll t-t-take fifty. G-g-go
on, you c-c-can sell 'em all this afternoon. By G-G-God, papa," he said,
pointing to the Jews, as Gant entered the office, "it l-l-looks like
the Last S-S-Supper, don't it? All right!" he said, smacking across the
buttocks a small boy who had bent for his quota. "Don't stick it in my
face." They shrieked with laughter. "Dive in to them now. Don't let 'em
get away from you." And, laughing and excited, he would send them out
into the streets.

To this kind of employment and this method of exploitation Eugene was
now initiated. He loathed the work with a deadly, an inexplicable
loathing. But something in him festered deeply at the idea of disposing
of his wares by the process of making such a wretched little nuisance of
himself that riddance was purchased only at the price of the magazine.
He writhed with shame and humiliation, but he stuck desperately to his
task, a queer curly-headed passionate little creature, who raced along
by the side of an astonished captive, pouring out of his dark eager face
a hurricane of language. And men, fascinated somehow by this strange
eloquence from a little boy, bought.

Sometimes the heavy paunch-bellied Federal judge, sometimes an attorney,
a banker would take him home, bidding him to perform for their wives,
the members of their families, giving him twenty-five cents when he was
done, and dismissing him. "What do you think of that!" they said.

His first and nearest sales made, in the town, he would make the long
circle on the hills and in the woods along the outskirts, visiting the
tubercular sanatoriums, selling the magazines easily and quickly--"like
hot cakes" as Luke had it--to doctors and nurses, to white, unshaven,
sensitive-faced Jews, to the wisp of a rake, spitting his rotten lungs
into a cup, to good-looking young women who coughed slightly from time
to time, but who smiled at him from their chairs, and let their warm
soft hands touch his slightly as they paid him.

Once, at a hillside sanatorium, two young New York Jews had taken him
to the room of one of them, closed the door behind him, and assaulted
him, tumbling him on the bed, while one drew forth a pocket knife and
informed him he was going to perform a caponizing operation on him. They
were two young men bored with the hills, the town, the deadly regime
of their treatment, and it occurred to him years later that they had
concocted the business, days ahead, in their dull lives, living for the
excitement and terror they would arouse in him. His response was more
violent than they had bargained for: he went mad with fear, screamed,
and fought insanely. They were weak as cats, he squirmed out of their
grasp and off the bed cuffing and clawing tigerishly, striking and
kicking them with blind and mounting rage. He was released by a nurse
who unlocked the door and led him out into the sunlight, the two young
consumptives, exhausted and frightened, remaining in their room. He was
nauseated by fear and by the impact of his fists on their leprous
bodies.

But the little mound of nickels and dimes and quarters chinked
pleasantly in his pockets: leg-weary and exhausted he would stand before
a gleaming fountain burying his hot face in an iced drink. Sometimes
conscience-tortured, he would steal an hour away from the weary streets
and go into the library for a period of enchantment and oblivion: he was
often discovered by his watchful and bustling brother, who drove him out
to his labour again, taunting and spurring him into activity.

"Wake up! You're not in Fairyland. Go after them."

Eugene's face was of no use to him as a mask: it was a dark pool in
which every pebble of thought and feeling left its circle--his shame,
his distaste for his employment was obvious, although he tried to
conceal it: he was accused of false pride, told that he was "afraid of a
little honest work," and reminded of the rich benefits he had received
from his big-hearted parents.

He turned desperately to Ben. Sometimes Ben, loping along the streets
of the town, met him, hot, tired, dirty, wearing his loaded canvas bag,
scowled fiercely at him, upbraided him for his unkempt appearance, and
took him into a lunch-room for something to eat--rich foaming milk, fat
steaming kidney-beans, thick apple-pie.

Both Ben and Eugene were by nature aristocrats. Eugene had just begun to
feel his social status--or rather his lack of one; Ben had felt it for
years. The feeling at bottom might have resolved itself simply into a
desire for the companionship of elegant and lovely women: neither was
able, nor would have dared, to confess this, and Eugene was unable to
confess that he was susceptible to the social snub, or the pain of caste
inferiority: any suggestion that the companionship of elegant people was
preferable to the fellowship of a world of Tarkintons, and its blousy
daughters, would have been hailed with heavy ridicule by the family, as
another indication of false and undemocratic pride. He would have been
called "Mr. Vanderbilt" or "the Prince of Wales."

Ben, however, was not to be intimidated by their cant, or deceived
by their twaddle. He saw them with bitter clarity, answered their
pretensions with soft mocking laughter, and a brief nod upwards and to
the side to the companion to whom he communicated all his contemptuous
observation--his dark satiric angel: "Oh, my God! Listen to that, won't
you?"

There was behind his scowling quiet eyes, something strange and fierce
and unequivocal that frightened them: besides, he had secured for
himself the kind of freedom they valued most--the economic freedom--and
he spoke as he felt, answering their virtuous reproof with fierce quiet
scorn.

One day, he stood, smelling of nicotine, before the fire, scowling
darkly at Eugene who, grubby and tousled, had slung his heavy bag over
his shoulder, and was preparing to depart.

"Come here, you little bum," he said. "When did you wash your hands
last?" Scowling fiercely, he made a sudden motion as if to strike the
boy, but he finished instead by re-tying, with his hard delicate hands,
his tie.

"In God's name, mamma," he burst out irritably to Eliza, "haven't you
got a clean shirt to give him? You know, he ought to have one every
month or so."

"What do you mean? What do you mean?" said Eliza with comic rapidity,
looking up from a basket of socks she was darning. "I gave him that one
last Tuesday."

"You little thug!" he growled, looking at Eugene with a fierce pain
in his eyes. "Mamma, for heaven's sake, why don't you send him to the
barber's and get that lousy hair cut off? By God, I'll pay for it, if
you don't want to spend the money."

She pursed her lips angrily and continued to darn. Eugene looked at him
dumbly, gratefully. After Eugene had gone, the quiet one smoked moodily
for a time, drawing the fragrant smoke in long gulps down into his thin
lungs. Eliza, recollective and hurt at what had been said, worked on.

"What are you trying to do with your kid, mamma?" he said in a hard
quiet voice, after a silence. "Do you want to make a tramp out of him?"

"What do you mean? What do you mean?"

"Do you think it's right to send him out on the streets with every
little thug in town?"

"Why, I don't know what you're talking about, boy," she said impatiently.
"It's no disgrace for a boy to do a little honest work, and no one
thinks so."

"Oh, my God," he said to the dark angel. "Listen to that!"

Eliza pursed her lips without speaking for a time.

"Pride goeth before a fall," she said after a moment. "Pride goeth
before a fall."

"I can't see that that makes much difference to us," said he. "We've got
no place to fall to."

"I consider myself as good as anyone," she said, with dignity. "I hold
my head up with anyone I meet."

"Oh, my God," Ben said to his angel. "You don't meet anyone. I don't
notice any of your fine brothers or their wives coming to see you."

This was true, and it hurt. She pursed her lips.

"No, mamma," he continued after a moment's pause, "you and the Old Man
have never given a damn what we've done so long as you thought you might
save a nickel by it."

"Why, I don't know what you're talking about, boy," she answered. "You
talk as if you thought we were Rich Folks. Beggars can't be choosers."

"Oh, my God," he laughed bitterly. "You and the Old Man like to make out
you're paupers, but you've a sock full of money."

"I don't know what you mean," she said angrily.

"No," he said, with his frequent negative beginning, after a moody
silence, "there are people in this town without a fifth what we've got
who get twice as much out of it. The rest of us have never had anything,
but I don't want to see the kid made into a little tramp."

There was a long silence. She darned bitterly, pursing her lips
frequently, hovering between quiet and tears.

"I never thought," she began after a long pause, her mouth tremulous
with a bitter hurt smile, "that I should live to hear such talk from a
son of mine. You had better watch out," she hinted darkly, "a day of
reckoning cometh. As sure as you live, as sure as you live. You will
be repaid threefold for your unnatural," her voice sank to a tearful
whisper, "your _unnatural_ conduct!" She wept easily.

"Oh, my God!" answered Ben, turning his lean, grey, bitter, bumpy face
up toward his listening angel. "Listen to that, won't you?"




XI


Eliza saw Altamont not as so many hills, buildings, people: she saw it
in the pattern of a gigantic blueprint. She knew the history of every
piece of valuable property--who bought it, who sold it, who owned it
in 1893, and what it was now worth. She watched the tides of traffic
cannily; she knew by what corners the largest number of people passed in
a day or an hour; she was sensitive to every growing-pain of the young
town, gauging from year to year its growth in any direction, and
deducing the probable direction of its future expansion. She judged
distances critically, saw at once where the beaten route to an important
centre was stupidly circuitous, and looking in a straight line through
houses and lots, she said:

"There'll be a street through here some day."

Her vision of land and population was clear, crude, focal--there
was nothing technical about it: it was extraordinary for its direct
intensity. Her instinct was to buy cheaply where people would come; to
keep out of pockets and _culs de sac_, to buy on a street that moved
toward a centre, and that could be given extension.

Thus, she began to think of Dixieland. It was situated five minutes from
the public square, on a pleasant sloping middle-class street of small
homes and boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame
house of eighteen or twenty draughty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a
rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow.
It had a pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row
of young deep-bodied maples: there was a sloping depth of one hundred
and ninety feet, a frontage of one hundred and twenty. And Eliza,
looking toward the town, said: "They'll put a street behind there some
day."

In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of Dixieland:
its back end was built high off the ground on wet columns of rotting
brick. Its big rooms were heated by a small furnace which sent up, when
charged with fire, a hot dry enervation to the rooms of the first floor,
and a gaseous but chill radiation to those upstairs.

The place was for sale. Its owner was a middle-aged horse-faced
gentleman whose name was the Reverend Wellington Hodge: he had begun
life favourably in Altamont as a Methodist minister, but had run foul of
trouble when he began to do double service to the Lord God of Hosts and
John Barleycorn--his evangelical career came to an abrupt ending one
winter's night when the streets were dumb with falling snow. Wellington,
clad only in his winter heavies, made a wild sortie from Dixieland at
two in the morning, announcing the kingdom of God and the banishment
of the devil, in a mad marathon through the streets that landed him
panting but victorious in front of the Post Office. Since then, with
the assistance of his wife, he had eked out a hard living at the
boarding-house. Now, he was spent, disgraced, and weary of the town.

Besides, the sheltering walls of Dixieland inspired him with horror--he
felt that the malign influence of the house had governed his own
disintegration. He was a sensitive man, and his promenades about his
estate were checked by inhibited places: the cornice of the long
girdling porch where a lodger had hanged himself one day at dawn, the
spot in the hall where the consumptive had collapsed in a hmorrhage,
the room where the old man cut his throat. He wanted to return to his
home, a land of fast horses, wind-bent grass, and good whisky--Kentucky.
He was ready to sell Dixieland.

Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully, went to town by way of
Spring Street more and more often.

"That's going to be a good piece of property some day," she said to
Gant.

He made no complaint. He felt suddenly the futility of opposing an
implacable, an inexorable desire.

"Do you want it?" he said.

She pursed her lips several times: "It's a good buy," she said.

"You'll never regret it as long as you live, W. O.," said Dick Gudger,
the agent.

"It's her house, Dick," said Gant wearily. "Make out the papers in her
name."

She looked at him.

"I never want to own another piece of property as long as I live," said
Gant. "It's a curse and a care, and the tax-collector gets all you have
in the end."

Eliza pursed her lips and nodded.

She bought the place for seventy-five hundred dollars. She had enough
money to make the first payment of fifteen hundred. The balance was to
be paid in instalments of fifteen hundred dollars a year. This she knew
she had to pay chiefly from the earnings of the house.

In the young autumn when the maples were still full and green, and the
migratory swallows filled secretly the trees with clamour, and swooped
of an evening in a black whirlwind down, drifting at its funnel end,
like dead leaves, into their chosen chimney, Eliza moved into Dixieland.
There was clangour, excitement, vast curiosity in the family about the
purchase, but no clear conception of what had really happened. Gant
and Eliza, although each felt dumbly that they had come to a decisive
boundary in their lives, talked vaguely about their plans, spoke of
Dixieland evasively as "a good investment," said nothing clearly. In
fact, they felt their approaching separation instinctively: Eliza's life
was moving by a half-blind but inevitable gravitation toward the centre
of its desire--the exact meaning of her venture she would have been
unable to define, but she had a deep conviction that the groping urge
which had led her so blindly into death and misery at Saint Louis had
now impelled her in the right direction. Her life was on the rails.

And however vaguely, confusedly, and casually they approached this
complete disruption of their life together, the rooting up of their
clamorous home, when the hour of departures came, the elements resolved
themselves immutably and without hesitation.

Eliza took Eugene with her. He was the last tie that bound her to all
the weary life of breast and cradle; he still slept with her of nights;
she was like some swimmer who ventures out into a dark and desperate
sea, not wholly trusting to her strength and destiny, but with a slender
cord bound to her which stretches still to land.

With scarcely a word spoken, as if it had been known anciently and
forever, Helen stayed with Gant.

The time for Daisy's marriage was growing near: she had been sought by a
tall middle-aged shaven life-insurance agent, who wore spats, collars of
immaculate starchiness five inches in height, who spoke with an unctuous
and insane croon, chortling gently in his throat from time to time for
no reason at all. His name was Mr. Markism, and she had screwed up
enough courage, after an arduous siege, to refuse him, upon the private
grounds of insanity.

She had promised herself to a young South Carolinian, who was connected
rather vaguely with the grocery trade. His hair was parted in the middle
of his low forehead, his voice was soft, drawling, amiable, his manner
hearty and insistent, his habits large and generous. He brought Gant
cigars on his visits, the boys large boxes of assorted candies. Everyone
felt that he had favourable prospects.

As for the others--Ben and Luke only--they were left floating in limbo;
for Steve, since his eighteenth year, had spent most of his life away
from home, existing for months by semi-vagabondage, scrappy employment,
and small forgeries upon his father, in New Orleans, Jacksonville,
Memphis, and reappearing to his depressed family after long intervals by
telegraphing that he was desperately sick or, through the intermediacy
of a crony who borrowed the title of "doctor" for the occasion, that he
was dying, and would come home in a box if he was not sent for in the
emaciated flesh.


Thus, before he was eight, Eugene gained another roof and lost forever
the tumultuous, unhappy, warm centre of his home. He had from day to day
no clear idea where the day's food, shelter, lodging was to come from,
although he was reasonably sure it would be given: he ate wherever
he happened to hang his hat, either at Gant's or at his mother's;
occasionally, although infrequently, he slept with Luke in the sloping,
alcoved, gabled back room, rude with calcimine, with the high draughty
steps that slanted to the kitchen porch, with the odour of old stacked
books in packing-cases, with the sweet orchard scents. There were two
beds; he exulted in his unaccustomed occupancy of an entire mattress,
dreaming of the day of manlike privacy. But Eliza did not allow this
often: he was riven into her flesh.

Forgetful of him during the day's press, she summoned him at night over
the telephone, demanding his return, and upbraiding Helen for keeping
him. There was a bitter submerged struggle over him between Eliza and
her daughter: absorbed in the management of Dixieland for days, she
would suddenly remember his absence from meals, and call for him angrily
across the phone.

"Good heavens, mamma," Helen would answer irritably. "He's your child,
not mine. I'm not going to see him starve."

"What do you mean? What do you mean? He ran off while dinner was on the
table. I've got a good meal fixed for him here. H-m! A _good_ meal."

Helen put her hand over the mouthpiece, making a face at him as he stood
catlike and sniggering by, burlesquing the Pentland manner, tone,
mouthing.

"H-m! Why, law me, child, yes--it's _good_ soup."

He was convulsed silently.

And then aloud: "Well, it's your own look-out, not mine. If he doesn't
want to stay up there, I can't help it."

When he returned to Dixieland, Eliza would question him with bitter
working lips; she would prick at his hot pride in an effort to keep him
by her.

"What do you mean by running off to your papa's like that? If I were
you, I'd have too much pride for that. I'd be a-sha-a-med!" Her face
worked with a bitter hurt smile. "Helen can't be bothered with you. She
doesn't want you around."

But the powerful charm of Gant's house, of its tacked and added whimsy,
its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its great gummed trees,
its roaring internal seclusiveness, the blistered varnish, the hot
calf-skin, the comfort and abundance, seduced him easily away from the
great chill tomb of Dixieland, particularly in winter, since Eliza was
most sparing of coal.

Gant had already named it "The Barn"; in the morning now, after his
heavy breakfast at home, he would swing gauntly toward town by way of
Spring Street, composing en route the invective that he had formerly
reserved to his sitting-room. He would stride through the wide chill
hall of Dixieland, bursting in upon Eliza, and two or three negresses,
busy preparing the morning meal for the hungry boarders who rocked
energetically upon the porch. All of the objections, all of the abuse
that had not been uttered when she bought the place, were vented now.

"Woman, you have deserted my bed and board, you have made a laughing
stock of me before the world, and left your children to perish. Fiend
that you are, there is nothing that you would not do to torture,
humiliate and degrade me. You have deserted me in my old age; you have
left me to die alone. Ah, Lord! It was a bitter day for us all when your
gloating eyes first fell upon this damnable, this awful, this murderous
and bloody Barn. There is no ignominy to which you will not stoop if you
think it will put a nickel in your pocket. You have fallen so low not
even your own brothers will come near you. 'Nor beast, nor man hath
fallen so far.'"

And in the pantries, above the stove, into the dining-room, the rich
voices of the negresses chuckled with laughter.

"Dat man sho' can tawk!"

Eliza got along badly with the negroes. She had all the dislike and
distrust for them of the mountain people. Moreover, she had never
been used to service, and she did not know how to accept or govern it
graciously. She nagged and berated the sullen negro girls constantly,
tortured by the thought that they were stealing her supplies and her
furnishings, and dawdling away the time for which she paid them. And she
paid them reluctantly, dribbling out their small wages a coin or two at
a time, nagging them for their laziness and stupidity.

"What have you been doing all this time? Did you get those back rooms
done upstairs?"

"No'm," said the negress sullenly, slatting flatfootedly down the
kitchen.

"I'll vow," Eliza fretted, "I never saw such a good-for-nothing
shiftless darkey in my life. You needn't think I'm going to pay you for
wasting your time."

This would go on throughout the day. As a result, Eliza would often
begin the day without a servant: the girls departed at night muttering
sullenly, and did not appear the next morning. Moreover, her reputation
for bickering pettiness spread through the length and breadth of
Niggertown. It became increasingly difficult for her to find anyone
at all who would work for her. Completely flustered when she awoke to
find herself without help, she would immediately call Helen over the
telephone, pouring her fretful story into the girl's ears and entreating
assistance:

"I'll declare, child, I don't know what I'm going to do. I could wring
that worthless nigger's neck. Here I am left all alone with a house full
of people."

"Mamma, in heaven's name, what's the matter? Can't you keep a nigger in
the house? Other people do. What do you do to them, anyway?"

But, fuming and irritable, she would leave Gant's and go to her
mother's, serving the tables with large heartiness, nervous and animated
good humour. All the boarders were very fond of her: they said she was a
fine girl. Everyone did. There was a spacious and unsparing generosity
about her, a dominant consuming vitality, which ate at her poor health,
her slender supply of strength, so that her shattered nerves drew her
frequently toward hysteria, and sometimes toward physical collapse. She
was almost six feet tall: she had large hands and feet, thin straight
legs, a big-boned generous face, with the long full chin slightly
adroop, revealing her big gold-traced upper teeth. But, in spite of this
gauntness, she did not look hard-featured or raw-boned. Her face was
full of heartiness and devotion, sensitive, whole-souled, hurt, bitter,
hysterical, but at times transparently radiant and handsome.

It was a spiritual and physical necessity for her to exhaust herself
in service for others, and it was necessary for her to receive heavy
slatherings of praise for that service, and especially necessary that
she feel her efforts had gone unappreciated. Even at the beginning, she
would become almost frantic reciting her grievances, telling the story
of her service to Eliza in a voice that became harsh and hysterical:

"Let the least little thing go wrong and she's at the phone. It's not
my place to go up there and work like a nigger for a crowd of old cheap
boarders. You know that, don't you? _Don't_ you?"

"Yes'm," said Eugene, meekly serving as audience.

"But she'd die rather than admit it. Do you ever hear her say a word of
thanks? Do I get," she said, laughing suddenly, her hysteria crossed for
the moment with her great humour, "do I get so much as 'go-to-hell' for
it?"

"_No!_" squealed Eugene, going off in fits of idiot laughter.

"Why, law me, child. H-m! Yes. It's _good_ soup," said she, touched with
her great earthy burlesque.

He tore his collar open, and undid his trousers, sliding to the floor in
an apoplexy of laughter.

"Sdop! Sdop! You're g-g-gilling me!"

"H-m! Why, law me! Yes," she continued, grinning at him as if she hoped
to succeed.

Nevertheless, whether Eliza was servantless or not, she went daily at
dinner, the mid-day meal, to help at table, and frequently at night when
Gant and the boys ate with Eliza instead of at home. She went because of
her deep desire to serve, because it satisfied her need for giving more
than was returned, and because, in spite of her jibes, along with Gant,
at the Barn, and the "cheap boarders," the animation of feeding, the
clatter of plates, the braided clamour of their talk, stimulated and
excited her.

Like Gant, like Luke, she needed extension in life, movement, excitement:
she wanted to dominate, to entertain, to be the life of the party. On
small solicitation, she sang for the boarders, thumping the cheap piano
with her heavy accurate touch, and singing in her strong, vibrant,
somewhat hard soprano a repertory of songs classical, sentimental, and
comic. Eugene remembered the soft cool nights of summer, the assembled
boarders and "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now," which Gant demanded over
and over; "Love Me and the World Is Mine"; "Till the Sands of the Desert
Grow Cold"; "Dear Old Girl, the Rob-_bin_ Sings Above You"; "The End
of a Perfect Day"; and "Alexander's Rag-Time Band," which Luke had
practised in a tortured house for weeks, and sung with thunderous
success in the High School Minstrels.

Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would hold forth on
the porch, his great voice carrying across the quiet neighbourhood, as
he held the charmed boarders by his torrential eloquence, his solution
of problems of state, his prejudiced but bold opinion upon current news.

"--And what did _we_ do, gentlemen? We sank their navy in an action that
lasted only twenty minutes, stormed at by shot and shell, Teddy and his
Rough Riders took the hill at Santiago--it was all over, as you well
know, in a few months. We had declared war with no thought of ulterior
gain; we came because the indignation of a _great_ people had been
aroused at the oppression of a smaller one, and then, with a magnanimity
well worthy the greatest people on the face of the earth, we paid
our defeated enemy twenty millions of dollars. Ah, Lord! That was
magnanimity indeed! You don't think any other nation would have done
that, do you?"

"No, sir," said the boarders emphatically.

They didn't always agree with his political opinions--Roosevelt was the
faultless descendant of Julius Csar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Abraham
Lincoln--but they felt he had a fine head and would have gone far in
politics.

"That man should have been a lawyer," said the boarders.


And yet, there was surging into these chosen hills the strong thrust of
the world, like a kissing tide, which swings lazily in with a slapping
glut of waters, and recoils into its parent crescent strength, to be
thrown farther inward once again.

It was an element of Eliza's primitive and focal reasoning that men and
women withered by the desert would seek an oasis, that those who were
thirsty would seek water, and that those panting on the plains would
look into the hills for comfort and relief. She had that bull's-eye
accuracy which has since been celebrated, when plum-picking's over,
under the name of "vision."

The streets, ten years before raw clay, were being paved: Gant went into
frenzies over the paving assessments, cursed the land, the day of his
birth, the machinations of Satan's children. But Eugene followed the
wheeled casks of boiling tar; watched the great roller, a monster that
crushed him in nightmares, powder the layered rock; felt, as he saw the
odorous pressed tongue of pavement lengthen out, a swelling ecstasy.

From time to time, a stilted Cadillac gasped cylindrically up the
hill past Dixieland: Eugene said a spell, as it faltered, for its
success--Jim Sawyer, a young blood, came for Miss Cutler, the Pittsburgh
beauty: he opened a door behind in the fat red belly. They got in.


Sometimes, when Eliza awoke to find her servants gone, he was sent
down into Niggertown to capture a new one: in that city of rickets he
searched into their fetid shacks, past the slow stench of little rills
of mire and sewage, in fetid cellars, through all the rank labyrinth of
the hill-sprawled settlement. He came, in the hot sealed dungeons of
their rooms, to know the wild grace of their bodies, thrown upon a bed,
their rich laughter, their smell of the jungle tropics stewed in with
frying cookery and a boiling wash.

"Do you want a job?"

"Whose little boy are you?"

"Mrs. Eliza Gant's."

Silence. Presently: "Dere's a gal up de street at Mis' Cawpening's who's
lookin' fo' wuk. _You_ go see _huh_."

Eliza watched them with a falcon's eye for thefts. Once, with a
detective, she searched a departed girl's room in Niggertown, finding
there sheets, towels, spoons that had been stolen from her. The girl
went to the penitentiary for two years. Eliza loved the commotion of
law, the smell and tension of the courts. Whenever she could go to law
she did so: she delighted in bringing suit against people, or in having
suit brought against her. She always won.

When her boarders defaulted payments she seized their belongings
triumphantly, delighting particularly in eleventh-hour captures at the
railway station, with the aid of an obedient constabulary, and ringed by
the attentive offal of the town.

Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland. And he was again afraid to express his
shame. As with _The Post_, he felt thwarted, netted, trapped. He hated
the indecency of his life, the loss of dignity and seclusion, the
surrender to the tumultuous rabble of the four walls which shield us
from them. He felt, rather than understood, the waste, the confusion,
the blind cruelty of their lives--his spirit was stretched out on the
rack of despair and bafflement as there came to him more and more the
conviction that their lives could not be more hopelessly distorted,
wrenched, mutilated, and perverted away from all simple comfort, repose,
happiness, if they set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein,
twist the pattern. He choked with fury: he thought of Eliza's slow
speech, her endless reminiscence, her maddening lip-pursing, and turned
white with constricted rage.

He saw plainly by this time that their poverty, the threat of the
poorhouse, the lurid references to the pauper's grave, belonged to the
insensate mythology of hoarding; anger smouldered like a brand in him at
their sorry greed. There was no place sacred unto themselves, no place
fixed for their own inhabitation, no place proof against the invasion of
the boarders.

As the house filled, they went from room to little room, going
successively down the shabby scale of their lives. He felt it would
hurt them, coarsen them: he had even then an intense faith in food, in
housing, in comfort--he felt that a civilized man must begin with them;
he knew that wherever the spirit had withered, it had not withered
because of food and plumbing.

As the house filled, in the summer season, and it was necessary to wait
until the boarders had eaten before a place could be found for him,
he walked sullenly about beneath the propped back porch of Dixieland,
savagely exploring the dark cellar, or the two dank windowless rooms
which Eliza rented, when she could, to negresses.

He felt now the petty cruelty of village caste. On Sunday for several
years, he had bathed, brushed, arrayed his anointed body in clean
underwear and shirting and departed, amid all the pleasurable bustle of
Sunday morning, for the Presbyterian Sunday School. He had by this time
been delivered from the instruction of the several spinsters who had
taught his infant faith the catechism, the goodness of God, and the
elements of celestial architecture. The five-cent piece which formerly
he had yielded up reluctantly, thinking of cakes and ale, he now
surrendered more gladly, since he usually had enough left over for cold
gaseous draughts at the soda-fountain.

In the fresh Sunday morning air he marched off with brisk excitement
to do duty at the altars, pausing near the church where the marshalled
ranks of the boys' military school split cleanly into regimented
Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians.

The children assembled in a big room adjacent to the church, honeycombed
to right and left with small classrooms, which they entered after the
preliminary service was finished. They were exhorted from the platform
by the superintendent, a Scotch dentist with a black-grey beard, fringed
by a small area of embalmed skin, whose cells, tissues, and chemical
juices seemed to have been fixed in a state of ageless suspension, and
who looked no older from one decade to another.

He read the text, or the parable of the day's study, commented on it
with Csarean dryness and concision, and surrendered the service to his
assistant, a shaven, spectacled, Wilsonian-looking man, also Scotch, who
smiled with cold affection at them over his high shiny collar, and led
them through the verses of a hymn, heaving up his arms and leering at
them encouragingly, as they approached the chorus. A sturdy spinster
thumped heavily upon a piano which shook like a leaf.

Eugene liked the high crystal voices of the little children, backed by
the substantial marrow of the older boys and girls, and based on the
strong volume of the Junior and Senior Baraccas and Philatheas. They
sang:

  "Throw out the lifeline, throw out the lifeline,
   Someone is sinking to-day-ee----"

on the mornings when the collection went for missionary work. And they
sang:

  "Shall we gather at the river,
   The bew-tee-ful, the bew-tee-ful r-hiver."

He liked that one very much. And the noble surge of "Onward, Christian
Soldiers."

Later, he went into one of the little rooms with his class. The sliding
doors rumbled together all around; presently there was a quiet drone
throughout the building.

He was now in a class composed entirely of boys. His teacher was a tall
white-faced young man, bent and thin, who was known to all the other
boys as secretary of the Y.M.C.A. He was tubercular; but the boys
admired him because of his former skill as a baseball and basketball
player. He spoke in a sad, sugary, whining voice; he was oppressively
Christ-like; he spoke to them intimately about the lesson of the day,
asking them what it might teach them in their daily lives, in acts of
obedience and love to their parents and friends, in duty, courtesy, and
Christian charity. And he told them that when they were in doubt about
their conduct they should ask themselves what Jesus would say: he spoke
of Jesus often in his melancholy, somewhat discontented voice--Eugene
became vaguely miserable as he talked, thinking of something soft,
furry, with a wet tongue.

He was nervous and constrained: the other boys knew one another
intimately--they lived on, or in the neighbourhood of Montgomery Avenue,
which was the most fashionable street in town. Sometimes, one of them
said to him, grinning: "Do you want to buy _The Saturday Evening Post_,
Mister?"

Eugene, during the week, never touched the lives of any of them, even in
a remote way. His idea of their eminence was grossly exaggerated; the
town had grown rapidly from a straggling village--it had few families as
old as the Pentlands, and, like all resort towns, its caste system was
liquidly variable, depending chiefly upon wealth, ambition, and
boldness.

Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs were Baptists, as were most of the
people, the Scotch excepted, in Gant's neighbourhood. In the social
scale the Baptists were the most populous and were considered the most
common: their minister was a large plump man with a red face and a white
vest, who reached great oratorical effects, roaring at them like a
lion, cooing at them like a dove, introducing his wife into the sermon
frequently for purpose of intimacy and laughter, in a programme which
the Episcopalians, who held the highest social eminence, and the
Presbyterians, less fashionable, but solidly decent, felt was hardly
chaste. The Methodists occupied the middle ground between vulgarity and
decorum.

This starched and well brushed world of Sunday morning Presbyterianism,
with its sober decency, its sense of restraint, its suggestion of quiet
wealth, solid position, ordered ritual, seclusive establishment, moved
him deeply with its tranquillity. He felt concretely his isolation from
it, he entered it from the jangled disorder of his own life once a week,
looking at it, and departing from it, for years, with the sad heart of
a stranger. And from the mellow gloom of the church, the rich distant
organ, the quiet nasal voice of the Scotch minister, the interminable
prayers, and the rich little pictures of Christian mythology which he
had collected as a child under the instruction of the spinsters, he
gathered something of the pain, the mystery, the sensuous beauty of
religion, something deeper and greater than this austere decency.




XII


It was the winter, and the sullen dying autumn that he hated most in
Dixieland--the dim fly-specked lights, the wretched progress about the
house in search of warmth, Eliza untidily wrapped in an old sweater, a
dirty muffler, a cast-off man's coat. She glycerined her cold-cracked
hands. The chill walls festered with damp: they drank in death from the
atmosphere: a woman died of typhoid, her husband came quickly out into
the hall and dropped his hands. They were Ohio people.

Upstairs, upon a sleeping porch, a thin-faced Jew coughed through the
interminable dark.

"In heaven's name, mamma," Helen fumed, "why do you take them in? Can't
you see he's got the bugs?"

"Why, no-o," said Eliza, pursing her lips. "He said he only had a little
bronchial trouble. I asked him about it, and he laughed just as big as
you please: 'Why, Mrs. Gant,' he said----" and there would follow an
endless anecdote, embellished with many a winding rivulet. The girl
raged: it was one of Eliza's basic traits to defend blindly whatever
brought her money.

The Jew was a kind man. He coughed gently behind his white hand and
ate bread fried in battered egg and butter. Eugene developed a keen
appetite for it: innocently he called it "Jew Bread" and asked for more.
Lichenfels laughed gently, coughed--his wife was full of swart rich
laughter. The boy did small services for him: he gave him a coin from
week to week. He was a clothier from a New Jersey town. In the Spring he
went to a sanatorium; he died there later.

In the winter a few chill boarders, those faces, those personalities
which become mediocre through repetition, sat for hours before the coals
of the parlour hearth, rocking interminably, dull of voice and gesture,
as hideously bored with themselves and Dixieland, no doubt, as he with
them.

He liked the summers better. There came slow-bodied women from the hot
rich South, dark-haired white-bodied girls from New Orleans, corn-haired
blondes from Georgia, nigger-drawling desire from South Carolina.
And there was malarial lassitude, tinged faintly with yellow, from
Mississippi but with white biting teeth. A red-faced South Carolinian,
with nicotined fingers, took him daily to the baseball games; a lank
yellow planter, malarial from Mississippi, climbed hills, and wandered
through the fragrant mountain valleys with him; of nights he heard the
rich laughter of the women, tender and cruel, upon the dark porches,
heard the florid throat-tones of the men; saw the yielding stealthy
harlotry of the South--the dark seclusion of their midnight bodies,
their morning innocence. Desire, with bloody beak, tore at his heart
like jealous virtue: he was moral for that which was denied him.

Of mornings he stayed at Gant's with Helen, playing ball with Buster
Isaacs, a cousin of Max, a plump jolly little boy who lived next door;
summoned later by the rich incense of Helen's boiling fudge. She sent
him to the little Jewish grocery down the street for the sour relishes
she liked so well: tabled in mid-morning they ate sour pickles, heavy
slabs of ripe tomatoes, coated with thick mayonnaise, amber percolated
coffee, fig-newtons and ladyfingers, hot pungent fudge pebbled with
walnuts and coated fragrantly with butter, sandwiches of tender bacon
and cucumber, iced belchy soft-drinks.

His trust in her Gantian wealth was boundless: this rich store of
delight came from inexhaustible resources. Warm lively hens cackled
cheerfully throughout the morning neighbourhood; powerful negroes
brought dripping ice in iron talons from their smoking wagons; he stood
beneath their droning saws and caught the flying ice-pulp in his hands;
he drank in the combined odour of their great bodies together with
the rich compost of the refrigeration, and the sharp oiliness of the
dining-room linoleum; and in the horsehair walnut parlour at midday,
good with the mellow piano-smell and the smell of stale varnished wood,
she played for him, and made him sing: "William Tell," "My Heart at Thy
Sweet Voice," "The Song Without Words," "_Celeste Ada_," "The Lost
Chord," her long throat lean and tendoned as her vibrant voice rang out.

She took insatiable delight in him, stuffing him with sour and sugared
relishes, tumbling him, in a random moment of her restless activity,
upon Gant's lounge, and pinioning him while she slapped his squirming
face sharply with her big hand.

Sometimes, frantic with some swift tangle of her nerves, she would
attack him viciously, hating him for his dark brooding face, his full
scalloped underlip, his deep absorption in a dream. Like Luke, and like
Gant, she sought in the world ceaseless entertainment for her restless
biting vitality: it infuriated her to see other people seek absorption
within themselves--she hated him at times when, her own wires strumming,
she saw his dark face brooding over a book or on some vision. She would
tear the book from his hands, slap him, and stab him with her cruel
savage tongue. She would pout out her lip, goggle her face about
stupidly on a drooping neck, assume an expression of dopey idiocy,
and pour out on him the horrible torrent of her venom.

"You little freak--wandering around with your queer dopey face. You're
a regular little Pentland--you funny little freak, you. Everybody's
laughing at you. Don't you know that? Don't you? We're going to dress
you up as a girl, and let you go around like that. You haven't got a
drop of Gant blood in you--papa's practically said as much--you're
Greeley all over again; you're queer. Pentland queerness sticking out
all over you."

Sometimes her sweltering and inchoate fury was so great that she threw
him on the floor and stamped on him.

He did not mind the physical assault so much as he did the poisonous
hatred of her tongue, insanely clever in fashioning the most wounding
barbs. He went frantic with horror, jerked unexpectedly from Elfland
into Hell, he bellowed madly, saw his bountiful angel change in a moment
to a snake-haired fury, lost all his sublime faith in love and goodness.
He rushed at the wall like an insane little goat, battered his head
screaming again and again, wished desperately that his constricted and
overloaded heart would burst, that something in him would break, that
somehow, bloodily, he might escape the stifling prisonhouse of his life.

This satisfied her desire; it was what deeply she had wanted--she had
found purging release in her savage attack upon him, and now she could
drain herself cleanly in a wild smother of affection. She would seize
him, struggling and screaming in her long arms, plaster kisses all over
his red mad face, soothing him with hearty flattery addressed in the
third person:

"Why, he didn't think I meant it, did he? Didn't he know I was only
joking? Why, he's strong as a little bull, isn't he? He's a regular
little giant, that's what he is. Why, he's perfectly wild, isn't he? His
eyes popping out of his head. I thought he was going to knock a hole
in the wall--Yes, ma'am. Why, law me, yes, child. It's _good_ soup,"
resorting to her broad mimicry in order to make him laugh. And he would
laugh against his will between his sobs, in a greater torture because of
this agony of affection and reconciliation than because of the abuse.

Presently, when he had grown quiet, she would send him off to the store
for pickles, cakes, cold bottled drinks; he would depart with red eyes,
his cheeks furrowed dirtily by his tears, wondering desperately as he
went down the street why the thing had happened, and drawing his foot
sharply off the ground and craning his neck convulsively as shame burnt
in him.

There was in Helen a restless hatred of dullness, respectability.
Yet she was at heart a severely conventional person, in spite of her
occasional vulgarity, which was merely a manifestation of her restless
energy, a very nave, a childishly innocent person about even the
simple wickedness of the village. She had several devoted young men
on her list--plain, hard-drinking country types: one, a native, lean,
red-faced, alcoholic, a city surveyor, who adored her; another, a
strapping florid blond from the Tennessee coal fields; another, a young
South Carolinian, townsman of her elder sister's fianc.

These young men--Hugh Parker, Jim Phelps, and Joe Cathcart, were
innocently devoted; they liked her tireless and dominant energy, the
eager monopoly of her tongue, her big sincerity and deep kindliness. She
played and sang for them--threw all her energy into entertaining them.
They brought her boxes of candy, little presents, were divided jealously
among themselves, but united in their affirmation that she was "a fine
girl."

And she would get Jim Phelps and Hugh Parker to bring her a drink of
whisky as well: she had begun to depend on small potations of alcohol
for the stimulus it gave her fevered body--a small drink was enough to
operate electrically in her blood: it renewed her, energised her, gave
her a temporary and hectic vitality. Thus, although she never drank much
at a time and showed, beyond the renewed vitality and gaiety, no sign of
intoxication, she nibbled at the bottle.

"I'll take a drink whenever I can get it," she said.

She liked, almost invariably, young fast women. She liked the hectic
pleasure of their lives, the sense of danger, their humour and
liberality. She was drawn magnetically to all the wedded harlotry,
which, escaping the Sunday discipline of a Southern village, and the
Saturday lust of sodden husbands, came gaily to Altamont in summer. She
liked people, who, as she said, "didn't mind taking a little drink now
and then."

She liked Mary Thomas, a tall jolly young prostitute who came from
Kentucky: she was a manicurist in an Altamont Hotel.

"There are two things I want to see," said Mary, "a rooster's
you-know-what and a hen's what-is-it." She was full of loud compelling
laughter. She had a small room with a sleeping porch, at the front of
the house upstairs. Eugene brought her some cigarettes once: she stood
before the window in a thin petticoat, her feet wide apart, her long
sensual legs outlined against the light.

Helen wore her dresses, hats, and silk stockings. Sometimes they drank
together. And, with humorous sentimentality, she defended her.

"Well, she's no hypocrite. That's one thing sure. She doesn't care who
knows it." Or,

"She's no worse than a lot of your little goody-goodies, if the truth's
known. She's only more open about it."

Or again, irritated at some implied criticism of her own friendliness
with the girl, she would say angrily:

"What do you know about her? You'd better be careful how you talk about
people. You'll get into trouble about it some day."

Nevertheless, she was scrupulous in her public avoidance of the girl
and, illogically, in a moment of unreasoning annoyance she would attack
Eliza:

"Why do you keep such people in your house, mamma? Every one in town
knows about her. Your place is getting the reputation of a regular
chippyhouse all over town."

Eliza pursed her lips angrily:

"I don't pay any attention to them," she said. "I consider myself as
good as any one. I hold my head up, and I expect every one else to do
likewise. You don't catch me associating with them."

It was part of her protective mechanism. She pretended to be proudly
oblivious to any disagreeable circumstance which brought her in money.
As a result, by that curious impalpable advertisement which exists
among easy women, Dixieland became known to them--they floated casually
in--the semi-public, clandestine prostitutes of a tourist town.

Helen had drifted apart from most of her friends of high school
days--the hard-working plain-faced Genevieve Pratt, daughter of a
schoolmaster, "Teeney" Duncan, Gertrude Brown. Her companions now
were livelier, if somewhat more vulgar, young women--Grace Deshaye,
a plumber's daughter, an opulent blonde; Pearl Hines, daughter of a
Baptist saddle-maker: she was heavy of body and face, but she had a
powerful ragtime singing voice.

Her closest companion, however was a girl whose name was Nan Gudger:
she was a brisk, slender, vital girl, with a waist so tightly corsetted
that a man's hands might go around it. She was the trusted, accurate,
infallible book-keeper of a grocery store. She contributed largely to
the support of her family--a mother whom Eugene looked upon with sick
flesh, because of the heavy goitre that sagged from her loose neck; a
crippled sister who moved about the house by means of crutches and the
propulsive strength of her powerful shoulders; and two brothers, hulking
young thugs of twenty and eighteen years, who always bore upon their
charmed bodies fresh knife-wounds, blue lumps and swellings, and
other marks of their fights in poolroom and brothel. They lived in a
two-storey shack of rickety lumber on Clingman Street: the women worked
uncomplainingly in the support of the young men. Eugene went here with
Helen often: she liked the vulgarity, the humour, the excitement of
their lives--and it amused her particularly to listen to Mary's obscene
earthy conversation.

Upon the first of every month, Nan and Mary gave to the boys a portion
of their earnings, for pocket money and for their monthly visit to the
women of Eagle Crescent.

"Oh, _surely_ not, Mary? Good heavens!" said Helen with eager unbelief.

"Why, hell yes, honey," said Mary, grinning her coarse drawl, taking her
snuff-stick out of the brown corner of her mouth, and holding it in her
strong hand. "We always give the boys money fer a woman once a month."

"Oh, _no_! You're joking," Helen said, laughing.

"Good God, child, don't you know _that_?" said Mary, spitting
inaccurately at the fire. "Hit's good fer their health. They'd git sick
if we didn't."

Eugene began to slide helplessly toward the floor. He got an instant
panorama of the whole astonishing picture of humour and solemn
superstition--the women contributing their money, in the interests of
sanitation and health, to the debauches of the two grinning, hairy,
nicotined young louts.

"What're you laughin' at, son?" said Mary, gooching him roughly in the
ribs, as he lay panting and prostrate. "You ain't hardly out of didies
yet."

She had all the savage passion of a mountaineer: crippled, she lived
in the coarse heat of her brothers' lust. They were crude, kindly,
ignorant, and murderous people. Nan was scrupulously respectable and
well-mannered: she had thick negroid lips that turned outward, and
hearty tropical laughter. She replaced the disreputable furniture of the
house by new shiny Grand Rapids chairs and tables. There was a varnished
bookcase, forever locked, stored with stiff sets of unread books--_The
Harvard Classics_, and a cheap encyclopdia.


When Mrs. Selborne first came to Dixieland from the hot South she was
only twenty-three, but she looked older. Ripeness with her was all:
she was a tall heavy-bodied blonde, well kept and elegant. She moved
leisurely with a luxurious sensual swing of the body: her smile was
tender and full of vague allurement, her voice gentle, her sudden
laughter, bubbling out of midnight secrecy, rich and full. She was one
of several handsome and bacchic daughters of a depleted South Carolinian
of good family: she had married at sixteen a red heavy man who came
and went from her incomparable table, eating rapidly and heartily,
muttering, when pressed, a few shy-sullen words, and departing to the
closed leather-and-horse smell of his little office in the livery-stable
he owned. She had two children by him, both girls: she moved with wasted
stealth around all the quiet slander of a South Carolina mill-town,
committing adultery carefully with a mill owner, a banker, and a lumber
man, walking circumspectly with her tender blond smile by day past all
the sly smiles of town and trade, knowing that the earth was mined below
her feet, and that her name, with clerk and merchant, was a sign for
secret laughter. The natives, the men in particular, treated her with
even more elaborate respect than a woman is usually given in a Southern
town, but their eyes, behind the courteous unctions of their masks, were
shiny with invitation.

Eugene felt when he first saw her, and knew about her, that she would
never be caught and always known. His love for her was desperate. She
was the living symbol of his desire--the dim vast figure of love and
maternity, ageless and autumnal, waiting, corn-haired, deep-breasted,
blond of limb, in the ripe fields of harvest--Demeter, Helen, the ripe
exhaustless and renewing energy, the cradling nurse of weariness and
disenchantment. Below the thrust of Spring, the sharp knife, the voices
of the young girls in the darkness, the sharp inchoate expectancies of
youth, his deep desire burned inextinguishably: something turned him
always to the older women.

When Mrs. Selborne first came to Dixieland her oldest child was seven
years old, her youngest five. She received a small cheque from her
husband every week, and a substantial one from the lumber man. She
brought a negro girl with her: she was lavish in her dispensations to
the negress, and to her children: this wastefulness, ease of living, and
her rich seductive laughter fascinated Helen, drew her to the older
woman.

And at night, as Eugene listened to the low sweet voice of the woman,
heard the rich sensual burst of her laughter, as she sat in the dark
porch with a commercial traveller or some merchant in the town, his
blood grew bitter with the morality of jealousy: he withered with his
hurt, thought of her little sleeping children, and, with a passionate
sense of fraternity, of her gulled husband. He dreamed of himself as
the redemptive hero, saving her in an hour of great danger, making her
penitent with grave reproof, accepting purely the love she offered.

In the morning, he breathed the seminal odour of her fresh bathed body
as she passed him, gazed desperately into the tender sensuality of her
face and, with a sense of unreality, wondered what change darkness
wrought in this untelling face.

Steve returned from New Orleans after a year of vagabondage. The old
preposterous swagger, following the ancient whine, reappeared as soon as
he felt himself safely established at home again.

"Stevie doesn't have to work," said he. "He's smart enough to make the
others work for him." This was his defiance to his record of petty
forgeries against Gant: he saw himself as a clever swindler although he
had never had courage to swindle any one except his father. People were
reading the Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford stories: there was an immense
admiration for this romantic criminal.

Steve was now a young man in the first twenties. He was somewhat above
the middle height, bumpy of face and sallow of skin, with a light
pleasing tenor voice. Eugene had a feeling of disgust and horror
whenever his oldest brother returned: he knew that those who were
physically least able to defend themselves, which included Eliza and
himself, would bear the brunt of his whining, petty bullying, and
drunken obscenity. He did not mind the physical abuse so much as he
did its cowardly stealth, weakness, and slobbering reconciliations.

Once, Gant, making one of his sporadic efforts to get his son fixed in
employment, had sent him out to a country graveyard to put up a small
monument. Eugene was sent along. Steve worked steadily in the hot sun
for an hour, growing more and more irritable because of the heat, the
rank weedy stench of the graveyard, and his own deep antipathy to work.
Eugene waited intensely for the attack he knew was coming.

"What are you standing there for?" screamed Big Brother at length,
looking up in an agony of petulance. He struck sharply at the boy's shin
with a heavy wrench he held in his hand, knocking him to the ground,
and crippling him for the moment. Immediately, he was palsied, not with
remorse, but with fear that he had injured him badly and would be
discovered.

"You're not hurt, are you, buddy? You're not hurt?" he began in a
quivering voice, putting his unclean yellow hands upon Eugene. And he
made the effort at reconciliation Eugene so dreaded, whimpering, blowing
his foul breath upon his brother's cringing flesh, and entreating him to
say nothing of the occurrence when he went home. Eugene became violently
nauseated: the stale odour of Steve's body, the clammy and unhealthy
sweat that stank with nicotine, the touch of his tainted flesh filled
him with horror.

There still remained, however, in the cast and carriage of his head,
in his swagger walk, the ghost of his ruined boyishness: women were
sometimes attracted to him. It was his fortune, therefore, to secure
Mrs. Selborne for his mistress the first summer she came to Dixieland.
At night her rich laughter welled up from the dark porch, they walked
through the quiet leafy streets, they went to Riverside together,
walking beyond the lights of the carnival into the dark sandy paths by
the river.

But, as her friendship with Helen ripened, as she saw the revulsion of
the Gants against their brother, and as she began to see what damage
she had already done to herself by her union with this braggart who had
brandished her name through every poolroom in town as a tribute to his
own power, she cast him off, quietly, implacably, tenderly. When she
returned now, summer by summer, she met with her innocent and unwitting
smile all his obscene innuendoes, his heavily suggestive threats, his
bitter revelations behind her back. Her affection for Helen was genuine,
but it was also, she felt, strategic and useful. The girl introduced her
to handsome young men, gave parties and dances at Gant's and Eliza's for
her, was really a partner in her intrigues, assuring her of privacy,
silence, and darkness, and defending her angrily when the evil
whispering began.

"What do you know about her? You don't know what she does. You'd better
be careful how you talk about her. She's got a husband to defend her,
you know. You'll get your head shot off some day." Or, more doubtfully:

"Well, I don't care what they say, I like her. She's mighty sweet. After
all, what can we say about her for sure? No one can _prove_ anything on
her."

And in the winters now she made short visits to the South Carolina town
where Mrs. Selborne lived, returning with an enthusiastic description
of her reception, the parties "in her honour," the food, the lavish
entertainment. Mrs. Selborne lived in the same town as Joe Gambell,
the young clerk to whom Daisy was engaged. He was full of sly hints
about the woman, but before her his manner was obsequious, confused,
reverential, and he accepted without complaint the presents of food and
clothing which she sent him after their marriage.

Daisy had been married in the month of June following Eliza's purchase
of Dixieland: the wedding was arranged on a lavish scale, and took place
in the big dining-room of the house. Gant and his two older sons grinned
sheepishly in unaccustomed evening dress, the Pentlands, faithful in
their attendance at weddings and funerals, sent gifts and came. Will and
Pett gave a heavy set of carving steels.

"I hope you always have something to use them on," said Will, flensing
his hand, and winking at Joe Gambell.

Eugene remembered weeks of frantic preparation, dress fittings,
rehearsals, the hysteria of Daisy, who stared at her nails until they
went blue, and the final splendour of the last two days--the arriving
gifts, the house, unnaturally cheerful with rich carpets and flowers,
the perilous moment when their lives joined, the big packed dining-room,
the droning interminable Scotch voice of the Presbyterian minister, the
mounting triumph of the music when the grocery clerk got his bride.
Later, the confusion, the greetings, the hysteria of the women. Daisy
sobbing uncontrollably in the arms of a distant cousin, Beth Pentland,
who had come up with her hearty red husband, the owner of a chain of
small groceries in a South Carolina town, bringing gifts and a giant
watermelon, and whose own grief was enhanced by the discovery, after the
wedding, that the dress she had worked on weeks in advance she had put
on, in her frenzy, wrong side out.

Thus Daisy passed more or less definitely out of Eugene's life, although
he was to see her briefly on visits, but with decreasing frequency, in
the years that followed. The grocery clerk was making the one daring
gesture of his life: he was breaking away from the cotton town, in which
all the years of his life had been passed, and from the long, lazy hours
of grocery clerks, the languorous gossip of lank cotton farmers and
townsmen, to which he had been used. He had found employment as a
commercial traveller for a food products company: his headquarters was
to be in Augusta, Georgia, but he was to travel into the far South.

This rooting up of his life, this adventure into new lands, the effort
to improve his fortune and his state, was his wedding gift to his
wife--a bold one, but imperilled already by distrust, fear, and his
peasant suspicion of new scenes, new faces, new departures, of any life
that differed from that of his village.

"There's no place like Henderson," said he, with complacent and annoying
fidelity, referring to that haven of enervation, red clay, ignorance,
slander, and superstition, in whose effluent rays he had been reared.

But he went to Augusta, and began his new life with Daisy in a lodging
house. She was twenty-one, a slender, blushing girl who played the piano
beautifully, accurately, academically, with a rippling touch, and with
no imagination. Eugene could never remember her very well.

In the early autumn after her marriage, Gant made the journey to
Augusta, taking Eugene with him. The inner excitement of both was
intense; the hot wait at the sleepy junction of Spartanburg, the ride in
the dilapidated day coaches of the branch line that ran to Augusta, the
hot baked autumnal land, rolling piedmont and pine woods, every detail
of the landscape they drank in with thirsty adventurous eyes. Gant's
roving spirit was parched for lack of travel: for Eugene, Saint Louis
was a faint unreality, but there burned in him a vision of the opulent
South, stranger even than his passionate winter nostalgia for the
snow-bound North, which the drifted but short-lived snows in Altamont,
the seizure of the unaccustomed moment for sledging and skating on the
steep hills awakened in him with a Northern desire, a desire for the
dark, the storm, the winds that roar across the earth and the triumphant
comfort of warm walls which only a Southerner perhaps can know.

And he saw the town of Augusta first not in the drab hues of reality,
but as one who bursts a window into the faery pageant of the world, as
one who has lived in prison, and finds life and the earth in rosy dawn,
as one who has lived in all the fabulous imagery of books, and finds
in a journey only an extension and verification of it--so did he see
Augusta, with the fresh washed eyes of a child, with glory, with
enchantment.

They were gone two weeks. He remembered chiefly the brown stains of the
recent flood, which had flowed through the town and inundated its lower
floors, the broad main street, the odorous and gleaming drug-store,
scented to him with all the spices of his fancy, the hills and fields
of Aiken, in South Carolina, where he sought vainly for John D.
Rockefeller, a legendary prince who, he heard, went there for sport,
marvelling that two States could join imperceptibly, without visible
markings, and the cotton gin where he saw the great press mash the huge
raw bales cleanly into tight bundles half their former size.

Once, some children on the street had taunted him because of his long
hair, and he had fallen into a cursing fury; once, in a rage at some
quarrel with his sister, he set off on a world adventure, walking
furiously for hours down a country road by the river and cotton fields,
captured finally by Gant who sought for him in a hired rig.

They went to the theatre: it was one of the first plays he had seen.
The play was a biblical one, founded on the story of Saul and Jonathan,
and he had whispered to Gant from scene to scene the trend of coming
events--a precocity which pleased his father mightily, and to which he
referred for months.

Just before they came home, Joe Gambell, in a fit of concocted petulance,
resigned his position, and announced that he was returning to Henderson.
His adventure had lasted three months.




XIII


In the years that followed, up to his eleventh or twelfth year when he
could no longer travel on half fares, Eugene voyaged year by year into
the rich mysterious South. Eliza, who, during her first winter at
Dixieland, had been stricken by severe attacks of rheumatism, induced
partly by kidney trouble, which caused her flesh to swell puffily, and
which was diagnosed by the doctor as Bright's Disease, began to make
extensive, although economical, voyages into Florida and Arkansas in
search of health and, rather vaguely, in search of wealth.

She always spoke hopefully of the possibility of opening a boarding-house
at some tropical winter resort, during the seasons there and in Altamont.
In winter now, she rented Dixieland for a few months, sometimes for a
year, although she really had no intention of allowing the place to
slip through her fingers during the profitable summer season: usually,
she let the place go, more or less deliberately, to some unscrupulous
adventuress of lodging houses, good for a month's or two months' rent,
but incapable of the sustained effort that would support it for a longer
time. On her return from her journey, with rents in arrears, or with
some other violation of the contract as an entering wedge, Eliza would
surge triumphantly into battle, making a forced entrance with police,
plain-clothes men, warrants, summonses, writs, injunctions, and all the
other artillery of legal warfare, possessing herself forcibly, and with
vindictive pleasure, of her property.

But she turned always into the South--the North for her was a land
which she threatened often to explore, but which secretly she held in
suspicion: there was in her no deep animosity because of an old war; her
feeling was rather one of fear, distrust, alienation--the "Yankee" to
whom she humorously referred was foreign and remote. So, she turned
always into the South, the South that burned like Dark Helen in Eugene's
blood, and she always took him with her. They still slept together.

His feeling for the South was not so much historic as it was of the
core and desire of dark romanticism--that unlimited and inexplicable
drunkenness, the magnetism of some men's blood that takes them into the
heart of the heat, and beyond that, into the polar and emerald cold
of the South as swiftly as it took the heart of that incomparable
romanticist who wrote _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_, beyond which
there is nothing. And this desire of his was unquestionably enhanced
by all he had read and visioned, by the romantic halo that his school
history cast over the section, by the whole fantastic distortion of that
period where people were said to live in "mansions," and slavery was a
benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the
strewn largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy
dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, all
men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger,
death-mocking cavaliers. Years later, when he could no longer think of
the barren spiritual wilderness, the hostile and murderous entrenchment
against all new life--when their cheap mythology, their legend of the
charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of their lives, the
quaint sweetness of their drawl, made him writhe--when he could think of
no return to their life and its swarming superstition without weariness
and horror, so great was his fear of the legend, his fear of their
antagonism, that he still pretended the most fanatic devotion to them,
excusing his Northern residence on grounds of necessity rather than
desire.

Finally, it occurred to him that these people had given him nothing,
that neither their love nor their hatred could injure him, that he owed
them nothing, and he determined that he would say so, and repay their
insolence with a curse. And he did.


So did his boundaries stretch into enchantment--into fabulous and
solitary wonder broken only by Eliza's stingy practicality, by her lack
of magnificence in a magnificent world, by the meals of sweet rolls and
milk and butter in an untidy room, by the shoe boxes of luncheon carried
on the trains and opened in the diner, after a lengthy inspection of the
menu had led to the ordering of coffee, by the interminable quarrels
over price and charges in almost every place they went, by her commands
to him to "scrooch up" when the conductor came through for the tickets,
for he was a tall lank boy, and his half-fare age might be called to
question.

She took him to Florida in the late winter following Gant's return from
Augusta: they went to Tampa first, and, a few days later, to Saint
Petersburg. He ploughed through the loose deep sand of the streets,
fished interminably with jolly old men at the end of the long pier,
devoured a chest full of dime novels that he found in the rooms she had
rented in a private house. They left abruptly, after a terrific quarrel
with the old Cracker who ran the place, who thought himself tricked out
of the best part of a season's rent, and hurried off to South Carolina
on receipt of a hysterical message from Daisy which bade her mother to
"come at once." They arrived in the dingy little town, which was sticky
with wet clay, and clammy with rain, in late March: Daisy's first
child, a boy, had been born the day before. Eliza, annoyed at what she
considered the useless disruption of her holiday, quarrelled bitterly
with her daughter a day or two after her arrival, and departed for
Altamont with the declaration, which Daisy ironically applauded, that
she would never return again. But she did.

The following winter she went to New Orleans at the season of the Mardi
Gras, taking her youngest with her. Eugene remembered the huge cisterns
for rain water, in the back yard of Aunt Mary's house, the heavy
window-rattling thunder of Mary's snores at night, and the vast
pageantry of carnival on Canal Street: the storied floats, the smiling
beauties, the marching troops, the masks grotesque and fantastical. And
once more he saw ships at anchor at the foot of Canal Street: and their
tall keels looked over on the street behind the sea walls; and in the
cemeteries all the graves were raised above the ground "because," said
Oll, Gant's nephew, "the water rots 'em."

And he remembered the smells of the French market, the heavy fragrance
of the coffee he drank there, and the foreign Sunday gaiety of the
city's life--the theatres open, the sound of hammer and saw, the gay
festivity of crowds. He visited the Boyles, old guests at Dixieland, who
lived in the old French quarter, sleeping at night with Frank Boyle in
a vast dark room lighted dimly with tapers: they had as cook an ancient
negress who spoke only French, and who returned from the market early
in the morning bearing a huge basket loaded with vegetables, tropical
fruits, fowls, meats. She cooked strange delicious food that he had
never tasted before--heavy gumbo, garnished steaks, sauced fowls.

And he looked upon the huge yellow snake of the river, dreaming of its
distant shores, the myriad estuaries lush with tropical growth that fed
it, all the romantic life of plantation and canefields that fringed it,
of moonlight, of dancing darkies on the levee, of slow lights on the
gilded river boat, and the perfumed flesh of black-haired women, musical
wraiths below the phantom, drooping trees.

They had but shortly returned from Mardi Gras when, one howling night
in winter, as he lay asleep at Gant's, the house was wakened by his
father's terrible cries. Gant had been drinking heavily, day after
fearful day. Eugene had been sent in the afternoons to his shop to fetch
him home, and at sundown, with Jannadeau's aid, had brought him, behind
the negro's spavined horse, roaring drunk to his house. There followed
the usual routine of soup-feeding, undressing, and holding him in check
until Doctor McGuire arrived, thrust his needle deeply into Gant's
stringy arm, left sleeping-powders, and departed. The girl was
exhausted; Gant himself had ravaged his strength, and had been brought
down by two or three painful attacks of rheumatism.

Now, he awoke in the dark, possessed by his terror and agony, for the
whole right side of his body was paralysed by such pain as he did not
know existed. He cursed and supplicated God alternately in his pain
and terror. For days doctor and nurse strove with him, hoping that the
leaping inflammation would not strike at his heart. He was gnarled,
twisted, and bent with a savage attack of inflammatory rheumatism. As
soon as he had recovered sufficiently to travel, he departed, under
Helen's care, for Hot Springs. Almost savagely, she drove all other
assistance from him, devoting every minute of the day to his care: they
were gone six weeks--occasionally post-cards and letters describing a
life of hotels, mineral baths, sickness and lameness, and the sport of
the blooded rich, came to add new colours to Eugene's horizon: when they
returned Gant was able again to walk, the rheumatism had been boiled
from his limbs, but his right hand, gnarled and stiff, was permanently
crippled. He was never again able to close it, and there was something
strangely chastened in his manner, a gleam of awe and terror in his
eyes.

But the union between Gant and his daughter was finally consummated.
Before Gant lay, half-presaged, a road of pain and terror which led on
to death, but as his great strength dwindled, palsied, broke along that
road, she went with him inch by inch, welding beyond life, beyond death,
beyond memory, the bond that linked them.

"I'd have died if it hadn't been for that girl," he said over and over.
"She saved my life. I couldn't get along without her." And he boasted
again and again of her devotion and loyalty, of the expenses of his
journey, of the hotels, the wealth, the life they both had seen.

And, as the legend of Helen's goodness and devotion grew, and his
dependence upon her got further advertisement, Eliza pursed her lips
more and more thoughtfully, wept sometimes into the spitting grease
of a pan, smiled, beneath her wide red nose, a smile tremulous, bitter,
terribly hurt.

"I'll show them," she wept. "I'll show them." And she rubbed
thoughtfully at a red itching patch that had appeared during the year
upon the back of her left hand.

She went to Hot Springs in the winter that followed. They stopped at
Memphis for a day or two: Steve was at work there in a paint store; he
slipped quickly in and out of saloons, as he took Eugene about the city,
leaving the boy outside for a moment while he went "in here to see a
fellow"--a "fellow" who always sent him forth, Eugene thought, with an
added impetuosity to his swagger.

Dizzily they crossed the river: at night he saw the small bleared shacks
of Arkansas set in malarial fields.

Eliza sent him to one of the public schools of Hot Springs: he plunged
heavily into the bewildering new world--performed brilliantly, and won
the affection of the young woman who taught him, but paid the penalty
of the stranger to all the hostile and banded little creatures of the
class. Before his first month was out, he had paid desperately for his
ignorance of their customs.

Eliza boiled herself out at the baths daily; sometimes, he went along
with her, leaving her with a sensation of drunken independence, while he
went into the men's quarter, stripping himself in a cool room, entering
thence a hot one lined with couches, shutting himself in a steam-closet
where he felt himself momently dwindling into the raining puddle of
sweat at his feet, to emerge presently on trembling legs and to be
rolled and kneaded about magnificently in a huge tub by a powerful
grinning negro. Later, languorous, but with a feeling of deep
purification, he lay out on one of the couches, victoriously his
own man in a man's world. They talked from couch to couch, or walked
pot-belliedly about, sashed coyly with bath towels--malarial Southerners
with malarial drawls, paunch-eyed alcoholics, purple-skinned gamblers,
and broken down prizefighters. He liked the smell of steam and of the
sweaty men.

Eliza sent him out on the streets at once with _The Saturday Evening
Post_.

"It won't hurt you to do a little light work after school," said she.
And as he trudged off with his sack slung from his neck, she would call
after him:

"Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Throw your shoulders back. Make folks think
you're somebody." And she gave him a pocketful of printed cards, which
bore this inscription:

         SPEND YOUR SUMMERS AT
                    DIXIELAND

             In Beautiful Altamont,
             America's Switzerland.
  Rates Reasonable--Both Transient and Tourist.
           Apply Eliza E. Gant, Prop.

"You've got to help me drum up some trade, if we're to live, boy," she
said again, with the lip-pursing, mouth-tremulous, jocularity that was
coming to wound him so deeply, because he felt it was only an obvious
mask for a more obvious insincerity.

He writhed as he saw himself finally a toughened pachyderm in Eliza's
world--sprucing up confidently, throwing his shoulders back proudly,
making people "think he was somebody" as he cordially acknowledged an
introduction by producing a card setting forth the joys of life in
Altamont and at Dixieland, and seized every opening in social relations
for the purpose of "drumming up trade." He hated the jargon of the
profession, which she had picked up somewhere long before, and which she
used constantly with such satisfaction--smacking her lips as she spoke
of "transients," or of "drumming up trade." In him, as in Gant, there
was a silent horror of selling for money the bread of one's table, the
shelter of one's walls, to the guest, the stranger, the unknown friend
from out the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the broken, the
knave, the harlot, and the fool.

Thus, lost in the remote Ozarks, he wandered up Central Avenue, fringed
on both sides by the swift-sloping hills, for him, by the borders
of enchantment, the immediate portals of a land of timeless, and
never-ending faery. He drank endlessly the water that came smoking from
the earth, hoping somehow to wash himself clean from all pollution,
beginning his everlasting fantasy of the miraculous spring, or the bath,
neck-high, of curative mud, which would draw out of a man's veins each
drop of corrupted blood, dry up in him a cancerous growth, dwindle and
absorb a cyst, remove all scorbutic blemishes scoop and suck and thread
away the fibrous slime of all disease, leaving him again with the
perfect flesh of an animal.

And he gazed for hours into the entrances of the fashionable hotels,
staring at the ladies' legs upon the verandas, watching the great ones
of the land at their recreations, thinking, with a pang of wonder,
that here were the people of Chambers, of Phillips, of all the society
novelists, leading their godlike lives in flesh, recording their
fiction. He was deeply reverential before the grand manner of these
books, particularly before the grand manner of the English books: these
people loved, but not as other people, elegantly; their speech was
subtle, delicate, exquisite; even in their passions there was no gross
lust or strong appetite--they were incapable of the vile thoughts or the
meaty desire of common people. As he looked at the comely thighs of the
young women on horses, fascinated to see their shapely legs split over
the strong good smell of a horse, he wondered if the warm sinuous
vibration of the great horse-back excited them, and what their love was
like. The preposterous elegance of their manner in the books awed him:
he saw seduction consummated in kid gloves, to the accompaniment of
subtle repartee. Such thoughts, when he had them, filled him with shame
at his own baseness--he imagined for these people a love conducted
beyond all the laws of nature, achieving the delight of animals or of
common men by the electrical touch of a finger, the flicker of an eye,
the intonation of a phrase--exquisitely and incorruptibly.

And as they looked at his remote fabulous face, more strange now that
its thick fringing curls had been shorn, they bought of him, paying him
several times his fee, with the lazy penitence of wasters.

Great fish within the restaurant windows swam in glass wells--eels
coiled snakily, white-bellied trout veered and sank: he dreamed of
strange rich foods within.

And sometimes men returned in carriages from the distant river, laden
with great fish, and he wondered if he would ever see that river. All
that lay around him, near but unexplored, filled him with desire and
longing.

And later, again, along the sandy coast of Florida, with Eliza, he
wandered down the narrow lanes of Saint Augustine, raced along the hard
packed beach of Daytona, scoured the green lawns of Palm Beach, before
the hotels, for coconuts, which Eliza desired as souvenirs, filling
a brown tow sack with them and walking, with the bag hung from his
shoulders, down the interminable aisles of the Royal Poinciana or the
Breakers, target of scorn, and scandal, and amusement from slave
and prince; or traversed the spacious palm-cool walks that cut the
peninsula, to see, sprawled in the sensual loose sand the ladies' silken
legs, the brown lean bodies of the men, the long sea-plunges in the
unending scroll-work of the emerald and infinite sea, which had beat in
his brain from his father's shells, which had played at his mountain
heart, but which never, until now, had he seen. Through the spattered
sunlight of the palms, in the smooth walks, princess and lord were
wheeled: in latticed bar-rooms, droning with the buzzing fans, men drank
from glacd tall glasses.


Or again, they came to Jacksonville, lived there for several weeks near
Pett and Greeley; he studied under a little crippled man from Harvard,
going to lunch with his teacher at a buffet, where the man consumed beer
and pretzels. Eliza protested the tuition when she left: the cripple
shrugged his shoulders, took what she had to offer. Eugene twisted his
neck about, and lifted his foot from the ground.


Thus did he see first, he the hill-bound, the sky-girt, of whom the
mountains were his masters, the fabulous South. The picture of flashing
field, of wood, and hill, stayed in his heart forever: lost in the dark
land, he lay the night-long through within his berth, watching the
shadowy and phantom South flash by, sleeping at length, and waking
suddenly, to see cool lakes in Florida at dawn, standing quietly as
if they had waited from eternity for this meeting; or hearing, as the
train in the dark hours of morning slid into Savannah, the strange quiet
voices of the men upon the platform, the boding faint echoes of the
station, or seeing, in pale dawn, the phantom woods, a rutted lane, a
cow, a boy, a drab, dull-eyed against a cottage door, glimpsed, at this
moment of rushing time, for which all life had been aplot, to flash upon
the window and be gone.

The commonness of all things in the earth he remembered with a strange
familiarity--he dreamed of the quiet roads, the moonlit woodlands, and
he thought that some day he would come to them on foot, and find them
there unchanged, in all the wonder of recognition. They had existed for
him anciently and forever.




_PART II_




XIV


The plum-tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her
million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. But in the spring,
lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit and
blossoms. She will grow young again. Red plums will ripen, will be
shaken desperately upon the tiny stems. They will fall bursted on the
loamy warm wet earth; when the wind blows in the orchard the air will
be filled with dropping plums; the night will be filled with the sound
of their dropping, and a great tree of birds will sing, burgeoning,
blossoming richly, filling the air also with warm-throated plum-dropping
bird-notes.

The harsh hill-earth has moistly thawed and softened, rich soaking rain
falls, fresh-bladed tender grass like soft hair growing sparsely streaks
the land.

My brother Ben's face, thought Eugene, is like a piece of slightly
yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted fiercely by his old man's
scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile the flicker of light across
a blade. His face is like a blade, and a knife, and a flicker of light:
it is delicate and fierce, and scowls beautifully forever, and when he
fastens his hard white fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he
wants to fix, he sniffs with sharp and private concentration through his
long pointed nose. Thus women, looking, feel a well of tenderness for
his pointed, bumpy, always scowling face: his hair shines like that of a
young boy--it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce.

Into the April night-and-morning streets goes Ben. The night is brightly
pricked with cool and tender stars. The orchard stirs leafily in the
short fresh wind. Ben prowls softly out of the sleeping house. His thin
bright face is dark within the orchard. There is a smell of nicotine and
shoe leather under the young blossoms. His pigeon-toed tan shoes ring
musically up the empty streets. Lazily slaps the water in the fountain
on the Square; all the firemen are asleep--but Big Bill Merrick, the
brave cop, hog-jowled and red, leans swinishly over mince-pie and coffee
in Uneeda Lunch. The warm good ink-smell beats in rich waves into the
street: a whistling train howls off into the springtime South.

By the cool orchards in the dark the paper-carriers go. The copper legs
of negresses in their dark dens stir. The creek brawls cleanly.


A new one, Number 6, heard boys speak of Foxy:

"Who's Foxy," asked Number 6.

"Foxy's a bastard, Number 6. Don't let him catch you."

"The bastard caught me three times last week. In the Greek's every time.
Why can't they let us eat?"

Number 3 thought of Friday morning--he had the Niggertown route.

"How many--3?"

"One hundred and sixty-two."

"How many Dead Heads you got, son?" said Mr. Randall cynically. "Do you
ever try to collect from them?" he added, thumbing through the book.

"He takes it out in Poon-Tang," said Foxy, grinning. "A week's
subscription free for a dose."

"What you got to say about it?" asked Number 3 belligerently. "You've
been knocking down on them for six years."

"Jazz 'em all if you like," said Randall, "but get the money. Ben, I
want you to go round with him Saturday."

Ben laughed silently and cynically into the air:

"Oh, my God!" he said. "Do you expect me to check up on the little thug?
He's been knocking down on you for the last six months."

"All right! All right!" said Randall, annoyed. "That's what I want you
to find out."

"Oh, for God's sake, Randall," said Ben contemptuously, "he's got
niggers on that book who've been dead for five years. That's what you
get for keeping every little crook that comes along."

"If you don't get a move on, 3, I'll give your route to another boy,"
said Randall.

"Hell, get another boy. I don't care," said Number 3, toughly.

"Oh, for God's sake! Listen to this, won't you?" said Ben, laughing
thinly and nodding to his angel, indicating Number 3 with a scowling
jerk of his head.

"Yes, listen to this, won't you! That's what I said," Number 3 answered
pugnaciously.

"All right, little boy. Run on and deliver your papers now, before you
get hurt," said Ben, turning his scowl quietly upon him and looking at
him blackly for a moment. "Ah, you little crook," he said with profound
loathing, "I have a kid brother who's worth six like you."


Spring lay strewn lightly like a fragrant gauzy scarf upon the earth;
the night was a cool bowl of lilac darkness, filled with fresh orchard
scents.

Gant slept heavily, rattling the loose window-sash with deep rasping
snores; with short explosive thunders, ripping the lilac night, 36 began
to climb Saluda. She bucked helplessly like a goat, her wheels spun
furiously on the rails, Tom Cline stared seriously down into the milky
boiling creek, and waited. She slipped, spun, held, ploughed slowly up,
like a straining mule, into the dark. Content, he leaned far out the cab
and looked: the starlight glimmered faintly on the rails. He ate a thick
sandwich of cold buttered fried meat, tearing it raggedly and glueily
staining it under his big black fingers. There was a smell of dogwood
and laurel in the cool slow passage of the world. The cars clanked
humpily across the spur; the switchman, bathed murkily in the hot yellow
light of his perilous bank-edged hut, stood sullen at the switch.

Arms spread upon his cab-sill, chewing thoughtfully, Tom, goggle-eyed,
looked carefully down at him. They had never spoken. Then in silence
he turned and took the milk-bottle, half full of cold coffee, that
his fireman offered him. He washed his food down with the large easy
gurgling swallows of a bishop.

At 18 Valley Street, the red shack-porch, slime-scummed with a greasy
salve of yellow negroid mud, quaked rottenly. Number 3's square-folded
ink-fresh paper struck flat against the door, falling on its edge
stiffly to the porch like a block of light wood. Within, May Corpening
stirred nakedly, muttering as if doped and moving her heavy copper legs,
in the fetid bed-warmth, with the slow noise of silk.


Harry Tugman lit a Camel, drawing the smoke deep into his powerful
ink-stained lungs as he watched the press run down. His bare arms were
heavy-muscled as his presses. He dropped comfortably into his pliant
creaking chair and tilted back, casually scanning the warm pungent
sheet. Luxurious smoke steamed slowly from his nostrils. He cast the
sheet away.

"Christ!" he said. "What a make-up!"

Ben came downstairs, moody, scowling, and humped over toward the
ice-box.

"For God's sake, Mac," he called out irritably to the Make-up Man, as
he scowled under the lifted lid, "don't you ever keep anything except
root-beer and sour milk?"

"What do you want, for Christ's sake?"

"I'd like to get a Coca-Cola once in a while. You know," he said
bitingly, "Old Man Candler down in Atlanta is still making it."

Harry Tugman cast his cigarette away.

"They haven't got the news up here yet, Ben," said he. "You'll have to
wait till the excitement over Lee's surrender has died down. Come on,"
he said abruptly, getting up, "let's go over to the Greasy Spoon."

He thrust his big head down into the deep well of the sink, letting the
lukewarm water sluice refreshingly over his broad neck and blue-white
sallow night-time face, strong, tough, and humorous. He soaped his hands
with thick slathering suds, his muscles twisting slowly like big snakes.
He sang in his powerful quartette baritone:

  "Beware! Beware! Beware!
   Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep,
   So beware! Bee-_ware!_"

Comfortably they rested in the warm completed exhaustion of the quiet
press-room: upstairs the offices, bathed in green-yellow light, sprawled
like men relaxed after work. The boys had gone to their routes. The
place seemed to breathe slowly and wearily. The dawn-sweet air washed
coolly over their faces. The sky was faintly pearled at the horizon.


Strangely, in sharp broken fragments, life awoke in the lilac
darkness. Clop-clopping slowly on the ringing street, Number Six,
Mrs. Goulderbilt's powerful brown mare, drew inevitably on the
bottle-clinking cream-yellow wagon, racked to the top with creamy
extra-heavy high-priced milk. The driver was a fresh-skinned young
countryman, richly odorous with the smell of fresh sweat and milk. Eight
miles, through the starlit dewy fields and forests of Biltburn, under
the high brick English lodgegate, they had come into the town.


At the Pisgah Hotel, opposite the station, the last door clicked softly;
the stealthy footfalls of the night ceased; Miss Bernice Redmond gave
the negro porter eight one-dollar bills and went definitely to bed with
the request that she be not disturbed until one o'clock; a shifting
engine slatted noisily about in the yard; past the Biltburn crossing Tom
Cline whistled with even, mournful respirations. By this time Number
3 had delivered 142 of his papers: he had only to ascend the rickety
wooden stairs of the Eagle Crescent bank to finish the eight houses of
the Crescent. He looked anxiously across the hill-and-dale-sprawled
negro settlement to the eastern rim: behind Birdseye Gap the sky was
pearl-grey--the stars looked drowned. Not much time left, he thought.
He had a blond meaty face, pale-coloured and covered thickly with young
blond hair. His jaw was long and fleshy: it sloped backward. He ran his
tongue along his full cracked underlip.

A 1910 model, four-cylinder, seven-passenger Hudson, with mounting
steady roar, shot drunkenly out from the station curbing, lurched into
the level negro-sleeping stretch of South End Avenue, where the firemen
had their tournaments, and zipped townward doing almost fifty. The
station quietly stirred in its sleep: there were faint reverberating
noises under the empty sheds; brisk hammer-taps upon car wheels,
metallic heel-clicks in the tiled waiting-room. Sleepily a negress
slopped water on the tiles, with languid sullen movement pushing a grey
sopping rag around the floor.


It was now five-thirty. Ben had gone out of the house into the orchard
at three twenty-five. In another forty minutes Gant would waken, dress,
and build the morning fires.


"Ben," said Harry Tugman, as they walked out of the relaxed office, "if
Jimmy Dean comes messing around my press-room again they can get some
one else to print their lousy sheet. What the hell! I can get a job on
the _Atlanta Constitution_ whenever I want it."

"Did he come down to-night?" asked Ben.

"Yes," said Harry Tugman, "and he got out again. I told him to take his
little tail upstairs."

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben. "What did he say?"

"He said, '_I'm_ the editor! I'm the editor of this paper!' 'I don't
give a good goddam,' I said, 'if you're the President's snotrag. If you
want any paper to-day keep out of the press-room.' And believe me, he
went!"

In cool blue-pearl darkness they rounded the end of the Post Office and
cut diagonally across the street to Uneeda Lunch No. 3. It was a small
beanery, twelve feet wide, wedged in between an optician's and a Greek
shoe parlour.

Within, Dr. Hugh McGuire sat on a stool patiently impaling kidney beans,
one at a time, upon the prongs of his fork. A strong odour of corn
whisky soaked the air about him. His thick skilful butcher's hands,
hairy on the backs, gripped the fork numbly. His heavy-jowled face was
blotted by large brown patches. He turned round and stared owlishly as
Ben entered, fixing the wavering glare of his bulbous red eyes finally
upon him.

"Hello, son," he said in his barking kindly voice, "what can I do for
you?"

"Oh, for God's sake," said Ben laughing contemptuously, and jerking his
head toward Tugman. "Listen to this, won't you?"

They sat down at the lower end. At this moment Horse Hines, the
undertaker, entered, producing, although he was not a thin man, the
effect of a skeleton clad in a black frock coat. His long lantern mouth
split horsily in a professional smile displaying big horse teeth in his
white, heavily starched face.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," he said for no apparent reason, rubbing his lean
hands briskly as if it was cold. His palm-flesh rattled together like
old bones.

Coker, the Lung Shark, who had not ceased to regard McGuire's bean-hunt
with sardonic interest, now took the long cigar out of his devil's head
and held it between his stained fingers as he tapped his companion.

"Let's get out," he grinned quietly, nodding toward Horse Hines. "It
will look bad if we're seen together here."

"Good morning, Ben," said Horse Hines, sitting down below him. "Are all
the folks well?" he added softly.

Sideways Ben looked at him scowling, then jerked his head back to the
counterman, with a fast bitter flicker of his lips.

"Doctor," said Harry Tugman with servile medicine-man respect, "what do
you charge to operate?"

"Operate what?" McGuire barked presently, having pronged a kidney bean.

"Why--appendicitis," said Harry Tugman, for it was all he could think
of.

"Three hundred dollars when we go into the belly," said McGuire. He
coughed chokingly to the side.

"You're drowning in your own secretions," said Coker with his yellow
grin. "Like Old Lady Sladen."

"My God!" said Harry Tugman, thinking jealously of lost news. "When did
she go?"

"To-night," said Coker.

"God, I'm sorry to hear that," said Harry Tugman, greatly relieved.

"I've just finished laying the old lady out," said Horse Hines, gently.
"A bundle of skin and bones." He sighed regretfully, and for a moment
his boiled eye moistened.

Ben turned his scowling head around with an expression of nausea.

"Joe," said Horse Hines with merry professionalism, "give me a mug of
that embalming fluid." He thrust his horsehead indicatively at the
coffee urn.

"Oh, for God's sake," Ben muttered in terms of loathing. "Do you ever
wash your damned hands before you come in here?" he burst out irritably.

Ben was twenty. Men did not think of his age.

"Would you like some cold pork, son?" said Coker, with his yellow
malicious grin.

Ben made a retching noise in his throat, and put his hand upon his
stomach.

"What's the matter, Ben?" Harry Tugman laughed heavily and struck him on
the back.

Ben got off the stool, took his coffee mug and the piece of tanned mince
pie he had ordered, and moved to the other side of Harry Tugman. Every
one laughed. Then he jerked his head toward McGuire with a quick frown.

"By God, Tug," he said. "They've got us cornered."

"Listen to him," said McGuire to Coker. "A chip off the old block, isn't
he. I brought that boy into the world, saw him through typhoid, got
the old man over seven hundred drunks, and I've been called eighteen
different kinds of son of a bitch for my pains even since. But let one
of 'em get a belly ache," he added proudly, "and you'll see how quick
they come running to me. Isn't that right, Ben?" he said, turning to
him.

"Oh, listen to this!" said Ben, laughing irritably and burying his
peaked face in his coffee mug. His bitter savour filled the place with
life, with tenderness, with beauty. They looked on him with drunken,
kindly eyes--at his grey scornful face and the lonely demon flicker of
his smile.

"And I tell you something else," said McGuire, ponderously wheeling
around on Coker, "if one of them's got to be cut open, see who gets the
job. What about it, Ben?" he asked.

"By God, if you ever cut me open, McGuire," said Ben, "I'm going to be
damned sure you can walk straight before you do."

"Come on, Hugh," said Coker, prodding McGuire under his shoulder. "Stop
chasing those beans around the plate. Crawl off or fall off that damned
stool--I don't care which."

McGuire drunkenly lost in reverie, stared witlessly down at his bean
plate and sighed.

"Come on, you damned fool," said Coker, getting up, "you've got to
operate in forty-five minutes."

"Oh, for God's sake," said Ben, lifting his face from the stained mug,
"who's the victim? I'll send flowers."

"... all of us sooner or later," McGuire mumbled puffily through his
puff-lips. "Rich and poor alike. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Doesn't
matter ... doesn't matter at all."

"In heaven's name," Ben burst out irritably to Coker. "Are you going to
let him operate like that? Why don't you shoot them instead?"

Coker plucked the cigar from his long malarial grinning face:

"Why, he's just getting hot, son," said he.


Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness;
the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning
moved like a pearl-grey tide across the fields and up the hillflanks,
flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.

At the curb now, young Dr. Jefferson Spaugh brought his Buick roadster
to a halt, and got out, foppishly drawing off his gloves and flicking
the silk lapels of his dinner jacket. His face, whisky-red, was
highboned and handsome; his mouth was straightlipped, cruel, and
sensual. An inherited aura of mountain-cornfield sweat hung scentlessly
but telepathically about him; he was a smartened-up mountaineer with
country-club and University of Pennsylvania glossings. Four years in
Philly change a man.

Thrusting his gloves carelessly into his coat, he entered. McGuire slid
bearishly off his stool and gazed him into focus. Then he made beckoning
round-arm gestures with his fat hands.

"Look at it, will you," he said. "Does any one know what it is?"

"It's Percy," said Coker. "You know Percy Van der Gould, don't you?"

"I've been dancing all night at the Hilliards," said Spaugh elegantly.
"Damn! These new patent-leather pumps have ruined my feet." He sat upon
a stool, and elegantly displayed his large country feet, indecently
broad and angular in the shoes.

"What's he been doing?" said McGuire doubtfully, turning to Coker for
enlightenment.

"He's been dawncing all night at the Hilliards," said Coker in a mincing
voice.

McGuire shielded his bloated face coyly with his hand.

"O crush me!" he said, "I'm a grape! Dancing at the Hilliards, were
you, you damned Mountain Grill. You've been on a Poon-Tang Picnic in
Niggertown. You can't load that bunk on us."

Bull-lunged, their laughter filled the nacreous dawn.

"Patent-leather pumps!" said McGuire. "Hurt his feet. By God, Coker, the
first time he came to town ten years ago he'd never been curried above
the knees. They had to throw him down to put shoes on him."

Ben laughed thinly to the Angel.

"A couple of slices of buttered toast, if you please, not too brown,"
said Spaugh delicately to the counterman.

"A mess of hog chitlings and sorghum, you mean, you bastard. You were
brought up on salt pork and cornbread."

"We're getting too low and coarse for him, Hugh," said Coker. "Now that
he's got drunk with some of the best families, he's in great demand
socially. He's so highly thought of that he's become the official
midwife to all pregnant virgins."

"Yes," said McGuire, "he's their friend. He helps them out. He not only
helps them out, he helps them in again."

"What's wrong with that?" said Spaugh. "We ought to keep it in the
family, oughtn't we?"

Their laughter howled out into the tender dawn.

"This conversation is getting too rough for me," said Horse Hines
banteringly as he got off his stool.

"Shake hands with Coker before you go, Horse," said McGuire. "He's the
best friend you've ever had. You ought to give him royalties."

The light that filled the world now was soft and otherworldly like the
light that fills the sea-floors of Catalina where the great fish swim.
Flat-footedly, with kidney-aching back, Patrolman Leslie Roberts, all
unbuttoned, slouched through the submarine pearl light and paused,
gently agitating his club behind him, as he turned his hollow liverish
face toward the open door.

"Here's your patient," said Coker softly, "the Constipated Cop."

Aloud with great cordiality, they all said: "How are you, Les?"

"Oh, tolable, tolable," said the policeman mournfully. As draggled as
his moustaches, he passed on, hocking into the gutter.

"Well, good morning, gentlemen," said Horse Hines, making to go.

"Remember what I told you, Horse. Be good to Coker, your best friend."
McGuire jerked a thumb toward Coker.

Beneath his thin joviality Horse Hines was hurt.

"I do remember," said the undertaker gravely. "We are both members of
honourable professions: in the hour of death when the storm-tossed ship
puts into its haven of rest, we are the trustees of the Almighty."

"Why, Horse!" Coker exclaimed, "this is eloquence!"

"The sacred rites of closing the eyes, of composing the limbs, and of
preparing for burial the lifeless repository of the departed soul is our
holy mission; it is for us, the living, to pour balm upon the broken
heart of Grief, to soothe the widow's ache, to brush away the orphan's
tears; it is for us, the living, to highly resolve that--"

"--Government of the people, for the people, and by the people," said
Hugh McGuire.

"Yes, Horse," said Coker, "you are right. I'm touched. And what's more,
we do it all for nothing. At least," he added virtuously, "I never
charge for soothing the widow's ache."

"What about embalming the broken heart of Grief?" asked McGuire.

"I said _balm_," Horse Hines remarked coldly.

"Say, Horse," said Harry Tugman, who had listened with great interest,
"didn't you make a speech with all that in it last summer at the
Undertakers' Convention?"

"What's true then is true now," said Horse Hines bitterly, as he left
the place.

"Jesus!" said Harry Tugman, "we've got him good and sore. I thought I'd
bust a gut, doc, when you pulled that one about embalming the broken
heart of Grief."

At this moment Dr. Ravenel brought his Hudson to a halt across the
street before the post office, and walked over rapidly, drawing his
gauntlets off. He was bareheaded; his silver aristocratic hair was
thinly rumpled; his surgical grey eyes probed restlessly below the thick
lenses of his spectacles. He had a famous, calm, deeply concerned face,
shaven, ashen, lean, lit gravely now and then by humour.

"Oh, Christ!" said Coker. "Here comes Teacher!"

"Good morning, Hugh," he said as he entered. "Are you going into
training again for the bughouse?"

"Look who's here!" McGuire roared hospitably. "Dead-eye Dick, the
literary sawbones, whose private collection of gall-stones is the finest
in the world. When d'jew get back, son?"

"Just in time, it seems," said Ravenel, holding a cigarette cleanly
between his long surgical fingers. He looked at his watch. "I believe
you have a little engagement at the Ravenel hospital in about half an
hour. Is that right?"

"By God, Dick, you're always right," McGuire yelled enthusiastically.
"What'd you tell 'em up there, boy?"

"I told them," said Dick Ravenel, whose affection was like a flower that
grew behind a wall, "that the best surgeon in America when he was sober
was a lousy bum named Hugh McGuire who was always drunk."

"Now wait, wait. Hold on a minute!" said McGuire, holding up his thick
hand. "I protest, Dick. You meant well, son, but you got that mixed up.
You mean the best surgeon in America when he's not sober."

"Did you read one of your papers?" said Coker.

"Yes," said Dick Ravenel. "I read one on carcinoma of the liver."

"How about one on pyorrhoea of the toe-nails?" said McGuire. "Did you
read that one?"

Harry Tugman laughed heavily, not wholly knowing why. McGuire belched
into the silence loudly and was witlessly adrift for a moment.

"Literature, literature, Dick," he returned portentously. "It's been the
ruin of many a good surgeon. You read too much, Dick. Yon Cassius hath a
lean and hungry look. You know too much. The letter killeth the spirit,
you know. Me--Dick, did you ever know me to take anything out that I
didn't put back? Anyway, don't I always leave 'em something to go on
with? I'm no scholar, Dick. I've never had your advantages. I'm a
self-made butcher. I'm a carpenter, Dick. I'm an interior decorator. I'm
a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller.
I'm a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I'm a practical man. I
take out their works, spit upon them, trim off the dirty edges, and send
them on their way again. I economize, Dick. I throw away everything I
can't use, and use everything I throw away. Who made the Pope a tailbone
from his knuckle? Who made the dog howl? Aha--that's why the governor
looks so young. We are rilled up with useless machinery, Dick.
Efficiency, economy, power! Have you a Little Fairy in your Home? You
haven't! Then let the Gold Dust Twins do the work! Ask Ben--he knows!"

"O my God!" laughed Ben thinly, "listen to that, won't you?"

Two doors below, directly before the post office, Pete Mascari rolled
upward with corrugated thunder the shutters of his fruit shop. The pearl
light fell coolly upon the fruity architecture, on the pyramided masonry
of spit-bright winesaps, the thin sharp yellow of the Florida oranges,
the purple Tokays, sawdust-bedded. There was a stale fruity odour from
the shop of ripening bananas, crated apples, and the acrid tang of
powder; the windows were filled with Roman candles, crossed rockets,
pinwheels, squat green Happy Hooligans, and mutilating Jack Johnsons,
red cannon-crackers, and tiny acrid packets of crackling spattering
firecrackers. Light fell a moment on the ashen corpsiness of his face
and on the liquid Sicilian poison of his eyes.

"Don' pincha da grape. Pinch da banan'!"

A street-car, toy-green with new spring paint, went square-ward.

"Dick," said McGuire more soberly, "take the job, if you like."

Ravenel shook his head.

"I'll stand by," said he. "I won't operate. I'm afraid of one like this.
It's your job, drunk or sober."

"Removing a tumour from a woman, ain't you?" said Coker.

"No," said Dick Ravenel, "removing a woman from a tumour."

"Bet you it weighs fifty pounds, if it weighs an ounce," said McGuire
with sudden professional interest.

Dick Ravenel winced ever so slightly. A cool spurt of young wind, clean
as a kid, flowed by him. McGuire's meaty shoulders recoiled burlily as
if from the cold shock of water. He seemed to waken.

"I'd like a bath," he said to Dick Ravenel, "and a shave." He rubbed his
hand across his blotched hairy face.

"You can use my room, Hugh, at the hotel," said Jeff Spaugh, looking at
Ravenel somewhat eagerly.

"I'll use the hospital," he said.

"You'll just have time," said Ravenel.

"In God's name, let's get a start on," he cried impatiently.

"Did you see Kelly do this one at Hopkins?" asked McGuire.

"Yes," said Dick Ravenel, "after a very long prayer. That's to give
power to his elbow. The patient died."

"Damn the prayers!" said McGuire. "They won't do much good to this one.
She called me a low-down licquored-up whisky-drinking bastard last
night: if she still feels like that she'll get well."

"These mountain women take a lot of killing," said Jeff Spaugh sagely.

"Do you want to come along?" McGuire asked Coker.

"No, thanks. I'm getting some sleep," he answered. "The old girl took a
hell of a time. I thought she'd never get through dying."

They started to go.

"Ben," said McGuire, with a return to his former manner, "tell the Old
Man I'll beat hell out of him if he doesn't give Helen a rest. Is he
staying sober?"

"In heaven's name, McGuire, how should I know?" Ben burst out irritably.
"Do you think that's all I've got to do--watching your licker-heads?"

"That's a great girl, boy," said McGuire sentimentally. "One in a
million."

"Hugh, for God's sake, come on," cried Dick Ravenel.

The four medical men went out into the pearl light. The town emerged
from the lilac darkness with a washed renascent cleanliness. All the
world seemed as young as Spring. McGuire walked across to Ravenel's
car, and sank comfortably with a sense of invigoration into the cool
leathers. Jeff Spaugh plunged off violently with a ripping explosion of
his engine and a cavalier wave of his hand.

Admiringly Harry Tugman's face turned to the slumped burly figure of
Hugh McGuire.

"By God!" he boasted, "I bet he does the damnedest piece of operating
you ever heard of."

"Why, hell," said the counterman loyally, "he ain't worth a damn until
he's got a quart of corn liquor under his belt. Give him a few drinks
and he'll cut off your damned head and put it on again without your
knowing it."

As Jeff Spaugh roared off Harry Tugman said jealously: "Look at that
bastard. Mr. Vanderbilt. He thinks he's hell, don't he? A big pile of
bull. Ben, do you reckon he was really out at the Hilliards to-night?"

"Oh, for God's sake," said Ben irritably, "how the hell should I know!
What difference does it make?" he added furiously.

"I guess Little Maudie will fill up the column to-morrow with some of
her crap," said Harry Tugman. "'The Younger Set,' she calls it! Christ!
It goes all the way from every little bitch old enough to wear drawers,
to Old Man Redmond. If Saul Gudger belongs to the Younger Set, Ben, you
and I are still in the third grade. Why, hell, yes," he said with an
air of conviction to the grinning counterman, "he was bald as a pig's
knuckle when the Spanish American War broke out."

The counterman laughed.

Foaming with brilliant slapdash improvisation Harry Tugman declaimed:

"Members of the Younger Set were charmingly entertained last night at a
dinner dance given at Snotwood, the beautiful residence of Mr. and Mrs.
Clarence Firkins, in honour of their youngest daughter, Gladys, who
made her debut this season. Mr. and Mrs. Firkins, accompanied by their
daughter, greeted each of the arriving guests at the threshold in a
manner reviving the finest old traditions of Southern aristocracy,
while Mrs. Firkins' accomplished sister, Miss Catherine Hipkiss,
affectionately known to members of the local younger set as Roaring
Kate, supervised the checking of overcoats, evening wraps, jock-straps,
and jewellery.

"Dinner was served promptly at eight o'clock, followed by coffee and
Pluto Water at eight forty-five. A delicious nine-course collation had
been prepared by Artaxerxes Papadopolos, the well-known confectioner and
caterer, and proprietor of the Bijou Caf for Ladies and Gents.

"After first-aid and a thorough medical examination by Dr. Jefferson
Reginald Alfonso Spaugh, the popular _gin_-ecologist, the guests
adjourned to the Ball Room where dance music was provided by Zeke
Buckner's Upper Hominy Stringed Quartette, Mr. Buckner himself
officiating at the trap drum and tambourine.

"Among those dancing were the Misses Aline Titsworth, Lena Ginster,
Ophelia Legg, Gladys Firkins, Beatrice Slutsky, Mary Whitesides, Helen
Shockett, and Lofta Barnes.

"Also the Messrs. I. C. Bottom, U. B. Freely, R. U. Reddy, O. I. Lovett,
Cummings Strong, Samson Horney, Preston Updyke, Dows Wicket, Pettigrew
Biggs, Otis Goode, and J. Broad Stern."

Ben laughed noiselessly, and bent his pointed face into the mug again.
Then, he stretched his thin arms out, extending his body sensually
upward, and forcing out in a wide yawn the night-time accumulation of
weariness, boredom, and disgust.

"Oh-h-h-h my God!"


Virginal sunlight crept into the street in young moteless shafts. At
this moment Gant awoke.

He lay quietly on his back for a moment in the pleasant yellow-shaded
dusk of the sitting-room, listening to the rippling flutiness of the
live piping birdy morning. He yawned cavernously and thrust his right
hand scratching into the dense hair-thicket of his breast.

The fast cackle-cluck of sensual hens. Come and rob us. All through the
night for you, master. Rich protesting yielding voices of Jewesses. Do
it, don't it. Break an egg in them.

Sleepless, straight, alert, the counterpane moulded over his gaunt legs,
he listened to the protesting invitations of the hens.

From the warm dust, shaking their fat feathered bodies, protesting but
satisfied they staggered up. For me. The earth too and the vine. The
moist new earth cleaving like cut pork from the plough. Or like water
from a ship. The spongy sod spaded cleanly and rolled back like flesh.
Or the earth loosened and hoed gently around the roots of the cherry
trees. The earth receives my seed. For me the great lettuces. Spongy and
full of sap now like a woman. The thick grape-vine--in August the heavy
clustered grapes----How there? Like milk from a breast. Or blood through
a vein. Fattens and plumps them.

All through the night the blossoms dropping. Soon now the White Wax.
Green apples end of May. Isaacs' June Apple hangs half on my side. Bacon
and fried green apples.

With sharp whetted hunger he thought of breakfast. He threw the sheet
back cleanly, swung in an orbit to a sitting position and put his white
somewhat phthisic feet on the floor. Standing up tenderly, he walked
over to his leather rocker and put on a pair of clean white-footed
socks. Then he pulled his nightgown over his head, looking for a moment
in the dresser mirror at his great boned structure, the long stringy
muscles of his arms, and his flat-meated hairy chest. His stomach sagged
paunchily. He thrust his white flaccid calves quickly through the
shrunken legs of a union suit, stretched it out elastically with a
comfortable widening of his shoulders and buttoned it. Then he
stepped into his roomy sculpturally heavy trousers and drew on his
soft-leathered laceless shoes. Crossing his suspender braces over his
shoulders, he strode into the kitchen and had a brisk fire of oil and
pine snapping in the range within three minutes. He was stimulated and
alive in all the fresh wakefulness of the Spring morning.


Through Birdseye Gap, in the dewy richness of Lunn's Cove, Judge Webster
Tayloe, the eminent, prosperous, and aristocratic corporation counsel
(retired, but occasional consultations), rose in the rich walnut
twilight of his bedchamber, noted approvingly, through the black lenses
of the glasses that gave his long, subtle, and contemptuous face its
final advantage over the rabble, that one of his country bumpkins was
coming from the third pasture with a slopping pail of new milk, another
was sharpening a scythe in the young glint of the sun, and another,
emulating his more intelligent fellow, the horse, was backing a buggy
slowly under the carriage shed.

Approvingly he watched his young mulatto son come over the lawn with
lazy cat-speed, noting with satisfaction the grace and quickness of his
movements, the slender barrel strength of his torso, his small-boned
resiliency. Also the well-shaped intelligent head, the eager black eyes,
the sensitive oval face, and the beautiful coprous olive of the skin. He
was very like a better-class Spaniard. _Quod potui perfeci._ By this
fusion, perhaps, men like men.

By the river the reed-pipes, the muse's temple, the sacred wood again.
Why not? As in this cove. I, too, have lived in Arcady.

He took off his glasses for a moment and looked at the ptotic
malevolence of his left eye, and the large harlequinesque wart in the
cheek below it. The black glasses gave the suggestion that he was
half-masked; they added a touch of unsearchable mystery to the subtle,
sensual and disquieting intelligence of his face. His negro man appeared
at this moment and told him his bath was ready. He drew the long thin
nightgown over his freckled Fitzsimmons body and stepped vigorously into
tepid water. Then for ten minutes he was sponged, scraped, and kneaded,
upon a long table by the powerful plastic hands of the negro. He dressed
in fresh laundered underwear and newly pressed clothes of black. He tied
a black string carelessly below the wide belt of starched collar and
buttoned across his straight long figure a frock coat that reached his
knees. He took a cigarette from a box on his table and lighted it.

Bouncing tinnily down the coiling road that came through the Gap from
the town, a flivver glinted momentarily through the trees. Two men were
in it. His face hardened against it, he watched it go by his gates on
the road with a scuffle of dust. Dimly he saw their lewd red mountain
faces, and completed the image with sweat and corduroy. And in the town
their city cousins. Brick, stucco, the white little eczema of Suburbia.
Federated Half-Breeds of the World.

Into my valley next with lawn-mowers and front lawns. He ground out the
life of the cigarette against an ashtray, and began a rapid window
calculation of his horses, asses, kine, swine, and hens; the stored
plenitude of his great barn, the heavy fruitage of his fields and
orchards. A man came toward the house with a bucket of eggs in one hand
and a bucket of butter in the other; each cake was stamped with a sheaf
of wheat and wrapped loosely in clean white linen cloths. He smiled
grimly: if attacked he could withstand a prolonged siege.


At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark room with a window
opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. Her chamber was
festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and string; stacks of old
newspapers and magazines were piled in the corners; and every shelf was
loaded with gummed, labelled, half-filled medicine bottles. There was a
smell in the air of mentholatum, Vick's Pneumonia Cure, and sweet
glycerine. The negress arrived, coming under the built-up house and
climbing lazily the steep tunnel of back steps. She knocked at the door.

"Who's there!" cried Eliza, sharply, waking at once, and coming forward
to the door. She wore a grey flannel nightgown over a heavy woollen
undershirt that Ben had discarded: the pendant string floated gently to
and fro as she opened the door, like some strange seamoss floating below
the sea. Upstairs, in the small front room with the sleeping-porch,
slept Miss Billie Edwards, twenty-four, of Missouri, the daring and
masterful lion-tamer of Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, then playing in
the field on the hill behind the Plum Street School. Next to her, in the
large airy room at the corner, Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of
an itinerant and usually absent drug salesman, lay deep in the pit of
alcoholic slumber. Upon each end of the mantel was a small snapshot in a
silver frame--one of her absent daughter, Louise, eighteen, and one of
Benjamin Gant, lying on the grass-bank in front of the house, propped on
his elbow and wearing a wide straw hat that shaded all his face except
his mouth. Also, in other chambers, front and back, Mr. Conway Richards,
candy-wheel concessionaire with the Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows,
Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six, trained nurse, Mr. William H. Baskett,
fifty-three, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, cotton grower, banker, and
sufferer from malaria, and his wife; in the large room at the head of
the stairs Miss Annie Mitchel, nineteen, of Valdosta, Georgia, Miss
Thelma Cheshire, twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina, and Mrs. Rose
Levin, twenty-eight, of Chicago, Illinois, all members of the chorus of
"Molasses" Evans and His Broadway Beauties, booked out of Atlanta,
Georgia, by the Piedmont Amusement Agency.

"O G-hirls! The Duke of Gorgonzola and the Count of Limburger are on
their way here now. I want all you girls to be nice to them and to show
them a good time when they arrive."

"You _bet_ we will."

"And keep your eye on the little one--he's the one with all the money."

"I'll _say_ we will. Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah!"

  "We are the girls that have the fun,
   We're snappy and happy every one;
   We're jolly and gay
   And ready to play,
   And that is why we say-ee----"

Behind a bill-plastered fence-boarding on Upper Valley Street, opposite
the Y.M.I. (coloured), and in the very heart of the crowded amusement
and commercial centre of Altamont's coloured population, Moses Andrews,
twenty-six, coloured, slept the last great sleep of white and black. His
pockets, which only the night before had been full of the money Saul
Stein, the pawnbroker, had given him in exchange for certain articles
which he had taken from the home of Mr. George Rollins, the attorney (as
an 18-carat Waltham gold watch with a heavy chain of twined gold, the
diamond engagement ring of Mrs. Rollins, three pairs of the finest silk
stockings, and two pairs of gentlemen's underdrawers), were now empty, a
half-filled bottle of Cloverleaf Bonded Kentucky Rye, with which he had
retired behind the boards to slumber, lay unmolested in the flaccid grip
of his left hand, and his broad black throat gaped cleanly open from
ear to ear, as a result of the skilled razor-work of his hated and
hating rival, Jefferson Flack, twenty-eight, who now lay peacefully,
unsuspected and unsought, with their mutual mistress, Miss Molly Fiske,
in her apartment on East Pine Street. Moses had been murdered in
moonlight.

A starved cat walked softly along the boards on Upper Valley: as the
courthouse bell boomed out its solid six strokes, eight negro labourers,
the bottoms of their overalls stiff with agglutinated cement, tramped by
like a single animal, in a wedge, each carrying his lunch in a small
lard bucket.


Meanwhile, the following events occurred simultaneously throughout the
neighbourhood:

Dr. H. M. MC Rae, fifty-eight, minister of the First Presbyterian
Church, having washed his lean Scotch body, arrayed himself in stiff
black and a boiled white shirt, and shaved his spare, clean un-ageing
face, descended from his chamber in his residence on Cumberland Avenue,
to his breakfast of oatmeal, dry toast, and boiled milk. His heart
was pure, his mind upright, his faith and his life like a clean board
scrubbed with sandstone. He prayed in thirty-minute prayers without
impertinence for all men and the success of all good ventures. He was a
white unwasting flame that shone through love and death; his speech rang
out like steel with a steady passion.

In Dr. Frank Engel's Sanitarium and Turkish Bath Establishment on
Liberty Street, Mr. J. H. Brown, wealthy sportsman and publisher of the
_Altamont Citizen_, sank into dreamless sleep, after five minutes in the
steam-closet, ten in the tub, and thirty in the drying-room, where he
had submitted to the expert osteopathy of "Colonel" Andrews (as Dr.
Engel's skilled negro masseur was affectionately known), from the soles
of his gouty feet to the veinous silken gloss of his slightly purple
face.

Across the street, at the corner of Liberty and Federal, and at the foot
of Battery Hill, a white-jacketed negro sleepily restacked in boxes the
scattered poker-chips that covered the centre table in the upstairs
centre room of the Altamont City Club. The guests, just departed, were
Mr. Gilbert Woodcock, Mr. Reeves Stikeleather, Mr. Henry Pentland,
junr., Mr. Sidney Newbeck, of Cleveland, Ohio (retired), and the
aforementioned Mr. J. H. Brown.


"And, Jesus, Ben!" said Harry Tugman, emerging at this moment from
Uneeda No. 3, "I thought I'd have a hmorrhage when they pulled the Old
Man out of the closet. After all the stuff he printed about cleaning up
the town, too."

"It wouldn't surprise me if Judge Sevier had them raid him," said Ben.

"Why, certainly, Ben," said Harry Tugman impatiently, "that's the idea,
but Queen Elizabeth was behind it. You don't think there's anything she
doesn't hear about, do you? So help me Jesus, you never heard a yap out
of him for a week. He was afraid to show his face out of the office."

At the Convent School of Saint Catherine's on Saint Clement's Road,
Sister Theresa, the Mother Superior, walked softly through the dormitory
lifting the window-shade beside each cot, letting the orchard cherry-apple
bloom come gently into the long cool glade of roseleaf sleeping girls.
Their breath expired gently upon their dewy half-opened mouths, light
fell rosily upon the pillowed curve of their arms, their slender young
sides, and the crisp pink buds of their breasts. At the other end of the
room a fat girl lay squarely on her back, her arms and legs outspread,
and snored solidly through blubbering lips. They had yet an hour of
sleep.

From one of the little white tables between the cots Theresa picked up
an opened book incautiously left there the night before, read below her
grey moustache with the still inward smile of her great-boned face, its
title--_The Common Law_, by Robert W. Chambers--and gripping a pencil in
her broad earthstained hand, scrawled briefly in jagged male letters:
"Rubbish, Elizabeth--but see for yourself." Then, on her soft powerful
tread, she went downstairs, and entered her study, where Sister Louise
(French), Sister Mary (History), and Sister Bernice (Ancient Languages)
were waiting for the morning consultation. When they had gone, she sat
down to her desk and worked for an hour on the manuscript of that book,
modestly intended for school children, which has since celebrated her
name wherever the noble architecture of prose is valued--the great
_Biology_.

Then the gong rang in the dormitory, she heard the high laughter of
young maidens, and rising saw, coming from the plum-tree by the wall, a
young nun, Sister Agnes, with blossoms in her arms.

Below, tree-hidden, in the Biltburn bottom, there was a thunder on the
rails, a wailing whistle cry.

Beneath the City Hall, in the huge sloping cellar, the market booths
were open. The aproned butchers swung their cleavers down on fresh cold
joints, slapping the thick chops on heavy sheets of mottled paper, and
tossing them, roughly tied, to the waiting negro delivery-boys.

The self-respecting negro, J. H. Jackson, stood in his square
vegetable-stall, attended by his two grave-faced sons, and his spectacled
businesslike daughter. He was surrounded by wide slanting shelves
of fruit and vegetables, smelling of the earth and morning--great
crinkled lettuces, fat radishes still clotted damply with black loam,
quill-stemmed young onions newly wrenched from gardens, late celery,
spring potatoes, and the thin rinded citrous fruits of Florida.

Above him, Sorrell, the fish and oyster man, drew up from the depths of
an enamelled ice-packed can dripping ladlefuls of oysters, pouring them
into thick cardboard cartons. Wide-bellied heavy sea-fish--carp, trout,
bass, shad--lay gutted in beds of ice.

Mr. Michael Walter Creech, the butcher, having finished his hearty
breakfast of calves' liver, eggs and bacon, hot biscuits and coffee,
made a sign to one of the waiting row of negro boys. The line sprang
forward like hounds; he stopped them with a curse and a lifted cleaver.
The fortunate youth who had been chosen then came forward and took the
tray, still richly morselled with food and a pot half full of coffee.
As he had to depart at this moment on a delivery, he put it down in the
sawdust at the end of the bench and spat copiously upon it in order to
protect it from his scavenging comrades. Then he wheeled off, full of
rich laughter and triumphant malice. Mr. Creech looked at his niggers
darkly.

The town had so far forgotten Mr. Creech's own African blood (an eighth
on his father's side, old Walter Creech, out of Yellow Jenny) that
it was about ready to offer him political preferment; but Mr. Creech
himself had not forgotten. He glanced bitterly at his brother, Jay, who,
happily ignorant of hatred, that fanged poison which may taint even a
brother's heart, was enthusiastically cleaving spare-ribs on the huge
bole of his own table, singing meanwhile in a rich tenor voice the
opening bars of "The Little Grey Home in the West":

  "... there are blue eyes that shine
   Just because they meet mine ..."

Mr. Creech looked venomously at Jay's yellow jowls, the fat throbbing of
his jaundiced throat, the crisp singed whorl of his hair.

By God, he thought in his anguish of spirit, he might be taken for a
Mexican.

Jay's golden voice neared its triumph breaking with delicate restraint,
on the last note, into a high sweet falsetto which he maintained for
more than twenty seconds. All of the butchers stopped working, several
of them, big strong men with grown-up families dashed a tear out of
their eyes.

The great audience was held spellbound. Not a soul stirred. Not even a
dog or a horse stirred. As the last sweet note melted away in a gossamer
tremolo, a silence profound as that of the tombs, nay, of death itself,
betokened the highest triumph the artist is destined to know upon this
earth. Somewhere in the crowd a woman sobbed and collapsed in a faint.
She was immediately carried out by two Boy Scouts who happened to be
present, and who administered first aid to her in the rest-room, one of
them hastily kindling a crackling fire of pine boughs by striking two
flints together, while the other made a tourniquet, and tied several
knots in his handkerchief. Then pandemonium broke loose. Women tore
the jewels from their fingers, ropes of pearls from their necks,
chrysanthemums, hyacinths, tulips and daisies from their expensive
corsages, while the fashionably-dressed men in the near-by stalls
kept up a constant bombardment of tomatoes, lettuces, new potatoes,
beef-tallow, pigs' knuckles, fish-heads, clams, loin-chops, and
pork-sausages.

Among the stalls of the market, the boarding-house keepers of Altamont
walked with spying bargain-hunting eyes and inquisitive nose. They were
of various sizes and ages, but they were all stamped with the print of
haggling determination and a pugnacious closure of the mouth. They pried
in among the fish and vegetables, pinching cabbages, weighing onions,
exfoliating lettuce-heads. You've got to keep your eye on people
or they'll skin you. And if you leave things to a lazy shiftless
nigger she'll waste more than she cooks. They looked at one another
hard-faced--Mrs. Barrett of the Grosvenor at Mrs. Neville of Glen View;
Mrs. Ambler of the Colonial at Miss Mamie Featherstone of Ravencrest;
Mrs. Ledbetter of the Belvedere----

"I hear you're full up, Mrs. Coleman," said she inquiringly.

"Oh, I'm full up all the time," said Mrs. Coleman. "My people are all
permanents, I don't want to fool with the transients," she said loftily.

"Well," said Mrs. Ledbetter acidly, "I could fill my house up at any
time with lungers who call themselves something else, but I won't have
them. I was saying the other day----"

Mrs. Michalove of Oakwood at Mrs. Jarvis of The Waverley; Mrs. Cowan of
Ridgmont at----

The city is splendidly equipped to meet the demands of the great and
steadily growing crowd of tourists that fill the Mountain Metropolis
during the busy months of June, July and August. In addition to eight
hotels de luxe of the highest quality, there were registered at the
Board of Trade in 1911 over 250 private hotels, boarding-houses and
sanatoriums all catering to the needs of those who come on missions of
business, pleasure or health.

Stop their baggage at the station.

At this moment Number 3, having finished his route, stepped softly on to
the slime-scummed porch of the house on Valley Street, rapped gently at
the door, and opened it quietly, groping his way through black miasmic
air to the bed in which May Corpening lay. She muttered as if drugged as
he touched her, turned toward him, and sleepily awakened, drew him down
to her with heavied and sensual caress, yoked under her big coppery
arms. Tom Cline clumped greasily up the steps of his residence on
Bartlett Street, swinging his tin pail; Ben returned to the paper office
with Harry Tugman; and Eugene, in the back room on Woodson Street,
waking suddenly to Gant's powerful command from the foot of the stairs,
turned his face full into a momentary vision of rose-flushed blue sky
and tender blossoms that drifted slowly earthward.




XV


The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup
of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his
absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. Old haunt-eyed faces
glimmered in his memory. He thought of Swain's cow, St. Louis, death,
himself in the cradle. He was the haunter of himself, trying for a
moment to recover what he had been part of. He did not understand
change, he did not understand growth. He stared at his framed baby
picture in the parlour, and turned away sick with fear and the effort to
touch, retain, grasp himself for only a moment.

And these bodiless phantoms of his life appeared with terrible
precision, with all the mad nearness of a vision. That which was five
years gone came within the touch of his hand, and he ceased at that
moment to believe in his own existence. He expected some one to wake
him; he would hear Gant's great voice below the laden vines, would gaze
sleepily from the porch into the rich low moon, and go obediently to
bed. But still there would be all that he remembered before that and
what if----Cause flowed ceaselessly into cause.

He heard the ghostly ticking of his life; his powerful clairvoyance, the
wild Scotch gift of Eliza, burned inward back across the phantom years,
plucking out of the ghostly shadows a million gleams of light--a little
station by the rails at dawn, the road cleft through the pineland seen
at twilight, a smoky cabin-light below the trestles, a boy who ran among
the bounding calves, a wisp-haired slattern, with snuff-sticked mouth,
framed in a door, floury negroes unloading sacks from freight-cars
on a shed, the man who drove the Fair Grounds bus at Saint Louis, a
cool-lipped lake at dawn.

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined
filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to
these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the
turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had
thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living
brightness these pin-points of experience and the ghostliness of all
things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations
that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been
caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train.

And it was this that awed him--the weird combination of fixity and
change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in
which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed
seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when
the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the
doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his
baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the
eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of
the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements
of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge--movement is
petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is
arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down
into the pool. Only, these images that burned in him existed without
beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in
no time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition.

His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining
the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house,
lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned shadow, the
living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later?
Where now?

I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched
me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave it to,
became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is
now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a
cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now?
Why then?

The fusion of the two strong egotisms, Eliza's inbrooding and Gant's
expanding outward, made of him a fanatical zealot in the religion of
Chance. Beyond all misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, confusion,
unswerving necessity was on the rails: not a sparrow fell through
the air but that its repercussion acted on his life, and the lonely
light that fell upon the viscous and interminable seas at dawn awoke
sea-changes washing life to him. The fish swam upward from the depth.


The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin
of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a
Georgia slattern because a London cut-purse went unhung. Through Chance,
we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through
Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that
starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across
the seas.


He believed himself thus at the centre of life; he believed the
mountains rimmed the heart of the world; he believed that from all the
chaos of accident the inevitable event came at the inexorable moment to
add to the sum of his life.

Against the hidden other flanks of the immutable hills the world washed
like a vast and shadowy sea, alive with the great fish of his imagining.
Variety, in this unvisited world, was unending, but order and purpose
certain: there would be no wastage in adventure--courage would be
rewarded with beauty, talent with success, all merit with its true
deserving. There would be peril, there would be toil, there would be
struggle. But there would not be confusion and waste. There would not be
groping. For collected Fate would fall, on its chosen moment, like a
plum. There was no disorder in enchantment.

       *       *       *       *       *

Spring lay abroad through all the garden of this world. Beyond the hills
the land bayed out to other hills, to golden cities, to rich meadows, to
deep forests, to the sea. Forever and forever.

Beyond the hills were the mines of King Solomon, the toy republics of
Central America, and little tinkling fountains in a court; beyond, the
moonlit roofs of Bagdad, the little grated blinds of Samarkand, the
moonlit camels of Bithynia, the Spanish ranch-house of the Triple Z,
and J. B. Montgomery and his lovely daughter stepping from their private
car upon a western track; and the castle-haunted crags of Graustark;
the fortune-yielding casino of Monte Carlo; and the blue eternal
Mediterranean, mother of empires. And instant wealth ticked out upon a
tape, and the first stage of the Eiffel Tower where the restaurant was,
and Frenchmen setting fire to their whiskers, and a farm in Devon, white
cream, brown ale, the winter's chimney merriment, and _Lorna Doone_;
and the hanging gardens of Babylon, and supper in the sunset with the
queens, and the slow slide of the barge upon the Nile, or the wise rich
bodies of Egyptian women couched on moonlit balustrades, and the thunder
of the chariots of great kings, and tomb-treasure sought at midnight,
and the wine-rich chateau land of France, and calico warm legs in hay.

Upon a field in Thrace Queen Helen lay, her lovely body dappled in the
sun.


Meanwhile, business had been fairly good. Eliza's earning-power the
first few years at Dixieland had been injured by her illnesses. Now,
however, she had recovered, and had paid off the last instalment on the
house. It was entirely hers. The property at this time was worth perhaps
$12,000. In addition she had borrowed $3,500 on a twenty-year $5,000
life insurance policy that had only two years more to run, and had made
extensive alterations: she had added a large sleeping-porch upstairs,
tacked on two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side, and extended a
hallway, adding three bedrooms, two baths, and a water-closet, on
the other. Downstairs she had widened the veranda, put in a large
sun-parlour under the sleeping-porch, knocked out the archway in the
dining-room, which she prepared to use as a big bedroom in the slack
season, scooped out a small pantry in which the family was to eat, and
added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her own occupancy.

The construction was after her own plans, and of the cheapest material:
it never lost the smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and flimsy rough
plastering, but she had added eight or ten rooms at a cost of only
$3,000. The year before she had banked almost $2,000--her bank account
was almost $5,000. In addition, she owned jointly with Gant the shop
on the Square, which had thirty feet of frontage, and was valued at
$20,000, from which he got $65 a month in rent: $20 from Jannadeau, $25
from the McLean Plumbing Company in the basement, and $20 from the J. N.
Gillespie Printing Co., which occupied all of the second storey.

There were, besides, three good building-lots on Merrion Avenue valued
at $2,000 apiece, or at $5,500 for all three; the house on Woodson
Street valued at $5,000; 110 acres of wooded mountainside with a
farmhouse, several hundred peach, apple and cherry trees, and a few
acres of arable ground for which Gant received $120 a year in rent, and
which they valued at $50 an acre, $5,500; two houses, one on Carter
Street, and one on Duncan, rented to railway people, for which they
received $25 a month apiece, and which they valued together at $4,500;
forty-eight acres of land two miles above Biltburn, and four from
Altamont, upon the important Reynoldsville Road, which they valued at
$210 an acre, or $10,000; three houses in Niggertown--one on Lower
Valley Street, one on Beaumont Crescent, just below the negro Johnson's
big house, and one on Short Oak, valued at $600, $900, and $1,600
respectively, and drawing a room-rental of $8, $12, and $17 a month
(total: $3,100 and $37 rental); two houses across the river, four miles
away in West Altamont, valued at $2,750 and at $3,500, drawing a rental
of $22 and $30 a month; three lots, lost in the growth of a rough
hillside, a mile from the main highway through West Altamont, $500; and
a house, unoccupied, object of Gantian anathema, on Lower Hatton Avenue,
$4,500.

In addition, Gant held ten shares, which were already worth $200 each
($2,000), in the newly organized Fidelity Bank; his stock of stones,
monuments, and fly-specked angels represented an investment of $2,700,
although he could not have sold them outright for so much; and he had
about $3,000 deposited in the Fidelity, the Merchants, and the Battery
Hill banks.

Thus, at the beginning of 1912, before the rapid and intensive
development of Southern industry, and the consequent tripling of
Altamont's population, and before the multiplication of her land values,
the wealth of Gant and Eliza amounted to about $100,000, the great bulk
of which was solidly founded in juicy well chosen pieces of property of
Eliza's selection, yielding them a monthly rental of more than $200,
which, added to their own earning capacities at the shop and Dixieland,
gave them a combined yearly income of $8,000 or $10,000. Although Gant
often cried out bitterly against his business and declared, when he was
not attacking property, that he had never made even a bare living from
his tombstones, he was rarely short of ready money: he usually had one
or two small commissions from country people, and he always carried a
well-filled purse, containing $150 or $200 in five and ten-dollar bills,
which he allowed Eugene to count out frequently, enjoying his son's
delight, and the feel of abundance.

Eliza had suffered one or two losses in her investments, led astray by
a strain of wild romanticism which destroyed for the moment her shrewd
caution. She invested $1,200 in the Missouri Utopia of a colonizer, and
received nothing for her money but a weekly copy of the man's newspaper,
several beautiful prospectuses of the look of things when finished, and
a piece of clay sculpture, eight inches in height, showing Big Brother
with his little sisters Jenny and Kate, the last with thumb in her
mouth.

"By God!" said Gant, who made savage fun of the proceeding, "she ought
to have it on her nose."

And Ben sneered, jerking his head toward it, saying:

"There's her $1,200."

But Eliza was preparing to go on by herself. She saw that co-operation
with Gant in the purchase of land was becoming more difficult each year.
And with something like pain, something assuredly like hunger, she saw
various rich plums fall into other hands or go unbought. She realised
that in a very short time land values would soar beyond her present
means. And she proposed to be on hand when the pie was cut.

Across the street from Dixieland was the Brunswick, a well-built red
brick house of twenty rooms. The marble facings had been done by Gant
himself twenty years before, the hardwood floors and oak timbering by
Will Pentland. It was an ugly gabled Victorian house, the marriage gift
of a rich Northerner to his daughter, who died of tuberculosis.

"Not a better built house in town," said Gant.

Nevertheless he refused to buy it with Eliza, and with an aching heart
she saw it go to S. Greenberg, the rich junk-man, for $8,500. Within a
year he had sold off five lots at the back, on the Yancey Street side,
for $1,000 each, and was holding the house for $20,000.

"We could have had our money back by now three times over," Eliza
fretted.

She did not have enough money at the time for any important investment.
She saved and she waited.

Will Pentland's fortune at this time was vaguely estimated at from
$500,000 to $700,000. It was mainly in property, a great deal of which
was situated--warehouses and buildings--near the passenger depot of the
railway.

Sometimes Altamont people, particularly the young men who loafed about
Collister's drug-store, and who spent long dreamy hours estimating the
wealth of the native plutocracy, called Will Pentland a millionaire. At
this time it was a distinction in American life to be a millionaire.
There were only six or eight thousand. But Will Pentland wasn't one. He
was really worth only a half million.

Mr. Goulderbilt was a millionaire. He was driven into town in a big
Packard, but he got out and went along the streets like other men.

One time Gant pointed him out to Eugene. He was about to enter a bank.

"There he is," whispered Gant. "Do you see him?"

Eugene nodded, wagging his head mechanically. He was unable to speak.
Mr. Goulderbilt was a small dapper man, with black hair, black clothes,
and a black moustache. His hands and feet were small.

"He's got over $50,000,000," said Gant. "You'd never think it to look at
him, would you?"

And Eugene dreamed of these money princes living in a princely fashion.
He wanted to see them riding down a street in a crested coach around
which rode a teetering guard of liveried outriders. He wanted their
fingers to be heavily gemmed, their clothes trimmed with ermine, their
women coroneted with flashing mosaics of amethyst, beryl, ruby, topaz,
sapphire, opal, emerald, and wearing thick ropes of pearls. And he
wanted to see them living in palaces of alabaster columns, eating
in vast halls upon an immense creamy table from vessels of old
silver--eating strange fabulous foods--swelling unctuous paps of a fat
pregnant sow, oiled mushrooms, calvered salmon, jugged hare, the beards
of barbels dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, carps' tongues,
dormice and camels' heels, with spoons of amber headed with diamond and
carbuncle, and cups of agate, studded with emeralds, hyacinths, and
rubies--everything, in fact, for which Epicure Mammon wished.

Eugene met only one millionaire whose performances in public satisfied
him, and he, unhappily, was crazy. His name was Simon.

Simon, when Eugene first saw him, was a man of almost fifty years. He
had a strong, rather heavy figure of middling height, a lean brown face,
with shadowy hollows across the cheeks, always closely shaven, but
sometimes badly scarred by his gouging fingernails, and a long thin
mouth that curved slightly downward, subtle, sensitive, lighting his
whole face at times with blazing demoniac glee. He had straight abundant
hair, heavily greyed, which he kept smartly brushed and flattened at the
sides. His clothing was loose and well cut: he wore a dark coat above
baggy grey flannels, silk shirts rayed with broad stripes, a collar to
match, and a generous loosely knotted tie. His waistcoats were of a
ruddy-brown chequered pattern. He had an appearance of great
distinction.

Simon and his two keepers first came to Dixieland when difficulties with
several of the Altamont hotels forced them to look for private quarters.
The men took two rooms and a sleeping-porch, and paid generously.

"Why, pshaw!" said Eliza persuasively to Helen, "I don't believe there's
a thing wrong with him. He's as quiet and well-behaved as you please."

At this moment there was a piercing yell upstairs, followed by a long
peal of diabolical laughter. Eugene bounded up and down the hall in his
exultancy and delight, producing little squealing noises in his throat.
Ben, scowling, with a quick flicker of his mouth, drew back his hard
white hand swiftly as if to cuff his brother. Instead, he jerked his
head sideways to Eliza, and said with a soft, scornful laugh: "By God,
mamma, I don't see why you have to take them in. You've got enough of
them in the family already."

"Mamma, in heaven's name----" Helen began furiously. At this moment Gant
strode in out of the dusk, carrying a mottled package of pork chops,
and muttering rhetorically to himself. There was another long peal of
laughter above. He halted abruptly startled, and lifted his head. Luke,
listening attentively at the foot of the stairs, exploded in a loud
boisterous guffaw, and the girl, her annoyance changing at once to angry
amusement, walked toward her father's inquiring face, and prodded him
several times in the ribs.

"Hey?" he said startled. "What is it?"

"Miss Eliza's got a crazy man upstairs," she sniggered, enjoying his
amazement.

"Jesus God!" Gant yelled frantically, wetting his big thumb swiftly
on his tongue, and glancing up toward his Maker with an attitude of
exaggerated supplication in his small grey eyes and the thrust of his
huge bladelike nose. Then, letting his arms slap heavily at his sides,
in a gesture of defeat, he began to walk rapidly back and forth,
clucking his deprecation loudly. Eliza stood solidly, looking from one
to another, her lips working rapidly, her white face hurt and bitter.

There was another long howl of mirth above. Gant paused, caught Helen's
eye, and began to grin suddenly in an unwilling sheepish manner.

"God have mercy on us," he chuckled. "She'll have the place filled with
all of Barnum's freaks the next thing you know."

At this moment, Simon, self-contained, distinguished and grave in
his manner, descended the steps with Mr. Gilroy and Mr. Flannagan,
his companions. The two guards were red in the face, and breathed
stertorously as if from some recent exertion. Simon, however, preserved
his habitual appearance of immaculate and well-washed urbanity.

"Good evening," he remarked suavely. "I hope I have not kept you waiting
long." He caught sight of Eugene.

"Come here, my boy," he said very kindly.

"It's all right," remarked Mr. Gilroy, encouragingly. "He wouldn't hurt
a fly."

Eugene moved into the presence.

"And what is your name, young man?" said Simon with his beautiful
devil's smile.

"Eugene."

"That's a very fine name," said Simon. "Always try to live up to it."
He thrust his hand carelessly and magnificently into his coat pocket,
drawing out under the boy's astonished eyes, a handful of shining five
and ten-cent pieces.

"Always be good to the birds, my boy," said Simon, and he poured the
money into Eugene's cupped hands.

Every one looked doubtfully at Mr. Gilroy.

"Oh, that's all right!" said Mr. Gilroy cheerfully. "He'll never miss
it. There's lots more where that came from."

"He's a mul-tye-millionaire," Mr. Flannagan explained proudly. "We give
him four or five dollars in small change every morning just to throw
away."

Simon caught sight of Gant for the first time.

"Look out for the Stingaree," he cried. "Remember the Maine."

"I tell you what," said Eliza laughing. "He's not so crazy as you
think."

"That's right," said Mr. Gilroy, noting Gant's grin. "The Stingaree's a
fish. They have them in Florida."

"Don't forget the birds, my friends," said Simon, going out with his
companions. "Be good to the birds."

They became very fond of him. Somehow he fitted into the pattern of
their life. None of them was uncomfortable in the presence of madness.
In the flowering darkness of Spring, prisoned in a room, his satanic
laughter burst suddenly out: Eugene listened, thrilled, and slept,
unable to forget the smile of dark flowering evil, the loose pocket
chinking heavily with coins.

Night, the myriad rustle of tiny wings. Heard lapping water of the
inland seas.


--And the air will be filled with warm-throated plum-dropping
bird-notes. He was almost twelve. He was done with childhood. As that
Spring ripened he felt entirely, for the first time, the full delight of
loneliness. Sheeted in the thin nightgown, he stood in darkness by the
orchard window of the back room at Gant's, drinking the sweet air down,
exulting in his isolation in darkness, hearing the strange wail of the
whistle going west.

The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled
completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination--he had learned
by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable
counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion. He no
longer went through the torment of the recess flight and pursuit. He was
now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big
Boys. His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter
siege against Eliza's obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the
curls. But he had grown like a weed, he already topped his mother by an
inch or two; his body was big-boned but very thin and fragile, with no
meat on it; his legs were absurdly long, thin, and straight, giving him
a curious scissored look as he walked with long bounding strides.

Stuck on a thin undeveloped neck beneath a big wide-browed head covered
thickly by curling hair which had changed, since his infancy, from a
light maple to dark brown-black, was a face so small, and so delicately
sculptured, that it seemed not to belong to its body. The strangeness,
the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous
concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every
splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a
pool. The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip
deeply scooped and pouting. His rapt dreaming intensity set the face
usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; he smiled,
oftener than he laughed, inwardly at some extravagant invention, or some
recollection of the absurd, now fully appreciated for the first time. He
did not open his lips to smile--there was a swift twisted flicker across
his mouth. His thick heavily arched eyebrows grew straight across the
base of his nose.

That Spring he was more alone than ever. Eliza's departure for Dixieland
three or four years before, and the disruption of established life
at Gant's, had begun the loosening of his first friendships with the
neighbourhood boys, Harry Tarkinton, Max Isaacs, and the others, and
had now almost completely severed them. Occasionally he saw these
boys again, occasionally he resumed again, at sporadic intervals, his
association with them, but he now had no steady companionship, he had
only a series of associations with children whose parents stayed for a
time at Dixieland, with Tim O'Doyle, whose mother ran the Brunswick,
with children here and there who briefly held his interest.

But he became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp
of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and
ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements. Dull people
filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his
own life as in the lives of others--his early distaste for Pett Pentland
and her grim rusty aunts came from submerged memories of the old house
on Central Avenue, the smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot
room, the swooping howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone
of their conversation on disease, death, and misery. He was filled with
terror and anger against them because they were able to live, to thrive,
in this horrible depression that sickened him.

Thus, the entire landscape, the whole physical background of his life,
was now dappled by powerful prejudices of liking and distaste formed,
God knows how, or by what intangible affinities of thought, feeling
and connotation. Thus, one street would seem to him to be a "good
street"--to exist in the rich light of cheerful, abundant, and
high-hearted living; another, inexplicably, a "bad street," touching
him somehow with fear, hopelessness, depression.

Perhaps the cold red light of some remembered winter's afternoon waning
pallidly over a playing-field, with all its mockery of Spring, while
lights flared up smokily in houses, the rabble-rout of children dirtily
went in to supper, and men came back to the dull but warm imprisonment
of home, oil lamps (which he hated), and bedtime, clotted in him a
hatred of the place which remained even when the sensations that caused
it were forgotten.

Or, returning from some country walk in late autumn, he would come back
from Cove or Valley with dewy nose, clotted boots, the smell of a mashed
persimmon on his knee, and the odour of wet earth and grass on the palms
of his hands, and with a stubborn dislike and suspicion of the scene he
had visited, and fear of the people who lived there.

He had the most extraordinary love of incandescence. He hated dull
lights, smoky lights, soft, or sombre lights. At night he wanted to
be in rooms brilliantly illuminated with beautiful, blazing, sharp,
poignant lights. After that, the dark.


He played games badly, although he took a violent interest in sports.
Max Isaacs continued to interest him as an athlete long after he had
ceased to interest him as a person. The game Max Isaacs excelled in
was baseball. Usually he played one of the outfield positions, ranging
easily about in his field, when a ball was hit to him, with the speed
of a panther, making impossible catches with effortless grace. He was a
terrific hitter, standing at the plate casually but alertly, and meeting
the ball squarely with a level swinging smack of his heavy shoulders.
Eugene tried vainly to imitate the precision and power of this movement,
which drove the ball in a smoking arc out of the lot, but he was never
able: he chopped down clumsily and blindly, knocking a futile bounder
to some nimble baseman. In the field he was equally useless: he never
learned to play in a team, to become a limb of that single animal which
united telepathically in a concerted movement. He became nervous, highly
excited, and erratic in team-play, but he spent hours alone with another
boy, or, after the midday meal, with Ben, passing a ball back and forth.

He developed blinding speed, bending all the young suppleness of his
long thin body behind the ball, exulting as it smoked into the pocket of
the mitt with a loud smack, or streaked up with a sharp dropping curve.
Ben, taken by surprise by a fast drop, would curse him savagely, and in
a rage hurl the ball back into his thin gloved hand. In the Spring and
Summer he went as often as he could afford it, or was invited, to the
baseball games in the district league, a fanatic partisan of the town
club and its best players, making a fantasy constantly of himself in a
heroic game-saving rle.

But he was in no way able to submit himself to the discipline, the hard
labour, the acceptance of defeat and failure that make a good athlete;
he wanted always to win, he wanted always to be the general, the heroic
spear-head of victory. And after that he wanted to be loved. Victory
and love. In all of his swarming fantasies Eugene saw himself like
this--unbeaten and beloved. But moments of clear vision returned to him
when all the defeat and misery of his life was revealed. He saw his
gangling and absurd figure, his remote unpractical brooding face, too
like a dark strange flower to arouse any feeling among his companions
and his kin, he thought, but discomfort, bitterness, and mockery; he
remembered, with a drained sick heart, the countless humiliations,
physical and verbal, he had endured, at the hands of school and family,
before the world, and as he thought, the horns of victory died within
the wood, the battle-drums of triumph stopped, the proud clangour of the
gongs quivered away in silence. His eagles had flown; he saw himself, in
a moment of reason, as a madman playing Csar. He craned his head aside
and covered his face with his hand.




XVI


The Spring grew ripe. There was at midday a soft drowsiness in the sun.
Warm sporting gusts of wind howled faintly at the eaves; the young grass
bent; the daisies twinkled.

He pressed his high knees uncomfortably against the bottom of his desk,
grew nostalgic on his dreams. Bessie Barnes scrawled vigorously two rows
away, displaying her long full silken leg. Open for me the gates of
delight. Behind her sat a girl named Ruth, dark, with milk-white skin,
eyes as gentle as her name, and thick black hair, parted in the middle.
He thought of a wild life with Bessie and of a later resurrection, a
pure holy life, with Ruth.

One day, after the noon recess, they were marshalled by the teachers--all
of the children in the three upper grades--and marched upstairs to the
big assembly hall. They were excited, and gossiped in low voices as they
went. They had never been called upstairs at this hour. Quite often the
bells rang in the halls: they sprang quickly into line and were marched
out in double files. That was fire drill. They liked that. Once they
emptied the building in four minutes.

This was something new. They marched into the big room and sat down in
blocks of seats assigned to each class: they sat with a seat between
each of them. In a moment the door of the principal's office on the
left--where little boys were beaten--was opened, and the principal came
out. He walked around the corner of the big room and stepped softly up
on the platform. He began to talk.

He was a new principal. Young Armstrong, who had smelled the flower so
delicately, and who had visited Daisy, and who once had almost beaten
Eugene because of the smutty rhymes, was gone. The new principal was
older. He was about thirty-eight years old. He was a strong, rather
heavy man a little under six feet tall; he was one of a large family who
had grown up on a Tennessee farm. His father was poor but he had helped
his children to get an education. All this Eugene knew already, because
the principal made long talks to them in the morning and said he had
never had their advantages. He pointed to himself with some pride. And
he urged the little boys, playfully but earnestly, to "be not like dumb
driven cattle, be a hero in the strife." That was poetry, Longfellow.

The principal had thick powerful shoulders; clumsy white arms, knotted
with big awkward country muscles. Eugene had seen him once hoeing in
the school yard; each of them had been given a plant to set out. He got
those muscles on the farm. The boys said he beat very hard. He walked
with a clumsy stealthy tread--awkward and comical enough, it is true,
but he could be up at a boy's back before you knew it. Otto Krause
called him Creeping Jesus. The name stuck, among the tough crowd. Eugene
was a little shocked by it.

The principal had a white face of waxen transparency, with deep flat
cheeks like the Pentlands, a pallid nose, a trifle deeper in its colour
than his face, and a thin slightly-bowed mouth. His hair was coarse,
black, and thick, but he never let it grow too long. He had short dry
hands, strong, and always coated deeply with chalk. When he passed near
by, Eugene got the odour of chalk and of the schoolhouse: his heart grew
cold with excitement and fear. The sanctity of chalk and school hovered
about the man's flesh. He was the one who could touch without being
touched, beat without being beaten. Eugene had terrible fantasies of
resistance, shuddering with horror as he thought of the awful consequences
of fighting back: something like God's fist in lightning. Then he looked
around cautiously to see if any one had noticed.

The principal's name was Leonard. He made long speeches to the children
every morning, after a ten-minute prayer. He had a high sonorous
countrified voice which often trailed off in a comical drawl; he got
lost very easily in reverie, would pause in the middle of a sentence,
gaze absently off with his mouth half-open and an expression of
stupefaction on his face, and return presently to the business before
him, his mind still loose, with witless distracted laugh.

He talked to the children aimlessly, pompously, dully for twenty minutes
every morning; the teachers yawned carefully behind their hands, the
students made furtive drawings, or passed notes. He spoke to them of
"the higher life" and of "the things of the mind." He assured them that
they were the leaders of to-morrow and the hope of the world. Then he
quoted Longfellow.

He was a good man, a dull man, a man of honour. He had a broad streak of
coarse earthy brutality in him. He loved a farm better than anything in
the world except a school. He had rented a big dilapidated house in a
grove of lordly oaks on the outskirts of town: he lived there with his
wife and his two children. He had a cow--he was never without a cow: he
would go out at night and morning to milk her, laughing his vacant silly
laugh, and giving her a good smacking kick in the belly to make her come
round into position.

He was a heavy-handed master. He put down rebellion with good cornfield
violence. If a boy was impudent to him he would rip him powerfully
from his seat, drag his wriggling figure into his office, breathing
stertorously as he walked along at his clumsy rapid gait, and saying
roundly, in tones of scathing contempt: "Why, you young upstart, we'll
just see who's master here. I'll just show you, my sonny, if I'm to be
dictated to by every two-by-four whippersnapper who comes along." And
once within the office, with the glazed door shut, he published the
stern warning of his justice by the loud exertion of his breathing, the
cutting swish of his rattan, and the yowls of pain and terror that he
exacted from his captive.

He had called the school together that day to command it to write him
a composition. The children sat, staring dumbly up at him as he made a
rambling explanation of what he wanted. Finally he announced a prize. He
would give five dollars from his own pocket to the student who wrote the
best paper. That aroused them. There was a rustle of interest.

They were to write a paper on the meaning of a French picture called
"The Song of the Lark." It represented a French peasant girl, barefooted,
with a sickle in one hand, and with face upturned in the morning-light
of the fields as she listened to the bird-song. They were asked to
describe what they saw in the expression of the girl's face. They were
asked to tell what the picture meant to them. It had been reproduced in
one of their readers. A larger print was now hung up on the platform for
their inspection. Sheets of yellow paper were given them. They stared,
thoughtfully masticating their pencils. Finally, the room was silent
save for a minute scratching on paper.

The warm wind spouted about the eaves; the grasses bent, whistling
gently.

Eugene wrote: "The girl is hearing the song of the first lark. She knows
that it means Spring has come. She is about seventeen or eighteen years
old. Her people are very poor, she has never been anywhere. In the
winter she wears wooden shoes. She is making out as if she was going to
whistle. But she doesn't let on to the bird that she has heard him. The
rest of her people are behind her, coming down the field, but we do not
see them. She has a father, a mother, and two brothers. They have worked
hard all their life. The girl is the youngest child. She thinks she
would like to go away somewhere and see the world. Sometimes she hears
the whistle of a train that is going to Paris. She has never ridden on a
train in her life. She would like to go to Paris. She would like to have
some fine clothes, she would like to travel. Perhaps she would like to
start life new in America, the Land of Opportunity. The girl has had a
hard time. Her people do not understand her. If they saw her listening
to the lark they would poke fun at her. She has never had the advantages
of a good education, her people are so poor, but she would profit by her
opportunity if she did, more than some people who have. You can tell by
looking at her that she's intelligent."

It was early in May; examinations came in another two weeks. He thought
of them with excitement and pleasure--he liked the period of hard
cramming, the long reviews, the delight of emptying out abundantly on
paper his stored knowledge. The big assembly room had about it the odour
of completion, of sharp nervous ecstasy. All through the summer it would
be drowsy-warm; if only here, alone, with the big plaster cast of
Minerva, himself and Bessie Barnes, or Miss--Miss----

"We want this boy," said Margaret Leonard. She handed Eugene's paper
over to her husband. They were starting a private school for boys. That
was what the paper had been for.

Leonard took the paper, pretended to read half a page, looked off
absently into eternity, and began to rub his chin reflectively, leaving
a slight coating of chalk-dust on his face. Then, catching her eye, he
laughed idiotically and said: "Why, that little rascal! Huh? Do you
suppose----?"

Feeling delightfully scattered, he bent over with a long suction of
whining laughter, slapping his knee and leaving a chalk print, making a
slobbering noise in his mouth.

"The Lord have mercy!" he gasped.

"Here! Never you mind about that," she said, laughing with tender sharp
amusement. "Pull yourself together and see this boy's people." She loved
the man dearly, and he loved her.

A few days later Leonard assembled the children a second time. He made
a rambling speech, the purport of which was to inform them that one of
them had won the prize, but to conceal the winner's name. Then, after
several divagations, which he thoroughly enjoyed, he read Eugene's
paper, announced his name, and called him forward.

Chalkface took chalkhand. The boy's heart thundered against his ribs.
The proud horns blared, he tasted glory.

Patiently, all through the summer, Leonard laid siege to Gant and Eliza.
Gant fidgeted, spoke shiftily, finally said:

"You'll have to see his mother." Privately he was bitterly scornful,
roared the merits of the public school as an incubator of citizenship.
The family was contemptuous. Private school! Mr. Vanderbilt! Ruin him
for good!

Which made Eliza reflective. She had a good streak of snobbism. Mr.
Vanderbilt? She was as good as any of them. They'd just see.

"Who are you going to have?" she asked. "Have you drummed any one up
yet?"

Leonard mentioned the sons of several fashionable and wealthy people--of
Dr. Kitchen, the eye, ear, nose and throat man, Mr. Arthur, the
corporation lawyer, and Bishop Raper, of the Episcopal diocese.

Eliza grew more reflective. She thought of Pett. She needn't give
herself airs.

"How much are you asking?" she said.

He told her the tuition was one hundred dollars a year. She pursed her
lips lingeringly before she answered.

"Hm-m!" she began, with a bantering smile, as she looked at Eugene.
"That's a whole lot of money. You know," she continued with her
tremulous smile, "as the darkey says, we're pore-folks."

Eugene squirmed.

"Well, what about it, boy?" said Eliza banteringly. "Do you think you're
worth that much money?"

Mr. Leonard placed his white dry hand upon Eugene's shoulders,
affectionately sliding it down his back and across his kidneys, leaving
white chalk prints everywhere. Then he clamped his meaty palm tightly
around the slender bracelet of boy-arm.

"That boy's worth it," he said, shaking him gently to and fro. "Yes,
sir!"

Eugene smiled painfully. Eliza continued to purse her lips. She felt a
strong psychic relation to Leonard. They both took time.

"Say," she said, rubbing her broad red nose, and smiling slyly, "I used
to be a school-teacher. You didn't know that, did you? But I didn't get
any such prices as you're asking," she added. "I thought myself mighty
lucky if I got my board and twenty dollars a month."

"Is that so, Mrs. Gant?" said Mr. Leonard with great interest. "Well,
sir!" He began to laugh in a vague whine, pulling Eugene about more
violently and deadening his arm under his crushing grip.

"Yes," said Eliza, "I remember my father--it was long before you were
born, boy," she said to Eugene, "for I hadn't laid eyes on your papa--as
the feller says, you were nothing but a dish-rag hanging out in
heaven--I'd have laughed at any one who suggested marriage then--Well, I
tell you what [she shook her head with a sad pursed deprecating mouth],
we were mighty poor at the time, I can tell you.--I was thinking about
it the other day--many's the time we didn't have food in the house for
the next meal.--Well, as I was saying, your grandfather [addressing
Eugene] came home one night and said--Look here, what about it?--Who do
you suppose I saw to-day?--I remember him just as plain as if I saw him
standing here--I had a feeling--[addressing Leonard with a doubtful
smile] I don't know what you'd call it but it's pretty strange when you
come to think about it, isn't it?--I had just finished helping Aunt Jane
set the table--she had come all the way from Yancey County to visit
your grandmother--when all of a sudden it flashed over me--mind you
[to Leonard] I never looked out the window or anything but I knew just
as well as I knew anything that he was coming--mercy I cried--here
he comes--why what on earth are you talking about, Eliza? said your
grandma--I remember she went to the door and looked out down the
path--there's no one there--He's acoming, I said--wait and see--Who?
said your grandmother--Why, father, I said--he's carrying something on
his shoulder--and sure enough--I had no sooner got the words out of my
mouth than there he was just acoming it for all he was worth, up the
path, with a tow-sack full of apples on his back--you could tell by the
way he walked that he had news of some sort--well--sure enough--without
stopping to say howdy-do--I remembered he began to talk almost before
he got into the house--Oh father, I called out--you've brought the
apples--it was the year after I had almost died of pneumonia--I'd been
spitting up blood ever since--and having hmorrhages--and I asked him
to bring me some apples--Well sir, mother said to him, and she looked
mighty queer, I can tell you--that's the strangest thing I ever heard
of--and she told him what had happened--Well, he looked pretty serious
and said--Yes, I'll never forget the way he said it--I reckon she saw
me. I wasn't there but I was thinking of being there and coming up the
path at that very moment--I've got news for you he said--who do you
suppose I saw to-day--why, I've no idea, I said--why old Professor
Truman--he came rushing up to me in town and said, see here: where's
Eliza--I've got a job for her if she wants it, teaching school this
winter out on Beaverdam--why, pshaw, said your grandfather, she's never
taught school a day in her life--and Professor Truman laughed just as
big as you please and said never you mind about that--Eliza can do
anything she sets her mind on--well sir, that's the way it all came
about." High-sorrowful and sad, she paused for a moment, adrift, her
white face slanting her life back through the aisled grove of years.

"Well, sir!" said Mr. Leonard vaguely, rubbing his chin. "You young
rascal, you!" he said, giving Eugene another jerk, and beginning to
laugh with narcissistic pleasure.

Eliza pursed her lips slowly.

"Well," she said, "I'll send him to you for a year." That was the way
she did business. Tides run deep in Sargasso.

So, on the hairline of million-minded impulse, destiny bore down on his
life again.


Mr. Leonard had leased an old pre-war house, set on a hill wooded by
magnificent trees. It faced west and south, looking toward Biltburn, and
abruptly down on South End, and the negro flats that stretched to the
depot. One day early in September he took Eugene there. They walked
across town, talking weightily of politics, across the Square, down
Hatton Avenue, south into Church, and southwesterly along the bending
road that ended in the schoolhouse on the abutting hill.

The huge trees made sad autumn music as they entered the grounds. In the
broad hall of the squat rambling old house Eugene for the first time saw
Margaret Leonard. She held a broom in her hands, and was aproned. But
his first impression was of her shocking fragility.

Margaret Leonard at this time was thirty-four years old. She had borne
two children, a son who was now six years old, and a daughter who was
two. As she stood there, with her long slender fingers splayed about the
broomstick, he noted, with a momentary cold nausea, that the tip of her
right index finger was flattened out as if it had been crushed beyond
healing by a hammer. But it was years before he knew that tuberculars
sometimes have such fingers.

Margaret Leonard was of middling height, five feet six inches perhaps.
As the giddiness of his embarrassment wore off, he saw that she could
not weigh more than eighty or ninety pounds. He had heard of the
children. Now he remembered them, and Leonard's white muscular bulk,
with a sense of horror. His swift vision leaped at once to the sexual
relation, and something in him twisted aside, incredulous and afraid.

She had on a dress of crisp grey gingham, not loose or lapping round her
wasted figure, but hiding every line in her body, like a draped stick.

As his mind groped out of the pain of impression he heard her voice and,
still feeling within him the strange convulsive shame, he lifted his
eyes to her face. It was the most tranquil and the most passionate face
he had ever seen. The skin was sallow with a dead ashen tinge; beneath,
the delicate bone-carving of face and skull traced itself clearly: the
cadaverous tightness of those who are about to die had been checked. She
had won her way back just far enough to balance carefully in the scales
of disease and recovery. It was necessary for her to measure everything
she did.

Her thin face was given a touch of shrewdness and decision by the
straight line of her nose, the fine long carving of her chin. Beneath
the sallow minutely pitted skin in her cheeks, and about her mouth,
several frayed nerve-centres twitched from moment to moment, jarring
the skin slightly without contorting or destroying the passionate
calm beauty that fed her inexhaustibly from within. This face was the
constant field of conflict, nearly always calm, but always reflecting
the incessant struggle and victory of the enormous energy that inhabited
her, over the thousand jangling devils of depletion and weariness that
tried to pull her apart. There was always written upon her the epic
poetry of beauty and repose out of struggle--he never ceased to feel
that she had her hand around the reins of her heart, that gathered into
her grasp were all the straining wires and sinews of disunion which
would scatter and unjoint her members, once she let go. Literally,
physically, he felt that, the great tide of valiance once flowed out of
her, she would immediately go to pieces.

She was like some great general, famous, tranquil, wounded unto death,
who, with his fingers clamped across a severed artery, stops for an hour
the ebbing of his life--sends on the battle.

Her hair was coarse and dull-brown, fairly abundant, tinged lightly with
grey: it was combed evenly in the middle and bound tightly in a knot
behind. Everything about her was very clean, like a scrubbed kitchen
board: she took his hand, he felt the firm nervous vitality of her
fingers, and he noticed how clean and scrubbed her thin somewhat
labour-worn hands were. If he noticed her emaciation at all now, it was
only with a sense of her purification: he felt himself in union not with
disease, but with the greatest health he had ever known. She made a high
music in him. His heart lifted.

"This," said Mr. Leonard, stroking him gently across the kidneys, "is
Mister Eugene Gant."

"Well, sir," she said, in a low voice, in which a vibrant wire was
thrumming, "I'm glad to know you." The voice had in it that quality of
quiet wonder that he had sometimes heard in the voices of people who had
seen or were told of some strange event, or coincidence, that seemed to
reach beyond life, beyond nature--a note of acceptance; and suddenly he
knew that all life seemed eternally strange to this woman, that she
looked directly into the beauty and the mystery and the tragedy in the
hearts of men, and that he seemed beautiful to her.

Her face darkened with the strange passionate vitality that left no
print, that lived there bodiless like life; her brown eyes darkened into
black as if a bird had flown through them and left the shadow of its
wings. She saw his small remote face burning strangely at the end of
his long unfleshed body, she saw the straight thin shanks, the big feet
turned awkwardly inward, the dusty patches on his stockings at the
knees, and his thin wristy arms that stuck out painfully below his cheap
ill-fitting jacket; she saw the thin hunched line of his shoulders, the
tangled mass of hair--and she did not laugh.

He turned his face up to her as a prisoner who recovers light, as a man
long pent in darkness who bathes himself in the great pool of dawn,
as a blind man who feels upon his eyes the white core and essence of
immutable brightness. His body drank in her great light as a famished
castaway the rain: he closed his eyes and let the great light bathe him,
and when he opened them again, he saw that her own were luminous and
wet.

Then she began to laugh. "Why, Mr. Leonard," she said, "what in the
world! He's almost as tall as you. Here, boy. Stand up here while I
measure." Deft-fingered, she put them back to back. Mr. Leonard was two
or three inches taller than Eugene. He began to whine with laughter.

"Why, the rascal," he said. "That little shaver."

"How old are you, boy?" she asked.

"I'll be twelve next month," he said.

"Well, what do you know about that!" she said wonderingly. "I tell you
what, though," she continued. "We've got to get some meat on those
bones. You can't go around like that. I don't like the way you look."
She shook her head.

He was uncomfortable, disturbed, vaguely resentful. It embarrassed and
frightened him to be told that he was "delicate"; it touched sharply on
his pride.

She took him into a big room on the left that had been fitted out as a
living-room and library. She watched his face light with eagerness as he
saw the fifteen hundred or two thousand books shelved away in various
places. He sat down clumsily in a wicker chair by the table and waited
until she returned, bringing him a plate of sandwiches and a tall glass
full of clabber, which he had never tasted before.

When he had finished, she drew a chair near to his, and sat down. She
had previously sent Leonard out on some barnyard errands; he could be
heard from time to time shouting in an authoritative country voice to
his live stock.

"Well, tell me boy," she said, "what have you been reading?"

Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of printery, naming as
his favourites those books which he felt would win her approval. As he
had read everything, good and bad, that the town library contained, he
was able to make an impressive showing. Sometimes she stopped him to
question about a book--he rebuilt the story richly with a blazing
tenacity of detail that satisfied her wholly. She was excited and
eager--she saw at once how abundantly she could feed this ravenous
hunger for knowledge, experience, wisdom. And he knew suddenly the joy
of obedience: the wild ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate
baffled desire was now to be ruddered, guided, controlled. The way
through the passage to India, that he had never been able to find, would
now be charted for him. Before he went away she had given him a fat
volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited engravings of
love and battle, of the period he loved best.

He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who killed the
bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of banditry, in all the
life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in valiant and beautiful
Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of Erasmus. Eugene thought _The
Cloister and the Hearth_ the best story he had ever read.


The Altamont Fitting School was the greatest venture of their lives. All
the delayed success that Leonard had dreamed of as a younger man he
hoped to realise now. For him the school was independence, mastership,
power, and, he hoped, prosperity. For her, teaching was its own
exceeding great reward--her lyric music, her life, the world in which
plastically she built to beauty what was good, the lord of her soul that
gave her spirit life while he broke her body.

In the cruel volcano of the boy's mind, the little brier moths of his
idolatry wavered in to their strange marriage and were consumed. One
by one the merciless years reaped down his gods and captains. What had
lived up to hope? What had withstood the scourge of growth and memory?
Why had the gold become so dim? All of his life, it seemed, his blazing
loyalties began with men and ended with images; the life he leaned on
melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a statue;
but enduring a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she
remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested
his hooded houseless soul. She remained.

O death in life that turns our men to stone! O change that levels down
our gods! If only one lives yet, above the cinders of the consuming
years, shall not this dust awaken, shall not dead faith revive, shall we
not see God again, as once in morning, on the mountain? Who walks with
us on the hills?




XVII


Eugene spent the next four years of his life in Leonard's school.
Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the dark road of pain and
death down which the great limbs of Gant had already begun to slope,
against all the loneliness and imprisonment of his own life which had
gnawed him like hunger, these years at Leonard's bloomed like golden
apples.

From Leonard he got little--a dry campaign over an arid waste of Latin
prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent skirmishing among the rules
of grammar, which frightened and bewildered him needlessly, and gave
him for years an unhealthy dislike of syntax, and an absurd prejudice
against the laws on which the language was built. Then, a year's study
of the lean, clear precision of Csar, the magnificent structure of the
style--the concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed
daily partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering _clich_ of pedantic
translation:

"Having done all things that were necessary, and the season now being
propitious for carrying on war, Csar began to arrange his legions in
battle array."

All the dark pageantry of war in Gaul, the thrust of the Roman spear
through the shield of hide, the barbaric parleys in the forests, and the
proud clangor of triumph--all that might have been supplied in the story
of the great realist, by one touch of the transforming passion with
which a great teacher projects his work, was lacking.

Instead, glibly, the wheels ground on into the hard rut of method and
memory. March 12, last year--three days late. _Cogitata._ Neut. pl. of
participle used as substantive. _Quo_ used instead of _ut_ to express
purpose when comparative follows. Eighty lines for to-morrow.

They spent a weary age, two years, on that dull dog, Cicero. _De
Senectute. De Amicitia._ They skirted Virgil because John Dorsey Leonard
was a bad sailor--he was not at all sure of Virgilian navigation. He
hated exploration. He distrusted voyages. Next year, he said. And the
great names of Ovid, lord of the elves and gnomes, the Bacchic piper of
_Amores_, or of Lucretius, full of the rhythm of tides. _Nox est
perpetua._

"Huh?" drawled Mr. Leonard, vacantly beginning to laugh. He was
fingermarked with chalk from chin to crotch. Stephen ("Pap") Rheinhart
leaned forward gently and fleshed his pen-point in Eugene Gant's left
rump. Eugene grunted painfully.

"Why, no," said Mr. Leonard, stroking his chin. "A different sort of
Latin."

"What sort?" Tom Davis insisted. "Harder than Cicero?"

"Well," said Mr. Leonard, dubiously, "different. A little beyond you at
present."

"_--est perpetua. Una dormienda. Luna dies et nox._"

"Is Latin poetry hard to read?" Eugene said.

"Well," said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head. "It's not easy. Horace--" he
began carefully.

"He wrote Odes and Epodes," said Tom Davis. "What is an Epode, Mr.
Leonard?"

"Why," said Mr. Leonard reflectively, "it's a form of poetry."

"Hell!" said "Pap" Rheinhart in a rude whisper to Eugene. "I knew that
before I paid tuition."

Smiling lusciously, and stroking himself with gentle fingers, Mr.
Leonard turned back to the lesson.

"Now let me see," he began.

"Who was Catullus?" Eugene shouted violently. Like a flung spear in his
brain, the name.

"He was a poet," Mr. Leonard answered thoughtlessly, quickly, startled.
He regretted.

"What sort of poetry did he write?" asked Eugene.

There was no answer.

"Was it like Horace?"

"No-o," said Mr. Leonard reflectively. "It wasn't exactly like Horace."

"What was it like?" said Tom Davis.

"Like your granny's gut," "Pap" Rheinhart toughly whispered.

"Why--he wrote on topics of general interest in his day," said Mr.
Leonard easily.

"Did he write about being in love?" said Eugene in a quivering voice.

Tom Davis turned a surprised face to him.

"Gre-a-at Day!" he exclaimed, after a moment. Then he began to laugh.

"He wrote about being in love," Eugene cried with sudden certain
passion. "He wrote about being in love with a lady named Lesbia. Ask Mr.
Leonard if you don't believe me."

They turned thirsty faces up to him.

"Why--no--yes--I don't know about all that," said Mr. Leonard,
challengingly, confused. "Where'd you hear all this, boy?"

"I read it in a book," said Eugene, wondering where. Like a flung spear,
the name.

--Whose tongue was fanged like a serpent, flung spear of ecstasy and
passion.

_Odi et amo: quare id faciam ..._

"Well, not altogether," said Mr. Leonard. "Some of them," he conceded.

_... fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior._

"Who was she?" said Tom Davis.

"Oh, it was the custom in those days," said Mr. Leonard carelessly.
"Like Dante and Beatrice. It was a way the poet had of paying a
compliment."

The serpent whispered. There was a distillation of wild exultancy in his
blood. The rags of obedience, servility, reverential awe dropped in a
belt around him.

"She was a man's wife!" he said loudly. "That's who she was."

Awful stillness.

"Why--here--who told you that?" said Mr. Leonard, bewildered, but
considering matrimony a wild and possibly dangerous myth. "Who told you
that, boy?"

"What was she, then?" said Tom Davis pointedly.

"Why--not exactly," Mr. Leonard murmured, rubbing his chin.

"She was a Bad Woman," said Eugene. Then, most desperately, he added:
"She was a Little Chippie."

"Pap" Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply.

"What's that, what's that, what's that?" cried Mr. Leonard rapidly when
he could speak. Fury boiled up in him. He sprang from his chair. "What
did you say, boy?"

But he thought of Margaret and looked down, with a sudden sense of
palsy, into the white ruination of boy-face. Too far beyond. He sat down
again, shaken.

--Whose foulest cry was shafted with his passion, whose greatest music
flowered out of filth----.

  "_Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam
    Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea es._"

"You should be more careful of your talk, Eugene," said Mr. Leonard
gently.

"See here!" he exclaimed suddenly, turning with violence to his book.
"This is getting no work done. Come on, now!" he said heartily, spitting
upon his intellectual hands. "You rascals you!" he said, noting Tom
Davis' grin. "I know what you're after--you want to take up the whole
period."

Tom Davis' heavy laughter boomed out, mingling with his own whine.

"All right, Tom," said Mr. Leonard briskly, "page 43, section 6, line
15. Begin at that point."

At this moment the bell rang and Tom Davis' laughter filled the room.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nevertheless, in charted lanes of custom, he gave competent instruction.
He would perhaps have had difficulty in constructing a page of Latin
prose and verse with which he had not become literally familiar by years
of repetition. In Greek, certainly, his deficiency would have been even
more marked, but he would have known a second aorist or an optative in
the dark (if he had ever met it before). There were two final years of
precious Greek: they read the _Anabasis_.

"What's the good of all this stuff?" said Tom Davis argumentatively.

Mr. Leonard was on sure ground here. He understood the value of the
classics.

"It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer Things. It gives him the
foundations of a liberal education. It trains his mind."

"What good's it going to do him when he goes to work?" said "Pap"
Rheinhart. "It's not going to teach him how to grow more corn."

"Well--I'm not so sure of that," said Mr. Leonard with a protesting
laugh. "I think it does."

"Pap" Rheinhart looked at him with a comical cock of the head. He had a
wry neck, which gave his humorous kindly face a sidelong expression of
quizzical maturity.

He had a gruff voice; he was full of rough kindly humour, and chewed
tobacco constantly. His father was wealthy. He lived on a big farm in
the Cove, ran a dairy and had a foundry in the town. They were
unpretending people--German stock.

"Pshaw, Mr. Leonard," said "Pap" Rheinhart. "Are you going to talk Latin
to your farmhands?"

"Egibus wantibus a peckibus of cornibus," said Tom Davis with sounding
laughter. Mr. Leonard laughed with abstracted appreciation. The joke was
his own.

"It trains the mind to grapple with problems of all sorts," he said.

"According to what you say," said Tom Davis, "a man who has studied
Greek makes a better plumber than one who hasn't."

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head smartly, "you know, I
believe he does." He joined, pleased, with their pleasant laughter, a
loose slobbering giggle.

He was on trodden ground. They engaged him in long debates: as he
ate his lunch, he waved a hot biscuit around, persuasive, sweetly
reasonable, exhaustively minute in an effort to prove the connection
of Greek and groceries. The great wind of Athens had touched him not
at all. Of the delicate and sensuous intelligence of the Greeks,
their feminine grace, the constructive power and subtlety of their
intelligence, the instability of their character, and the structure,
restraint, and perfection of their forms, he said nothing.

He had caught a glimpse in an American college, of the great structure
of the most architectural of languages: he felt the sculptural perfection
of such a word as [Greek:  gynaikos], but his opinions smelled of chalk,
the classroom, and a very bad lamp--Greek was good because it was
ancient, classic, and academic. The smell of the East, the dark tide of
the Orient that flowed below, touching the lives of poet and soldier,
with something perverse, evil, luxurious, was as far from his life as
Lesbos. He was simply the mouthpiece of a formula of which he was
assured without having a genuine belief.

[Greek:  kai kata gn kai kata thalattan].


The mathematics and history teacher was John Dorsey's sister Amy. She
was a powerful woman, five feet ten inches tall, who weighed 185 pounds.
She had very thick black hair, straight and oily, and very black eyes,
giving a heavy sensuousness to her face. Her thick forearms were fleeced
with light down. She was not fat, but she corsetted tightly, her
powerful arms and heavy shoulders bulging through the cool white of her
shirtwaists. In warm weather she perspired abundantly: her waists were
stained below the arm-pits with big spreading blots of sweat; in the
winter, as she warmed herself by the fire, she had about her the
exciting odour of chalk, and the strong good smell of a healthy animal.
Eugene, passing down the wind-swept back porch one day in winter, looked
in on her room just as her tiny niece opened the door to come out.
She sat before a dancing coal-fire, after her bath, drawing on her
stockings. Fascinated, he stared at her broad red shoulders, her big
body steaming cleanly like a beast.

She liked the fire and the radiance of warmth: sleepily alert she sat
by the stove, with her legs spread, sucking in the heat, her large earth
strength more heavily sensuous than her brother's. Stroked by the slow
heat-tingle she smiled slowly with indifferent affection on all the
boys. No men came to see her: like a pool she was thirsty for lips. She
sought no one. With lazy cat-warmth she smiled on all the world.

She was a good teacher of mathematics: number to her was innate. Lazily
she took their tablets, worked answers lazily, smiling good-naturedly
with contempt. Behind her, at a desk, Durand Jarvis moaned passionately
to Eugene, and writhed erotically, gripping the leaf of his desk
fiercely.

Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at the end of
the second year--cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with blood,
seventy-three years old. They said he was forty-nine--sickness
made him look old. He was a tall man, six feet three, with long
straight moustaches, waxen and emaciated as a mandarin. He painted
pictures--impressionist blobs--sheep on a gorsey hill, fishboats at
the piers, with a warm red jumble of brick buildings in the background.

Old Gloucester Town, Marble head, Cape Cod Folks, Captains Courageous--the
rich salty names came reeking up with a smell of tarred rope, dry codheads
rotting in the sun, rocking dories knee-deep in gutted fish, the strong
loin-smell of the sea in harbours, and the quiet brooding vacancy of a
seaman's face, sign of his marriage with ocean. How look the seas at
dawn in Spring? The cold gulls sleep upon the wind. But rose the skies.

They saw the waxen mandarin walk shakily three times up and down the
road. It was Spring, there was a south wind high in the big trees. He
wavered along on a stick, planted before him with a blue phthisic hand.
His eyes were blue and pale as if he had been drowned.

He had begotten two children by Sheba--girls. They were exotic tender
blossoms, all black and milky white, as strange and lovely as Spring.
The boys groped curiously.

"He must be a better man than he looks yet," said Tom Davis. "The little
'un's only two or three years old."

"He's not as old as he looks," said Eugene. "He looks old because he's
been sick. He's only forty-nine."

"How do you know?" said Tom Davis.

"Miss Amy says so," said Eugene innocently.

"Pap" Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene and carried his quid deftly on
the end of his tongue to the other cheek.

"Forty-nine!" he said, "you'd better see a doctor, boy. He's as old as
God."

"That's what she said," Eugene insisted doggedly.

"Why, of course she said it!" "Pap" Rheinhart replied. "You don't think
they're going to let it out, do you? When they're running a school here."

"Son, you must be simple!" said Jack Candler who had not thought of it
up to now.

"Hell, you're their pet. They know you'll believe whatever they tell
you," said Julius Arthur. "Pap" Rheinhart looked at him searchingly,
then shook his head as if a cure was impossible. They laughed at his
faith.

"Well, if he's so old," said Eugene, "why did old Lady Lattimer marry
him?"

"Why, because she couldn't get any one else, of course," said "Pap"
Rheinhart, impatient at this obtuseness.

"Do you suppose she has had to keep him up?" said Tom Davis curiously.
Silently they wondered. And Eugene, as he saw the two lovely children
fall like petals upon their mother's heavy breast, as he saw the waxen
artist faltering his last steps to death, and heard Sheba's strong
voice levelling a conversation at its beginning, expanding in violent
burlesque all of her opinions, was bewildered again before the
unsearchable riddle--out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth,
a flower.

His faith was above conviction. Disillusion had come so often that it
had awakened in him a strain of bitter suspicion, an occasional mockery,
virulent, coarse, cruel, and subtle, which was all the more scalding
because of his own pain. Unknowingly, he had begun to build up in
himself a vast mythology for which he cared all the more deeply because
he realised its untruth. Brokenly, obscurely, he was beginning to feel
that it was not truth that men must live for--the creative men--but for
falsehood. At times his devouring, unsated brain seemed to be beyond his
governance: it was a frightful bird whose beak was in his heart, whose
talons tore unceasingly at his bowels. And this unsleeping demon wheeled,
plunged, revolved about an object, returning suddenly, after it had
flown away, with victorious malice, leaving stripped, mean, and common
all that he had clothed with wonder.

But he saw hopefully that he never learned--that what remained was the
tinsel and the gold. He was so bitter with his tongue because his heart
believed so much.

The merciless brain lay coiled and alert like a snake: it saw every
gesture, every quick glance above his head, the shoddy scaffolding of
all deception. But these people existed for him in a world remote from
human error. He opened one window of his heart to Margaret, together
they entered the sacred grove of poetry; but all dark desire, the dream
of fair forms, and all the misery, drunkenness, and disorder of his
life at home he kept fearfully shut. He was afraid they would hear.
Desperately he wondered how many of the boys had heard of it. And all
the facts that levelled Margaret down to life, that plunged her in the
defiling stream of life, were as unreal and horrible as a nightmare.

That she had been near death from tuberculosis, that the violent and
garrulous Sheba had married an old man, who had begotten two children
and was now about to die, that the whole little family, powerful in
cohesive fidelity, were nursing their great sores in privacy, building
up before the sharp eyes and rattling tongues of young boys a barrier of
flimsy pretence and evasion, numbed him with a sense of unreality.

Eugene believed in the glory and the gold.


He lived more at Dixieland now. He had been more closely bound to Eliza
since he began at Leonard's. Gant, Helen, and Luke, were scornful of the
private school. The children were resentful of it--a little jealous. And
their temper was barbed now with a new sting. They would say:

"You've ruined him completely since you sent him to a private school."
Or, "He's too good to soil his hands now that he's quit the public
school."

Eliza herself kept him sufficiently reminded of his obligation. She
spoke often of the effort she had to make to pay the tuition fee, and of
her poverty. She said, he must work hard, and help her all he could in
his spare hours. He should also help her through the summer and "drum up
trade" among the arriving tourists at the station.

"For God's sake! What's the matter with you?" Luke jeered. "You're not
ashamed to do a little honest work, are you?"

This way, sir, for Dixieland. Mrs. Eliza E. Gant, proprietor. Just A
Whisper Off The Square, Captain. All the comforts of the Modern Jail.
Biscuits and home-made pies just like mother should have made but
didn't.

That boy's a hustler.

At the end of Eugene's first year at Leonard's, Eliza told John Dorsey
she could no longer afford to pay the tuition. He conferred with
Margaret and, returning, agreed to take the boy for half price.

"He can help you drum up new prospects," said Eliza.

"Yes," Leonard agreed, "that's the very thing."


Ben bought a new pair of shoes. They were tan. He paid six dollars for
them. He always bought good things. But they burnt the soles of his
feet. In a scowling rage he loped to his room and took them off.

"Goddam it!" he yelled, and hurled them at the wall. Eliza came to the
door.

"You'll never have a penny, boy, as long as you waste money the way you
do. I tell you what, it's pretty bad when you think of it." She shook
her head sadly with puckered mouth.

"Oh for God's sake!" he growled. "Listen to this! By God, you never hear
me asking any one for anything, do you?" he burst out in a rage.

She took the shoes and gave them to Eugene.

"It would be a pity to throw away a good pair of shoes," she said. "Try
'em on, boy."

He tried them on. His feet were already bigger than Ben's. He walked
about carefully and painfully a few steps.

"How do they feel?" asked Eliza.

"All right, I guess," he said doubtfully. "They're a little tight."

He liked their clean strength, the good smell of leather. They were the
best shoes he had ever had.

Ben entered the kitchen.

"You little brute!" he said. "You've a foot like a mule." Scowling, he
knelt and touched the straining leather at the toes. Eugene winced.

"Mamma, for God's sake," Ben cried out irritably, "don't make the kid
wear them if they're too small. I'll buy him a pair myself if you're too
stingy to spend the money."

"Why, what's wrong with these?" said Eliza. She pressed them with her
fingers. "Why, pshaw!" she said. "There's nothing wrong with them. All
shoes are a little tight at first. It won't hurt him a bit."

But he had to give up at the end of six weeks. The hard leather did not
stretch, his feet hurt more every day. He limped about more and more
painfully until he planted each step woodenly as if he were walking on
blocks. His feet were numb and dead, sore on the palms. One day, in a
rage, Ben flung him down and took them off. It was several days before
he began to walk with ease again. But his toes that had grown through
boyhood straight and strong were pressed into a pulp, the bones gnarled,
bent and twisted, the nails thick and dead.

"It does seem a pity to throw those good shoes away," sighed Eliza.


But she had strange fits of generosity. He didn't understand.

A girl came down to Altamont from the west. She was from Sevier, a
mountain town, she said. She had a big brown body, and the black hair
and eyes of a Cherokee Indian.

"Mark my words," said Gant. "That girl's got Cherokee blood in her
somewhere."

She took a room, and for days rocked back and forth in a chair before
the parlour fire. She was shy, frightened, a little sullen--her manners
were country and decorous. She never spoke unless she was spoken to.

Sometimes she was sick and stayed in bed. Eliza took her food then, and
was extremely kind to her.

Day after day the girl rocked back and forth, all through the stormy
autumn. Eugene could hear her large feet as rhythmically they hit the
floor, ceaselessly propelling the rocker. Her name was Mrs. Morgan.

One day as he laid large crackling lumps upon the piled glowing mass of
coals, Eliza entered the room. Mrs. Morgan rocked away stolidly. Eliza
stood by the fire for a moment, pursing her lips reflectively, and
folding her hands quietly upon her stomach. She looked out the window
at the stormy sky, the swept windy bareness of the street.

"I tell you what," she said, "it looks like a hard winter for the poor
folks."

"Yes'm," said Mrs. Morgan sullenly. She kept on rocking.

Eliza was silent a moment longer.

"Where's your husband?" she asked presently.

"In Sevier," Mrs. Morgan said. "He's a railroad man."

"What's that, what's that?" said Eliza quickly, comically. "A railroad
man, you say?" she inquired sharply.

"Yes'm."

"Well, it looks mighty funny to me he hasn't been in to see you," said
Eliza, with enormous accusing tranquillity. "I'd call it a pretty poor
sort of man who'd act like that."

Mrs. Morgan said nothing. Her tar-black eyes glittered in fireflame.

"Have you got any money?" said Eliza.

"No'm," said Mrs. Morgan.

Eliza stood solidly, enjoying the warmth, pursing her lips. "When do you
expect to have your baby?" said Eliza suddenly.

Mrs. Morgan said nothing for a moment. She kept on rocking.

"In less'n a month now, I reckon," she answered.

She had been getting bigger week after week.

Eliza bent over and pulled her skirt up, revealing her leg to the knee,
cotton-stockinged and lumpily wadded with her heavy flannels.

"Whew!" she cried out coyly, noticing that Eugene was staring. "Turn
your head, boy," she commanded, snickering and rubbing her finger along
her nose. The dull green of rolled banknotes shone through her
stockings. She pulled the bills out.

"Well, I reckon you'll have to have a little money," said Eliza, peeling
off two tens and giving them to Mrs. Morgan.

"Thank you, ma'am," said Mrs. Morgan, taking the money.

"You can stay here until you're able to work again," said Eliza. "I know
a good doctor."


"Mamma, in heaven's name," Helen fumed. "Where on earth do you get these
people?"

"Merciful God!" howled Gant, "you've had 'em all--blind, lame, crazy,
chippies and bastards. They all come here."

Nevertheless, when he saw Mrs. Morgan now, he always made a profound
bow, saying with the most florid courtesy:

"How do you do, madam?" Aside to Helen he said:

"I tell you what--she's a fine-looking girl."

"Hahahaha," said Helen, laughing in an ironic falsetto, and prodding
him, "you wouldn't mind having her yourself, would you?"

"B'God," he said humorously, wetting his thumb, and grinning slyly at
Eliza, "she's got a pair of pippins."

Eliza smiled bitterly into popping grease.

"Hm!" she said disdainfully. "I don't care how many he goes with.
There's no fool like an old fool. You'd better not be too smart. That's
a game two can play at."

"Hahahahaha!" laughed Helen thinly, "she's mad now."

Helen took Mrs. Morgan often to Gant's and cooked great meals for her.
She also brought her presents of candy and scented soap from town.

They called in McGuire at the birth of the child. From below Eugene
heard the quiet commotion in the upstairs room, the low moans of the
woman, and finally a high piercing wail. Eliza, greatly excited, kept
kettles seething with hot water constantly over the gas flame of the
stove. From time to time she rushed upstairs with a boiling kettle,
descending a moment later more slowly, pausing from step to step while
she listened attentively to the sounds in the room.

"After all," said Helen, banging kettles about restlessly in the
kitchen, "what do we know about her? Nobody can say she hasn't got a
husband, can they? They'd better be careful! People have no right to say
those things," she cried out irritably against unknown detractors.

It was night. Eugene went out on to the veranda. The air was frosty,
clear, not very cold. Above the black bulk of the eastern hills, and in
the great bowl of the sky, far bright stars were scintillant as jewels.
The light burned brightly in neighbourhood houses, as bright and hard
as if carved from some cold gem. Across the wide yard-spaces wafted the
warm odour of hamburger steak and fried onions. Ben stood at the veranda
rail, leaning upon his cocked leg, smoking with deep lung inhalations.
Eugene went over and stood by him. They heard the wail upstairs. Eugene
snickered, looking up at the thin ivory mask. Ben lifted his white hand
sharply to strike him, but dropped it with a growl of contempt, smiling
faintly. Far before them, on the top of Birdseye, faint lights wavered
in the rich Jew's castle. In the neighbourhood there was a slight mist
of supper, and frost-far voices.

Deep womb, dark flower. The Hidden. The secret fruit, heart-red, fed by
rich Indian blood. Womb-night brooding darkness flowering secretly into
life.


Mrs. Morgan went away two weeks after her child was born. He was a
little brown-skinned boy, with a tuft of elvish black hair, and very
black bright eyes. He was like a little Indian. Before she left Eliza
gave her twenty dollars.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"I've got folks in Sevier," said Mrs. Morgan.

She went up the street carrying a cheap imitation-crocodile valise. At
her shoulder the baby waggled his head, and looked merrily back with his
bright black eyes. Eliza waved to him and smiled tremulously; she turned
back into the house sniffling, with wet eyes.

Why did she come to Dixieland, I wonder? Eugene thought.


Eliza was good to a little man with a moustache. He had a wife and a
little girl nine years old. He was a hotel steward; he was out of work
and he stayed at Dixieland until he owed her more than one hundred
dollars. But he split kindling neatly, and carried up coal; he did handy
jobs of carpentry, and painted up rusty places about the house.

She was very fond of him; he was what she called "a good family man."
She liked domestic people; she liked men who were housebroken. The
little man was very kind and very tame. Eugene liked him because he made
good coffee. Eliza never bothered him about the money. Finally, he got
work at the Inn, and quarters there. He paid Eliza all he owed her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Eugene stayed late at the school, returning in the afternoon at three
or four o'clock. Sometimes it was almost dark when he came back to
Dixieland. Eliza was fretful at his absences, and brought him his dinner
crisped and dried from its long heating in the oven. There was a heavy
vegetable soup thickly glutinous with cabbage, beans, and tomatoes, and
covered on top with big grease blisters. There would also be warmed-over
beef, pork, or chicken, a dish full of cold lima beans, biscuits, slaw,
and coffee.

But the school had become the centre of his heart and life--Margaret
Leonard his spiritual mother. He liked to be there most in the
afternoons when the crowd of boys had gone, and when he was free to
wander about the old house, under the singing majesty of great trees,
exultant in the proud solitude of that fine hill, the clean windy rain
of the acorns, the tang of burning leaves. He would read wolfishly until
Margaret discovered him and drove him out under the trees or toward the
flat court behind Bishop Raper's residence at the entrance, which was
used for basketball. Here, while the western sky reddened, he raced
down toward the goal, passing the ball to a companion, exulting in his
growing swiftness, agility, and expertness in shooting the basket.

Margaret Leonard watched his health jealously, almost morbidly, warning
him constantly of the terrible consequences that followed physical
depletion, the years required to build back what had once been thrown
carelessly away.

"Look here, boy!" she would begin, stopping him in a quiet boding voice.
"Come in here a minute. I want to talk to you."

Somewhat frightened, extremely nervous, he would sit down beside her.

"How much sleep have you been getting?" she asked.

Hopefully, he said nine hours a night. That should be about right.

"Well, make it ten," she commanded sternly. "See here, 'Gene, you simply
can't afford to take chances with your health. Lordy, boy, I know what
I'm talking about. I've had to pay the price, I tell you. You can't do
anything in this world without your health, boy."

"But I'm all right," he protested desperately, frightened. "There's
nothing wrong with me."

"You're not strong, boy. You've got to get some meat on your bones. I
tell you what, I'm worried by those circles under your eyes. Do you keep
regular hours?"

He did not: he hated regular hours. The excitement, the movement, the
constant moments of crisis at Gant's and Eliza's had him keyed to their
stimulation. The order and convention of domestic life he had never
known. He was desperately afraid of regularity. It meant dullness and
inanition to him. He loved the hour of midnight.

But obediently he promised her that he would be regular--regular in
eating, sleeping, studying, and exercising.

But he had not yet learned to play with the crowd. He still feared,
disliked and distrusted them.

He shrank from the physical conflict of boy life, but knowing her eye
was upon him he plunged desperately into their games, his frail strength
buffeted in the rush of strong legs, the heavy jar of strong bodies,
picking himself up bruised and sore at heart to follow and join again
the mill of the burly pack. Day after day to the ache of his body was
added the ache and shame of his spirit, but he hung on with a pallid
smile across his lips, and envy and fear of their strength in his heart.
He parroted faithfully all that John Dorsey had to say about the "spirit
of fair play," "sportsmanship," "playing the game for the game's sake,"
"accepting defeat or victory with a smile," and so on, but he had no
genuine belief or understanding. These phrases were current among all
the boys at the school--they had been made somewhat too conscious
of them and, as he listened, at times the old, inexplicable shame
returned--he craned his neck and drew one foot sharply off the ground.

And Eugene noted, with the old baffling shame again, as this cheap
tableau of self-conscious, robust, and raucously aggressive boyhood was
posed, that, for all the mouthing of phrases, the jargon about fair play
and sportsmanship, the weaker, at Leonard's, was the legitimate prey of
the stronger. Leonard, beaten by a boy in a play of wits, or in an
argument for justice, would assert the righteousness of his cause by
physical violence. These spectacles were ugly and revolting: Eugene
watched them with sick fascination.

Leonard himself was not a bad man--he was a man of considerable
character, kindliness, and honest determination. He loved his family, he
stood up with some courage against the bigotry in the Methodist church,
where he was a deacon, and at length had to withdraw because of his
remarks on Darwin's theory. He was, thus, an example of that sad
liberalism of the village--an advanced thinker among the Methodists, a
bearer of the torch at noon, an apologist for the toleration of ideas
that have been established for fifty years. He tried faithfully to do
his duties as a teacher. But he was of the earth--even his heavy-handed
violence was of the earth, and had in it the unconscious brutality of
nature. Although he asserted his interest in "the things of the mind,"
his interest in the soil was much greater, and he had added little to
his stock of information since leaving college. He was slow-witted and
quite lacking in the sensitive intuitions of Margaret, who loved the man
with such passionate fidelity, however, that she seconded all his acts
before the world. Eugene had even heard her cry out in a shrill, trembly
voice against a student who had answered her husband insolently: "Why,
I'd slap his head off! That's what I'd do!" And the boy had trembled,
with fear and nausea, to see her so. But thus, he knew, could love
change one. Leonard thought his actions wise and good: he had grown up
in a tradition that demanded strict obedience to the master, and that
would not brook opposition to his rulings. He had learned from his
father, a Tennessee patriarch who ran a farm, preached on Sundays, and
put down rebellion in his family with a horse-whip and pious prayers,
the advantages of being God! He thought little boys who resisted him
should be beaten.

Upon the sons of his wealthiest and most prominent clients, as well as
upon his own children, Leonard was careful to inflict no chastisement,
and these young men, arrogantly conscious of their immunity, were
studious in their insolence and disobedience. The son of the Bishop,
Justin Raper, a tall thin boy of thirteen, with black hair, a thin dark
bumpy face, and absurdly petulant lips, typed copies of a dirty ballad
and sold them among the students at five cents a copy.

  "Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
              Slapoon!
   Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
              Slapoon!"

Moreover, Leonard surprised this youth one afternoon in Spring, on
the eastern flank of the hill, in the thick grass beneath a flowering
dogwood, united in sexual congress with Miss Hazel Bradley, the daughter
of a small grocer who lived below on Biltburn Avenue, and whose lewdness
was already advertised in the town. Leonard, on second thought, did not
go to the Bishop. He went to the Grocer.

"Well," said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long moustache reflectively away
from his mouth, "you ought to put up a no-trespassin' sign."

The target of concentrated abuse, both for John Dorsey and the boys, was
the son of a Jew. The boy's name was Edward Michalove. His father was a
jeweller, a man with a dark, gentle floridity of manner and complexion.
He had white delicate fingers. His counters were filled with old
brooches, gemmed buckles, ancient incrusted watches. The boy had two
sisters--large handsome women. His mother was dead. None of them looked
Jewish: they all had a soft dark fluescence of appearance.

At twelve, he was a tall slender lad, with dark amber features, and the
mincing effeminacy of an old maid. He was terrified in the company of
other boys, all that was sharp, spinsterly, and venomous, would come
protectively to the surface when he was ridiculed or threatened, and he
would burst into shrill unpleasant laughter, or hysterical tears. His
mincing walk, with the constant gesture of catching maidenly at the
fringe of his coat as he walked along, his high husky voice, with a
voluptuous and feminine current playing through it, drew upon him at
once the terrible battery of their dislike.

They called him "Miss" Michalove; they badgered him into a state of
constant hysteria, until he became an unpleasant snarling little cat,
holding up his small clawed hands to scratch them with his long nails
whenever they approached; they made him detestable, master and boys
alike, and they hated him for what they made of him.

Sobbing one day when he had been kept in after school hours, he leaped
up and rushed suddenly for the doors. Leonard, breathing stertorously,
pounded awkwardly after him, and returned in a moment dragging the
screaming boy along by the collar.

"Sit down!" yelled John Dorsey, hurling him into a desk. Then, his
boiling fury unappeased, and baffled by fear of inflicting some
crippling punishment on the boy, he added illogically: "Stand up!" and
jerked him to his feet again.

"You young upstart!" he panted. "You little two-by-two whippersnapper!
We'll just see, my sonny, if I'm to be dictated to by the like of you."

"Take your hands off me!" Edward screamed, in an agony of physical
loathing. "I'll tell my father on you, old man Leonard, and he'll come
down here and kick your big fat behind all over the lot. See if he
don't."

Eugene closed his eyes, unable to witness the snuffing out of a young
life. He was cold and sick about his heart. But when he opened his eyes
again Edward, flushed and sobbing, was standing where he stood. Nothing
had happened.

Eugene waited for God's visitation upon the unhappy blasphemer. He
gathered, from the slightly open paralysis that had frozen John Dorsey's
and Sister Amy's face, that they were waiting too.

Edward lived. There was nothing beyond this--nothing.

       *       *       *       *       *

Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the old piercing
shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the irrevocable
moment of some cowardly or dishonourable act. For not only did he join
in the persecution of the boy--he was also glad at heart because of the
existence of someone weaker than himself, someone at whom the flood
of ridicule might be directed. Years later it came to him that on the
narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a burden he might otherwise have borne,
that that overladen heart was swollen with a misery that might have been
his.

Mr. Leonard's "men of to-morrow" were doing nicely. The spirit of
justice, of physical honour was almost unknown to them, but they
were loud in proclaiming the letter. Each of them lived in a fear
of discovery; each of them who was able built up his own defences of
swagger, pretence, and loud assertion--the great masculine flower of
gentleness, courage, and honour died in a foul tangle. The great clan of
go-getter was emergent in young boys--big in voice, violent in threat,
withered and pale at heart--the "He-men" were on the rails.

And Eugene, encysted now completely behind the walls of his fantasy,
hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated, as best he could,
the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows, joined, by act or
spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself, and was compensated
sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret say that he was a "boy
with a fine spirit." She said it very often.

He was, fortunately, thanks to Gant and Eliza, a creature that was
dominantly masculine in its sex, but in all his life, either at home
or in school, he had seldom known victory. Fear he knew well. And so
incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength,
that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully
fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent
assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger,
and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust
back the jostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse
them.

He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him with shame. But it was
many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine
person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own
dishonour, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing
degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There
is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne--it must go to
Parnassus.




XVIII


In the years that had followed Eliza's removal to Dixieland, by a slow
inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had
occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away from
Helen's earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben. This separation
was inevitable. The great affection she had shown him when he was a
young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit,
but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a
cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.

The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of
slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his
young flesh. He was not so attractive physically--he had lost the round
contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long
and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big
and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward. Moreover,
he sank deeper year by year into the secret life, a strange wild thing
bloomed darkly in his face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were
filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.

And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could
never understand, choked her with fury. It was necessary for her to
seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to
fondle, love, and enslave it. Her boiling energy rushed outward on all
things that lived in the touch of the sun. It was necessary for her to
dominate and enslave, all her virtues--her strong lust to serve, to
give, to nurse, to amuse--came from the imperative need for dominance
over almost all she touched.

She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield to
her governance. In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into
bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so
strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the
flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which
his life was bound. She hated secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but
knowing reticence, or the unfathomable depths of other-worldliness
goaded her to fury.

Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would caricature the pout
of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding kangaroo walk.

"You little freak. You nasty little freak. You don't even know who you
are--you little bastard. You're not a Gant. Anyone can see that. You
haven't a drop of papa's blood in you. Queer one! Queer one! You're
Greeley Pentland all over again."

She always returned to this--she was fanatically partisan, her
hysterical superstition had already lined the family in embattled groups
of those who were Gant and those who were Pentland. On the Pentland
side, she placed Steve, Daisy, and Eugene--they were, she thought, the
"cold and selfish ones," and the implication of the older sister and the
younger brother with the criminal member of the family gave her an added
pleasure. Her union with Luke was now inseparable. It had been inevitable.
They were the Gants--those who were generous, fine, and honourable.

The love of Luke and Helen was epic. They found in each other the
constant effervescence, the boundless extraversion, the richness, the
loudness, the desperate need to give and to serve that was life to them.
They exacerbated the nerves of each other, but their love was beyond
grievance, and their songs of praise were extravagant.

"I'll criticise him if I like," she said pugnaciously. "I've got the
right to. But I won't hear anyone else criticise him. He's a fine
generous boy--the finest one in this family. That's one thing sure."

Ben alone seemed to be without the grouping. He moved among them like a
shadow--he was remote from their passionate full-blooded partisanship.
But she thought of him as "generous"--he was, she concluded, a "Gant."

In spite of this violent dislike for the Pentlands, both Helen and Luke
had inherited all Gant's social hypocrisy. They wanted above all else
to put a good face on before the world, to be well liked and to have
many friends. They were profuse in their thanks, extravagant in their
praise, cloying in their flattery. They slathered it on. They kept their
ill-temper, their nervousness, and their irritability for exhibition
at home. And in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland's
family their manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly
with servility. Money impressed them.

It was a period of incessant movement in the family. Steve had married a
year or two before a woman from a small town in lower Indiana. She was
thirty-seven years old, twelve years his senior, a squat heavy German
with a big nose and a patient and ugly face. She had come to Dixieland
one summer with another woman, a spinster of lifelong acquaintance, and
allowed him to seduce her before she left. The winter following, her
father, a small manufacturer of cigars, had died, leaving her $9,000 in
insurance, his home, a small sum of money in the bank, and a quarter
share in his business, which was left to the management of his two sons.

Early in Spring the woman, whose name was Margaret Lutz, returned to
Dixieland. One drowsy afternoon Eugene found them at Gant's. The house
was deserted save for them. They were sprawled out face to face, with
their hands across each other's hips, on Gant's bed. They lay there
silently, while he looked, in an ugly stupor. Steve's yellow odour
filled the room. Eugene began to tremble with insane fury. The Spring
was warm and lovely, the air brooded slightly in a flowering breeze,
there was a smell of soft tar. He had come down to the empty house
exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of
indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes. In a moment
the world turned hag.

There was nothing that Steve touched that he did not taint.

Eugene hated him because he stank, because all that he touched stank,
because he brought fear, shame, and loathing wherever he went; because
his kisses were fouler than his curses, his whines nastier than his
threats. He saw the woman's hair blown gently by the blubbered
exhalations of his brother's foul breath.

"What are you doing there on papa's bed?" he screamed.

Steve rose stupidly and seized him by the arm. The woman sat up, dopily
staring, her short legs widened.

"I suppose you're going to be a little Tattle-tale," said Steve,
bludgeoning him with heavy contempt. "You're going to run right up and
tell mamma, aren't you?" he said. He fastened his yellow fingers on
Eugene's arm.

"Get off papa's bed," said Eugene desperately. He jerked his arm away.

"You're not going to tell on us, buddy, are you?" Steve wheedled,
breathing pollution in his face.

He grew sick.

"Let me go," he muttered. "No."

Steve and Margaret were married soon after. With the old sense of
physical shame Eugene watched them descend the stairs at Dixieland each
morning for breakfast. Steve swaggered absurdly, smiled complacently,
and hinted at great fortune about the town. There was rumour of a
quarter-million.

"Put it there, Steve," said Harry Tugman, slapping him powerfully upon
the shoulder. "By God, I always said you'd get there."

Eliza smiled at swagger and boast, her proud, pleased, tremulous sad
smile. The first-born.

"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any longer," said he. "He's on
Easy Street. Where are all the Wise Guys now who said 'I told you so'?
They're all mighty glad to give Little Stevie a Big Smile and the Glad
Hand when he breezes down the street. Every Knocker is a Booster now all
right, all right."

"I tell you what," said Eliza with proud smiles, "he's no fool. He's as
bright as the next one when he wants to be." Brighter, she thought.

Steve bought new clothes, tan shoes, striped silk shirts, and a wide
straw hat with a red, white and blue band. He swung his shoulders in a
wide arc as he walked, snapped his fingers nonchalantly, and smiled
with elaborate condescension on those who greeted him. Helen was vastly
annoyed and amused; she had to laugh at his absurd strut, and she had a
great rush of feeling for Margaret Lutz. She called her "honey," felt
her eyes mist warmly with unaccountable tears as she looked into the
patient, bewildered, and slightly frightened face of the German woman.
She took her in her arms and fondled her.

"That's all right, honey," she said, "you let us know if he doesn't
treat you right. We'll fix him."

"Steve's a good boy," said Margaret, "when he isn't drinking. I've
nothing to say against him when he's sober." She burst into tears.

"That awful, that awful curse," said Eliza, shaking her head sadly, "the
curse of licker. It's been responsible for the ruination of more homes
than anything else."

"Well, she'll never win any beauty prizes, that's one thing sure," said
Helen privately to Eliza.

"I'll vow!" said Eliza.

"What on earth did he mean by doing such a thing!" she continued. "She's
ten years older than he if she's a day."

"I think he's done pretty well, if you ask me," said Helen, annoyed.
"Good heavens, mamma! You talk as if he's some sort of prize. Everyone
in town knows what Steve is." She laughed ironically and angrily. "No,
indeed! He got the best of the bargain. Margaret's a decent girl."

"Well," said Eliza hopefully, "maybe he's going to brace up now and make
a new start. He's promised that he'd try."

"Well, I should hope so," said Helen scathingly. "I should hope so. It's
about time."

Her dislike for him was innate. She had placed him among the tribe of
the Pentlands. But he was really more like Gant than anyone else. He was
like Gant in all his weakness, with none of his cleanliness, his lean
fibre, his remorse. In her heart she knew this and it increased her
dislike for him. She shared in the fierce antagonism Gant felt toward
his son. But her feeling was broken, as was all her feeling, by moments
of friendliness, charity, tolerance.

"What are you going to do, Steve?" she asked. "You've got a family now,
you know."

"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any longer," he said, smiling
easily. "He lets the others do the worrying." He lifted his yellow
fingers to his mouth, drawing deeply at a cigarette.

"Good heavens, Steve," she burst out angrily. "Pull yourself together
and try to be a man for once. Margaret's a woman. You surely don't
expect her to keep you up, do you?"

"What business is that of yours, for Christ's sake?" he said in a high
ugly voice. "Nobody's asked your advice, have they? All of you are
against me. None of you had a good word for me when I was down and out,
and now it gets your goat to see me make good." He had believed for
years that he was persecuted--his failure at home he attributed to the
malice, envy, and disloyalty of his family, his failure abroad to the
malice and envy of an opposing force that he called "the world."

"No," he said, taking another long puff at the moist cigarette, "don't
worry about Stevie. He doesn't need anything from any of you, and you
don't hear him asking for anything. You see that, don't you?" he said,
pulling a roll of banknotes from his pocket and peeling off a few
twenties. "Well, there's lots more where that came from. And I'll tell
you something else: Little Stevie will be right up there among the Big
Boys soon. He's got a couple of deals coming off that'll show the pikers
in this town where to get off. You get that, don't you?" he said.

Ben, who had been sitting on the piano stool all this time, scowling
savagely at the keys, and humming a little recurrent tune to himself
while he picked it out with one finger, turned now to Helen, with a
sharp flicker of his mouth, and jerked his head sideways.

"I hear Mr. Vanderbilt's getting jealous," he said.

Helen laughed ironically, huskily.

"You think you're a pretty wise guy, don't you?" said Steve heavily.
"But I don't notice it's getting you anywhere."

Ben turned his scowling eyes upon him, and sniffed sharply,
unconsciously.

"Now, I hope you're not going to forget your old friends, Mr.
Rockefeller," he said in his subdued, caressing ominous voice. "I'd like
to be vice-president if the job's still open." He turned back to the
keyboard--and searched with a hook finger.

"All right, all right," said Steve. "Go ahead and laugh, both of you,
if you think it's funny. But you notice that Little Stevie isn't a
fifteen-dollar clerk in a newspaper office, don't you? And he doesn't
have to sing in moving-picture shows, either," he added.

Helen's big-boned face reddened angrily. She had begun to sing in public
with the saddle-maker's daughter.

"You'd better not talk, Steve, until you get a job and quit bumming
around," she said. "You're a fine one to talk, hanging around pool-rooms
and drug-stores all day on your wife's money. Why, it's absurd!" she
said furiously.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Ben cried irritably, wheeling around. "What do you
want to listen to him for? Can't you see he's crazy?"

As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink heavily again. His
decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to ache simultaneously: he was
wild with pain and cheap whisky. He felt that Eliza and Margaret were in
some way responsible for his woe--he sought them out day after day when
they were alone, and screamed at them. He called them foul names and
said they had poisoned his system.

In the early hours of morning, at two or three o'clock, he would waken,
and walk through the house weeping and entreating release. Eliza would
send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his residence, in
Eugene's charge. The doctors, surly and half-awake, peeled back his
shirt-sleeve and drove a needle loaded with morphine deep in his upper
arm. After that, he found relief and sleep again.

One night, at the supper hour, he returned to Dixieland, holding his
tortured jaws between his hands. He found Eliza bending over the
spitting grease of the red-hot stove. He cursed her for bearing him, he
cursed her for allowing him to have teeth, he cursed her for lack of
sympathy, motherly love, human kindliness.

Her white face worked silently above the heat.

"Get out of here," she said. "You don't know what you're talking about.
It's that accursed licker that makes you so mean." She began to weep,
brushing at her broad red nose with her hand.

"I never thought I'd live to hear such talk from a son of mine," she
said. She held out her forefinger with the old powerful gesture.

"Now, I want to tell you," she said, "I'm not going to put up with you
any longer. If you don't get out of here at once I'm going to call
thirty-eight and let them take you." This was the police station. It
awoke unpleasant memories. He had spent the day in gaol on two similar
occasions. He became more violent than before, screamed a vile name at
her, and made a motion to strike her. At this moment, Luke entered; he
was on his way to Gant's.

The antagonism between the boy and his older brother was deep and
deadly. It had lasted for years. Now, trembling with anger, Luke came to
his mother's defence.

"You m-m-m-miserable d-d-d-degenerate," he stuttered, unconsciously
falling into the swing of the Gantian rhetoric. "You ought to b-b-b-be
horsewhipped."

He was a well-grown and muscular young fellow of nineteen years, but too
sensitive to all the taboos of brotherhood to be prepared for the attack
Steve made on him. Steve drove at him viciously, smashing drunkenly at
his face with both hands. He was driven gasping and blinded across the
kitchen.

Wrong forever on the throne.

Somewhere, through fear and fury, Eugene heard Ben's voice humming
unconcernedly, and the slow picked tune on the piano.

"Ben!" he screamed, dancing about and grasping a hammer.

Ben entered like a cat. Luke was bleeding warmly from the nose.

"Come on, come on, you big bastard," said Steve, exalted by his success,
throwing himself into a fancy boxing posture. "I'll take you on now. You
haven't got a chance, Ben," he continued, with elaborate pity. "You
haven't got a chance, boy. I'll tear your head off with what I know."

Ben scowled quietly at him for a moment while he pranced softly about,
proposing his fists in Police Gazette attitudes. Then, exploding
suddenly in maniacal anger, the quiet one sprang upon the amateur
pugilist with one bound, and flattened him with a single blow of his
fist. Steve's head bounced upon the floor in a most comforting fashion.
Eugene gave a loud shriek of ecstasy and danced about, insane with joy,
while Ben, making little snarling noises in his throat, leaped on his
brother's prostrate body and thumped his bruised skull upon the boards.
There was a beautiful thoroughness about his wakened anger--it never
made inquiries till later.

"Good old Ben," screamed Eugene, howling with insane laughter. "Good old
Ben."

Eliza, who had been calling out loudly for help, the police, and
the interference of the general public, now succeeded with Luke's
assistance, in checking Ben's assault, and pulling him up from his dazed
victim. She wept bitterly, her heart laden with pain and sadness, while
Luke, forgetful of his bloody nose, sorrowful and full of shame only
because brother had struck brother, assisted Steve to his feet and
brushed him off.

A terrible shame started up in each of them--they were unable to
meet one another's gaze. Ben's thin face was very white; he trembled
violently and, catching sight of Steve's bleared eyes for a moment, he
made a retching noise in his throat, went over to the sink, and drank a
glass of cold water.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand," Eliza wept.

Helen came in from town with a bag of warm bread and cakes.

"What's the matter?" she said, noting at once all that had happened.

"I don't know," said Eliza, her face working, shaking her head for
several moments before she spoke. "It seems that the judgment of God is
against us. There's been nothing but misery all my life. All I want is a
little peace." She wept softly, wiping her weak bleared eyes with the
back of her hand.

"Well, forget about it," said Helen quietly. Her voice was casual,
weary, sad. "How do you feel, Steve?" she asked.

"I wouldn't make any trouble for anyone, Helen," he said, with a maudlin
whimper. "No! No!" he continued in a brooding voice, "they've never
given Steve a chance. They're all down on him. They jumped on me, Helen.
My own brothers jumped on me, sick as I am, and beat me up. It's all
right. I'm going away somewhere and try to forget. Stevie doesn't hold
any grudge against anyone. He's not built that way. Give me your hand,
buddy," he said, turning to Ben with nauseous sentimentality and
extending his yellow fingers, "I'm willing to shake your hand. You hit
me to-night, but Steve's willing to forget."

"Oh, my God!" said Ben, grasping his stomach. He leaned weakly across
the sink and drank another glass of water.

"No. No." Steve began again. "Stevie isn't built----"

He would have continued indefinitely in this strain, but Helen checked
him with weary finality.

"Well, forget about it," she said, "all of you. Life's too short."

Life was. At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion,
antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of
strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with
sad tranquillity. They were like men who, driving forward desperately
at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their foot-prints stretching
interminably away across the waste land of the desert; or I should say,
they were like those who have been mad, and who will be mad again, but
who see themselves for a moment quietly, sanely, at morning, looking
with sad untroubled eyes into a mirror.

Their faces were sad. There was great age in them. They felt suddenly
the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a
moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew
them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless
nihilism of life.

Margaret came in fearfully. Her eyes were red, her broad German face
white and tearful. A group of excited boarders whispered in the hall.

"I'll lose them all now," Eliza fretted. "The last time three left. Over
twenty dollars a week and money so hard to get. I don't know what's to
become of us all." She wept again.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Helen impatiently. "Forget about the
boarders once in a while."

Steve sank stupidly into a chair by the long table. From time to time
he muttered sentimentally to himself. Luke, his face sensitive, hurt,
ashamed around his mouth, stood by him attentively, spoke gently to him,
and brought him a glass of water.

"Give him a cup of coffee, mamma," Helen cried irritably. "For heaven's
sake, you might do a little for him."

"Why, here, here," said Eliza, rushing awkwardly to the gas range and
lighting a burner. "I never thought--I'll have some in a minute."

Margaret sat in a chair on the other side of the disorderly table,
leaning her face in her hand and weeping. Her tears dredged little
gulches through the thick compost of rouge and powder with which she
coated her rough skin.

"Cheer up, honey," said Helen, beginning to laugh. "Christmas is
coming." She patted the broad German back comfortingly.

Ben opened the torn screen door and stepped out on the back porch. It
was a cool night in the rich month of August; the sky was deeply pricked
with great stars. He lighted a cigarette, holding the match with white
trembling fingers. There were faint sounds from summer porches, the
laughter of women, a distant throb of music at a dance. Eugene went and
stood beside him: he looked up at him with wonder, exultancy, and with
sadness. He prodded him half with fear, half with joy.

Ben snarled softly at him, made a sudden motion to strike him, but
stopped. A swift light flickered across his mouth. He smoked.


Steve went away with the German woman to Indiana, where, at first, came
news of opulence, fatness, ease and furs (with photographs), later of
brawls with her honest brothers, and talk of divorce, reunion, and
renascence. He gravitated between the two poles of his support, Margaret
and Eliza, returning to Altamont every summer for a period of drugs and
drunkenness that ended in a family fight, gaol, and a hospital cure.

"Hell commences," howled Gant, "as soon as he comes home. He's a curse
and a care, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. Woman, you
have given birth to a monster who will not rest until he has done me to
death, fearful, cruel and accursed reprobate that he is!"

But Eliza wrote her eldest son regularly, enclosed sums of money from
time to time, and revived her hopes incessantly, against nature, against
reason, against the structure of life. She did not dare to come openly
to his defence, to reveal frankly the place he held in her heart's core,
but she would produce each letter in which he spoke boastfully of his
successes, or announced his monthly resurrection, and read them to an
unmoved family. They were florid, foolish letters, full of quotation
marks and written in a large fancy hand. She was proud and pleased at
all their extravagances; his flowery illiteracy was another proof to her
of his superior intelligence.


DEAR MAMMA,

Yours of the 11th to hand and must say I was glad to know you were in
"the land of the living" again as I had begun to feel it was a "long
time between drinks" since your last. ("I tell you what," said Eliza,
looking up and sniggering with pleasure, "he's no fool." Helen, with a
smile that was half ribald, half annoyed, about her big mouth, made a
face at Luke, and lifted her eyes patiently upward to God as Eliza
continued. Gant leaned forward tensely with his head craned upward,
listening carefully with a faint grin of pleasure.) Well, mamma, since I
last wrote you things have been coming my way and it now looks as if the
"Prodigal Son" will come home some day in his own private car. ("Hey,
what's that?" said Gant, and she read it again for him. He wet his thumb
and looked about with a pleased grin. "Wh-wh-what's the matter?" asked
Luke. "Has he b-b-bought the railroad?" Helen laughed hoarsely. "I'm
from Missouri," she said.) It took me a long time to get started, mamma,
but things were breaking against me and all that little Stevie has ever
asked from anyone in this "vale of tears" is a fair chance. (Helen
laughed her ironical husky falsetto. "All that Little S-S-Stevie has
ever asked," said Luke, reddening with annoyance, "is the whole
g-g-g-goddam world with a few gold mines thrown in.") But now that I'm
on my feet at last, mamma, I'm going to show the world that I haven't
forgotten those who stood by me in my "hour of need," and that the best
friend a man ever had is his mother. ("Where's the shovel?" said Ben,
snickering quietly.)


"That boy writes a good letter," said Gant appreciatively. "I'm damned
if he's not the smartest one of the lot when he wants to be."

"Yes," said Luke angrily, "he's so smart that you'll b-b-believe any
fairy tale he wants to tell you. B-b-b-but the one who's stuck by you
through thick and thin gets no c-c-credit at all." He glanced meaningly
at Helen. "It's a d-d-dam shame."

"Forget about it," she said wearily.

"Well," said Eliza thoughtfully, holding the letter in her folded hands
and gazing away, "perhaps he's going to turn over a new leaf now. You
never know." Lost in pleased reverie she looked into vacancy, pursing
her lips.

"I hope so!" said Helen wearily. "You've got to show me."

Privately: "You see how it is, don't you?" she said to Luke, mounting to
hysteria. "Do I get any credit? Do I? I can work my fingers to the bone
for them, but do I get so much as Go to Hell for my trouble? Do I?"


In these years Helen went off into the South with Pearl Hines, the
saddlemaker's daughter. They sang together at moving-picture theatres in
country towns. They were booked from a theatrical office in Atlanta.

Pearl Hines was a heavily built girl with a meaty face and negroid lips.
She was jolly and vital. She sang ragtime and nigger songs with a
natural passion, swinging her hips and shaking her breasts erotically.

  "Here comes my da-dad-dy now
   O pop, O pop, O-o pop."

They earned as much as $100 a week sometimes. They played in towns like
Waycross, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Hattiesburg, Mississippi,
and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

They brought with them the great armour of innocency. They were eager
and decent girls. Occasionally the village men made cautious explorative
insults, relying on the superstition that lives in small towns
concerning "show girls." But generally they were well treated.

For them, these ventures into new lands were eager with promise. The
vacant idiot laughter, the ribald enthusiasm with which South Carolina
or Georgia countrymen, filling a theatre with the strong smell of clay
and sweat, greeted Pearl's songs, left them unwounded, pleased, eager.
They were excited to know that they were members of the profession; they
bought _Variety_ regularly, they saw themselves finally a celebrated
high-salaried team on "big time" in great cities. Pearl was to "put
over" the popular songs, to introduce the rag melodies with the vital
rhythm of her dynamic meatiness, Helen was to give operatic dignity to
the programme. In a respectful hush, bathed in a pink spot, she sang
ditties of higher quality--Tosti's "Good-bye," "The End of a Perfect
Day," and "The Rosary." She had a big, full, somewhat metallic voice:
she had received training from her Aunt Louise, the splendid blonde who
had lived in Altamont for several years after her separation from Elmer
Pentland. Louise gave music lessons and enjoyed her waning youth with
handsome young men. She was one of the ripe, rich, dangerous women that
Helen liked. She had a little girl and went away to New York with the
child when tongues grew fanged.

But she said: "Helen, that voice ought to be trained for grand opera."

Helen had not forgotten. She fantasied of France and Italy: the big
crude glare of what she called "a career in opera," the florid music,
the tiered galleries winking with gems, the torrential applause directed
toward the full-blooded, dominant all-shadowing songsters struck up
great anthems in her. It was a scene, she thought, in which she was
meant to shine. And as the team of Gant and Hines (The Dixie Melody
Twins) moved on their jagged circuit through the South, this desire,
bright, fierce, and formless, seemed, in some way, to be nearer
realization.

She wrote home frequently, usually to Gant. Her letters beat like
great pulses; they were filled with the excitement of new cities,
presentiments of abundant life. In every town they met "lovely
people"--everywhere, in fact, good wives and mothers, and nice young
men, were attracted hospitably to these two decent, happy, exciting
girls. There was a vast decency, an enormous clean vitality about Helen
that subjugated good people and defeated bad ones. She held under her
dominion a score of young men--masculine, red-faced, hard-drinking and
shy. Her relation to them was maternal and magistral, they came to
listen and to be ruled; they adored her, but few of them tried to kiss
her.

Eugene was puzzled and frightened by these lamb-like lions. Among men,
they were fierce, bold, and combative; with her, awkward and timorous.
One of them, a city surveyor, lean, high-boned, alcoholic, was
constantly involved in police-court brawls; another, a railroad
detective, a large fair young man, split the skulls of negroes when
he was drunk, shot several men, and was himself finally killed in a
Tennessee gun-fight.

She never lacked for friends and protectors wherever she went.
Occasionally, Pearl's happy and vital sensuality, the innocent gusto
with which she implored

  "Some sweet old daddy
   Come make a fuss over me."

drew on village rakedom to false conjectures. Unpleasant men with
wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial drink of corn whisky,
call them "girley," and suggest a hotel room or a motor-car as a
meeting-place. When this happened, Pearl was stricken into silence;
helpless and abashed, she appealed to Helen.

And she, her large loose mouth tense and wounded at the corners, her
eyes a little brighter, would answer:

"I don't know what you mean by that remark. I guess you've made a
mistake about us." This did not fail to exact stammering apologies and
excuses.

She was painfully innocent, temperamentally incapable of wholly
believing the worst about anyone. She lived in the excitement of rumour
and suggestion: it never seemed to her actually possible that the fast
young women who excited her had, in the phrase she used, "gone the
limit." She was skilled in gossip, and greedily attentive to it, but of
the complex nastiness of village life she had little actual knowledge.
Thus, with Pearl Hines, she walked confidently and joyously over
volcanic crust, scenting only the odour of freedom, change, and
adventure.

But this partnership came to an end. The intention of Pearl Hines' life
was direct and certain. She wanted to get married, she had always wanted
to get married before she was twenty-five. For Helen, the singing
partnership, the exploration of new lands, had been a gesture toward
freedom, an instinctive groping toward a centre of life and purpose to
which she could fasten her energy, a blind hunger for variety, beauty,
and independence. She did not know what she wanted to do with her life;
it was probable that she would never control even partially her destiny:
she would be controlled, when the time came, by the great necessity that
lived in her. That necessity was to enslave and to serve.

For two or three years Helen and Pearl supported themselves by these
tours, leaving Altamont during its dull winter lassitude, and returning
to it in Spring, or in Summer, with money enough to suffice them until
their next season.

Pearl juggled carefully with the proposals of several young men during
this period. She had the warmest affection for a ball-player, the second
baseman and manager of the Altamont team. He was a tough handsome young
animal, forever hurling his glove down in a frenzy of despair during the
course of a game, and rushing belligerently at the umpire. She liked his
hard assurance, his rapid twang, his tanned lean body.

But she was in love with no one--she would never be--and caution told
her that the life-risk on bush-league ball-players was very great. She
married finally a young man from Jersey City, heavy of hand, hoof, and
voice, who owned a young but flourishing truck and livery business.


Thus, the partnership of the Dixie Melody Twins was dissolved. Helen,
left alone, turned away from the drear monotony of the small towns to
the gaiety, the variety, and the slaking fulfilment of her desires,
which she hoped somehow to find in the cities.

She missed Luke terribly. Without him she felt incomplete, unarmoured.
He had been enrolled in the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta for
two years. He was taking the course in electrical engineering; the whole
direction of his life had been thus shaped by Gant's eulogies, years
before, of the young electrical expert, Liddell. He was failing in his
work--his mind had never been forced to the discipline of study. All
purpose with him was broken by a thousand impulses: his brain stammered
as did his tongue, and as he turned impatiently and irritably to the
logarithm tables, he muttered the number of the page in idiot repetition,
keeping up a constant wild vibration of his leg upon the ball of his
foot.

His great commercial talent was salesmanship: he had superlatively that
quality that American actors and men of business call "personality"--a
wild energy, a Rabelaisian vulgarity, a sensory instinct for rapid
and swingeing repartee, and a hypnotic power of speech, torrential,
meaningless, mad, and evangelical. He could see anything because, in the
jargon of salesmen, he could sell himself; and there was a fortune in
him in the fantastic elasticity of American business, the club of all
the queer trades, of wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he
could have chanted the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from
their coats, doing every one, everything, and finally himself. He was
not an electrical engineer--he was electrical energy. He had no gift
for study--he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with it
desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus and
the mechanical sciences.

Enormous humour flowed from him like crude light. Men who had never
known him seethed with strange internal laughter when they saw him, and
roared helplessly when he began to speak. Yet, his physical beauty was
astonishing. His head was like that of a wild angel--coils and whorls
of living golden hair flashed from his head, his features were regular,
generous, and masculine, illuminated by the strange inner smile of idiot
ecstasy.

His broad mouth, even when stammering irritably or when nervousness
clouded his face, was always cocked for laughter--unearthly, exultant,
idiot laughter. There was in him demoniac exuberance, a wild intelligence
that did not come from the brain. Eager for praise, for public esteem,
and expert in ingratiation, this demon possessed him utterly at the
most unexpected moments, in the most decorous surroundings, when he was
himself doing all in his power to preserve the good opinion in which he
was held.

Thus, listening to an old lady of the church, who with all her power of
persuasion and earnestness was unfolding the dogmas of Presbyterianism
to him, he would lean forward in an attitude of exaggerated respectfulness
and attention, one broad hand clinched about his knee, while he murmured
gentle agreement to what she said:

"Yes?... Ye-e-es?... Ye-e-e-es?... Ye-e-es?... Is that right?...
Ye-e-es?"

Suddenly the demonic force would burst in him. Insanely tickled at the
cadences of his agreement, the earnest placidity and oblivion of the old
woman, and the extravagant pretence of the whole situation, his face
flooded with wild exultancy, he would croon in a fat luscious bawdily
suggestive voice:

"Y-ah-s?... Y-a-h-s?--Y-ah-s?... Y-ah-s?"

And when at length too late she became aware of this drowning flood of
demoniac nonsense, and paused, turning an abrupt startled face to him,
he would burst into a wild "Whah-whah-whah-whah" of laughter, beyond all
reason, with strange throat noises, tickling her roughly in the ribs.

Often Eliza, in the midst of long, minutely replenished reminiscence,
would grow conscious, while she was purse-lipped in reverie, of this
annihilating mockery, would slap at his hand angrily as he gooched her,
and shake a pursed piqued face at him, saying, with a heavy scorn that
set him off into fresh "whah-whahs": "I'll declare, boy! You act like a
regular idiot," and then shaking her head sadly, with elaborate pity:
"I'd be ash-a-a-med! A-sha-a-med."

His quality was extraordinary; he had something that was a great deal
better than most intelligence; he saw the world in burlesque, and his
occasional answer to its sham, hypocrisy, and intrigue was the idiot
devastation of "whah-whah!" But he did not possess his demon; it
possessed him from time to time. If it had possessed him wholly,
constantly, his life would have prevailed with astonishing honesty
and precision. But when he reflected, he was a child--with all the
hypocrisy, sentimentality and dishonest pretence of a child.

His face was a church in which beauty and humour were married--the
strange and the familiar were at one in him. Men, looking at Luke, felt
a start of recognition as if they saw something of which they had never
heard, but which they had known forever.

Once or twice, during the Winter and Spring, while she was touring with
Pearl Hines, Helen got into Atlanta to see him. In Spring they attended
the week of Grand Opera. He would find employment for one night as a
spearman in _Ada_ and pass the doorman for the remainder of the week
with the assurance that he was "a member of the company--Lukio Gantio."


His large feet spread tightly out in sandals; behind the shin-greaves
his awkward calves were spined thickly with hair; a thick screw of hair
writhed under the edge of his tin helmet, as he loafed in the wings,
leaning comically on his spear, his face lit with exultancy.

Caruso, waiting his entrance, regarded him from time to time with a wide
Wop smile.

"Wotta you call yourself, eh?" asked Caruso, approaching and looking him
over.

"W-w-w-why," he said, "d-don't you know one of your s-s-s-soldiers when
you see him?"

"You're one hell of a soldier," said Caruso.

"Whah-whah-whah!" Luke answered. With difficulty he restrained his
prodding fingers.


In the summer now he returned to Altamont, finding employment with a
firm of land-auctioneers, and assisting them at the sale of a tract or
a parcel of lots. He moved about above the crowd in the bed of a wagon,
exhorting them to bid, with his hand at the side of his mouth, in a
harangue compounded of frenzy, passionate solicitation, and bawdry. The
work intoxicated him. With wide grins of expectancy they crowded round
the spokes. In a high throaty tenor he called to them:

"Step right up, gentlemen, lot number 17, in beautiful Homewood--we
furnish the wood, you furnish the home. Now gentlemen, this handsome
building-site has a depth of 179 feet, leaving plenty of room for garden
and backhouse (grow your own corn cobs in beautiful Homewood) with a
frontage of 114 feet on a magnificent new macadam road."

"Where is the road?" someone shouted.

"On the blueprint, of course, Colonel. You've got it all in black and
white. Now, gentlemen, the opportunity of your lives is kicking you in
the pants. Are you men of vision? Think what Ford, Edison, Napoleon
Bonaparte, and Julius Csar would do. Obey that impulse. You can't lose.
The town is coming this way. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? Swell.
The new court-house will be built on yonder hill, the undertaker and the
village bakery will occupy handsome edifices of pressed brick just above
you. Oyez, oyez, oyez. What am I offered? What am I offered? Own your
own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannon-shot of all railway,
automobile, and aeroplane connections. Running water abounds within a
Washingtonian stone's throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all
trains. Gentlemen, here's your chance to make a fortune. The ground is
rich in mineral resources--gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal
and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the
trees."

"What about the bushes, Luke?" yelled Mr. Halloran, the dairy-lunch
magnate.

"Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes," Luke answered amid
general tumult. "All right, Major. You with the face. What am I offered?
What am I offered?"


When there was no sale, he greeted incoming tourists at the
station-curbing with eloquent invitations to Dixieland, rich,
persuasive, dominant above all the soliciting babel of the car-drivers,
negro hotel-porters, and boarding-house husbands.

"I'll give you a dollar apiece for everyone you drum up," said Eliza.

"Oh, that's all right." Oh, modestly. Generously.

"He'd give you the shirt off his back," said Gant.

A fine boy. As she cooled from her labours in the summer night, he
brought her little boxes of ice-cream from town.

He was a hustler: he sold patent washboards, trick potato-peelers, and
powdered cockroach-poison from house to house. To the negroes he sold
hair-oil guaranteed to straighten kinky hair, and religious lithographs,
peopled with flying angels, white and black, and volant cherubs, black
and white, sailing about the knees of an impartial and crucified
Saviour, and sub-titled "God Loves Them Both."

They sold like hot cakes.

Otherwise, he drove Gant's car--a 1913 five-passenger Ford, purchase of
an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half Gant's conversation,
object of abuse, boast, and anathema. It was before every one owned
a car. Gant was awed and terrified by his rash act, exalted at the
splendour of his chariot, appalled at its expense. Each bill for
gasoline, repairs, or equipment brought a howl of anguish from him; a
puncture, a breakdown, a minor disorder caused him to circle about in
maddened strides, cursing, praying, weeping.

"I've never had a moment's peace since I bought it," he howled.
"Accursed and bloody monster that it is, it will not be content until it
has sucked out my life-blood, sold the roof over my head, and sent me
out to the pauper's grave to perish. Merciful God," he wept, "it's
fearful, it's awful, it's cruel that I should be afflicted thus in my
old age." Turning to his constrained and apologetic son abruptly, he
said: "How much is the bill? Hey?" His eyes roved wildly in his head.

"D-d-d-don't get excited, papa," Luke answered soothingly, teetering
from foot to foot, "it's only $8.92."

"Jesus God!" Gant screamed. "I'm ruined." Sobbing in loud burlesque
sniffles, he began his caged pacing.

But it was pleasant at dusk or in the cool summer nights, with Eliza or
one of his daughters beside him, and a fragrant weed between his pallid
lips, to hinge his long body into the back seat, and ride out into the
fragrant countryside, or through the long dark streets of town. At the
approach of another car he cried out in loud alarm, by turns cursing
and entreating his son to caution. Luke drove nervously, erratically,
wildly--his stammering impatient hands and knees communicated their
uneven fidget to the flivver. He cursed irritably, plunged in
exacerbated fury at the brake, and burst out in an annoyed
"tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh," when the car stalled.

As the hour grew late, and the streets silent, his madness swelled in
him. Lipping the rim of a long hill street, tree-arched and leafy and
shelving in even terraces, he would burst suddenly into insane laughter,
bend over the wheel, and pull the throttle open, his idiot "whah-whahs"
filling the darkness as Gant screamed curses at him. Down through the
night they tore at murderous speed, the boy laughing at curse and prayer
alike as they shot past the blind menace of street-crossings.

"You Goddamned scoundrel!" Gant yelled. "Stop, you mountain grill, or
I'll put you in jail."

"Whah-whah." His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto.

Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness, quite blue with
terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual arrivals to her
breast, melodramatically, and moan:

"I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my innocent
motherless babes----"

"Whah-whah-whah!"

"He's a fiend out of hell," cried Gant, beginning to weep. "Cruel and
criminal monster that he is, he will batter our brains out against a
tree, before he's done." They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car
that, with a startled screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like
a frightened horse.

"You damned thug!" Gant roared, plunging forward and fastening his great
hands around Luke's throat. "Will you stop?"

Luke added another notch of blazing speed. Gant fell backward with a
howl of terror.

       *       *       *       *       *

On Sunday they made long tours into the country. Often they drove to
Reynoldsville, twenty-two miles away. It was an ugly little resort,
noisy with arriving and departing cars, with a warm stench of oil and
gasoline heavy above its broad main street. But people were coming and
going from several States: Southward they came up from South Carolina
and Georgia, cotton-farmers, small tradesmen and their families in
battered cars coated with red sandclay dust. They had a heavy afternoon
dinner of fried chicken, corn, string-beans, and sliced tomatoes at
one of the big wooden boarding-house hotels, spent another hour in a
drugstore over a chocolate nut-sundae, watched the summer crowd of
fortunate tourists and ripe cool-skinned virgins flow by upon the wide
sidewalk in thick pullulation, and returned again, after a brief tour of
the town, on the winding immediate drop to the hot South. New lands.

Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South
filled summer porches.

Luke was a darling. He was a dear, a fine boy, a big-hearted generous
fellow, and just the cutest thing. Women liked him, laughed at him,
pulled fondly the thick golden curls of his hair. He was sentimentally
tender to children--girls of fourteen years. He had a grand romantic
feeling for Delia Selborne, the oldest daughter of Mrs. Selborne. He
bought her presents, was tender and irritable by turns. Once, at Gant's,
on the porch under an August moon and the smell of ripening grapes, he
caressed her while Helen sang in the parlour. He caressed her gently,
leaned his head over her, and said he would like to lay it on her
b-b-b-b-breast. Eugene watched them bitterly, with an inch of poison
round his heart. He wanted the girl for himself: she was stupid, but she
had the wise body and faint hovering smile of her mother. He wanted Mrs.
Selborne more, he fantasied passionately about her yet, but her image
lived again in Delia. As a result, he was proud, cold, scornful and
foolish before them. They disliked him.

Enviously, with gnawn heart, he observed Luke's ministrations to Mrs.
Selborne. His service was so devout; so extravagant that even Helen grew
annoyed and occasionally jealous. And nightly, from a remote corner at
Gant's or Eliza's, or from a parked automobile before the house, he
heard her rich welling laughter, full of tenderness, surrender, and
mystery. Sometimes, waiting in pitch darkness on the stairs at Eliza's,
at one or two o'clock in the morning, he felt her pass him. As she
touched him in the dark, she gave a low cry of terror; with an uncivil
grunt he reassured her, and descended to bed with a pounding heart and a
burning face.

Ah, yes, he thought, with green morality, observing his brother throned
in laughter and affection, you Big Fool, you--you're just a sucker! You
show off and act big, my sonny, and spend your money bringing ice-cream
for them--but what do you get out of it? How do you feel when she gets
out of an automobile at two o'clock in the morning after grunting in the
dark with some damned travelling-man, or with old Poxy Logan who's been
keeping a nigger woman up for years. "May I p-p-p-put my head on your
breast?" You make me sick, you damned fool. _She's_ no better, only
you don't know beans. She'll let you spend all your money on her and
then she'll run off with some little pimp in an automobile for the rest
of the night. Yes, that's so. Do you want to make anything out of it?
You big bluff. Come out into the back yard.... I'll show you ... take
that ... and that ... and that....

Pumping his fists wildly, he fought his phantom into defeat and himself
into exhaustion.


Luke had several hundred dollars saved from _The Saturday Evening Post_
days, when he went off to school. He accepted very little money from
Gant. He waited on tables, he solicited for college boarding-houses, he
was the agent for a tailor who made Kippy Kampus Klothes. Gant boasted
of these efforts. The town shifted its quid, nodded pertly, and spat,
saying:

"That boy'll make his mark."

Luke worked as hard for an education as any other self-made man. He made
every sacrifice. He did everything but study.

He was an immense popular success, so very extra, so very Luky. The
school sought and adored him. Twice, after football games, he mounted a
hearse and made funeral orations over the University of Georgia.

But, in spite of all his effort, toward the end of his third year he
was still a sophomore, with every prospect of remaining one. One day in
Spring he wrote the following letter to Gant:

"The b-b-b-bastards who r-r-run this place have it in for me. I've been
c-c-c-crooked good and proper. They take your hard-earned m-m-money here
and skin you. I'm g-g-g-going to a real school."

He went to Pittsburgh and found work with the Westinghouse Electric
Company. Three times a week at night he attended courses at the Carnegie
Institute of Technology. He made friends.

The war had come. After fifteen months in Pittsburgh he moved on to
Dayton where he got employment at a boiler factory engaged in the
fabrication of war materials.

From time to time, in summer for a few weeks, at Christmas for a few
days, he returned to celebrate his holidays with his family. Always he
brought Gant a suitcase stocked with beer and whisky. That boy was "good
to his father."




XIX


One afternoon in the young summer, Gant leaned upon the rail, talking to
Jannadeau. He was getting on to sixty-five, his erect body had settled,
he stooped a little. He spoke of old age often, and he wept in his
tirades now because of his stiffened hand. Soaked in pity, he referred
to himself as "the poor old cripple who has to provide for them all."

The indolence of age and disintegration was creeping over him. He now
rose a full hour later, he came to his shop punctually, but he spent
long hours of the day extended on the worn leather couch of his office,
or in gossip with Jannadeau, bawdy old Liddell, Cardiac, and Fagg
Sluder, who had salted away his fortune in two big buildings on the
Square and was at the present moment tilted comfortably in a chair
before the fire department, gossiping eagerly with members of the ball
club, whose chief support he was. It was after five o'clock, the game
was over.

Negro labourers, grisly with a white coating of cement, sloped down
past the shop on their way home. The draymen dispersed slowly, a slouchy
policeman loafed down the steps of the city hall picking his teeth, and
on the market side, from high grilled windows there came the occasional
howls of a drunken negress. Life buzzed slowly like a fly.

The sun had reddened slightly, there was a cool flowing breath from
the hills, a freshening relaxation over the tired earth, the hope,
the ecstasy of evening in the air. In slow pulses the thick plume of
fountain rose, fell upon itself, and slapped the pool in lazy rhythms.
A wagon rattled leanly over the big cobbles; beyond the firemen, the
grocer Bradly wound up his awning with slow creaking revolutions.

Across the Square, at its other edge, the young virgins of the eastern
part of town walked lightly home in chattering groups. They came to town
at four o'clock in the afternoon, walked up and down the little avenue
several times, entered a shop to purchase small justifications, and
finally went into the chief drug-store, where the bucks of the town
loafed and drawled in lazy alert groups. It was their club, their
brasserie, the forum of the sexes. With confident smiles the young men
detached themselves from their group and strolled back to booth and
table.

"Hey theah! Wheahd you come from?"

"Move ovah theah, lady. I want to tawk to you."

Eyes as blue as Southern skies looked roguishly up to laughing grey
ones, the winsome dimples deepened, and the sweetest little tail in dear
old Dixie slid gently over on the polished board.

Gant spent delightful hours now in the gossip of dirty old men--their
huddled bawdry exploded in cracked high wheezes on the Square. He came
home at evening stored with gutter tidings, wetting his thumb and
smiling slyly as he questioned Helen hopefully:

"She's no better than a regular little chippie--eh?"

"Ha-ha-ha-ha," she laughed mockingly. "Don't you wish you knew?"

His age bore certain fruits, emoluments of service. When she came home
in the evening with one of her friends, she presented the girl with
jocose eagerness to his embrace. And, crying out paternally, "Why,
bless her heart! Come kiss the old man," he planted bristling moustache
kisses on their white throats, their soft lips, grasping the firm
meat of one arm tenderly with his good hand and cradling them gently.
They shrieked with throaty giggle-twiddles of pleasure because it
tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-_tickled_ so.

"Ooh! Mr. Gant! Whah-whah-whah!"

"Your father's such a nice man," they said. "Such lovely manners."

Helen's eyes fed fiercely on them. She laughed with husky-harsh
excitement.

"Hah-ha-ha! He likes that, doesn't he? It's too bad, old boy, isn't it?
No more monkey business."

He talked with Jannadeau, while his fugitive eyes roved over the east
end of the Square. Before the shop the comely matrons of the town came
up from the market. From time to time they smiled, seeing him, and he
bowed sweepingly. Such lovely manners.

"The King of England," he observed, "is only a figurehead. He doesn't
begin to have the power of the President of the United States."

"His power is severely li_mit_ed," said Jannadeau gutturally, "by custom
but not by statute. In actua_lit_y he is still one of the most powerful
monarchs in the world." His thick black fingers probed carefully into
the viscera of a watch.

His uneasy eyes followed carefully the stylish carriage of "Queen"
Elizabeth's well clad figure as she went down by the shop. She smiled
pleasantly, and for a moment turned her candid stare upon smooth marble
slabs of death, carved lambs and cherubim. Gant bowed elaborately.

"Good-evening, madam," he said.

She disappeared. In a moment she came back decisively and mounted the
broad steps. He watched her approach with quickened pulses. Twelve
years.

"How's the madam?" he said gallantly. "Elizabeth, I was just telling
Jannadeau you were the most stylish woman in town."

"Well, that's mighty sweet of you, Mr. Gant," she said in her cool
poised voice. "You've always got a good word for every one."

She gave a bright pleasant nod to Jannadeau, who swung his huge scowling
head ponderously around and muttered at her.

"Why, Elizabeth," said Gant, "you haven't changed an inch in fifteen
years. I don't believe you're a day older."

She was thirty-eight and pleasantly aware of it.

"Oh, yes," she said laughing. "You're only saying that to make me feel
good. I'm no chicken any more."

She had a pale clear skin, pleasantly freckled, carrot-coloured hair,
and a thin mouth live with humour. Her figure was trim and strong--no
longer young. She had a great deal of energy, distinction, and elegance
in her manner.

"How are all the girls, Elizabeth?" he asked kindly.

Her face grew sad. She began to pull her gloves off.

"That's what I came in to see you about," she said. "I lost one of them
last week."

"Yes," said Gant gravely, "I was sorry to hear of that."

"She was the best girl I had," said Elizabeth. "I'd have done anything
in the world for her. We did everything we could," she added. "I've no
regrets on that score. I had a doctor and two trained nurses by her all
the time."

She opened her black leather handbag, thrust her gloves into it, and
pulling out a small bluebordered handkerchief, began to weep quietly.

"Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh," said Gant, shaking his head. "Too bad, too bad,
too bad. Come back to my office," he said. They went back and sat down.
Elizabeth dried her eyes.

"What was her name?" he asked.

"We called her Lily--her full name was Lillian Reed."

"Why, I knew that girl," he exclaimed. "I spoke to her not over two
weeks ago."

"Yes," said Elizabeth, "she went like that--one hmorrhage right after
another, down here." She tapped her abdomen. "Nobody ever knew she was
sick until last Wednesday. Friday she was gone." She wept again.

"T-t-t-t-t-t," he clucked regretfully. "Too bad, too bad. She was pretty
as a picture."

"I couldn't have loved her more, Mr. Gant," said Elizabeth, "if she had
been my own daughter."

"How old was she?" he asked.

"Twenty-two," said Elizabeth, beginning to weep again.

"What a pity! What a pity!" he agreed. "Did she have any people?"

"No one who would do anything for her," Elizabeth said. "Her mother died
when she was thirteen--she was born out here on the Beetree Fork--and
her father," she added indignantly, "is a mean old bastard who's never
done anything for her or any one else. He didn't even come to her
funeral."

"He will be punished," said Gant darkly.

"As sure as there's a God in heaven," Elizabeth agreed, "he'll get
what's coming to him in hell. The old bastard!" she continued
virtuously, "I hope he rots!"

"You can depend upon it," he said grimly. "He will. Ah, Lord." He was
silent a moment while he shook his head with slow regret.

"A pity, a pity," he muttered. "So young." He had the moment of triumph
all men have when they hear some one has died. A moment, too, of grisly
fear. Sixty-four.

"I couldn't have loved her more," said Elizabeth, "if she'd been one of
my own. A young girl like that, with all her life before her."

"It's pretty sad when you come to think of it," he said. "By God, it
is."

"And she was such a fine girl, Mr. Gant," said Elizabeth, weeping
softly. "She had such a bright future before her. She had more
opportunities than I ever had, and I suppose you know"--she spoke
modestly--"what I've done."

"Why," he exclaimed, startled, "you're a rich woman, Elizabeth--damned
if I don't believe you are. You own property all over town."

"I wouldn't say that," she answered, "but I've got enough to live on
without ever doing another lick of work. I've had to work hard all my
life. From now on I don't intend to turn my hand over."

She regarded him with a shy pleased smile, and touched a coil of her
fine hair with a small competent hand. He looked at her attentively,
noting with pleasure her firm uncorseted hips, moulded compactly into
her tailored suit, and her cocked comely legs tapering to graceful feet,
shod in neat little slippers of tan. She was firm, strong, washed, and
elegant--a faint scent of lilac hovered over her: he looked at her
candid eyes, lucently grey, and saw that she was quite a great lady.

"By God, Elizabeth," he said, "you're a fine-looking woman."

"I've had a good life," she said. "I've taken care of myself."

They had always known each other--since first they met. They had no
excuses, no questions, no replies. The world fell away from them. In the
silence they heard the pulsing slap of the fountain, the high laughter
of bawdry in the Square. He took a book of models from the desk, and
began to turn its slick pages. They showed modest blocks of Georgia
marble and Vermont granite.

"I don't want any of those," she said impatiently. "I've already made up
my mind. I know what I want."

He looked up surprised. "What is it?"

"I want the angel out front."

His face was shocked and unwilling. He gnawed the corner of his thin
lip. No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his
White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it.
For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and
the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked. But it had come from Carrara
in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other
hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of
one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone
idiocy.

In his rages, Gant sometimes directed vast climaxes of abuse at the
angel. "Fiend out of Hell!" he roared. "You have impoverished me, you
have ruined me, you have cursed my declining years, and now you will
crush me to death, fearful, awful, and unnatural monster that you are."

But sometimes when he was drunk he fell weeping on his knees before it,
called it Cynthia, and entreated its love, forgiveness, and blessing for
its sinful but repentant boy. There was laughter from the Square.

"What's the matter?" said Elizabeth. "Don't you want to sell it?"

"It will cost you a good deal, Elizabeth," he said evasively.

"I don't care," she answered, positively. "I've got the money. How much
do you want?"

He was silent, thinking for a moment of the place where the angel stood.
He knew he had nothing to cover or obliterate that place--it left a
barren crater in his heart.

"All right," he said. "You can have it for what I paid for it--$420."

She took a thick sheaf of banknotes from her purse and counted the money
out for him. He pushed it back.

"No. Pay me when the job's finished and it has been set up. You want
some sort of inscription, don't you?"

"Yes. There's her full name, age, place of birth, and so on," she said,
giving him a scrawled envelope. "I want some poetry, too--something that
suits a young girl taken off like this."

He pulled his tattered little book of inscriptions from a pigeonhole,
and thumbed its pages, reading her a quatrain here and there. To each
she shook her head. Finally, he said:

"How's this one, Elizabeth?" He read:

  She went away in beauty's flower,
  Before her youth was spent;
  Ere life and love had lived their hour
  God called her, and she went.

  Yet whispers Faith upon the wind:
  No grief to her was given.
  She left _your_ love and went to find
  A greater one in heaven.

"Oh, that's lovely--lovely," she said. "I want that one."

"Yes," he agreed, "I think that's the best one."

In the musty cool smell of his little office they got up. Her gallant
figure reached his shoulder. She buttoned her kid gloves over the small
pink haunch of her palms and glanced about her. His battered sofa filled
one wall, the line of his long body was printed in the leather. She
looked up at him. His face was sad and grave. They remembered.

"It's been a long time, Elizabeth," he said.

They walked slowly to the front through aisled marbles. Sentinelled just
beyond the wooden doors, the angel leered vacantly down. Jannadeau drew
his great head turtlewise a little further into the protective hunch of
his burly shoulders. They went out on to the porch.

The moon stood already, like its own phantom, in the clear washed skies
of evening. A little boy with an empty paper-delivery bag swung lithely
by, his freckled nostrils dilating pleasantly with hunger and the
fancied smell of supper. He passed, and for a moment, as they stood at
the porch edge, all life seemed frozen in a picture: the firemen and
Fagg Sluder had seen Gant, whispered, and were now looking toward him:
a policeman, at the high side-porch of the Police Court, leaned on the
rail and stared; at the near edge of the central grass-plot below the
fountain, a farmer bent for water at a bubbling jet, rose dripping, and
stared; from the Tax Collector's office, City Hall, upstairs, Yancey,
huge, meaty, shirtsleeved, stared. And in that second the slow pulse of
the fountain was suspended, life was held, like an arrested gesture, in
photographic abeyance, and Gant felt himself alone move deathward in
a world of seemings as, in 1910, a man might find himself again in a
picture taken, years before, on the grounds of the Chicago Fair, when he
was thirty and his moustache black, and, noting the bustled ladies and
the derbied men fixed in the second's pullulation, remember the dead
instant, seek beyond the borders for what was there (he knew); or as a
veteran who finds himself upon his elbow near Ulysses Grant, before the
march, in pictures of the Civil War, and sees a dead man on a horse; or
I should say, like some completed Don, who finds himself again before
a tent in Scotland in his youth, and notes a cricket-bat long lost and
long forgotten, the face of a poet who has died, and young men and the
tutor as they looked that Long Vacation when they read nine hours a day
for "Greats."

Where now? Where after? Where then?




XX


Gant, during these years in which Helen and Luke, the two for whom he
felt the deepest affection, were absent a large part of the time, lived
a splintered existence at home and at Eliza's. He feared and hated a
lonely life, but habit was deeply rooted in him, and he was unwilling to
exchange the well-used comfort of his own home for the bald wintriness
of Eliza's. She did not want him. She fed him willingly enough, but his
tirades and his nightly sojourns, both longer and more frequent now that
his daughter was absent, annoyed her more than they ever had before.

"You have a place of your own," she cried fretfully. "Why don't you stay
in it? I don't want you around making trouble."

"Send him on," he moaned bitterly. "Send him on. Over the stones rattle
his bones, he's only a beggar that nobody owns. Ah, Lord! The old
drayhorse has had its day. Its race is run. Kick him out: the old
cripple can no longer provide them with victuals, and they will throw
him on the junkheap, unnatural and degenerate monsters that they are."

But he remained at Dixieland as long as there was any one to listen to
him, and to the bleak little group of winter boarders he brought magic.
They fed hungrily on all the dramatic gusto with which, lunging back
and forth in a big rocker, before the blazing parlour fire, he told and
retold the legends of his experience, taking, before their charmed eyes,
an incident that had touched him romantically, and embellishing, weaving
and building it up. A whole mythology grew up as, goggle-eyed, they
listened:

General Fitzhugh Lee, who had reined up before the farmer boy and asked
for a drink of water, now tossed off an oaken bucketful, questioned him
closely concerning the best roads into Gettysburg, asked if he had seen
detachments of the enemy, wrote his name down in a small book, and went
off saying to his staff: "That boy will make his mark. It is impossible
to defeat an enemy which breeds boys like that."

The Indians, whom he had passed amicably as he rode out into the New
Mexican desert on a burro, seeking the ancient fort, now spurred after
him with fell intent and wild scalping whoops. He rode furiously through
muttering redskin villages, and found the protection of two cattlemen in
the nick of time. The thief who had entered his room at dead of night
in New Orleans, and picked up his clothes, and whom he had fought
desperately upon the floor, he now pursued naked for seventeen blocks
(not five) down Canal Street.


He went several times a week to the moving-picture shows, taking Eugene,
and sitting, bent forward in hunched absorption, through two full
performances. They came out at ten-thirty or eleven o'clock, on cold
ringing pavements, into a world frozen bare--a dead city of closed
shops, dressed windows, milliners' and clothiers' models posturing with
waxen gaiety at congealed silence.

On the Square the slackened fountain dropped a fat spire of freezing
water into its thickening rim of ice. In summer, a tall spire blown in
blue sheets of spray. When they turned it down it wilted--that was like
a fountain, too. No wind blew.

His eyes fixed on the clean concrete walk, Gant strode on, muttering
dramatically, composing a narrative of the picture. The cold steel of
new sewing-machines glinted in dim light. The Singer building. Tallest
in the world. The stitching hum of Eliza's machine. Needle through your
finger before you know it. He winced. They passed the Sluder Building
at the corner of the Square and turned left. Gets over $700 a month in
office-rent from this alone. The window on the corner was filled with
rubber syringes and thermos bottles. Drink Coca Cola. They say he stole
the formula from old mountain woman. $50,000,000 now. Rats in the vats.
Dope at Wood's better. Too weak here. He had recently acquired a taste
for the beverage and drank four or five glasses a day.

D. Stern had his old shack on that corner twenty years before Fagg
bought it. Belonged to Paston estate. Could have bought it for a song.
Rich man now. D. moved to North Main now. The Jew's rich. Fortune out of
winnies. They're hot, they're hot. In a broken pot. If I had a little
time I'd make a little rhyme. Thirteen kids--she had one every year. As
broad as she's long. They all get fat. Every one works. Sons pay father
board. None of mine, I can assure you. The Jews get there.

The hunchback--what did they call him? One of Nature's Cruel Jests. Ah,
Lord! What's become of old John Bunny? I used to like his pictures. Oh
yes. Dead.

That pure look they have, at the end, when he kisses her, mused Eugene.
Later--A Warmer Clime. Her long lashes curled down over her wet eyes,
she was unable to meet his gaze. The sweet lips trembled with desire as,
clasping her in a grip of steel, he bent down over her yielding body and
planted hungry kisses on her mouth. When the purple canopy of dawn had
been reft asunder by the rays of the invading sun. The Stranger. It
wouldn't do to say the next morning. They have a thick coat of yellow
paint all over their face. Meanwhile, in Old England. I wonder what they
say to each other. They're a pretty tough lot, I suppose.

A swift thrust of conviction left him unperturbed. The other was better.

He thought of the Stranger. Steel-grey eyes. A steady face. An eighth
of a second faster on the draw than any one else: Two-gun Bill Hart.
Anderson of the Essanay. Strong quiet men.

He clapped his hand against his buttock with a sharp smack and shot the
murderous forefinger at an ashcan, a lamp-post, and a barber-pole, with
a snapping wrist. Gant, startled in composition, gave him a quick,
uneasy look. They walked on.

Came a day when Spring put forth her blossoms on the earth again. No,
no--not that. Then all grew dark. Picture of a lily trampled on the
earth. That means he bigged her. Art. Filled her with thee a baby fair.
You can't go away now. Why? Because--because--her eyes dropped shyly,
a slow flush mantled her cheek. He stared at her blankly for a moment,
then his puzzled gaze--(O good!)--fell to the tiny object she was
fingering nervously, with dawning comprehension. Blushing rosily, she
tried to conceal the little jacket behind her. Grace! A great light
broke on him! Do you mean it? She went to him with a cry, half laugh,
half sob, and buried her burning face in his neck. You silly boy. Of
course I mean it (you bastard!). The little dance girl. Smiling with wet
lechery and manipulating his moist rope of cigar, Faro Jim shuffled a
pack of cards slowly and fixed on her his vulturesque eye. A knife in
his shiny boots, a small derringer and three aces up his ruffled sleeve,
and suave murder in his heart. But the cold grey eyes of the Stranger
missed nothing. Imperturbably he drank his Scotch, wheeled from the
mirror with barking Colt just one-sixth of a second before the gambler
could fire. Faro coughed and slid forward slowly upon the floor.

There was no sound now in the crowded room of the Triple Y. Men stood
petrified. The face of Bad Bill and the two Mexicans had turned a dirty
grey. Finally, the sheriff spoke, turning with awe from the still figure
on the sawdust floor.

"By God, stranger!" he ejaculated. "I never knew the man lived who could
beat Faro to the draw. What's yore name?"

"In the fam'ly Bible back home, pardner," the Stranger drawled, "it's
Eugene Gant, but folks out here generally calls me The Dixie Ghost."

There was a slow gasp of wonder from the crowd.

"Gawd!" some one whispered. "It's the Ghost!"

As the Ghost turned coolly back to finish his interrupted drink, he
found himself face to face with the little dancing girl. Two smoking
globes of brine welled from the pellucid depths of her pure eyes and
fell with a hot splash on his bronzed hand.

"How can I ever thank you!" she cried. "You have saved me from a fate
far worse than death."

But the Ghost, who had faced death many times without a flicker of a
lash, was unable to face something he saw now in a pair of big brown
eyes. He took off his sombrero and twisted it shyly in his big hands.

"Why, that's all right, ma'am," he gulped awkwardly. "Glad to be of
service to a lady any time."

By this time the two bartenders had thrown a tablecloth over Faro
Bill, carried the limp body into the back room, and returned to their
positions behind the bar. The crowd clustered about in little groups,
laughing and talking excitedly, and in a moment, as the pianist began to
hammer out a tune on the battered piano, broke into the measures of a
waltz.

In the wild West of those days, passions were primitive, vengeance
sudden, and retribution immediate.

Two dimples sentinelled a platoon of milk-white teeth.

"Won't you dance with me, Mr. Ghost?" she coaxed.


Thoughtfully he pondered on love's mystery. Pure but passionate.
Appearances against her, 'tis true. The foul breath of slander. She
worked in a bawdy-house but her heart was clean. Outside of that, what
can one say against her? He thought pleasantly of murder. With child's
eyes he regarded his extinct enemies. Men died violently but cleanly, in
the movies. Bang-bang. Good-bye, boys, I'm through. Through the head or
heart--a clean hole, no blood. He had kept innocency. Do their guts or
their brains come spilling out? Currant jelly where a face was, the chin
shot off. Or down there that other----His arm beat the air like a wing;
he writhed. If you lose that? Done, die. He clutched his throat in his
anguish.

They bent down eastward along Academy Street, having turned right from
the little caudal appendage that gave on the north-eastern corner of the
Square. The boy's mind flamed with bright streaming images, sharp as
gems, mutable as chameleons. His life was the shadow of a shadow, a play
within a play. He became the hero-actor-star, the lord of the cinema,
and the lover of a beautiful movie-queen, as heroic as his postures,
with a superior actuality for every make-believe. He was the Ghost and
he who played the Ghost, the cause that minted legend into fact.

He was those heroes whom he admired, and the victor, in beauty,
nobility, and sterling worth, over those whom he despised because they
always triumphed and were forever good and pretty and beloved of women.
He was chosen and beloved of a bevy of internationally renowned beauties,
vampires, and pure sweet girls alike, with fruity blondes in the lead,
all contesting for his favours, and some of the least scrupulous
resorting to underhand practices in order to win him. Their pure eyes
turned up to him in everlasting close-ups: he feasted virtuously upon
their proffered lips and, conflict over, murder sanctified, and virtue
crowned, walked away with his siren into the convenient blaze of a
constantly setting sun.

With burning sidelong face he looked quickly up at Gant, twisting his
convulsive neck.


Across the street, a calcium glare from the corner light bathed coldly
the new brick faade of the Orpheum Theatre. All This Week Gus Nolan and
His Georgia Peaches. Also the Piedmont Comedy Four and Miss Bobbie
Dukane.

The theatre was dark, the second show was over. They stared curiously
across the street at the posters. In this cold silence where were the
Peaches? At the Athens now, upon the Square. They always went there
after. Gant looked at his watch. 11.12. Big Bill Messler outside
swinging his club and watching them. On the counter stools a dozen
bucks and ogling rakehells. I've got a car outside. Dalliance under
difficulties. Later, the Genevieve on Liberty Street. They all stay
there. Whisperings. Footfalls. Raided.

Girls from good families, some of them, I suppose, Gant thought.

Opposite the Baptist church a hearse was drawn up before Gorham's
Undertaking Parlours. A light burned dimly through the ferns. Who can
that be? he wondered. Miss Annie Patton critically ill. She's past
eighty. Some lunger from New York. A little Jew with a peaked face.
Some one all the time. Await alike th'inevitable hour. Ah, Lord!

With loss of hunger, he thought of undertaking and undertakers, and
in particular of Mr. Gorham. He was a man with blond hair and white
eyebrows.

Waited to marry her when that rich young Cuban died, so they could take
honeymoon to Havana.

They turned down Spring Street by the Baptist church. This is really
like a city of the dead, Eugene thought. The town, rimed with frost, lay
frozen below the stars in a cataleptic trance. The animacy of life hung
in abeyance. Nothing grew old, nothing decayed, nothing died. It was a
triumph over time. If a great demon snapped his fingers and stopped all
life in the world for an instant that should be a hundred years, who
would know the difference? Every man a Sleeping Beauty. If you're waking
call me early, call me early, mother dear.

He tried to see life and movement behind the walls, and failed. He and
Gant were all that lived. For a house betrays nothing: there may be
murder behind its very quiet face. He thought that Troy should be like
this--perfect, undecayed as the day when Hector died. Only they burned
it. To find old cities as they were, unruined--the picture charmed him.
The Lost Atlantis. Ville d'Ys. The old lost towns, seasunken. Great
vacant ways, unrusted, echoed under his lonely feet; he haunted vast
arcades, he pierced the atrium, his shoes rang on the temple flags.

Or to be, he lusciously meditated, left alone with a group of pretty
women, in a town whence all the other people had fled from some terror
of plague, earthquake, volcano, or other menace to which he, quite
happily, was immune. Lolling his tongue delicately, he saw himself
loafing sybaritically through first-class confectioners' and grocers'
shops, gorging like an anaconda on imported dainties: exquisite small
fish from Russia, France and Sardinia; coal-black hams from England;
ripe olives, brandied peaches, and liqueur chocolates. He would loot
old cellars for fat Burgundies, crack the gold necks of earth-chilled
bottles of Pol Roger against the wall, and slake his noonday thirst at
the spouting bung of a great butt of _Mnchener dunkels_. When his linen
was soiled he would outfit himself anew with silk underwear and the
finest shirtings; he would have a new hat every day in the week and new
suits whenever he pleased.

He would occupy a new house every day, and sleep in a different bed
every night, selecting the most luxurious residence ultimately for
permanent occupancy, and bringing together in it the richest treasures
of every notable library in the city. Finally, when he wanted a woman
from the small group that remained and that spent its time in weaving
new enticements for him, he would summons her by ringing out the number
he had given her on the Court House bell.

He wanted opulent solitude. His dark vision burned on kingdoms under the
sea, on windy castle crags, and on the deep elf kingdoms at the earth's
core. He groped for the doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted
country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone. And no birds
sing.

More practically, he saw for himself great mansions in the ground,
grottoes buried in the deep heart of a hill, vast chambers of brown
earth, sumptuously appointed with his bee-like plunder. Cool hidden
cisterns would bring him air; from a peephole in the hillside he could
look down on a winding road and see armed men seeking for him, or
hear their thwarted gropings overhead. He would pull fat fish from
subterranean pools, his great earth cellars would be stocked with old
wine, he could loot the world of its treasures, including the handsomest
women, and never be caught.

King Solomon's mines. She. Proserpine. Ali Baba. Orpheus and Eurydice.
Naked came I from my mother's womb. Naked shall I return. Let the
mothering womb of earth engulf me. Naked, a valiant wisp of man, in vast
brown limbs engulfed.


They neared the corner above Eliza's. For the first time the boy noted
that their pace had quickened, and that he had almost broken into a trot
in order to keep up with Gant's awkward plunging strides.

His father was moaning softly with long quivering exhalations of
breath, and he had one hand clasped over his pain. The boy spluttered
idiotically with laughter. Gant turned a glance full of reproach and
physical torture upon him.

"Oh-h-h-h-h! Merciful God," he whined, "it's hurting me."

Abruptly, Eugene was touched with pity. For the first time he saw
plainly that great Gant had grown old. The sallow face had yellowed and
lost its sinew. The thin mouth was petulant. The chemistry of decay had
left its mark.

No, there was no return after this. Eugene saw now that Gant was dying
very slowly. The vast resiliency, the illimitable power of former times
had vanished. The big frame was breaking up before him like a beached
ship. Gant was sick. He was old.

He had a disease that is very common among old men who have lived
carelessly and lustily--enlargement of the prostate gland. It was not
often in itself a fatal disease--it was more often one of the flags
of age and death, but it was ugly and uncomfortable. It was generally
treated successfully by surgery--the operation was not desperate. But
Gant hated and feared the knife: he listened eagerly to all persuasions
against it.

He had no gift for philosophy. He could not view with amusement and
detachment the death of the senses, the waning of desire, the waxing of
physical impotence. He fed hungrily, lewdly, on all news of seduction:
his amusement had in it the eyes of eagerness, the hot breath of desire.
He was incapable of the pleasant irony by which the philosophic spirit
mocks that folly it is no longer able to enjoy.

Gant was incapable of resignation. He had the most burning of all
lusts--the lust of memory, the ravenous hunger of the will which tries
to waken what is dead. He had reached the time of life when he read the
papers greedily for news of death. As friends and acquaintances died
he shook his head with the melancholy hypocrisy of old men, saying:
"They're all going, one by one. Ah, Lord! The old man will be the next."
But he did not believe it. Death was still for the others, not for
himself.

He grew old very rapidly. He began to die before their eyes--a quick
age, and a slow death, impotent, disintegrating, horrible because his
life had been so much identified with physical excess--huge drinking,
huge eating, huge rioting debauchery. It was fantastic and terrible
to see the great body waste. They began to watch the progress of
his disease with something of the horror with which one watches the
movements of a dog with a broken leg, before he is destroyed--a horror
greater than that one feels when a man has a similar hurt, because a man
may live without legs. A dog is all included in his hide.

His wild bombast was tempered now by senile petulance. He cursed and
whined by intervals. At the dead of night he would rise, full of pain
and terror, blaspheming vilely against his God at one moment, and
frantically entreating forgiveness at the next. Through all this
tirade ran the high quivering exhalation of physical pain--actual and
undeniable.

"Oh-h-h-h-h-h! I curse the day I was born!... I curse the day I was
given life by that bloodthirsty Monster up above.... Oh-h-h-h-h-h!
Jesus! I beg of you. I know I've been bad. Forgive me. Have mercy and
pity upon me! Give me another chance, in Jesus' name ... Oh-h-h-h-h!"

Eugene had moments of furious anger because of these demonstrations. He
was angry that Gant, having eaten his cake, now howled because he had
stomach-ache and at the same time begged for more. Bitterly he reflected
that his father's life had devoured whatever had served it, and that few
men had had more sensuous enjoyment, or had been more ruthless in their
demands on others. He found these exhibitions, these wild denunciations
and cowardly grovellings in propitiation of a God none of them paid any
attention to in health, ugly and abominable. The constant meditation of
both Gant and Eliza on the death of others, their morbid raking of the
news for items announcing the death of some person known to them, their
weird absorption with the death of some toothless hag who, galled by
bedsores, at length found release after her eightieth year, while fire,
famine, and slaughter in other parts of the world passed unnoticed
by them, their extravagant superstition over what was local and
unimportant, seeing the intervention of God in the death of a peasant,
and the suspension of divine law and natural order in their own, filled
him with choking fury.

But Eliza was in splendid condition now to ponder upon the death of
others. Her health was perfect. She was in her middle fifties: she had
grown triumphantly stronger after the diseases of the middle years.
White, compact, a great deal heavier now than she had ever been, she
performed daily tasks of drudgery in the maintenance of Dixieland, that
would have floored a strong negro. She hardly ever got to bed before two
o'clock in the morning, and was up again before seven.

She admitted her health grudgingly. She made the most of every ache, and
she infuriated Gant by meeting every complaint with a corresponding
account of her own disorders. When badgered by Helen because of her
supposed neglect of the sick man or when the concentration of attention
upon the invalid piqued her jealousy, she smiled with white tremulous
bitterness, hinting darkly:

"He may not be the first to go. I had a premonition--I don't know what
else you'd call it--the other day. I tell you what--it may not be long
now----" Her eyes bleared with pity--shaking her puckered mouth, she
wept at her own funeral.

"Good heavens, mamma!" Helen burst out furiously. "There's nothing wrong
with you. Papa's a sick man! Don't you realise that?"

She didn't.

"Pshaw!" she said. "There's nothing much wrong with him. McGuire told me
two men out of three have it after they're fifty."

His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of hatred against her
crescent health. It made him mad to see her stand so strong. Murderous,
impotent, baffled--a maniacal anger against her groped for an outlet in
him, sometimes exploding in a wild inchoate scream.

He yielded weakly to invalidism, he became tyrannous of attention,
jealous of service. Her indifference to his health maddened him, created
a morbid hunger for pity and tears. At times he got insanely drunk and
tried to frighten her by feigning death, one time so successfully that
Ben, bending over his rigid form in the hallway, was whitened with
conviction.

"I can't feel his heart, mamma," he said, with a nervous whicker of his
lips.

"Well," she said, picking her language with deliberate choosiness, "the
pitcher went to the well once too often. I knew it would happen sooner
or later."

Through a slotted eye he glared murderously at her. Judicially, with
placid folded hands, she studied him. Her calm eye caught the slow
movement of a stealthy inhalation.

"You get his purse, son, and any papers he may have," she directed.
"I'll call the undertaker."

With an infuriate scream the dead awakened.

"I thought that would bring you to," she said complacently.

He scrambled to his feet.

"You hell-hound!" he yelled. "You would drink my heart's blood. You are
without mercy and without pity--inhuman and bloody monster that you
are."

"Some day," Eliza observed, "you'll cry wolf-wolf once too often."


He went three times a week to Cardiac's office for treatment. The dry
doctor had grown old; behind his dusty restraint, the prim authority
of his manner, there was a deepening well of senile bawdry. He had a
comfortable fortune, he cared little for his dwindling practice. He was
still a brilliant bacteriologist: he spent hours over slides etched in
flowering patterns of bacilli, and he was sought after by diseased
prostitutes, to whom he rendered competent service.

He dissuaded the Gants from surgery. He was jealously absorbed in the
treatment of Gant's disease, scoffed at operations, and insisted he
could give adequate relief.




XXI


During the first years of this illness Gant showed a diminished, but
not a seriously impaired, energy. At first he had, under the doctor's
treatment, periods of tranquillity when he almost believed himself well.
There were also times when he became a whining dotard over night, lay
indolently abed for days, and was flabbily acquiescent to his disorder.
These climaxes usually came on the heels of a roaring spree. The saloons
had been closed for years: the town had been one of the first to vote on
"local option."

Gant had piously contributed his vote for purity. Eugene remembered the
day, years before, when he went proudly with his father to the polls.
The militant "drys" had agreed to advertise their vote by wearing a
scrap of white silk in their lapels. That was for purity. The defiant
wets wore "red."

Announced by violent trumpetings in the Protestant churches, the day
of atonement dawned on a seasoned army of well drilled teetotalers.
Those wets who had victoriously withstood the pressure of hearth and
pulpit--their number (_ai, ai_) was small--went to their death with
the gallant swagger, and with the gleam of purloined honour, of men who
are to die fighting most desperately against the engulfing mob.

They did not know how gallant was their cause: they knew only that
they had stood against the will of a priest-ridden community--the most
annihilating force in the village. They had never been told they stood
for liberty; they stood rubily, stubbornly, with the strong brown smell
of shame in their nostrils, for the bloodshot, malt-mouthed, red-nosed,
loose-pursed Demon Rum. So, they came down with vine leaves in their
hair, and a good fog of rye upon their breaths, and with brave set
smiles around their determined mouths.

As they approached the polls, glancing, like surrounded knights, for an
embattled brother, the church women of the town, bent like huntresses
above the straining leash, gave the word to the eager children of the
Sunday schools. Dressed all in white, and clutching firmly in their
small hands the tiny stems of American flags, the pigmies, monstrous as
only children can be when they become the witless mouths of slogans and
crusades, charged hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their
Gulliver.

"There he is, children. Go get him."

Swirling around the marked man in wild elves' dance, they sang with
piping empty violence:

  "We are some fond mother's treasure,
     Men and women of to-morrow,
   For a moment's empty pleasure
     Would you give us lifelong sorrow?

   Think of sisters, wives, and mothers,
     Of helpless babes in some low slum,
   Think not of yourself, but others,
     Vote against the Demon Rum."

Eugene shuddered, and looked up at Gant's white emblem with coy pride.
They walked happily by unhappy alcoholics, deltaed in foaming eddies of
innocence, and smiling murderously down at some fond mother's treasure.

If they were mine I'd warm their little tails, they thought--privately.

Outside the corrugated walls of the warehouse, Gant paused for a moment
to acknowledge the fervent congratulation of a group of ladies from
the First Baptist Church: Mrs. Tarkinton, Mrs. Fagg Sluder, Mrs. C. M.
McDonnell, and Mrs. W.H. (Pett) Pentland, who, heavily powdered, trailed
her long skirt of grey silk with a musty rustle and sneered elegantly
down over her whaleboned collar. She was very fond of Gant.

"Where's Will?" he asked.

"Feathering the pockets of the licker interests, when he ought to be
down here doing the Lord's Work," she replied with Christian bitterness.
"Nobody but you knows what I've had to put up with, Mr. Gant. You've had
to put up with the queer Pentland streak, in your own home," she added
with lucid significance.

He shook his head regretfully, and stared sorrowfully at the gutter.

"Ah, Lord, Pett! We've been through the mill--both of us."

A smell of drying roots and sassafras twisted a sharp spiral from the
warehouse into the thin slits of his nostrils.

"When the time comes to speak up for the right," Pett announced to
several of the ladies, "you'll always find Will Gant ready to do his
part."

With far-seeing statesmanship he looked westward toward Pisgah.

"Licker," he said, "is a curse and a care. It has caused the sufferings
of untold millions----"

"Amen, Amen," Mrs. Tarkinton chanted softly, swaying her wide hips
rhythmically.

"----it has brought poverty, disease, and suffering to hundreds of
thousands of homes, broken the hearts of wives and mothers, and taken
bread from the mouths of little orphaned children."

"Amen, brother."

"It has been," Gant began, but at this moment his uneasy eye lighted
upon the broad red face of Tim O'Doyle and the fierce whiskered
whiskiness of Major Ambrose Nethersole, two prominent publicans,
who were standing near the entrance not six feet away and listening
attentively.

"Go on!" Major Nethersole urged, with the deep chest notes of a
bullfrog. "Go on, W.O., but for God's sake, don't belch!"

"Begod!" said Tim O'Doyle, wiping a tiny rill of tobacco juice from the
thick simian corner of his mouth, "I've seen him start for the door and
step through the windey. When we see him coming we hire two extra bottle
openers. He used to give the barman a bonus to get up early."

"Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of you," said Gant scathingly.
"They are the lowest of the low, the whisky-besotted dregs of humanity,
who deserve to bear not even the name of men, so far have they
retrograded backwards."

With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he departed into the
warehouse.

"By God!" said Ambrose Nethersole approvingly. "It takes W.O. to tie a
knot in the tail of the English language. It always did."


But within two months he moaned bitterly his unwetted thirst. For
several years he ordered, from time to time, the alloted quota--a gallon
of whisky every two weeks--from Baltimore. It was the day of the blind
tiger. The town was mined thickly with them. Bad rye and moonshine corn
were the prevailing beverages. He grew old, he was sick, he still drank.

A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the parched gulley of
desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery. He made pretty young
summer widows at Dixieland presents of money, underwear, and silk
stockings, which he drew on over their shapely legs in the dusty gloom
of his little office. Smiling with imperturbable tenderness, Mrs.
Selborne thrust out her heavy legs slowly to swell with warm ripe smack
his gift of flowered green-silk garters. Wetting his thumb with sly thin
after-smile, he told.

A grass widow, forty-nine, with piled hair of dyed henna, corseted
breasts and hips architecturally protuberant in a sharp diagonal, meaty
mottled arms, and a gulched face of leaden flaccidity puttied up
brightly with cosmetics, rented the upstairs of Woodson Street while
Helen was absent.

"She looks like an adventuress, hey?" said Gant hopefully.

She had a son. He was fourteen, with a round olive face, a soft white
body, and thin legs. He bit his nails intently. His hair and eyes were
dark, his face full of sad stealth. He was wise and made himself
unobtrusively scarce at proper times.

Gant came home earlier. The widow rocked brightly on the porch. He bowed
sweepingly, calling her Madam. Coy-kittenish, she talked down at him,
slogged against the creaking stair rail. She leered cosily at him. She
came and went freely through his sitting-room, where he now slept. One
evening, just after he had entered, she came in from the bathroom,
scented lightly with the best soap, and beefily moulded into a flame-red
kimono.

A handsome woman yet, he thought. Good evening, madam.

He got up from his rocker, put aside the crackling sheets of the evening
paper (Republican), and unclipped his steel-rimmed glasses from the
great blade of his nose.

She came over with sprightly gait to the empty hearth, clasping her
wrapper tightly with veinous hands.

Swiftly, with a gay leer, she opened the garment, disclosing her thin
legs, silkshod, and her lumpy hips, gaudily clothed in ruffled drawers
of blue silk.

"Aren't they pretty?" she twittered invitingly but obscurely. Then, as
he took an eager stride forward, she skipped away like a ponderous mnad
soliciting Bacchic pursuit.

"A pair of pippins," he agreed inclusively.

After this, she prepared breakfast for him. From Dixieland, Eliza
surveyed them with a bitter eye. He had no talent for concealment. His
visits morning and evening were briefer, his tongue more benevolent.

"I know what you're up to down there," she said. "You needn't think I
don't."

He grinned sheepishly and wet his thumb. Her mouth worked silently at
attempted speech for a moment. She speared a frying steak and flipped it
over on its raw back, smiling vengefully in a mounting column of greasy
blue vapour. He poked her clumsily with his stiff fingers; she shrieked
a protest mixed of anger and amusement, and moved awkwardly out of his
reach with bridling gait.

"Get away! I don't want you round me! It's too late for that." She
laughed with nagging mockery.

"Don't you wish you could, though? I'll vow!" she continued, kneading
her lips for several seconds in an effort to speak. "I'd be ashamed.
Every one's laughing at you behind your back."

"You lie! By God, you lie!" he thundered magnificently, touched.
Hammer-hurling Thor.

But he tired very quickly of his new love. He was weary, and frightened
by his depletion. For a time he gave the widow small sums of money, and
forgot the rent. He transferred to her his storming abuse, muttered
ominously to himself in long aisle-pacings at his shop, when he saw that
he had lost the ancient freedom of his house and saddled himself with a
tyrannous hag. One evening he returned insanely drunk, routed her out
of her chamber and pursued her unfrocked, untoothed, unputtied, with a
fluttering length of kimono in her palsied hand, driving her finally
into the yard beneath the big cherry tree, which he circled, howling,
making frantic lunges for her as she twittered with fear, casting
splintered glances all over the listening neighbourhood as she put on
the crumpled wrapper, hid partially the indecent jigging of her breasts,
and implored succour. It did not come.

"You bitch!" he screamed. "I'll kill you. You have drunk my heart's-blood,
you have driven me to the brink of destruction, and you gloat upon my
misery, listening with fiendish delight to my death-rattle, bloody and
unnatural monster that you are."

She kept the tree deftly between them and, when his attention was
diverted for a moment to the flood of anathema, tore off on fear-quick
feet, streetward to the haven of the Tarkintons' house. As she rested
there, in Mrs. Tarkinton's consolatory arms, weeping hysterically and
dredging gullies in her poor painted face, they heard his chaotic
footsteps blundering within his house, the heavy crash of furniture,
and his fierce curse when he fell.

"He'll kill himself! He'll kill himself!" she cried. "He doesn't know
what he's doing. Oh, my God!" she wept. "I've never been talked to that
way by any man in my life!"

Gant fell heavily within his house. There was silence. She rose
fearfully.

"He's not a bad man," she whispered.


One morning in early summer, after Helen had returned, Eugene was
wakened by scuffling feet and excited cries along the small board-walk
that skirted the house on its upper side and led to the playhouse, a
musty little structure of pine with a single big room, which he could
almost touch from the sloping roof that flowed about his gabled backroom
window. The playhouse was another of the strange extravagances of
Gantian fancy: it had been built for the children when they were young.
It had been for many years closed, it was a retreat of delight; its
imprisoned air, stale and cool, was scented permanently with old pine
boards, cased books, and dusty magazines.

For some weeks now it had been occupied by Mrs. Selborne's South
Carolina cook, Annie, a plump comely negress of thirty-five, with a rich
coppery skin. The woman had come into the mountains for the summer: she
was a good cook and expected work at hotels or boarding-houses. Helen
engaged her for five dollars a Week. It was an act of pride.

That morning, Gant had wakened earlier and stared at his ceiling
thoughtfully. He had risen, dressed, and wearing his leather slippers,
walked softly back, along the boards, to the playhouse. Helen was roused
by Annie's loud protests. Tingling with premonition she came downstairs,
and found Gant wringing his hands and moaning as he walked up and down
the washroom. Through the open doors she heard the negress complaining
loudly to herself as she banged out drawers and slammed her belongings
together.

"I ain't used to no such goins-on. I'se a married woman, I is. I ain't
goin' to stay in dis house anothah minnit."

Helen turned furiously upon Gant and shook him.

"You rotten old thing, you!" she cried. "How dare you!"

"Merciful God!" he whined, stamping his foot like a child, and pacing up
and down. "Why did this have to come upon me in my old age!" He began
to sniffle affectedly. "Boo-hoo-hoo! O Jesus, it's fearful, it's awful,
it's cruel that you should put this affliction on me." His contempt for
reason was Parnassian. He accused God for exposing him; he wept because
he had been caught.

Helen rushed out to the playhouse and with large gesture and hearty
entreaty strove to appease outraged Annie.

"Come on, Annie," she coaxed. "I'll give you a dollar a week more if you
stay. Forget about it!"

"No'm," said Annie stubbornly. "I cain't stay heah any longer. I'se
afraid of dat man."

Gant paused in his distracted pacing from time to time long enough
to cock an eager ear. At each iteration of Annie's firm refusals, he
fetched out a deep groan and took up his lament again.

Luke who had descended, had fidgeted about in a nervous prance from
one large bare foot to another. Now he went to the door and looked out,
bursting suddenly into a large Whah-Whah as he caught sight of the
sullen respectability of the negress' expression. Helen came back into
the house with an angry perturbed face.

"She'll tell this all over town," she announced.

Gant moaned in lengthy exhalations. Eugene, shocked at first, and
frightened, flung madly across the kitchen linoleum in twisting leaps,
falling catlike on his bare soles. He squealed ecstatically at Ben who
loped in scowling, and began to snicker in short contemptuous fragments.

"And of course she'll tell Mrs. Selborne all about it, as soon as she
goes back to Henderson," Helen continued.

"O my God!" Gant whined, "why was this put on me----"

"O gotohell! Gotohell!" she said comically, her wrath loosened suddenly
by a ribald and exasperated smile. They howled.

"I jhall dy-ee."

Eugene choked in faint hiccoughs and began to slide gently down the
kitchen-washroom door jamb.

"Ah! you little idiot!" Ben snarled, lifting his white hand sharply. He
turned away quickly with a flickering smile.

At this moment, Annie appeared on the walk outside the door, with a face
full of grieved decorum.

Luke looked nervously and gravely from his father to the negress,
fidgeting from one big foot to the other.

"I'se a married woman," said Annie. "I ain't used to nothin' like dis. I
wants my money."

Luke blew up in an explosion of wild laughter.

"Whah-whah!" He pronged her larded ribs with scooped fingers. She moved
away angrily, muttering.

Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one leg out gently as
if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling blindly at the neckband
of his nightshirt. A faint clucking sound came at intervals from his
wide-open mouth.

They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad laughter all the
welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered in them, washing
out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and fatality of their
lives, the pain of age and death.

Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament against God's lidless
stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with uneasy prying eyes, a
faint tickled grin playing craftily about his wailing mouth.


Roofing the deep tides, swinging in their embrace, rocked Eliza's life
Sargassic, as when, at morning, a breath of kitchen air squirmed through
her guarded crack of door, and fanned the pendant clusters of old string
in floating rhythm. She rubbed the sleep gently from her small weak
eyes, smiling dimly as she thought, unwakened, of ancient losses. Her
worn fingers still groped softly in the bed beside her, and when she
found it vacant, she awoke. Remembered. My youngest, my oldest, final
bitter fruit, O dark of soul, O far and lonely, where? Remembered O his
face! Death-son, partner of my peril, last coinage of my flesh, who
warmed my flanks and nestled to my back. Gone? Cut off from me? When?
Where?

The screen slammed, the market boy dumped ground sausage on the table, a
negress fumbled at the stove. Awake now.


Ben moved quietly, but not stealthily, about, confessing and denying
nothing. His thin laughter pierced the darkness softly above the droning
creak of the wooden porch-swing. Mrs. Pert laughed gently, comfortingly.
She was forty-three: a large woman of gentle manners, who drank a great
deal. When she was drunk, her voice was soft, low, and fuzzy, she
laughed uncertainly, mildly, and walked with careful alcoholic gravity.
She dressed well: she was well fleshed, but not sensual-looking. She had
good features, soft oaken hair, blue eyes, a little bleared. She laughed
with a comfortable, happy chuckle. They were all very fond of her. Helen
called her "Fatty."

Her husband was a drug salesman: he travelled through Tennessee,
Arkansas, and Mississippi, and returned to Altamont for a fortnight
every four months. Her daughter, Catherine, who was almost Ben's age,
came to Dixieland for a few weeks each summer. She was a school-teacher
in a public school in a Tennessee village. Ben squired both.

Mrs. Pert chuckled softly when she spoke to him, and called him "Old
Ben." In the darkness he sat, talking a little, humming a little,
laughing occasionally in his thin minor key, quietly, with a cigarette
between his forked ivory fingers, drawing deeply. He would buy a flask
of whisky and they would drink it very quietly. Perhaps they talked a
little more. But they were never riotous. Occasionally, they would rise
at midnight from the swing, and go out into the street, departing under
leafy trees. They would not return during the night. Eliza, ironing out
a great pile of rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would listen. Presently,
she would mount the stairs, peer carefully into Mrs. Pert's room, and
descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded.

She had to speak these things to Helen. There was a strange defiant
communion between them. They laughed or were bitter together.

"Why, of course," said Helen, impatiently, "I've known it all along."
But she looked beyond the door curiously, her big gold-laced teeth
half-shown in her opened mouth, the child look of belief, wonder,
scepticism, and hurt innocency in her big highboned face.

"Do you suppose he really does? Oh surely not, mamma. She's old enough
to be his mother."

Across Eliza's white puckered face, thoughtful and reproving, a sly
smile broke. She rubbed her finger under the broad wings of her nose to
conceal it, and snickered.

"I tell you what!" she said. "He's a chip off the old block. His father
over again," she whispered. "It's in the blood."

Helen laughed huskily, picking vaguely at her chin, and gazing out
across the weedy garden.

"Poor old Ben!" she said, and her eyes, she did not know why, were
sheeted with tears. "Well, 'Fatty's' a lady. I like her--I don't care
who knows it," she added defiantly. "It's their business anyway. They're
quiet about it. You've got to say that much for them."

She was silent a moment.

"Women are crazy about him," she said. "They like the quiet ones, don't
they? He's a gentleman."

Eliza shook her head portentously for several moments.

"What do you think!" she whispered, and shook her pursed lips again.
"Always ten years older at least."

"Poor old Ben!" Helen said again.

"The quiet one. The sad one. I tell you what!" Eliza shook her head,
unable to speak. Her eyes too were wet.

They thought of sons and lovers: they drew closer in their communion,
they drank the cup of their twin slavery as they thought of the Gant men
who would always know hunger, the strangers on the land, the unknown
farers who had lost their way. O lost!


The hands of women were hungry for his crisp hair. When they came to
the paper office to insert advertisements they asked for him. Frowning
gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet crossed, reading, in a
somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had written. His thin hairy
wrists slatted leanly against his starched white cuffs, his strong
nervous fingers, ivoried by nicotine, smoothed out the crumples.
Scowling intently, he bent his fine head, erasing, arranging. Empathic
lady-fingers twitched. "How's that?" Answers vague-voiced, eyes tangled
in crisp hair. "Oh, much better, thank you."

Wanted: frowning boy-man head for understanding fingers of mature and
sympathetic woman. Unhappily married. Address Mrs. B. J. X., Box 74.
Eight cents a word for one insertion. "Oh [tenderly], thank you, Ben."

"Ben," said Jack Eaton, the advertising manager, thrusting his plump
face into the city editor's office, "one of your harem's out there. She
wanted to murder me when I tried to take it. See if she's got a friend."

"Oh, listen to this, won't you?" Ben snickered fiercely to the City
Editor. "You missed your calling, Eaton. What you want is the end-man's
job with Honeyboy Evans."

Scowling, he cast the cigarette from his ivory hand, and loped out into
the office. Eaton remained a moment to laugh with the City Editor. Oh,
rare Ben Gant!


Sometimes, returning late at night to Woodson Street, in the crowded
summer season, he slept with Eugene in the front room upstairs
where they had all been born. Propped high on pillows in the old
cream-coloured bed, painted gaily at head and foot with round medals of
clustering fruit, he read aloud in a quiet puzzled voice, fumbling over
pronunciation, the baseball stories of Ring Lardner. _You know me, Al._
Just outside the windows the flat veranda roof was still warm from its
daytime exhalations of tar-caulked tin. Rich cobwebbed grapes hung in
packed clusters among the broad leaves. _I didn't raise my boy to be a
southpaw. I've a good mind to give Gleason a sock in the eye._

Ben read painfully, pausing a moment later to snicker. Thus, like a
child, he groped intently at all meanings, with scowling studiousness.
Women liked to see him scowl and study so. He was sudden only in anger,
and in his quick communications with his angel.


Eliza went to Florida again during his fourteenth year and left him to
board with the Leonards. Helen was drifting, with crescent weariness
and fear, through the cities of the East and Middle-West. She sang
for several weeks in a small cabaret in Baltimore, she moved on to
Philadelphia and thumped out popular tunes on a battered piano at the
music counter of a five and ten cent store, with studious tongue
out-thrust as she puzzled through new scores.

Gant wrote her faithfully twice a week--a blue but copious log of
existence. Occasionally he enclosed small cheques, which she saved,
uncashed.

"Your mother," he wrote, "has gone off on another wild-goose chase to
Florida, leaving me here alone to face the music, freeze, or starve. God
knows what we'll all come to before the end of this fearful, hellish,
and damnable winter, but I predict the poorhouse and soup-kitchens like
we had in the Cleveland administration. When the Democrats are in, you
may as well begin to count your ribs. The banks have no money, people
are out of work. You can mark my words everything will go to the
tax-collector under the hammer before we're done. The temperature was
seven above when I looked this morning, coal has gone up seventy-five
cents a ton. The Sunny South. Keep off the grass said Bill Nye. Jesus
God! I passed the Southern Fuel Co. yesterday and saw old Wagner at the
window with a fiendish smile of gloatation on his face as he looked out
on the sufferings of the widows and orphans. Little does he care if they
all freeze. Bob Grady dropped dead Tuesday morning as he was coming out
of the Citizen's Bank. I had known him twenty-five years. He'd never
been sick a day in his life. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Old Gant will be the next. I have been eating at Mrs. Sales' since
your mother went away. You've never seen such a table as she keeps in
your life--a profusion of fruits piled up in pyramids, stewed prunes,
peaches, and preserves, big roasts of pork, beef, lamb, cold cuts of ham
and tongue, and a half dozen vegetables in an abundance that beggars
description. How in God's name she does it for thirty-five cents I don't
know. Eugene is staying with the Leonards while your mother's away. I
take him up to Sales' with me once or twice a week and give him a square
meal. They look mighty serious when they see those long legs coming. God
knows where he puts it all--he can eat more than any three people I ever
saw. I suppose he gets pretty lean pickings at the school. He's got the
lean and hungry Gant look. Poor child. He has no mother any more. I'll
do the best I can for him until the smash comes. Leonard comes and brags
about him every week. He says his equal is not to be found anywhere.
Everyone in town has heard of him. Preston Carr (who's sure to be the
next governor) was talking to me about him the other day. He wants me to
send him to the State university law school where he will make lifelong
friends among the people of his own State, and then put him into
politics. It's what I should have done. I'm going to give him a good
education. The rest is up to him. Perhaps he'll be a credit to the name.
You haven't seen him since he put on long pants. His mother picked
out a beautiful suit at Moale's Christmas. He went down to Daisy's for
Christmas and put them on. I bought him a cheap pair at the Racket Store
for everyday wear. He can save the good ones for Sunday. Your mother has
let the Old Barn to Mrs. Revell until she gets back. I went in the other
day and found it warm for the first time in my life. She keeps the
furnace going and she's not afraid to burn coal. I hardly ever see Ben
from one week to another. He comes in and prowls around in the kitchen
at one and two o'clock in the morning and I'm up and gone hours before
he's awake. You can get nothing out of him--he never says half-a-dozen
words and if you ask him a civil question he cuts you off short. I see
him down-town late at night sometimes with Mrs. P. They're thick as
thieves together. I guess she's a bad egg. This is all for this time.
John Duke was shot and killed by the house detective at the Whitstone
hotel Sunday night. He was drunk and threatening to shoot everyone. It's
a sad thing for his wife. He left three children. She was in to see me
to-day. He was well-liked by everyone but a terror when he drank. My
heart bled for her. She's a pretty little woman. Liquor has caused more
misery than all the other evils in the world put together. I curse the
day it was first invented. Enclosed find a small cheque to buy yourself
a present. God knows what we're coming to. Aff. Your Father, W. O.
Gant."

She saved carefully all his letters--written on his heavy slick business
stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his crippled right hand.

In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared
thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at
Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length to
Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and citrous fruits, the
Pentlands waited her approach, Pett, with a cold lust of battle on her
face, Will with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled
stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand.




XXII


When he had been a student at Leonard's for two years, Ben got work
for him as a paper carrier. Eliza grumbled at the boy's laziness. She
complained that she could get him to do little or nothing for her. In
fact, he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of boarding-house
routine. Her demands on him were not heavy, but they were frequent and
unexpected. He was depressed at the uselessness of effort in Dixieland,
at the total erasure of all daily labour. If she had given him position,
the daily responsibility of an ordered task, he could have fulfilled it
with zeal. But her own method was much too random: she wanted to keep
him on tap for an occasional errand, and he did not have her interest.

Dixieland was the heart of her life. It owned her. It appalled him. When
she sent him to the grocer's for bread, he felt wearily that the bread
would be eaten by strangers, that nothing out of the effort of their
lives grew younger, better, or more beautiful, that all was erased
in a daily wash of sewage. She sent him forth in the rank thicket
of her garden to hoe out the swarming weeds that clustered about her
vegetables, which flourished, as did all the earth, under her careless
touch. He knew, as he chopped down in a weary frenzy, that the weeds
would grow again in the hot sun-stench, that her vegetables--weeded or
not--would grow fat and be fed to her boarders, and that her life, hers
alone, would endure to something. As he looked at her, he felt the
weariness and horror of time: all but her must die in a smothering
Sargasso. Thus, flailing the clotted earth drunkenly, he would be
brought to suddenly by her piercing scream from the high back porch, and
realize that he had destroyed totally a row of young bladed corn.

"Why, what on earth, boy!" she fretted angrily, peering down at him
through a shelving confusion of wash-tubs, limp drying stockings, empty
milk-bottles, murky and unwashed, and rusty lard-buckets. "I'll vow!"
she said, turning to Mr. Baskett, the Hattiesburg cotton merchant, who
grinned down malarially through his scraggly moustaches, "what am I
going to do with him? He's chopped down every stock of corn in the row."

"Yes," Mr. Baskett said, peering over, "and missed every weed. Boy," he
added judicially, "you need two months on a farm."

The bread that I fetch will be eaten by strangers. I carry coal and
split up wood for fires to warm them. Smoke. _Fuimus fumus._ All of our
life goes up in smoke. There is no structure, no creation in it, not
even the smoky structure of dreams. Come lower, angel; whisper in our
ears. We are passing away in smoke and there is nothing to-day but
weariness to pay us for yesterday's toil. How may we save ourselves?


He was given the Niggertown route--the hardest and least profitable of
all. He was paid two cents a copy for weekly deliveries, given ten per
cent of his weekly collections, and ten cents for every new subscription.
Thus, he was able to earn four or five dollars a week. His thin
undeveloped body drank sleep with insatiable thirst, but it was now
necessary for him to get up at half-past three in the morning with
darkness and silence making an unreal humming in his drugged ears.

Strange aerial music came fluting out of darkness, or over his
slow-wakening senses swept the great waves of symphonic orchestration.
Fiend-voices, beautiful and sleep-loud, called down through darkness and
light, developing the thread of ancient memory.

Staggering blindly in the whitewashed glare, his eyes, sleep-corded,
opened slowly as he was born anew, umbilically cut, from darkness.

Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness. Waken, phantom, O into us.
Try, try, O try the way. Open the wall of light. Ghost, ghost, who is
the ghost? O lost. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O whisper-tongued
laughter. Eugene! Eugene! Here, O here, Eugene. Here, Eugene. The way is
here, Eugene. Have you forgotten? The leaf, the rock, the wall of light.
Lift up the rock, Eugene, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door. Return,
return.

A voice, sleep-strange and loud, forever far-near, spoke.

Eugene!

Spoke, ceased, continued without speaking, to speak. In him spoke. Where
darkness, son, is light. Try, boy, the word you know remember. In the
beginning was the logos. Over the border the borderless green-forested
land. Yesterday, remember?

Far-forested, a horn-note wound. Sea-forested, water-far, the grotted
coral sea-far horn-note. The pillioned ladies witch-faced in
bottle-green robes saddle-swinging. Merwomen unscaled and lovely in
sea-floor colonnades. The hidden land below the rock. The flitting
wood-girls growing into bark. Far-faint, as he wakened, they besought
him with lessening whirr. Then deeper song, fiend-throated, wind-shod.
Brother, O brother! They shot down the brink of darkness, gone on the
wind like bullets. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back
again.


He dressed and descended the stairs gently to the back porch. The cool
air, charged with blue starlight, shocked his body into wakefulness, but
as he walked townward up the silent streets, the strange ringing in his
ears persisted. He listened, like his own ghost, to his footsteps, heard
from afar the winking flicker of the street-lamps, saw, from sea-sunk
eyes, the town.

There sounded in his heart a solemn music. It filled the earth, the air,
the universe; it was not loud, but it was omnipresent, and it spoke to
him of death and darkness, and of the focal march of all who lived or
had lived, converging on a plain. The world was filled with silent
marching men: no word was spoken, but in the heart of each there was a
common knowledge, the word that all men knew and had forgotten, the lost
key opening the prison gates, the lane-end into heaven, and as the music
soared and filled him, he cried: "I will remember. When I come to the
place, I shall know."


Hot bands of light streamed murkily from the doors and windows of the
office. From the press-room downstairs there was an ascending roar as
the big press mounted to its capacity. As he entered the office and
drank in the warm tides of steel and ink that soaked the air, he awoke
suddenly, his light-drugged limbs solidifying with a quick shock, as
would some aerial spirit, whose floating body corporealises the instant
it touches earth. The carriers, waiting in a boisterous line, filed up
to the circulation manager's desk, depositing their collections, cold
handfuls of greasy coin. Seated beneath a green-shaded light, he ran
swiftly down their books, totalling up their figures and counting
nickels, dimes and pennies into the little spooned trays of a drawer.
Then he gave to each a scrawled order for his morning quota.

They ran downstairs, eager as whippets to be off, brandishing their
slips at a sullen counter whose black fingers galloped accurately across
the stiff ridges of a great sheaf. He allowed them two "extras." If the
carrier was not scrupulous, he increased his number of spare copies by
keeping on his book the names of a half-dozen discontinued subscribers.
These surplus copies were always good for coffee and pie with the
lunch-man, or as tribute to a favourite policeman, fireman, or
motor-man.

In the press-pit Harry Tugman loafed under their stare comfortably, a
fat trickle of cigarette smoke coiling from his nostrils. He glanced
over the press with professional carelessness, displaying his powerful
chest with its thick bush, which lay a dark blot under his sweat-wet
under-shirt. An assistant press-man climbed nimbly among roaring pistons
and cylinders, an oil-can and a bunch of waste in his hand. A broad
river of white paper rushed constantly up from the cylinder and leaped
into a mangling chaos of machinery whence it emerged a second later,
cut, printed, folded and stacked, sliding along a board with a hundred
others in a fattening sheaf.

Machine-magic! Why not men, like that? Doctor, surgeon, poet,
priest--stacked, folded, printed.

Harry Tugman cast away his wet fragment of cigarette with a luxurious
grimace. The carriers eyed him reverently. Once he had knocked a
sub-pressman down for sitting in his chair. He was Boss. He got $55 a
week. If he was not pleased he could get work at any time on the _New
Orleans Times-Picayune_, the _Louisville Courier Journal_, the _Atlanta
Constitution_, the _Knoxville Sentinel_, the _Norfolk Pilot_. He could
travel.

In a moment more they were out on the streets, hobbling along rapidly
under the accustomed weight of the crammed canvas bags.


He was most desperately afraid of failure. He listened with constricted
face to Eliza's admonition.

"Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Make them think you are somebody!"

He had little confidence in himself; he recoiled in advance from the
humiliation of dismissal. He feared the sabre-cut of language, and
before his own pride he drew back and was afraid.

For three mornings he accompanied the retiring carrier, gathering his
mind to focal intensity while he tried to memorise each stereotyped
movement of the delivery, tracing again and again the labyrinthine web
of Niggertown, wreaking his plan out among the sprawled chaos of clay
and slime, making incandescent those houses to which a paper was
delivered, and forgetting the others. Years later, alone in darkness,
when he had forgotten the twisted anarchy of that pattern, he still
remembered a corner where he left his bag while he climbed a spur of
hill, a bank down which he clambered to three rotting shacks, a high
porched house into which accurately he shot his folded block of news.

The retiring carrier was a robust country boy of seventeen who had been
given better employment at the paper office. His name was Jennings Ware.
He was tough, good-humoured, a little cynical, and he smoked a great
many cigarettes. He was clothed in vitality and comfort. He taught his
pupil when and where to expect the prying face of "Foxy," how to escape
discovery under the lunch-room counter, and how to fold a paper and
throw it with the speed and accuracy of a ball.

In the fresh pre-natal morning they began their route, walking down the
steep hill of Valley Street into tropical sleep, past the stabled torpor
of black sleepers, past all the illicit loves, the casual and
innumerable adulteries of Niggertown. As the stiff block of paper
thudded sharply on the flimsy porch of a shack, or smacked the loose
boarding of a door, they were answered by a long sullen moan of
discontent. They sniggered.

"Check this one off," said Jennings Ware, "if you can't collect next
time. She owes for six weeks now."

"This one," he said, flipping a paper quietly on a door-mat, "is good
pay. They're good niggers. You'll get your money every Wednesday."

"There's a High Yaller in here," he said, hurling the paper against the
door with a whizzing smack and smiling, as a young full-meated woman's
yell of indignation answered, a thin devil's grin. "You can have that if
you want it."

A wan smile of fear struggled across Eugene's mouth. Jennings Ware
looked at him shrewdly, but did not press him. Jennings Ware was a
good-hearted boy.

"She's a pretty good old girl," he said. "You've got a right to a few
dead-heads. Take it out in trade."

They walked on down the dark unpaved street, folding papers rapidly
during the intervals between delivery.

"It's a hell of a route," said Jennings Ware. "When it rains it's
terrible. You'll go into mud up to your knees. And you can't collect
from half the bastards." He hurled a paper viciously.

"But, oh man!" he said, after a moment. "If you want Jelly Roll you've
come to the right place. I ain't kidding you!"

"With--with niggers?" Eugene whispered, moistening his dry lips.

Jennings Ware turned his red satirical face on him.

"You don't see any Society Belles around here, do you?" he said.

"Are niggers good?" Eugene asked in a small dry voice.

"Boy!" The word blew out of Jennings Ware's mouth like an explosion. He
was silent a moment.

"There ain't nothing better," he said.


At first, the canvas strap of the paper-bag bit cruelly across his
slender shoulders. He strained against the galling weight that pulled
him earthwards. The first weeks were like a warring nightmare: day after
day he fought his way up to liberation. He knew all the sorrow of those
who carry weight; he knew, morning by morning, the aerial ecstasy of
release. As his load lightened with the progress of his route, his
leaning shoulder rose with winged buoyancy, his straining limbs grew
light: at the end of his labour his flesh, touched sensuously by
fatigue, bounded lightly from the earth. He was Mercury chained by
fardels, Ariel bent beneath a pack: freed, his wing-shod feet trod
brightness. He sailed in air. The rapier stars glinted upon his serfdom:
dawn reddened on release. He was like a sailor drowned within the
hold, who gropes to life and morning through a hatch; a diver twined
desperately in octopal feelers, who cuts himself from death and mounts
slowly from the sea-floor into light.

Within a month a thick hummock of muscle hardened on his shoulder: he
bent jubilantly into his work. He had now no fear of failure. His heart
lifted like a proud crested cock. He had been dropped among others
without favour, and he surpassed them. He was a lord of darkness; he
exulted in the lonely sufficiency of his work. He walked into the
sprawled chaos of the settlement, the rifleman of news for sleeping men.
His fast hands blocked the crackling sheet, he swung his lean arm like a
whip. He saw the pale stars drown, and ragged light break open on the
hills. Alone, the only man alive, he began the day for men, as he walked
by the shuttered windows and heard the long denned snore of the tropics.
He walked amid this close thick sleep, hearing again the ghostly ring of
his own feet, and the vast orchestral music of darkness. As the grey
tide of morning surged westward he awoke.

And Eugene watched the slow fusion of the seasons; he saw the royal
processional of the months; he saw the summer light eat like a river
into dark; he saw dark triumph once again; and he saw the minute-winning
days, like flies, buzz home to death.

In summer, full day had come before he finished: he walked home in a
world of wakenings. The first cars were grouped on the Square as he
passed, their new green paint giving them the pleasant appearance of
fresh toys. The huge battered cans of the milkmen glinted cleanly in
the sun. Light fell hopefully upon the swarthy greasiness of George
Chakales, nightman of the Athens Caf. The Hellenic Dawn. And in Uneeda
No. 1, upon the Square, Eugene sat, washing an egg-sandwich down with
long swallows of pungent coffee, stooled in a friendly company of
motor-men, policemen, chauffeurs, plasterers, and masons. It was very
pleasant, he felt, to complete one's work when all the world was
beginning theirs. He went home under singing trees of birds.

In autumn, a late red moon rode low in the skies till morning. The air
was filled with dropping leaves, there was a solemn thunder of great
trees upon the hills; sad phantasmal whisperings and the vast cathedral
music deepened in his heart.

In winter, he went down joyously into the dark howling wind, leaning his
weight upon its advancing wall as it swept up a hill; and when in early
Spring the small cold rain fell from the reeking sky he was content. He
was alone.


He harried his deficient subscribers for payment with a wild tenacity.
He accepted their easy promises without question; he hunted them down in
their own rooms, or in the rooms of a neighbour, he pressed so doggedly
that, at length, sullenly or good-humouredly, they paid a part of their
debt. This was more than any of his predecessors had accomplished,
but he fretted nervously over his accounts until he found that he had
become, for the circulation manager, the exemplar for indolent boys. As
he dumped his desperately gathered pile of "chicken feed" upon the man's
desk, his employer would turn accusingly to a delinquent boy, saying:

"Look at that! He does it every week! Niggers, too!"

His pallid face would flame with joy and pride. When he spoke to the
great man his voice trembled. He could hardly speak.

As the wind yelled through the dark, he burst into maniacal laughter. He
leaped high into the air with a scream of insane exultancy, burred in
his throat idiot animal-squeals, and shot his papers terrifically into
the flimsy boarding of the shacks. He was free. He was alone. He heard
the howl of a train-whistle, and it was not so far away. In the darkness
he flung his arm out to the man on the rails, his goggled brother with
steel-steady rail-fixed eyes.

He did not shrink so much, beneath the menace of the family fist. He was
more happily unmindful of his own unworthiness.

Assembled with three or four of the carriers in the lunch-room, he
learned to smoke: in the sweet blue air of Spring, as he sloped down to
his route, he came to know the beauty of Lady Nicotine, the delectable
wraith who coiled into his brain, left her poignant breath in his young
nostrils, her sharp kiss upon his mouth.

He was a sharp blade.

The Spring drove a thorn into his heart, it drew a wild cry from his
lips. For it, he had no speech.

He knew hunger. He knew thirst. A great flame rose in him. He cooled his
hot face in the night by bubbling water jets. Alone, he wept sometimes
with pain and ecstasy. At home the frightened silence of his childhood
was now touched with savage restraint. He was wired like a racehorse. A
white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him like a rocket, and for a
moment he would be cursing mad.

"What's wrong with him? Is it the Pentland crazy streak coming out?"
Helen asked, seated in Eliza's kitchen.

Eliza moulded her lips portentously for some time, shaking her head
slowly.

"Why," she said, with a cunning smile, "don't you know, child?"

His need for the negroes had become acute. He spent his afternoons after
school combing restlessly through the celled hive of Niggertown. The
rank stench of the branch, pouring its thick brown sewage down a bed of
worn boulders, the smell of wood-smoke and laundry stewing in a black
iron yard-pot, and the low jungle cadences of dusk, the forms that slid,
dropped and vanished, beneath a twinkling orchestration of small sounds.
Fat ropes of language in the dusk, the larded sizzle of frying fish, the
sad faint twanging of a banjo, and the stamp, far-faint, of heavy feet;
voices Nilotic, river-wailing, and the greasy light of four thousand
smoky lamps in shack and tenement.

From the worn central butte round which the colony swarmed, the panting
voices of the Calvary Baptist Church mounted, in an exhausting and
unceasing frenzy, from seven o'clock until two in the morning, in their
wild jungle wail of sin and love and death. The dark was hived with
flesh and mystery. Rich wells of laughter bubbled everywhere. The
cat-forms slid. Everything was immanent. Everything was far. Nothing
could be touched.

In this old witch-magic of the dark, he began to know the awful
innocence of evil, the terrible youth of an ancient race; his lips slid
back across his teeth, he prowled in darkness with loose swinging arms,
and his eyes shone. Shame and terror, indefinable, surged through him.
He could not face the question in his heart.

A good part of his subscription list was solidly founded among decent
and laborious darkies--barbers, tailors, grocers, pharmacists, and
ginghamed black housewives, who paid him promptly on a given day each
week, greeting him with warm smiles full of teeth, and titles of respect
extravagant and kindly: "Mister," "Colonel," "General," "Governor," and
so on. They all knew Gant.

But another part--the part in which his desire and wonder met--were
"floaters," young men and women of precarious means, variable lives, who
slid mysteriously from cell to cell, who peopled the night with their
flitting stealth. He sought these phantoms fruitlessly for weeks, until
he discovered that he might find them only on Sunday morning, tossed
like heavy sacks across one another, in the fetid dark of a tenement
room, a half-dozen young men and women, in a snoring exhaustion of
whisky-stupor and sexual depletion.


One Saturday evening, in the fading red of a summer twilight, he
returned to one of these tenements, a rickety three-storey shack, that
dropped its two lower floors down a tall clay bank at the western ledge,
near the whites. Two dozen men and women lived here. He was on the
search for a woman named Ella Corpening. He had never been able to find
her: she was weeks behind in her subscription. But her door stood open
to-night: a warm waft of air and cooking food came up to him. He
descended the rotten steps that climbed the bank.

Ella Corpening sat facing the door in a rocking chair, purring lazily
in the red glow of a little kitchen range, with her big legs stretched
comfortably out on the floor. She was a mulatto of twenty-six years, a
handsome woman of Amazonian proportions, with smooth tawny skin.

She was dressed in the garments of some former mistress: she wore a
brown woollen skirt, patent-leather shoes with high suede tops
pearl-buttoned, and grey silk hose. Her long heavy arms shone darkly
through the light texture of a freshly laundered white shirt-waist. A
lacing of cheap blue ribbon gleamed across the heavy curve of her
breasts.

There was a blubbering pot of cabbage and sliced fat pork upon the
stove.

"Paper boy," said Eugene. "Come to collect."

"Is you de boy?" drawled Ella Corpening with a lazy movement of her arm.
"How much does I owe?"

"$1.20," he answered. He looked meaningly at one extended leg, where,
thrust in below the knee, a wadded bank-note gleamed dully.

"Dat's my rent money," she said. "Can't give you dat. Dollah-twenty!"
She brooded. "Uh! Uh!" she grunted pleasantly. "Don't seem lak it ought
to be dat much."

"It is, though," he said, opening his account book.

"It mus' is," she agreed, "if de book say so."

She meditated luxuriously for a moment.

"Does you collec' Sunday mawnin'?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"You come roun' in de mawnin'," she said hopefully. "I'll have somethin'
fo' yuh, sho. I'se waitin' fo' a white gent'man now. He's goin' gib me a
dollah."

She moved her great limbs slowly, and smiled at him. Forked pulses beat
against his eyes. He gulped dryly: his legs were rotten with excitement.

"What's--what's he going to give you a dollar for?" he muttered, barely
audible.

"Jelly Roll," said Ella Corpening.

He moved his lips twice, unable to speak. She got up from her chair.

"What yo' want?" she asked softly. "Jelly Roll?"

"Want to see--to see!" he gasped.

She closed the door opening on the bank and locked it. The stove cast
a grated glow from its open ashpan. There was a momentary rain of red
cinders into the pit.

Ella Corpening opened the door beyond that, leading to another room.
There were two dirty rumpled beds; the single window was bolted and
covered by an old green shade. She lit a smoky little lamp, and turned
the wick low.

There was a battered little dresser with a mottled glass, from which the
blistered varnish was flaking. Over the screened hearth, on a low
mantel, there was a Kewpie doll, sashed with pink ribbon, a vase with
fluted edges and gilt flowers, won at a carnival, and a paper of pins.
A calendar, also, by courtesy of the Altamont Coal and Ice Company,
showing an Indian maid paddling her canoe down an alley of paved
moonlight, and a religious motto in flowered scrollwork, framed in
walnut: _God Loves Them Both._

"What yo' want?" she whispered, facing him.

Far off, he listened to the ghost of his own voice.

"Take off your clothes."

Her skirt fell in a ring about her feet. She took off her starched
waist. In a moment, save for her hose, she stood naked before him.

Her breath came quickly, her full tongue licked across her mouth.

"Dance!" he cried. "Dance!"

She began to moan softly, while an undulant tremor flowed through her
great yellow body; her hips and her round heavy breasts writhed slowly
in a sensual rhythm.

Her straight oiled hair fell across her neck in a thick shock. She
extended her arms for balance, the lids closed over her large yellow
eyeballs. She came near him. He felt her hot breath on his face, the
smothering flood of her breasts. He was whirled like a chip in the wild
torrent of her passion. Her powerful yellow hands gripped his slender
arms round like bracelets. She shook him to and fro slowly, fastening
him rightly against her pelt.

He strained back desperately against the door, drowning in her embrace.

"Get-'way-nigger. Get-'way," he panted thickly.

Slowly she released him: without opening her eyes, moaning, she slid
back as if he had been a young tree. She sang, in a wailing minor key,
with unceasing iteration:

  "Jelly Roll! Je-e-e-ly Roll!"----

her voice falling each time to a low moan.

Her face, the broad column of her throat, and her deep-breasted torso
were rilled with sweat. He fumbled blindly for the door, lunged across
the outer room and, gasping, found his way into the air. Her chant,
unbroken and undisturbed by his departure, followed him up the flimsy
steps. He did not pause to get his breath until he came to the edge of
the market square. Below him in the valley, across on the butte, the
smoky lamps of Niggertown flared in the dusk. Faint laughter, rich,
jungle-wild, welled up from hived darkness. He heard lost twangling
notes, the measured thump of distant feet; beyond, above, more thin,
more far than all, the rapid wail of sinners in a church.




XXIII

[Greek:  Enteuthen exelaunei stathmous treis parasangas pentekaideka epi
ton Euphratn potamon.]


He did not tell the Leonards that he was working in the early morning.
He knew they would oppose his employment, and that their opposition
would manifest itself in the triumphant argument of lowered grades.
Also, Margaret Leonard, he knew, would talk ominously of health
undermined, of the promise of future years destroyed, of the sweet lost
hours of morning sleep that could never be regained. He was really more
robust now than he had ever been. He was heavier and stronger. But he
sometimes felt a gnawing hunger for sleep: he grew heavy at mid-day,
revived in the afternoon, but found it difficult to keep his sleepy
brain fixed on a book after eight o'clock in the evening.

He learned little of discipline. Under the care of the Leonards he
came even to have a romantic contempt for it. Margaret Leonard had the
marvellous vision, of great people, for essences. She saw always the
dominant colour, but she did not always see the shadings. She was an
inspired sentimentalist. She thought she "knew boys": she was proud of
her knowledge of them. In fact, however, she had little knowledge of
them. She would have been stricken with horror if she could have known
the wild confusion of adolescence, the sexual nightmares of puberty, the
grief, the fear, the shame in which a boy broods over the dark world of
his desire. She did not know that every boy, caged in from confession by
his fear, is to himself a monster.

She did not have knowledge. But she had wisdom. She found immediately a
person's quality. Boys were her heroes, her little gods. She believed
that the world was to be saved, life redeemed, by one of them. She saw
the flame that burns in each of them, and she guarded it. She tried
somehow to reach the dark gropings toward light and articulation, of
the blunt, the stolid, the shamefast. She spoke a calm low word to the
trembling racehorse, and he was still.


Thus, he made no confessions. He was still prison-pent. But he turned
always to Margaret Leonard as toward the light: she saw the unholy fires
that cast their sword-dance on his face, she saw the hunger and the
pain, and she fed him--majestic crime!--on poetry.

Whatever of fear or shame locked them in careful silence, whatever
decorous pretence of custom guarded their tongues, they found release in
the eloquent symbols of verse. And by that sign, Margaret was lost to
the good angels. For what care the ambassadors of Satan, for all the
small fidelities of the letter and the word, if from the singing choir
of earthly methodism we can steal a single heart--lift up, flame-tipped,
one great lost soul to the high sinfulness of poetry?

The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of
poetry was inextinguishably mixed with her blood, entombed in her flesh.

By the beginning of his fifteenth year Eugene knew almost every major
lyric in the language. He possessed them to their living core, not in
a handful of scattered quotations, but almost line for line. His thirst
was drunken, insatiate: he added to his hoard entire scenes from
Schiller's _Wilhelm Tell_, which he read by himself in German; the
lyrics of Heine, and several folk songs. He committed to memory the
entire passage in the _Anabasis_, the mounting and triumphal Greek which
described the moment when the starving remnant of the Ten Thousand had
come at length to the sea, and sent up their great cry, calling it by
name. In addition, he memorised some of the sonorous stupidities of
Cicero, because of the sound, and a little of Csar, terse and lean.

The great lyrics of Burns he knew from music, from reading, or from
hearing Gant recite them. But "Tam O'Shanter" Margaret Leonard read to
him, her eyes sparkling with laughter as she read:

  "In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'."

The shorter Wordsworth pieces he had read at grammar school. "My heart
leaps up," "I wandered lonely as a cloud," and "Behold her, single in
the field," he had known for years; but Margaret read him the sonnets
and made him commit "The world is too much with us" to memory. Her voice
trembled and grew low with passion when she read it.

He knew all the songs in Shakespeare's plays, but the two that moved him
most were: "O mistress mine, where are you roaming?" which blew a far
horn in his heart, and the great song from _Cymbeline_: "Fear no more
the heat o' the sun." He had tried to read all the sonnets, and failed,
because their woven density was too much for his experience, but he had
read, and forgotten, perhaps, half of them, and remembered a few which
burned up from the page, strangely, immediately, like lamps for him.

Those that he knew were: "When, in the chronicle of wasted time," "To
me, fair friend, you never can be old," "Let me not to the marriage of
true minds," "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame," "When to the
sessions of sweet silent thought," "Shall I compare thee to a summer's
day?" "From you have I been absent in the spring," and "That time of
year thou mayest in me behold," the greatest of all, which Margaret
brought him to, and which shot through him with such electric ecstasy
when he came to "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,"
that he could hardly hold his course unbroken through the rest of it.

He read all the plays save _Timon_, _Titus Andronicus_, _Pericles_,
_Coriolanus_, and _King John_, but the only play that held his interest
from first to last was _King Lear_. With most of the famous declamatory
passages he had been familiar, for years, by Gant's recitation, and
now they wearied him. And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which
Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the
master's swingeing wit, he felt vaguely were very dull. He never had any
confidence in Shakespeare's humour--his Touchstones were not only windy
fools, but dull ones.

"For my part I had rather bear with you than bear you; yet I should bear
no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your
purse."

This sort of thing reminded him unpleasantly of the Pentlands. The Fool
in "Lear" alone he thought admirable--a sad, tragic, mysterious fool.
For the rest, he went about and composed parodies, which, with a devil's
grin, he told himself would split the sides of posterity. Such as: "Aye,
nuncle, an if Shrove Tuesday come last Wednesday, I'll do the capon to
thy cock, as Tom O'Ludgate told the shepherd when he found the cowslips
gone. Dost bay with two throats, Cerberus? Down, boy, down!"

The admired beauties he was often tired of, perhaps because he had heard
them so often, and it seemed to him, moreover, that Shakespeare often
spoke absurdly and pompously when he might better have spoken simply, as
in the scene where, being informed by the Queen of the death of his
sister by drowning, Laertes says:

  "Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
   And therefore I forbid my tears."

You really can't beat that (he thought). Aye, Ben! Would he had blotted
a hundred! A thousand!

But he was deep in other passages which the elocutionist misses, such as
the terrible and epic invocation of Edmund, in _King Lear_, drenched in
evil, which begins:

  "Thou, Nature, art my goddess,"

and ends,

  "Now, gods, stand up for bastards."

It was as dark as night, as evil as Niggertown, as vast as the elemental
winds that howled down across the hills: he chanted it in the black
hours of his labour, into the dark and the wind. He understood; he
exulted in its evil--which was the evil of earth, of illicit nature. It
was a call to the unclassed; it was a cry for those beyond the fence,
for rebel angels, and for all the men who are too tall.

He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond Shakespeare's plays. But
he very early came to know a little of the poetry of Ben Jonson, whom
Margaret looked on as a literary Falstaff, condoning, with the familiar
weakness of the school-marm, his Gargantuan excesses as a pardonable
whimsy of genius.

She was somewhat academically mirthful over the literary bacchanalia, as
a professor in a Baptist college smacks his lips appetizingly and beams
ruddily at his classes when he reads of sack and porter and tankards
foaming with the musty ale. All this is part of the liberal tradition.
Men of the world are broadminded. Witness Professor Albert Thorndyke
Firkins, of the University of Chicago, at the Falcon in Soho. Smiling
bravely, he sits over a half-pint of bitter beer, in the company of a
racing tout, a swaybacked barmaid, broad in the stern, with adjustable
teeth, and three companionable tarts from Lisle street, who are making
the best of two pints of Guinness. With eager impatience he awaits the
arrival of two famous men of letters.


"Oh rare Ben Jonson!" Margaret Leonard sighed with gentle laughter. "Ah,
Lord!"

"My God, boy!" Sheba roared, snatching the suggested motif of conversation
out of the air, and licking her buttered fingers noisily as she stormed
into action. "God bless him!" Her hairy red face burned like clover, her
veinous eyes were tearful bright. "God bless him, 'Gene! He was as
English as roast beef and a tankard of musty ale!"

"Ah, Lord!" sighed Margaret. "He was a genius if ever there was one."
With misty eyes she gazed far off, a thread of laughter on her mouth.
"Whee!" she laughed gently. "Old Ben!"

"And say, 'Gene!" Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand
gripped upon her knee. "Do you know that the greatest tribute to
Shakespeare's genius is from his hand?"

"Ah, I tell you, boy!" said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her voice was
husky. He was afraid she was going to weep.

"And yet the fools!" Sheba yelled. "The mean little two-by-two
pusillanimous swill-drinking fools----"

"Whee!" gently Margaret moaned. John Dorsey turned his chalk-white face
to the boy and whined with vacant appreciation, winking his head pertly.
Oh, absently!

"--for that's all they are, have had the effrontery to suggest that he
was jealous."

"Pshaw!" said Margaret impatiently. "There's nothing in that."

"Why, they don't know what they're talking about!" Sheba turned a sudden
grinning face upon him. "The little upstarts! It takes us to tell 'em,
'Gene," she said.

He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair. John Dorsey
slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately, drooling
slightly at the mouth.

"The Lord a' mercy!" he wheezed, gasping.

"I was talking to a feller the other day," said Sheba, "a lawyer that
you'd think might know a _little_ something, and I used a quotation out
of _The Merchant of Venice_ that every schoolboy knows--'The quality of
mercy is not strained.' The man looked at me as if he thought I was
crazy!"

"Great heavens!" said Margaret in a still voice.

"I said, 'Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you may
have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are a lot of
things you don't know yet. There are a lot of things money can't buy, my
sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.'"

"Why, pshaw!" said Mr. Leonard. "What do these little whipper-snappers
know about the things of the mind? You might as well expect some
ignorant darkey out in the fields to construe a passage in Homer." He
grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the table, and tilting it
intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds
which he slid, quivering, into his mouth. "No, sir!" he laughed.
"They may be Big Men on the tax collector's books, but when they
try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says,
'they--they----'" he began to whine, "'why, they just ain't nothin'.'"

"What shall it profit a man," said Sheba, "if he gain the whole world,
and lose----"

"Ah, Lord!" sighed Margaret, shaking her smoke-dark eyes. "I tell you!"


She told him. She told him of the Swan's profound knowledge of the human
heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his enormous
humour.

"Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!" She laughed. "The fat rascal!
Imagine a man keeping the time!"

And, carefully: "It was the custom of the time, 'Gene. As a matter of
fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries you see how
much purer he is than they are." But she avoided a word, a line, here
and there. The slightly spotty Swan--muddied a little by custom. Then,
too, the Bible.

The smoky candle-ends of time. Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai:
Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor Catfish (D.D.) of Presbyterian
College.

"And observe, Eugene," she said, "he never made vice attractive."

"Why didn't he?" he asked. "There's Falstaff."

"Yes," she replied, "and you know what happened to him, don't you?"

"Why," he considered, "he died!"

"You see, don't you?" she concluded, with triumphant warning.

I see, don't I? The wages of sin. What, by the way, are the wages of
virtue? The good die young.

  Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!
  I really feel so blue!
    I was given to crime,
    And cut off in my prime
  When only eighty-two.

"Then, note," she said, "how none of his characters stand still. You can
see them grow, from first to last. No one is the same at the end as he
was in the beginning."

In the beginning was the word. I am Alpha and Omega. The growth of Lear.
He grew old and mad. There's growth for you.


This tin-currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses at
college, and in her reading. They were--are, perhaps, still--part of the
glib jargon of pedants. But they did her no real injury. They were
simply the things people said. She felt, guiltily, that she must trick
out her teaching with these gauds: she was afraid that what she had to
offer was not enough. What she had to offer was simply a feeling that
was so profoundly right, so unerring, that she could no more utter great
verse meanly than mean verse well. She was a voice that God seeks. She
was the reed of demonic ecstasy. She was possessed, she knew not how,
but she knew the moment of her possession. The singing tongues of all
the world were wakened into life again under the incantation of her
voice. She was inhabited. She was spent.

She passed through their barred and bolted boy-life with the direct
stride of a spirit. She opened their hearts as if they had been lockets.
They said: "Mrs. Leonard is sure a nice lady."


He knew some of Ben Jonson's poems, including the fine Hymn to Diana,
"Queen and huntress, chaste and fair," and the great tribute to
Shakespeare which lifted his hair at

  "... But call forth thundering schylus,
   Euripides and Sophocles to us----"

and caught at his throat at:

  "He was not for an age, but for all time!
   And all the Muses still were in their prime ..."

The elegy to little Salathiel Pavy, the child actor, was honey from the
lion's mouth. But it was too long.

Of Herrick, sealed of the tribe of Ben, he knew much more. The poetry
sang itself. It was, he thought later, the most perfect and unfailing
lyrical voice in the language--a clean, sweet, small, unfaltering note.
It is done with the incomparable ease of an inspired child. The young
men and women of our century have tried to recapture it, as they have
tried to recapture Blake and, a little more successfully, Donne.

  Here a little child I stand
  Heaving up my either hand;
  Cold as paddocks though they be,
  Here I lift them up to Thee,
  For a benison to fall
  On our meat and on us all. Amen.

There was nothing beyond this--nothing that surpassed it in precision,
delicacy, and wholeness.

Their names dropped musically like small fat bird-notes through the
freckled sunlight of a young world: prophetically he brooded on the
sweet lost bird-cries of their names, knowing they never would return.
Herrick, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, Campion, Lovelace, Dekker. O sweet
content, O sweet, O sweet content!

He read shelves of novels: all of Thackeray, all the stories of Poe and
Hawthorne, and Herman Melville's _Omoo_ and _Typee_, which he found at
Gant's. Of _Moby Dick_ he had never heard. He read a half-dozen Coopers,
all of Mark Twain, but failed to finish a single book of Howells or
James.

He read a dozen of Scott, and liked best of all _Quentin Durward_,
because the descriptions of food were as bountiful and appetising as any
he had ever read.




XXIV


Miss Amy closed her small beautifully kept grade book, thrust her great
arms upward, and yawned. Eugene looked hopefully at her and out along
the playing court, reddened by the late sun. He was wild, uncontrollable,
erratic. His mad tongue leaped out in class. He could never keep peace a
full day. He amazed them. They loved him, and they punished him piously,
affectionately. He was never released at the dismissal hour. He was
always "kept in."

John Dorsey noted each whisper of disorder, or each failure in
preparation, by careful markings in a book. Each afternoon he read the
names of delinquents, amid a low mutter of sullen protest, and stated
their penalties. Once Eugene got through an entire day without a mark.
He stood triumphantly before Leonard while the master searched the
record.

John Dorsey began to laugh foolishly; he gripped his hand affectionately
around the boy's arm.

"Well, sir!" he said. "There must be a mistake. I'm going to keep you in
on general principles."

He bent to a long dribbling suction of laughter. Eugene's wild eyes were
shot with tears of anger and surprise. He never forgot.

Miss Amy yawned, and smiled on him with slow, powerful, affectionate
contempt.

"Go on!" she said, in her broad, lazy accent. "I don't want to fool with
you any more. You're not worth powder enough to blow you up."

Margaret came in, her face furrowed deeply between smoke-dark eyes, full
of tender sternness and hidden laughter.

"What's wrong with the rascal?" she asked. "Can't he learn algebra?"

"He can learn!" drawled Miss Amy. "He can learn anything. He's
lazy--that's what it is. Just plain lazy."

She smacked his buttock smartly with a ruler.

"I'd like to warm you a bit with this," she laughed, slowly and richly.
"You'd learn then."

"Here!" said Margaret, shaking her head in protest. "You leave that boy
alone. Don't look behind the faun's ears. Never mind about algebra,
here. That's for poor folks. There's no need for algebra where two and
two make five."

Miss Amy turned her handsome gypsy eyes on Eugene.

"Go on. I've seen enough of you." She made a strong weary gesture of
dismissal.

Hatless, with a mad whoop, he plunged through the door and leaped the
porch rail.

"Here, boy!" Margaret called. "Where's your hat?"

Grinning, he gallopped back, picked up a limp rag of dirty green felt,
and pulled it over his chaotic hair. Curly tufts stuck through the
gaping crease-holes.

"Come here!" said Margaret gravely. Her nervous fingers pulled his
frayed necktie around to the front, tugged down his vest, and buttoned
his coat over tightly, while he peered at her with his strange devil's
grin. Suddenly she trembled with laughter.

"Good heavens, Amy," she said. "Look at that hat."

Miss Amy smiled at him with indifferent sleepy cat-warmth.

"You want to fix yourself up, 'Gene," she said, "so the girls will begin
to notice you."

He heard the strange song of Margaret's laughter.

"Can you see him out courting?" she said. "The poor girl would think she
had a demon lover, sure."

  "As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
   By woman wailing for her demon lover."

His eyes burned on her face, flowing with dark secret beauty.

"Get along, you scamp!" she ordered.

He turned, and, crying fiercely in his throat, tore down the road with
bounding strides.

All the dusk blurred in her eyes.

"Leave him alone!" she whispered to no one. "Leave him alone!"




XXV


Yes. The enormous crime had been committed. And, for almost a year,
Eugene had been maintaining a desperate neutrality. His heart, however,
was not neutral. The fate of civilisation, it appeared, hung in the
balance.

The war had begun at the peak of the summer season. Dixieland was full.
His closest friend at the time was a sharp old spinster with frayed
nerves, who had been for thirty years a teacher of English in a New York
City public school. Day by day, after the murder of the Grand Duke, they
watched the tides of blood and desolation mount through the world. Miss
Crane's thin red nostrils quivered with indignation. Her old grey eyes
were sharp with anger. The idea! The idea!

For, of all the English, none can show a loftier or more inspired love
for Albion's Isle than American ladies who teach its noble tongue.

Eugene was also faithful. With Miss Crane he kept a face of mournful
regret, but his heart drummed a martial tattoo against his ribs. The air
was full of fifes and flutes; he heard the ghostly throbbing of great
guns.

"We must be fair!" said Margaret Leonard. "We must be fair!" But her
eyes darkened when she read the news of England's entry, and her throat
was trembling like a bird's. When she looked up her eyes were wet.

"Ah, Lord!" she said. "You'll see things now."

"Little Bobs!" roared Sheba.

"God bless him! Did you see where he's going to take the field?"

John Dorsey Leonard laid down the paper, and bent over with high
drooling laughter.

"Lord a'mercy!" he gasped. "Let the rascals come now!"

Ah, well--they came.

All through that waning summer, Eugene shuttled frantically from the
school to Dixieland, unable, in the delirium of promised glory, to curb
his prancing limbs. He devoured every scrap of news, and rushed to share
it with the Leonards or Miss Crane. He read every paper he could lay
hands on, exulting in the defeats that were forcing the Germans back at
every point. For, he gathered from this wilderness of print, things were
going badly with the Huns. At a thousand points they fled squealing
before English steel at Mons, fell suppliantly before the French charge
along the Marne; withdrew here, gave way there, ran away elsewhere.
Then, one morning, when they should have been at Cologne, they were
lined up at the walls of Paris. They had run in the wrong direction. The
world grew dark. Desperately, he tried to understand. He could not. By
the extraordinary strategy of always retreating, the German army had
arrived before Paris. It was something new in warfare. It was several
years in fact, before Eugene could wholly understand that some one in
the German armies had done some fighting.

John Dorsey Leonard was untroubled.

"You wait!" he said confidently. "You just wait, my sonny. That old
fellow Joffer knows what he's about. This is just what he's been waiting
for. Now he's got them where he wants them."

Eugene wondered for what subtle reason a French general might want a
German army at Paris.

Margaret lifted her troubled eyes from the paper.

"It looks mighty serious," she said. "I tell you!" She was silent a
moment, a torrent of passion rose up in her throat. Then she added in a
low trembling voice: "If England goes, we all go."

"God bless her!" Sheba yelled.

"God bless her, 'Gene," she continued, tapping him on the knee. "When
I stepped ashore on her dear old soil that time, I just couldn't help
myself. I didn't care what any one thought. I knelt right down there in
the dirt, and pretended to tie my shoe, but say, boy"--her bleared eyes
glistened through her tears--"God bless her, I couldn't help it. Do you
know what I did? I leaned over and kissed her earth." Large gummy tears
rolled down her red cheeks. She was weeping loudly, but she went on. "I
said: This is the earth of Shakespeare, and Milton, and John Keats and,
by God, what's more, it's mine as well! God bless her! God bless her!"

Tears flowed quietly from Margaret Leonard's eyes. Her face was wet. She
could not speak. They were all deeply moved.

"She won't go," said John Dorsey Leonard. "We'll have a word to say to
that! She won't go! You wait!"

They were lifted up on the wings of their enormous folly; they were
drunken, inspired, by that great false vision of Arcadia unvisited. They
were sick with a beautiful poison--they had felt the kiss of evil on
their heart, and they would have spilled their blood exalted in its holy
war. To them, it seemed that once again the lost dark angels hurled
their charge against the spires and ramparts of eternity. To them it
seemed that darkness had assembled once again for the dislodgment of
eternal light. For them, those distant feet that shook the earth went
out for justice, truth, and honour, and for that unspoken tongue that
Milton spoke, for those undying songs of Herrick's that have died.

Fools to their high passion, they could not see the convulsive fears of
menaced empires--they lived in that strange universe of hell and heaven
where all the sheep and goats are meadowed apart, and one fair chosen
folk shall rule above the rest. They did not only believe that there are
civilised individuals, which is probable; they believed that there are
civilised nations, which is mad. So, proudly asserting their rejected
brotherhood, swearing their allegiance to the language they spoke with
a despised accent, they cast up, the country cousins, their fervent
prayers for the destruction of Krupp, and the preservation of Chaucer
and John Keats.

In Eugene's fantasy there burned the fixed vision of the great hands
clasped across the sea, the flowering of green fields, and the
developing convolutions of a faery London--mighty, elfin, old, a
romantic labyrinth of ancient crowded ways, tall, leaning houses,
Lucullan food and drink, and the mad imperial eyes of genius burning
among the swarm of quaint originality.

As the war developed, and the literature of war-enchantment began to
appear, Margaret Leonard gave him book after book to read. They were the
books of the young men--the young men who fought to blot out the evil
of the world with their blood. In her trembling voice she read to him
Rupert Brooke's sonnet--"If I should die, think only this of me"--and
she put a copy of Donald Hankey's _A Student in Arms_ into his hand,
saying:

"Read this, boy. It will stir you as you've never been stirred before.
Those boys have seen the vision!"

He read it. He read many others. He saw the vision. He became a member
of this legion of chivalry--young Galahad-Eugene--a spearhead of
righteousness. He had gone a-Grailing. He composed dozens of personal
memoirs, into which quietly, humorously, with fine-tempered English
restraint, he poured the full measure of his pure crusading heart.
Sometimes, he came through to the piping times of peace minus an arm,
a leg, or an eye, diminished but ennobled; sometimes his last radiant
words were penned on the eve of the attack that took his life. With
glistening eyes, he read his own epilogue, enjoyed his post-mortem
glory, as his last words were recorded and explained by his editor:

"It's no use, mater," he wrote six hours before the attack in which he
fell, "I simply can't bring myself to hate these Huns. I dare say they
are mostly chaps like me with their own Pollys and Paters, and dear
little flaxen-headed Tommies somewhere back home. Dreadful heresy from
the young war lord--what? Anyway, I'm not alone in my feeling. We all
feel that way--all ranks, all kinds and conditions of men. We all know
this war is above that sort of thing. Somehow, I think we've been
touched with glory. That sounds like the mere frightful tosh, I
know--but, oh well! I know _you_ understand. We are not fighting men,
but something ugly, as old and as monstrous as evil, which is against
men, which kills them, and kills truth and green fields, and does worse
than kill Pollies, and all the other lovely things that are. And we know
that, and know that we must kill this monster, or it will leave us
nothing worth the having.

"The spirit of the men is splendid. The other day a Hun was flying low,
strafing us frightfully, and doing no end of damage to a lovely little
green copse which somehow--God knows how!--the beggars had left
standing. Then up spake Little Finch!--you know he's the Stepney chap
I told you about, butcher's boy, and a frightfully good sort. 'That's
right, you blighter!' he said (I won't attempt to reproduce his
priceless dialect), 'That's right! 'Ere we are with a toppin' ole ditch
to throw yer stinkin' bombs in, an' you want to go messin' up the only
decent bit o' landscipe we've got left.' Too priceless, what?

"The socks arrived wrapped up in the familiar blue silk unmentionables
and were simply ripping.

"I forgot to add that we go over at six o'clock in the morning. If
anything happens (it _won't_, old dear), I've told G.G. what to do with
this. And so to bed, with oceans of love and more than a thought of
England (now that April's there!). God bless you, and the Pater, and
Polly, and as Tommy has it in his prayer, God bless us all!
                                                           "'GENE."

The last letter.

"I simply can't believe he is gone," wrote perhaps his closest friend,
Captain George Albert Fortescue Graves, D.S.O. "But the supply of
sunshine has run low--permanently, I'm afraid. I can see him now the
day before he went, tall, boyish, with his quick bright smile of
irresistible charm, coming along the trench with that buoyant stride
which had won for him the affectionate sobriquet of 'Highpockets' from
officers and men alike.

"'You know, Georgie,' he said to me a day or two before he went west,
calling me by the name he had used playfully ever since the great old
days at St. Leonard's-on-the-Hill, 'you know, old chap, I've a feeling
I'm in for it.'

"'What's the matter?' I said, trying to rally him. 'Funk?'

"'Yes,' he answered, with the beautiful smile. 'Simply ghastly!'

"I saw that he meant it. Somehow, I had a horrid premonition--it passed
in a moment--that it was the last time I should see him standing there.

"'Nonsense!' I said. 'Don't be an ass! This beastly racket is getting on
the nerves of all of us. Cheer up, old boy. In three days more we'll be
out of the bloody show and back home on leave.'

"Well, he is gone now, and there's a vacancy in our hearts that no one
can fill. Meanwhile, we do our best to achieve forgetfulness by putting
an added lustre on our bayonets. If certain gentlemen in Berlin knew
what is in our hearts at the present moment the gloom at Potsdam could
be cut with a knife----"

Smiling bravely, Eugene dropped three smoking tears upon his young slain
body. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._


Ben loped along, scowling, by Wood's pharmacy. As he passed the idling
group at the tiled entrance, he cast on them a look of sudden fierce
contempt. Then he laughed quietly, savagely.

"Oh, my God!" he said.

At the corner, scowling, he waited for Mrs. Pert to cross from the Post
Office. She came over slowly, reeling.

Having arranged to meet her later in the pharmacy, he crossed over, and
turned angularly down Federal Street behind the Post Office. At the
second entrance to the Doctors' and Surgeons' Building, he turned in,
and began to mount the dark creaking stairs. Somewhere, with punctual
developing monotony, a single drop of water was falling into the wet
black basin of a sink. He paused in the wide corridor of the first floor
to control the nervous thudding of his heart. Then he walked half-way
down and entered the waiting-room of Dr. J. H. Coker. It was vacant.
Frowning, he sniffed the air. The whole building was sharp with the
clean nervous odour of antiseptics. A litter of magazines--_Life_,
_Judge_, _The Literary Digest_, and _The American_--on the black mission
table told its story of weary and distressed fumbling. The inner door
opened and the doctor's assistant, Miss Ray, came out. She had on her
hat. She was ready to depart.

"Do you want to see the doctor?" she asked.

"Yes," said Ben, "is he busy?"

"Come on in, Ben," said Coker, coming to the door. He took his long wet
cigar from his mouth, grinning yellowly. "That's all for to-day, Laura.
You can go."

"Good-bye," said Miss Laura Ray, departing.

Ben went into Coker's office. Coker closed the door and sat down at his
untidy desk.

"You'll be more comfortable if you lie down on that table," he said
grinning.

Ben gave the doctor's table a look of nausea.

"How many have died on that thing?" he asked. He sat down nervously in
a chair by the desk, and lighted a cigarette, holding the flame to the
charred end of cigar Coker thrust forward.

"Well, what can I do for you, son?" he asked.

"I'm tired of pushing daisies here," said Ben. "I want to push them
somewhere else."

"What do you mean, Ben?"

"I suppose you've heard, Coker," said Ben quietly and insultingly, "that
there's a war going on in Europe. That is, if you've learned to read the
papers."

"No, I hadn't heard about it, son," said Coker, puffing slowly and
deeply. "I read a paper--the one that comes out in the morning. I
suppose they haven't got the news yet." He grinned maliciously. "What
do you want, Ben?"

"I'm thinking of going to Canada and enlisting," said Ben. "I want you
to tell me if I can get in."

Coker was silent a moment. He took the long chewed weed from his mouth
and looked at it thoughtfully.

"What do you want to do that for, Ben?" he said.

Ben got up suddenly, and went to the window. He cast his cigarette away
into the court. It struck the cement well with a small dry plop. When he
turned around, his sallow face had gone white and passionate.

"In Christ's name, Coker," he said, "what's it all about? Are you able
to tell me? What in heaven's name are we here for? You're a doctor--you
ought to know something."

Coker continued to look at his cigar. It had gone out again.

"Why?" he said deliberately. "Why should I know anything?"

"Where do we come from? Where do we go to? What are we here for? What
the hell is it all about?" Ben cried out furiously in a rising voice. He
turned bitterly, accusingly, on the older man. "For God's sake, speak
up, Coker. Don't sit there like a damned tailor's dummy. Say something,
won't you?"

"What do you want me to say?" said Coker. "What am I? A mind-reader? A
spiritualist? I'm your physician, not your priest. I've seen them born,
and I've seen them die. What happens to them before or after, I can't
say."

"Damn that!" said Ben. "What happens to them in between?"

"You're as great an authority on that as I am, Ben," said Coker. "What
you want, son, is not a doctor, but a prophet."

"They come to you when they're sick, don't they?" said Ben. "They all
want to get well, don't they? You do your best to cure them, don't you?"

"No," said Coker. "Not always. But I'll grant that I'm supposed to. What
of it?"

"You must all think that it's about something," said Ben, "or you
wouldn't do it!"

"A man must live, mustn't he?" said Coker with a grin.

"That's what I'm asking you, Coker. Why must he?"

"Why," said Coker, "in order to work nine hours a day in a newspaper
office, sleep nine hours and enjoy the other six in washing, shaving,
dressing, eating at the Greasy Spoon, loafing in front of Wood's and
occasionally taking the Merry Widow to see Francis X. Bushman. Isn't
that reason enough for any man? If a man's hardworking and decent,
and invests his money in the Building and Loan every week instead of
squandering it on cigarettes, coca-cola, and Kuppenheimer clothes,
he may own a little home some day." Coker's voice sank to a hush of
reverence. "He may even have his own car, Ben. Think of that! He can get
in it, and ride, and ride, and ride. He can ride all over these damned
mountains. He can be very, very happy. He can take exercise regularly
in the Y.M.C.A. and think only clean thoughts. He can marry a good pure
woman and have any number of fine sons and daughters, all of whom may be
brought up in the Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian faiths, and given
splendid courses in Economics, Commercial Law, and the Fine Arts, at the
State university. There's plenty to live for, Ben. There's something to
keep you busy every moment."

"You're a great wit, Coker," Ben said, scowling. "You're as funny as a
crutch." He straightened his humped shoulders self-consciously, and
filled his lungs with air.

"Well, what about it?" he asked, with a nervous grin. "Am I fit to go?"

"Let's see," said Coker deliberately, beginning to look him over.
"Feet--pigeon-toed, but good arch." He looked at Ben's tan leathers
closely.

"What's the matter, Coker?" said Ben. "Do you need your toes to shoot a
gun with?"

"How're your teeth, son?"

Ben drew back his thin lips and showed two rows of hard white grinders.
At the same moment, casually, swiftly, Coker prodded him with a strong
yellow finger in the solar plexus. His distended chest collapsed; he
bent over laughing, and coughed dryly. Coker turned away to his desk and
picked up his cigar.

"What's the matter, Coker?" said Ben. "What's the idea?"

"That's all, son. I'm through with you," said Coker.

"Well, what about it?" said Ben nervously.

"What about what?"

"Am I all right?"

"Certainly you're all right," said Coker. He turned with burning match.
"Who said you weren't all right?"

Ben stared at him, scowling, with fear-bright eyes.

"Quit your kidding, Coker," he said. "I'm three times seven, you know.
Am I fit to go?"

"What's the rush?" said Coker. "The war's not over yet. We may get into
it before long. Why not wait a bit?"

"That means I'm not fit," said Ben. "What's the matter with me, Coker?"

"Nothing," said Coker carefully. "You're a bit thin. A little run down,
aren't you, Ben? You need a little meat on those bones, son. You can't
sit on a stool at the Greasy Spoon, with a cigarette in one hand and a
cup of coffee in the other, and get fat."

"Am I all right or not, Coker?"

Coker's long death's-head widened in a yellow grin.

"Yes," he said. "You're all right, Ben. You're one of the most all right
people I know."

Ben read the true answer in Coker's veined and weary eyes. His own were
sick with fear. But he said bitingly:

"Thanks, Coker. You're a lot of help. I appreciate what you've done a
lot. As a doctor, you're a fine first baseman."

Coker grinned. Ben left the office.

As he went out on the street he met Harry Tugman going down to the paper
office.

"What's the matter, Ben?" said Harry Tugman. "Feeling sick?"

"Yes," said Ben, scowling at him. "I've just had a shot of 606."

He went up the street to meet Mrs. Pert.




XXVI


In the autumn, at the beginning of his fifteenth year--his last year at
Leonard's--Eugene went to Charleston on a short excursion. He found a
substitute for his paper route.

"Come on!" said Max Isaacs, whom he still occasionally saw. "We're going
to have a good time, son."

"Yeah, man!" said Malvin Bowden, whose mother was conducting the tour.
"You can still git beer in Charleston," he added with a dissipated leer.

"You can go swimmin' in the ocean at the Isle of Palms," said Max Isaacs.
Then, reverently, he added: "You can go to the Navy Yard an' see the
ships."

He was waiting until he should be old enough to join the navy. He read
the posters greedily. He knew all the navy men at the enlistment office.
He had read all the booklets--he was deep in naval lore. He knew to a
dollar the earnings of firemen, second class, of radio men, and of all
kinds of C.P.O.'s.

His father was a plumber. He did not want to be a plumber. He wanted to
join the navy and see the world. In the navy, a man was given good pay
and a good education. He learned a trade. He got good food and good
clothing. It was all given to him free, for nothing.

"H'm!" said Eliza, with a bantering smile. "Why, say, boy, what do you
want to do that for? You're my baby!"

It had been years since he was. She smiled tremulously.

"Yes'm," said Eugene. "Can I go? It's only for five days. I've got the
money." He thrust his hand into his pocket, feeling.

"I tell you what!" said Eliza, working her lips, smiling. "You may wish
you had that money before this winter's over. You're going to need new
shoes and a warm overcoat when the cold weather comes. You must be
mighty rich. I wish I could afford to go running off on a trip like
that."

"Oh, my God!" said Ben, with a short laugh. He tossed his cigarette into
one of the first fires of the year.

"I want to tell you, son," said Eliza, becoming grave, "you've got to
learn the value of a dollar or you'll never have a roof to call your
own. I want you to have a good time, boy, but you mustn't squander your
money."

"Yes'm," said Eugene.

"For heaven's sake!" Ben cried. "It's the kid's own money. Let him do
what he likes with it. If he wants to throw it out the damned window,
it's his own business."

She clasped her hands thoughtfully upon her waist and stared away,
pursing her lips.

"Well, I reckon it'll be all right," she said. "Mrs. Bowden will take
good care of you."

It was his first journey to a strange place alone. Eliza packed an old
valise carefully, and stowed away a box of sandwiches and eggs. He went
away at night. As he stood by his valise, washed, brushed, excited, she
wept a little. He was again, she felt, a little farther off. The hunger
for voyages was in his face.

"Be a good boy," she said. "Don't get into any trouble down there." She
thought carefully a moment, looking away. Then she went down in her
stocking, and pulled out a five-dollar bill.

"Don't waste your money," she said. "Here's a little extra. You may need
it."

"Come here, you little thug!" said Ben. Scowling, his quick hands worked
busily at the boy's stringy tie. He jerked down his vest, slipping a
wadded ten-dollar bill into Eugene's pocket. "Behave yourself," he said,
"or I'll beat you to death."

Max Isaacs whistled from the street. He went out to join them.

There were six in Mrs. Bowden's party: Max Isaacs, Malvin Bowden,
Eugene, two girls named Josie and Louise, and Mrs. Bowden. Josie was
Mrs. Bowden's niece and lived with her. She was a tall bean-pole of a
girl with a prognathous mouth and stick-out grinning teeth. She was
twenty. The other girl, Louise, was a waitress. She was small, plump, a
warm brunette. Mrs. Bowden was a little sallow woman with ratty brown
hair. She had brown worn-out eyes. She was a dressmaker. Her husband, a
carpenter, had died in the Spring. There was a little insurance money.
That was how she came to take the trip.

Now, by night, he was riding once more into the South. The day-coach was
hot, full of the weary smell of old red plush. People dozed painfully,
distressed by the mournful tolling of the bell, and the grinding halts.
A baby wailed thinly. Its mother, a gaunt wisp-haired mountaineer,
turned the back of the seat ahead, and bedded the child on a spread
newspaper. Its wizened face peeked dirtily out of its swaddling
discomfort of soiled jackets and pink ribbon. It wailed and slept. At
the front of the car, a young hill-man, high-boned and red, clad in
corduroys and leather leggings, shelled peanuts steadily, throwing the
shells into the aisle. People trod through them with a sharp masty
crackle. The boys, bored, paraded restlessly to the car-end for water.
There was a crushed litter of sanitary drinking-cups upon the floor, and
a stale odour from the toilets.

The two girls slept soundly on turned seats. The small one breathed
warmly and sweetly through moist parted lips.

The weariness of the night wore in upon their jaded nerves, lay upon
their dry hot eyeballs. They flattened noses against the dirty windows,
and watched the vast structure of the earth sweep past--clumped
woodlands, the bending sweep of the fields, the huge flowing lift of the
earth-waves, cyclic intersections bewildering--the American earth--rude,
immeasurable, formless, mighty.

His mind was bound in the sad lulling magic of the car wheels.
Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. He
thought of his life as something that had happened long ago. He had
found, at last, his gateway to the lost world. But did it lie before
or behind him? Was he leaving or entering it? Above the rhythm of the
wheels he thought of Eliza's laughter over ancient things. He saw a
brief forgotten gesture, her white broad forehead, a ghost of old grief
in her eyes. Ben, Gant--their strange lost voices. Their sad laughter.
They swam toward him through green walls of fantasy. They caught and
twisted at his heart. The green ghost-glimmer of their faces coiled
away. Lost. Lost.

"Let's go for a smoke," said Max Isaacs.

They went back and stood wedged for stability on the closed platform of
the car. They lighted cigarettes.

Light broke against the east, in a murky rim. The far dark was eaten
cleanly away. The horizon sky was barred with hard fierce strips of
light. Still buried in night, they looked across at the unimpinging
sheet of day. They looked under the lifted curtain at brightness. They
were knifed sharply away from it. Then, gently, light melted across the
land like dew. The world was grey.

The east broke out in ragged flame. In the car, the little waitress
breathed deeply, sighed, and opened her clear eyes.

Max Isaacs fumbled his cigarette awkwardly, looked at Eugene, and
grinned sheepishly with delight, craning his neck along his collar, and
making a nervous grimace of his white fuzz-haired face. His hair was
thick, straight, the colour of taffy. He had blond eyebrows. There was
much kindness in him. They looked at each other with clumsy tenderness.
They thought of the lost years at Woodson Street. They saw with decent
wonder their awkward bulk of puberty. The proud gate of the years swung
open for them. They felt a lonely glory. They said farewell.


Charleston, fat weed that roots itself on Lethe wharf, lived in another
time. The hours were days, the days weeks.

They arrived in the morning. By noon, several weeks had passed, and he
longed for the day's ending. They were quartered in a small hotel on
King Street--an old place above stores, with big rooms. After lunch,
they went out to see the town. Max Isaacs and Malvin Bowden turned at
once toward the Navy Yard. Mrs. Bowden went with them. Eugene was weary
for sleep. He promised to meet them later.

When they had gone, he pulled off his shoes and took off his coat and
shirt, and lay down to sleep in a big dark room, into which the warm sun
fell in shuttered bars. Time droned like a sleepy October fly.

At five o'clock, Louise, the little waitress, came to wake him. She,
too, had wanted to sleep. She knocked gently at the door. When he did
not answer, she opened it quietly and came in, closing it behind her.
She came to the side of the bed and looked at him for a moment.

"Eugene!" she whispered. "Eugene."

He murmured drowsily, and stirred. The little waitress smiled and sat
down on the bed. She bent over him and tickled him gently in the ribs,
chuckling to see him squirm. Then she tickled the soles of his feet. He
wakened slowly, yawning, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

"What is it?" he said.

"It's time to go out there," she said.

"Out where?"

"To the Navy Yard. We promised to meet them."

"Oh, damn the Navy Yard!" he groaned. "I'd rather sleep."

"So would I!" she agreed. She yawned luxuriously, stretching her plump
arms above her head. "I'm so sleepy. I could stretch out anywhere." She
looked meaningly at the bed.

He wakened at once, sensuously alert. He lifted himself upon one elbow:
a hot torrent of blood swarmed through his cheeks. His pulses beat
thickly.

"We're all alone up here," said Louise smiling. "We've got the whole
floor to ourselves."

"Why don't you lie down and take a nap, if you're still sleepy?" he
asked. "I'll wake you up," he added, with gentle chivalry.

"I've got such a little room. It's hot and stuffy. That's why I got up,"
said Louise. "What a nice big room you've got!"

"Yes," he said. "It's a nice big bed, too." They were silent a waiting
moment.

"Why don't you lie down here, Louise?" he said, in a low unsteady voice.
"I'll get up," he added hastily, sitting up. "I'll wake you."

"Oh, no," she said, "I wouldn't feel right."

They were again silent. She looked admiringly at his thin young arms.

"My!" she said. "I bet you're strong."

He flexed his long stringy muscles manfully, and expanded his chest.

"My!" she said. "How old are you, 'Gene?"

He was just at his fifteenth year.

"I'm going on sixteen," he said. "How old are you, Louise?"

"I'm eighteen," she said. "I bet you're a regular heart-breaker, 'Gene.
How many girls have you got?"

"Oh--I don't know. Not many," he said truthfully enough. He wanted to
talk--he wanted to talk madly, seductively, wickedly. He would excite
her by uttering, in grave respectful tones, honestly, matter-of-factly,
the most erotic suggestions.

"I guess you like the tall ones, don't you?" said Louise. "A tall fellow
wouldn't want a little thing like me, would he? Although," she said
quickly, "you never know. They say opposites attract each other."

"I don't like tall girls," said Eugene. "They're too skinny. I like them
about your size, when they've got a good build."

"Have I got a good build, 'Gene?" said Louise, holding her arms up and
smiling.

"Yes, you have a pretty build, Louise--a fine build," said Eugene
earnestly. "The kind I like."

"I haven't got a pretty face. I've got an ugly face," she said
invitingly.

"You haven't got an ugly face. You have a pretty face," said Eugene
firmly. "Anyway, the face doesn't matter much with me," he added,
subtly.

"What do you like best, 'Gene?" Louise asked.

He thought carefully and gravely.

"Why," he said, "a woman ought to have pretty legs. Sometimes a woman
has an ugly face, but a pretty leg. The prettiest legs I ever saw were
on a High Yellow."

"Were they prettier than mine?" said the waitress, with an easy laugh.

She crossed her legs slowly and displayed her silk-shod ankle.

"I don't know, Louise," he said, staring critically. "I can't see
enough."

"Is that enough?" she said, pulling her tight skirt above her calves.

"No," said Eugene.

"Is that?" she pulled her skirt back over her knees, and displayed her
plump thighs, gartered with a ruffled band of silk and red rosettes. She
thrust her small feet out, coyly turning the toes in.

"Lord!" said Eugene, staring with keen interest at the garter. "I never
saw any like that before. That's pretty." He gulped noisily. "Don't
those things hurt you, Louise?"

"Uh-uh," she said, as if puzzled, "why?"

"I should think they'd cut into your skin," he said. "I know mine do if
I wear them too tight. See."

He pulled up his trousers' leg and showed his young gartered shank,
lightly spired with hair.

Louise looked, and felt the garter gravely with a plump hand.

"Mine don't hurt me," she said. She snapped the elastic with a ripe
smack. "See!"

"Let me see," he said. He placed his trembling fingers lightly upon her
garter.

"Yes," he said unsteadily, "I see."

Her round young weight lay heavy against him, her warm young face turned
blindly up to his own. His brain reeled as if drunken, he dropped his
mouth awkwardly upon her parted lips. She sank back heavily on the
pillows. He planted dry and clumsy kisses upon her mouth, her eyes, in
little circles round her throat and face. He fumbled at the throat-hook
of her waist, but his fingers shook so violently that he could not
unfasten it. She lifted her smooth hands with a comatose gesture, and
unfastened it for him.

Then he lifted his beet-red face, and whispered tremulously, not knowing
well what he said:

"You're a nice girl, Louise. A pretty girl."

She thrust her pink fingers slowly through his hair, drew back his face
into her breasts again, moaned softly as he kissed her, and clutched his
hair in an aching grip. He put his arms around her and drew her to him.
They devoured each other with young wet kisses, insatiate, unhappy,
trying to grow together in their embrace, draw out the last distillation
of desire in a single kiss.

He lay sprawled, scattered and witless with passion, unable to collect
and focus his heat. He heard the wild tongueless cries of desire, the
inchoate ecstasy that knows no gateway of release. But he knew fear--not
the social fear, but the fear of ignorance, of discovery. He feared his
potency. He spoke to her thickly, wildly, not hearing himself speak.

"Do you want me to? Do you want me to, Louise?"

She drew his face down, murmuring:

"You won't hurt me, 'Gene? You wouldn't do anything to hurt me, honey?
If anything happens--" she said drowsily.

He seized the straw of her suggestion.

"I won't be the first. I won't be the one to begin you. I've never
started a girl off," he babbled, aware vaguely that he was voicing an
approved doctrine of chivalry. "See, here, Louise!" he shook her--she
seemed drugged. "You've got to tell me before----I won't do _that_! I
may be a bad fellow, but nobody can say I ever did that. Do you hear!"
His voice rose shrilly; his face worked wildly; he was hardly able to
speak.

"I say, do you hear? Am I the first one, or not? You've got to answer!
Did you ever----before?"

She looked at him lazily. She smiled.

"No," she said.

"I may be bad, but I won't do that." He had become inarticulate; his
voice went off into a speechless jargon. Gasping, stammering, with
contorted and writhing face, he sought for speech.

She rose suddenly, and put her warm arms comfortingly around him.
Soothing and caressing him, she drew him down on her breast. She stroked
his head, and talked quietly to him.

"I know you wouldn't, honey. I know you wouldn't. Don't talk. Don't say
anything. Why, you're all excited, dear. There. Why, you're shaking like
a leaf. You're high-strung, honey. That's what it is. You're a bundle of
nerves."

He wept soundlessly into her arm.

He became quieter. She smiled, and kissed him softly.

"Put on your clothes," said Louise. "We ought to get started if we're
going out there."

In his confusion he tried to draw on a pair of Mrs. Bowden's cast-off
pumps. Louise laughed richly, and thrust her fingers through his hair.


At the Navy Yard, they could not find the Bowdens nor Max Isaacs. A
young sailor took them over a destroyer. Louise went up a railed iron
ladder with an emphatic rhythm of her shapely thighs. She showed her
legs. She stared impudently at a picture of a chorus lady, cut from
the _Police Gazette_. The young sailor rolled his eyes aloft with an
expression of innocent debauchery. Then he winked heavily at Eugene.

The deck of the Oregon.

"What's that for?" said Louise, pointing to the outline in nails of
Admiral Dewey's foot.

"That's where he stood during the fight," said the sailor.

Louise put her small foot within the print of the greater one. The
sailor winked at Eugene. You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.


"She's a nice girl," said Eugene.

"Yeah," said Max Isaacs. "She's a nice lady." He craned his neck
awkwardly, and squinted. "About how old is she?"

"She's eighteen," said Eugene.

Malvin Bowden stared at him.

"You're crazy!" said he. "She's twenty-one."

"No," said Eugene, "she's eighteen. She told me so."

"I don't care," said Malvin Bowden, "she's no such thing. She's
twenty-one. I reckon I ought to know. My folks have known her for five
years. She had a baby when she was eighteen."

"Aw!" said Max Isaacs.

"Yes," said Malvin Bowden, "a travelling man got her in trouble. Then he
ran away."

"Aw!" said Max Isaacs. "Without marryin' her or anything?"

"He didn't do nothing for her. He ran away," said Malvin Bowden. "Her
people are raising the kid now."

"Great Day!" said Max Isaacs slowly. Then, sternly, he added, "A man
who'd do a thing like that ought to be shot."

"You're right!" said Malvin Bowden.


They loafed along the Battery, along the borders of ruined Camelot.

"Those are nice old places," said Max Isaacs. "They've been good houses
in their day."

He looked greedily at wrought-iron gateways; the old lust of his
childhood for iron-scraps awoke.

"Those are old Southern mansions," said Eugene, reverently.

The bay was still: there was a green stench of warm standing water.

"They've let the place run down," said Malvin. "It's no bigger now than
it was before the Civil War."

No, sir, and, by heaven, so long as one true Southern heart is left
alive to remember Appomattox, Reconstruction, and the Black parliaments,
we will defend with our dearest blood our menaced, but sacred,
traditions.

"They need some Northern capital," said Max Isaacs sagely. They all did.

An old woman, wearing a tiny bonnet, was led out on a high veranda
from one of the houses, by an attentive negress. She seated herself
in a porch rocker and stared blindly into the sun. Eugene looked at
her sympathetically. She had probably not been informed by her loyal
children of the unsuccessful termination of the war. United in their
brave deception, they stinted themselves daily, reining in on their
proud stomachs in order that she might have all the luxury to which she
had been accustomed. What did she eat? The wing of a chicken, no doubt,
and a glass of dry sherry. Meanwhile, all the valuable heirlooms had
been pawned or sold. Fortunately, she was almost blind, and could not
see the wastage of their fortune. It was very sad. But did she not
sometimes think of that old time of the wine and the roses? When
knighthood was in flower?

"Look at that old lady," whispered Malvin Bowden.

"You can _tell_ she's a lady," said Max Isaacs. "I bet she's never
turned her hand over."

"An old family," said Eugene gently. "The Southern aristocracy."

An old negro came by, fringed benevolently by white whiskers. A good old
man--an ante-bellum darkey. Dear Lord, their number was few in these
unhappy days.

Eugene thought of the beautiful institution of human slavery, which his
slaveless maternal ancestry had fought so valiantly to preserve. Bress
de Lawd, Marse! Ole Mose doan' wan' to be free niggah. How he goan' lib
widout marse? He doan' wan' stahve wid free niggahs. Har, har, har!

Philanthropy. Pure philanthropy. He brushed a tear from his een.


They were going across the harbour to the Isle of Palms. As the boat
churned past the round brick cylinder of Fort Sumter, Malvin Bowden
said:

"They had the most men. If things had been even, we'd have beaten them."

"They didn't beat us," said Max Isaacs. "We wore ourselves out beating
them."

"We were defeated," said Eugene, quietly, "not beaten."

Max Isaacs stared at him dumbly.

"Aw!" he said.

They left the little boat, and ground away toward the beach in a
street-car. The land had grown dry and yellow in the enervation of the
summer. The foliage was coated with dust: they rattled past cheap summer
houses, baked and blistered, stogged drearily in the sand. They were
small, flimsy, a multitudinous vermin--all with their little wooden
sign of lodging. "The Ishkabibble," "Seaview," "Rest Haven," "Atlantic
Inn"--Eugene looked at them, reading with weariness the bleached and
jaded humour of their names.

"There are a lot of boarding-houses in the world," said he.

A hot wind of beginning autumn rustled dryly through the long parched
leaves of stunted palms. Before them rose the huge rusted spokes of a
Ferris Wheel. St. Louis. They had reached the beach.

Malvin Bowden leaped joyously from the car.

"Last one in's a rotten egg!" he cried, and streaked for the bathhouse.

"Kings! I've got kings, son," yelled Max Isaacs. He held up his crossed
fingers. The beach was bare: two or three concessions stood idly open
for business. The sky curved over them, a cloudless blue burnished
bowl. The sea offshore was glazed emerald: the waves rode heavily in,
thickening murkily as they turned with sunlight and sediment to a beachy
yellow.

They walked slowly down the beach toward the bathhouse. The tranquil,
incessant thunder of the sea made in them a lonely music. Seawards,
their eyes probed through the seething glare.

"I'm going to join the navy, 'Gene," said Max Isaacs. "Come on and go
with me."

"I'm not old enough," said Eugene. "You're not, either."

"I'll be sixteen in November," said Max Isaacs defensively.

"That's not old enough."

"I'm going to lie to get in," said Max Isaacs. "They won't bother you.
You can get in. Come on."

"No," said Eugene. "I can't."

"Why not?" said Max Isaacs. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to college," said Eugene. "I'm going to get an education and
study law."

"You'll have lots of time," said Max Isaacs. "You can go to college when
you come out. They teach you a lot in the navy. They give you a good
training. You go everywhere."

"No," said Eugene, "I can't."

But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely thunder of the sea.
He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage, and heard the little tinkling
sounds of Asia. He believed in harbours at the end.


Mrs. Bowden's niece and the waitress came out on the next car. After
his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the gusty wind, upon the
beach. A fine tang of salt was on his lips. He licked his clean young
flesh.

Louise came from the bathhouse and walked slowly toward him. She came
proudly, her warm curves moulded into her bathing-suit: her legs were
covered with stockings of green silk.

Far out, beyond the ropes, Max Isaacs lifted his white heavy arms, and
slid swiftly through a surging wall of green water. His body glimmered
greenly for a moment; he stood erect wiping his eyes and shaking water
from his ears.

Eugene took the waitress by the hand and led her into the water. She
advanced slowly, with little twittering cries. An undulant surge rolled
in deceptively, and rose suddenly to her chin, drinking her breath. She
gasped and clung to him. Initiated, they bucked deliciously through a
roaring wall of water, and, while her eyes were still closed, he caught
her to him with young salty kisses.

Presently they came out, and walked over the wet strip of beach into the
warm loose sand, bedding their dripping bodies gratefully in its warmth.
The waitress shivered: he moulded sand over her legs and hips, until she
was half buried. He kissed her, stilling his trembling lips upon her
mouth.

"I like you! I like you a lot!" he said.

"What did they tell you about me?" she said. "Did they talk about me?"

"I don't care," he said. "I don't care about that. I like you."

"You won't remember me, honey, when you start going with the girls.
You'll forget about me. Some day you'll see me, and you won't even know
me. You won't recognise me. You'll pass without speaking."

"No," he said. "I'll never forget you, Louise. So long as I live."

Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of the sea. She kissed
him. They were hill-born.


He returned in late September.

In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for Baltimore. The
operation, too long deferred, was now inevitable. His disease had grown
steadily worse. He had gone through a period of incessant pain. He was
enfeebled. He was frightened.

Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house with his cries,
commanding terror with his old magnificence.

"I see it! I see it! The knife! The knife!... Do you see its shadow?
... There! There! There!"

With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to invulnerable nothings.

"Do you see him standing there in the shadows? So you've come at last to
take the old man with you? ... There he stands--the Grim Reaper--as I
always knew he would. Jesus, have mercy on my soul!"


Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins.
Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in and looked at his chart.
He talked happily and went away. He was one of the greatest surgeons in
the country.

"Don't worry," said the nurse encouragingly, "the mortality's only four
per cent. It used to be thirty. He's reduced it."

Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his daughter's vital grasp.

"Don't worry, old boy!" she said, "you're going to be as good as you
ever were, after this."

She fed him with her life, her hope, her love. He was almost tranquil
when they wheeled him in to his operation.

But the little grey-haired man looked, shook his head regretfully, and
trimmed deftly.

"All right!" he said, four minutes later, to his assistant. "Close the
wound."

Gant was dying of cancer.


Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor veranda, looking
out through bright October air at the city spread far into the haze
before him. He looked very clean, almost fragile. A faint grin of
happiness and relief hovered about his thin mouth. He smoked a long
cigar, with fresh-awakened senses.

"There," he said pointing, "is where I spent part of my boyhood. Old
Jeff Streeter's hotel stood about there," he pointed.

"Dig down!" said Helen, grinning.

Gant thought of the years between, and the vexed pattern of fate. His
life seemed strange to him.

"We'll go to see all those places when you get out of here. They're
going to let you out of here, day after to-morrow. Did you know that?
Did you know you're almost well?" she cried with a big smile.

"I'm going to be a well man after this," said Gant. "I feel twenty years
younger!"

"Poor old papa!" she said. "Poor old papa!"

Her eyes were wet. She put her big hands on his face, and drew his head
against her.




XXVII


My Shakespeare, rise! He rose. The bard rose throughout the length and
breadth of his brave new world. He was not for an age, but for all time.
Then, too, his tercentenary happened only once--at the end of three
hundred years. It was observed piously from Maryland to Oregon.
Eighty-one members of the House of Representatives, when asked by
literate journalists for their favourite lines, replied instantly with a
quotation from Polonius: "This above all: to thine own self be true."
The Swan was played, and pageanted, and essayed in every schoolhouse in
the land.

Eugene tore the Chandos portrait from the pages of the _Independent_ and
nailed it to the calcimined wall of the back-room. Then, still full of
the great echoing pan of Ben Jonson's, he scrawled below it in large
trembling letters: "My Shakespeare, rise!" The large plump face--"as
damned silly a head as ever I looked at"--stared baldly at him with
goggle eyes, the goatee pointed ripe with hayseed vanity. But, lit by
the presence, Eugene plunged back into the essay littered across his
table.

He was discovered. In an unwise absence, he left the Bard upon the wall.
When he returned, Ben and Helen had read his scrawl. Thereafter, he was
called poetically to table, to the telephone, to go an errand.

"My Shakespeare, rise!"

With red resentful face, he rose.

"Will My Shakespeare pass the biscuits?" or, "Could I trouble My
Shakespeare for the butter?" said Ben, scowling at him.

"My Shakespeare! My Shakespeare! Do you want another piece of pie?" said
Helen. Then, full of penitent laughter, she added: "That's a shame! We
oughtn't to treat the poor kid like that." Laughing, she plucked at her
large straight chin, gazing out the window, and laughing
absently--penitently, laughing.

But--"his art was universal. He saw life clearly and he saw it whole. He
was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched every shore of thought. He
was all things in one: lawyer, merchant, soldier, doctor, statesman.
Men of science have been amazed, by the depth of his learning. In _The
Merchant of Venice_, he deals with the most technical questions of law
with the skill of an attorney. In _King Lear_, he boldly prescribes
sleep as a remedy for Lear's insanity. 'Sleep that knits up the ravell'd
sleave of care.' Thus, he has foreseen the latest researches of modern
science by almost three centuries. In his sympathetic and well-rounded
sense of characterisation, he laughs with, not at, his characters."

Eugene won the medal--bronze or of some other material even more
enduring. The Bard's profile murkily indented. W.S. 1616-1916. A long
and useful life.


The machinery of the pageant was beautiful and simple. Its author--Dr.
George B. Rockham, at one time, it was whispered, a trouper with the Ben
Greet players--had seen to that. All the words had been written by Dr.
George B. Rockham, and all the words, accordingly, had been written for
Dr. George B. Rockham. Dr. George B. Rockham was the Voice of History.
The innocent children of Altamont's schools were the mute illustrations
of that voice.

Eugene was Prince Hal. The day before the pageant his costume arrived
from Philadelphia. At John Dorsey Leonard's direction he put it on.
Then he came out sheepishly before John Dorsey on the school veranda,
fingering his tin sword and looking somewhat doubtfully at his pink silk
hose which came three quarters up his skinny shanks, and left exposed,
below his doublet, a six-inch hiatus of raw thigh.

John Dorsey Leonard looked gravely.

"Here, boy," he said. "Let me see!"

He pulled strongly at the top of the deficient hose, with no result save
to open up large runs in them. Then John Dorsey Leonard began to laugh.
He slid helplessly down upon the porch rail, and bent over, palsied with
silent laughter, from which a high whine, full of spittle, presently
emerged.

"O-oh my Lord!" he gasped. "Egscuse me!" he panted, seeing the boy's
angry face. "It's the funniest thing I ever----" at this moment his
voice died of paralysis.

"I'll fix you," said Miss Amy. "I've got just the thing for you."

She gave him a full baggy clown's suit, of green linen. It was a relic
of a Hallowe'en party; its wide folds were gartered about his ankles.

He turned a distressed, puzzled face toward Miss Amy.

"That's not right, is it?" he asked. "He never wore anything like that,
did he?"

Miss Amy looked. Her deep bosom heaved with full contralto laughter.

"Yes, that's right! That's fine!" she yelled. "He was like that, anyway.
No one will ever notice, boy." She collapsed heavily into a wicker chair
which widened with a protesting creak.

"Oh, Lord!" she groaned, wet-cheeked. "I don't believe I ever saw----"


The pageant was performed on the embowered lawns of the Manor House.
Dr. George B. Rockham stood in a green hollow--a natural amphitheatre.
His audience sat on the turf of the encircling banks. As the phantom
cavalcades of poetry and the drama wound down to him, Dr. George B.
Rockham disposed of each character neatly in descriptive pentameter
verse. He was dressed in the fashion of the Restoration--a period he
coveted because it understood the charms of muscular calves. His heavy
legs bulged knottily below a coy fringe of drawer-ruffles.

Eugene stood waiting on the road above, behind an obscuring wall of
trees. It was rich young May. "Doc" Hines (Falstaff) waited beside him.
His small tough face grinned apishly over garments stuffed with yards of
wadding. Grinning, he smote himself upon his swollen paunch: the blow
left a dropsical depression.

He turned, with a comical squint, on Eugene:

"Hal," said he, "you're a hell of a looking prince."

"You're no beauty, Jack," said Eugene.

Behind him, Julius Arthur (Macbeth), drew his sword with a flourish.

"I challenge you, Hal," said he.

In the young shimmering light their tin swords clashed rapidly.
Twittered with young bird-laughter, on bank and saddle sprawled, all of
the Bard's _person_. Julius Arthur thrust swiftly, was warded, then,
with loose grin, buried his brand suddenly in "Doc" Hines' receiving
paunch. The company of the immortal shrieked happily.

Miss Ida Nelson, the assistant director, rushed angrily among them.

"Sh!" she hissed loudly. "Sh-h!" She was very angry. She had spent the
afternoon hissing loudly.

Swinging gently in her side-saddle, Rosalind, on horseback, a ripe
little beauty from the convent, smiled warmly at him. Looking, he
forgot.

Below them, on the road, the crowded press loosened slowly, broke off in
minute fragments, and disappeared into the hidden gulch of Dr. George B.
Rockham's receiving voice. With fat hammy sonority he welcomed them.

But he had not come to Shakespeare. The pageant had opened with the
Voices of Past and Present--voices a trifle out of harmony with
the tenor of event--but necessary to the commercial success of the
enterprise. These voices now moved voicelessly past--four frightened
sales-ladies from Schwartzberg's, clad decently in cheesecloth and
sandals, who came by bearing the banner of their concern. Or, as the
doctor's more eloquent iambics had it:

  "Fair Commerce, sister of the arts, thou, too,
   Shalt take thy lawful place upon our stage."

They came and passed: Ginsberg's--"the glass of fashion and the mould of
form"; Bradley the Grocer--"when first Pomona held her fruity horn"; The
Buick Agency--"the chariots of Oxus and of Ind."

Came, passed--like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

Behind them, serried ranks of cherubim, the marshalled legions of
Altamont's Sunday schools, each in white arrayed and clutching grimly in
tiny hands two thousand tiny flags of freedom, God's small angels, and
surely there for God knows what far-off event, began to move into the
hollow. Their teachers nursed them gently into action, with tapping feet
and palms.

"One, two, _three_, four. One, two, _three_, four. Quickly children!"

A hidden orchestra, musical in the trees, greeted them, as they
approached, with holy strains: the Baptists, with the simple doctrine of
"It's the Old-time Religion"; the Methodists, with "I'll Be Waiting at
the River"; the Presbyterians, with "Rock of Ages"; the Episcopalians,
with "Jesus, Lover of My Soul"; and rising to lyrical climactic passion,
the little Jews, with the nobly marching music of "Onward, Christian
Soldiers."

They passed without laughter. There was a pause.

"Well, thank God for that!" said Ralph Rolls coarsely in a solemn quiet.
The Bard's strewn host laughed, rustled noisily into line.

"Sh-h! Sh-h!" hissed Miss Ida Nelson.

"What the hell does she think she is?" said Julius Arthur, "a steam
valve?"

Eugene looked attentively at the shapely legs of the page, Viola.

"Wow!" said Ralph Rolls, with his accustomed audibility. "Look who's
here!"

She looked on them all with a pert impartial smile. But she never told
her love.

Miss Ida Nelson caught the doctor's stealthy sign. Carefully, in slow
twos, she fed them down to him.

The Moor of Venice (Mr. George Graves), turned his broad back upon their
jibes, and lurched down with sullen-sheepish grin, unable to conceal the
massive embarrassment of his calves.

"Tell him who you are, Villa," said Doc Hines. "You look like Jack
Johnson."

The town, in its first white shirting of Spring, sat on the turfy banks,
and looked down gravely upon the bosky little comedy of errors; the
encircling mountains, and the gods thereon, looked down upon the
slightly larger theatre of the town; and, figuratively, from mountains
that looked down on mountains, the last stronghold of philosophy, the
author of this chronicle looked down on everything.

"Here we go, Hal," said Doc Hines, nudging Eugene.

"Give 'em hell, son," said Julius Arthur. "You're dressed for the part."

"He looks it, you mean," said Ralph Rolls. "Boy, you'll knock 'em dead,"
he added with an indecent laugh.

They descended into the hollow, accompanied by a low but growing titter
of amazement from the audience. Before them, the doctor had just
disposed of Desdemona, who parted with a graceful obeisance. He was now
engaged on Othello, who stood, bullish and shy, till his ordeal should
finish. In a moment, he strode away, and the doctor turned to Falstaff,
reading the man by his padded belly, briskly, with relief:

  "Now, Tragedy, begone, and to our dell
   Bring antic Jollity with cap and bells:
   Falstaff, thou prince of jesters, lewd old man
   Who surfeited a royal prince with mirth,
   And swayed a kingdom with his wanton quips----"

Embarrassed by the growing undertone of laughter, Doc Hines squinted
around with a tough grin, gave a comical hitch to his padded figure, and
whispered a hoarse aside to Eugene: "Hear that, Hal? I'm hell on wheels,
ain't I?"

Eugene saw him depart in a green blur, and presently became aware that
an unnatural silence had descended upon Doctor George B. Rockham. The
Voice of History was, for the moment, mute. Its long jaw, in fact, had
fallen ajar.

Dr. George B. Rockham looked wildly about him for succour. He rolled his
eyes entreatingly upwards at Miss Ida Nelson. She turned her head away.

"Who are you?" he said hoarsely, holding a hairy hand carefully beside
his mouth.

"Prince Hal," said Eugene, likewise hoarsely and behind his hand.

Dr. George B. Rockham staggered a little. Their speech had reached the
stalls. But firmly, before the tethered chafing laughter, he began:

  "Friend to the weak and comrade of the wild,
   By folly sired to wisdom, dauntless Hal----"

Laughter, laughter unleashed and turbulent, laughter that rose flood
by flood upon itself, laughter wild, earth-shaking, thunder-cuffing,
drowned Dr. George B. Rockham and all he had to say. Laughter! Laughter!
Laughter!


Helen was married in the month of June--a month sacred, it is said,
to Hymen, but used so often for nuptials that the god's blessing is
probably not infallible.

She had returned to Altamont in May, from her last singing engagement.
She had been in Atlanta for the week of opera, and had come back by way
of Henderson, where she had visited Daisy and Mrs. Selborne. There she
had found her mate.

He was not a stranger to her. She had known him years before in
Altamont, where he had lived for a short time as district agent for
the great and humane corporation that employed him--the Federal Cash
Register Company. Since that time he had gone to various parts of the
country at his master's bidding, carrying with him his great message of
prosperity and thrift. At the present time, he lived with his sister and
his aged mother, whose ponderous infirmity of limb had not impaired her
appetite, in a South Carolina town. He was devoted and generous to them
both. And the Federal Cash Register Company, touched by his devotion to
duty, rewarded him with a good salary. His name was Barton. The Bartons
lived well.

Helen returned with the unexpectedness in which all returning Gants
delighted. She came in on members of her family, one afternoon, in the
kitchen at Dixieland.

"Hello, everybody!" she said.

"Well, for G-g-god's sake," said Luke after a moment. "Look who's here!"

They embraced heartily.

"Why, what on earth!" cried Eliza, putting her iron down on the board,
and wavering on her feet, in an effort to walk in two directions at
once. They kissed.

"I was just thinking to myself," said Eliza, more calmly, "that it
wouldn't surprise me a bit if you should come walking in. I had a
premonition, I don't know what else you'd call it----"

"Oh, my God!" groaned the girl, good-humouredly, but with a shade of
annoyance. "Don't start that Pentland spooky stuff! It makes my flesh
crawl."

She exchanged a glance of burlesque entreaty with Luke. Winking, he
turned suddenly, and with an idiotic laugh, tickled Eliza sharply.

"Get away!" she shrieked.

He chortled madly.

"I'll declare, boy!" she said fretfully. "I believe you're crazy. I'll
vow I do!"

Helen laughed huskily.

"Well," said Eliza, "how'd you leave Daisy and the children?"

"They're all right, I suppose," said Helen wearily. "Oh, my God! Deliver
me!" she laughed. "You never saw such pests! I spent fifty dollars on
them in toys and presents alone! You'd never think it from the thanks I
get. Daisy takes it all as her due! Selfish! Selfish! Selfish!"

"For G-g-god's sake!" said Luke loyally.

She was one fine girl.

"I paid for everything I got at Daisy's, I can assure you!" she said
sharply, challengingly. "I spent no more time there than I had to. I was
at Mrs. Selborne's nearly all the time. I had practically all my meals
there."

Her need for independence had become greater; her hunger for dependents
acute. Her denial of obligation to others was militant. She gave more
than she received.

"Well, I'm in for it," she said presently, trying to mask her strong
eagerness.

"In for what?" asked Luke.

"I've gone and done it at last," she said.

"Mercy!" shrieked Eliza. "You're not married, are you?"

"Not yet," said Helen, "but I will be soon."

Then she told them about Mr. Hugh T. Barton, the cash register salesman.
She spoke loyally and kindly of him, without great love.

"He's ten years older than I am," she said.

"Well," said Eliza thoughtfully, moulding her lips. "They sometimes make
the best husbands." After a moment she asked: "Has he got any property?"

"No," said Helen, "they live up to all he makes. They live in style, I
tell you. There are two servants in that house all the time. The old
lady doesn't turn her hand over."

"Where are you going to live?" said Eliza sharply. "With his folks?"

"Well, I should say not! I should say not!" said Helen slowly and
emphatically. "Good heavens, mamma!" she continued irritably. "I want a
home of my own. Can't you realise that? I've been doing for others all
my life. Now I'm going to let them do for me. I want no in-laws about.
No, sir!" she said emphatically.

Luke bit his nails nervously.

"Well, he's g-g-getting a great g-g-girl," he said. "I hope he has sense
enough to realise that."

Moved, she laughed bigly, ironically.

"I've got one booster, haven't I?" she said. She looked at him seriously
with clear affectionate eyes. "Well, thanks, Luke. You're one of the lot
that's always had the interests of the family at heart."

Her big face was for a moment tranquil and eager. A great calm lay
there: the radiant decent beauty of dawn and rain-water. Her eyes were
as luminous and believing as a child's. No evil dwelt in her. She had
learned nothing.

"Have you told your papa?" said Eliza, presently.

"No," she said, after a pause, "I haven't."

They thought of Gant in silence, with wonder. Her going was a marvel.

"I have a right to my own life," said Helen angrily, as if some one
disputed that right, "as much as anyone. Good heavens, mamma! You and
papa have lived your lives--don't you know that? Do you think it's right
that I should go on for ever looking after him? Do you?" Her voice rose
under the stress of hysteria.

"Why, no-o. I never said----" Eliza began, flustered and conciliatory.

"You've spent your life f-f-finking of others and not of yourself," said
Luke. "That's the trouble. They don't appreciate it."

"Well, I'm not going to any longer. That's one thing sure! No, indeed!
I want a home and some children. I'm going to have them!" she said
defiantly. In a moment, she added tenderly:

"Poor old papa! I wonder what he's going to say?"

He said very little. The Gants, after initial surprise, moulded new
event very quickly into the texture of their lives. Abysmal change
widened their souls out in a brooding unconsciousness.


Mr. Hugh Barton came up into the hills to visit his affianced kin. He
came, to their huge delight, lounging in the long racing chassis of a
dusty brown 1911 Buick roadster. He came, in a gaseous coil, to the
roaring explosion of great engines. He descended, a tall, elegant
figure, dyspeptic, lean almost to emaciation, very foppishly laundered
and tailored. He looked the car over slowly, critically, a long cigar
clamped in the corner of his saturnine mouth, drawing his gauntlets off
deliberately. Then, in the same unhurried fashion, he removed from his
head the ten-gallon grey sombrero--the only astonishing feature of his
otherwise undebatable costume--and shook each long thin leg delicately
for a moment to straighten out the wrinkles. But there were none. Then,
deliberately, he came up the walk to Dixieland, where the Gants were
assembled. As he came, unhurried, he took the cigar from his mouth
calmly and held it in the fingers of his lean, hairy, violently palsied
hand. His thin black hair, fine spun, was fanned lightly from its
elegance by a wantoning breeze. He espied his betrothed and grinned,
with dignity, sardonically, with big nuggets of gold teeth. They greeted
and kissed.

"This is my mother, Hugh," said Helen.

Hugh Barton bent slowly, courteously, from his thin waist. He fastened
on Eliza a keen penetrating stare that discomposed her. His lips twisted
again in an impressive sardonic smile. Everyone felt he was going to say
something very, very important.

"How do you do?" he asked, and took her hand.

Everyone then felt that Hugh Barton had said something very, very
important.

With equal slow gravity he greeted each one. They were somewhat awed by
his lordliness. Luke, however, burst out uncontrollably:

"You're g-g-getting a fine girl, Mr. B-b-barton."

Hugh Barton turned on him slowly and fixed him with his keen stare.

"I think so," he said gravely. His voice was deep, deliberate, with an
impressive rasp. He was selling himself.

In an awkward silence he turned, grinning amiably, on Eugene.

"Have a cigar?" he asked, taking three long powerful weeds from his
upper vest pocket, and holding them out in his clean, twitching fingers.

"Thanks," said Eugene with a dissipated leer, "I'll smoke a Camel."

He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. Gravely, Hugh Barton
held a match for him.

"Why do you wear the big hat?" asked Eugene.

"Psychology," he said. "It makes 'em talk."

"I tell you what!" said Eliza, beginning to laugh. "That's pretty smart,
isn't it?"

"Sure!" said Luke. "That's advertising! It pays to advertise!"

"Yes," said Mr. Barton slowly, "you've got to get the other fellow's
psychology."

The phrase seemed to describe an action of modified assault and
restrained pillage.

They liked him very much. They all went into the house.


Hugh Barton's mother was in her seventy-fourth year, but she had the
strength of a healthy woman of fifty, and the appetite of two of forty.
She was a powerful old lady, six feet tall, with the big bones of a man,
and a heavy full-jawed face, sensuous and complacent, and excellently
equipped with a champing mill of strong yellow horse-teeth. It was cake
and pudding to see her at work on corn on the cob. A slight paralysis
had slowed her tongue and thickened her speech a little, so that she
spoke deliberately, with a ponderous enunciation of each word. This
deformity, which she carefully hid, added to, rather than subtracted
from, the pontifical weight of her opinions: she was an earnest
Republican--in memory of her departed mate--and she took a violent
dislike to anyone who opposed her political judgment. When thwarted or
annoyed in any way, the heavy benevolence of her face was dislodged by
a thunder-cloud of petulance, and her wide pouting underlip rolled out
like a window-shade. But, as she barged slowly along, one big hand
gripping a heavy stick on which she leaned her massive weight, she was
an impressive dowager.

"She's a lady--a real lady," said Helen proudly. "Anyone can see that!
She goes out with all the best people."

Hugh Barton's sister, Mrs. Genevieve Watson, was a sallow woman of
thirty-eight years, tall, wren-like and emaciated, like her brother;
dyspeptic, and very elegantly kept. The divorced Watson was conspicuous
for his absence from all conversations: there was once or twice a heavy
flutter around his name, a funereal hush, and a muttered suggestion of
oriental debauchery.

"He was a beast," said Hugh Barton, "a low dog. He treated sister very
badly."

Mrs. Barton wagged her great head with the slow but emphatic approval
she accorded all her son's opinions.

"O-o-h!" she said. "He was a ter-rib-bul man."

He had, they inferred, been given to hellish practices. He had "gone
after other women."

Sister Veve had a narrow discontented face, a metallic vivacity, an
effusive cordiality. She was always very smartly dressed. She had
somewhat vague connections in the real estate business; she spoke
grandly of obscure affairs; she was always on the verge of an indefinite
"Big Deal."

"I'm getting them lined up, brother," she would say with cheerful
confidence. "Things are coming my way. J. D. came in to-day and said:
'Veve--you're the only woman in the world that can put this thing
across. Go to it, little girl. There's a fortune in it for you.'" And
so on.

Her conversation, Eugene thought, was not unlike Brother Steve's.

But their affection and loyalty for one another was beautiful. Its
unaccustomed faith, its abiding tranquillity, puzzled and disturbed the
Gants. They were touched indefinably, a little annoyed, because of it.

The Bartons came to Woodson Street two weeks before the wedding. Within
three days after their arrival, Helen and old lady Barton were at odds.
It was inevitable. The heat of the girl's first affection for Barton's
family wore off very quickly: her possessive instinct asserted
itself--she would halve no one's love, she would share with no other a
place in the heart. She would own, she would possess completely. She
would be generous, but she would be mistress. She would give. It was the
law of her nature.

She began immediately, by force of this essential stress, to make out a
case against the old woman.

Mrs. Barton, too, felt the extent of her loss. She wanted to be sure
that Helen realised the extent of her acquisition of one of the
latter-day saints.

Rocking ponderously in the dark on Gant's veranda, the old woman would
say:

"You are get-ting a good boy, Hel-en." She would wag her powerful head
from side to side, pugnaciously emphatic. "Though I do say it myself,
you are get-ting one good boy, Hel-en. A bet-ter boy than Hugh does-ent
live."

"Oh, I don't know!" said Helen, annoyed. "I don't think it's such a bad
bargain for him either, you know. I think pretty well of myself, too."
And she would laugh, huskily, heartily, trying in laughter to conceal
her resentment, but visibly, to every eye but Mrs. Barton's, angered.

A moment later, on some pretext, she would go back into the house,
where, with a face contorted by her rising hysteria, to Luke, Eugene, or
any sympathetic audience, she would burst out:

"You heard that, didn't you? You heard that? You see what I've got to
put up with, don't you? Do you see? Do you blame me for not wanting
that damned old woman around? Do you? You see how she wants to run
things, don't you? Do you see how she rubs it into me whenever she
gets a chance? She can't bear to give him up. Of course not! He's her
meal-ticket. They've bled him white. Why, even now, if it came to a
question of choosing between us----" her face worked strongly. She could
not continue. In a moment she quieted herself, and said decisively: "I
suppose you know now why we're going to live away from them. You see,
don't you? Do you blame me?"

"No'm," said Eugene, obedient after pumping.

"It's a d-d-damn shame!" said Luke loyally.

At this moment Mrs. Barton, kindly but authoritative, called from the
veranda:

"Hel-en! Where are you, Hel-en?"

"Oh, gotohell. Gotohell!" said Helen, in a comic undertone.

"Yes? What is it?" she called out sharply.

You see, don't you?


She was married at Dixieland, because she was having a big wedding. She
knew a great many people.

As her wedding-day approached, her suppressed hysteria mounted. Her
sense of decorum grew militant: she attacked Eliza bitterly for keeping
certain dubious people in the house.

"Mamma, in heaven's name! What do you mean by allowing such goings-on
right in the face of Hugh and his people? What do you suppose they think
of it? Have you no respect for my feelings? Good heavens, are you going
to have the house full of chippies on the night of my wedding?" Her
voice was high and cracked. She almost wept.

"Why, child!" said Eliza, with troubled face. "What do you mean? I've
never noticed anything."

"Are you blind! Everyone's talking about it! They're practically living
together!" This last was a reference to a condition existing between a
dissipated and alcoholic young man and a darkly handsome young woman,
slightly tubercular.

To Eugene was assigned the task of digging this couple out of their
burrow. He waited sternly outside the girl's room, watching the shadow
dance at the door crack. At the end of the sixth hour, the besieged
surrendered--the man came out. The boy--pallid, but proud of his
trust--told the house-defiler that he must go. The young man agreed with
cheerful alcoholism. He went at once.

Mrs. Pert was saved in the house-cleaning.

"After all," said Helen, "what do we know about her? They can say what
they like about Fatty. I like her."

       *       *       *       *       *

Ferns, flowers, potted plants, presents and guests arriving. The long
nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The packed crowd. The
triumphant booming of "The Wedding March."

A flashlight: Hugh Barton and his bride limply astare--frightened; Gant,
Ben, Luke, and Eugene, widely, sheepishly agrin; Eliza, high-sorrowful
and sad; Mrs. Selborne and a smile of subtle mystery; the pert
flower-girls; Pearl Hines' happy laughter.

When it was over, Eliza and her daughter hung in each other's arms,
weeping.

Eliza repeated over and over, from guest to guest:

  "A son is a son till he gets him a wife,
   But a daughter's a daughter all the days of her life."

She was comforted.

They escaped at length, wilted, from the thronging press of well-wishing
guests. White-faced, scared, witless, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Barton got into
a closed car. It was done! They would spend the night at the Battery
Hill. Ben had engaged the wedding-suite. To-morrow, a honeymoon to
Niagara.

Before they went, the girl kissed Eugene with something of the old
affection.

"I'll see you in the Fall, honey. Come as soon as you're settled."

For Hugh Barton was beginning life with his bride in a new place. He was
going to the capital of the State. And it had already been determined,
chiefly by Gant, that Eugene was going to the State University.


But Hugh and Helen did not go honeymooning the next morning, as they
had planned. During the night, as she lay at Dixieland, old Mrs. Barton
was taken with a violent, a retching sickness. For once, her massive
digestive mechanism failed to meet the heavy demands she had put upon it
during the prenuptial banqueting. She came near death.

Hugh and Helen returned abruptly next morning to a scene of dismal
tinsellings and jaded lilies. Helen hurled her vitality into the sick
woman's care; dominant, furious, all-mastering, she blew back her life
into her. Within three days, Mrs. Barton was out of danger; but her
complete recovery was slow, ugly, and painful. As the days lengthened
out wearily, the girl became more and more bitter over her thwarted
honeymoon. Rushing out of the sick-room, she would enter Eliza's kitchen
with writhen face, unable to control her anger:

"That damned old woman! Sometimes I believe she did it on purpose! My
God, am I to get no happiness from life? Will they never leave me alone?
Urr-p! Urr-p!" Her rough bacchic smile played loosely over her large
unhappy face. "Mamma, in God's name, will you please tell me how long
it's going to last?"

Eliza laughed slyly, passing her finger under her broad nose-wing.

"Why, child!" she said. "What in the world! I've never seen the like!
She must have saved up for the last six months."

"Hel-en! Oh, Hel-en!" Mrs. Barton's voice came feebly in to them.

"Oh, gotohell!" said the girl, sotto-voce. "Urr-p! Urr-p!" She burst
suddenly into tears: "Is it going to be like this always! I sometimes
believe the judgment of God is against us all. Papa was right."

"Pshaw!" said Eliza, wetting her fingers, and threading a needle before
the light. "I'd go on and pay no more attention to her. There's nothing
wrong with her. It's all imagination!" It was Eliza's rooted conviction
that most human ills, except her own, were "all imagination."

"Hel-en!"

"All right! I'm coming!" the girl cried cheerfully, turning an angry
grin on Eliza as she went. It was funny. It was ugly. It was terrible.


It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the chief celestial
Cloud-Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter moderns have sometimes
called "the ancient Jester"--had turned his frown upon their fortunes.

It began to rain--rain incessant, spouting, torrential rain, fell among
the reeking hills, leaving grass and foliage drowned upon the slopes,
starting the liquid avalanche of earth upon a settlement, glutting lean
rocky mountain-streams to a foaming welter of yellow flood. It mined
the yellow banks away with unheard droppings; it caved in hillsides; it
drank the steep banked earth away below the rails, leaving them strung
to their aerial ties across a gutted canyon.

There was a flood in Altamont. It swept down in a converging width from
the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its banks in
a wide waste Mississippi. It looted the bottomlands of the river; it
floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as it might float a
leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all who dwelt therein.

The town was cut off from every communication with the world. At the end
of the third week, as the waters slid back into their channels, Hugh
Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great pit of the Buick,
rode out through flooded roads, crawled desperately over ruined trestles,
daring the irresistible wrath of water to achieve their wilted
anti-climactic honeymoon.


"He will go where I send him or not at all," Gant spoke his final word,
not loudly.

Thus it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University.

Eugene did not want to go to the State University.

For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard about his future
education. It was proposed that, in view of his youth, he should attend
Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years, go to Harvard for two years
more, and then, having arrived by easy stages at Paradise, "top things
off" with a year or two at Oxford.

"Then," said John Dorsey Leonard, who talked enchantingly on the
subject, between mouthfuls of clabber, "then, my sonny, a man may begin
to say he's really 'cultsherd.' After that, of course," he continued
with a spacious carelessness, "he may travel for a year or so."

But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him.

"You're too young, boy," said Margaret Leonard. "Can't you persuade your
father to wait another year? You're only a child in years, Eugene. You
have all the time in the world." Her eyes darkened as she talked.

Gant would not be persuaded.

"He's old enough," he said. "When I was his age I had been earning my
living for years. I'm getting old. I won't be here much longer. I want
him to begin to make a name for himself before I die."

He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement. In his youngest son
he saw the last hope of his name's survival in laurels--in the political
laurels he so valued. He wanted his son to be a great and far-seeing
statesman and a member of the Republican or Democratic party. His choice
of a university was therefore a measure of political expediency, founded
upon the judgment of his legal and political friends.

"He's ready to go," said Gant, "and he's going to the State University,
and nowhere else. He'll be given as good an education there as he can
get anywhere. Furthermore, he will make friends there who will stand by
him the rest of his life." He turned upon his son a glance of bitter
reproach. "There are very few boys who have had your chance," said he,
"and you ought to be grateful instead of turning up your nose at it.
Mark my words, you'll live to see the day when you'll thank me for
sending you there. Now, I've given you my last word: you'll go where I
send you or you'll go nowhere at all."




_PART III_




XXVIII


Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the
university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall,
and weighed perhaps 130 pounds. He had been sick very little in his
life, but his rapid growth had eaten sharply at his strength: he was
full of a wild energy of mind and body that devoured him and left him
exhausted. He tired very quickly.

He was a child when he went away: he was a child who had looked much on
pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the Ideal. Walled up in his
great city of visions, his tongue had learned to mock, his lip to sneer,
but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life.
Again and again he had been bogged in the grey slough of factuality. His
cruel eyes had missed the meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter
heart had sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom
melted at the glow of his imagination. He was not a child when he
reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer
that governed his belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler
race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a
lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in
brave heroic lives. He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and
gentleness he had little known. He believed in beauty and in order, and
that he would wreak out their mighty forms upon the distressful chaos of
his life. He believed in love, and in the goodness and glory of women.
He believed in valiance, and he hoped that, like Socrates, he would do
nothing mean or common in the hour of danger. He exulted in his youth,
and he believed that he could never die.

Four years later, when he was graduated, he had passed his adolescence,
the kiss of love and death burned on his lips, and he was still a child.

When it was at last plain that Gant's will was on this inflexible,
Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:

"Well, then, go your ways, boy. Go your ways. God bless you."

She looked a moment at his long thin figure and turned to John Dorsey
Leonard with wet eyes:

"Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who came to us four years
ago? Can you believe it?"

John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary gentle relaxation.

"What do you know about it?" he said.

When Margaret turned to him again her voice, low and gentle, was charged
with the greatest passion he had ever heard in it.

"You are taking a part of our heart with you, boy. Do you know that?"

She took his trembling hand gently between her own lean fingers. He
lowered his head and closed his eyelids tightly.

"Eugene," she continued, "we could not love you more if you were our own
child. We wanted to keep you with us for another year, but since that
cannot be, we are sending you out with our hopes pinned to you. Oh, boy,
you are fine. There is no atom in you that is not fine. A glory and a
chrism of bright genius rest upon you. God bless you: the world is
yours."

The proud words of love and glory sank like music to his heart, evoking
their bright pictures of triumph, and piercing him with the bitter shame
of his concealed desires. Love bade him enter, but his soul drew back,
guilty of dust and sin.

He tore his hand from her grasp, clinching, with the strangled cry of an
animal, his convulsive throat.

"I can't!" he choked. "You mustn't think----" He could not go on; his
life groped blindly to confessional.

Later, after he left her, her light kiss upon his cheek, the first she
had ever given him, burned like a ring of fire.

       *       *       *       *       *

That summer he was closer to Ben than ever before. They occupied the
same room at Woodson Street. Luke had returned to the Westinghouse plant
at Pittsburgh after Helen's marriage.

Gant still occupied his sitting-room, but the rest of the house he had
rented to a sprightly grey-haired widow of forty. She looked after them
beautifully, but she served Ben with an especial tenderness. At night,
on the cool veranda, Eugene would find them below the ripening clusters,
hear the quite note of his brother's voice, his laugh, see the slow red
arc of his cigarette in darkness.

The quiet one was more quiet and morose than he had ever been before:
he stalked through the house scowling ferociously. All his conversation
with Eliza was short and bitterly scornful; with Gant he spoke hardly
at all. They had never talked together. Their eyes never met--a great
shame, the shame of father and son, that mystery that goes down beyond
motherhood, beyond life, that mysterious shame that seals the lips of
all men, and lives in their hearts, had silenced them.

But to Eugene, Ben talked more freely than ever before. As they sat
upon their beds at night, reading and smoking before they slept, all of
the pain and bitterness of Benjamin Gant's life burst out in violent
denunciation. He began to speak with slow sullen difficulty, halting
over his words as he did when he read, but speaking more rapidly as his
quiet voice became more passionate.

"I suppose they've told you how poor they are?" he began, tossing his
cigarette away.

"Well," said Eugene, "I've got to go easy. I mustn't waste my money."

"Ah-h!" said Ben, making an ugly face. He laughed silently, with a thin
and bitter contortion of his lips.

"Papa said that a lot of boys pay their own way through college by
waiting on tables and so on. Perhaps I can do something like that."

Ben turned over on his side until he faced his brother, propping himself
on his thin hairy forearm.

"Now listen, 'Gene," he said sternly, "don't be a damned little fool, do
you hear? You take every damn cent you can get out of them," he added
savagely.

"Well, I appreciate what they're doing. I'm getting a lot more than the
rest of you had. They're doing a lot for me," said the boy.

"For _you_, you little idiot!" said Ben, scowling at him in disgust.
"They're doing it all for themselves. Don't let them get away with that.
They think you'll make good and bring a lot of credit to them some day.
They're rushing you into it two years too soon, as it is. No, you take
everything you can get. The rest of us never had anything, but I want
to see you get all that's coming to you. My God!" he cried furiously.
"Their money's doing no one any good rotting in the damned bank, is it?
No, 'Gene, get all you can. When you get down there, if you find you
need more to hold your own with the other boys, make the old man give it
to you. You've never had a chance to hold your head up in your own home
town, so make the most of your chances when you get away."

He lighted a cigarette and smoked in bitter silence for a moment.

"To hell with it all!" he said. "What in God's name are we living for!"


Before his first year was ended, the boy had changed his lodging four or
five times. He finished the year living alone in a big bare carpetless
room--an existence rare at Pulpit Hill, where the students, with very
few exceptions, lived two or three to a room. In that room began a
physical isolation, hard enough to bear at first which later became
indispensable to him, mind and body.

Eugene lived in a small world but its ruins for him were actual. His
misfortunes were trifling but their effect upon his spirit was deep and
calamitous. He withdrew deeply and scornfully into his cell. He was
friendless, whipped with scorn and pride. He set his face blindly
against all the common united life around him.

It was during this bitter and desperate autumn that Eugene first met Jim
Trivett.

Jim Trivett, the son of a rich tobacco farmer in the eastern part of the
State, was a good-tempered young tough of twenty years. He was a strong,
rather foul-looking boy, with a coarse protruding mouth, full-meated and
slightly ajar, constantly rayed with a faint loose smile and blotted at
the corner with a brown smear of tobacco juice. He had bad teeth. His
hair was light-brown, dry, and unruly; it stuck out in large untidy
mats. He was dressed in the last cheap extreme of the dreadful fashion
of the time: skin-tight trousers that ended an inch above his Oxford
shoes exposing an inch of clocked hose, a bobtailed coat belted in
across his kidneys, large striped collars of silk. Under his coat he
wore a big sweater with high-school numerals.

Jim Trivett lived with several other students from his community in
a lodging-house near Eugene's, but closer to the west gate of the
university. There were four young men banded together for security and
companionship in two untidy rooms heated to a baking dryness by small
cast-iron stoves. They made constant preparations for study, but they
never studied: one would enter sternly, announcing that he had "a hell
of a day to-morrow," and begin the most minute preparations for a long
contest with his books: he would sharpen his pencils carefully and
deliberately, adjust his lamp, replenish the red-hot stove, move his
chair, put on an eyeshade, clean his pipe, stuff it carefully with
tobacco, light, relight and empty it, then, with an expression of
relief, hear a rapping on his door.

"Come in the house, Goddamn it!" he would roar hospitably.

"Hello, 'Gene! Pull up a chair, son, and sit down," said Tom Grant. He
was a thickly built boy, gaudily dressed; he had a low forehead, black
hair, and a kind, stupid, indolent temper.

"Have you been working?"

"Hell, yes!" shouted Jim Trivett. "I've been working like a
son-of-a-bitch."

"God!" said Tom Grant, turning slowly to look at him. "Boy, you're going
to choke to death on one of those some day." He shook his head slowly
and sadly, then continued with a rough laugh: "If old man Trivett knew
what you were doing with his money, damn if he wouldn't bust a gut."

"'Gene!" said Jim Trivett, "what the hell do you know about this damned
English, anyway?"

"What he doesn't know about it," said Tom Grant, "you could write out on
the back of a postage stamp. Old man Sanford thinks you're hell, 'Gene."

"I thought you had Torrington," said Jim Trivett.

"No," said Eugene, "I wasn't English enough. Young and crude. I changed,
thank God! What is it you want, Jim?" he asked.

"I've got a long paper to write. I don't know what to write about," said
Jim Trivett.

"What do you want me to do? Write it for you?"

"Yes," said Jim Trivett.

"Write your own damn paper," said Eugene with mimic toughness, "I won't
do it for you. I'll help you if I can."

"When are you going to let Hard Boy take you to Exeter?" said Tom Grant,
winking at Jim Trivett.

Eugene flushed, making a defensive answer.

"I'm ready to go any time he is," he said uneasily.

"Look here, Legs!" said Jim Trivett, grinning loosely. "Do you really
want to go with me or are you just bluffing?"

"I'll go with you! I've told you I'd go with you!" Eugene said angrily.
He trembled a little.

Tom Grant grinned slyly at Jim Trivett.

"It'll make a man of you, 'Gene," he said. "Boy, it'll sure put hair on
your chest." He laughed, not loudly, but uncontrollably, shaking his
head as at some secret thought.

Jim Trivett's loose smile widened. He spat into the wood-box.

"Gawd!" he said. "They'll think Spring is here when they see old Legs.
They'll need a stepladder to git at him."

Tom Grant was shaken with hard fat laughter.

"They sure God will!" he said.

"Well, what about it, 'Gene?" Jim Trivett demanded suddenly. "Is it a
go? Saturday?"

"Suits me!" said Eugene.

When he had gone, they grinned thirstily at each other for a moment, the
pleased corrupters of chastity.

"Pshaw!" said Tom Grant. "You oughtn't to do that, Hard Boy. You're
leading the boy astray."

"It's not going to hurt him," said Jim Trivett. "It'll be good for him."

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grinning.


"Wait a minute!" whispered Jim Trivett. "I think this is the place."

They had turned away from the centre of the dreary tobacco town. For
a quarter of an hour they had walked briskly through drab autumnal
streets, descending finally a long rutted hill that led them, past a
thinning squalor of cheap houses, almost to the outskirts. It was three
weeks before Christmas: the foggy air was full of chill menace. There
was a brooding quietness, broken by far small sounds. They turned into a
sordid little road, unpaved, littered on both sides with negro shacks
and the dwellings of poor whites. It was a world of rickets. The road
was unlighted. Their feet stirred dryly through fallen leaves.

They paused before a two-storey frame house. A lamp burned dimly behind
lowered yellow shades, casting a murky pollen out upon the smoky air.

"Wait a minute," said Jim Trivett, in a low voice, "I'll find out."

They heard scuffling steps through the leaves. In a moment a negro man
prowled up.

"Hello, John," said Jim Trivett, almost inaudibly.

"Evenin', boss!" the negro answered wearily, but in the same tone.

"We're looking for Lily Jones' house," said Jim Trivett. "Is this it?"

"Yes, suh," said the negro, "dis is it."

Eugene leaned against a tree, listening to their quiet conspiratorial
talk. The night, vast and listening, gathered about him its evil
attentive consciousness. His lips were cold and trembled. He thrust a
cigarette between them and, shivering, turned up the thick collar of his
overcoat.

"Does Miss Lily know you're comin'?" the negro asked.

"No," said Jim Trivett. "Do you know her?"

"Yes, suh," said the negro. "I'll go up dar wid yo'."

Eugene waited in the shadow of the tree while the two men went up to the
house. They avoided the front veranda, and went around to the side. The
negro rapped gently at a latticed door. There were always latticed
doors. Why?

He waited, saying farewell to himself. He stood over his life, he felt,
with lifted assassin blade. He was mired to his neck, inextricably, in
complication. There was no escape.

There had been a faint closed noise from the house: voices and laughter,
and the cracked hoarse tone of an old phonograph. The sound stopped
quickly as the negro rapped: the shabby house seemed to listen. In a
moment, a hinge creaked stealthily: he caught the low startled blur of
a woman's voice. Who is it? Who?

In another moment Jim Trivett returned to him, and said quietly:

"It's all right, 'Gene. Come on."

He slipped a coin into the negro's hand, thanking him. Eugene looked for
a moment into the black broad friendliness of the man's face. He had a
flash of warmth through his cold limbs. The black bawd had done his work
eagerly and kindly: over their bought unlovely loves lay the warm shadow
of his affection.

They ascended the path quietly and, mounting two or three steps, went in
under the latticed door. A woman stood beside it, holding it open. When
they had entered, she closed it securely. Then they crossed the little
porch and entered the house.

They found themselves in a little hall which cleft the width of the
house. A smoky lamp, wicked low, cast its dim circle into the dark. An
uncarpeted stair mounted to the second floor. There were two doors both
to left and right, and an accordion hat-rack, on which hung a man's
battered felt hat.

Jim Trivett embraced the woman immediately, grinning, and fumbling in
her breast.

"Hello, Lily," he said.

"Gawd!" She smiled crudely, and continued to peer at Eugene, curious at
what the maw of night had thrown in to her. Then, turning to Jim Trivett
with a coarse laugh, she said:

"Lord a' mercy! Any woman that gits him will have to cut off some of
them legs."

"I'd like to see him with Thelma," said Jim Trivett, grinning.

Lily Jones laughed hoarsely. The door to the right opened and Thelma,
a small woman, slightly built, came out, followed by high empty yokel
laughter. Jim Trivett embraced her affectionately.

"My Gawd!" said Thelma, in a tinny voice. "What've we got here?" She
thrust out her sharp wrenny face, and studied Eugene insolently.

"I brought you a new beau, Thelma," said Jim Trivett.

"Ain't he the lankiest feller you ever seen?" said Lily Jones
impersonally. "How tall are you, son?" she added, addressing him in a
kind drawl.

He winced a little.

"I don't know," he said. "I think about six three."

"He's more than that!" said Thelma positively. "He's seven foot tall or
I'm a liar."

"He hasn't measured since last week," said Jim Trivett. "He can't be
sure about it."

"He's young, too," said Lily, staring at him intently. "How old are you,
son?"

Eugene turned his pallid face away, indefinitely.

"Why," he croaked, "I'm about----"

"He's going on eighteen," said Jim Trivett loyally. "Don't you worry
about him. Old Legs knows all the ropes, all right. He's a bearcat. I
wouldn't kid you. He's been there."

"He don't look that old," said Lily doubtfully. "I wouldn't call him
more'n fifteen, to look at his face. Ain't he got a little face,
though?" she demanded in a slow puzzled voice.

"It's the only one I've got," said Eugene angrily. "Sorry I can't change
it for a larger one."

"It looks so funny stickin' way up there above you," she went on
patiently.

Thelma nudged her sharply.

"That's because he's got a big frame," she said. "Legs is all right.
When he begins to fill out an' put some meat on them bones he's goin' to
make a big man. You'll be a heartbreaker sure, Legs," she said harshly,
taking his cold hand and squeezing it. In him the ghost, his stranger,
turned grievously away. Oh, God! I shall remember, he thought.

"Well," said Jim Trivett "let's git goin'." He embraced Thelma again.
They fumbled amorously.

"You go on upstairs, son," said Lily. "I'll be up in a minute. The
door's open."

"See you later, 'Gene," said Jim Trivett. "Stay with them, son."

He hugged the boy roughly with one arm, and went into the room to the
left with Thelma.

Eugene mounted the creaking stairs slowly and entered the room with the
open door. A hot mass of coals glowed flamelessly in the hearth. He took
off his hat and overcoat and threw them across a wooden bed. Then he
sat down tensely in a rocker and leaned forward, holding his trembling
fingers to the heat. There was no light save that of the coals; but, by
their dim steady glow, he could make out the old and ugly wall-paper,
stained with long streaks of water rust, and scaling, in dry tattered
scrolls, here and there. He sat quietly, bent forward, but he shook
violently, as with an ague, from time to time. Why am I here? This is
not I, he thought.

Presently he heard the woman's slow heavy tread upon the stairs: she
entered in a swimming tide of light, bearing a lamp before her. She put
the lamp down on a table and turned the wick. He could see how her
more plainly. Lily was a middle-aged country woman, with a broad heavy
figure, unhealthily soft. Her smooth peasant face was mapped with fine
little traceries of wrinkles at the corners of mouth and eyes, as if she
had worked much in the sun. She had black hair, coarse and abundant. She
was whitely plastered with talcum powder. She was dressed shapelessly
in a fresh loose dress of gingham, unbelted. She was dressed like a
housewife, but she conceded to her profession stockings of red silk,
and slippers of red felt, rimmed with fur, in which she walked with a
flat-footed tread.

The woman fastened the door, and returned to the hearth where the boy
was now standing. He embraced her with feverish desire, fondling her
with his long nervous hands. Indecisively, he sat in the rocker and drew
her down clumsily on his knee. She yielded her kisses with the coy and
frigid modesty of the provincial harlot, turning her mouth away. She
shivered as his cold hands touched her.

"You're cold as ice, son," she said. "What's the matter?"

She chafed him with rough embarrassed professionalism. In a moment she
rose impatiently.

"Let's git started," she said. "Where's my money?"

He thrust two crumpled bills into her hand.

Then he lay down beside her. He trembled, unnerved and impotent. Passion
was extinct in him.

The massed coals caved in the hearth. The lost bright wonder died.


When he went downstairs, he found Jim Trivett waiting in the hall,
holding Thelma by the hand. Lily led them out quietly, after peering
through the lattice into the fog, and listening for a moment.

"Be quiet," she whispered, "there's a man across the street. They've
been watching us lately."

"Come again, Slats," Thelma murmured, pressing his hand.

They went out softly, treading gently until they reached the road. The
fog had thickened: the air was saturated with fine stinging moisture.

At the corner, in the glare of the street-lamp, Jim Trivett released his
breath with loud relief, and stepped forward boldly.

"Damn!" he said. "I thought you were never coming. What were you trying
to do with the woman, Legs?" Then, noting the boy's face, he added
quickly, with warm concern: "What's the matter, 'Gene? Don't you feel
good?"

"Wait a minute!" said Eugene thickly. "Be all right!" After a moment he
straightened.

"How do you feel?" asked Jim Trivett. "Better?"

"Yes," said Eugene, "I'm all right now."

"Why didn't you tell me you were sick?" said Jim Trivett chidingly.

"It came on all of a sudden," said Eugene. He added presently: "I think
it was something I ate at that damn Greek's to-night."

"I felt all right," said Jim Trivett. "A cup of coffee will fix you up,"
he added with cheerful conviction.

They mounted the hill slowly. The light from winking corner-lamps fell
with a livid stare across the fronts of the squalid houses.

"Jim," said Eugene, after a moment's pause.

"Yes. What is it?"

"Don't say anything about my getting sick," he said awkwardly.

Surprised, Jim Trivett stared at him.

"Why not? There's nothing in that," he said. "Pshaw, boy, anyone's
likely to get sick."

"Yes, I know. But I'd rather you wouldn't."

"Oh, all right. I won't. Why should I?" said Jim Trivett.

Eugene was haunted by his own lost ghost: he knew it to be irrecoverable.
For three days he avoided everyone: the brand of his sin, he felt, was
on him. He was published by every gesture, by every word. His manner
grew more defiant, his greeting to life more unfriendly. He clung more
closely to Jim Trivett, drawing a sad pleasure from his coarse loyal
praise. His unappeased desire began to burn anew: it conquered his
bodily disgust and made new pictures. At the end of the week he went
again, alone, to Exeter. No more of him, he felt, could be lost. This
time he sought out Thelma.


When he went home for Christmas, his body was crawling. The great body
of the State lay like a barren giant below the leaden reek of the skies.
The train roared on across the vast lift of the Piedmont: at night, as
he lay in his berth, in a diseased coma, it crawled up into the great
fortress of the hills. Dimly, he saw their wintry bulk, with its bleak
foresting. Below a trestle, silent as a dream, a white rope of water
coiled between its frozen banks. His sick heart lifted in the haunting
eternity of the hills. He was hillborn. But at dawn, as he came from
the cars with the band of returning students, his depression revived.
The huddle of cheap buildings at the station seemed meaner and nearer
than ever before. The hills, above the station flats, with their cheap
propped houses, had the unnatural closeness of a vision. The silent
Square seemed to have rushed together during his absence, and as he left
the car and descended the street to Dixieland, it was as if he devoured
toy-town distances with a giant's stride.

The Christmas was grey and chill. Helen was not there to give it warmth.
Gant and Eliza felt the depression of her absence. Ben came and went
like a ghost. Luke was not coming home. And he himself was sick with
shame and loss.

He did not know where to turn. He paced his chill room at night,
muttering, until Eliza's troubled face appeared above her wrapper.
His father was gentler, older than he had ever seen him; his pain had
returned on him. He was absent and sorrowful. He talked perfunctorily
with his son about college. Speech choked in Eugene's throat. He
stammered a few answers and fled from the house and the vacant fear in
Gant's eyes. He walked prodigiously, day and night, in an effort to
command his own fear. He believed himself to be rotting with a leprosy.
And there was nothing to do but rot. There was no cure. For such had
been the instruction of the moralists of his youth.

He walked with aimless desperation, unable to quiet for a moment his
restless limbs. He went up on the eastern hills that rose behind
Niggertown. A winter's sun laboured through the mist. Low on the
meadows, and high on the hills, the sunlight lay on the earth like
milk.

He stood looking. A shaft of hope cut through the blackness of his
spirit. I will go to my brother, he thought.

He found Ben still in bed at Woodson Street, smoking. He closed the
door, then spun wildly about as if caged.

"In God's name!" Ben cried angrily. "Have you gone crazy? What's wrong
with you?"

"I'm--I'm sick!" he gasped.

"What's the matter? Where've you been?" asked Ben sharply. He sat up in
bed.

"I've been with a woman," said Eugene.

"Sit down, 'Gene," said Ben quietly, after a moment. "Don't be a little
idiot. You're not going to die, you know. When did this happen?"

The boy blurted out his confession.

Ben got up and put on his clothes.

"Come on," said he, "we'll go to see McGuire."

As they walked townward, he tried to talk, explaining himself in
babbling incoherent spurts.

"It was like this," he began, "if I had known, but at that time I
didn't--of course I know it was my own fault for----"

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben impatiently. "Dry up! I don't want to
hear about it. I'm not your damned Guardian Angel."

The news was comforting. So many people, after our fall from grace, are.

They mounted to the wide dark corridor of the Doctors' and Surgeons',
with its sharp excitement of medical smells. McGuire's ante-room was
empty. Ben rapped at the inner door. McGuire opened it: he pulled away
the wet cigarette that was plastered on his heavy lip, to greet them.

"Hello, Ben. Hello, son!" he barked, seeing Eugene. "When'd you get
back?"

"He thinks he's dying of galloping consumption, McGuire," said Ben,
with a jerk of the head. "You may be able to do something to prolong
his life."

"What's the matter, son?" said McGuire.

Eugene gulped dryly, craning his livid face.

"If you don't mind," he croaked. "See you alone." He turned desperately
upon his brother. "You stay here. Don't want you with me."

"I don't want to go with you," said Ben surlily. "I've got troubles
enough of my own."

Eugene followed McGuire's burly figure into the office; McGuire closed
the door, and sat down heavily at his littered desk.

"Sit down, son," he commanded, "and tell me about it." He lit a
cigarette and stuck it deftly on his sag wet lip. He glanced keenly at
the boy, noting his contorted face.

"Take your time, son," he said kindly, "and control yourself. Whatever
it is, it's probably not as bad as you think."

"It was this way," Eugene began in a low voice. "I've made a mistake. I
know that. I'm willing to take my medicine. I'm not making any excuses
for what has happened," his voice rose sharply; he got half-way out of
his chair, and began to pound fiercely upon the untidy desk. "I'm
putting the blame on no one. Do you understand that?"

McGuire turned a bloated bewildered face slowly upon his patient. His
wet cigarette sagged comically from his half-opened mouth.

"Do I understand what?" he said. "See here, 'Gene: what the hell are you
driving at? I'm no Sherlock Holmes, you know. I'm your doctor. Spit it
out."

The boy answered with a bitter writhen face.

"What I've done," he said dramatically, "thousands have done. Oh, I know
they may pretend not to. But they do! You're a doctor--you know that.
People high up in society, too. I'm one of the unlucky ones. I got
caught. Why am I any worse than they are? Why----" he continued
rhetorically.

"I think I catch your drift," said McGuire dryly. "Let's have a look,
son."

Eugene obeyed feverishly, still declaiming.

"Why should I bear the stigma for what others get away with?
Hypocrites--a crowd of damned, dirty, whining hypocrites, that's what
they are. The Double-Standard! Hah! Where's the justice, where's the
honour of that? Why should I be blamed for what people in High
Society----"

McGuire lifted his big head from its critical stare, and barked
comically.

"Who's blaming you? You don't think you're the first one who ever had
this sort of trouble, do you? There's nothing wrong with you, anyway."

"Can--can you cure me?" Eugene asked.

"No. You're incurable, son!" said McGuire. He scrawled a few
hieroglyphics on a prescription pad. "Give this to the druggist," he
said, "and be a little more careful hereafter of the company you keep.
People in High Society, eh?" he grinned. "So that's where you've been?"

The great weight of blood and tears had lifted completely out of the
boy's heart, leaving him dizzily buoyant, wild, half-conscious only of
his rushing words.

He opened the door and went into the outer room. Ben got up quickly and
nervously.

"Well," he said, "how much longer has he got to live?" Seriously, in a
low voice, he added: "There's nothing wrong with him, is there?"

"No," said McGuire, "I think he's a little off his nut. But, then, you
all are."

When they came out on the street again, Ben said:

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"No," said Eugene.

"When did you eat last?"

"Some time yesterday," said Eugene. "I don't remember."

"You damned fool!" Ben muttered. "Come on--let's eat."

The idea became very attractive. The world was washed pleasantly in the
milky winter sunshine. The town, under the stimulus of the holidays and
the returning students, had wakened momentarily from its winter torpor:
warm brisk currents of life seethed over the pavements. He walked
along at Ben's side with a great bounding stride, unable to govern the
expanding joy that rose yeastily in him. Finally, as he turned in on the
busy avenue, he could restrain himself no longer: he leaped high in the
air, with a yelp of ecstasy:

"Squee-ee!"

"You little idiot!" Ben cried sharply. "Are you crazy!"

He scowled fiercely, then turned to the roaring passersby, with a thin
smile.

"Hang on to him, Ben!" yelled Jim Pollock. He was a deadly little man,
waxen and smiling under a black moustache, the chief compositor, a
Socialist.

"If you cut off his damned big feet," said Ben, "he'd go up like a
balloon."

They went into the big new lunch-room and sat at one of the tables.

"What's yours?" said the waiter.

"A cup of coffee and a piece of mince pie," said Ben.

"I'll take the same," said Eugene.

"Eat!" said Ben fiercely. "Eat!"

Eugene studied the card thoughtfully.

"Bring me some veal cutlets breaded with tomato sauce," he said, "with a
side-order of hash-brown potatoes, a dish of creamed carrots and peas,
and a plate of hot biscuits. Also a cup of coffee."

Eugene got back his heart again. He got it back fiercely and carelessly,
with an eldritch wildness. During the remainder of his holiday, he
plunged recklessly through the lively crowds, looking boldly but without
insolence at the women and young girls. They grew unexpectedly out of
the waste drear winter like splendid flowers. He was eager and alone.
Fear is a dragon that lives among crowds--and in armies. It lives hardly
with men who are alone. He felt released--beyond the last hedge of
desperation.

Freed and alone, he looked with a boding detachment at all the possessed
and possessing world about him. Life hung for his picking fingers like
a strange and bitter fruit. _They_--the great clan huddled there behind
the stockade for warmth and safety--could hunt him down some day and put
him to death: he thought they would.

But he was not now afraid--he was content, if only the struggle might
be fruitful. He looked among the crowds printed with the mark of his
danger, seeking that which he might desire and take.


He went back to the university sealed up against the taunts of the young
men: in the hot green Pullman they pressed about him with thronging
jibe, but they fell back sharply, as fiercely he met them, with
constraint.

There came and sat beside him Tom French, his handsome face vested in
the hard insolence of money. He was followed by his court jester, Roy
Duncan, the slave with the high hard cackle.

"Hello, Gant," said Tom French harshly. "Been to Exeter lately?"
Scowling, he winked at grinning Roy.

"Yes," said Eugene, "I've been there lately, and I'm on my way there
now. What's it to you, French?"

Discomfited by this hard defiance, the rich man's son drew back.

"We hear you're stepping out among them, 'Gene," said Roy Duncan,
cackling.

"Who's we?" said Eugene. "Who's them?"

"They say," said Tom French, "that you're as pure as the flowing sewer."

"If I need cleaning," said Eugene, "I can always use the Gold Dust
Twins, can't I? French and Duncan, the Gold Dust Twins--who never do any
work."

The cluster of grinning students, the young impartial brutes who had
gathered above them on the seats back and front, laughed loudly.

"That's right! That's right! Talk to them, 'Gene!" said Zeno Cochran,
softly. He was a tall lad of twenty, slender and powerful, with the
grace of a running horse. He had punted against the wind for eighty
yards in the Yale Bowl. He was a handsome fellow, soft-spoken and
kindly, with the fearless gentleness of the athlete.

Confused and angry, with sullen boastfulness, Tom French said:

"Nobody has anything on me. I've been too slick for them. Nobody knows
anything about me."

"You mean," said Eugene, "that every one knows all about you, and nobody
wants to know anything about you."

The crowd laughed.

"Wow!" said Jimmy Revell.

"What about that, Tom?" he asked challengingly. He was very small and
plump, the son of a carpenter, offensively worthy, working his way
through college by various schemes. He was a "kidder," an egger-on,
finding excuse for his vulgarity and malice in a false and loud
good-humour.

Eugene turned quietly on Tom French. "Stop it!" he said. "Don't go on
because the others are listening. I don't think it's funny. I don't like
it. I don't like you. I want you to leave me alone now. Do you hear?"

"Come on," said Roy Duncan, rising, "leave him alone, Tom. He can't take
a joke. He takes things too seriously."

They left him. Unperturbed, relieved, he turned his face toward the vast
bleak earth, grey and hoary in the iron grip of winter.


Winter ended. The sleety frozen earth began to soften under thaw and the
rain. The town and campus paths were dreary trenches of mud and slime.
The cold rain fell: the grass shot up in green wet patches. He hurtled
down the campus lanes, bounding along like a kangaroo, leaping high at
the lower boughs to clip a budding twig with his teeth. He cried loudly
in his throat--a whinnying squeal--the centaur-cry of man or beast,
trying to unburden its overladen heart in one blast of pain and joy and
passion. At other times he slouched by, depressed by an unaccountable
burden of weariness and dejection.

He lost count of the hours--he had no sense of time--no regular periods
for sleep, work, or recreation, although he attended his classes
faithfully, and ate with fair regularity by compulsion of dining-hall or
boarding-house schedules. The food was abundant, coarse, greasily and
badly cooked. It was very cheap: at the college commons, twelve dollars
a month; at the boarding-houses, fifteen. He ate at the commons for a
month: his interest in food was too profound and too intelligent to
stand it longer. The commons was housed in a large bleak building of
white brick. It was called officially Stiggins Hall, but, in the more
descriptive epithet of the students--The Sty.

He went to see Helen and Hugh Barton several times. They lived
thirty-five miles away at Sydney, the State capital. It was a town
of thirty thousand people, sleepy, with quiet leafy pavements, and a
capitol Square in the centre, with radial streets. At the head of the
main street, across from the capitol, a brown weathered building of
lichened stone, was a cheap hotel--the largest and most notorious
brothel in town. There were also three denominational colleges for
young women.

The Bartons had rented quarters in an old house on the street above the
Governor's Mansion. They lived in three or four rooms on the ground
floor.

It was to Sydney that Gant had come, a young man, from Baltimore,
on his slow drift to the South. It was in Sydney that he had first
started business for himself and conceived, from the loss of his first
investments, his hatred of property. It was in Sydney that he had met
and wedded the sainted Cynthia, the tubercular spinster who had died
within two years of their marriage.

Their father's great ghost haunted them: it brooded over the town, above
the scouring oblivion of the years that wipes all trace of us away.

Together, they hunted down into the mean streets, until they stood at
length before a dreary shop on the skirts of the negro district.

"This must be it," she said. "His shop stood here. It's gone now."

She was silent a moment. "Poor old Papa." She turned her wet eyes away.

There was no mark of his great hand on this bleak world. No vines
grew round the houses. That part of him which had lived here was
buried--buried with a dead woman below the long grey tide of the years.
They stood quietly, frightened, in that strange place, waiting to hear
the summons of his voice, with expectant unbelief, as some one looking
for the god in Brooklyn.


In April, America declared war on Germany. Before the month was out,
all the young men at Pulpit Hill who were eligible--those who were
twenty-one--were going into service. At the gymnasium he watched the
doctors examine them, envying them the careless innocence with which
they stripped themselves naked. They threw off their clothes in
indifferent heaps and stood, laughing and certain, before the doctors.
They were clean-limbed, sound and white of tooth, graceful and fast in
their movements.

On the central campus, several students who had been approved by the
examining board, descended from the old dormitories, bearing packed
valises. They turned down under the trees, walking toward the village
street. From time to time they threw up an arm in farewell.

"So long, boys! See you in Berlin." The shining and dividing sea was
closer and not so wide.

He read a great deal--but at random, for pleasure. He read Defoe,
Smollet, Sterne, and Fielding--the fine salt of the English novel lost,
during the reign of the Widow of Windsor, beneath an ocean of tea and
molasses. He read the tales of Boccaccio, and all that remained of a
tattered copy of the _Heptameron_. At Buck Benson's suggestion, he read
Murray's _Euripides_ (at the time he was reading the Greek text of the
_Alcestis_--noblest and loveliest of all the myths of Love and Death).
He saw the grandeur of the _Prometheus_ fable--but the fable moved him
more than the play of schylus. In fact, schylus he found sublime--and
dull: he could not understand his great reputation. Rather--he could. He
was Literature--a writer of masterpieces. He was almost as great a bore
as Cicero--that windy old moralist who came out so boldly in favour of
Old Age and Friendship. Sophocles was an imperial poet--he spoke like
God among flashes of lightning: the _Oedipus Rex_ is not only one of the
greatest plays in the world, it is one of the greatest stories. This
story--perfect, inevitable, and fabulous--wreaked upon him the nightmare
coincidence of Destiny. It held him birdlike before its great snake-eye
of wisdom and horror. And Euripides (whatever the disparagement of
pedantry) he thought one of the greatest lyrical singers in all poetry.

He liked all weird fable and wild invention, in prose or verse, from the
_Golden Ass_ to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chief prince of the moon
and magic. But he liked the fabulous wherever he found it, and for
whatever purpose.

The best fabulists have often been the greatest satirists: satire (as
with Aristophanes, Voltaire, and Swift) is a high and subtle art, quite
beyond the barnyard snipings and wholesale geese-slaughterings of the
present degenerate age. Great satire needs the sustenance of great
fable. Swift's power of invention is incomparable: there's no better
fabulist in the world.

He read Poe's stories, _Frankenstein_, and the plays of Lord Dunsany. He
read _Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight_ and the _Book of Tobit_. He did
not want his ghosts and marvels explained. Magic was magic. He wanted
old ghosts--not Indian ghosts, but ghosts in armour, the spirits of old
kings, and pillioned ladies with high coned hats. Then, for the first
time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on. Suddenly, it was
strange to him that he should read Euripides there in the wilderness.

Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with
cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America--more land, more wooden
houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly. He was reading Euripides, and
all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food. He was
reading of ancient sorceries and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever
come to haunt this land? The ghost of Hamlet's Father, in Connecticut,

  "... I am thy father's spirit,
   Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
   Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine."

He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation. Only the
earth endured--the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful
breast a world of flimsy rickets. Only the earth endured--this broad
terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it. Stogged in the desert,
half-broken and overthrown, among the columns of lost temples strewn,
there was no ruined image of Menkaura, there was no alabaster head of
Akhnaton. Nothing had been done in stone. Only this earth endured, upon
whose lonely breast he read Euripides. Within its hills he had been held
a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.

O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in
our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and
our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be
forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land;
our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which,
leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in
Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when
we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big
enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were
close and near. And the old hunger returned--the terrible and obscure
hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home
and strangers wherever we go.


Eliza visited Helen in Sydney in the Spring. The girl was quieter,
sadder, more thoughtful than she had ever been. She was subdued by the
new life: chastened by her obscurity. She missed Gant more than she
would confess. She missed the mountain town.

"What do you have to pay for this place?" said Eliza, looking around
critically.

"Fifty dollars a month," said Helen.

"Furnished?"

"No, we had to buy furniture."

"I tell you what, that's pretty high," said Eliza, "just for downstairs.
I believe rents are lower at home."

"Yes, I know it's high," said Helen. "But good heavens, mamma! Do
you realise that this is the best neighbourhood in town? We're only
two blocks from the Governor's Mansion, you know. Mrs. Mathews is no
common boarding-house keeper, I can assure you! No, sir!" she exclaimed
laughing. "She's a real swell--goes to all the big functions and gets in
the papers all the time. You know Hugh and I have got to try to keep up
appearances. He's a young man just starting out here."

"Yes. I know," Eliza agreed thoughtfully. "How's he been doing?"

"O'Toole says he's the best agent he's got," said Helen. "Hugh's all
right. We could get along together anywhere, as long as there's no
damned family about. It makes me furious at times to see him slaving to
feather O'Toole's pockets. He works like a dog. You know, O'Toole gets
a commission on every sale he makes. And Mrs. O'T. and those two girls
ride around in a big car and never turn their hands over. They're
Catholics, you know, but they get to go everywhere."

"I tell you what," said Eliza, with a timid half-serious smile, "it
might not be a bad idea if Hugh became his own boss. There's no use
doing it all for the other fellow. Say, child!" she exclaimed, "why
wouldn't it be a good idea if he tried to get the Altamont agency? I
don't believe that fellow they've got is much account. He could get it
without trying."

There was a pause.

"We've been thinking of that," the girl admitted slowly. "Hugh has
written in to the main office. Anyway," she said a moment later, "he'd
be his own boss. That's something."

"Well," said Eliza slowly, "I don't know but what it'd be a good idea.
If he works hard there's no reason why he shouldn't build a good
business up. Your papa's been complaining here lately about his trouble.
He'd be glad to have you back." She shook her head slowly for a moment.
"Child! they didn't do him a bit of good, up there. It's all come back."


They drove over to Pulpit Hill at Easter for a two days' visit. Eliza
took him to Exeter and bought him a suit of clothes.

"I don't like those skimpy trousers," she told the salesman. "I want
something that makes him look more of a man."

When he was newly dressed, she puckered her lips, smiling, and said:

"Spruce up, boy! Throw your shoulders back! That's one thing about your
father--he carries himself straight as an arrow. If you go all humped
over like that, you'll have lung trouble before you're twenty-five."

"I want you to meet my mother," he said awkwardly to Mr. Joseph
Ballantyne, a smooth pink young man who had been elected president of
the Freshman class.

"You're a good smart-looking fellow," said Eliza smiling, "I'll make a
trade with you. If you drum up some boarders for me among your friends
here in this part of the State, I'll throw in your board free. Here are
some of my cards," she added, opening her purse. "You might hand a few
of them out, if you get a chance, and say a good word for Dixieland in
the Land of the Sky."

"Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Ballantyne, in a slow surprised voice, "I
certainly will."

Eugene turned a hot distressed face toward Helen. She laughed huskily,
ironically, then turning to the boy, said:

"You're welcome at any time, Mr. Ballantyne, boarders or not. We'll
always find a place for you."

When they were alone, in answer to his stammering and confused protests,
she said with an annoyed grin:

"Yes, I know. It's pretty bad. But you're away from it most of the time.
You're the lucky one. You see what I've had to listen to, the last week,
don't you? You see, don't you?"


When he went home at the end of the year, late in May, he found that
Helen and Hugh Barton had preceded him. They were living with Gant, at
Woodson Street. Hugh Barton had secured the Altamont agency.

The town and the nation boiled with patriotic frenzy--violent, in a
chaotic sprawl, to little purpose. The spawn of Attila must be crushed
("exterminated," said the Reverend Mr. Smallwood) by the sons of
freedom. There were loans, bond issues, speech-making, a talk of drafts,
and a thin trickle of Yankees into France. Pershing arrived in Paris,
and said, "Lafayette, we are here!" But the French were still looking.
Ben went up before the enlistment board and was rejected. "Lungs--weak!"
they said quite definitely. "No--not tubercular. A tendency. Underweight."
He cursed. His face was a little more like a blade--thinner, greyer. The
cleft of his scowl was deeper. He seemed more alone.

Eugene came up into the hills again and found them in their rich young
summer glory. Dixieland was partly filled by paying guests. More
arrived.

Eugene was sixteen years old. He was a College Man. He walked among the
gay crowd of afternoon with a sense of elation, answering the hearty
greetings with joy, warming to its thoughtless bombast.

"They tell me you're batting a thousand down there, son," yelled Mr.
Wood, the plump young pharmacist, who had been told nothing at all.
"That's right, boy! Go get 'em." The man passed forward cheerfully, up
the prosperous glade of his store. Fans droned.

After all, Eugene thought, he had not done so badly. He had felt his
first wounds. He had not been broken. He had seen love's bitter mystery.
He had lived alone.




XXX


There was at Dixieland a girl named Laura James. She was twenty-one
years old. She looked younger. She was there when he came back.

Laura was a slender girl, of medium height, but looking taller than she
was. She was very firmly moulded: she seemed fresh and washed and clean.
She had thick hair, very straight and blonde, combed in a flat bracelet
round her small head. Her face was white, with small freckles. Her eyes
were soft, candid, cat-green. Her nose was a little too large for her
face: it was tilted. She was not pretty. She dressed very simply and
elegantly in short plaid skirts and waists of knitted silk.

She was the only young person at Dixieland. Eugene spoke to her with
timid hauteur. He thought her plain and dull. But he began to sit with
her on the porch at night. Somehow, he began to love her.

He did not know that he loved her. He talked to her arrogantly and
boastfully as they sat in the wooden porch-swing. But he breathed the
clean perfume of her marvellous young body. He was trapped in the tender
cruelty of her clear green eyes, caught in the subtle net of her smile.

Laura James lived in the eastern part of the State, far east even of
Pulpit Hill, in a little town built on a salt river of the great coastal
plain. Her father was a wealthy merchant--a wholesale provisioner. The
girl was an only child: she spent extravagantly.

Eugene sat on the porch rail one evening and talked to her. Before, he
had only nodded, or spoken stiffly a word or two. They began haltingly,
aware painfully of gaps in their conversation.

"You're from Little Richmond, aren't you?" he said.

"Yes," said Laura James, "do you know any one from there?"

"Yes," said he, "I know John Bynum and a boy named Ficklen. They're from
Little Richmond, aren't they?"

"Oh, Dave Ficklen! Do you know him? Yes. They both go to Pulpit Hill. Do
you go there?"

"Yes," he said, "that's where I knew them."

"Do you know the two Barlow boys? They're Sigma Nus," said Laura James.

He had seen them. They were great swells, football men.

"Yes, I know them," he said, "Roy Barlow and Jack Barlow."

"Do you know 'Snooks' Warren? He's a Kappa Sig."

"Yes. They call them Keg Squeezers," said Eugene.

"What fraternity are you?" said Laura James.

"I'm not any," he said painfully. "I was just a Freshman this year."

"Some of the best friends I have never joined fraternities," said Laura
James.


They met more and more frequently, without arrangement, until by silent
consent they met every night upon the porch. Sometimes they walked along
the cool dark streets. Sometimes he squired her clumsily through the
town, to the movies, and later, with the uneasy pugnacity of youth,
past the loafing cluster at Wood's. Often he took her to Woodson Street,
where Helen secured for him the cool privacy of the veranda. She was
very fond of Laura James.

"She's a nice girl. A lovely girl. I like her. She's not going to take
any beauty prizes, is she?" She laughed with a trace of good-natured
ridicule.

He was displeased.

"She looks all right," he said. "She's not as ugly as you make out."

But she _was_ ugly--with a clean lovely ugliness. Her face was freckled
lightly, over her nose and mouth: her features were eager, unconscious,
turned upward in irregular pertness. But she was exquisitely made and
exquisitely kept: she had the firm young line of Spring, budding,
slender, virginal. She was like something swift, with wings, which
hovers in a wood--among the feathery trees suspected, but uncaught,
unseen.

He tried to live before her in armour. He showed off before her.
Perhaps, he thought, if he were splendid enough, she would not see the
ugly disorder and meanness of the world he dwelt in.

Across the street, on the wide lawn of the Brunswick--the big brick
gabled house that Eliza once had coveted--Mr. Pratt, who crawled in
that mean world in which only a boarding-house husband can exist, was
watering wide green spaces of lawn with a hose. The flashing water motes
gleamed in the red glare of sunset. The red light fell across the shaven
pinched face. It glittered on the buckles of his arm-bands. Across the
walk, on the other lobe of grass, several men and women were playing
croquet. There was laughter on the vine-hid porch. Next door, at
the Belton, the boarders were assembled on the long porch in bright
hash-house clatter. The comedian of the Dixie Ramblers arrived with two
chorus girls. He was a little man, with the face of a weasel and no
upper teeth. He wore a straw hat with a striped band, and a blue shirt
and collar. The boarders gathered in around him. In a moment there was
shrill laughter.

Julius Arthur sped swiftly down the hill, driving his father home.
He grinned squintily and flung his arm up in careless greeting. The
prosperous lawyer twisted a plump Van Dyked face on a wry neck
curiously. Unsmiling, he passed.

A negress in the Brunswick struck on the several bells of a Japanese
gong. There was a scramble of feet on the porch; the croquet players
dropped their mallets and walked rapidly toward the house. Pratt wound
his hose over a wooden reel.

A slow bell-clapper in the Belton sent the guests in a scrambling drive
for the doors. In a moment there was a clatter of heavy plates and a
loud foody noise. The guests on the porch at Dixieland rocked more
rapidly, with low mutters of discontent.

Eugene talked to Laura in thickening dusk, sheeting his pain in pride
and indifference. Eliza's face, a white blur in the dark, came up behind
the screen.

"Come on out, Mrs. Gant, and get a breath of fresh air," said Laura
James.

"Why no-o, child. I can't now. Who's that with you?" she cried,
obviously flustered. She opened the door. "Huh? Heh? Have you seen
'Gene? Is it 'Gene?"

"Yes," he said. "What's the matter?"

"Come here a minute, boy," she said.

He went into the hall.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Why, son, what in the world! I don't know. You'll have to do
something," she whispered, twisting her hands together.

"What is it, mamma? What are you talking about?" he cried irritably.

"Why--Jannadeau's just called up. Your papa's on a rampage again and
he's coming this way. Child! There's no telling what he'll do. I've all
these people in the house. He'll ruin us." She wept. "Go and try to stop
him. Head him off if you can. Take him to Woodson Street."

He got his hat quickly and ran through the door.

"Where are you going?" asked Laura James. "Are you going off without
supper?"

"I've got to go to town," he said. "I won't be long. Will you wait for
me?"

"Yes," she said.

He leaped down on the walk just as his father lurched in from the street
by the high obscuring hedge that shut the house from the spacious yard
of the attorney Hall. Gant reeled destructively, across a border of
lilies, on to the lawn, and strode for the veranda. He stumbled,
cursing, on the bottom step and plunged forward in a sprawl upon the
porch. The boy jumped for him, and half dragged half lifted his great
drunken body erect. The boarders shrank into a huddle with a quick
scattering of chairs: he greeted them with a laugh of howling contempt.

"Are you there? I say, are you there? The lowest of the low--boarding-house
swine! Merciful God! What a travesty! A travesty on Nature! That it
should come to this!"

He burst into a long peal of maniacal laughter.

"Papa! Come on!" said Eugene in a low voice. He took his father
cautiously by the sleeve. Gant flung him half across the porch with a
gesture of his hand. As he stepped in again swiftly, his father struck
at him with a flailing arm. He evaded the great moving fist without
trouble, and caught the falling body, swung from its own pivot, in his
arms. Then quickly, before Gant could recover, holding him from behind,
he rushed him toward the door. The boarders scattered away like
sparrows. But Laura James was at the screen before him: she flung it
open.

"Get away! Get away!" he cried, full of shame and anger. "You stay out
of this." For a moment he despised her for seeing his hurt.

"Oh, let me help you, my dear," Laura James whispered. Her eyes were
wet, but she was not afraid.

Father and son plunged chaotically down the wide dark hall, Eliza,
weeping and making gestures, just before them.

"Take him in here, boy. Take him in here," she whispered, motioning to
a large bedroom on the upper side of the house. Eugene propelled his
father through a blind passage of bathroom, and pushed him over on the
creaking width of an iron bed.

"You damned scoundrel!" Gant yelled, again trying to reap him down with
the long arm, "let me up or I'll kill you!"

"For God's sake, papa," he implored angrily, "try to quiet down. Every
one in town can hear you."

"To hell with them!" Gant roared. "Mountain Grills--all of them,
fattening upon my heart's-blood. They have done me to death, as sure as
there's a God in heaven."

Eliza appeared in the door, her face contorted by weeping.

"Son, can't you do something to stop him?" she said. "He'll ruin us all.
He'll drive every one away."

Gant struggled to stand erect when he saw her. Her white face stirred
him to insanity.

"There it is! There! There! Do you see! The fiend-face I know so well,
gloating upon my misery. Look at it! Look! Do you see its smile of evil
cunning? Greeley, Will, The Hog, The Old Major! The Tax Collector will
get it all, and I shall die in the gutter!"

"If it hadn't been for me," Eliza began, stung to retaliation, "you'd
have died there long ago."

"Mamma, for God's sake!" the boy cried. "Don't stand there talking to
him! Can't you see what it does to him! Do something, in heaven's name!
Get Helen! Where is she?"

"I'll make an end to it all!" Gant yelled, staggering erect. "I'll do
for us both now."

Eliza vanished.

"Yes, sir, papa. It's going to be all right," Eugene began soothingly,
pushing him back on the bed again. He dropped quickly to his knees,
and began to draw off one of Gant's soft tongueless shoes, muttering
reassurances all the time: "Yes, sir. We'll get you some good hot soup
and put you to bed in a jiffy. Everything's going to be all right,"
the shoe came off in his hand and, aided by the furious thrust of his
father's foot, he went sprawling back.

Gant got to his feet again and, taking a farewell kick at his fallen
son, lunged toward the door. Eugene scrambled up quickly, and leaped
after him. The two men fell heavily into the roughly grained plaster of
the wall. Gant cursed, flailing about clumsily at his tormentor. Helen
came in.

"Baby!" Gant wept, "they're trying to kill me. O Jesus, do something to
save me, or I perish."

"You get back in that bed," she commanded sharply, "or I'll knock your
head off."

Very obediently he suffered himself to be led back to bed and undressed.
In a few minutes she was sitting beside him with a bowl of smoking soup.
He grinned sheepishly as she spooned it into his opened mouth. She
laughed--almost happily--thinking of the lost and irrevocable years.
Suddenly, before he slept, he lifted himself strongly from the pillows
that propped him, and, with staring eyes, called out in savage terror:

"Is it a cancer? I say, is it a cancer?"

"Hush!" she cried. "No. Of course not! Don't be foolish."

He fell back exhausted, with eyes closed. But they knew that it was. He
had never been told. The terrible name of his malady was never uttered
save by him. And in his heart he knew--what they all knew and never
spoke of before him--that it was, it was a cancer. All day, with
fear-stark eyes, Gant had sat, like a broken statue, among his marbles,
drinking. It was a cancer.


The boy's right hand bled very badly across the wrist, where his father's
weight had ground it into the wall.

"Go wash it off," said Helen. "I'll tie it up for you."

He went into the dark bathroom and held his hand under a jet of lukewarm
water. A very quiet despair was in his heart, a weary peace that brooded
too upon the house of death and tumult, that flowed, like a soft
exploring wind, through its dark halls, bathing all things quietly with
peace and weariness. The boarders had fled like silly sheep to the two
houses across the street: they had eaten there, they were clustered
there upon the porches, whispering. And their going brought him peace
and freedom, as if his limbs had been freed from a shackling weight.
Eliza, amid the slow smoke of the kitchen, wept more quietly over the
waste of supper; he saw the black mournful calm of the negress's face.
He walked slowly up the dark hall, with a handkerchief tied loosely
round his wound. He felt suddenly the peace that comes with despair. The
sword that pierces very deep had fared through the folds of his poor
armour of pride. The steel had shared his side, had bitten to his heart.
But under his armour he had found himself. No more than himself could be
known. No more than himself could be given. What he was--he was: evasion
and pretence could not add to his sum. With all his heart he was glad.

By the door, in the darkness, he found Laura James.

"I thought you had gone with the others," he said.

"No," said Laura James, "how is your father?"

"He's all right now. He's gone to sleep," he answered. "Have you had
anything to eat?"

"No," she said, "I didn't want it."

"I'll bring you something from the kitchen," he said. "There's plenty
there." In a moment he added: "I'm sorry, Laura."

"What are you sorry for?" she asked.

He leaned against the wall limply, drained of his strength at her touch.

"Eugene. My dear," she said. She pulled his drooping face down to her
lips and kissed him. "My sweet, my darling, don't look like that."

All his resistance melted from him. He seized her small hands, crushing
them in his hot fingers, and devouring them with kisses.

"My dear Laura! My dear Laura!" he said in a choking voice. "My sweet,
my beautiful Laura! My lovely Laura. I love you, I love you." The words
rushed from his heart, incoherent, unashamed, foaming through the broken
levees of pride and silence. They clung together in the dark, with their
wet faces pressed mouth to mouth. Her perfume went drunkenly to his
brain; her touch upon him shot through his limbs a glow of magic; he
felt the pressure of her narrow breasts, eager and lithe, against him
with a sense of fear--as if he had dishonoured her--with a sickening
remembrance of his defilement.

He held between his hands her elegant small head, so gloriously wound
with its thick bracelet of fine blonde hair, and spoke the words he had
never spoken--the words of confession, filled with love and humility.

"Don't go! Don't go! Please don't go!" he begged. "Don't leave, dear.
Please."

"Hush!" she whispered. "I won't go! I love you, my dear."

She saw his hand, wrapped in its bloody bandage: she nursed it gently
with soft little cries of tenderness. She fetched a bottle of iodine
from her room and painted the stinging cut with a brush. She wrapped it
with clean strips of fine white cloth, torn from an old waist, scented
with a faint and subtle perfume.

Then they sat upon the wooden swing. The house seemed to sleep in
darkness. Helen and Eliza came presently from its very quiet depth.

"How's your hand, 'Gene?" Helen asked.

"It's all right," he said.

"Let me see! O-ho, you've got a nurse now, haven't you?" she said, with
a good laugh.

"What's that? What's that? Hurt his hand? How'd you do that? Why,
here--say--I've got the very thing for it, son," said Eliza, trying to
bustle off in all directions.

"Oh, it's all right now, mamma. It's been fixed," he said wearily,
reflecting that she had the very thing always too late. He looked at
Helen grinning:

"God bless our Happy Home!" he said.

"Poor old Laura!" she laughed, and hugged the girl roughly with one
hand. "It's too bad you have to be dragged into it."

"That's all right," said Laura. "I feel like one of the family now,
anyhow."

"He needn't think he can carry on like this," said Eliza resentfully.
"I'm not going to put up with it any longer."

"Oh forget about it!" said Helen wearily. "Good heavens, mamma. Papa's a
sick man. Can't you realise that?"

"Pshaw!" said Eliza scornfully. "I don't believe there's a thing in the
world wrong with him but that vile liquor. All his trouble comes from
that."

"Oh--how ridiculous! How ridiculous! You can't tell me!" Helen exclaimed
angrily.

"Let's talk about the weather," said Eugene.

Then they all sat quietly, letting the darkness soak into them. Finally
Helen and Eliza went back into the house: Eliza went unwillingly, at the
girl's insistence, casting back the doubtful glimmer of her face upon
the boy and girl.

The wasting helve of the moon rode into heaven over the bulk of the
hills. There was a smell of wet grass and lilac, and the vast brooding
symphony of the million-noted little night things, rising and falling in
a constant ululation, and inhabiting the heart with steady unconscious
certitude. The pallid light drowned out the stars, it lay like silence
on the earth, it dripped through the leafy web of the young maples,
printing the earth with swarming moths of elvish light.

Eugene and Laura sat with joined hands in the slowly creaking swing. Her
touch shot through him like a train of fire: as he put his arm around
her shoulders and drew her over to him, his fingers touched the live
firm cup of her breast. He jerked his hand away, as if he had been
stung, muttering an apology. Whenever she touched him, his flesh got
numb and weak. She was a virgin, crisp like celery--his heart shrank
away from the pollution of his touch upon her. It seemed to him that he
was much the older, although he was sixteen, and she twenty-one. He felt
the age of his loneliness and his dark perception. He felt the grey
wisdom of sin--a waste desert, but seen and known. When he held her
hand, he felt as if he had already seduced her. She lifted her lovely
face to him, pert and ugly as a boy's; it was inhabited by a true and
steadfast decency, and his eyes were wet. All the young beauty in the
world dwelt for him in that face that had kept wonder, that had kept
innocency, that had lived in such immortal blindness to the terror and
foulness of the world. He came to her, like a creature who had travelled
its life through dark space, for a moment of peace and conviction on
some lonely planet, where now he stood, in the vast enchanted plain of
moonlight, with moonlight falling on the moonflower of her face. For if
a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find within his hand a flower
as token that he had really been there--what then, what then?

"Eugene," she said presently, "how old are you?"

His vision thickened with his pulse. In a moment he answered with
terrible difficulty.

"I'm--just sixteen."

"Oh, you child!" she cried. "I thought you were more than that!"

"I'm--old for my age," he muttered. "How old are you?"

"I'm twenty-one," she said. "Isn't it a pity?"

"There's not much difference," he said. "I can't see that it matters."

"Oh, my dear," she said. "It does! It matters so much!"

And he knew that it did--how much he did not know. But he had his
moment. He was not afraid of pain, he was not afraid of loss. He cared
nothing for the practical need of the world. He dared to say the strange
and marvellous thing that had bloomed so darkly in him.

"Laura," he said, hearing his low voice sound over the great plain of
the moon, "let's always love each other as we do now. Let's never get
married. I want you to wait for me and to love me forever. I am going
all over the world. I shall go away for years at a time; I shall become
famous, but I shall always come back to you. You shall live in a house
away in the mountains, you shall wait for me, and keep yourself for me.
Will you?" he said, asking for her life as calmly as for an hour of her
time.

"Yes, dear," said Laura in the moonlight, "I will wait for you forever."


She was buried in his flesh. She throbbed in the beat of his pulses. She
was wine in his blood, a music in his heart.


"He has no consideration for you or any one else," Hugh Barton growled.
He had returned late from work at his office, to take Helen home. "If he
can't do better than this, we'll find a house of our own. I'm not going
to have you get down sick on account of him."

"Forget about it," Helen said. "He's getting old."

They came out on the veranda.

"Come down to-morrow, honey," she said to Eugene. "I'll give you a real
feed. Laura, you come too. It's not always like this, you know." She
laughed, fondling the girl with a big hand.

They coasted away downhill.

"What a lovely girl your sister is," said Laura James. "Aren't you
simply crazy about her?"

Eugene made no answer for a moment.

"Yes," he said.

"She is about you. Anyone can see that," said Laura.

In the darkness he caught at his throat.

"Yes," he said.

The moon quartered gently across heaven. Eliza came out again, timidly,
hesitantly.

"Who's there? Who's there?" she spoke into the darkness. "Where's 'Gene?
Oh! I didn't know! Are you there, son?" She knew very well.

"Yes," he said.

"Why don't you sit down, Mrs. Gant?" asked Laura. "I don't see how you
stand that hot kitchen all day long. You must be worn out."

"I tell you what!" said Eliza, peering dimly at the sky. "It's a fine
night, isn't it? As the fellow says, a night for lovers." She laughed
uncertainly, then stood for a moment in thought.

"Son," she said in a troubled voice, "why don't you go to bed and get
some sleep? It's not good for you staying up till all hours like this."

"That's where I should be," said Laura James, rising.

"Yes, child," said Eliza. "Go get your beauty sleep. As the saying goes,
early to bed and early to rise----"

"Let's all go, then. Let's all go!" said Eugene impatiently and angrily,
wondering if she must always be the last one awake in that house.

"Why, law, no!" said Eliza. "I can't, boy. I've all those things to
iron."

Beside him, Laura gave his hand a quiet squeeze, and rose. Bitterly, he
watched his loss.

"Good-night, all. Good-night, Mrs. Gant."

"Good-night, child."

When she had gone, Eliza sat down beside him, with a sigh of weariness.

"I tell you what," she said. "That feels good. I wish I had as much
time as some folks, and could sit out here enjoying the air." In the
darkness, he knew her puckering lips were trying to smile.

"Hm!" she said, and caught his hand in her rough palm. "Has my baby gone
and got him a girl?"

"What of it? What if it were true?" he said angrily. "Haven't I a right
as much as any one?"

"Pshaw!" said Eliza. "You're too young to think of them. I wouldn't pay
any attention to them, if I were you. Most of them haven't an idea in
the world except going out to parties and having a good time. I don't
want my boy to waste his time on them."

He felt her earnestness beneath her awkward banter. He struggled in a
chaos of confused fury, trying for silence. At last he spoke in a low
voice, filled with his passion:

"We've got to have something, mamma. We've got to have something, you
know. We can't go on always alone--alone."

It was dark. No one could see. He let the gates swing open. He wept.

"I know!" Eliza agreed hastily. "I'm not saying----"

"My God, my God, where are we going? What's it all about? He's
dying--can't you see it? Don't you know it? Look at his life. Look
at yours. No light, no love, no comfort--nothing." His voice rose
frantically; he beat on his ribs like a drum. "Mamma, mamma, in God's
name, what is it? What do you want? Are you going to strangle and drown
us all? Don't you own enough? Do you want more string? Do you want more
bottles? By God, I'll go around collecting them if you say so." His
voice had risen almost to a scream. "But tell me what you want. Don't
you own enough? Do you want the town? What is it?"

"Why, I don't know what you're talking about, boy," said Eliza angrily.
"If I hadn't tried to accumulate a little property none of you would
have had a roof to call your own, for your papa, I can assure you, would
have squandered everything."

"A roof to call our own!" he yelled, with a crazy laugh. "Good God, we
haven't a bed to call our own. We haven't a room to call our own. We
have not a quilt to call our own that might not be taken from us to warm
the mob that rocks upon this porch and grumbles."

"Now, you may sneer at the boarders all you like----" Eliza began
sternly.

"No," he said. "I can't. There's not breath or strength enough in me to
sneer at them all I like."

Eliza began to weep.

"I've done the best I could!" she said. "I'd have given you a home if I
could. I'd have put up with anything after Grover's death, but he never
gave me a moment's peace. Nobody knows what I've been through. Nobody
knows, child. Nobody knows."

He saw her face in the moonlight, contorted by an ugly grimace of
sorrow. What she said, he knew, was fair and honest. He was touched
deeply.

"It's all right, mamma," he said painfully. "Forget about it! I know."

She seized his hand almost gratefully and laid her white face, still
twisted with her grief, against his shoulder. It was the gesture of a
child: a gesture that asked for love, pity, and tenderness. It tore up
great roots in him, bloodily.

"Don't!" he said. "Don't, mamma! Please!"

"Nobody knows," said Eliza. "Nobody knows. I need some one, too. I've
had a hard life, son, full of pain and trouble." Slowly, like a child
again, she wiped her wet weak eyes with the back of her hand.

Ah, he thought, as his heart twisted in him full of wild pain and
regret, she will be dead some day and I shall always remember this.
Always this. This.

They were silent a moment. He held her rough hand tightly, and kissed
her.

"Well," Eliza began, full of cheerful prophecy, "I tell you what: I'm
not going to spend my life slaving away here for a lot of boarders. They
needn't think it. I'm going to set back and take things as easy as any
of them." She winked knowingly at him. "When you come home next time,
you may find me living in a big house in Doak Park. I've got the
lot--the best lot out there for view and location, far better than the
one W.J. Bryan has. I made the trade with old Dr. Doak himself, the
other day. Look here! What about it!" She laughed. "He said, 'Mrs. Gant,
I can't trust any of my agents with you. If I'm to make anything on this
deal, I've got to look out. You're the sharpest trader in this town.'
'Why, pshaw! Doctor,' I said (I never let on I believed him or
anything), 'all I want is a fair return on my investment. I believe in
every one making his profit and giving the other fellow a chance. Keep
the ball a-rolling!' I said, laughing as big as you please. 'Why, Mrs.
Gant!' he said----" She was off on a lengthy divagation, recording with
an absorbed gusto the interminable minutiae of her transaction with the
worthy Quinine King, with the attendant phenomena, during the time, of
birds, bees, flowers, sun, clouds, dogs, cows, and people. She was
pleased. She was happy.

Presently, returning to an abrupt reflective pause, she said: "Well, I
may do it. I want a place where my children can come to see me and bring
their friends, when they come home."

"Yes," he said, "yes. That would be nice. You mustn't work all your
life."

He was pleased at her happy fable: for a moment he almost believed in a
miracle of redemption, although the story was an old one to him.

"I hope you do," he said. "It would be nice.... Go on to bed now, why
don't you, mamma? It's getting late." He rose. "I'm going now."

"Yes, son," she said, getting up. "You ought to. Well, good-night." They
kissed with a love, for the time, washed clean of bitterness, Eliza went
before him into the dark house.

But before he went to bed, he descended to the kitchen for matches. She
was still there, beyond the long littered table, at her ironing board,
flanked by two big piles of laundry. At his accusing glance she said
hastily:

"I'm a-going. Right away. I just wanted to finish up these towels."

He rounded the table, before he left, to kiss her again. She fished into
a button-box on the sewing-machine and dug out the stub of a pencil.
Gripping it firmly above an old envelope, she scrawled out on the
ironing board a rough mapping. Her mind was still lulled in its project.

"Here, you see," she began, "is Sunset Avenue, coming up the hill. This
is Doak Place, running off here at right angles. Now this corner-lot
here belongs to Dick Webster; and right here above it, at the very top
is----"

Is, he thought, staring with dull interest, the place where the Buried
Treasure lies. Ten paces N.N.E. from the Big Rock, at the roots of the
Old Oak Tree. He went off into his delightful fantasy while she talked.
What if there _was_ a buried treasure on one of Eliza's lots? If she
kept on buying, there might very well be. Or why not an oil-well? Or a
coal-mine? These famous mountains were full (they said) of minerals. 150
Bbl. a day right in the backyard. How much would that be? At $3.00 a
Bbl., there would be over $50.00 a day for every one in the family. The
world is ours!

"You see, don't you?" she smiled triumphantly. "And right there is where
I shall build. That lot will bring twice its present value in five
years."

"Yes," he said, kissing her. "Good-night, mamma. For God's sake, go to
bed and get some sleep."

"Good-night, son," said Eliza.

He went out and began to mount the dark stairs. Benjamin Gant, entering
at this moment, stumbled across a mission-chair in the hall. He cursed
fiercely, and struck at the chair with his hand. Damn it! Oh damn it!
Mrs. Pert whispered a warning behind him, with a fuzzy laugh. Eugene
paused, then mounted softly the carpeted stair, so that he would not be
heard, entering the sleeping-porch at the top of the landing on which he
slept.

He did not turn on the light, because he disliked seeing the raw
blistered varnish of the dresser and the bent white iron of the bed. It
sagged, and the light was dim--he hated dim lights, and the large moths,
flapping blindly around on their dusty wings. He undressed in the moon.
The moonlight fell upon the earth like a magic unearthly dawn. It wiped
away all rawness, it hid all sores. It gave all common and familiar
things--the sagging drift of the barn, the raw shed of the creamery, the
rich curve of the lawyer's crab-apple trees--a uniform bloom of wonder.
He lighted a cigarette, watching its red glowing suspiration in the
mirror, and leaned upon the rail of his porch, looking out. Presently,
he grew aware that Laura James, eight feet away, was watching him. The
moonlight fell upon them, bathing their flesh in a green pallor, and
steeping them in its silence. Their faces were blocked in miraculous
darkness, out of which, seeing but unseen, their bright eyes lived. They
gazed at each other in that elfin light, without speaking. In the room
below them, the light crawled to his father's bed, swam up the cover,
and opened across his face, thrust sharply upward. The air of the night,
the air of the hills, fell on the boy's bare flesh like a sluice of
clear water. His toes curled in to grip wet grasses.

On the landing, he heard Mrs. Pert go softly up to bed, fumbling with
blind care at the walls. Doors creaked and clicked. The house grew
solidly into quiet, like a stone beneath the moon. They looked, waiting
for a spell and the conquest of time. Then she spoke to him--her whisper
of his name was only a guess at sound. He threw his leg across the
rail, and thrust his long body over space to the sill of her window,
stretching out like a cat. She drew her breath in sharply, and cried out
softly, "No! No!" but she caught his arms upon the sills and held him as
he twisted in.

Then they held each other tightly in their cool young arms, and kissed
many times with young lips and faces. All her hair fell down about her
like thick corn-silk, in a sweet loose wantonness. Her straight dainty
legs were clad in snug little green bloomers, gathered in by an elastic
above the knee.

They were locked limb to limb: he kissed the smooth sheen of her arms
and shoulders--the passion that numbed his limbs was governed by a
religious ecstasy. He wanted to hold her, and go away by himself to
think about her.

He stooped, thrusting his arm under her knees, and lifted her up
exultantly. She looked at him frightened, holding him more tightly.

"What are you doing?" she whispered. "Don't hurt me."

"I won't hurt you, my dear," he said. "I'm going to put you to bed. Yes.
I'm going to put you to bed. Do you hear?" He felt he must cry out in
his throat for joy.

He carried her over and laid her on the bed. Then he knelt beside her,
putting his arm beneath her and gathering her to him.

"Good-night, my dear. Kiss me good-night. Do you love me?"

"Yes." She kissed him. "Good-night, my darling. Don't go back by the
window. You may fall."

But he went, as he came, reaching through the moonlight exultantly like
a cat. For a long time he lay awake, in a quiet delirium, his heart
thudding fiercely against his ribs. Sleep crept across his senses with
goose-soft warmth: the young leaves of the maples rustled, a cock
sounded his distant elfin minstrelsy, the ghost of a dog howled. He
slept.


He awoke with a high hot sun beating in on his face through the porch
awnings. He hated to awake in sunlight. Some day he would sleep in a
great room that was always cool and dark. There would be trees and vines
at his windows, or the scooped-out lift of the hill. His clothing was
wet with night-damp as he dressed. When he went downstairs he found Gant
rocking miserably upon the porch, his hand gripped over a walking-stick.

"Good-morning," he said, "how do you feel?"

His father cast his uneasy flickering eyes on him, and groaned.

"Merciful God! I'm being punished for my sins."

"You'll feel better in a little," said Eugene. "Did you eat anything?"

"It stuck in my throat," said Gant, who had eaten heartily. "I couldn't
swallow a bite. How's your hand, son?" he asked very humbly.

"Oh, it's all right," said Eugene quickly. "Who told you about my hand?"

"She said I had hurt your hand," said Gant sorrowfully.

"Ah-h!" said the boy angrily. "No. I wasn't hurt."

Gant leaned to the side and, without looking, clumsily, patted his son's
uninjured hand.

"I'm sorry for what I've done," he said. "I'm a sick man. Do you need
money?"

"No," said Eugene, embarrassed. "I have all I need."

"Come to the office to-day, and I'll give you something," said Gant.
"Poor child, I suppose you're hard up."

But instead, he waited until Laura James returned from her morning visit
to the city's bathing-pool. She came with her bathing-suit in one hand,
and several small packages in the other. More arrived by negro carriers.
She paid and signed.

"You must have a lot of money, Laura?" he said. "You do this every day,
don't you?"

"Daddy gets after me about it," she admitted, "but I love to buy
clothes. I spend all my money on clothes."

"What are you going to do now?"

"Nothing--whatever you like. It's a lovely day to do something, isn't
it?"

"It's a lovely day to do nothing. Would you like to go off somewhere,
Laura?"

"I'd love to go off somewhere with you," said Laura James.

"That is the idea, my girl. That is the idea," he said exultantly, in
throaty and exuberant burlesque. "We will go off somewhere alone--we
will take along something to eat," he said lusciously.

Laura went to her room and put on a pair of sturdy little slippers.
Eugene went into the kitchen.

"Have you a shoe-box?" he asked Eliza.

"What do you want that for?" she said suspiciously.

"I'm going to the bank," he said ironically. "I wanted something to
carry my money in." But immediately he added roughly:

"I'm going on a picnic."

"Huh? Hah? What's that you say?" said Eliza. "A picnic? Who are you
going with? That girl?"

"No," he said heavily, "with President Wilson, the King of England, and
Dr. Doak. We're going to have lemonade--I've promised to bring the
lemons."

"I'll vow, boy!" said Eliza fretfully. "I don't like it--your running
off this way when I need you. I wanted you to make a deposit for me, and
the telephone people will disconnect me if I don't send them the money
to-day."

"Oh mamma! For God's sake!" he cried annoyed. "You always need me when I
want to go somewhere. Let them wait! They can wait a day."

"It's overdue," she said. "Well, here you are. I wish I had time to go
off on picnics." She fished a shoe-box out of a pile of magazines and
newspapers that littered the top of a low cupboard.

"Have you got anything to eat?"

"We'll get it," he said, and departed.

They went down the hill, and paused at the musty little grocery around
the corner on Woodson Street, where they bought crackers, peanut butter,
currant jelly, bottled pickles, and a big slice of rich yellow cheese.
The grocer was an old Jew who muttered jargon into a rabbi's beard as if
saying a spell against Dybbuks. The boy looked closely to see if his
hands touched the food. They were not clean.

On their way up the hill, they stopped for a few minutes at Gant's.
They found Helen and Ben in the dining-room. Ben was eating breakfast,
bending, as usual, with scowling attention, over his coffee, turning
from eggs and bacon almost with disgust. Helen insisted on contributing
boiled eggs and sandwiches to their provision: the two women went back
into the kitchen. Eugene sat at table with Ben, drinking coffee.

"O-oh my God!" Ben said at length, yawning wearily. He lighted a
cigarette. "How's the Old Man this morning?"

"He's all right, I think. Said he couldn't eat breakfast."

"Did he say anything to the boarders?"

"'You damned scoundrels! You dirty Mountain Grills! Whee--!' That was
all."

Ben snickered quietly.

"Did he hurt your hand? Let's see."

"No. You can't see anything. It's not hurt," said Eugene, lifting his
bandaged wrist.

"He didn't hit you, did he?" asked Ben sternly.

"Oh, no. Of course not. He was just drunk. He was sorry about it this
morning."

"Yes," said Ben, "he's always sorry about it--after he's raised all the
hell he can." He drank deeply at his cigarette, inhaling the smoke as if
in the grip of a powerful drug.

"How'd you get along at college this year, 'Gene?" he asked presently.

"I passed my work. I made fair grades--if that's what you mean? I did
better--this Spring," he added, with some difficulty. "It was hard
getting started--at the beginning."

"You mean last Fall?"

Eugene nodded.

"What was the matter?" said Ben, scowling at him. "Did the other boys
make fun of you?"

"Yes," said Eugene, in a low voice.

"Why did they? You mean they didn't think you were good enough for them?
Did they look down on you? Was that it?" said Ben savagely.

"No," said Eugene, very red in the face. "No. That had nothing to do
with it. I look funny, I suppose. I looked funny to them."

"What do you mean, you look funny?" said Ben pugnaciously. "There's
nothing wrong with you, you know, if you didn't go around looking like a
bum. In God's name," he exclaimed angrily, "when did you get that hair
cut last? What do you think you are: the Wild Man from Borneo?"

"I don't like barbers!" Eugene burst out furiously. "That's why! I don't
want them to go sticking their damned dirty fingers in my mouth. Whose
business is it, if I never get my hair cut?"

"A man is judged by his appearance to-day," said Ben sententiously. "I
was reading an article by a big business man in _The Post_ the other
day. He says he always looks at a man's shoes before he gives him a
job."

He spoke seriously, haltingly, in the same way that he read, without
genuine conviction. Eugene writhed to hear his fierce condor prattle
this stale hash of the canny millionaires, like any obedient parrot in a
teller's cage. Ben's voice had a dull flat quality as he uttered these
admirable opinions: he seemed to grope behind it all for some answer,
with hurt puzzled eyes. As he faltered along, with scowling intensity,
through a success-sermon, there was something poignantly moving in his
effort: it was the effort of his strange and lonely spirit to find some
entrance into life--to find success, position, companionship. And it was
as if, spelling the words out with his mouth, a settler in the Bronx
from the fat Lombard plain, should try to unriddle the new world by
deciphering the World Almanac, or as if some woodsman, trapped by the
winter, and wasted by an obscure and terrible disease, should hunt its
symptoms and its cure in a book of Household Remedies.

"Did the Old Man send you enough money to get along on?" Ben asked.
"Were you able to hold your own with the other boys? He can afford it,
you know. Don't let him stint you. Make him give it to you, 'Gene."

"I had plenty," said Eugene, "all that I needed."

"This is the time you need it--not later," said Ben. "Make him put you
through college. This is an age of specialisation. They're looking for
college-trained men."

"Yes," said Eugene. He spoke obediently, indifferently, the hard bright
mail of his mind undinted by the jargon: within, the Other One, who had
no speech, saw.

"So get your education," said Ben, scowling vaguely. "All the Big
Men--Ford, Edison, Rockefeller--whether they had it or not, say it's a
good thing."

"Why didn't you go yourself?" said Eugene curiously.

"I didn't have any one to tell me," said Ben. "Besides, you don't think
the Old Man would give me anything, do you?" He laughed cynically. "It's
too late now."

He was silent a moment; he smoked.

"You didn't know I was taking a course in advertising, did you?" he
asked, grinning.

"No. Where?"

"Through the Correspondence School," said Ben. "I get my lessons every
week. I don't know," he laughed diffidently, "I must be good at it.
I make the highest grades they have--98 or 100 every time. I get a
diploma, if I finish the course."

A blinding mist swam across the younger brother's eyes. He did not know
why. A convulsive knot gathered in his throat. He bent his head quickly
and fumbled for his cigarettes. In a moment he said:

"I'm glad you're doing it. I hope you finish, Ben."

"You know," Ben said seriously, "they've turned out some Big Men. I'll
show you the testimonials some time. Men who started with nothing: now
they're holding down big jobs."

"I hope you do," said Eugene.

"So, you see you're not the only College Man around here," said Ben with
a grin. In a moment, he went on gravely: "You're the last hope, 'Gene.
Go on and finish up, if you have to steal the money. The rest of us will
never amount to a damn. Try to make something out of yourself. Hold your
head up! You're as good as any of them--a damn sight better than these
little pimps about town." He became very fierce; he was very excited. He
got up suddenly from the table. "Don't let them laugh at you! By God,
we're as good as they are. If any of them laughs at you again, pick up
the first damn thing you get your hand on and knock him down. Do you
hear?" In his fierce excitement he snatched up the heavy carving steel
from the table and brandished it.

"Yes," said Eugene awkwardly. "I think it's going to be all right now. I
didn't know how to do at first."

"I hope you have sense enough now to leave those old hookers alone?"
said Ben very sternly. Eugene made no answer. "You can't do that and be
anything, you know. And you're likely to catch everything. This looks
like a nice girl," he said quietly, after a pause. "For heaven's sake,
fix yourself up and try to keep fairly clean. Women notice that, you
know. Look after your finger-nails, and keep your clothes pressed. Have
you any money?"

"All I need," said Eugene, looking nervously toward the kitchen. "Don't,
for God's sake!"

"Put it in your pocket, you little fool," Ben said angrily, thrusting a
bill into his hand. "You've got to have some money. Keep it until you
need it."


Helen came out on the high front porch with them as they departed. As
usual, she had added a double heaping measure to what they needed. There
was another shoe-box stuffed with sandwiches, boiled eggs, and fudge.

She stood on the high step-edge, with a cloth wound over her head, her
gaunt arms, pitted with old scars, akimbo. A warm sunny odour of
nasturtiums, loamy earth, and honeysuckle washed round them its hot
spermy waves.

"O-ho! A-ha!" she winked comically. "I know something! I'm not as blind
as you think, you know----" She nodded with significant jocularity, her
big smiling face drenched in the curious radiance and purity that
occasionally dwelt so beautifully there. He thought always, when he saw
her thus, of a sky washed after rain, of wide crystalline distances,
cool and clean.

With a rough snigger she prodded him in the ribs:

"Ain't love grand! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Look at his face, Laura." She drew the
girl close to her in a generous hug, laughing, oh, with laughing pity,
and as they mounted the hill, she stood there, in the sunlight, her
mouth slightly open, smiling, touched with radiance, beauty, and wonder.

They mounted slowly toward the eastern edge of town, by the long upward
sweep of Academy Street, which bordered the negro settlement sprawled
below it. At the end of Academy Street, the hill loomed abruptly; a
sinuous road, well paved, curved up along the hillside to the right.
They turned into this road, mounting now along the eastern edge of
Niggertown. The settlement fell sharply away below them, rushing down
along a series of long clay streets. There were a few frame houses by
the roadside: the dwellings of negroes and poor white people, but these
became sparser as they mounted. They walked at a leisurely pace up the
cool road speckled with little dancing patches of light that filtered
through the arching trees and shaded on the left by the dense massed
foliage of the hill. Out of this green loveliness loomed the huge raw
turret of a cement reservoir: it was streaked and blotted coolly with
water-marks. Eugene felt thirsty. Further along, the escape from a
smaller reservoir roared from a pipe in a foaming hawser, as thick as a
man's body.

They climbed sharply up, along a rocky trail, avoiding the last long
corkscrew of the road, and stood in the gap, at the road's summit. They
were only a few hundred feet above the town: it lay before them with
the sharp nearness of a Sienese picture, at once close and far. On the
highest ground, he saw the solid masonry of the Square, blocked cleanly
out in light and shadow, and a crawling toy that was a car, and men no
bigger than sparrows. And about the Square was the treeless brick jungle
of business--cheap, ragged and ugly, and beyond all this, in indefinite
patches, the houses where all the people lived, with little bright raw
ulcers of suburbia further off, and the healing and concealing grace of
fair massed trees. And below him, weltering up from the hollow along the
flanks and shoulders of the hill, was Niggertown. There seemed to be a
kind of centre at the Square, where all the cars crawled in and waited,
yet there was no purpose anywhere.

But the hills were lordly, with a plan. Westward, they widened into the
sun, soaring up from buttressing shoulders. The town was thrown up on
the plateau like an encampment: there was nothing below him that could
resist time. There was no idea. Below him, in a cup, he felt that all
life was held: he saw it as might one of the old schoolmen writing in
monkish Latin a Theatre of Human Life; or like Peter Breughel, in one of
his swarming pictures. It seemed to him suddenly that he had not come up
on the hill from the town, but that he had come out of the wilderness
like a beast, and was staring now with steady beast-eye at this little
huddle of wood and mortar which the wilderness must one day repossess,
devour, cover over.

The seventh from the top was Troy--but Helen had lived there; and so the
German dug it up.

They turned from the railing, with recovered wind, and walked through
the gap, under Philip Roseberry's great arched bridge. To the left, on
the summit, the rich Jew had his castle, his stables, his horses, his
cows, and his daughters. As they went under the shadow of the bridge
Eugene lifted his head and shouted. His voice bounded against the arch
like a stone. They passed under and stood on the other side of the gap,
looking from the road's edge down into the cove. But they could not yet
see the cove, save for green glimmers. The hillside was thickly wooded,
the road wound down its side in a white perpetual corkscrew. But they
could look across at the fair wild hills on the other side of the cove,
cleared half-way up their flanks with ample field and fenced meadow, and
forested above with a billowing sea of greenery.

The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and
sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water,
all over the land. A rich warm wind was blowing, turning all the leaves
back the same way, and making mellow music through all the lute-strings
of flower and grass and fruit. The wind moaned, not with the mad
fiend-voice of winter in harsh boughs, but like a fruitful woman,
deep-breasted, great, full of love and wisdom; like Demeter unseen and
hunting through the world. A dog bayed faintly in the cove, his howl
spent and broken by the wind. A cowbell tinkled gustily. In the thick
wood below them the rich notes of birds fell from their throats,
straight down, like nuggets. A woodpecker drummed on the dry unbarked
bole of a blasted chestnut-tree. The blue gulf of the sky was spread
with light massy clouds: they cruised like swift galleons, tacking
across the hills before the wind, and darkening the trees below with
their floating shadows.

The boy grew blind with love and desire: the cup of his heart was
glutted with all this wonder. It overcame and weakened him. He grasped
the girl's cool fingers. They stood leg to leg, riven into each other's
flesh. Then they left the road, cutting down across its loops along
steep wooded paths. The wood was a vast green church; the bird-cries
fell like plums. A great butterfly, with wings of blue velvet streaked
with gold and scarlet markings, fluttered heavily before them in
freckled sunlight, tottering to rest finally upon a spray of dogwood.
There were light skimming noises in the dense undergrowth to either
side, the swift bullet-shadows of birds. A garter snake, greener than
wet moss, as long as a shoelace and no thicker than a woman's little
finger, shot across the path, its tiny eyes bright with terror, its
small forked tongue playing from its mouth like an electric spark. Laura
cried out, drawing back in sharp terror; at her cry he snatched up a
stone in a wild lust to kill the tiny creature that shot at them,
through its coils, the old snake-fear, touching them with beauty, with
horror, with something supernatural. But the snake glided away into the
undergrowth and, with a feeling of strong shame, he threw the stone
away. "They won't hurt you," he said.

At length, they came out above the cove, at a forking of the road. They
turned left, to the north, toward the upper and smaller end. To the
south, the cove widened out in a rich little Eden of farm and pasture.
Small houses dotted the land, there were green meadows and a glint of
water. Fields of young green wheat bent rhythmically under the wind; the
young corn stood waist-high, with light clashing blades. The chimneys of
Rheinhart's house showed above its obscuring grove of maples; the fat
dairy cows grazed slowly across the wide pastures. And further below,
half tree-and-shrub-hidden, lay the rich acres of Judge Webster Tayloe.
The road was thickly coated with white dust; it dipped down and ran
through a little brook. They crossed over on white rocks, strewn across
its bed. Several ducks, scarcely disturbed by their crossing, waddled up
out of the clear water and regarded them gravely, like little children
in white choir aprons. A young country fellow clattered by them in a
buggy filled with empty milk-cans. He grinned with a cordial red face,
saluting them with a slow gesture, and leaving behind an odour of milk
and sweat and butter. A woman, in a field above them, stared curiously
with shaded eyes. In another field, a man was mowing with a scythe,
moving into the grass like a god upon his enemies, with a reaping hook
of light.

They left the road near the head of the cove, advancing over the fields
on rising ground to the wooded cup of the hills. There was a powerful
masculine stench of broad dock-leaves, a hot weedy odour. They moved
over a pathless field, knee-high in a dry stubbly waste, gathering on
their clothes clusters of brown cockle-burrs. All the field was sown
with hot odorous daisies. Then they entered the wood again, mounting
until they came to an island of tender grass, by a little brook that
fell down from the green hill along a rocky ferny bed in bright
cascades.

"Let's stop here," said Eugene. The grass was thick with dandelions:
their poignant and wordless odour studded the earth with yellow magic.
They were like gnomes and elves, and tiny witchcraft in flower and
acorn.

Laura and Eugene lay upon their backs, looking up through the high green
shimmer of leaves at the Caribbean sky, with all its fleet of cloudy
ships. The water of the brook made a noise like silence. The town behind
the hill lay in another unthinkable world. They forgot its pain and
conflict.

"What time is it?" Eugene asked. For, they had come to a place where no
time was. Laura held up her exquisite wrist, and looked at her watch.

"Why!" she exclaimed, surprised. "It's only half-past twelve."

But he scarcely heard her.

"What do I care what time it is!" he said huskily, and he seized the
lovely hand, bound with its silken watch-cord, and kissed it. Her long
cool fingers closed around his own; she drew his face down to her mouth.

They lay there, locked together, upon that magic carpet, in that
paradise. Her grey eyes were deeper and clearer than a pool of clear
water; he kissed the little freckles on her rare skin; he gazed
reverently at the snub tilt of her nose; he watched the mirrored dance
of the sparkling water over her face. All of that magic world--flower
and field and sky and hill, and all the sweet woodland cries, sound and
sight and odour--grew into him, one voice in his heart, one tongue in
his brain, harmonious, radiant, and whole--a single passionate lyrical
noise.

"My dear! Darling! Do you remember last night?" he asked fondly, as if
recalling some event of her childhood.

"Yes," she gathered her arms tightly about his neck, "why do you think I
could forget it?"

"Do you remember what I said--what I asked you to do?" he insisted
eagerly.

"Oh, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?" she moaned,
turning her head to the side and flinging an arm across her eyes.

"What is it? What's the matter? Dear!"

"Eugene--my dear, you're only a child. I'm so old--a grown woman."

"You're only twenty-one," he said. "There's only five years' difference.
That's nothing."

"Oh!" she said. "You don't know what you're saying. It's all the
difference in the world."

"When I'm twenty, you'll be twenty-five. When I'm twenty-six, you'll be
thirty-one. When I'm forty-eight, you'll be fifty-three. What's that?"
he said contemptuously. "Nothing."

"Everything," she said, "everything. If I were sixteen, and you
twenty-one, it would be nothing. But you're a boy and I'm a woman. When
you're a young man I'll be an old maid; when you grow old I shall be
dying. How do you know where you'll be, what you'll be doing five years
from now?" she continued in a moment. "You're only a boy--you've just
started college. You have no plans yet. You don't know what you're going
to do."

"Yes, I do!" he yelled furiously. "I'm going to be a lawyer. That's what
they're sending me for. I'm going to be a lawyer, and I'm going into
politics. Perhaps," he added, with gloomy pleasure, "you'll be sorry
then, after I make a name for myself." With bitter joy he foresaw his
lonely celebrity. The Governor's Mansion. Forty rooms. Alone. Alone.

"You're going to be a lawyer," said Laura, "and you're going everywhere
in the world, and I'm to wait for you, and never get married. You poor
kid!" She laughed softly. "You don't know what you're going to do."

He turned a face of misery on her; brightness dropped from the sun.

"You don't care?" he choked. "You don't care?" He bent his head to hide
his wet eyes.

"Oh, my dear," she said, "I do care. But people don't live like that.
It's like a story. Don't you know that I'm a grown woman? At my age,
dear, most girls have begun to think of getting married. What--what if I
had begun to think of it, too?"

"Married!" The word came from him in a huge gasp of horror as if she had
mentioned the abominable, proposed the unspeakable. Then, having heard
the monstrous suggestion, he immediately accepted it as a fact. He was
like that.

"So! That's it!" he said furiously. "You're going to get married, eh?
You have fellows, have you? You go out with them, do you? You've known
it all the time, and you've tried to fool me."

Nakedly, with breast bare to horror, he scourged himself, knowing in
the moment that the nightmare cruelty of life is not in the remote and
fantastic, but in the probable--the horror of love, loss, marriage, the
ninety seconds treason in the dark.

"You have fellows--you let them feel you. They feel your legs, they
play with your breasts, they----" His voice became inaudible through
strangulation.

"No. No, my dear. I haven't said so," she rose swiftly to a sitting
position, taking his hands. "But there's nothing unusual about getting
married, you know. Most people do. Oh, my dear! Don't look like that!
Nothing has happened. Nothing! Nothing!"

He seized her fiercely, unable to speak. Then he buried his face in her
neck.

"Laura! My dear! My sweet! Don't leave me alone! I've been alone! I've
always been alone!"

"It's what you want, dear. It's what you'll always want. You couldn't
stand anything else. You'd get so tired of me. You'll forget this ever
happened. You'll forget me. You'll forget--forget."

"Forget! I'll never forget! I won't live long enough."

"And I'll never love anyone else! I'll never leave you! I'll wait for
you for ever! Oh, my child, my child!"

They clung together in that bright moment of wonder, there on the magic
island, where the world was quiet, believing all they said. And who
shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic,
or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the
singing, and the gold? Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on
the rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume
of painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away. Their world was
a singing voice again: they were young and they could never die. This
would endure.

He kissed her on her splendid eyes; he grew into her young Mnad's body,
his heart numbed deliciously against the pressure of her narrow breasts.
She was as lithe and yielding to his sustaining hand as a willow
rod--she was bird-swift, more elusive in repose than the dancing
water-motes upon her face. He held her tightly lest she grow into the
tree again, or be gone amid the wood like smoke.

Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind
grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless
valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month
of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistering in your
hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is
the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh,
the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small
firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the
little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny
wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick
the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music,
will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost,
ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not
into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted
wood, where we still lie, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O
my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back
again.




XXXI


One day, when June was coming to its end, Laura James said to him:

"I shall have to go home next week." Then, seeing his stricken face, she
added, "but only for a few days--not more than a week."

"But why? The summer's only started. You will burn up down there."

"Yes. It's silly, I know. But my people expect me for the Fourth of
July. You know, we have an enormous family--hundreds of aunts, cousins,
and in-laws. We have a family re-union every year--a great barbecue and
picnic. I hate it. But they'd never forgive me if I didn't come."

Frightened, he looked at her for a moment.

"Laura! You're coming back, aren't you?" he said quietly.

"Yes, of course," she said. "Be quiet."

He was trembling violently; he was afraid to question her more closely.

"Be quiet," she whispered, "quiet!" She put her arms around him.


He went with her to the station on a hot mid-afternoon. There was a
smell of melted tar in the streets. She held his hand beside her in
the rattling trolley, squeezing his fingers to give him comfort, and
whispering from time to time:

"In a week! Only a week, dear."

"I don't see the need," he muttered. "It's over four hundred miles. Just
for a few days."

He passed the old one-legged gateman on the station platform very
easily, carrying her baggage. Then he sat beside her in the close green
heat of the pullman until the train should go. A little electric fan
droned uselessly above the aisle; a prim young lady whom he knew,
arranged herself amid the bright new leather of her bags. She returned
his greeting elegantly, with a shade of refined hauteur, then looked out
the window again, grimacing eloquently at her parents who gazed at her
raptly from the platform. Several prosperous merchants went down the
aisle in expensive tan shoes that creaked under the fan's drone.

"Not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Morris?"

"Hello, Jim. No, I'm running up to Richmond for a few days." But even
the grey weather of their lives could not deaden the excitement of that
hot chariot to the East.

"'Board!"

He got up trembling.

"In a few days, dear." She looked up, taking his hand in her small
gloved palms.

"You will write as soon as you get there? Please!"

"Yes. To-morrow--at once."

He bent down suddenly and whispered, "Laura--you will come back. You
will come back!"

She turned her face away and wept bitterly. He sat beside her once more;
she clasped him tightly as if he had been a child.

"My dear, my dear! Don't forget me ever!"

"Never. Come back. Come back."

The salt print of her kiss was on his mouth, his face, his eyes. It was,
he knew, the guttering candle-end of time. The train was in motion. He
leaped blindly up the passage with a cry in his throat.

"Come back again!"

But he knew. Her cry followed him, as if he had torn something from her
grasp.


Within three days he had his letter. On four sheets of paper, bordered
with victorious little American flags, this:


"My dear: I got home at half-past one, just too tired to move. I
couldn't sleep on the train at all last night, it seemed to get hotter
all the way down. I was so blue when I got here, I almost cried. Little
Richmond is too ghastly for words--everything burned up and every one
gone away to the mountains or the sea. How can I ever stand it even for
a week!" (Good! he thought. If the weather holds, she will come back all
the sooner.) "It would be heaven now to get one breath of mountain air.
Could you find your way back to our place in the valley again?" (Yes,
even if I were blind, he thought.) "Will you promise to look after your
hand until it gets well? I worried so after you had gone, because I
forgot to change the bandage yesterday. Daddy was glad to see me: he
said he was not going to let me go again but, don't worry, I'll have my
own way in the end. I always do. I don't know anyone at home any
more--all of the boys have enlisted or gone to work in the shipyards at
Norfolk. Most of the girls I know are getting married, or married
already. That leaves only the kids." (He winced. As old as I am, maybe
older.) "Give my love to Mrs. Barton, and tell your mother I said she
must not work so hard in that hot kitchen. And all the little
cross-marks at the bottom are for you. Try to guess what they are.
                                                            "LAURA."


He read her prosy letter with rigid face, devouring the words more
hungrily than if they had been lyrical song. She would come back! She
would come back! Soon.

There was another page. Weakened and relaxed from his excitement, he
looked at it. There he found, almost illegibly written, but at last in
her own speech, as if leaping out from the careful aimlessness of her
letter, this note:


                                                           "July 4.
"Richard came yesterday. He is twenty-five, works in Norfolk. I've
been engaged to him almost a year. We're going off quietly to Norfolk
to-morrow to get married. My dear! My dear! I couldn't tell you! I tried
to, but couldn't. I didn't want to lie. Everything else was true. I
meant all I said. If you hadn't been so young, but what's the use of
saying that? Try to forgive me, but please don't forget me. Good-bye and
God bless you. Oh, my darling, it was heaven! I shall never forget you."


When he had finished the letter, he re-read it, slowly and carefully.
Then he folded it, put it in his inner breast-pocket, and leaving
Dixieland, walked for forty minutes, until he came up in the gap over
the town again. It was sunset. The sun's vast rim, blood-red, rested
upon the western earth, in a great field of murky pollen. It sank beyond
the western ranges. The clear sweet air was washed with gold and pearl.
The vast hills melted into purple solitudes: they were like Canaan and
rich grapes. The motors of cove people toiled up around the horse-shoe
of the road. Dusk came. The bright winking lights in the town went up.
Darkness melted over the town like dew: it washed out all the day's
distress, the harsh confusions. Low wailing sounds came faintly up from
Niggertown.

And above him the proud stars flashed into heaven: there was one, so
rich and low, that he could have picked it, if he had climbed the hill
beyond the Jew's great house. One, like a lamp, hung low above the heads
of men returning home. (O Hesperus, you bring us all good things.) One
had flashed out the light that winked on him the night that Ruth lay
at the feet of Boaz; and one on Queen Isolt; and one on Corinth and on
Troy. It was night, vast brooding night, the mother of loneliness, that
washes our stains away. He was washed in the great river of night, in
the Ganges tides of redemption. His bitter wound was for the moment
healed in him: he turned his face upward to the proud and tender stars,
which made him a god and a grain of dust, the brother of eternal beauty
and the son of death--alone, alone.


"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Helen laughed huskily, prodding him in the ribs. "Your
girl went and got married, didn't she? She fooled you. You got left."

"Wh-a-a-a-t!" said Eliza banteringly, "has my boy been--as the fellow
says" (she sniggered behind her hand) "has my boy been a-courtin'?" She
puckered her lips in playful reproach.

"Oh, for God's sake," he muttered angrily. "What fellow says!"

His scowl broke into an angry grin as he caught his sister's eye. They
laughed.

"Well, 'Gene," said the girl seriously, "forget about it. You're only a
kid yet. Laura is a grown woman."

"Why, son," said Eliza with a touch of malice, "that girl was fooling
you all the time. She was just leading you on."

"Oh, stop it, please."

"Cheer up!" said Helen heartily. "Your time's coming. You'll forget her
in a week. There are plenty more, you know. This is puppy love. Show
her that you're a good sport. You ought to write her a letter of
congratulation."

"Why, yes," said Eliza, "I'd make a big joke of it all. I wouldn't let
on to her that it affected me. I'd write her just as big as you please
and laugh about the whole thing. I'd show them! That's what I'd----"

"Oh, for God's sake!" he groaned, starting up. "Leave me alone, won't
you?"

He left the house.


But he wrote the letter. And the moment after the lid of the mail-box
clanged over it, he was writhen by shame. For it was a proud and
boastful letter, salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English
verse, quotable scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety,
without accuracy, without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to
show her his weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning.
She would be sorry when she knew her loss! But, for a moment at the end,
his fiercely beating heart stormed through:

"... and I hope he's worth having you--he can't deserve you, Laura; no
one can. But if he knows what he has, that's something. How lucky he is!
You're right about me--I'm too young. I'd cut off my hand now for eight
or ten years more. God bless and keep you, my dear, dear Laura.

"Something in me wants to burst. It keeps trying to, but it won't, it
never has. Oh, God! If it only would! I shall never forget you. I'm lost
now and I'll never find the way again. In God's name write me a line
when you get this. Tell me what your name is now--you never have. Tell
me where you're going to live. Don't let me go entirely, I beg of you,
don't leave me alone."

He sent the letter to the address she had given him--to her father's
house. Week melted into week: his life mounted day by day in a terrible
tension to the delivery of the mail, morning and afternoon, fell then
into a miasmic swamp when no word came. July ended. The summer waned.
She did not write.


Upon the darkening porch, awaiting food, the boarders rocked, oh, rocked
with laughter.

The boarders said: "Eugene's lost his girl. He doesn't know what to do,
he's lost his girl."

"Well, well! Did the Old Boy lose his girl?"

The little fat girl, the daughter of one of the two fat sisters whose
husbands were hotel clerks in Charleston, skipped to and from him, in
slow May dance, with fat calves twinkling brownly above her socks.

"Lost his girl! Lost his girl! Eugene, Eugene, has lost his girl."

The fat little girl skipped back to her fat mother for approbation: they
regarded each other with complacent smiles loosely netted in their
full-meated mouths.

"Don't let them kid you, big boy. What's the matter: did someone get
your girl?" asked Mr. Hake, the flour salesman. He was a dapper young
man of twenty-six years, who smoked large cigars; he had a tapering
face, and a high domey head, bald on top, fringed sparsely with fine
blond hair. His mother, a large grass-widow near fifty, with the
powerful craggy face of an Indian, a large mass of dyed yellow hair, and
a coarse smile, full of gold and heartiness, rocked mightily, laughing
with hoarse compassion:

"Git another girl, 'Gene. Why, law! I'd not let it bother me two
minutes." He always expected her to spit, emphatically, with gusto,
after speaking.

"You should worry, boy. You should _worry_!" said Mr. Farrel, of Miami,
the dancing instructor. "Women are like street-cars: if you miss one,
there's another along in fifteen minutes. Ain't that right, lady?" he
said pertly, turning to Miss Clark, of Valdosta, Georgia, for whom it
had been uttered. She answered with a throaty confused twiddle-giggle
of laughter. "Oh, aren't men the awfullest----"

Leaning upon the porch rail in the thickening dusk, Mr. Jake Clapp, a
well-to-do widower from Old Hominy, pursued his stealthy courtship of
Miss Florry Mangle, the trained nurse. Her limp face made a white blot
in the darkness; she spoke in a tired whine:

"I thought she was too old for him when I saw her. 'Gene's only a kid.
He's taken it hard, you can tell by looking at him how miserable he is.
He's going to get sick if he keeps on at this rate. He's thin as a bone.
He hardly eats a bite. People get run down like that and catch the first
disease that comes along----"

Her melancholy whine continued as Jake's stealthy thigh fumbled against
her. She kept her arms carefully folded across her sagging breasts.

In the grey darkness, the boy turned his starved face on them. His dirty
clothes lapped round his scarecrow body: his eyes burned like a cat's in
the dark, his hair fell over his forehead in a matted net.

"He'll git over it," said Jake Clapp, in a precise country drawl,
streaked with a note of bawdry. "Every boy has got to go through the
Calf-Love stage. When I was about 'Gene's age----" He pressed his hard
thigh gently against Florry, grinning widely and thinly with a few
gold teeth. He was a tall solid man, with a hard precise face, lewdly
decorous, and slanting Mongol eyes. His head was bald and knobby.

"He'd better watch out," whined Florry sadly. "I know what I'm talking
about. That boy's not strong--he has no business to go prowling around
to all hours the way he does. He's on the verge of----"

Eugene rocked gently on his feet, staring at the boarders with a steady
hate. Suddenly he snarled like a wild beast, and started down the porch,
unable to speak, reeling, but snarling again and again his choking and
insane fury.

"Miss Brown" meanwhile sat primly at the end of the porch, a little
apart from the others. From the dark sun-parlour at the side came
swiftly the tall elegant figure of Miss Irene Mallard, twenty-eight, of
Tampa, Florida. She caught him at the step edge, and pulled him round
sharply, gripping his arms lightly with her cool long fingers.

"Where are you going, 'Gene?" she said quietly. Her eyes of light violet
were a little tired. There was a faint exquisite perfume of rosewater.

"Leave me alone!" he muttered.

"You can't go on like this," she said in a low tone. "She's not worth
it--none of them are. Pull yourself together."

"Leave me alone!" he said furiously. "I know what I'm doing!" He
wrenched away violently, and leaped down into the yard, plunging around
the house in a staggering run.

"Ben!" said Irene Mallard sharply.

Ben rose from the dark porch-swing where he had been sitting with Mrs.
Pert.

"See if you can't do something to stop him," said Irene Mallard.

"He's crazy," Ben muttered. "Which way did he go?"

"By there--around the house. Go quick!"

Ben went swiftly down the shallow steps and loped back over the lawn.
The yard sloped sharply down: the gaunt back of Dixieland was propped
upon a dozen rotting columns of whitewashed brick, fourteen feet high.
In the dim light, by one of these slender piers, already mined with
crumbling ruins of wet brick, the scarecrow crouched, toiling with the
thin grape-vine of his arms against the temple.

"I will kill you, House," he gasped. "Vile and accursed House, I will
tear you down. I will bring you down upon the whores and boarders. I
will wreck you, House."

Another convulsion of his shoulders brought down a sprinkling rain of
dust and rubble.

"I will make you fall down on all the people in you, House," he said.

"Fool!" cried Ben, leaping upon him, "what are you trying to do?" He
caught the boy's arms from behind and dragged him back. "Do you think
you can bring her back to you by wrecking the house? Are there no other
women in the world, that you should let one get the best of you like
this?"

"Let me go! Let me go!" said Eugene. "What does it matter to you?"

"Don't think, fool, that I care," said Ben fiercely. "You're hurting no
one but yourself. Do you think you'll hurt the boarders by pulling the
house down on your own head? Do you think, idiot, that anyone cares if
you kill yourself?" He shook the boy. "No. No. I don't care what you do,
you know. I simply want to save the family the trouble and expense of
burying you."

With a great cry of rage and bafflement Eugene tried to free himself.
But the older brother held on as desperately as the Old Man of the Sea.
Then, with a great effort of his hands and shoulders, the boy lifted his
captor off the ground, and dashed him back against the white brick wall
of the cellar. Ben collapsed, releasing him, with a fit of dry coughing,
holding his hand against his thin breast.

"Don't be a fool!" he gasped.

"Did I hurt you?" said Eugene dully.

"No. Go into the house and wash yourself. You ought to comb your hair
once or twice a week, you know. You can't go around like a wild man.
Get something to eat. Have you any money?"

"Yes--I have enough."

"Are you all right now?"

"Yes--don't talk about it, please."

"I don't want to talk about it, fool. I want you to learn a little
sense," said Ben. He straightened, brushing his whitened coat. In a
moment, he went on quietly: "To hell with them, 'Gene. To hell with them
all. Don't let them worry you. Get all that you can. Don't give a damn
for anything. Nothing gives a damn for you. To hell with it all! To
hell with it! There are a lot of bad days. There are a lot of good ones.
You'll forget. There are a lot of days. Let it go."

"Yes," said Eugene wearily, "let it go. It's all right now. I'm too
tired. When you get tired you don't care, do you? I'm too tired to care.
I'll never care any more. I'm too tired. The men in France get tired and
don't care. If a man came and pointed a gun at me now, I wouldn't be
scared. I'm too tired." He began to laugh, loosely, with a sense of
delicious relief. "I don't care for any one or anything. I've always
been afraid of everything, but when I got tired I didn't care. That's
how I shall get over everything. I shall get tired."

Ben lighted a cigarette.

"That's better," he said. "Let's get something to eat." He smiled
thinly. "Come along, Samson."

They walked out slowly around the house.


He washed himself, and ate a hearty meal. The boarders finished, and
wandered off into the darkness variously--some to the band-concert on
the Square, some to the moving-pictures, some for walks through the
town. When he had fed he went out on the porch. It was dark and almost
empty save where, at the side, Mrs. Selborne sat in the swing with a
wealthy lumber man from Tennessee. Her low rich laughter bubbled up
softly from the vat of the dark. "Miss Brown" rocked quietly and
decorously by herself. She was a heavily built and quietly dressed woman
of thirty-nine years, touched with that slightly comic primness--that
careful gentility--that marks the conduct of the prostitute incognito.
She was being very refined. She was a perfect lady and would, if
aroused, assert the fact.

"Miss Brown" lived, she said, in Indianapolis. She was not ugly:
her face was simply permeated with the implacable dullness of the
Mid-Westerner. In spite of the lewdness of her wide thin mouth, her look
was smug. She had a fair mass of indifferent brown hair, rather small
brown eyes, and a smooth russet skin.

"Pshaw!" said Eliza. "I don't believe her name's 'Miss Brown' any more
than mine is."


There had been rain. The night was cool and black; the flower-bed before
the house was wet, with a smell of geraniums and drenched pansies. He
lighted a cigarette, sitting upon the rail. "Miss Brown" rocked.

"It's turned off cool," she said. "That little bit of rain has done a
lot of good, hasn't it?"

"Yes, it was hot," he said. "I hate hot weather."

"I can't stand it either," she said. "That's why I go away every summer.
Out my way we catch it. You folks here don't know what hot weather is."

"You're from Milwaukee, aren't you?"

"Indianapolis."

"I knew it was somewhere out there. Is it a big place?" he asked
curiously.

"Yes. You could put Altamont in one corner of it and never miss it."

"How big is it?" he said eagerly. "How many people have you there?"

"I don't know exactly--over three hundred thousand with the suburbs."

He reflected with greedy satisfaction.

"Is it pretty? Are there a lot of pretty houses and fine buildings?"

"Yes--I think so," she said reflectively. "It's a nice home-like place."

"What are the people like? What do they do? Are they rich?"

"Why--yes. It's a business and manufacturing place. There are a lot of
rich people."

"I suppose they live in big houses and ride around in big cars, eh?" he
demanded. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went on: "Do they have
good things to eat? What?"

She laughed awkwardly, puzzled and confused.

"Why, yes. There's a great deal of German cooking. Do you like German
cooking?"

"Beer!" he muttered lusciously. "Beer--eh? You make it out there?"

"Yes." She laughed, with a voluptuous note in her voice. "I believe
you're a bad boy, Eugene."

"And what about the theatres and libraries? You have lots of shows,
don't you?"

"Yes. A lot of good shows come to Indianapolis. All the big hits in New
York and Chicago."

"And a library--you have a big one, eh?"

"Yes. We have a nice library."

"How many books has it?"

"Oh, I can't say as to that. But it's a good big library."

"Over 100,000 books, do you suppose? They wouldn't have half a million,
would they?" He did not wait for an answer, he was talking to himself.
"No, of course not. How many books can you take out at a time? What?"

The great shadow of his hunger bent over her; he rushed out of himself,
devouring her with his questions.

"What are the girls like? Are they blonde or brunette? What?"

"Why, we have both kinds--more dark than fair, I should say." She looked
through the darkness at him, grinning.

"Are they pretty?"

"Well! I can't say. You'll have to draw your own conclusions, Eugene.
I'm one of them, you know." She looked at him with demure lewdness,
offering herself for inspection. Then, with a laugh of teasing reproof,
she said: "I believe you're a bad boy, Eugene. I believe you're a bad
boy."

He lighted another cigarette feverishly.

"I'd give anything for a smoke," muttered "Miss Brown". "I don't suppose
I could here?" She looked round her.

"Why not?" he said impatiently. "There's no one to see you. It's dark.
What does it matter anyway?"

Little electric currents of excitement played up his spine.

"I believe I will," she whispered. "Have you got a cigarette?"

He gave her his package; she stood up to receive the flame he nursed
in his cupped hands. She leaned her heavy body against him as, with
puckered face and closed eyes, she held her cigarette to the fire. She
grasped his shaking hands to steady the light, holding them for a moment
after.

"What," said "Miss Brown," with a cunning smile, "what if your mother
should see us? You'd catch it!"

"She'll not see us," he said. "Besides," he added generously, "why
shouldn't women smoke the same as men? There's no harm in it."

"Yes," said "Miss Brown", "I believe in being broad-minded about these
things, too."

But he grinned in the dark, because the woman had revealed herself
with a cigarette. It was a sign--the sign of the province, the sign
unmistakable of debauchery.

Then, when he laid his hands upon her, she came very passively into his
embrace as he sat before her on the rail.

"Eugene! Eugene!" she said in mocking reproof.

"Where is your room?" he said.

She told him.

Later, Eliza came suddenly and silently out upon them, on one of her
swift raids from the kitchen.

"Who's there? Who's there?" she said, peering into the gloom suspiciously.
"Huh? Hah? Where's Eugene? Has any one seen Eugene?" She knew very well
he was there.

"Yes, here I am," he said. "What do you want?"

"Oh! Who's that with you? Hah?"

"'Miss Brown' is with me."

"Won't you come out and sit down, Mrs. Gant?" said "Miss Brown". "You
must be tired and hot."

"Oh!" said Eliza awkwardly, "is that you, 'Miss Brown'? I couldn't see
who it was." She switched on the dim porch light. "It's mighty dark out
here. Some one coming up those steps might fall and break a leg. I tell
you what," she continued conversationally, "this air feels good. I wish
I could let everything go and just enjoy myself."

She continued in amiable monologue for another half hour, her eyes
probing about swiftly all the time at the two dark figures before her.
Then hesitantly, by awkward talkative stages, she went into the house
again.

"Son," she said before she went, troubled, "it's getting late. You'd
better go to bed. That's where we all ought to be."

"Miss Brown" assented gracefully and moved toward the door.

"I'm going now. I feel tired. Good-night, all."

He sat quietly on the rail, smoking, listening to the noises in the
house. It went to sleep. He went back and found Eliza preparing to
retire to her little cell.

"Son!" she said, in a low voice, after shaking her puckered face
reproachfully for a moment, "I tell you what--I don't like it. It
doesn't look right--your sitting out alone with that woman. She's old
enough to be your mother."

"She's _your_ boarder, isn't she?" he said roughly, "not mine. I didn't
bring her here."

"There's one thing sure," said Eliza, wounded. "You don't catch me
associating with them. I hold up my head as high as any one." She smiled
at him bitterly.

"Well, good-night, mamma," he said, ashamed and hurt. "Let's forget
about them for a while. What does it matter?"

"Be a good boy," said Eliza timidly. "I want you to be a good boy, son."

There was a sense of guilt in her manner, a note of regret and
contrition.

"Don't worry!" he said, turning away suddenly, wrenched bitterly, as he
always was, by a sense of the child-like innocence and steadfastness
that lay at the bottom of her life. "It's not your fault if I'm not. I
shan't blame you. Good-night."

The kitchen-light went out; he heard his mother's door click gently.
Through the dark house a shaft of air blew coolly. Slowly, with thudding
heart, he began to mount the stairs.


But on that dark stair, his foot-falls numbed in the heavy carpet, he
came squarely upon a woman's body that, by its fragrance, like magnolia,
he knew was that of Mrs. Selborne. They held each other sharply by the
arms, discovered, with caught breath. She bent toward him: a few strands
of her blonde hair brushed his face, leaving it aflame.

"Hush-h!" she whispered.

So they paused there, holding each other, breast to breast, the only
time that they had ever touched. Then, with their dark wisdom of each
other confirmed, they parted, each a sharer in the other's life, to meet
thereafter before the world with calm untelling eyes.

He groped softly back along the dark corridor until he came to the door
of "Miss Brown's" room. It was slightly ajar. He went in.


She took all his medals, all that he had won at Leonard's school--the
one for debating, the one for declaiming, the one in bronze for William
Shakespeare. W. S. 1616-1916--Done for a Ducat!

He had no money to give her: she did not want much--a coin or two at a
time. It was, she said, not the money: it was the principle of the
thing. He saw the justice of her argument.

"For," said she, "if I wanted money, I wouldn't fool with you. Somebody
tries to get me to go out every day. One of the richest men in this town
(old man Tyson) has been after me ever since I came. He's offered me ten
dollars if I'll go out in his car with him. I don't need your money.
But you've got to give me something. I don't care how little it is. I
wouldn't feel decent unless you did. I'm not one of your little Society
Chippies that you see every day uptown. I've too much self-respect for
that."

So, in lieu of money, he gave her his medals as pledges.

"If you don't redeem them," said "Miss Brown", "I'll give them to my own
son when I go home."

"Have you a son?"

"Yes. He's eighteen years old. He's almost as tall as you are and twice
as broad. All the girls are mad about him."

He turned his head away sharply, whitening with a sense of nausea and
horror, feeling in him an incestuous pollution.

"That's enough, now," said "Miss Brown" with authority. "Go to your room
and get some sleep."

But, unlike the first one in the tobacco town, she never called him
"son."

  "Poor Butterfly, for her heart was break-king,
   Poor Butterfly, for she loved him so-o----"

Miss Irene Mallard changed the needle of the little phonograph in the
sun-parlour, and reversed the well-worn record. Then as with stately
emphasis, the opening measure of "Katinka" paced out, she waited for
him, erect, smiling, slender, beautiful, with long lovely hands held up
like wings to his embrace. She was teaching him to dance. Laura James
had danced beautifully: it had maddened him to see her poised in
the arms of a young man dancing. Now, clumsily, he moved off on a
conscientious left foot, counting to himself. One, two, three, four!
Irene Mallard slipped and veered to his awkward pressure, as bodiless as
a fume of smoke. Her left hand rested on his bony shoulder lightly as a
bird: her cool fingers were threaded into his hot sawing palm.

She had thick hair of an oaken colour, evenly parted in the middle; her
skin was pearl-pale, and transparently delicate; her jaw was long, full,
and sensuous--her face was like that of one of the pre-Raphaelite women.
She carried her tall graceful body with beautiful erectness, but with
the slightly worn sensuousness of fragility and weariness: her lovely
eyes were violet, always a little tired, but full of slow surprise
and tenderness. She was like a Luini madonna, mixed of holiness and
seduction, the world and heaven. He held her with reverent care, as one
who would not come too near, who would not break a sacred image. Her
exquisite and subtle perfume stole through him like a strange whisper,
pagan and divine. He was afraid to touch her--and his hot palm sweated
to her fingers.

Sometimes she coughed gently, smiling, holding a small crumpled
handkerchief, edged with blue, before her mouth.

She had come to the hills not because of her own health, but because of
her mother's, a woman of sixty-five, rustily dressed, with the petulant
hang-dog face of age and sickness. The old woman suffered from asthma
and heart-disease. They had come from Florida. Irene Mallard was a very
capable business woman; she was the chief book-keeper of one of the
Altamont banks. Every evening Randolph Gudger, the bank president,
telephoned her.

Irene Mallard pressed her palm across the mouthpiece of the telephone,
smiling at Eugene ironically, and rolling her eyes entreatingly aloft.

Sometimes Randolph Gudger drove by and asked her to go with him. The boy
went sulkily away until the rich man should leave: the banker looked
bitterly after him.

"He wants me to marry him, 'Gene," said Irene Mallard. "What am I going
to do?"

"He's old enough to be your grandfather," said Eugene. "He has no hair
on the top of his head; his teeth are false, and I don't know what-all!"
he said resentfully.

"He's a rich man, 'Gene," said Irene, smiling. "Don't forget that."

"Go on, then! Go on!" he cried furiously. "Yes--go ahead. Marry him.
It's the right thing for you. Sell yourself. He's an old man!" he said
melodramatically. Randolph Gudger was almost forty-five.


But they danced there slowly in a grey light of dusk that was like pain
and beauty; like the lost light undersea, in which his life, a lost
merman, swam, remembering exile. And as they danced, she, whom he dared
not touch, yielded her body unto him, whispering softly to his ear,
pressing with slender fingers his hot hand. And she, whom he would not
touch, lay there, like a sheaf of grain, in the crook of his arm, token
of the world's remedy--the refuge from the one lost face out of all the
faces, the anodyne against the wound named Laura--a thousand flitting
shapes of beauty to bring him comfort and delight. The great pageantry
of pain and pride and death hung through the dusk its awful vision,
touching his sorrow with a lonely joy. He had lost; but all pilgrimage
across the world was loss: a moment of cleaving, a moment of taking
away, the thousand phantom shapes that beaconed, and the high
impassionate grief of stars.


It was dark. Irene Mallard took him by the hand and led him out on the
porch.

"Sit down here a moment, 'Gene. I want to talk to you." Her voice was
serious, low-pitched. He sat beside her in the swing, obediently, with
the sense of an impending lecture.

"I've been watching you these last few days," said Irene Mallard. "I
know what's been going on."

"What do you mean?" he said thickly, with thudding pulses.

"You know what I mean," said Irene Mallard sternly. "Now you're too fine
a boy, 'Gene, to waste yourself on that woman. Any one can see what she
is. Mother and I have both talked about it. A woman like that can ruin a
young boy like you. You've got to stop it."

"How did you know about it?" he muttered. He was frightened and ashamed.
She took his trembling hand and held it between her cool palms until he
grew quieter. But he drew no closer to her: he halted, afraid, before
her loveliness. As with Laura James, she seemed too high for his passion.
He was afraid of her flesh; he was not afraid of "Miss Brown's." But
now he was tired of the woman and didn't know how he could pay her. She
had all his medals.


All through the waning summer he walked with Irene Mallard. They walked
at night through the cool streets filled with the rustle of tired
leaves. They went together to the hotel roof and danced; later "Pap"
Rheinhart, kind and awkward and shy, and smelling of his horse, came to
their little table, sitting and drinking with them. He had spent the
years since Leonard's at a military school, trying to straighten the wry
twist of his neck. But he remained the same as ever--quizzical, dry, and
humorous. Eugene looked at that good shy face, remembering the lost
years, the lost faces. And there was sorrow in his heart for what would
come no more. August ended.


September came, full of departing wings. The world was full of
departures. It had heard the drums. The young men were going to the
war. Ben had been rejected again in the draft. Now he was preparing to
drift off in search of employment in other towns. Luke had given up his
employment in a war-munitions factory at Dayton, Ohio, and had enlisted
in the Navy. He had come home on a short leave before his departure for
the training-school at Newport, Rhode Island. The street roared as he
came down at his vulgar wide-legged stride, in flapping blues, his face
all on the grin, thick curls of his unruly hair coiling below the band
of his hat. He was the cartoon of a gob.

"Luke!" shouted Mr. Fawcett, the land-auctioneer, pulling him in from
the street to Wood's pharmacy, "by God, son, you've done your bit. I'm
going to set you up. What are you going to have?"

"Make it a dope," said Luke. "Colonel, yours truly!" He lifted the
frosty glass in a violently palsied hand, and stood posed before the
grinning counter. "F-f-f-Forty years ago," he began, in a hoarse
voice, "I might have refused, but now I can't, G-G-G-God help me! I
c-c-c-c-can't!"


Gant's sickness had returned on him with increased virulence. His face
was haggard and yellow: a tottering weakness crept into his limbs. It
was decided that he must go again to Baltimore. Helen would go with him.


"Mr. Gant," said Eliza persuasively, "why don't you just give up
everything and settle down to take things easy the rest of your days?
You don't feel good enough to tend to business any more; if I were you,
I'd retire. We could get $20,000 for your shop without any trouble--If
I had that much money to work with, I'd show them a thing or two." She
nodded pertly with a smart wink. "I could turn it over two or three
times within two years' time. You've got to trade quick to keep the ball
a-rolling. That's the way it's done."

"Merciful God!" he groaned. "That's my last refuge on earth. Woman, have
you no mercy? I beg of you, leave me to die in peace: it won't be long
now. You can do what you please with it after I'm gone, but give me a
little peace now. In the name of Jesus, I ask it!" He sniffled
affectedly.

"Pshaw!" said Eliza, thinking no doubt to encourage him. "There's
nothing wrong with you. Half of it's only imagination."

He groaned, turning his head away.


Summer died upon the hills. There was a hue, barely guessed, upon
the foliage, of red rust. The streets at night were filled with sad
lispings: all through the night, upon his porch, as in a coma, he heard
the strange noise of autumn. And all the people who had given the town
its light thronging gaiety were vanished strangely overnight. They had
gone back into the vast South again. The solemn tension of the war
gathered about the nation. A twilight of grim effort hovered around
him, above him. He felt the death of joy; but the groping within him of
wonder, of glory. Out of the huge sprawl of its first delirium, the
nation was beginning to articulate the engines of war--engines to mill
and print out hatred and falsehood, engines to pump up glory, engines to
manacle and crush opposition, engines to drill and regiment men.

But something of true wonder had come upon the land--the flares and
rockets of the battle-fields cast their light across the plains as well.
Young men from Kansas were going to die in Picardy. In some foreign
earth lay the iron, as yet unmoulded, that was to slay them. The
strangeness of death and destiny was legible upon lives and faces which
held no strangeness of their own. For, it is the union of the ordinary
and the miraculous that makes wonder.

Luke had gone away to the training-school at Newport. Ben went to
Baltimore with Helen and Gant, who, before entering the hospital again
for radium treatment, had gone on a violent and unruly spree which had
compelled their rapid transference from one hotel to another and had
finally brought Gant moaning to his bed, hurling against God the
anathemas that should have been saved for huge riotings in raw oysters
washed down chaotically with beer and whisky. They all drank a great
deal: Gant's excesses, however, reduced the girl to a state of angry
frenzy, and Ben to one of scowling and cursing disgust.

"You damned old man!" cried Helen, seizing and shaking his passive
shoulders as he lay reeking and sodden on an untidy bed. "I could wear
you out! You're not sick; I've wasted my life nursing you, and you're
not as sick as I am! You'll be here long after I'm gone, you selfish old
man! It makes me furious!"

"Why, baby!" he roared, with a vast gesture of his arms, "God bless you,
I couldn't do without you."

"Don't 'baby' me!" she cried.

But she held his hand next day as they rode out to the hospital, held it
as, quaking, he turned for an instant and looked sadly at the city
stretched behind and below him.

"I was a boy here," he muttered.

"Don't worry," she said, "we're going to make you well again. Why!
You'll be a boy again!"

Hand in hand they entered the lobby where, flanked with death and terror
and the busy matter-of-factness of the nurses and the hundred flitting
shapes of the quiet men with the grey faces and gimlet eyes who walk so
surely in among the broken lives--with arms proposed in an attitude of
enormous mercy--many times bigger than Gant's largest angel--is an image
of gentle Jesus.


Eugene went to see the Leonards several times. Margaret looked thin and
ill, but the great light in her seemed on this account to burn more
brightly. Never before had he been so aware of her enormous tranquil
patience, the great health of her spirit. All of his sin, all of his
pain, all the vexed weariness of his soul were washed away in that deep
radiance: the tumult and evil of life dropped from him its foul and
ragged cloak. He seemed to be clothed anew in garments of seamless
light.

But he could confess little that lay on his heart: he talked freely of
his work at the university, he talked of little else. His heart was
packed with its burden for confessional, but he knew he could not speak,
that she would not understand. She was too wise for anything but faith.
Once, desperately, he tried to tell her of Laura: he blurted out a
confession awkwardly in a few words. Before he had finished she began to
laugh.

"Mr. Leonard!" she called. "Imagine this rascal with a girl! Pshaw, boy!
You don't know what love is. Get along with you. There'll be time enough
to think of that ten years from now." She laughed tenderly to herself,
with absent misty gaze.

"Old 'Gene with a girl! Pity the poor girl! Ah, Lord, boy! That's a long
way off for you. Thank your stars!"

He bent his head sharply, and closed his eyes. O! My lovely Saint! he
thought. How close you have been to me, if any one. How I have cut my
brain open for you to see, and would my heart, if I had dared, and how
alone I am, and always have been.


He walked through the streets at night with Irene Mallard; the town was
thinned and saddened by departures. A few people hurried past, as if
driven along by the brief pouncing gusts of wind. He was held in the
lure of her subtle weariness: she gave him comfort and he never touched
her. But he unpacked the burden of his heart, trembling and passionate.
She sat beside him and stroked his hand. It seemed to him that he never
knew her until he remembered her years later.


The house was almost empty. At night Eliza packed his trunk carefully,
counting the ironed shirts and mended socks with satisfaction.

"Now, you have plenty of good warm clothes, son. Try to take care of
them." She put Gant's cheque in his inner pocket and fastened it with a
safety-pin.

"Keep a sharp eye on your money, boy. You never know who you'll run up
with on a train."

He dawdled nervously toward the door, wishing to melt away, not end in
leave-taking.

"It does seem you might spend one night at home with your mother," she
said querulously. Her eyes grew misty at once, her lips began to work
tremulously in a bitter self-pitying smile. "I tell you what! It looks
mighty funny, doesn't it? You can't stay with me five minutes any more
without wanting to be up and off with the first woman that comes along.
It's all right! It's all right. I'm not complaining. It seems as if all
I was fit for is to cook and sew and get you ready to go off." She burst
volubly into tears. "It seems that that's the only use you have for me.
I've hardly laid eyes on you all summer."

"No," he said bitterly, "you've been too busy looking after the
boarders. Don't think, mamma, that you can work on my feelings here at
the last minute," he cried, already deeply worked-on. "It's easy to cry.
But I was here all the time if you had had time for me. Oh, for God's
sake! Let's make an end to this! Aren't things bad enough without it?
Why must you act this way whenever I go off? Do you want to make me as
miserable as you can?"

"Well, I tell you," said Eliza hopefully, becoming dry-eyed at once,
"if I make a couple of deals and everything goes well, you may find me
waiting for you in a big fine house when you come back next Spring. I've
got the lot picked out. I was thinking about it the other day," she went
on, giving him a bright and knowing nod.

"Ah-h!" he made a strangling noise in his throat and tore at his collar.
"In God's name! Please!" There was a silence.

"Well," said Eliza gravely, plucking at her chin, "I want you to be
a good boy and study hard, son. Take care of your money--I want you
to have plenty of good food and warm clothes--but you mustn't be
extravagant, boy. This sickness of your papa's has cost a lot of money.
Everything is going out and nothing's coming in. Nobody knows where the
next dollar's coming from. So you've got to watch out."

Again silence fell. She had said her say; she had come as close as she
could, but suddenly she felt speechless, shut out, barred from the
bitter and lonely secrecy of his life.

"I hate to see you go, son," she said quietly, with a deep and
indefinable sadness.

He cast his arms up suddenly in a tortured incomplete gesture.

"What does it matter! Oh, God, what does it matter!"

Eliza's eyes filled with tears of real pain. She grasped his hand and
held it.

"Try to be happy, son," she wept, "try to be a little more happy. Poor
child! Poor child! Nobody's ever known you. Before you were born," she
shook her head slowly, speaking in a voice that was drowned and husky
with her tears. Then, huskily, clearing her throat, she repeated,
"Before you were born----"




XXXII


When he returned to the university for his second year, he found the
place adjusted soberly to war. It seemed quieter, sadder--the number of
students was smaller and they were younger. The older ones had gone to
war. The others were in a state of wild, but subdued, restlessness. They
were careless of colleges, careers, successes--the war had thrilled them
with its triumphing Now. Of what use To-morrow! Of what use all labour
for To-morrow! The big guns had blown all spun schemes to fragments:
they hailed the end of all planned work with a fierce, a secret joy. The
business of education went on half-heartedly, with an abstracted look:
in the classroom, their eyes were vague upon the book, but their ears
cocked attentively for alarums and excursions without.


Eugene began the year earnestly as room-mate of a young man who had been
the best student in the Altamont High School. His name was Bob Sterling.
Bob Sterling was nineteen years old, the son of a widow. He was of
middling height, always very neatly and soberly dressed; there was
nothing conspicuous about him. For this reason, he could laugh
good-naturedly, a little smugly, at whatever was conspicuous. He had
a good mind--bright, attentive, studious, unmarked by originality or
inventiveness. He had a time for everything: he apportioned a certain
time for the preparation of each lesson, and went over it three times,
mumbling rapidly to himself. He sent his laundry out every Monday. When
in merry company he laughed heartily and enjoyed himself, but he always
kept track of the time. Presently, he would look at his watch, saying:
"Well, this is all very nice, but it's getting no work done," and he
would go.

Every one said he had a bright future. He remonstrated with Eugene, with
good-natured seriousness, about his habits. He ought not to throw his
clothes around. He ought not to let his shirts and drawers accumulate in
a dirty pile. He ought to have a regular time for doing each lesson; he
ought to live by regular hours.

They lived in a private dwelling on the edge of the campus, in a large
bright room decorated with a great number of college pennants, all of
which belonged to Bob Sterling.

Bob Sterling had heart-disease. He stood on the landing, gasping,
when he had climbed the stairs. Eugene opened the door for him. Bob
Sterling's pleasant face was dead white, spotted by pale freckles. His
lips chattered and turned blue.

"What is it, Bob? How do you feel?" said Eugene.

"Come here," said Bob Sterling with a grin. "Put your head down here."
He took Eugene's head and placed it against his heart. The great pump
beat slowly and irregularly, with a hissing respiration.

"Good God!" cried Eugene.

"Do you hear it?" said Bob Sterling, beginning to laugh. Then he went
into the room, chaffing his dry hands briskly.

But he fell sick and could not attend classes. He was taken to the
College Infirmary, where he lay for several weeks, apparently not very
ill, but with lips constantly blue, a slow pulse, and a subnormal
temperature. Nothing could be done about it.

His mother came and took him home. Eugene wrote him regularly twice a
week, getting in return short but cheerful messages. Then one day he
died.

Two weeks later the widow returned to gather together the boy's
belongings. Silently she collected the clothing that no one would ever
wear. She was a stout woman in her forties. Eugene took all the pennants
from the wall and folded them. She packed them in a valise and turned to
go.

"Here's another," said Eugene.

She burst suddenly into tears and seized his hand.

"He was so brave," she said, "so brave. Those last days--I had not meant
to--Your letters made him so happy."

She's alone now, Eugene thought.


I cannot stay here, he thought, where he has been. We were here together.
Always I should see him on the landing, with the hissing valve and the
blue lips, or hear him mumbling his lessons. Then, at night, the other
cot would be empty. I think I shall room alone hereafter.


But he roomed the remainder of the term in one of the dormitories. He
had two room-mates--one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name
of L. K. Duncan (the "L" stood for Lawrence, but every one called him
"Elk") and the other, the son of an Episcopal minister, Harold Gay. Both
were several years older than Eugene: Elk Duncan was twenty-four, and
Harold Gay, twenty-two. But it is doubtful whether a more precious
congress of freaks had ever before gathered in two small rooms, one of
which they used as a "study."

Elk Duncan was the son of an Altamont attorney, a small Democratic
politician, mighty in county affairs. Elk Duncan was tall--an inch or
two over six feet--and incredibly thin, or rather narrow. He was already
a little bald, he had a high prominent forehead, and large pale bulging
eyes: from that point his long pale face sloped backward to his chin.
His shoulders were a trifle bowed and very narrow; the rest of his body
had the symmetry of a lead pencil. He always dressed very foppishly,
in tight suits of blue flannel, with high stiff collars, fat silken
cravats, and coloured silk handkerchiefs. He was a student in the Law
School, but he spent a large part of his time, industriously, in
avoiding study.

The younger students--particularly the Freshmen--gathered around him
after meals with mouths slightly ajar, feeding upon his words like
manna, and hungrily demanding more, the wilder his fable became. His
posture toward life was very much that of the barker of a carnival
side-show: loquacious, patronising, and cynical.

The other room-mate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child.
He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull greyness of
his face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been
puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence
that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them. Instead, he
concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that echoed
at all the wrong places, and a silly grin full of an absurd and devilish
knowingness. His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits
of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy,
he smoked cigarettes with a debauched leer, and cursed loudly and
uneasily with the accent of a depraved clergyman.

"Harold! Harold!" said Elk Duncan reprovingly. "Damn, son! You're
getting hard! If you go on like this, you'll begin to chew gum, and
fritter away your Sunday-school money at the movies. Think of the rest
of us, please. 'Gene here's only a young boy, as pure as a barnyard
privy, and, as for me, I've always moved in the best circles, and
associated with only the highest class of bartenders and ladylike
streetwalkers. What would your father say if he could hear you? Don't
you know he'd be shocked? He'd cut off your cigarette money, son."

"I don't give a damn what he'd do, Elk, nor you either!" said Harold
toughly, grinning. "So, what the hell!" he roared as loudly as he
could. There was an answering howl from the windows of the whole
dormitory--cries of "Go to hell!" "Cut it out!" and ironical cheers,
at which he was pleased.


The scattered family drew together again at Christmas. A sense of
impending dissolution, of loss and death, brought them back. The surgeon
at Baltimore had given no hope. He had, rather, confirmed Gant's
death-warrant.

"Then how long can he live?" asked Helen.

He shrugged his shoulders. "My dear girl!" he said. "I have no idea. The
man's a miracle. Do you know that he's Exhibit A here? Every surgeon in
the place has had a look. How long can he last? I'll swear to nothing--I
no longer have any idea. When your father left here, the first time,
after his operation, I never expected to see him again. I doubted if he
would last the winter through. But he's back again. He may be back many
times."

"Can you help him at all? Do you think the radium does any good?"

"I can give him relief for a time. I can even check the growth of the
disease for a time. Beyond that, I can do nothing. But his vitality is
enormous. He is a creaking gate which hangs by one hinge--but which
hangs, nevertheless."


Thus, she had brought him home, the shadow of his death suspended over
them like a Damoclean sword. Fear prowled softly through their brains on
leopard feet. The girl lived in a condition of repressed hysteria: it
had its outburst daily at Eliza's or in her own home. Hugh Barton had
purchased a house to which he had taken her.

"You'll get no peace," he said, "as long as you're near them. That's
what's wrong with you now."

She had frequent periods of sickness. She went constantly to the doctors
for treatment and advice. Sometimes she went to the hospital for several
days. Her illness manifested itself in various ways--sometimes in a
terrible mastoid pain, sometimes in nervous exhaustion, sometimes in an
hysterical collapse in which she laughed and wept by turns, and which
was governed partly by Gant's illness and a morbid despair over her
failure to bear a child. She drank stealthily at times--she drank in
nibbling draughts for stimulus, never enough for drunkenness. She drank
vile liquids--seeking only the effect of alcohol and getting at it
in strange ways through a dozen abominations called "tonics" and
"extracts." Almost deliberately she ruined her taste for the better
sort of potable liquors, concealing from herself, under the convenient
labellings of physic, the ugly crawling hunger in her blood. This
self-deception was characteristic of her. Her life expressed itself
through a series of deceptions--of symbols: her dislikes, affections,
grievances, brandishing every cause but the real one.

But, unless actually bedridden, she was never absent from her father for
many hours. The shadow of his death lay over their lives. They shuddered
below its horror; its protracted menace, its unsearchable enigma,
deprived them of dignity and courage. They were dominated by the weary
and degrading egotism of life, which is blandly philosophical over the
death of the alien, but sees in its own the corruption of natural law.
It was as hard for them to think of Gant's death as of God's death: it
was a great deal harder, because he was more real to them than God, he
was more immortal than God, he was God.

This hideous twilight into which their lives had passed froze Eugene
with its terror, and choked him with fury. He would grow enraged after
reading a letter from home and pound the grained plaster of the
dormitory wall until his knuckles were bloody. They have taken his
courage away! he thought. They have made a whining coward out of him!
No, and if I die, no damned family about! Blowing their messy breaths in
your face! Snuffling down their messy noses at you! Gathering around you
till you can't breathe. Telling you how well you're looking with hearty
smiles, and boo-hooing behind your back. O messy, messy, messy death!
Shall we never be alone? Shall we never live alone, think alone, live in
a house by ourselves alone? Ah! but I shall! I shall! Alone, alone and
far away, with falling rain. Then, bursting suddenly into the study, he
found Elk Duncan, with unaccustomed eye bent dully upon a page of Torts,
a bright bird held by the stare of that hypnotic snake, the law.

"Are we to die like rats?" he said. "Are we to smother in a hole?"

"Damn!" said Elk Duncan, folding the big calfskin and cowering
defensively behind it.

"Yes, that's right, that's right! Calm yourself. You are Napoleon
Bonaparte and I'm your old friend, Oliver Cromwell. Harold!" he called.
"Help! He killed the keeper and got out."

"'Gene!" yelled Harold Gay, hurling a thick volume from him under the
spell of Elk's great names. "What do you know about history? Who signed
Magna Charta, eh?"

"It wasn't signed," said Eugene. "The King didn't know how to write, so
they mimeographed it."

"Correct!" roared Harold Gay. "Who was thelred the Unready?"

"He was the son of Cynewulf the Silly and Undine the Unwashed," said
Eugene.

"On his Uncle Jasper's side," said Elk Duncan, "he was related to Paul
the Poxy and Genevieve the Ungenerous."

"He was excommunicated by the Pope in a Bull of the year 903, but he
refused to be cowed," said Eugene.

"Instead, he called together all the local clergy, including the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Gay, who was elected Pope," said Elk
Duncan. "This caused a great schism in the Church."

"But as usual, God was on the side of the greatest number of canons,"
said Eugene. "Later on, the family migrated to California, and made its
fortune in the Gold Rush of '49."

"You boys are too good for me!" yelled Harold Gay, getting up abruptly.
"Come on! Who's going to the Pic?"

The Pic was the only purchasable entertainment that the village afforded
steadily. It was a moving-picture theatre, inhabited nightly by a
howling tribe of students who rushed down aisles, paved with
peanut-shells, through a shrapnel fire of flying goobers, devoting
themselves studiously for the remainder of the evening to the unhappy
heads and necks of Freshmen, and less attentively, but with roars of
applause, indignation, or advice, to the poor flicker-dance of puppets
that wavered its way illegibly across the worn and pleated screen. A
weary but industrious young woman with a scrawny neck thumped almost
constantly at a battered piano. If she was idle for five minutes, the
whole pack howled ironically, demanding: "Music, Myrtle! Music!"


In this strange place Eugene flourished amazingly. He was outside the
pale of popular jealousies: it was quite obvious that he was not safe,
that he was not sound, that decidedly he was an irregular person. He
could never be an all-round man. Obviously, he would never be governor.
Obviously, he would never be a politician, because he said funny things.
He was not the man to lead a class or say a prayer; he was a man for
curious enterprise. Well, thought they benevolently, we need some such.
We are not all made for weighty business.

He was happier than he had ever been in his life, and more careless. His
physical loneliness was more complete and more delightful. His escape
from the bleak horror of disease and hysteria and death impending,
that hung above his crouched family, left him with a sense of aerial
buoyancy, drunken freedom. He had come to the place alone, without
companions. He had no connections. He had, even now, not one close
friend. And this isolation was in his favour. Every one knew him at
sight; every one called him by name, and spoke to him kindly. He was not
disliked. He was happy, full of expansive joy, he greeted every one with
enthusiastic gusto. He had a vast tenderness, an affection for the whole
marvellous and unvisited earth, that blinded his eyes. He was closer to
a feeling of brotherhood than he had ever been, and more alone. He was
filled with a divine indifference for all appearance. Joy ran like a
great wine through his young expanding limbs; he bounded down the paths
with wild cries in his throat, leaping for life like an apple, trying to
focus the blind desire that swept him apart, to melt down to a bullet
all of his formless passion, and so, slay death, slay love.

He began to join. He joined everything. He had never "belonged" to any
group before, but now all groups were beckoning him. He had without much
trouble won a place for himself on the staff of the college paper and
the magazine. The small beginning trickle of distinctions widened into
a gushet. It began to sprinkle, then it rained. He was initiated into
literary fraternities, dramatic fraternities, theatrical fraternities,
speaking fraternities, journalistic fraternities, and in the Spring into
a social fraternity. He joined enthusiastically, submitted with
fanatical glee to the hard mauling of the initiations, and went about
lame and sore, more pleased than a child or a savage, with coloured
ribbons in his coat lapel, and a waistcoat plastered with pins, badges,
symbols and Greek letterings.


But not without labour had his titles come. The early autumn was
lustreless and slack: he could not come from the shadow of Laura. She
haunted him. When he went home at Christmas, he found the hills bleak
and close, and the town mean and cramped in the grim stinginess of
winter. There was a ludicrous, a desperate gaiety in the family.

"Well!" said Eliza sorrowfully, as she peered above the stove, "let's
all try to be happy this time and enjoy a quiet Christmas. You never
know! You never know!" She shook her head, unable to continue. Her eyes
were wet. "It may be the last time we're all together. The old trouble!
The old trouble!" she said hoarsely, turning to him.

"What old trouble?" he said angrily. "Good God, why are you so
mysterious?"

"My heart!" she whispered, with a brave smile. "I've said nothing to
any one. But last week--I thought I was gone." This was delivered in a
boding whisper.

"Oh, my God!" he groaned. "You'll be here when the rest of us are
rotten."

Helen burst into a raucous angry laugh, looking at his sullen face, and
prodding him roughly with her big fingers.

"K-K-K-K-K-K-K! Did you ever know it to fail? Did you? If you come to
her with one of your kidneys gone, she's always got something worse the
matter with her. No, sir! I've never known it to fail!"

"You may laugh! You may laugh!" said Eliza with a smile of watery
bitterness. "But I may not be here to laugh at much longer."

"Good heavens, mamma!" the girl cried irritably. "There's nothing wrong
with you. You're not the sick one! Papa's the sick one. He's the one
that needs attention. Can't you realise that--he's dying. He may not
last the winter out. I'm the sick one! You'll be here long after we're
both gone."

"You never know," said Eliza mysteriously. "You never know who'll be
the first one to go. Only last week, there was Mr. Cosgrave, as fine a
looking man as----"

"They're off!" Eugene screamed with a crazy laugh, stamping up and down
the kitchen in a frenzy. "By God! They're off!"

At this moment, one of the aged harpies, of whom the house always
sheltered two or three during the grim winter, lurched from the hall
back into the door-space. She was a large raw-boned hag, a confirmed
drug-eater, who moved by a violent and dissonant jerking of her gaunt
limbs, pawing abruptly at the air with a gnarled hand.

"Mrs. Gant," said she, writhing her loose grey lips horribly before she
could speak. "Did I get a letter? Have you seen him?"

"Seen who? Go on!" said Eliza fretfully. "I don't know what you're
talking about, and I don't believe you do, either."

Smiling hideously at them all, and pawing the air, the monster got under
way again, disappearing like an old wagon with loose wheels. Helen began
to laugh, hoarsely, as Eugene's face hung forward with mouth half-open
in an expression of sullen stupefaction. Eliza laughed, too, slyly,
rubbing her nosewing with a finger.

"I'll vow!" she said. "I believe she's crazy. She takes dope of some
sort--that's certain. It makes my flesh crawl when she comes around."

"Then why do you keep her in the house?" said Helen resentfully. "Good
heavens, mamma! You could get rid of her if you wanted to. Poor old
'Gene!" she said, beginning to laugh again. "You always catch it, don't
you?"

"The time draws near the birth of Christ," said he, piously.

She laughed; then, with abstracted eyes, plucked vaguely at her large
chin.

His father spent most of the day staring vacantly into the parlour
fire. Miss Florry Mangle, the nurse, gave him the morbid comfort of her
silence: she rocked incessantly before the fire, thirty heel-taps to the
minute, with arms tight-folded on her limp breasts. Occasionally she
talked of death and disease. Gant had aged and wasted shockingly. His
heavy clothes wound round his feeble shanks: his face was waxen and
transparent--it was like a great beak. He looked clean and fragile. The
cancer, Eugene thought, flowered in him like some terrible but beautiful
plant. His mind was very clear, not doting, but sad and old. He spoke
little, with almost comical gentleness, but he ceased to listen almost
as soon as one answered.

"How have you been, son?" he asked. "Are you getting along all right?"

"Yes. I am a reporter on the paper now; I may be managing editor next
year. I have been elected to several organisations," he went on eagerly,
glad of the rare chance to speak to one of them about his life. But when
he looked up again, his father's stare was fixed sadly in the fire. The
boy stopped in confusion, pierced with a bitter pain.

"That's good," said Gant, hearing him speak no more. "Be a good boy,
son. We're proud of you."


Ben came home two days before Christmas: he prowled through the house
like a familiar ghost. He had left the town early in the autumn, after
his return from Baltimore. For three months he had wandered alone
through the South, selling to the merchants in small towns space for
advertisements upon laundry cards. How well this curious business
succeeded he did not say: he was scrupulously neat, but threadbare and
haggard, and more fiercely secretive than ever. He had found employment
at length upon a newspaper in a rich tobacco town of the Piedmont. He
was going there after Christmas.

He had come to them, as always, bearing gifts.

Luke came in from the naval school at Newport, on Christmas eve. They
heard his sonorous tenor shouting greetings to people in the street; he
entered the house upon a blast of air. Every one began to grin.

"Well, here we are! The Admiral's back! Papa, how's the boy! Well, for
God's sake!" he cried, embracing Gant, and slapping his back. "I thought
I was coming to see a sick man! You're looking like the flowers that
bloom in the Spring."

"Pretty well, my boy. How are you?" said Gant, with a pleased grin.

"Couldn't be better, Colonel. 'Gene, how are you, Old Scout? Good!"
he said, without waiting for an answer. "Well, well, if it isn't Old
Baldy," he cried, pumping Ben's hand. "I didn't know whether you'd be
here or not. Mamma, old girl," he said, as he embraced her, "how're they
going? Still hitting on all six. Fine!" he yelled, before any one could
reply to anything.

"Why, son--what on earth!" cried Eliza, stepping back to look at him.
"What have you done to yourself? You walk as if you are lame."

He laughed idiotically at sight of her troubled face and prodded her.

"Whah--whah! I got torpedoed by a submarine," he said. "Oh, it's
nothing," he added modestly. "I gave a little skin to help out a fellow
in the electrical school."

"What!" Eliza screamed. "How much did you give?"

"Oh, only a little six-inch strip," he said carelessly. "The boy was
badly burned: a bunch of us got together and chipped in with a little
hide."

"Mercy!" said Eliza. "You'll be lame for life. It's a wonder you can
walk."

"He always thinks of others--that boy!" said Gant proudly. "He'd give
you his heart's-blood."


The sailor had secured an extra valise, and stocked it on the way home
with a great variety of beverages for his father. There were several
bottles of Scotch and rye whiskies, two of gin, one of rum, and one each
of port and sherry wine.

Every one grew mildly convivial before the evening meal.

"Let's give the poor kid a drink," said Helen. "It won't hurt him."

"What! My ba-a-by! Why, son, you wouldn't drink, would you?" Eliza said
playfully.

"Wouldn't he!" said Helen, prodding him. "Ho! ho! ho!"

She poured him out a stiff draught of Scotch whisky.

"There!" she said cheerfully. "That's not going to hurt him."

"Son," said Eliza gravely, balancing her wine-glass, "I don't want you
ever to acquire a taste for it." She was still loyal to the doctrine of
the good Major.

"No," said Gant. "It'll ruin you quicker than anything in the world, if
you do."

"You're a goner, boy, if that stuff ever gets you," said Luke. "Take a
fool's advice."

They lavished fair warnings on him as he lifted his glass. He choked as
the fiery stuff caught in his young throat, stopping his breath for a
moment and making him tearful. He had drunk a few times before--minute
quantities that his sister had given him at Woodson Street. Once, with
Jim Trivett, he had fancied himself tipsy.

When they had eaten, they drank again. He was allowed a small one. Then
they all departed for town to complete their belated shopping. He was
left alone in the house.

What he had drunk beat pleasantly through his veins in warm pulses,
bathing the tips of ragged nerves, giving to him a feeling of power
and tranquillity he had never known. Presently, he went to the pantry
where the liquor was stored. He took a water tumbler and filled it
experimentally with equal portions of whisky, gin, and rum. Then,
seating himself at the kitchen table, he began to drink the mixture
slowly.

The terrible draught smote him with the speed and power of a man's fist.
He was made instantly drunken, and he knew instantly why men drank. It
was, he knew, one of the great moments in his life--he lay, greedily
watching the mastery of the grape over his virgin flesh, like a girl for
the first time in the embrace of her lover. And suddenly, he knew how
completely he was his father's son--how completely, and with what added
power and exquisite refinement of sensation, was he Gantian. He exulted
in the great length of his limbs and his body, through which the mighty
liquor could better work its wizardry. In all the earth there was no
other like him, no other fitted to be so sublimely and magnificently
drunken. It was greater than all the music he had ever heard; it was as
great as the highest poetry. Why had he never been told? Why had no one
ever written adequately about it? Why, when it was possible to buy a god
in a bottle, and drink him off, and become a god oneself, were men not
forever drunken?

He had a moment of great wonder--the magnificent wonder with which we
discover the simple and unspeakable things that lie buried and known,
but unconfessed, in us. So might a man feel if he wakened after death
and found himself in Heaven.

Then a divine paralysis crept through his flesh. His limbs were numb;
his tongue thickened until he could not bend it to the cunning sounds of
words. He spoke aloud, repeating difficult phrases over and over, filled
with wild laughter and delight at his effort. Behind his drunken body
his brain hung poised like a falcon, looking on him with scorn, with
tenderness, looking on all laughter with grief and pity. There lay in
him something that could not be seen and could not be touched, which was
above and beyond him--an eye within an eye, a brain above a brain, the
Stranger that dwelt in him and regarded him and was him, and that he did
not know. But, thought he, I am alone now in this house; if I can come
to know him, I will.

He got up, and reeled out of the alien presences of light and warmth in
the kitchen; he went out into the hall where a dim light burned and the
high walls gave back their grave-damp chill. This, he thought, is the
house.

He sat down upon the hard mission settle, and listened to the cold drip
of silence. This is the house in which I have been an exile. There is a
stranger in the house, and there's a stranger in me.

O house of Admetus, in whom (although I was a god) I have endured so
many things. Now, house, I am not afraid. No ghost need fear come by me.
If there's a door in silence, let it open. My silence can be greater
than your own. And you who are in me, and who I am, come forth beyond
this quiet shell of flesh that makes no posture to deny you. There is
none to look at us: O come, my brother and my lord, with unbent face. If
I had 40,000 years, I should give all but the ninety last to silence. I
should grow to the earth like a hill or a rock. Unweave the fabric of
nights and days; unwind my life back to my birth; subtract me into
nakedness again, and build me back with all the sums I have not counted.
Or let me look upon the living face of darkness; let me hear the
terrible sentence of your voice.

There was nothing but the living silence of the house: no doors were
opened.


Presently, he got up and left the house. He wore no hat or coat; he
could not find them. The light was blanketed in a thick steam of mist:
sounds came faintly and cheerfully. Already the earth was full of
Christmas. He remembered that he had bought no gifts. He had a few
dollars in his pocket; before the shops closed he must get presents for
the family. Bare-headed he set off for the town. He knew that he was
drunk and that he staggered; but he believed that with care and control
he could hide his state from any one who saw him. He straddled the line
that ran down the middle of the concrete sidewalk, keeping his eyes
fixed on it and coming back to it quickly when he lurched away from it.
When he got into the town the streets were thronged with late shoppers.
An air of completion was on everything. The people were streaming home
to Christmas. He plunged down from the Square into the narrow avenue,
going in among the staring passers-by. He kept his eye hotly on the line
before him. He did not know where to go. He did not know what to buy.

As he reached the entrance to Wood's pharmacy, a shout of laughter went
up from the lounging beaux. The next instant he was staring into the
friendly grinning faces of Julius Arthur and Van Yeats.

"Where the hell do you think you're going?" said Julius Arthur.

He tried to explain; a thick jargon broke from his lips.

"He's cock-eyed drunk," said Van Yeats.

"You look out for him, Van," said Julius. "Get him in a doorway, so none
of his folks will see him. I'll get the car."

Van Yeats propped him carefully against the wall; Julius Arthur ran
swiftly into Church Street, and drew up in a moment at the curb. Eugene
had a vast inclination to slump carelessly upon the nearest support. He
placed his arms around their shoulders and collapsed. They wedged him
between them on the front seat; somewhere bells were ringing.

"Ding-dong!" he said, very cheerfully. "Cris-muss!"

They answered with a wild yell of laughter.

The house was still empty when they came to it. They got him out of the
car, and staggered up the steps with him. He was sorry enough that their
fellowship was broken.

"Where's your room, 'Gene?" said Julius Arthur, panting, as they entered
the hall.

"This one's as good as any," said Van Yeats.

The door of the front bedroom, opposite the parlour, was open. They took
him in and put him on the bed.

"Let's take off his shoes," said Julius Arthur. They unlaced them and
pulled them off.

"Is there anything else you want, son?" said Julius.

He tried to tell them to undress him, put him below the covers, and
close the door, in order to conceal his defection from his family, but
he had lost the power of speech. After looking and grinning at him for a
moment, they went out without closing the door.


When they had gone he lay upon the bed, unable to move. He had no sense
of time, but his mind worked very clearly. He knew that he should rise,
fasten the door, and undress. But he was paralysed.

Presently the Gants came home. Eliza alone was still in town, pondering
over gifts. It was after eleven o'clock. Gant, his daughter, and his two
sons came into the room and stared at him. When they spoke to him, he
burred helplessly.

"Speak! Speak!" yelled Luke, rushing at him and choking him vigorously.
"Are you dumb, idiot?"

I shall remember that, he thought.

"Have you no pride? Have you no honour? Has it come to this?" the sailor
roared dramatically, striding around the room.

Doesn't he think he's hell, though? Eugene thought. He could not fashion
words, but he could make sounds, ironically, in the rhythm of his
brother's moralising. "Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh! Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh! Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh!"
he said, with accurate mimicry. Helen, loosening his collar, bent over
him laughing. Ben grinned swiftly under a cleft scowl.

Have you no this? Have you no that? Have you no this? Have you no
that?--he was cradled in their rhythm. No, ma'am. We've run out of
honour to-day, but we have a nice fresh lot of self-respect.

"Ah, be quiet," Ben muttered. "No one's dead, you know."

"Go heat some water," said Gant professionally, "he's got to get it off
his stomach." He no longer seemed old. His life in a marvellous instant
came from its wasting shadow; it took on a hale sinew of health and
action.

"Save the fireworks," said Helen to Luke, as she left the room. "Close
the door. For heaven's sake, try to keep it from mamma, if you can."

This is a great moral issue, thought Eugene. He began to feel sick.

Helen returned in a very few minutes with a kettle of hot water, a
glass, and a box of soda. Gant fed him the solution mercilessly until
he began to vomit. At the summit of his convulsion Eliza appeared. He
lifted his sick head dumbly from the bowl, and saw her white face at the
door, and her weak brown eyes, that could take on so much sharpness and
sparkle when her suspicion was awakened.

"Hah? Huh? What is it?" said Eliza.

But she knew, of course, instantly, what it was.

"What say?" she asked sharply. No one had said anything. He grinned
feebly at her, tickled, above his nausea and grief, at the palpable
assumption of blind innocence which always heralded her discoveries.
Seeing her thus, they all laughed.

"Oh, my Lord!" said Helen. "Here she is. We were hoping you wouldn't get
here till it was over. Come and look at your Baby," she said, with a
good-humoured snicker, keeping his head comfortably supported on the
palm of her hand.

"How do you feel now, son?" Gant asked kindly.

"Better," he mumbled, discovering, with some elation, that his vocal
paralysis was not permanent.

"Well, you see!" Helen began, kindly enough, but with a brooding
satisfaction. "It only goes to show we're all alike. We all like it.
It's in our blood."

"That awful curse!" Eliza said. "I had hoped that I might have one son
who might escape it. It seems," she said, bursting into tears, "as if a
Judgment were on us. The sins of the fathers----"

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" Helen cried angrily. "Stop it! It's not going
to kill him: he'll learn a lesson from it."

Gant gnawed his thin lip, and wetted his great thumb in the old manner.

"You might know," he said, "that I'd get the blame for it. Yes--if one
of them broke a leg it would be the same."

"There's one thing sure!" said Eliza. "None of them ever got it from my
side of the house. Say what you will, his grandfather, Major Pentland,
never in his life allowed a drop in his house."

"Major Pentland be damned!" said Gant. "If you'd depended on him for
anything you'd have gone hungry."

Certainly, thought Eugene, you'd have gone thirsty.

"Forget it!" said Helen. "It's Christmas. Let's try to have a little
peace and quiet once a year."

When they had left him, the boy tried to picture them lulled in the
dulcet tranquillity they so often invoked. Its effects, he thought,
would be more disastrous than any amount of warfare.

In the darkness, everything around and within him, swam hideously. But
presently he slid down into a pit of distressed sleep.


Every one had agreed on a studious forgiveness. They stepped with
obtrusive care around his fault, filled pleasantly with Christmas and
mercy. Ben scowled at him quite naturally, Helen grinned and prodded
him, Eliza and Luke surrendered themselves to sweetness, sorrow, and
silence. Their forgiveness made a loud noise in his ears.

During the morning his father asked him to come for a walk. Gant was
embarrassed and hang-dog: a duty of gentle admonishment devolved upon
him--he had been counselled to it by Helen and Eliza. Now, no man in his
time could carry on in the big, Bow-wow style better than Gant, but none
was less fitted to scatter the blossoms of sweetness and light. His
wrath was sudden, his invective sprang from the moment, but he had for
this occasion no thunder-bolts in his quiver, and no relish for the
business before him. He had a feeling of personal guilt; he felt like a
magistrate fining for intoxication a culprit with whom he has been on a
spree the night before. Besides--what if the Bacchic strain in him had
been passed on to his son?

They walked on in silence across the Square, by the rimmed fountain.
Gant cleared his throat nervously several times.

"Son," said he presently, "I hope you'll take last night as a warning.
It would be a terrible thing if you let whisky get the best of you. I'm
not going to speak harshly to you about it: I hope you'll learn a lesson
by it. You had better be dead than become a drunkard."

There! He was glad it was over.

"I will!" Eugene said. He was filled with gratitude and relief. How good
every one was. He wanted to make passionate avowals, great promises. He
tried to speak. But he couldn't. There was too much to be said.

But they had their Christmas, beginning thus with parental advice and
continuing through all the acts of contrition, love, and decorum.
They put on, over their savage lives, the raiment of society, going
diligently through the forms and conventions, and thinking, "now, we are
like all other families"; but they were timid and shy and stiff, like
rustics dressed in evening-clothes.


But they could not keep silence. They were not ungenerous or mean: they
were simply not bred to any restraint. Helen veered in the wind of
hysteria, the strong uncertain tides of her temperament. At times when,
before her own fire, her vitality sank, and she heard the long howl of
the wind outside, she almost hated Eugene.

"It's ridiculous!" she said to Luke. "His behaving like this. He's only
a kid--he's had everything, we've had nothing! You see what it's come
to, don't you?"

"His college education has ruined him," said the sailor, not unhappy
that his candle might burn more brightly in a naughty world.

"Why don't you speak to her?" she said irritably. "She may listen to
you--she won't to me! Tell her so! You've seen how she's rubbed it in to
poor old papa, haven't you? Do you think that old man--sick as he is--is
to blame? 'Gene's not a Gant, anyway. He takes after her side of the
house. He's queer--like all of them! _We're_ Gants!" she said with a
bitter emphasis.

"There was always some excuse for papa," said the sailor. "He's had a
lot to put up with." All his convictions in family affairs had been
previously signed with her approval.

"I wish you'd tell her that. With all his moping into books, he's no
better than we are. If he thinks he's going to lord it over me, he's
mistaken."

"I'd like to see him try it when I'm around," said Luke grimly.

The boy was doing a multiple penance--he had committed his first great
wrong in being at once so remote from them and so near to them. His
present trouble was aggravated by the cross-complication of Eliza's
thrusts at his father, and the latent but constantly awakening
antagonism of mother and daughter. In addition, he bore directly Eliza's
nagging and carping attack. All this he was prepared for--it was the
weather of his mother's nature (she was as fond of him as of any of
them, he thought), and the hostility of Helen and Luke was something
implacable, unconscious, fundamental, that grew out of the structure
of their lives. He was of them, he was recognisably marked, but he
was not with them, nor like them. He had been baffled for years by
the passionate enigma of their dislike--their tenders of warmth and
affection, when they came, were strange to him: he accepted them
gratefully and with a surprise he did not wholly conceal. Otherwise, he
had grown into a shell of sullenness and quiet: he spoke little in the
house.

He was wearing ragged from the affair and its consequences. He felt that
he was being unfairly dealt with, but as the hammering went on he drew
his head bullishly down and held his tongue, counting the hours until
his holiday should end. He turned silently to Ben--he should have turned
nowhere. But the trusted brother, frayed and bitter on his own accord,
scowled bitterly, and gave him the harsh weight of his tongue. This
finally was unendurable. He felt betrayed--utterly turned against and
set upon.

The outbreak came three nights before his departure as he stood, tense
and stolid, in the parlour. For almost an hour, in a savage monotone,
Ben had tried deliberately, it seemed, to goad him to an attack. He had
listened without a word, smothering in pain and fury, and enraging by
his silence the older brother who was finding a vent for his own alien
frustration.

"----and don't stand there scowling at me, you little thug. I'm
telling you for your own good. I'm only trying to keep you from being
a jailbird, you know."

"The trouble with you," said Luke, "is that you have no appreciation
for what's been done for you. Everything's been done for you, and you
haven't sense enough to appreciate it. Your college education has ruined
you."

The boy turned slowly on Ben.

"All right, Ben," he muttered. "That's enough now. I don't care what he
says, but I've had enough of it from you."

This was the admission the older one had wanted. They were all in very
chafed and ugly temper.

"Don't talk back to me, you little fool, or I'll bat your brains out."

The boy sprang at his brother like a cat, with a snarling cry. He bore
him backward to the floor as if he were a child, laying him down gently
and kneeling above him, because he had been instantly shocked by the
fragility of his opponent and the ease of his advantage. He struggled
with such mixed rage and shame as those who try quietly to endure the
tantrum of a trying brat. As he knelt above Ben, holding his arms
pinned, Luke fell heavily on his back, uttering excited cries,
strangling him with one arm and cuffing awkwardly with the other.

"All right, B-B-Ben," he chattered, "you grab his legs."

A free scrimmage upon the floor followed, with such a clatter of upset
scuttles, fire-irons, and chairs, that Eliza was brought at a fast
gallop from the kitchen.

"Mercy!" she shrieked, as she reached the door. "They'll kill him!"

But, although being subdued--in the proud language of an older South
"defeated, sir, but never beaten"--Eugene was doing very well for his
age, and continued to chill the spines of his enemies with strange
noises in his larynx, even after they had all clambered panting to their
feet.

"I f-f-f-fink he's gone crazy," said Luke. "He j-j-jumped on us without
a word of warning."

The hero replied to this with a drunken roll of the head, a furious
dilation of the nostrils, and another horrible noise in his throat.

"What's to become of us!" wept Eliza. "When brother strikes brother, it
seems that the smash-up has come." She lifted the padded arm-chair, and
placed it on its legs again.

When he could speak, Eugene said quietly, to control the trembling of
his voice:

"I'm sorry I jumped on you, Ben. You," he said to the excited sailor,
"jumped on my back like a coward. But I'm sorry for what's happened.
I'm sorry for what I did the other night and now. I said so, and you
wouldn't leave me alone. You've tried to drive me crazy with your talk.
And I didn't," he choked, "I didn't think you'd turn against me as you
have. I know what the others are like--they hate me."

"Hate you!" cried Luke excitedly. "For G-g-god's sake! You talk like a
fool. We're only trying to help you, for your own good. Why should we
hate you!"

"Yes, you hate me," Eugene said, "and you're ashamed to admit it. I
don't know why you should, but you do. You wouldn't ever admit anything
like that, but it's the truth. You're afraid of the right words. But
it's been different with you," he said, turning to Ben. "We've been like
brothers--and now, you've gone over against me."

"Ah!" Ben muttered, turning away nervously. "You're crazy. I don't know
what you're talking about!" He lighted a cigarette, holding the match in
a hand that trembled.

But although the boy had used a child's speech of woe and resentment,
they knew there was a core of truth in what he had said.

"Children, children!" said Eliza sadly. "We must try to love one
another. Let's try to get along together this Christmas--what time's
left. It may be the last one we'll ever have together." She began to
weep: "I've had such a hard life," she said, "it's been strife and
turmoil all the way. It does seem I deserve a little peace and happiness
now."

They were touched with the old bitter shame: they dared not look at one
another. But they were awed and made quiet by the vast riddle of pain
and confusion that scarred their lives.

"No one, 'Gene," Luke began quietly, "has turned against you. We want
to help you--to see you amount to something. You're the last chance--if
booze gets you the way it has the rest of us, you're done for."

The boy felt very tired; his voice was flat and low. He began to speak
with the bluntness of despair: what he said had undebatable finality.

"And how are you going to keep booze from getting me, Luke?" he said.
"By jumping on my back and trying to strangle me? That's on a level with
every other effort you've ever made to know me."

"Oh," said Luke ironically, "you don't think we understand you?"

"No," Eugene said quietly. "I don't think you do. You know nothing
whatever about me. I know nothing about you--or any of you. I have
lived here with you for seventeen years and I'm a stranger. In all that
time have you ever talked to me like a brother? Have you ever told me
anything of yourself? Have you ever tried to be a friend or a companion
to me?"

"I don't know what you want," Luke answered, "but I thought I was acting
for the best. As to telling you about myself, what do you want to know?"

"Well," said Eugene slowly, "you're six years older than I am: you've
been away to school, you've worked in big cities, and you are now
enlisted in the United States Navy. Why do you always act like God
Almighty," he continued with rankling bitterness. "I know what sailors
do! You're no better than I am! What about liquor? What about women?"

"That's no way to talk before your mother," said Luke sternly.

"No, son," said Eliza in a troubled voice. "I don't like that way of
talking."

"Then I won't talk like that," Eugene said. "But I had expected you to
say that. We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call
things by their names, although we're willing to call one another bad
ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honour. The way to make
yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won't admit that
either, but it's true. Well, then, Luke, we won't talk of the ladies,
black or white, you may or may not know, because it would make you
uncomfortable. Instead, you can keep on being God and I'll listen to
your advice, like a little boy in Sunday school. But I'd rather read
the Ten Commandments where it's written down shorter and better."

"Son," said Eliza again with her ancient look of trouble and
frustration, "we must try to get on together."

"No," he said. "Alone. I have done an apprenticeship here with you for
seventeen years, but it is coming to an end. I know now that I shall
escape; I know that I have been guilty of no great crime against you,
and I am no longer afraid of you."

"Why, boy!" said Eliza. "We've done all we could for you. What crime
have we accused you of?"

"Of breathing your air, of eating your food, of living under your roof,
of having your life and your blood in my veins, of accepting your
sacrifice and privation, and of being ungrateful for it all."

"We should all be thankful for what we have," said Luke sententiously.
"Many a fellow would give his right eye for the chance you've been
given."

"I've been given nothing!" said Eugene, his voice mounting with a husky
flame of passion. "I'll go bent over no longer in this house. What
chance I have I've made for myself in spite of you all, and over your
opposition. You sent me away to the university when you could do nothing
else, when it would have been a crying disgrace to you among the people
in this town if you hadn't. You sent me off after the Leonards had cried
me up for three years, and then you sent me a year too soon--before I
was sixteen--with a box of sandwiches, two suits of clothes, and
instructions to be a good boy."

"They sent you some money, too," said Luke. "Don't forget that."

"I'd be the only one who would, if I did," the boy answered. "For that
is really what is behind everything, isn't it? My crime the other night
was not in getting drunk, but in getting drunk without any money of my
own. If I did badly at the university with money of my own, you'd dare
say nothing, but if I do well on money you gave me, I must still be
reminded of your goodness and my unworthiness."

"Why, son!" said Eliza diplomatically, "no one has a word to say against
the way you've done your work. We're very proud of you."

"You needn't be," he said sullenly. "I've wasted a great deal of time
and some money. But I've had something out of it--more than most--I've
done as much work for my wages as you deserve. I've given you a fair
value for your money; I thank you for nothing."

"What's that! What's that!" said Eliza sharply.

"I said I thank you for nothing, but I take that back."

"That's better!" said Luke.

"Yes, I have a great deal to give thanks for," said Eugene. "I give
thanks for every dirty lust and hunger that crawled through the polluted
blood of my noble ancestors. I give thanks for every scrofulous token
that may ever come upon me. I give thanks for the love and mercy that
kneaded me over the washtub the day before my birth. I give thanks for
the country slut who nursed me and let my dirty bandage fester across my
navel. I give thanks for every blow and curse I had from any of you
during my childhood, for every dirty cell you ever gave me to sleep in,
for the ten million hours of cruelty or indifference, and the thirty
minutes of cheap advice."

"Unnatural!" Eliza whispered. "Unnatural son! You will be punished if
there's a just God in heaven."

"Oh, there is! I'm sure there is!" cried Eugene. "Because I have been
punished. By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart
back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a
child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for
the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.
And now at last I am free from you all, although you may hold me for a
few years more. If I am not free, I am at least locked up in my own
prison, but I shall get me some beauty, I shall get me some order out of
this jungle of my life: I shall find my way out of it yet, though it
take me twenty years more--alone."

"Alone?" said Eliza, with the old suspicion. "Where are you going?"

"Ah," he said, "you were not looking, were you? I've gone."




XXXIII


During the few remaining days of his holiday, he stayed almost entirely
away from the house, coming for a brief and mumbled meal, and late at
night, for bed. He waited for departure as a prisoner for release. The
dolorous prelude to a journey--the wet platform eyes, the sudden
radiation of hectic warmth, the declarations of love at sound of the
whistle--left him this time unmoved. The tear-ducts, he was beginning to
discover, had, like sweat-glands, dermic foundations, and were easily
brought to a salty sparkle at mere sight of a locomotive. He had,
therefore, the somewhat detached composure of a gentleman on his way to
a comfortable week-end, who stands in a noisy crowd, waiting for the
ferry.


He gave benediction to the words in which he had so happily defined his
position as wage-earner. They stated and confirmed an attitude, and in
some measure protected him against the constant betrayals of sentiment.
During the Spring he worked stupendously at joining activities, knowing
that here was coin whose ring they could hear. He wrote conscientiously
each item of his distinctions; his name found its way back more than
once to the indulgent Altamont papers. Gant kept the clippings proudly,
and gave public readings when he could.

The boy had two short awkward letters from Ben, who was now stationed
one hundred miles away, in the tobacco town. At Easter, Eugene visited
him, staying at his lodgings, where again his unerring destiny had
thrown him into the welcoming arms of a grey-haired widow. She was under
fifty--a handsome silly woman, who prodded and teased him as she would
an adored child. She addressed him--with a loose giggle--as "Old
Curly-Head," at which he fetched out his usual disgusted plea to his
Maker. "Oh, my God! Listen to this!" She had reverted to an astonishing
romping girlhood, and would exercise her playfulness by leaping suddenly
upon Old Curly-Head, dealing him a stiff dig in the ribs, and skipping
away with a triumphant "Hah! Got you that time!"

There was forever in that town a smell of raw tobacco, biting the
nostrils with its acrid pungency: it smote the stranger coming from the
train, but all the people in the town denied it, saying: "No; there is
no smell at all." And within a day the stranger too could smell it no
more.

On Easter morning he arose in the blue light and went with the other
pilgrims to the Moravian cemetery.

"You ought to see it," Ben said. "It's a famous custom: people come from
everywhere." But the older brother did not go. Behind massed bands of
horns, the trumpeting blare of trombones, the big crowds moved into
the strange burial ground where all the stones lay flat upon the
graves--symbol, it was said, of all-levelling Death. But as the horns
blared, the old ghoul-fantasy of death returned, the grave slabs made
him think of tablecloths: he felt as if he were taking part in some
obscene feast.

Spring was coming on again across the earth like a light sparkle of
water-spray: all of the men who had died were making their strange and
lovely return in blossom and flower. Ben walked along the streets of the
tobacco town looking like asphodel. It was strange to find a ghost there
in that place: his ancient soul prowled wearily by the cheap familiar
brick and all the young faades.

There was a Square on high ground; in the centre a court-house. Cars
were parked in close lines. Young men loitered in the drug-store.

How real it is, Eugene thought. It is like something we have always
known about and do not need to see. The town would not have seemed
strange to Thomas Aquinas--but he to the town.

Ben prowled along, greeting the merchants with a grave scowl, leaning
his skull against their round skulls of practicality, across their
counters--a phantom soliciting advertisement in a quiet monotone.

"This is my kid brother, Mr. Fulton."

"Hello, son! Dogged if they don't grow tall 'uns up there, Ben. Well, if
you're like Old Ben, young fellow, we won't kick. We think a lot of him
here."

That's like thinking well of Balder, in Connecticut, Eugene thought.


"I have only been here three months," said Ben, resting in bed on his
elbow and smoking a cigarette. "But I know all the leading business men
already. I'm well thought of here." He glanced at his brother quickly
and grinned, with a shy charm of rare confession. But his fierce eyes
were desperate and lonely. Hill-haunted? For--home? He smoked.

"You see, they think well of you, once you get away from your people.
You'll never have a chance at home, 'Gene. They'll ruin everything for
you. For heaven's sake, get away when you can. What's the matter with
you? Why are you looking at me like that?" he said sharply, alarmed at
the set stare of the boy's face. In a moment he said: "They'll spoil
your life. Can't you forget about her?"

"No," said Eugene. In a moment he added: "She's kept coming back all
Spring."

He twisted his throat with a wild cry.


The Spring advanced with a mounting hum of war. The older students
fell out quietly and drifted away to enlistments. The younger strained
tensely, waiting. The war brought them no sorrow: it was a pageant which
might, they felt, pluck them instantly into glory. The country flowed
with milk and honey. There were strange rumours of a land of Eldorado
to the north, amid the war industry of the Virginia coast. Some of the
students had been there, the year before: they brought back stories of
princely wages. One could earn twelve dollars a day, with no experience.
One could assume the duties of a carpenter, with only a hammer, a saw,
and a square. No questions were asked.

War is not death to young men; war is life. The earth had never worn
raiment of such colour as it did that year. The war seemed to unearth
pockets of ore that had never been known in the nation: there was a vast
unfolding and exposure of wealth and power. And somehow--this imperial
wealth, this display of power in men and money, was blended into a
lyrical music. In Eugene's mind, wealth and love and glory melted into
a symphonic noise: the age of myth and miracle had come upon the world
again. All things were possible.

He went home stretched like a bowstring and announced his intention of
going away into Virginia. There was protest, but not loud enough to
impede him. Eliza's mind was fastened on real-estate and the summer
trade. Gant stared into the darkness at his life. Helen laughed at him
and scolded him; then fell to plucking at her chin, absently.

"Can't do without her? You can't fool me! No, sir. I know why you want
to go," she said jocularly. "She's a married woman now: she may have a
baby, for all you know. You've no right to go after her."

Then abruptly, she said:

"Well, let him go if he wants to. It looks silly to me, but he's got to
decide for himself."

He got twenty-five dollars from his father--enough to pay his railway
fare to Norfolk and leave him a few dollars.

"Mark my words," said Gant. "You'll be back in a week's time. It's a
wild-goose chase you're going on."

He went.


All through the night he drew toward her across Virginia, propped on his
elbow in the berth and staring bewitched upon the great romantic country
clumped with dreaming woodlands and white as a weird dawn beneath the
blazing moonlight.

Early in the morning he came to Richmond. He had to change trains; there
was a wait. He went out from the station and walked up the hill toward
the fine old State House drenched cleanly in the young morning light. He
ate breakfast at a lunch-room on Broad Street, filled already with men
going to their work. This casual and brief contact with their lives,
achieved after his lonely and magnificent approach through the night,
thrilled him by its very casualness. All the little ticking sounds of a
city beginning its day, the strange familiarity of voices in an alien
place, heard curiously after the thunder of the wheels, seemed magical
and unreal. The city had no existence save that which he conferred on
it: he wondered how it had lived before he came, how it would live after
he left. He looked at all the men, feeding with eyes that held yet the
vast moon-meadows of the night and the cool green width of the earth.
They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the
little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their
limbs and faces of their own little cosmos. And the great hunger for
voyages rose up in him--to come always, as now at dawn, into strange
cities, striding in among them, and sitting with them unknown, like a
god in exile, stored with the enormous vision of the earth.

The counterman yawned and turned the crackling pages of a morning paper.
That was strange.

Cars clanked by, beginning to work through the town. Merchants lowered
their awnings; he left them as their day began.

An hour later he was riding for the sea. Eighty miles away lay the sea
and Laura. She slept unwitting of the devouring wheels that brought him
to her. He looked at the aqueous blue sky whitened with little clouds,
and at the land wooded with pines and indefinable tokens of the marshes
and bright salt.

The train drew under the boat-shed at Newport News. The terrific
locomotive, as beautiful as any ship, breathed with the laborious
fatigue at the rail-head. There, by lapping water, she came to rest,
like a completed destiny.

The little boat lay waiting at the dock. Within a few minutes he had
left the hot murky smell of the shed and was cruising out into the blue
water of the Roads. A great light wind swept over the water, making a
singing noise through the tackle of the little boat, making a music and
a glory in his heart. He drove along the little decks at a bounding
stride, lunging past the staring people, with wild noises in his throat.
The lean destroyers, the bright mad camouflage of the freighters and the
transports, the lazy red whirl of a propeller, half-submerged, and the
light winey sparkle of the waves fused to a single radiance and filled
him with glory. He cried back into the throat of the enormous wind, and
his eyes were wet.

Upon the decks of the boats, clean little figures in white moved about;
under the bulging counter of a huge Frenchman young naked men were
swimming. They come from France, he thought, and it is strange that they
should be here.

O, the wonder, the magic and the loss! His life was like a great wave
breaking in the lonely sea; his hungry shoulder found no barriers--he
smote his strength at nothing, and was lost and scattered like a wrack
of mist. But he believed that this supreme ecstasy which mastered him
and made him drunken might some day fuse its enormous light into a
single articulation. He was Phaeton with the terrible horses of the sun:
he believed that his life might pulse constantly at its longest stroke,
achieve an eternal summit.

The hot Virginias broiled under the fierce blue oven of the sky, but in
the Roads the ships rocked in the freshening breeze of war and glory.


Eugene remained in the furnace of Norfolk for four days, until his money
was gone. He watched it go without fear, with a sharp quickening of his
pulses, tasting the keen pleasure of his loneliness and the unknown
turnings of his life. He sensed the throbbing antenn of the world: life
purred like a hidden dynamo, with the vast excitement of ten thousand
glorious threats. He might do all, dare all, become all. The far and the
mighty was near him, around him, above him. There was no great bridge
to span, no hard summit to win. From obscurity, hunger, loneliness, he
might be lifted in a moment into power, glory, love. The transport
loading at the docks might bear him war-ward, love-ward, fame-ward
Wednesday night.

He walked by lapping water through the dark. He heard its green wet
slap against the crusted pier-piles: he drank its strong cod scent, and
watched the loading of great boats drenched in blazing light as they
weltered slowly down into the water. And the night was loud with the
rumble of huge cranes, the sudden loose rattle of the donkey-engines,
the cries of the overseers, and the incessant rumbling trucks of
stevedores within the pier.

His imperial country, for the first time, was gathering the huge thrust
of her might. The air was charged with murderous exuberance, rioting and
corrupt extravagance.

Through the hot streets of that town seethed the toughs, the crooks, the
vagabonds of a nation--Chicago gunmen, bad niggers from Texas, Bowery
bums, pale Jews with soft palms from the shops of the city, Swedes from
the Middle-West, Irish from New England, mountaineers from Tennessee and
North Carolina, whores, in shoals and droves, from everywhere. For these
the war was a fat enormous goose raining its golden eggs upon them.
There was no thought or belief in any future. There was only the
triumphant _Now_. There was no life beyond the moment. There was
only an insane flux and re-flux of getting and spending.

Young men from Georgia farms came, in the evenings, from their work on
piers, in camps, in shipyards, to dress up in their peacock plumage. And
at night, hard and brown and lean of hand and face, they stood along
the curbing in $18.00 tan leathers, $80.00 suits, and $8.00 silk shirts
striped with broad alternating bands of red and white. They were
carpenters, masons, gang overseers, or said they were: they were paid
ten, twelve, fourteen, eighteen dollars a day.

They shifted, veered from camp to camp, worked for a month, loafed
opulently for a week, enjoying the brief bought loves of girls they met
upon the ocean-beach or in a brothel.

Strapping black buck-niggers, with gorilla arms and the black paws of
panthers, earned $60 a week as stevedores, and spent it on a mulatto
girl in a single evening of red riot.

And more quietly, soberly, in this crowd, moved the older, thriftier
workmen: the true carpenters, the true masons, the true mechanics--the
canny Scotch-Irish of North Carolina, the fishermen of the Virginia
coast, the careful peasantry of the Middle-West, who had come to earn,
to save, to profit from the war.

Everywhere amid this swarming crowd gleamed the bright raiment of blood
and glory: the sailors thronged the streets in flapping blues and
spotless whites--brown, tough and clean. The marines strode by in
arrogant twos, stiff as rods in the loud pomp of chevrons and striped
trousers. Commanders grey and grim, hard-handed C.P.O.'s, and elegant
young ensigns out of college, with something blonde and fluffy at their
side, went by among the red cap-buttons of French matelots, or the
swagger sea-wise port of the Englishmen.

Through this crowd, with matted uncut hair that fell into his eyes, that
shot its spirals through the rents of his old green hat, that curled
a thick scroll up his dirty neck, Eugene plunged with hot devouring
eyes--soaked in his sweat by day, sharp and stale by night.

In this great camp of vagrant floaters he lost himself: he came home
into this world from loneliness. The hunger for voyages, the hunger that
haunts Americans, who are a nomad race, was half-assuaged here in this
maelstrom of the war.

He lost himself in the crowd. He lost count of the days. His little
store of money melted. He moved from a cheap hotel, loud at night with
the noise of harlotry, to a little attic room in a lodging-house, an
oven of hot pine and tarred roof; he moved from the lodging-house to a
fifty-cent cot in the Y.M.C.A., where, returning night by night, he paid
his fee, and slept in a room with forty snoring sailors.

Finally, his money gone, he slept, until driven out, in all-night
lunch-rooms; upon the Portsmouth ferry; and over lapping water on a
rotting pier.

By night he prowled about among the negroes; he listened to their rich
proposed seductions; he went where the sailors went, down Church Street,
where the women were. He prowled the night with young beast-lust, his
thin boy-body stale with sweat, his hot eyes burning through the dark.

He grew hungry for food. His money was gone. But there was a hunger and
thirst in him that could not be fed. Over the chaos of his brain hung
the shadow of Laura James. Her shadow hung above the town, above all
life. It had brought him here; his heart was swollen with pain and
pride; he would not go to find her.

He was obsessed with the notion that he would find her in the crowd,
upon the street, around the corner. He would not speak to her if he met
her. He would go proudly and indifferently by. He would not see her. She
would see him. She would see him at some heroic moment, just as he was
receiving the love and respect of beautiful women. She would speak to
him; he would not speak to her. She would be stricken; she would be
beaten down; she would cry to him for love and mercy.

Thus, unclean, unkempt, clothed in rags and hunger and madness, he saw
himself victorious, heroic and beautiful. He was mad with his obsession.
He thought he saw Laura on the streets a dozen times a day: his heart
turned rotten; he did not know what he should do or say, whether to
run or remain. He brooded for hours over her address in the telephone
directory; sitting by the 'phone, he trembled with excitement because
its awful magic could be sounded at a gesture, because within a minute
he could be with her, voice to voice.

He hunted out her home. She was living in an old frame house far
out from the centre of the town. He stalked carefully about the
neighbourhood, keeping a block away from the house at all times,
observing it obliquely, laterally, from front and back, with stealthy
eye and a smothering thud of the heart, but never passing before it,
never coming directly to it.

He was foul and dirty. The soles of his shoes wore through: his
calloused feet beat against hot pavements. He stank.

At length, he tried to get work. Work there was in great abundance--but
the princely wages of which he had been told were hard to find. He could
not swear he was a carpenter, a mason. He was a dirty boy, and looked
it. He was afraid. He went to the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, the Naval
Base at Norfolk, the Bush Terminal, everywhere there was work, abundant
work--hard labour that paid four dollars a day. This he would gladly
have taken; but he found that he could not have his wages until after
the second week, and that one week's pay would be withheld to tide him
over in illness, trouble or departure.

And he had no money left.

He went to a Jew and pawned the watch Eliza had given him upon his
birthday. He got five dollars on it. Then he went by boat once more to
Newport News, and by trolley up the coast to Hampton. He had heard, in
the thronging rumour of Norfolk, that there was work upon the flying
field, and that the worker was fed and housed upon the field, at company
expense.

In the little employment shack at the end of the long bridge that led
across into the field, he was signed on as a labourer and searched by
the sentry, who made him open his valise. Then he laboured across
the bridge, kneeing his heavy bag, which bulged with his soiled and
disorderly belongings, before him.


These months, although filled with terror and hunger, must be passed in
rapid summary, with bare mention of the men and actions that a lost boy
knew. They belong to a story of escape and wandering--valuable here to
indicate the initiation to the voyage this life will make. They are a
prelude to exile, and into their nightmare chaos no other purpose may be
read than the blind groping of a soul toward freedom and isolation.

Eugene worked upon the Flying Field for a month.

At length, hungry again for the ships and faces, he left his work
and spent his earnings in a week of gaudy riot in Norfolk and on
the Virginia beaches. Almost penniless again, with only the savage
kaleidoscope of a thousand streets, a million lights, the blazing
confusion and the strident noise of carnival, he returned to Newport
News in search of employment, accompanied by another youth from
Altamont, likewise a thriftless adventurer in war-work, whom he had
found upon the beach. This worthy, whose name was Sinker Jordan, was
three years older than Eugene. He was a handsome, reckless boy, small in
stature, and limping from an injury he had received in a football game.
His character was weak and volatile--he hated effort, and was obstinate
only in cursing ill-fortune.

The two young men had a few dollars between them. They pooled their
resources, and, with wild optimism, purchased from a pawnbroker in
Newport News the rudiments of carpenter's equipment--hammers, saws,
and T-squares. They went inland fifteen or twenty miles to a dreary
government camp sweltering in the Virginia pines. They were refused
employment here and in black dejection returned in the afternoon to the
town they had left so hopefully in the morning. Before sundown they
had secured employment in the Shipbuilding Yards, but they had been
discharged five minutes after they reported for work, when they
confessed to a grinning foreman in a room full of wood-shavings and
quietly slatting belts, that they had no knowledge of the intensely
special carpentry of ship's carving. Nor (they might have added) of any
other.

They were quite moneyless now, and once on the street again, Sinker
Jordan had hurled upon the pavement the fatal tools, cursing savagely
the folly that threatened now to keep them hungry. Eugene picked the
tools up, and took them back to the imperturbable Uncle, who repurchased
them for only a few dollars less than the sum they had paid him in the
morning.

Eugene was early up at dawn, and after futile efforts to waken the
luxuriously somnolent Sinker, he was off to the dingy yellow piers along
the water-front, which were stored with munitions for the war. After
a morning tramping up and down the dusty road outside the guarded
enclosures, he had obtained employment for himself and Sinker from the
chief checker, a nervous ugly man, swollen with petty tyranny. He had
gimlet eyes, glittering below spectacles, and hard muscular jaws that
writhed constantly.

Eugene went to work at seven the next morning--Sinker, a day or two
later, only when his last small coin had vanished. Eugene screwed up his
pride and borrowed a few dollars from one of the other checkers. On this
he and Sinker lived meagrely until pay-day--which was only a few days
off. This money slipped quickly through their careless fingers. Down to
a few coins again, with the next pay-day almost two weeks off, Sinker
gambled at dice with the checkers, behind the great fortress of sacked
oats upon the pier--lost, won, lost, rose penniless and cursing God.
Eugene knelt beside the checkers, with his last half-dollar in his palm,
heedless of Sinker's bitter taunt. He had never thrown dice before:
naturally, he won--$8.50. He rose exultantly from their profane
surprise, and took Sinker to dinner at the best hotel.

A day or two later, he went behind the oats again, gambled with his last
dollar--and lost.

He began to starve. Day crawled into weary day. The fierce eye of July
beat down upon the pier with a straight insufferable glare. The boats
and trains slid in and out, crammed to the teeth with munitions--with
food for the soldiers. The hot grainy air on the pier swam before his
eyes speckled with dancing patches, and he made weary tallies on a sheet
as the big black stevedores swarmed past him with their trucks. Sinker
Jordan cadged small sums from the other checkers, and lived miserably
on bottled pop and cheese at a little grocery across the road from the
pier. Eugene was unable to beg or borrow. Partly from pride, but more
from the powerful brooding inertia of his temper, which more and more
was governing his will to act, he found himself unable to speak. Each
day he said: "I shall speak to one of them to-day. I shall say that I
must eat, and that I have no money." But when he tried to speak he could
not.

As they grew more efficient in their work they were called back,
after the day's end, for work at night. This extra work, with its
time-and-a-half pay, he would otherwise have been glad to get, but
stumbling from exhaustion, the command to return was horrible. For
several days now he had not been home to the dingy little room which he
shared with Sinker Jordan. At the end of his day's work, he would climb
to a little oasis in the enormous wall of sacked oats and sink into
exhausted sleep, with the rattling of cranes and winches, the steady
rumble of the trucks, and the remote baying of boats anchored in the
stream--mixing in a strange faint symphony in his ears.

And he lay there, with the fading glimmer of the world about him, as
the war mounted to its climax of blood and passion during that terrible
month. He lay there, like his own ghost, thinking with pain, with grief,
of all the million towns and faces he had not known. He was the atom for
which all life had been a plot--Csar had died and a nameless wife of
Babylon, and somewhere here, upon this marvellous dying flesh, this
myriad brain, their mark, their spirit, rested.

And he thought of the strange lost faces he had known, the lonely figure
of his family, damned in chaos, each chained to a destiny of ruin and
loss--Gant, a fallen Titan, staring down enormous vistas of the Past,
indifferent to the world about him; Eliza, beetle-wise, involved in
blind accretions; Helen, childless, pathless, furious--a great wave
breaking on the barren waste; and finally, Ben--the ghost, the stranger,
prowling at this moment in another town, going up and down the thousand
streets of life, and finding no doors.


But the next day, on the pier, Eugene was weaker than ever. He sat
sprawled upon a throne of plump oat sacks, with blurred eyes watching
the loading of the bags at the spout, marking raggedly his tally upon
the sheet as the stevedores plunged in and out. The terrible heat
steamed through the grainy pollen of the air: he moved each limb with
forethought, picking it up and placing it as if it were a detached
object.

At the end of the day he was asked to return for night-work. He
listened, swaying on his feet, to the far-sounding voice of the chief
checker.

The supper hour came, upon the heated pier, with the sudden noise of
silence. There were small completed noises up and down the enormous
shed: a faint drumming of footfalls of workers walking toward the
entrance, a slap of water at the ship's hull, a noise from the bridge.

Eugene went behind the oat pile and climbed blindly up until he reached
his little fortress at the top. The world ebbed from his fading sense:
all sound grew fainter, more far. Presently, he thought, when I have
rested here, I shall get up and go down to work. It has been a hot day.
I am tired. But when he tried to move he could not. His will struggled
against the imponderable lead of his flesh, stirring helplessly like a
man in a cage. He thought quietly, with relief, with tranquil joy. They
will not find me here. I cannot move. It is over. If I had thought of
this long ago, I would have been afraid. But I'm not, now. Here--upon
the oat pile--doing my bit--for Democracy. I'll begin to stink. They'll
find me then.

Life glimmered away out of his weary eyes. He lay, half-conscious,
sprawled upon the oats. He thought of the horse.

In this way the young checker, who had loaned him money, found him. The
checker knelt above him, supporting Eugene's head with one hand, and
putting a bottle of raw hard liquor to his mouth with the other. When
the boy had revived somewhat, the checker helped him to descend the pile
and walked slowly with him up the long wooden platform of the pier.

They went across the road to a little grocery-store. The checker ordered
a bottle of milk, a box of crackers, and a big block of cheese. As
Eugene ate, the tears began to flow down his grimy face, dredging dirty
gullies on his skin. They were tears of hunger and weakness: he could
not restrain them.

The checker stood over him watchfully, with a kindly troubled stare.
He was a young man with a lantern jaw, and a thin dish face: he wore
scholarly spectacles, and smoked a pipe reflectively.

"Why didn't you tell me, boy? I'd have let you have the money," he said.

"I--don't--know," said Eugene, between bites of cheese. "Couldn't."

With the checker's loan of five dollars he and Sinker Jordan lived until
pay-day. Then, after dining together on four pounds of steak, Sinker
Jordan departed for Altamont and the enjoyment of an inheritance which
had fallen due a few days before, on his twenty-first birthday. Eugene
stayed on.


Mr. Finch, the chief checker with the ugly slit eyes, approached Eugene
with a smile of false warmth. His grey jaws worked.

"I've got a job for you, Gant," he said, "Double-time pay, I want you to
get in on some of the easy money."

"What is it?" said Eugene.

"They're loading this ship with big stuff," said Mr. Finch, "They're
taking her out into the stream to get it on. I want you to go out with
her. They'll take you off in a tug to-night."

The dish-faced checker, when jubilantly he told him of his appointment,
said:

"They asked me to go, but I wouldn't."

"Why not?" said Eugene.

"I don't want the money bad enough. They're loading her with T.N.T. and
nitro-glycerin. The niggers play baseball with those cases. If they ever
drop one, they'll bring you home in a bucket."

"It's all in the day's work," said Eugene dramatically.

This was danger, war. He was definitely in on it, risking his hide for
Democracy. He was thrilled.

When the big freighter slid away from the pier, he stood in the bow with
spread legs, darting his eyes about with fierce eagle glances. The iron
decks blistered his feet through the thin soles of his shoes. He did not
mind. He was the captain.

She anchored seaward down the Roads, and the great barges were nosed in
by the tugs. All through the day, under a broiling sun, they loaded her
from the rocking barges: her huge yellow booms swung up and down; by
nightfall she rode deeply in the water, packed to her throat with shells
and powder, and bearing on the hot plates of her deck 1,200 grisly tons
of field artillery.

Eugene stood with fierce appraising eyes, walking about the guns with a
sense of authority, jotting down numbers, items, pieces. From time to
time he thrust a handful of moist scrap-tobacco into his mouth, and
chewed with an air of relish. He spat hot sizzling gobs upon the iron
deck. God! thought he. This is man's work. Heave-ho, ye black devils!
There's a war on! He spat.

The tug came at nightfall and took him off. He sat apart from the
stevedores, trying to fancy the boat had come for him alone. The lights
went twinkling up the far Virginia shores. He spat into the swirling
waters.


When the trains slid in and out, the stevedores raised the wooden
bridges that spanned the tracks. Foot by foot, with rhythmic pull and
halt the gangs tugged at the ropes, singing, under the direction of
their leader, their song of love and labour:

"Jelly Roll! (Heh!) Je-e-elly Roll."

They were great black men, each with his kept woman. They earned fifty
or sixty dollars a week.


Once or twice again, in the dying summer, Eugene went to Norfolk. He
saw the sailor, but he no longer tried to see Laura. She seemed far and
lost.

He had not written home all summer. He found a letter from Gant, written
in his father's Gothic sprawl--a sick and feeble letter, written
sorrowfully and far away. O lost! Eliza, in the rush and business of
the summer trade, had added a few practical lines. Save his money. Get
plenty of good food. Keep well. Be a good boy.

The boy was a lean column of brown skin and bone. He had lost over
thirty pounds during the summer: he was over six foot four and weighed
little more than one hundred and thirty pounds.

The sailor was shocked at his emaciation, and bullied him with
blustering reproof:

"Why didn't you t-t-tell me where you were, idiot? I'd have sent you
money. For G-g-god's sake! Come on and eat!" They ate.

The summer waned. When September came, Eugene quit his work and, after
a luxurious day or two in Norfolk, started homeward. But, at Richmond,
where there was a wait of three hours between trains, he changed his
plans suddenly and went to a good hotel.

He was touched with pride and victory. In his pockets he had $130 that
he had won hardily by his own toil. He had lived alone, he had known
pain and hunger, he had survived. The old hunger for voyages fed at his
heart. He thrilled to the glory of the secret life. The fear of the
crowd, a distrust and hatred of group life, a horror of all bonds that
tied him to the terrible family of the earth, called up again the vast
Utopia of his loneliness. To go alone, as he had gone, into strange
cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know
him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him
there could be no better thing than that.

He thought of his own family with fear, almost with hatred. My God! Am I
never to be free? he thought. What have I done to deserve this slavery?
Suppose--suppose I were in China, or in Africa, or at the South Pole. I
should always be afraid of his dying while I was away. (He twisted his
neck as he thought of it.) And how they would rub it in to me if I were
not there! Enjoying yourself in China (they would say) while your father
was dying. Unnatural son! Yes, but curse them! Why should I be there?
Can they not die alone? Alone! O God, is there no freedom on this earth?

With quick horror, he saw that such freedom lay a weary world away, and
could be brought by such enduring courage as few men have.

He stayed in Richmond several days, living sumptuously in the splendid
hotel, eating from silver dishes in the grill, and roaming pleasantly
through the wide streets of the romantic old town, to which he had come
once as a Freshman at Thanksgiving, when the university's team had
played Virginia there. He spent three days trying to seduce a waitress
in an ice-cream and candy-store: he lured her finally to a curtained
booth in a chop-suey restaurant, only to have his efforts fail when
the elaborate meal he had arranged for with the Chinaman aroused her
distaste because it had onions in it.

Before he went home he wrote an enormous letter to Laura James at
Norfolk, a pitiable and boasting letter which rose at its end to an
insane crow: "I was there all summer and I never looked you up. You were
not decent enough to answer my letters; I saw no reason why I should
bother with you any more. Besides, the world is full of women; I got my
share and more this summer."

He mailed the letter, with a sense of malevolent triumph. But the moment
the iron lid of the box clanged over it, his face was contorted by shame
and remorse: he lay awake, writhing as he recalled the schoolboy folly
of it. She had beaten him again.




XXXIV


Eugene returned to Altamont two weeks before the term began at Pulpit
Hill. The town and the nation seethed in the yeasty ferment of war. The
country was turning into one huge camp. The colleges and universities
were being converted into training-camps for officers. Everyone was
"doing his bit."

It had been a poor season for tourists. Eugene found Dixieland almost
deserted, save for a glum handful of regular or semi-regular guests.
Mrs. Pert was there, sweet, gentle, a trifle more fuzzy than usual. Miss
Newton, a wrenny and neurotic old maid, with asthma, who had gradually
become Eliza's unofficial assistant in the management of the house, was
there. Miss Malone, the gaunt drug-eater with the loose grey lips, was
there. Fowler, a civil engineer with blond hair and a red face, who came
and departed quietly, leaving a sodden stench of corn-whisky in his
wake, was there. Gant, who had now moved definitely from the house on
Woodson Street, which he had rented, to a big back room at Eliza's, was
there--a little more waxen, a little more petulant, a little feebler
than he had been before. And Ben was there.

He had been home for a week or two when Eugene arrived. He had been
rejected again by both army and navy examining-boards, he had been
rejected as unfit in the draft; he had left his work suddenly in the
tobacco town and come quietly and sullenly home. He was thinner and more
like old ivory than ever. He prowled softly about the house, smoking
innumerable cigarettes, cursing in brief snarling fury, touched with
despair and futility. His old surly scowl was gone, his old angry
mutter; his soft contemptuous laugh, touched with so much hidden
tenderness, had given way to a contained but savage madness.

During the brief two weeks that Eugene remained at home before
departing again for Pulpit Hill, he shared with Ben a little room and
sleeping-porch upstairs. And the quiet one talked--talked himself from
a low fierce mutter into a howling anathema of bitterness and hate that
carried his voice, high and passionate, across all the sleeping world of
night and rustling autumn.

"What have you been doing to yourself, you little fool?" he began,
looking at the boy's starved ribs. "You look like a scarecrow."

"I'm all right," said Eugene. "I wasn't eating for a while. But I didn't
write then," he added proudly. "They thought I couldn't hold out by
myself. But I did. I didn't ask for help. And I came home with my own
money. See?" He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out his
soiled roll of banknotes, boastfully displaying it.

"Who wants to see your lousy little money?" Ben yelled furiously. "Fool!
You come back, looking like a dead man, as if you'd done something to be
proud of. What've you done? What've you done except make a monkey of
yourself?"

"I've paid my own way," Eugene cried resentfully, stung and wounded.
"That's what I've done."

"Ah-h," said Ben, with an ugly sneer, "you little fool! That's what
they've been after! Do you think you've put anything over on them? Do
you? Do you think they give a damn whether you die or not, as long as
you save them expense? What are you bragging about? Don't brag until
you've got something out of them."

Propped on his arm, he smoked deeply, in bitter silence, for a moment.
Then more quietly, he continued:

"No, 'Gene. Get it out of them any way you can. Make them give it to
you. Beg it, take it, steal it--only get it somehow. If you don't,
they'll let it rot. Get it, and get away from them. Go away and don't
come back. To hell with them!" he yelled.

Eliza, who had come softly upstairs to put out the lights, and had been
standing for a moment outside the door, rapped gently and entered.
Clothed in a tattered old sweater and indefinable under-lappings, she
stood for a moment with folded hands, peering in on them with a white
troubled face.

"Children," she said, pursing her lips reproachfully, and shaking her
head, "it's time everyone was in bed. You're keeping the whole house
awake with your talk."

"Ah-h," said Ben with an ugly laugh, "to hell with them!"

"I'll vow, child!" she said, fretfully. "You'll break us up. Have you
got that porch light on, too?" Her eyes probed about suspiciously. "What
on earth do you mean by burning up all that electricity!"

"Oh, listen to this, won't you?" said Ben, jerking his head upward with
a jeering laugh.

"I can't afford to pay all these bills," said Eliza angrily, with a
smart shake of her head. "And you needn't think I can. I'm not going to
put up with it. It's up to us all to economize."

"Oh, for God's sake!" Ben jeered. "Economize! What for? So you can give
it all away to Old Man Doak for one of his lots?"

"Now, you needn't get on your high-horse," said Eliza. "You're not the
one who has to pay the bills. If you did, you'd laugh out of the other
side of your mouth. I don't like any such talk. You've squandered every
penny you've earned because you've never known the value of a dollar."

"Ah-h!" he said. "The value of a dollar! By God, I know the value of a
dollar better than you do. I've had a little something out of mine, at
any rate. What have you had out of yours? I'd like to know that. What
the hell's good has it ever been to any one? Will you tell me that?" he
yelled.

"You may sneer all you like," said Eliza sternly, "but if it hadn't been
for your papa and me accumulating a little property, you'd never have
had a roof to call your own. And this is the thanks I get for all my
drudgery in my old age," she said, bursting into tears. "Ingratitude!
Ingratitude!"

"Ingratitude!" he sneered. "What's there to be grateful for? You don't
think I'm grateful to you or the old man for anything, do you? What have
you ever given me? You let me go to hell from the time I was twelve
years old. No one has ever given me a damned nickel since then. Look at
your kid here. You've let him run around the country like a crazy man.
Did you think enough of him this summer to send him a post-card? Did you
know where he was? Did you give a damn, as long as there was fifty cents
to be made out of your lousy boarders?"

"Ingratitude!" she whispered huskily, with a boding shake of the head.
"A day of reckoning cometh."

"Oh, for God's sake!" he said, with a contemptuous laugh. He smoked for
a moment. Then he went on quietly:

"No, mamma. You've done very little to make us grateful to you. The rest
of us ran around wild and the kid grew up here among the dope-fiends and
street-walkers. You've pinched every penny and put all you've had into
real estate which has done no one any good. So don't wonder if your kids
aren't grateful to you."

"Any son who will talk that way to his mother," said Eliza with rankling
bitterness, "is bound to come to a bad end. Wait and see!"

"The hell you say!" he sneered. They stared at each other with hard,
bitter eyes. He turned away in a moment, scowling with savage annoyance,
but stabbed already with fierce regret.

"All right! Go on, for heaven's sake! Leave us alone! I don't want you
around!" He lit a cigarette to show his indifference. The lean white
fingers trembled, and the flame went out.

"Let's stop it!" said Eugene wearily. "Let's stop it! None of us is
going to change! Nothing's going to get any better. We're all going to
be the same. We've said all this before. So, for God's sake, let's stop
it! Mamma, go to bed, please. Let's all go to bed and forget about it."
He went to her, and with a strong sense of shame, kissed her.

"Well, good-night, son," said Eliza slowly, with gravity. "If I were you
I'd put the light out now and turn in. Get a good night's sleep, boy.
You mustn't neglect your health."

She kissed him, and went away without another glance at the older boy.
He did not look at her. They were parted by hard and bitter strife.

After a moment, when she had gone, Ben said without anger:

"I've had nothing out of life. I've been a failure. I've stayed here
with them until I'm done for. My lungs are going: they won't even take a
chance on me for the army. They won't even give the Germans a chance to
shoot at me. I've never made good at anything. By God!" he said, in a
mounting blaze of passion. "What's it all about? Can you figure it out,
'Gene? Is it really so, or is somebody playing a joke on us? Maybe we're
dreaming all this. Do you think so?"

"Yes," said Eugene, "I do. But I wish they'd wake us up." He was silent,
brooding over his thin bare body, bent forward on the bed for a moment.
"Maybe," he said slowly, "maybe--there's nothing, nobody to wake."

"To hell with it all!" said Ben. "I wish it were over."


Eugene returned to Pulpit Hill in a fever of war excitement. The
university had been turned into an armed camp. Young men who were
eighteen years old were being admitted into the officers' training
corps. But he was not yet eighteen. His birthday was two weeks off. In
vain he implored the tolerance of the examining board. What did two
weeks matter? Could he get in as soon as his birthday arrived? They told
him he could not. What, then, could he do? They told him that he must
wait until there was another draft. How long would that be? Only two or
three months, they assured him. His wilted hope revived. He chaffed
impatiently. All was not lost.

By Christmas, with fair luck, he might be eligible for service in khaki:
by Spring, if God was good, all the proud privileges of trench-lice,
mustard gas, spattered brains, punctured lungs, ripped guts,
asphyxiation, mud and gangrene, might be his. Over the rim of the earth
he heard the glorious stamp of the feet, the fierce sweet song of the
horns. With a tender smile of love for his dear self, he saw himself
wearing the eagles of a colonel on his gallant young shoulders. He saw
himself as Ace Gant, the falcon of the skies, with sixty-three Huns
to his credit by his nineteenth year. He saw himself walking up the
Champs-Elyses, with a handsome powdering of grey hair above his
temples, a left forearm of the finest cork, and the luscious young widow
of a French marshal at his side. For the first time he saw the romantic
charm of mutilation. The perfect and unblemished heroes of his childhood
now seemed cheap to him--fit only to illustrate advertisements for
collars and toothpaste. He longed for that subtle distinction, that air
of having lived and suffered that could only be attained by a wooden
leg, a rebuilt nose, or the seared scar of a bullet across his temple.

Meanwhile, he fed voraciously, and drank gallons of water in an effort
to increase his poundage. He weighed himself a half-dozen times a day.
He even made some effort at systematic exercise: swinging his arms,
bending from his hips, and so on.

And he talked about his problem with the professors. Gravely, earnestly,
he wrestled with his soul, mouthing with gusto the inspiring jargon of
the crusade. For the present, said the professors, was his Place not
Here? Did his Conscience tell him that he Had to go? If it did, they
said gravely, they would say nothing more. But had he considered the
Larger Issues?

"Is not," said the Acting Dean persuasively, "is not this your Sector?
Is your own Front Line not here on the campus? Is it not here that you
must Go Over The Top? Oh, I know," he went on with a smile of quiet
pain, "I know it would be easier to go. I have had to fight that battle
myself. But we are all part of the Army now; we are all enlisted in the
Service of Liberty. We are all Mobilised for Truth. And each must Do His
Bit where it will count for most."

"Yes," said Eugene, with a pale tortured face, "I know. I know it's
wrong. But oh, sir--when I think of those murderous beasts, when I think
of how they have menaced All that we Hold Dear, when I think of Little
Belgium, and then of My Own Mother, My Own Sister----" He turned away,
clenching his hands, madly in love with himself.

"Yes, yes," said the Acting Dean gently, "for boys with a spirit like
yours it's not easy."

"Oh, sir, it's hard!" cried Eugene passionately. "I tell you it's hard."

"We must endure," said the Dean quietly. "We must be tempered in the
fire. The Future of Mankind hangs in the balance."

Deeply stirred they stood together for a moment, drenched in the radiant
beauty of their heroic souls.


Eugene was managing editor of the college paper. But since the editor
was enlisted in the corps, the entire work of publication fell to the
boy. Every one was in the army. With the exception of a few dozen ratty
Freshmen, a few cripples, and himself, every one, it seemed was in the
army. All of his fraternity brothers, all of his college mates, who had
not previously enlisted, and many young men who had never before thought
of college, were in the army. "Pap" Rheinhart, George Graves, Julius
Arthur--who had experienced brief and somewhat unfortunate careers at
other universities, and a host of young Altamonters who had never known
a campus before, were all enlisted now in the Student's Army.

During the first days, in the confusion of the new order, Eugene saw a
great deal of them. Then, as the cogs of the machine began to grind more
smoothly, and the university was converted into a big army post, with
its punctual monotony of drilling, eating, studying, inspection,
sleeping, he found himself detached, alone, occupying a position of
unique and isolated authority.

He Carried On. He Held High the Torch. He Did His Bit. He was editor,
reporter, censor, factotum of the paper. He wrote the news. He wrote the
editorials. He seared them with flaming words. He extolled the crusade.
He was possessed of the inspiration for murder.

He came and he went as he chose. When the barracks went dark at night,
he prowled the campus, contemptuous of the electric flash and the
muttered apologies of the officious shave-tails. He roomed in the
village with a tall cadaver, a gaunt medical student with hollow cheeks
and a pigeon-breast, named Heston. Three or four times a week he was
driven over the rutted highway to Exeter, where, in a little print shop,
he drank the good warm smell of ink and steel.

Later, he prowled up the dreary main street of the town as the lights
went up, ate at the Greek's, flirted with a few stray furtive women
until the place went dead at ten o'clock, and came back through the dark
countryside in a public-service car beside a drunken old walrus who
drove like a demon, and whose name was "Soak" Young.

October began, and a season of small cold rain. The earth was a
sodden reek of mud and rotten leaves. The trees dripped wearily and
incessantly. His eighteenth birthday came, and he turned again, with a
quivering tension, toward the war.

He got a brief sick letter from his father; a few pages, practical,
concrete with her blunt pungent expression, from Eliza:

"Daisy has been here with all her tribe. She went home two days ago,
leaving Caroline and Richard. They have all been down sick with the
'flu. We've had a siege of it here. Every one has had it, and you never
know who's going to be next. It seems to get the big strong ones first.
Mr. Hanby, the Methodist minister, died last week. Pneumonia set in. He
was a fine healthy man in the prime of life. The doctors said he was
gone from the start. Helen has been laid up for several days. Says it's
her old kidney trouble. They had McGuire in Thursday night. But they
can't fool me, no matter what they say. Son, I hope you will never
surrender to that awful craving. It has been the curse of my life. Your
papa seems to go along about the same as usual. He eats well, and gets
lots of sleep. I can't notice any change in him from a year ago. He may
be here long after some of the rest of us are under the sod. Ben is
still here. He mopes around the house all day and complains of having no
appetite. I think he needs to get to work again doing something that
will take his mind off himself. There are only a few people left in the
house. Mrs. Pert and Miss Newton hang on as usual. The Crosbys have gone
back to Miami. If it gets much colder here I'll just pack up and go too.
I guess I must be getting old. I can't stand the cold the way I could
when I was young. I want you to buy yourself a good warm overcoat before
the winter sets in. You must also eat plenty of good substantial food.
Don't squander your money but ..."

He heard nothing more for several weeks. Then, one drizzling evening at
six o'clock, when he returned to the room that he occupied with Heston,
he found a telegram. It read: "Come home at once. Ben has pneumonia.
Mother."




XXXV


There was no train until the next day. Heston quieted him during the
evening with a stiff drink of gin manufactured from alcohol taken from
the medical laboratory. Eugene was silent and babbled incoherently by
starts: he asked the medical student a hundred questions about the
progress and action of the disease.

"If it were double pneumonia she would have said so. Doesn't it seem
that way to you? Hey?" he demanded feverishly.

"I should think so," said Heston. He was a kind and quiet boy.

Eugene went to Exeter the next morning to catch the train. All through
a dreary grey afternoon it pounded across the sodden State. Then,
there was a change and a terrible wait of several hours at a junction.
Finally, as dark came, he was being borne again toward the hills.

Within his berth he lay with hot sleepless eyes, staring out at the
black mass of the earth, the bulk of the hills. Finally, in the hours
after midnight, he dropped into a nervous doze. He was wakened by the
clatter of the trucks as they began to enter the Altamont yards. Dazed,
half-dressed, he was roused by the grinding halt, and a moment later was
looking out through the curtains into the grave faces of Luke and Hugh
Barton.

"Ben's very sick," said Hugh Barton.

Eugene pulled on his shoes and dropped to the floor, stuffing his collar
and tie into a coat pocket.

"Let's go," he said. "I'm ready."

They went softly down the aisle, amid the long dark snores of the
sleepers. As they walked through the empty station toward Hugh Barton's
car, Eugene said to the sailor:

"When did you get home, Luke?"

"I came in last night," he said. "I've been here only a few hours."

It was half-past three in the morning. The ugly station settlement lay
fixed and horrible, like something in a dream. His strange and sudden
return to it heightened his feeling of unreality. In one of the cars
lined at the station curbing, the driver lay huddled below his blanket.
In the Greek's lunch-room a man sat sprawled face downward on the
counter. The lights were dull and weary: a few burned with slow lust in
the cheap station-hotels.

Hugh Barton, who had always been a cautious driver, shot away with a
savage grinding of gears. They roared townward through the rickety slums
at fifty miles an hour.

"I'm afraid B-B-B-Ben is one sick boy," Luke began.

"How did it happen?" Eugene asked. "Tell me."

He had taken influenza, they told Eugene, from one of Daisy's children.
He had moped about, ill and feverish, for a day or two, without going to
bed.

"In that G-g-g-god-dam cold barn," Luke burst out. "If that boy dies
it's because he c-c-c-couldn't keep warm."

"Never mind about that now," Eugene cried irritably, "go on."

Finally he had gone to bed, and Mrs. Pert had nursed him for a day or
two.

"She was the only one who d-d-d-did a damn thing for him," said the
sailor. Eliza, at length, had called in Cardiac.

"The d-d-damned old quack," Luke stuttered.

"Never mind! Never mind!" Eugene yelled. "Why dig it up now? Get on with
it!"

After a day or two, he had grown apparently convalescent, and Cardiac
told him he might get up if he liked. He got up and moped about the
house for a day, in a cursing rage, but the next day he lay a-bed, with
a high fever. Coker at length had been called in, two days before----

"That's what they should have done at the start," growled Hugh Barton
over his wheel.

"Never mind!" screamed Eugene. "Get on with it."

And Ben had been desperately ill, with pneumonia in both lungs, for over
a day. The sad prophetic story, a brief and terrible summary of the
waste, the tardiness, and the ruin of their lives, silenced them for a
moment with its inexorable sense of tragedy. They had nothing to say.

The powerful car roared up into the chill dead Square. The feeling of
unreality grew upon the boy. He sought for his life, for the bright lost
years, in this mean cramped huddle of brick and stone. Ben and I, here
by the City Hall, the Bank, the grocery-store (he thought). Why here? In
Gath or Ispahan. In Corinth or Byzantium. Not here. It is not real.

A moment later, the big car sloped to a halt at the curb, in front of
Dixieland. A light burned dimly in the hall, evoking for him chill
memories of damp and gloom. A warmer light burned in the parlour,
painting the lowered shade of the tall window a warm and mellow orange.

"Ben's in that room upstairs," Luke whispered, "where the light is."

Eugene looked up with cold dry lips to the bleak front room upstairs,
with its ugly Victorian bay-window. It was next to the sleeping-porch
where, but three weeks before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his
savage curse at life. The light in the sickroom burned greyly, bringing
to him its grim vision of struggle and naked terror.

The three men went softly up the walk and entered the house. There was a
faint clatter from the kitchen, and voices.

"Papa's in here," said Luke.

Eugene entered the parlour and found Gant seated alone before a bright
coal-fire. He looked up dully and vaguely as his son entered.

"Hello, papa," said Eugene, going to him.

"Hello, son," said Gant. He kissed the boy with his bristling cropped
moustache. His thin lip began to tremble petulantly.

"Have you heard about your brother?" he snuffled. "To think that this
should be put upon me, old and sick as I am. O Jesus, it's fearful----"

Helen came in from the kitchen.

"Hello, Slats," she said, heartily embracing him. "How are you, honey?
He's grown four inches more since he went away," she jeered, sniggering.
"Well, 'Gene, cheer up! Don't look so blue. While there's life there's
hope. He's not gone yet, you know." She burst into tears, hoarse,
unstrung, hysterical.

"To think that this must come upon me," Gant sniffled, responding
mechanically to her grief, as he rocked back and forth on his cane
and stared into the fire. "Oh boo-hoo-hoo! What have I done that God
should----"

"You shut up!" she cried, turning upon him in a blaze of fury. "Shut
your mouth this minute. I don't want to hear any more from you! I've
given my life to you! Everything's been done for you, and you'll be here
when we're all gone. You're not the one who's sick." Her feeling toward
him had, for the moment, gone rancorous and bitter.

"Where's mamma?" Eugene asked.

"She's back in the kitchen," Helen said. "I'd go back and say hello
before you see Ben if I were you." In a low brooding tone, she
continued: "Well, forget about it. It can't be helped now."

He found Eliza busy over several bright bubbling pots of water on
the gas-stove. She bustled awkwardly about, and looked surprised and
confused when she saw him.

"Why, what on earth, boy! When'd you get in?"

He embraced her. But beneath her matter-of-factness, he saw the terror
in her heart: her dull black eyes glinted with bright knives of fear.

"How's Ben, mamma?" he asked quietly.

"Why-y," she pursed her lips reflectively, "I was just saying to Doctor
Coker before you came in. 'Look here,' I said. 'I tell you what, I don't
believe he's half as bad off as he looks. Now, if only we can hold on
till morning, I believe there's going to be a change for the better.'"

"Mamma, in heaven's name!" Helen burst out furiously. "How can you bear
to talk like that? Don't you know that Ben's condition is critical? Are
you never going to wake up?"

Her voice had its old cracked note of hysteria.

"Now, I tell you, son," said Eliza, with a white tremulous smile, "when
you go in there to see him, don't make out as if you knew he was sick.
If I were you, I'd make a big joke of it all. I'd laugh just as big as
you please and say, 'See here, I thought I was coming to see a sick man.
Why, pshaw!' (I'd say) 'there's nothing wrong with you. Half of it's
only imagination!'"

"Oh mamma! for Christ's sake!" said Eugene frantically. "For Christ's
sake!"

He turned away, sick at heart, and caught at his throat with his
fingers.

Then he went softly upstairs with Luke and Helen, approaching the
sick-room with a shrivelled heart and limbs which had gone cold and
bloodless. They paused for a moment, whispering, before he entered. The
wretched conspiracy in the face of death filled him with horror.

"N-n-n-now I wouldn't stay but a m-m-m-minute," whispered Luke. "It
m-m-might make him nervous."

Eugene, bracing himself, followed Helen blindly into the room.

"Look who's come to see you," her voice came heartily. "It's
Highpockets."

For a moment Eugene could see nothing, for dizziness and fear. Then, in
the grey shaded light of the room, he descried Bessie Gant, the nurse,
and the long yellow skull's-head of Coker, smiling wearily at him, with
big stained teeth, over a long chewed cigar. Then, under the terrible
light which fell directly and brutally upon the bed alone, he saw Ben.
And in that moment of searing recognition he saw, what they had all
seen, that Ben was dying.

Ben's long thin body lay three-quarters covered by the bedding; its
gaunt outline was bitterly twisted below the covers, in an attitude of
struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him, it was somehow
distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal. And
the sallow yellow of his face had turned grey: out of this granite tint
of death, lit by two red flags of fever, the stiff black furze of a
three-day beard was growing. The beard was somehow horrible; it recalled
the corrupt vitality of hair, which can grow from a rotting corpse.
And Ben's thin lips were lifted, in a constant grimace of torture and
strangulation, above his white somehow dead-looking teeth, as inch by
inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs.

And the sound of this gasping--loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable,
filling the room, and orchestrating every moment in it--gave to the
scene its final note of horror.

Ben lay upon the bed below them, drenched in light, like some enormous
insect on a naturalist's table, fighting, while they looked at him, to
save with his poor wasted body the life that no one could save for him.
It was monstrous, brutal.

As Eugene approached, Ben's fear-bright eyes rested upon the younger
brother for the first time and bodilessly, without support, he lifted
his tortured lungs from the pillow, seizing the boy's wrists fiercely in
the hot white circle of his hands, and gasping in strong terror like a
child: "Why have you come? Why have you come home, 'Gene?"

The boy stood white and dumb for a moment, while swarming pity and
horror rose in him.

"They gave us a vacation, Ben," he said presently. "They had to close
down on account of the 'flu."

Then he turned away suddenly into the black murk, sick with his poor
lie, and unable longer to face the fear in Ben's grey eyes.

"All right, 'Gene," said Bessie Gant, with an air of authority. "Get
out of here--you and Helen both. I've got one crazy Gant to look after
already. I don't want two more in here." She spoke harshly, with an
unpleasant laugh.

She was a thin woman of thirty-eight years, the wife of Gant's nephew,
Gilbert. She was of mountain stock: she was coarse, hard, and vulgar,
with little pity in her, and a cold lust for the miseries of sickness
and death. These inhumanities she cloaked with her professionalism,
saying:

"If I gave way to my feelings, where would the patient be?"

When they got out into the hall again, Eugene said angrily to Helen:

"Why have you got that death's-head here? How can he get well, with her
around? I don't like her!"

"Say what you like--she's a good nurse." Then, in a low voice, she said:
"What do you think?"

He turned away, with a convulsive gesture. She burst into tears, and
seized his hand.

Luke was teetering about restlessly, breathing stertorously and smoking
a cigarette, and Eliza, working her lips, stood with an attentive ear
cocked to the door of the sick-room. She was holding a useless kettle of
hot water.

"Huh? Hah? What say?" asked Eliza, before any one had said anything.
"How is he?" Her eyes darted about at them.

"Get away! Get away! Get away!" Eugene muttered savagely. His voice
rose. "Can't you get away?"

He was infuriated by the sailor's loud nervous breathing, his large
awkward feet. He was angered still more by Eliza's useless kettle, her
futile hovering, her "huh?" and "hah?"

"Can't you see he's fighting for his breath? Do you want to strangle
him? It's messy! Messy! Do you hear?" His voice rose again.

The ugliness and discomfort of the death choked him; and the swarming
family, whispering outside the door, pottering uselessly around, feeding
with its terrible hunger for death on Ben's strangulation, made him mad
with alternate fits of rage and pity.

Indecisively, after a moment, they went downstairs, still listening for
sounds in the sick-room.

"Well, I tell you," Eliza began hopefully. "I have a feeling, I don't
know what you'd call it----" She looked about awkwardly and found
herself deserted. Then she went back to her boiling pots and pans.

Helen, with contorted face, drew him aside, and spoke to him in
whispered hysteria, in the front hall.

"Did you see that sweater she's wearing? Did you see it? It's filthy!"
Her voice sank to a brooding whisper. "Did you know that he can't bear
to look at her? She came into the room yesterday and he grew perfectly
sick. He turned his head away and said 'Oh Helen, for God's sake, take
her out of here.' You hear that, don't you? Do you hear? He can't stand
to have her come near him. He doesn't want her in the room."

"Stop! Stop! For God's sake, stop!" Eugene said, clawing at his throat.

The girl was for the moment insane with hatred and hysteria.

"It may be a terrible thing to say, but if he dies I shall hate her. Do
you think I can forget the way she's acted? Do you?" Her voice rose
almost to a scream. "She's let him die here before her very eyes. Why,
only day before yesterday, when his temperature was 104, she was talking
to Old Doctor Doak about a lot. Did you know that?"

"Forget about it!" he said frantically. "She'll always be like that!
It's not her fault. Can't you see that? O God, how horrible! How
horrible!"

"Poor old mamma!" said Helen, beginning to weep. "She'll never get over
this. She's scared to death! Did you see her eyes? She knows, of course
she knows!"

Then suddenly, with mad brooding face, she said: "Sometimes I think I
hate her! I really think I hate her." She plucked at her large chin,
absently. "Well, we mustn't talk like this," she said. "It's not right.
Cheer up. We're all tired and nervous. I believe he's going to get all
right yet."

Day came grey and chill, with a drear reek of murk and fog. Eliza
bustled about eagerly, pathetically busy, preparing breakfast. Once
she hurried awkwardly upstairs with a kettle of water, and stood for a
second at the door as Bessie Gant opened it, peering in at the terrible
bed, with her white puckered face. Bessie Gant blocked her further
entrance, and closed the door rudely. Eliza went away making flustered
apologies.

For, what the girl had said was true, and Eliza knew it. She was not
wanted in the sick-room; the dying boy did not want to see her. She
had seen him turn his head wearily away when she had gone in. Behind
her white face dwelt this horror but she made no confession, no
complaint. She bustled around doing useless things with an eager
matter-of-factness. And Eugene, choked with exasperation at one moment,
because of her heavy optimism, was blind with pity the next when he saw
the terrible fear and pain in her dull black eyes. He rushed toward her
suddenly, as she stood above the hot stove, and seized her rough worn
hand, kissing it and babbling helplessly.

"Oh mamma! Mamma! It's all right! It's all right! It's all right."

And Eliza, stripped suddenly of her pretences, clung to him, burying her
white face in his coat sleeve, weeping bitterly, helplessly, grievously,
for the sad waste of the irrevocable years--the immortal hours of love
that might never be relived, the great evil of forgetfulness and
indifference that could never be righted now. Like a child she was
grateful for his caress, and his heart twisted in him like a wild and
broken thing, and he kept mumbling:

"It's all right! It's all right! It's all right!"--knowing that it was
not, could never be, all right.

"If I had known. Child, if I had known," she wept, as she had wept long
before at Grover's death.

"Brace up!" he said. "He'll pull through yet. The worst is over."

"Well, I tell you," said Eliza, drying her eyes at once, "I believe it
is. I believe he passed the turning-point last night. I was saying to
Bessie----"

The light grew. Day came, bringing hope. They sat down to breakfast in
the kitchen, drawing encouragement from every scrap of cheer doctor
or nurse would give them. Coker departed, non-committally optimistic.
Bessie Gant came down to breakfast and was professionally encouraging.

"If I can keep his damn family out of the room, he may have some chance
of getting well."

They laughed hysterically, gratefully, pleased with the woman's abuse.

"How is he this morning?" said Eliza. "Do you notice any improvement?"

"His temperature is lower, if that's what you mean."

They knew that a lower temperature in the morning was a fact of no great
significance, but they took nourishment from it: their diseased emotion
fed upon it--they had soared in a moment to a peak of hopefulness.

"And he's got a good heart," said Bessie Gant. "If that holds out, and
he keeps fighting, he'll pull through."

"D-d-don't worry about his f-f-fighting," said Luke, in a rush of
eulogy. "That b-b-boy'll fight as long as he's g-g-got a breath left in
him."

"Why, yes," Eliza began, "I remember when he was a child of seven--I
know I was standing on the porch one day--the reason I remember is Old
Mr. Buckner had just come by with some butter and eggs your papa
had----"

"Oh my God!" groaned Helen, with a loose grin. "Now we'll get it."

"Whah--whah!" Luke chortled crazily, prodding Eliza in the ribs.

"I'll vow, boy!" said Eliza angrily. "You act like an idiot. I'd be
ashamed!"

"Whah--whah--whah!"

Helen sniggered, nudging Eugene.

"Isn't he crazy, though? Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh." Then, with wet eyes, she
drew Eugene roughly into her big bony embrace.

"Poor old 'Gene. You always got on together, didn't you? You'll feel it
more than any of us."

"He's not b-b-buried yet," Luke cried heartily. "That boy may be here
when the rest of us are pushing d-d-daisies."

"Where's Mrs. Pert?" said Eugene. "Is she in the house?"

A strained and bitter silence fell upon them.

"I ordered her out," said Eliza grimly, after a moment. "I told
her exactly what she was--a whore." She spoke with the old stern
judiciousness, but in a moment her face began to work and she burst into
tears. "If it hadn't been for that woman I believe he'd be well and
strong to-day. I'll vow I do!"

"Mamma, in heaven's name!" Helen burst out furiously. "How dare you say
a thing like that? She was the only friend he had: when he was taken
sick she nursed him hand and foot. Why, the idea! The idea!" she panted
in her indignation. "If it hadn't been for Mrs. Pert he'd have been dead
by now. Nobody else did anything for him. You were willing enough, I
notice, to keep her here and take her money until he got sick. No, sir!"
she declared with emphasis. "Personally, I like her. I'm not going to
cut her now."

"It's a d-d-d-damn shame!" said Luke, staunch to his goddess. "If it
hadn't been for Mrs. P-P-P-Pert and you, Ben would be S. O. L. Nobody
else around here gave a damn. If he d-d-d-dies, it's because he didn't
get the proper care when it would have done him some good. There's
always been too d-d-damn much thought of saving a nickel, and too
d-d-damn little about flesh and blood!"

"Well, forget about it!" said Helen wearily. "There's one thing sure:
I've done everything I could. I haven't been to bed for two days.
Whatever happens, I'll have no regrets on that score." Her voice was
filled with a brooding ugly satisfaction.

"I know you haven't! I know that!" The sailor turned to Eugene in his
excitement, gesticulating. "That g-g-girl's worked her fingers to the
bone. If it hadn't been for her----" His eyes got wet; he turned his
head away and blew his nose.

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Eugene yelled, springing up from the table.
"Stop it, won't you! Let's wait till later."


In this way, the terrible hours of the morning lengthened out,
while they spent themselves trying to escape from the tragic net of
frustration and loss in which they were caught. Their spirits soared to
brief moments of insane joy and exultancy, and plunged into black pits
of despair and hysteria. Eliza alone seemed consistently hopeful.
Trembling with exacerbated nerves, the sailor and Eugene paced the lower
hall, smoking incessant cigarettes, bristling as they approached each
other, ironically polite when their bodies touched. Gant dozed in the
parlour or in his own room, waking and sleeping by starts, moaning
petulantly, detached, vaguely aware only of the meaning of events, and
resentful because of the sudden indifference to him. Helen went in and
out of the sick-room constantly, dominating the dying boy by the power
of her vitality, infusing him with moments of hope and confidence.
But when she came out, her hearty cheerfulness was supplanted by the
strained blur of hysteria; she wept, laughed, brooded, loved, and hated
by turns.

Eliza went only once into the room. She intruded with a hot-water bag,
timidly, awkwardly, like a child, devouring Ben's face with her dull
black eyes. But when above the loud labour of his breath his bright eyes
rested on her, his clawed white fingers tightened their grip in the
sheets, and he gasped strongly, as if in terror:

"Get out! Out! Don't want you."

Eliza left the room. As she walked she stumbled a little, as if her feet
were numb and dead. Her white face had an ashen tinge, and her dull eyes
had grown bright and staring. As the door closed behind her, she leaned
against the wall and put one hand across her face. Then, in a moment,
she went down to her pots again.

Frantically, angrily, with twitching limbs they demanded calm and steady
nerves from one another; they insisted that they keep away from the
sick-room--but, as if drawn by some terrible magnet, they found
themselves again and again outside the door, listening, on tiptoe, with
caught breath, with an insatiate thirst for horror, to the hoarse noise
of his gasping as he strove to force air down into his strangled and
cemented lungs. And eagerly, jealously, they sought entrance to the
room, waiting their turn for carrying water, towels, supplies.

Mrs. Pert, from her refuge in the boarding-house across the street,
called Helen on the 'phone each half-hour, and the girl talked to her
while Eliza came from the kitchen into the hall, and stood, hands
folded, lips pursed, with eyes that sparkled with her hate.

The girl cried and laughed as she talked.

"Well ... that's all right, Fatty.... You know how I feel about it....
I've always said that if he had one true friend in the world, it's you
... and don't think we're _all_ ungrateful for what you've done...."

During the pauses, Eugene could hear the voice of the other woman across
the wires, sobbing.

And Eliza said, grimly: "If she calls up again you let me talk to her.
I'll fix her!"

"Good heavens, mamma!" Helen cried angrily. "You've done enough already.
You drove her out of the house when she'd done more for him than all his
family put together." Her big strained features worked convulsively.
"Why, it's ridiculous!"

Within Eugene, as he paced restlessly up and down the hall or prowled
through the house a-search for some entrance he had never found, a
bright and stricken thing kept twisting about like a trapped bird. This
bright thing, the core of him, his Stranger, kept twisting its head
about, unable to look at horror, until at length it gazed steadfastly,
as if under a dreadful hypnosis, into the eyes of death and darkness.
And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt that
he could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain and
ugliness, from the eclipsing horror and pity of it all. And as he
walked, he twisted his own neck about, and beat the air with his arm
like a wing, as if he had received a blow in his kidneys. He felt that
he might be clean and free if he could only escape into a single
burning passion--hard, and hot, and glittering--of love, hatred,
terror, or disgust. But he was caught, he was strangling, in the web of
futility--there was no moment of hate that was not touched by a dozen
shafts of pity: impotently, he wanted to seize them, cuff them, shake
them, as one might a trying brat, and at the same time to caress them,
love them, comfort them.

As he thought of the dying boy upstairs, the messy ugliness of it--as
they stood whimpering by while he strangled--choked him with fury and
horror. The old fantasy of his childhood came back to him: he remembered
his hatred of the semi-private bathroom, his messy discomfort while he
sat at stool and stared at the tub filled with dirty wash, sloppily
puffed and ballooned by cold grey soapy water. He thought of this as Ben
lay dying.

Their hopes revived strongly in the forenoon when word came to them that
the patient's temperature was lower, his pulse stronger, the congestion
of the lungs slightly relieved. But at one o'clock, after a fit of
coughing, he grew delirious, his temperature mounted, he had increasing
difficulty in getting his breath. Eugene and Luke raced to Wood's
pharmacy in Hugh Barton's car, for an oxygen tank. When they returned,
Ben had almost choked to death.

Quickly they carried the tank into the room, and placed it near his
head. Bessie Gant seized the cone, and started to put it over Ben's
mouth, commanding him to breathe it in. He fought it away tigerishly:
curtly the nurse commanded Eugene to seize his hands.

Eugene gripped Ben's hot wrists: his heart turned rotten. Ben rose
wildly from his pillows, wrenching like a child to get his hands free,
gasping horribly, his eyes wild with terror:

"No! No! 'Gene! 'Gene! No! No!"

Eugene caved in, releasing him and turning away, white-faced, from the
accusing fear of the bright dying eyes. Others held him: he was given
temporary relief. Then he became delirious again.

By four o'clock it was apparent that death was near. Ben had brief
periods of consciousness, unconsciousness, and delirium--but most of the
time he was delirious. His breathing was easier, he hummed snatches of
popular songs, some old and forgotten, called up now from the lost and
secret adyta of his childhood; but always he returned, in his quiet
humming voice, to a popular song of war-time--cheap, sentimental, but
now tragically moving: "Just a Baby's Prayer at Twilight,"

  "... when lights are low.
   Poor baby's years"

Helen entered the darkening room.

  "Are filled with tears."

The fear had gone out of his eyes: above his gasping he looked gravely
at her, scowling, with the old puzzled child's stare. Then, in a moment
of fluttering consciousness, he recognised her. He grinned beautifully,
with the thin swift flicker of his mouth.

"Hello, Helen! It's Helen!" he cried eagerly.

She came from the room with a writhen and contorted face, holding the
sobs that shook her until she was half-way down the stairs.


As darkness came upon the grey wet day, the family gathered in the
parlour, in the last terrible congress before death, silent, waiting.
Gant rocked petulantly, spitting into the fire, making a weak whining
moan from time to time. One by one, at intervals, they left the room,
mounting the stairs softly, and listening outside the door of the
sick-room. And they heard Ben, as, with incessant humming repetition,
like a child, he sang his song,

  "There's a mother there at twilight
   Who's glad to know----"

Eliza sat stolidly, hands folded, before the parlour fire. Her dead
white face had a curious carven look; the inflexible solidity of
madness.

"Well," she said at length, slowly, "you never know. Perhaps this is the
crisis. Perhaps----" her face hardened into granite again. She said no
more.

Coker came in and went at once, without speaking, to the sick-room.
Shortly before nine o'clock Bessie Gant came down.

"All right," she said quietly. "You had all better come up now. This is
the end."

Eliza got up and marched out of the room with a stolid face. Helen
followed her: she was panting with hysteria, and had begun to wring her
big hands.

"Now, get hold of yourself, Helen," said Bessie Gant warningly. "This is
no time to let yourself go."

Eliza went steadily upstairs, making no noise. But, as she neared the
room, she paused, as if listening for sounds within. Faintly, in the
silence, they heard Ben's song. And suddenly, casting away all pretence,
Eliza staggered, and fell against the wall, turning her face into her
hand, with a terrible wrenched cry:

"O God! If I had known! If I had known!"

Then, weeping with bitter unrestraint, with the contorted and ugly
grimace of sorrow, mother and daughter embraced each other. In a moment
they composed themselves, and quietly entered the room.

Eugene and Luke pulled Gant to his feet and supported him up the stairs.
He sprawled upon them, moaning in long quivering exhalations.

"Mer-ci-ful God! That I should have to bear this in my old age. That I
should----"

"Papa! For God's sake!" Eugene cried sharply. "Pull yourself together!
It's Ben who's dying--not us! Let's try to behave decently to him for
once."

This served to quiet Gant for a moment. But as he entered the room, and
saw Ben lying in the semi-conscious coma that precedes death, the fear
of his own death overcame him, and he began to moan again. They seated
him in a chair, at the foot of the bed, and he rocked back and forth,
weeping:

"O Jesus! I can't bear it! Why must you put this upon me? I'm old and
sick, and I don't know where the money's to come from. How are we ever
going to face this fearful and croo-el winter? It'll cost a thousand
dollars before we're through burying him, and I don't know where the
money's to come from." He wept affectedly with sniffling sobs.

"Hush! hush!" cried Helen, rushing at him. In her furious anger, she
seized him and shook him. "You damned old man you, I could kill you! How
dare you talk like that when your son's dying? I've wasted six years of
my life nursing you, and you'll be the last one to go!" In her blazing
anger, she turned accusingly on Eliza:

"You've done this to him. You're the one that's responsible. If you
hadn't pinched every penny he'd never have been like this. Yes, and Ben
would be here, too!" She panted for breath for a moment. Eliza made no
answer. She did not hear her.

"After this, I'm through! I've been looking for you to die--and Ben's
the one who has to go." Her voice rose to a scream of exasperation. She
shook Gant again. "Never again! Do you hear that, you selfish old man?
You've had everything--Ben's had nothing. And now he's the one to go. I
hate you!"

"Helen! Helen!" said Bessie Gant quietly. "Remember where you are."

"Yes, that means a lot to us," Eugene muttered bitterly.

Then, over the ugly clamour of their dissension, over the rasp and snarl
of their nerves, they heard the low mutter of Ben's expiring breath. The
light had been re-shaded: he lay, like his own shadow, in all his fierce
grey lonely beauty. And as they looked and saw his bright eyes already
blurred with death, and saw the feeble beating flutter of his poor thin
breast, the strange wonder, the dark rich miracle of his life surged
over them its enormous loveliness. They grew quiet and calm, they
plunged below all the splintered wreckage of their lives, they drew
together in a superb communion of love and valiance, beyond horror and
confusion, beyond death.

And Eugene's eyes grew blind with love and wonder: an enormous
organ-music sounded in his heart, he possessed them for a moment, he was
a part of their loveliness, his life soared magnificently out of the
slough of pain and ugliness. He thought:

"That was not all! That really was not all!"

Helen turned quietly to Coker, who was standing in shadow by the window,
chewing upon his long unlighted cigar.

"Is there nothing more you can do? Have you tried everything? I
mean--_everything_?"

Her voice was prayerful and low. Coker turned toward her slowly, taking
the cigar between his big stained fingers. Then, gently, with his weary
yellow smile, he answered: "Everything. Not all the king's horses, not
all the doctors and nurses in the world, can help him now."

"How long have you known this?" she said.

"For two days," he answered. "From the beginning." He was silent for a
moment. "For ten years!" he went on with growing energy. "Since I first
saw him, at three in the morning, in the Greasy Spoon, with a doughnut
in one hand and a cigarette in the other. My dear, dear girl," he said
gently, as she tried to speak, "we can't turn back the days that have
gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound,
our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a
heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which
we cannot get back."

He picked up his greasy black slouch hat, and jammed it carelessly upon
his head. Then he fumbled for a match and lit the chewed cigar.

"Has everything been done?" she said again. "I want to know! Is there
anything left worth trying?"

He made a weary gesture of his arms.

"My dear girl!" he said. "He's drowning! Drowning!"

She stood frozen with the horror of his pronouncement.

Coker looked for a moment more at the grey twisted shadow on the bed.
Then, quietly, sadly, with tenderness and tired wonder, he said: "Old
Ben. When shall we see _his_ like again?"

Then he went quietly out, the long cigar clamped firmly in his mouth.

In a moment, Bessie Gant, breaking harshly in upon their silence with
ugly and triumphant matter-of-factness, said: "Well, it will be a relief
to get this over. I'd rather be called into forty outside cases than one
in which any of these damn relations are concerned. I'm dead for sleep."

Helen turned quietly upon her.

"Leave the room!" she said. "This is our affair now. We have the right
to be left alone."

Surprised, Bessie Gant stared at her for a moment with an angry,
resentful face. Then she left the room.

The only sound in the room now was the low rattling mutter of Ben's
breath. He no longer gasped; he no longer gave signs of consciousness or
struggle. His eyes were almost closed; their grey flicker was dulled,
coated with the sheen of insensibility and death. He lay quietly upon
his back, very straight, without sign of pain, and with a curious
upturned thrust of his sharp thin face. His mouth was firmly shut.
Already, save for the feeble mutter of his breath, he seemed to be
dead--he seemed detached, no part of the ugly mechanism of that sound
which came to remind them of the terrible chemistry of flesh, to mock at
illusion, at all belief in the strange passage and continuance of life.

He was dead, save for the slow running down of the worn-out machine,
save for that dreadful mutter within him of which he was no part. He was
dead.

But in their enormous silence wonder grew. They remembered the strange
flitting loneliness of his life, they thought of a thousand forgotten
acts and moments--and always there was something that now seemed
unearthly and strange: he walked through their lives like a shadow--they
looked now upon his grey deserted shell with a thrill of awful
recognition, as one who remembers a forgotten and enchanted word, or as
men who look upon a corpse and see for the first time a departed god.

Luke, who had been standing at the foot of the bed, now turned to Eugene
nervously, stammering in an unreal whisper of wonder and disbelief:

"I g-g-g-guess Ben's gone."

Gant had grown very quiet: he sat in the darkness at the foot of the
bed, leaning forward upon his cane, escaped from the reverie of his own
approaching death, into the waste land of the past, blazing back sadly
and poignantly the trail across the lost years that led to the birth of
his strange son.

Helen sat facing the bed, in the darkness near the windows. Her eyes
rested not on Ben but on her mother's face. All by unspoken consent
stood back in the shadows and let Eliza repossess the flesh to which she
had given life.

And Eliza, now that he could deny her no longer, now that his fierce
bright eyes could no longer turn from her in pain and aversion, sat near
his head beside him, clutching his cold hand between her rough worn
palms.

She did not seem conscious of the life around her. She seemed under a
powerful hypnosis: she sat very stiff and erect in her chair, her white
face set stonily, her dull black eyes fixed upon the grey cold face.

They sat waiting. Midnight came. A cock crew. Eugene went quietly to a
window and stood looking out. The great beast of night prowled softly
about the house. The walls, the windows seemed to bend inward from the
thrusting pressure of the dark. The low noise in the wasted body seemed
almost to have stopped. It came infrequently, almost inaudibly, with a
faint fluttering respiration.

Helen made a sign to Gant and Luke. They rose and went quietly out. At
the door she paused, and beckoned to Eugene. He went to her.

"You stay here with her," she said. "You're her youngest. When it's over
come and tell us."

He nodded, and closed the door behind her. When they had gone, he
waited, listening for a moment. Then he went to where Eliza was sitting.
He bent over her.

"Mamma!" he whispered. "Mamma!"

She gave no sign that she had heard him. Her face did not move; she did
not turn her eyes from their fixed stare.

"Mamma!" he said more loudly. "Mamma!"

He touched her. She made no response.

"Mamma! Mamma!"

She sat there stiffly and primly like a little child.

Swarming pity rose in him. Gently, desperately, he tried to detach her
fingers from Ben's hand. Her rough clasp on the cold hand tightened.
Then, slowly, stonily, from right to left, without expression, she shook
her head.

He fell back, beaten, weeping before that implacable gesture. Suddenly,
with horror, he saw that she was watching her own death, that the
unloosening grip of her hand on Ben's hand was an act of union with her
own flesh, that, for her, Ben was not dying--but that a part of _her_,
of _her_ life, _her_ blood, _her_ body, was dying. Part of her, the
younger, the lovelier, the better part, coined in her flesh, borne and
nourished and begun with so much pain there twenty-six years before, and
forgotten since, was dying.

Eugene stumbled to the other side of the bed and fell upon his knees. He
began to pray. He did not believe in God, nor in Heaven or Hell, but he
was afraid they might be true. He did not believe in angels with soft
faces and bright wings, but he believed in the dark spirits that hovered
above the heads of lonely men. He did not believe in devils or angels,
but he believed in Ben's bright demon to whom he had seen him speak so
many times.

Eugene did not believe in these things, but he was afraid they might be
true. He was afraid that Ben would get lost again. He felt that no one
but he could pray for Ben now: that the dark union of their spirits
made only _his_ prayers valid. All that he had read in books, all the
tranquil wisdom he had professed so glibly in his philosophy course, and
the great names of Plato and Plotinus, of Spinoza and Immanuel Kant, of
Hegel and Descartes, left him now, under the mastering surge of his wild
Celtic superstition. He felt that he must pray frantically as long as
the little ebbing flicker of breath remained in his brother's body.

So, with insane sing-song repetition, he began to mutter over and over
again: "Whoever You Are, be good to Ben to-night. Show him the way ...
Whoever You Are, be good to Ben to-night. Show him the way ..." He lost
count of the minutes, the hours: he heard only the feeble rattle of
dying breath, and his wild synchronic prayer.

Light faded from his brain, and consciousness. Fatigue and powerful
nervous depletion conquered him. He sprawled out on the floor, with
his arms pillowed on the bed, muttering drowsily, Eliza, unmoving, sat
across the bed, holding Ben's hand. Eugene, mumbling, sank into an
uneasy sleep.

He awoke suddenly, conscious that he had slept, with a sharp quickening
of horror. He was afraid that the little fluttering breath had now
ceased entirely, that the effect of his prayer was lost. The body on
the bed was almost rigid: there was no sound. Then, unevenly, without
rhythm, there was a faint mutter of breath. He knew it was the end. He
rose quickly and ran to the door. Across the hall, in a cold bedroom, on
two wide beds, Gant, Luke, and Helen lay exhausted.

"Come," cried Eugene. "He's going now."

They came quickly into the room. Eliza sat unmoving, oblivious of them.
As they entered the room, they heard, like a faint expiring sigh, the
final movement of breath.

The rattling in the wasted body, which seemed for hours to have given
over to death all of life that is worth saving, had now ceased. The
body appeared to grow rigid before them. Slowly, after a moment, Eliza
withdrew her hands. But suddenly, marvellously, as if his resurrection
and rebirth had come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in a long and
powerful respiration; his grey eyes opened. Filled with a terrible
vision of all life in the one moment, he seemed to rise forward
bodilessly from his pillows without support--a flame, a light, a
glory--joined at length in death to the dark spirit who had brooded upon
each footstep of his lonely adventure on earth; and, casting the fierce
sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room
haunted with its grey pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and
on all those uncertain mummers of waste and confusion fading now from
the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornful and
unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.

We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the
nothingness of death and of life after death--but who can believe in the
nothingness of Ben? Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in
the sad house of King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into
the grey hovel of this world. And he lived here a stranger, trying
to recapture the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great
forgotten language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door.

O Artemidorus, farewell!




XXXVI


In that enormous silence, where pain and darkness met, some birds were
waking. It was October. It was almost four o'clock in the morning. Eliza
straightened out Ben's limbs, and folded his hands across his body. She
smoothed out the rumpled covers of the bed, and patted out the pillows,
making a smooth hollow for his head to rest in. His flashing hair,
cropped close to his well-shaped head, was crisp and crinkly as a boy's,
and shone with bright points of light. With a pair of scissors, she
snipped off a little lock where it would not show.

"Grover's was black as a raven's without a kink in it. You'd never have
known they were twins," she said.

They went downstairs to the kitchen.

"Well, Eliza," said Gant, calling her by name for the first time in
thirty years, "you've had a hard life. If I'd acted different, we might
have got along together. Let's try to make the most of what time's left.
Nobody is blaming you. Taking it all in all, you've done pretty well."

"There are a great many things I'd like to do over again," said Eliza
gravely. She shook her head. "We never know."

"We'll talk about it some other time," said Helen. "I guess every one is
worn out. I know I am. I'm going to get some sleep. Papa, go on to bed,
in heaven's name! There's nothing you can do now. Mamma, I think you'd
better go, too----"

"No," said Eliza, shaking her head. "You children go on. I couldn't
sleep now anyway. There are too many things to do. I'm going to call up
John Hines now."

"Tell him," said Gant, "to spare no expense. I'll foot the bills."

"Well," said Helen, "whatever it costs, let's give Ben a good funeral.
It's the last thing we can ever do for him. I want to have no regrets on
that score."

"Yes," said Eliza, nodding slowly. "I want the best one that money will
buy. I'll make arrangements with John Hines when I talk to him. You
children go on to bed now."

"Poor old 'Gene," said Helen, laughing. "He looks like the last rose of
summer. He's worn out. You pile in and get some sleep, honey."

"No," he said, "I'm hungry. I haven't had anything to eat since I left
the university."

"Well, for G-G-G-God's sake!" Luke stuttered. "Why didn't you speak,
idiot? I'd have got you something. Come on," he said, grinning. "I
wouldn't mind a bite myself. Let's go uptown and eat."

"Yes," said Eugene. "I'd like to get out for a while from the bosom of
the family circle."

They laughed crazily. He poked around the stove for a moment, peering
into the oven.

"Huh? Hah? What are you after, boy?" said Eliza, suspiciously.

"What you got good to eat, Miss Eliza?" he said, leering crazily at her.
He looked at the sailor: they burst into loud idiot laughter, pronging
each other in the ribs. Eugene picked up a coffee-pot half-filled with a
cold weak wash, and sniffed at it.

"By God!" he said. "That's one thing Ben's out of. He won't have to
drink mamma's coffee any more."

"Whah-whah-whah!" said the sailor.

Gant grinned, wetting a thumb.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," said Helen, with a hoarse
snigger. "Poor old Ben!"

"Why, what's wrong with that coffee?" said Eliza, vexed. "It's _good_
coffee."

They howled. Eliza pursed her lips for a moment.

"I don't like that way of talking, boy," she said. Her eyes blurred
suddenly. Eugene seized her rough hand and kissed it.

"It's all right, mamma!" he said. "It's all right. I didn't mean it!" He
put his arms around her. She wept, suddenly and bitterly.

"Nobody ever knew him. He never told us about himself. He was the quiet
one. I've lost them both now." Then, drying her eyes, she added:

"You boys go get something to eat. A little walk will do you good. And,
say," she added, "why don't you go by _The Citizen_ office? They ought
to be told. They've been calling up every day to find out about him."

"They thought a lot of that boy," said Gant.

They were tired, but they all felt an enormous relief. For over a day,
each had known that death was inevitable, and after the horror of the
incessant strangling gasp, this peace, this end of pain touched them all
with a profound, a weary joy.

"Well, Ben's gone," said Helen slowly. Her eyes were wet, but she wept
quietly now, with gentle grief, with love. "I'm glad it's over. Poor old
Ben! I never got to know him until these last few days. He was the best
of the lot. Thank God, he's out of it now."

Eugene thought of death now, with love, with joy. Death was like a
lovely and tender woman, Ben's friend and lover, who had come to free
him, to heal him, to save him from the torture of life.

They stood there together, without speaking, in Eliza's littered
kitchen, and their eyes were blind with tears, because they thought of
lovely and delicate death, and because they loved one another.


Eugene and Luke went softly up the hall, and out into the dark. Gently
they closed the big front door behind them, and descended the veranda
steps. In that enormous silence, birds were waking. It was a little
after four o'clock in the morning. Wind pressed the boughs. It was still
dark. But above them the thick clouds that had covered the earth for
days with a dreary grey blanket had been torn open. Eugene looked up
through the deep ragged vault of the sky and saw the proud and splendid
stars, bright and unwinking. The withered leaves were shaking.

A cock crew his shrill morning cry of life beginning and awaking. The
cock that crew at midnight (thought Eugene) had an elfin ghostly cry.
His crow was drugged with sleep and death: it was like a far horn
sounding under sea; and it was a warning to all the men who are about
to die, and to the ghosts that must go home.

But the cock that crows at morning (he thought), has a voice as shrill
as any life. It says, we are done with sleep. We are done with death. O
waken, waken into life, says his voice as shrill as any fife. In that
enormous silence, birds were waking.

He heard the cock's bright minstrelsy again, and by the river in the
dark, the great thunder of flanked wheels, and the long retreating wail
of the whistle. And slowly, up the chill deserted street, he heard the
heavy ringing clangour of shod hoofs. In that enormous silence, life was
waking.

Joy awoke in him, and exultation. They had escaped from the prison
of death; they were joined to the bright engine of life again. Life,
ruddered life, that would not fail, began its myriad embarkations.

A paper-boy came briskly, with the stiff hobbled limp that Eugene
knew so well, down the centre of the street, hurling a blocked paper
accurately upon the porch of the Brunswick. As he came opposite
Dixieland, he moved in to the curb, tossing his fresh paper with a
careful plop. He knew there was sickness in the house.

The withered leaves were shaking.

Eugene jumped to the sidewalk from the sodded yard. He stopped the
carrier.

"What's your name, boy?" he said.

"Tyson Smathers," said the boy, turning upon him a steady Scotch-Irish
face that was full of life and business.

"My name is 'Gene Gant. Did you ever hear of me?"

"Yes," said Tyson Smathers, "I've heard of you. You had number 7."

"That was a long time ago," said Eugene, pompously, grinning. "I was
just a boy."

In that enormous silence, birds were waking.

He thrust his hand into a pocket and found a dollar-bill.

"Here," he said. "I carried the damn things once. Next to my brother
Ben, I was the best boy they ever had. Merry Christmas, Tyson."

"It ain't Christmas yet," said Tyson Smathers.

"You're right, Tyson," said Eugene, "but it will be."

Tyson Smathers took the money, with a puzzled, freckled grin. Then he
went on down the street, throwing papers.

The maples were thin and sere. Their rotting leaves covered the ground.
But the trees were not leafless yet. The leaves were quaking. Some birds
began to chatter in the trees. Wind pressed the boughs, the withered
leaves were shaking. It was October.

As Luke and Eugene turned up the street toward town, a woman came out of
the big brick house across the street, and over the yard toward them.
When she got near, they saw she was Mrs. Pert. It was October, but some
birds were waking.

"Luke," she said fuzzily. "Luke? Is it Old Luke?"

"Yes," said Luke.

"And 'Gene? Is it old 'Gene?" She laughed gently, patting his hand,
peering comically at him with her bleared oaken eyes, and swaying back
and forth gravely, with alcoholic dignity. The leaves, the withered
leaves, were shaking, quaking. It was October, and the leaves were
shaking.

"They ran old Fatty away, 'Gene," she said. "They won't let her come in
the house any more. They ran her away because she liked Old Ben. Ben.
Old Ben." She swayed gently, vaguely, collecting her thought. "Old Ben.
How's Old Ben, 'Gene?" she coaxed. "Fatty wants to know."

"I'm m-m-m-mighty sorry, Mrs. P-P-P-Pert ..." Luke began.

Wind pressed the boughs, the withered leaves were quaking.

"Ben's dead," said Eugene.

She stared at him for a moment, swaying on her feet.

"Fatty liked Ben," she said gently, in a moment. "Fatty and Old Ben were
friends."

She turned and started unsteadily across the street, holding one hand
out gravely, for balance.

In that enormous silence, birds were waking. It was October, but some
birds were waking.


Then Luke and Eugene walked swiftly townward, filled with great joy
because they heard the sounds of life and daybreak. And as they walked,
they spoke often of Ben, with laughter, with old pleasant memory,
speaking of him not as of one who had died, but as of a brother who
had been gone for years, and was returning home. They spoke of him
with triumph and tenderness, as of one who had defeated pain, and had
joyously escaped. Eugene's mind groped awkwardly about. It fumbled like
a child, with little things.

They were filled with a deep and tranquil affection for each other: they
talked without constraint, without affectation, with quiet confidence
and knowledge.

"Do you remember," Luke began, "the t-t-t-time he cut the hair of Aunt
Pett's orphan boy--Marcus?"

"He--used--a chamber-pot--to trim the edges," Eugene screamed, waking
the street with wild laughter.

They walked along hilariously, greeting a few early pedestrians with
ironical obsequiousness, jeering pleasantly at the world in brotherly
alliance. Then they entered the relaxed and weary offices of the paper
which Ben had served so many years, and gave their stick of news to the
tired man there.

There was regret, a sense of wonder, in that office where the swift
record of so many days had died--a memory that would not die, of
something strange and passing.

"Damn! I'm sorry! He was a great boy!" said the men.

As light broke greyly in the empty streets, and the first car rattled up
to town, they entered the little beanery where he had spent, in smoke
and coffee, so many hours of daybreak.

Eugene looked in and saw them there, assembled as they had been many
years before, like the nightmare ratification of a prophecy: McGuire,
Coker, the weary counter-man, and, at the lower end, the pressman, Harry
Tugman.

Luke and Eugene entered, and sat down at the counter.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," said Luke sonorously.

"Hello, Luke," barked McGuire. "Do you think you'll ever have any sense?
How are you, son? How's school?" he said to Eugene. He stared at them
for a moment, his wet cigarette plastered comically on his full sag lip,
his bleared eyes kindly and drunken.

"General, how's the boy? What're you drinking these days--turpentine
or varnish?" said the sailor, tweaking him roughly in his larded ribs.
McGuire grunted.

"Is it over, son?" said Coker quietly.

"Yes," said Eugene.

Coker took the long cigar from his mouth and grinned malarially at the
boy.

"Feel better, don't you, son?" he said.

"Yes," said Eugene. "A hell of a lot."

"Well, Eugenics," said the sailor briskly, "what are you eating?"

"What's the man got?" said Eugene, staring at the greasy card. "Have you
got any young roast whale left?"

"No," said the counter-man. "We did have some, but we run out."

"How about the fricasseed bull?" said Luke. "Have you got any of that?"

"You don't need any one to fricassee your bull, son," said McGuire.
"You've got plenty as it is."

Their bull-laughter bellowed in the beanery.

With puckered forehead, Luke stuttered over the menu.

"F-f-f-fried chicken a la Maryland," he muttered. "A la Maryland?" he
repeated as if puzzled. "Now, ain't that nice?" he said, looking around
with mincing daintiness.

"Bring me one of your this week's steaks," said Eugene, "well done, with
a meat-axe and the sausage-grinder."

"What do you want the sausage-grinder for, son?" said Coker.

"That's for the mince pie," said Eugene.

"Make it two," said Luke, "with a coupla cups of Mock-a, just like
mother still makes."

He looked crazily around at Eugene, and burst into loud whah-whahs,
prodding him in the ribs.

"Where they got you stationed now, Luke?" said Harry Tugman, peering up
snoutily from a mug of coffee.

"At the p-p-p-present time in Norfolk at the Navy Base," Luke answered,
"m-m-making the world safe for hypocrisy."

"Do you ever get out to sea, son?" said Coker.

"Sure!" said Luke. "A f-f-five-cent ride on the street-car brings me
right out to the beach."

"That boy has had the makings of a sailor in him ever since he wet the
bed," said McGuire. "I predicted it long ago."

Horse Hines came in briskly, but checked himself when he saw the two
young men.

"Look out!" whispered the sailor to Eugene, with a crazy grin. "You're
next! He's got his fishy eye glued on you. He's already getting you
measured up for one."

Eugene looked angrily around at Horse Hines, muttering. The sailor
chortled madly.

"Good morning, gentlemen," said Horse Hines, in an accent of refined
sadness. "Boys," he said, coming up to them sorrowfully, "I was mighty
sorry to hear of your trouble. I couldn't have thought more of that boy
if he'd been my own brother."

"Don't go on, Horse," said McGuire, holding up four fat fingers of
protest. "We can see you're heart-broken. If you go on, you may get
hysterical with your grief, and break right out laughing. We couldn't
bear that, Horse. We're big strong men, but we've had hard lives. I beg
of you to spare us, Horse."

Horse Hines did not notice him.

"I've got him over at the place now," he said softly. "I want you boys
to come in later in the day to see him. You won't know he's the same
person when I'm through."

"God! An improvement over nature," said Coker. "His mother will
appreciate it."

"Is this an undertaking shop you're running, Horse," said McGuire, "or a
beauty parlour?"

"We know you'll d-d-do your best, Mr. Hines," said the sailor with ready
earnest insincerity. "That's the reason the family got you."

"Ain't you goin' to eat the rest of your steak?" said the counterman to
Eugene.

"Steak! Steak! It's not steak!" muttered Eugene. "I know what it is
now." He got off the stool and walked over to Coker. "Can you save me?
Am I going to die? Do I look sick, Coker?" he said in a hoarse mutter.

"No, son," said Coker. "Not sick--crazy."

Horse Hines took his seat at the other end of the counter. Eugene,
leaning upon the greasy marble counter, began to sing:

  "Hey, ho, the carrion crow,
   Derry, derry, derry, derr--oh!"

"Shut up, you damn fool!" said the sailor in a hoarse whisper, grinning.

  "A carrion crow sat on a rock,
   Derry, derry, derry, derr--oh!"

Outside, in the young grey light, there was a brisk wakening of life. A
street-car curved slowly into the avenue, the motor-man leaning from his
window and shifting the switch carefully with a long rod, blowing the
warm fog of his breath into the chill air. Patrolman Leslie Roberts,
sallow and liverish, slouched by anmically, swinging his club. The
negro man-of-all-work for Wood's pharmacy walked briskly into the
post office to collect the morning mail. J. T. Stearns, the railway
passenger-agent, waited on the curb across the street for the depot car.
He had a red face, and he was reading the morning paper.

"There they go!" Eugene cried suddenly. "As if they didn't know about
it!"

"Luke," said Harry Tugman, looking up from his paper, "I was certainly
sorry to hear about Ben. He was one fine boy." Then he went back to his
sheet.

"By God!" said Eugene. "This is news!"

He burst into a fit of laughter, gasping and uncontrollable, which came
from him with savage violence. Horse Hines glanced craftily up at him.
Then he went back to his paper.


The two young men left the lunch-room and walked homeward through the
brisk morning. Eugene's mind kept fumbling with little things. There was
a frosty snap and clatter of life upon the streets, the lean rattle of
wheels, the creak of blinds, a cold rose-tint of pearled sky. In the
Square, the motor-men stood about among their cars, in loud foggy gossip.
At Dixieland, there was an air of exhaustion, of nervous depletion. The
house slept; Eliza alone was stirring, but she had a smart fire crackling
in the range, and was full of business.

"You children go and sleep now. We've all got work to do later in the
day."

Luke and Eugene went into the big dining-room which Eliza had converted
into a bedroom.

"D-d-d-damn if I'm going to sleep upstairs," said the sailor, angrily.
"Not after this!"

"Pshaw!" said Eliza. "That's only superstition. It wouldn't bother me a
bit."


The brothers slept heavily until past noon. Then they went out again to
see Horse Hines. They found him with his legs comfortably disposed on
the desk of his dark little office, with its odour of weeping ferns, and
incense, and old carnations.

He got up quickly as they entered, with a starchy crackle of his hard
boiled shirt, and a solemn rustle of his black garments. Then he began
to speak to them in a hushed voice, bending forward slightly.

How like Death this man is (thought Eugene). He thought of the awful
mysteries of burial--the dark ghoul-ritual, the obscene communion with
the dead, touched with some black and foul witch-magic. Where is the can
in which they throw the parts? There is a restaurant near here. Then
he took the cold phthisic hand, freckled on its back, that the man
extended, with a sense of having touched something embalmed. The
undertaker's manner had changed since the morning: it had become
official, professional. He was the alert marshal of their grief, the
efficient master-of-ceremonies. Subtly he made them feel there was an
order and decorum in death: a ritual of mourning that must be observed.
They were impressed.

"We thought we'd like to s-s-s-see you f-f-f-first, Mr. Hines, about
the c-c-c-c-casket," Luke whispered nervously. "We're going to ask your
advice. We want you to help us find something appropriate."

Horse Hines nodded with grave approval. Then he led them softly back,
into a large dark room with polished waxen floors where, amid a rich
dead smell of wood and velvet, upon wheeled trestles, the splendid
coffins lay in their proud menace.

"Now," said Horse Hines quietly, "I know the family doesn't want
anything cheap."

"No, sir!" said the sailor, positively. "We want the b-b-b-best you
have."

"I take a personal interest in this funeral," said Horse Hines with
gentle emotion. "I have known the Gant and Pentland families for thirty
years or more. I have had business dealings with your father for nigh on
to twenty years."

"And I w-w-want you to know, Mr. Hines, that the f-f-f-family
appreciates the interest you're taking in this," said the sailor, very
earnestly.

He likes this, Eugene thought. The affection of the world. He must have
it.

"Your father," continued Horse Hines, "is one of the oldest and most
respected business men in the community. And the Pentland family is one
of the wealthiest and most prominent."

Eugene was touched with a moment's glow of pride.

"You don't want anything shoddy," said Horse Hines. "I know that.
What you get ought to be in good taste and have dignity. Am I right?"

Luke nodded emphatically.

"That's the way we feel about it, Mr. Hines. We want the best you have.
We're not pinching p-p-p-pennies where Ben's concerned," he said
proudly.

"Well, then," said Horse Hines, "I'll give you my honest opinion. I
could give you this one cheap," he placed his hand upon one of the
caskets, "but I don't think it's what you want. Of course," he said,
"it's good at the price. It's worth the money. It'll give you service,
don't worry. You'll get value out of it----"

Now there's an idea, thought Eugene.

"They're all good, Luke. I haven't got a bad piece of stock in the
place. But----"

"We want something b-b-b-better," said Luke earnestly. He turned to
Eugene. "Don't you think so, 'Gene?"

"Yes," said Eugene.

"Well," said Horse Hines, "I could sell you this one," he indicated the
most sumptuous casket in the room. "They don't come better than that,
Luke. That's the top. She's worth every dollar I ask for her."

"All right," said Luke. "You're the judge. If that's the best you've
g-g-g-got, we'll take it."

No, no! thought Eugene. You mustn't interrupt. Let him go on.

"But," said Horse Hines relentlessly, "there's no need for you to take
that one, either. What you're after, Luke, is dignity and simplicity. Is
that right?"

"Yes," said the sailor meekly, "I guess you're right at that, Mr. Hines."

Now we'll have it, thought Eugene. This man takes joy in his work.

"Well, then," said Horse Hines decisively, "I was going to suggest to
you boys that you take this one." He put his hand affectionately upon a
handsome casket at his side.

"This is neither too plain nor too fancy. It's simple and in good taste.
Silver handles, you see--silver plate here for the name. You can't go
wrong on this one. It's a good buy. She'll give you value for every
dollar you put into it."

They walked around the coffin, staring at it critically.

After a moment, Luke said nervously:

"How--wh--wh--wh-what's the price of this one?"

"That sells for $450," said Horse Hines. "But," he added, after a
moment's dark reflection, "I'll tell you what I'll do. Your father and I
are old friends. Out of respect for the family, I'll let you have it at
cost--$375."

"What do you say, 'Gene?" the sailor asked. "Does it look all right to
you?"

Do your Christmas shopping early.

"Yes," said Eugene, "let's take it. I wish there were another colour. I
don't like black," he added. "Haven't you got any other colour?"

Horse Hines stared at him for a moment.

"Black _is_ the colour," he said.

Then, after a moment's silence, he went on:

"Would you boys care to see the body?"

"Yes," they said.

He led them on tiptoe down the aisle of the coffins, and opened a
door to a room behind. It was dark. They entered and stood with caught
breath. Horse Hines switched on a light and closed the door.

Ben, clad in his best suit of clothes, a neat one of dark grey-black,
lay in rigid tranquillity upon a table. His hands, cold and white, with
clean dry nails, withered a little like an old apple, were crossed
loosely on his stomach. He had been closely shaved: he was immaculately
groomed. The rigid head was thrust sharply upward, with a ghastly
counterfeit of a smile: there was a little gum of wax at the nostrils,
and a waxen lacing between the cold firm lips. The mouth was tight,
somewhat bulging. It looked fuller than it ever had looked before.

There was a faint indefinably cloying odour.

The sailor looked with superstition, nervously, with puckered forehead.
Then he whispered to Eugene:

"I g-g-guess that's Ben, all right."

Because, Eugene thought, it is not Ben, and we are lost. He looked at
that cold bright carrion, that bungling semblance which had not even the
power of a good wax-work to suggest its image. Nothing of Ben could be
buried here. In this poor stuffed crow, with its pathetic barbering, and
its neat buttons, nothing of the owner had been left. All that was there
was the tailoring of Horse Hines, who now stood by, watchfully, hungry
for their praise.

No, this is not Ben (Eugene thought). No trace of him is left in this
deserted shell. It bears no mark of him. Where has he gone? Is this his
bright particular flesh, made in his image, given life by his unique
gesture, by his one soul? No, he is gone from that bright flesh. This
thing is one with all carrion; it will be mixed with the earth again.
Ben? Where? O lost!

The sailor, looking, said:

"That b-b-b-boy sure suffered." Suddenly, turning his face away into
his hand, he sobbed briefly and painfully, his confused stammering life
drawn out of its sprawl into a moment of hard grief.

Eugene wept, not because he saw Ben there, but because Ben had gone, and
because he remembered all the tumult and the pain.

"It is over now," said Horse Hines gently. "He is at peace."

"By God, Mr. Hines," said the sailor earnestly, as he wiped his eyes on
his jacket, "that was one g-g-great boy."

Horse Hines looked raptly at the cold strange face.

"A fine boy," he murmured as his fish-eye fell tenderly on his work.
"And I have tried to do him justice."

They were silent for a moment, looking.

"You've d-d-done a fine job," said the sailor. "I've got to hand it to
you. What do you say, 'Gene?"

"Yes," said Eugene, in a small choking voice. "Yes."

"He's a b-b-b-bit p-p-p-pale, don't you think?" the sailor stammered,
barely conscious of what he was saying.

"Just a moment!" said Horse Hines quickly, lifting a finger. Briskly he
took a stick of rouge from his pocket, stepped forward, and deftly,
swiftly, sketched upon the dead grey cheeks a ghastly rose-hued mockery
of life and health.

"There!" he said, with deep satisfaction; and, rouge-stick in hand, head
critically cocked, like a painter before his canvas, he stepped back
into the terrible staring prison of their horror.

"There are artists, boys, in every profession," Horse Hines continued in
a moment, with quiet pride, "and though I do say it myself, Luke, I'm
proud of my work on this job. Look at him!" he exclaimed with sudden
energy, and a bit of colour in his grey face. "Did you ever see anything
more natural in your life?"

Eugene turned upon the man a grim and purple stare, noting with pity,
with a sort of tenderness, as the dogs of laughter tugged at his
straining throat, the earnestness and pride in the long horse-face.

"Look at it!" said Horse Hines again in slow wonder. "I'll never beat
that again! Not if I live to be a million! That's art, boys!"

A slow strangling gurgle escaped from Eugene's screwed lips. The sailor
looked quickly at him, with a crazy suppressed smile.

"What's the matter?" he said warningly. "Don't fool!" His grin broke
loose.

Eugene staggered across the floor and collapsed upon a chair, roaring
with laughter while his long arms flapped helplessly at his sides.

"Scuse!" he gasped. "Don't mean to--A-r-rt! Yes! Yes! That's it!" he
screamed, and he beat his knuckles in a crazy tattoo upon the polished
floor. He slid gently off the chair, slowly unbuttoning his vest, and
with a languid hand loosening his neck-tie. A faint gurgle came from his
weary throat, his head lolled around on the floor languidly, tears
coursed down his swollen features.

"What's wrong with you? Are you c-c-c-crazy?" said the sailor, all
a-grin.

Horse Hines bent sympathetically and assisted the boy to his feet.

"It's the strain," he said knowingly to the sailor. "The pore fellow has
become hysterical."




XXXVII


So, to Ben dead was given more care, more time, more money than had ever
been given to Ben living. His burial was a final gesture of irony and
futility: an effort to compensate carrion death for the unpaid wage of
life--love and mercy. He had a grand funeral. All the Pentlands sent
wreaths, and came with their separate clans, bringing along with their
hastily assumed funeral manners a smell of recent business. Will
Pentland talked with the men about politics, the war, and trade
conditions, paring his nails thoughtfully, pursing his lips and nodding
in his curiously reflective way, and occasionally punning with a birdy
wink. His pleased self-laughter was mixed with Henry's loud guffaw.
Pett, older, kinder, gentler than Eugene had ever seen her, moved about
with a rustling of grey silk, and a relaxed bitterness. And Jim was
there, with his wife, whose name Eugene forgot, and his four bright
hefty daughters, whose names he confused, but who had all been to
college and done well, and his son, who had been to a Presbyterian
college, and had been expelled for advocating free love and socialism
while editor of the college paper. Now he played the violin, and loved
music, and helped his father with the business: he was an effeminate and
mincing young man, but of the breed. And there was Thaddeus Pentland,
Will's book-keeper, the youngest and poorest of the three. He was a man
past fifty, with a pleasant red face, brown moustaches, and a gentle
placid manner. He was full of puns and pleased good nature, save when he
quoted from Karl Marx and Eugene Debs. He was a Socialist, and had once
received eight votes for Congress. He was there with his garrulous wife
(whom Helen called Jibber-Jibber) and his two daughters, languid
good-looking blondes of twenty and twenty-four.

There they were, in all their glory--that strange rich clan, with its
fantastic mixture of success and impracticality, its hard monied sense,
its visionary fanaticism. There they were, in their astonishing
contradictions: the business man who had no business method, and yet
had made his million dollars; the frantic antagonist of Capital who
had given the loyal service of a lifetime to the thing he denounced;
the wastrel son, with the bull vitality of the athlete, a great laugh,
animal charm--no more; the musician son, a college rebel, intelligent,
fanatic, with a good head for figures; insane miserliness for oneself,
lavish expenditure for one's children.

There they were, each with the familiar marking of the clan--broad nose,
full lips, deep flat cheeks, deliberate pursed mouths, flat drawling
voices, flat complacent laughter. There they were, with their enormous
vitality, their tainted blood, their meaty health, their sanity, their
insanity, their humour, their superstition, their meanness, their
generosity, their fanatic idealism, their unyielding materialism. There
they were, smelling of the earth and Parnassus--that strange clan which
met only at weddings or funerals, but which was forever true to itself,
indissoluble and forever apart, with its melancholia, its madness, its
mirth: more enduring than life, more strong than death.

And as Eugene looked, he felt again the nightmare horror of destiny: he
was of them--there was no escape. Their lust, their weakness, their
sensuality, their fanaticism, their strength, their rich taint, were
rooted in the marrow of his bones.

But Ben, with the thin grey face (he thought) was not a part of them.
Their mark was nowhere on him.

And among them, sick and old, leaning upon his cane, moved Gant, the
alien, the stranger. He was lost and sorrowful, but sometimes, with a
flash of his old rhetoric, he spoke of his grief and the death of his
son.

The women filled the house with their moaning. Eliza wept almost
constantly; Helen by fits, in loose hysterical collapse. And all the
other women wept with gusto, comforting Eliza and her daughter, falling
into one another's arms, wailing with keen hunger. And the men stood
sadly about, dressed in their good clothes, wondering when it would be
over. Ben lay in the parlour, bedded in his expensive coffin. The room
was heavy with the incense of the funeral flowers.

Presently the Scotch minister arrived: his decent soul lay above all the
loud posturings of grief like a bolt of hard clean wool. He began the
service for the dead in a dry nasal voice, remote, monotonous, cold, and
passionate.

Then, marshalled by Horse Hines, the pallbearers, young men from the
paper and the town, who had known the dead man best, moved slowly out,
gripping the coffin-handles with their nicotined fingers. In proper
sequence, the mourners followed, lengthening out in closed victorias
that exhaled their funeral scent of stale air and old leather.

To Eugene came again the old ghoul fantasy of a corpse and cold pork,
the smell of the dead and hamburger steak--the glozed corruption of
Christian burial, the obscene pomps, the perfumed carrion. Slightly
nauseated, he took his seat with Eliza in the carriage, and tried to
think of supper.

The procession moved off briskly to the smooth trotting pull of the
velvet rumps. The mourning women peered out of the closed carriages at
the gaping town. They wept behind their heavy veils, and looked to see
if the town was watching. Behind the world's great mask of grief, the
eyes of the mourners shone through with a terrible and indecent hunger,
an unnameable lust.

It was raw October weather--grey and wet. The service had been short, as
a precaution against the pestilence which was everywhere. The funeral
entered the cemetery. It was a pleasant place, on a hill. There was a
good view of the town. As the hearse drove up, two men who had been
digging the grave, moved off. The women moaned loudly when they saw the
raw open ditch.

Slowly the coffin was lowered on to the bands that crossed the grave.

Again Eugene heard the nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The
boy's mind fumbled at little things. Horse Hines bent ceremoniously,
with a starched crackle of shirt, to throw his handful of dirt into
the grave. "Ashes to ashes----" He reeled and would have fallen in
if Gilbert Gant had not held him. He had been drinking. "I am the
resurrection and the life----" Helen wept constantly, harshly and
bitterly. "He that believeth in me----" The sobs of the women rose to
sharp screams as the coffin slid down upon the bands into the earth.

Then the mourners got back into their carriages and were driven briskly
away. There was a fast indecent hurry about their escape. The long
barbarism of burial was at an end. As they drove away, Eugene peered
back through the little glass in the carriage. The two grave-diggers
were already returning to their work. He watched until the first shovel
of dirt had been thrown into the grave. He saw the raw new graves, the
sere long grasses, noted how quickly the mourning wreaths had wilted.
Then he looked at the wet grey sky. He hoped it would not rain that
night.


It was over. The carriages split away from the procession. The men
dropped off in the town at the newspaper office, the pharmacy, the
cigar-store. The women went home. No more. No more.

Night came, the bare swept streets, the gaunt winds. Helen lay before a
fire in Hugh Barton's house. She had a bottle of chloroform liniment
in her hand. She brooded morbidly into the fire, reliving the death a
hundred times, weeping bitterly and becoming calm again.

"When I think of it, I hate her. I shall never forget. And did you hear
her? Did you? Already she's begun to pretend how much he loved her. But
you can't fool me! I know! He wouldn't have her around. You saw that,
didn't you? He kept calling for me. I was the only one he'd let come
near him. You know that, don't you?"

"You're the one who always has to be the goat," said Hugh Barton sourly.
"I'm getting tired of it. That's what has worn you out. If they don't
leave you alone, I'm going to take you away from here."

Then he went back to his charts and pamphlets, frowning importantly over
a cigar, and scrawling figures on an old envelope with a stub of pencil
gripped between his fingers.

She has him trained, too, Eugene thought.

Then, hearing the sharp whine of the wind, she wept again.

"Poor old Ben," she said. "I can't bear to think of him out there
to-night."

She was silent for a moment, staring at the fire.

"After this, I'm through," she said. "They can get along for themselves.
Hugh and I have a right to our own lives. Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Eugene. I'm merely the chorus, he thought.

"Papa's not going to die," she went on. "I've nursed him like a slave
for six years, and he'll be here when I'm gone. Everyone was expecting
papa to die, but it was Ben who went. You never can tell. After this,
I'm through."

Her voice had a note of exasperation in it. They all felt the grim
trickery of Death, which had come in by the cellar while they waited at
the window.

"Papa has no right to expect it of me!" she burst out resentfully.
"He's had his life. He's an old man. We have a right to ours as well
as anyone. Good heavens! Can't they realise that! I'm married to Hugh
Barton! I'm _his_ wife!"

Are you? thought Eugene. Are you?


But Eliza sat before the fire at Dixieland with hands folded, reliving a
past of tenderness and love that never had been. And as the wind howled
in the bleak street, and Eliza wove a thousand fables of that lost and
bitter spirit, the bright and stricken thing in the boy twisted about in
horror, looking for escape from the house of death. No more! No more!
(it said). You are alone now. You are lost. Go find yourself, lost boy,
beyond the hills.

This little bright and stricken thing stood up on Eugene's heart and
talked into his mouth.

O but I can't go now, said Eugene to it. (Why not? it whispered.)
Because her face is so white, and her forehead is so broad and high,
with the black hair drawn back from it, and when she sat there at the
bed she looked like a little child. I can't go now and leave her here
alone. (She is alone, it said, and so are you.) And when she purses up
her mouth and stares, so grave and thoughtful, she is like a little
child. (You are alone now, it said. You must escape, or you will die.)
It is all like death: she fed me at her breast, I slept in the same bed
with her, she took me on her trips. All of that is over now, and each
time it was like a death. (And like a life, it said to him. Each time
that you die, you will be born again. And you will die a hundred times
before you become a man.) I can't! I can't! Not now--later, more slowly.
(No. Now, it said.) I am afraid. I have nowhere to go. (You must find
the place, it said.) I am lost. (You must hunt for yourself, it said.) I
am alone. Where are you? (You must find me, it said.)

Then, as the bright thing twisted about in him, Eugene heard the whine
of the bleak wind about the house that he must leave, and the voice of
Eliza calling up from the past the beautiful lost things that never
happened.

"--and I said, 'Why, what on earth, boy, you want to dress up warm
around your neck or you'll catch your death of cold.'"

Eugene caught at his throat, and plunged for the door.

"Here, boy! Where are you going?" said Eliza, looking up quickly.

"I've got to go," he said in a choking voice. "I've got to get away from
here."

Then he saw the fear in her eyes, and the grave troubled child's stare.
He rushed to where she sat and grasped her hand. She held him tightly
and laid her face against his arm.

"Don't go yet," she said. "You've all your life ahead of you. Stay with
me just a day or two."

"Yes, mamma," he said, falling to his knees. "Yes, mamma." He hugged her
to him frantically. "Yes, mamma. God bless you, mamma. It's all right,
mamma. It's all right."

Eliza wept bitterly.

"I'm an old woman," she said, "and one by one I've lost you all. He's
dead now, and I never got to know him. O son, don't leave me yet. You're
the only one that's left: you were my baby. Don't go! Don't go." She
laid her white face against his sleeve.

It is not hard to go (he thought). But when can we forget?


It was October and the leaves were quaking. Dusk was beginning. The sun
had gone, the western ranges faded in chill purple mist, but the western
sky still burned with ragged bands of orange. It was October.

Eugene walked swiftly along the sinuous paved curves of Rutledge Road.
There was a smell of fog and supper in the air: a warm moist blur at
window-panes, and the pungent sizzle of cookery. There were mist-far
voices, and a smell of burning leaves, and a warm yellow blur of lights.

He turned into an unpaved road by the big wooden sanatorium. He heard
the rich kitchen laughter of the negroes, the larded sizzle of food, the
dry veranda coughing of the lungers.

He walked briskly along the lumpy road, with a dry scuffling of leaves.
The air was a chill dusky pearl: above him a few pale stars were out.
The town and the house were behind him. There was a singing in the great
hill-pines.

Two women came down the road and passed him. He saw that they were
country women. They were dressed rustily in black, and one of them was
weeping. He thought of the men who had been laid in the earth that day,
and of all the women who wept. Will they come again? he wondered.

When he came to the gate of the cemetery he found it open. He went in
quickly and walked swiftly up the winding road that curved around the
crest of the hill. The grasses were dry and sere; a wilted wreath of
laurel lay upon a grave. As he approached the family plot, his pulse
quickened a little. Someone was moving slowly, deliberately, in among
the gravestones. But as he came up he saw that it was Mrs. Pert.

"Good-evening, Mrs. Pert," said Eugene.

"Who is it?" she asked, peering murkily. She came to him with her grave
unsteady step.

"It's 'Gene," he said.

"Oh, is it Old 'Gene?" she said. "How are you, 'Gene?"

"Pretty well," he said. He stood awkwardly, chilled, not knowing how to
continue. It was getting dark. There were long lonely preludes to winter
in the splendid pines, and a whistling of wind in the long grasses.
Below them, in the gulch, night had come. There was a negro settlement
there--Stumptown, it was called. The rich voices of Africa wailed up to
them their jungle dirge.

But in the distance, away on their level and above, on other hills, they
saw the town. Slowly, in twinkling nests, the lights of the town went
up, and there were frost-far voices, and music, and the laughter of a
girl.

"This is a nice place," said Eugene. "You get a nice view of the town
from here."

"Yes," said Mrs. Pert. "And Old Ben's got the nicest place of all. You
get a better view right here than anywhere else. I've been here before
in the daytime." In a moment she went on. "Old Ben will turn into lovely
flowers. Roses, I think."

"No," said Eugene, "dandelions--and big flowers with a lot of thorns on
them."

She stood looking about fuzzily for a moment, with the blurred gentle
smile on her lips.

"It is getting dark, Mrs. Pert," said Eugene hesitantly. "Are you out
here alone?"

"Alone? I've got Old 'Gene and Old Ben here, haven't I?" she said.

"Maybe we'd better go back, Mrs. Pert?" he said. "It's going to turn
cold to-night. I'll go with you."

"Fatty can go by herself," she said with dignity. "Don't worry, 'Gene.
I'll leave you alone."

"That's all right," said Eugene, confused. "We both came for the same
reason, I suppose."

"Yes," said Mrs. Pert. "Who'll be coming here this time next year, I
wonder? Will Old 'Gene come back then?"

"No," said Eugene. "No, Mrs. Pert. I shall never come here again."

"Nor I, 'Gene," she said. "When do you go back to school?"

"To-morrow," he said.

"Then Fatty will have to say good-bye," she said reproachfully. "I'm
going away too."

"Where are you going?" he asked, surprised.

"I'm going to live with my daughter in Tennessee. You didn't know Fatty
was a grandmother, did you?" she said, with her soft blurred smile.
"I've a little grandson two years old."

"I'm sorry to see you go," Eugene said.

Mrs. Pert was silent a moment, rocking vaguely upon her feet.

"What did they say was wrong with Ben?" she asked.

"He had pneumonia, Mrs. Pert," said Eugene.

"Oh, pneumonia! That's it!" She nodded her head wisely as if satisfied.
"My husband's a drug salesman, you know, but I never can remember all
the things that people have. Pneumonia."

She was silent again, reflecting.

"And when they shut you up in a box and put you in the ground, the way
they did Old Ben, what do they call that?" she asked with a soft
inquiring smile.

He did not laugh.

"They call that death, Mrs. Pert."

"Death! Yes, that's it," said Mrs. Pert brightly, nodding her head in
agreement. "That's one kind, 'Gene. There are some other kinds, too. Did
you know that?" She smiled at him.

"Yes," said Eugene. "I know that, Mrs. Pert."

She stretched out her hands suddenly to him, and clasped his cold
fingers. She did not smile any more.

"Good-bye, my dear," she said. "We both knew Ben, didn't we? God bless
you."

Then she turned and walked away down the road, at her portly uncertain
gait, and was lost in the gathering dark.

The great stars rode proudly up into heaven. And just over him, just
over the town, it seemed, there was one so rich and low he could have
touched it. Ben's grave had been that day freshly sodded: there was a
sharp cold smell of earth there. Eugene thought of Spring, and the
poignant and wordless odour of the elvish dandelions that would be
there. In the frosty dark, far-faint, there was the departing wail of a
whistle.

And suddenly, as he watched the lights wink cheerfully up in the town,
their warm message of the hived life of men brought to him a numb hunger
for all the words and the faces. He heard the far voices and laughter.
And on the distant road a powerful car, bending around the curve, cast
over him for a second, over that lonely hill of the dead, its great
shaft of light and life. In his numbed mind, which for days now had
fumbled curiously with little things, with little things alone, as a
child fumbles with blocks or with little things, a light was growing.

His mind gathered itself out of the wreckage of little things: out of
all that the world had shown or taught him he could remember now only
the great star above the town, and the light that had swung over the
hill, and the fresh sod upon Ben's grave, and the wind, and far sounds
and music, and Mrs. Pert.

Wind pressed the boughs, the withered leaves were shaking. It was
October, but the leaves were shaking. A star was shaking. A light was
waking. Wind was quaking. The star was far. The night, the light. The
light was bright. A chant, a song, the slow dance of the little things
within him. The star over the town, the light over the hill, the sod
over Ben, night over all. His mind fumbled with little things. Over us
all is something. Star, night, earth, light ... light ... O lost! ... a
stone ... a leaf ... a door ... O ghost!... a light ... a song ... a
light ... a light swings over the hill ... over us all ... a star shines
over the town ... over us all ... a light.

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again. But over us
all, over us all, over us all is--something.

Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were shaking. It was
October, but some leaves were shaking.

A light swings over the hill. (We shall not come again.) And over the
town a star. (Over us all, over us all that shall not come again.) And
over the day the dark. But over the darkness--what?

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.

Over the dawn a lark. (That shall not come again.) And wind and music
far. O lost! (It shall not come again.) And over your mouth the earth. O
ghost! But, over the darkness, what?

Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were quaking.

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again. It was October,
but we never shall come back again.

When will they come again? When will they come again?

The laurel, the lizard, and the stone will come no more. The women
weeping at the gate have gone and will not come again. And pain and
pride and death will pass, and will not come again. And light and dawn
will pass, and the star and the cry of a lark will pass, and will not
come again. And we shall pass, and shall not come again.

What things will come again? O Spring, the cruellest and fairest of the
seasons, will come again. And the strange and buried men will come
again, in flower and leaf the strange and buried men will come again,
and death and the dust will never come again, for death and the dust
will die. And Ben will come again, he will not die again, in flower and
leaf, in wind and music far, he will come back again.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!


It had grown dark. The frosty night blazed with great brilliant stars.
The lights in the town shone with sharp radiance. Presently, when he
had lain upon the cold earth for some time, Eugene got up and went away
toward the town.

Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were shaking.




XXXVIII


Three weeks after Eugene's return to the university the war ended. The
students cursed and took off their uniforms. But they rang the great
bronze bell, and built a bonfire on the campus, leaping around it like
dervishes.

Life fell back into civilian patterns. The grey back of winter was
broken: the Spring came through.

Eugene was a great man on the campus of the little university. He
plunged exultantly into the life of the place. He cried out in his
throat with his joy: all over the country, life was returning, reviving,
awaking. The young men were coming back to the campus. The leaves were
out in a tender green blur: the quilled jonquil spouted from the rich
black earth, and peach-bloom fell upon the shrill young isles of grass.
Everywhere life was returning, awaking, reviving. With victorious joy,
Eugene thought of the flowers above Ben's grave.

He was wild with ecstasy because the Spring had beaten death. The grief
of Ben sank to a forgotten depth in him. He was charged with the juice
of life and motion. He did not walk: he bounded along. He joined
everything he had not joined. He made funny speeches in chapel, at
smokers, at meetings of all sorts. He edited the paper, he wrote poems
and stories--he flung outward without pause or thought.

Sometimes at night he would rush across the country, beside a drunken
driver, to Exeter and Sydney, and there seek out the women behind the
chained lattices, calling to them in the fresh dawn-dusk of Spring his
young goat-cry of desire and hunger.

Lily! Louise! Ruth! Ellen! O mother of love, you cradle of birth and
living, whatever your billion names may be, I come, your son, your
lover. Stand, Maya, by your opened door, denned in the jungle web of
Niggertown.

Sometimes, when he walked softly by, he heard the young men talking in
their rooms of Eugene Gant. Eugene Gant was crazy. Eugene Gant was mad.
Oh, I (he thought) am Eugene Gant!

Then a voice said: "He didn't change his underwear for six weeks. One of
his fraternity brothers told me so." And another: "He takes a bath once
a month, whether he needs it or not." They laughed; one said then that
he was "brilliant"; they all agreed.

He caught the claw of his hand into his lean throat. They are talking
of me, of me! I am Eugene Gant--the conqueror of nations, lord of the
earth, the Siva of a thousand beautiful forms.

In nakedness and loneliness of soul he paced along the streets. Nobody
said, I know you. Nobody said, I am here. The vast wheel of life, of
which he was the hub, spun round.


Most of us think we're hell, thought Eugene. I do. I think I'm hell.
Then, in the dark campus path, he heard the young men talking in their
rooms, and he gouged at his face bloodily, with a snarl of hate against
himself.

I think I am hell, and they say I stink because I have not had a bath.
But I could not stink, even if I never had a bath. Only the others
stink. My dirtiness is better than their cleanliness. The web of my
flesh is finer; my blood is a subtle elixir; the hair of my head, the
marrow of my spine, the cunning jointure of my bones, and all the
combining jellies, fats, meats, oils, and sinews of my flesh, the
spittle of my mouth, the sweat of my skin, is mixed with rarer elements,
and is fairer and finer than their gross peasant beef.

There had appeared that year upon the nape of his neck a small tetter of
itch, a sign of his kinship with the Pentlands--a token of his kinship
with the great malady of life. He tore at the spot with frantic nails;
he burned his neck to a peeled blister with carbolic acid--but the
spot, as if fed by some ineradicable leprosy in his blood, remained.
Sometimes, during cool weather, it almost disappeared; but in warm
weather it returned angrily, and he scraped his neck red in an itching
torture.

He was afraid to let people walk behind him. He sat, whenever possible,
with his back to the wall; he was in agony when he descended a crowded
stair, holding his shoulders high so that the collar of his coat might
hide the terrible patch. He let his hair grow in a great thick mat,
partly to hide his sore, and partly because exposing it to the view of
the barber touched him with shame and horror.

He would become at times insanely conscious of spotless youth: he was
terrified before the loud good health of America, which is really a
sickness, because no man will admit his sores. He shrank back at the
memory of his lost heroic fantasies: he thought of Bruce-Eugene, of all
his thousand romantic impersonations, and never could he endure himself
with an itching tetter upon his flesh. He became morbidly conscious of
all his blemishes, real and fancied: for days he would see nothing but
people's teeth--he would stare into their mouths when he talked to them,
noting the fillings, the extractions, the plates and bridges. He would
gaze with envy and fear at the sound ivory grinders of the young men,
baring his own, which were regular but somewhat yellowed with smoking,
a hundred times a day. He scrubbed at them savagely with a stiff brush
until the gums bled; he brooded for hours upon a decaying molar which
must one day be extracted, and, wild with despair, he would figure out
on paper the age at which he might become toothless.

But if, he thought, I lose only one every two years after I am twenty,
I shall still have over fifteen left when I am fifty, since we have
thirty-two, including wisdom-teeth. And it will not look so bad, if
only I can save the front ones. Then, with his hope in futures, he
thought: But by that time perhaps the dentists can give me real ones.
He read several dental magazines to see if there was any hope for
the transplanting of sound teeth for old ones. Then, with brooding
satisfaction, he studied his sensual deeply scalloped mouth with the
pouting underlip, noting that even when he smiled he barely revealed his
teeth.

He asked the medical students innumerable questions about the treatment
or cure of inherited blood maladies, venereal diseases, intestinal and
inguinal cancers, and the transference of animal glands to men. He went
to the movies only to examine the teeth and muscles of the hero; he
pored over the toothpaste and collar advertisements in the magazines;
he went to the shower-rooms at the gymnasium and stared at the straight
toes of the young men, thinking with desperate sick pain of his own
bunched and crooked ones. He stood naked before a mirror, looking at
his long gaunt body, smooth and white save for the crooked toes and the
terrible spot on his neck--lean, but moulded with delicate and powerful
symmetry.

Then, slowly, he began to take a terrible joy in his taint. The thing
on his neck that could not be gouged or burnt away he identified with
a tragic humour of his blood that plunged him downward at times into
melancholia and madness. But there was, he saw, a great health in him
as well, that could bring him back victoriously from desolation. In his
reading of fiction, in the movies, in the collar advertisements, in all
his thousand fantasies of Bruce-Eugene, he had never known a hero with
crooked toes, a decaying tooth, and a patch of tetter on his neck. Nor
had he ever known a heroine, whether among the society women of Chambers
and Phillips, or among the great elegants of Meredith and Ouida, who had
borne such a blemish. But, in all his fantasies now, he loved a woman
with hair of carrot silk and eyes of a faintly weary violet, webbed
delicately at the corners. Her teeth were small, white and irregular,
and she had one molar edged with gold which was visible when she smiled.
She was subtle, and a little weary: a child and a mother, as old and as
deep as Asia, and as young as germinal April who returns forever like a
girl, a mistress, a parent, and a nurse.

Thus, through the death of his brother, and the sickness that was rooted
in his own flesh, Eugene came to know a deeper and darker wisdom than
he had ever known before. He began to see that what was subtle and
beautiful in human life was touched with a divine pearl-sickness. Health
was to be found in the steady stare of the cats and dogs, or in the
smooth vacant chops of the peasant. But he looked on the faces of the
lords of the earth--and he saw them wasted and devoured by the beautiful
disease of thought and passion. In the pages of a thousand books he
saw their portraits: Coleridge at twenty-five, with the loose sensual
mouth, gaping idiotically, the vast staring eyes, holding in their opium
depths the vision of seas haunted by the albatross, the great white
forehead--head mixed of Zeus and the village degenerate; the lean worn
head of Csar, a little thirsty in the flanks; and the dreaming mummy
face of Kublai Khan, lit with eyes that flickered with green fires. And
he saw the faces of the great Thothmes, and Aspalta and Mycerinus, and
all the heads of subtle Egypt--those smooth unwrinkled faces that held
the wisdom of 1,200 gods. And the strange wild faces of the Goth, the
Frank, the Vandal, that came storming up below the old tired eyes of
Rome. And the weary craftiness on the face of the great Jew, Disraeli;
the terrible skull-grin of Voltaire; the mad ranting savagery of Ben
Jonson's; the dour wild agony of Carlyle's; and the faces of Heine, and
Rousseau, and Dante, and Tiglath-Pileser, and Cervantes--these were all
faces on which life had fed. They were faces wasted by the vulture,
Thought; they were faces seared and hollowed by the flame of Beauty.

And thus, touched with the terrible destiny of his blood, caught in the
trap of himself and the Pentlands, with the little flower of sin and
darkness on his neck, Eugene escaped forever from the good and the
pretty, into a dark land that is forbidden to the sterilized. The
creatures of romantic fiction, the vicious doll-faces of the movie
women, the brutal idiot regularity of the faces in the advertisements,
and the faces of most of the young college-men and women, were stamped
in a mould of enamelled vacancy, and became unclean to him.

The national demand for white shiny plumbing, toothpaste, tiled
lunch-rooms, hair-cuts, manicured dentistry, horn spectacles, baths,
and the insane fear of disease that sent the voters whispering to the
druggist after their brutal fumbling lecheries--all of this seemed
nasty. Their outer cleanliness became the token of an inner corruption:
it was something that glittered and was dry, foul, and rotten at the
core. He felt that, no matter what leper's taint he might carry upon his
flesh, there was in him a health that was greater than they could ever
know--something fierce and cruelly wounded, but alive, that did not
shrink away from the terrible sunken river of life; something desperate
and merciless that looked steadily on the hidden and unspeakable
passions that unify the tragic family of this earth.


Yet, Eugene was no rebel. He had no greater need for rebellion than have
most Americans, which is none at all. He was quite content with any
system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do
as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write
what he chose. And he did not care under what form of government he
lived--Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist--if it could
assure him these things. He did not want to reform the world, or to make
it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world
was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if he could only go and
find them. The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he
wanted to escape from it. He felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.

It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into
it. He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension
in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200
gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged
bull might all be found in their proper places. He believed that there
was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles.
Moreover, since Ben's death, the conviction had grown on him that men do
not escape from life because life is dull, but that life escapes from
men because men are little. He felt that the passions of the play were
greater than the actors. It seemed to him that he had never had a great
moment of living in which he had measured up to its fullness. His pain
at Ben's death had been greater than he, the love and loss of Laura had
left him stricken and bewildered, and when he embraced young girls and
women he felt a desperate frustration: he wanted to eat them like cake
and to have them, too; to roll them up into a ball; to entomb them in
his flesh; to possess them more fully than they may ever be possessed.

Further, it annoyed and wounded him to be considered "queer." He exulted
in his popularity among the students, his heart pounded with pride under
all the pins and emblems, but he resented being considered an eccentric,
and he envied those of his fellows who were elected to office for their
solid golden mediocrity. He wanted to obey the laws and to be respected:
he believed himself to be a sincerely conventional person--but, some
one would see him after midnight, bounding along a campus path, with
goat-cries beneath the moon. His suits went baggy, his shirts and
drawers got dirty, his shoes wore through--he stuffed them with
cardboard strips--his hats grew shapeless and wore through at the
creases. But he did not mean to go unkempt--the thought of going for
repairs filled him with weary horror. He hated to act--he wanted to
brood upon his entrails for fourteen hours a day. At length, goaded,
he would lash his great bulk, lulled in the powerful inertia of its
visions, into a cursing and violent movement.

He was desperately afraid of people in crowds: at class meetings, or
smokers, or at any public gathering, he was nervous and constrained
until he began to talk to them, and got them under him. He was always
afraid that some one would make a joke about him, and that he would be
laughed at. But he was not afraid of any man alone: he felt that he
could handle any one if he got him away from his crowd. Remembering his
savage fear and hatred of the crowd, with a man alone he would play
cruelly, like a cat, snarling gently at him, prowling in on him softly,
keeping cocked and silent the terrible tiger's paw of his spirit. All of
their starch oozed out of them; they seemed to squeak and twitter, and
look round for the door.


Sometimes, when he was in a chafed and bitter temper, he would hear a
burst of laughter from a student's room, and he would turn snarling, and
curse them, believing they laughed at him. He inherited his father's
conviction at times that the world was gathered in an immense conspiracy
against him: the air about him was full of mockery and menace, the
leaves whispered with treason, in a thousand secret places people were
assembled to humiliate, degrade, and betray him. He would spend hours
under the terrible imminence of some unknown danger: although he was
guilty of nothing but his own nightmare fantasies, he would enter a
class, a meeting, a gathering of students, with a cold constricted
heart, awaiting exposure, sentence, and ruin, for he knew not what
crime. Again, he would be wild, extravagant, and careless, squealing
triumphantly in their faces and bounding along possessed with goaty
joy, as he saw life dangling like a plum for his taking.

And thus, going along a campus path at night, fulfilled with his
dreams of glory, he heard young men talking of him kindly and coarsely,
laughing at his antics, and saying he needed a bath and clean underwear.
He clawed at his throat as he listened.

I think I'm hell, thought Eugene, and they say I stink because I have
not had a bath. Me! Me! Bruce-Eugene, the Scourge or the Greasers, and
the greatest fullback Yale ever had! Marshal Gant, the saviour of his
country! Ace Gant, the hawk of the sky, the man who brought Richthofen
down! Senator Gant, Governor Gant, President Gant, the restorer and
uniter of a broken nation, retiring quietly to private life in spite of
the weeping protest of one hundred million people, until, like Arthur or
Barbarossa, he shall hear again the drums of need and peril.

Jesus-of-Nazareth Gant, mocked, reviled, spat upon, and imprisoned for
the sins of others, but nobly silent, preferring death rather than cause
pain to the woman he loves. Gant, the Unknown Soldier, the Martyred
President, the slain God of Harvest, the Bringer of Good Crops. Duke
Gant of Westmoreland, Viscount Pondicherry, twelfth Lord Runnymede, who
hunts for true love, incognito, in Devon and ripe grain, and finds the
calico white legs embedded in sweet hay. Yes, George-Gordon-Noel-Byron
Gant, carrying the pageant of his bleeding heart through Europe, and
Thomas-Chatterton Gant (that bright boy!) and Franois-Villon Gant,
and Ahasuerus Gant, and Mithridates Gant, and Artaxerxes Gant, and
Edward-the-Black-Prince Gant; Stilicho Gant, and Jugurtha Gant, and
Vercingetorix Gant, and Czar-Ivan-the-Terrible Gant. And Gant, the
Olympian Bull; and Heracles Gant; and Gant, the Seductive Swan; and
Ashtaroth and Azrael Gant, Proteus Gant, Anubis and Osiris and
Mumbo-Jumbo Gant.


But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I'm not a
Genius? He did not ask himself the question often. He was alone: he
spoke aloud, but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of his
blasphemy. It was a moonless night, full of stars. There was no thunder
and no lightning.

Yes, but what, he thought with a livid snarl, but what if anybody else
thinks I'm not? Ah, but they'd like to, the swine. They hate me, and are
jealous of me because they can't be like me, so they'll belittle me if
they can. They'd like to say it, if they dared, just to hurt me. For a
moment his face was convulsed with pain and bitterness: he craned his
neck, holding his throat with his hand.

Then, as was his custom, when he had burnt his heart out, he began to
look nakedly and critically at the question.

Well, he went on very calmly, what if I'm not? Am I going to cut my
throat, or eat worms, or swallow arsenic? He shook his head slowly but
emphatically. No, he said, I am not. Besides, there are enough geniuses.
They have at least one in every high school, and one in the orchestra of
every small-town movie. Sometimes Mrs. Von Zeck, the wealthy patroness
of the arts, sends a genius or two off to New York to study. So that,
he estimated, this broad land of ours has by the census not less than
26,400 geniuses and 83,752 artists, not counting those in business and
advertising. For his personal satisfaction, Eugene then muttered over
the names of 21 geniuses who wrote poetry, and 37 more who devoted
themselves to the drama and the novel. After this, he felt quite
relieved.

What, he thought, can I be, besides a genius? I've been one long enough.
There must be better things to do.

Over that final hedge, he thought, not death, as I once believed--but
new life--and new lands.


Erect, with arm akimbo on his hip, he stood, his domed head turned out
toward the light: sixty, subtle and straight of body, deep-browed, with
an old glint of hawk-eyes, lean apple-cheeks, a moustache bristle-cropped.
That face on which the condor Thought has fed, arched with high subtle
malice, sophist glee.

Below, benched in rapt servility, they waited for his first husky word.
Eugene looked at the dull earnest faces, lured from the solid pews of
Calvinism to the shadowland of metaphysics. And now his mockery will
play like lightning around their heads, but they will never see it, nor
feel it strike. They will rush forward to wrestle with his shadow, to
hear his demon's laughter, to struggle solemnly with their unborn souls.

The clean cuffed hand holds up an abraded stick. Their stare follows
obediently along its lustre.

"Mr. Willis?"

White, bewildered, servile, the patient slave's face.

"Yes, sir."

"What have I here?"

"A stick, sir."

"What is a stick?"

"It's--a piece of wood, sir."

A pause. Ironic eyebrows ask their laughter. They snicker smugly for the
wolf that will devour them.

"Mr. Willis says a stick is a piece of wood."

Their laughter rattles against the walls. Absurd.

"But a stick _is_ a piece of wood," says Mr. Willis.

"So is a tree or a telephone-pole. No, I'm afraid that will not do. Does
the class agree with Mr. Willis?"

Their grave pretending faces consider the question.

"A stick is a piece of wood cut off at a certain length."

"Then we agree, Mr. Ransom, that a stick is not simply wood with
unlimited extension?"

The stunned peasant's face with its blink of effort.

"I see that Mr. Gant is leaning forward in his seat. There is a light
in his face that I have seen there before. Mr. Gant will not sleep of
nights, for thinking."

"A stick," said Eugene, "is not only wood but the negation of wood.
It is the meeting in Space of Wood and No-Wood. A stick is finite and
unextended wood, a fact determined by its own denial."

The old head listens gravely above the ironic intake of their breath. He
will bear me out and praise me, for I am measured against this peasant
earth. He sees me with the titles of proud office; and he loves victory.

"We have a new name for him, Professor Weldon," said Nick Mabley. "We
call him Hegel Gant."

He listened to their shout of laughter; he saw their pleased faces turn
back on him. That was meant well. I shall smile--their Great Original,
the beloved eccentric, the poet of substantial yokels.

"That's a name he may be worthy of," said Vergil Weldon seriously.

Old Fox, I too can juggle with your phrases so they will never catch
me. Over the jungle of their wits our unfoiled minds strike irony
and passion. Truth? Reality? The Absolute? The Universal? Wisdom?
Experience? Knowledge? The Fact? The Concept? Death--the great negation?
Parry and thrust, Volpone! Have we not words? We shall prove anything.
But Ben, and the demon-flicker of his smile? Where now?

The Spring comes back. I see the sheep upon the hill. The belled cows
come along the road in wreaths of dust, and the wagons creak home below
the pale ghost of the moon. But what stirs within the buried heart?
Where are the lost words? And who has seen his shadow in the Square?


"And if they had asked you, Mr. Rountree?"

"I'd have told the truth," said Mr. Rountree, removing his glasses.

"But they had built a good big fire, Mr. Rountree."

"That doesn't matter," said Mr. Rountree, putting his glasses on again.

How nobly we can die for truth--in conversation.

"It was a very hot fire, Mr. Rountree. They'd have burned you if you
hadn't recanted."

"Ah, I'd have let them burn," said the martyred Rountree through
moistening spectacles.

"I think it might be painful," Vergil Weldon suggested. "Even a little
blister hurts."

"Who wants to be burned for anything?" said Eugene. "I'd have done what
Galileo did--backed out of it."

"So should I," said Vergil Weldon, and their faces arched with gleeful
malice over the heavy laughter of the class.

Nevertheless, it moves.


"On one side of the table stood the combined powers of Europe; on the
other stood Martin Luther, the son of a blacksmith."

The voice of husky passion, soul-shaken. This they can remember, and put
down.

"There, if ever, was a situation to try the strongest soul. But the
answer came like a flash. _Ich kann nicht anders_--I can't do otherwise.
It was one of the great utterances of history."

That phrase, used now for thirty years, relic of Yale and Harvard:
Royce and Munsterberg. In all this jugglery, the Teutons were Weldon's
masters, yet mark how thirstily the class lap it up. He will not let
them read, lest some one find the rag-quilt of his takings from Zeno to
Immanuel Kant. The crazy patchwork of three thousand years, the forced
marriage of irreconcilables, the summation of all thought, in his old
head. Socrates begat Plato. Plato begat Plotinus. Plotinus begat St.
Augustine ... Kant begat Hegel. Hegel begat Vergil Weldon. Here we
pause. There's no more to beget. An Answer to All Things in Thirty Easy
Lessons. How sure they are they've found it!

And to-night they will carry their dull souls into his study, will make
unfleshly confessions, will writhe in concocted tortures of the spirit,
revealing struggles that they never had.

"It took character to do a thing like that. It took a man who refused to
crack under pressure. And that is what I want my boys to do! I want them
to succeed! I want them to absorb their negations. I want them to keep
as clean as a hound's tooth!"

Eugene winced, and looked around on all the faces set in a resolve to
fight desperately for monogamy, party politics, and the will of the
greatest number.

And yet the Baptists fear this man! Why? He has taken the whiskers off
their God, but for the rest, he has only taught them to vote the ticket.

So here is Hegel in the Cotton Belt!


During these years Eugene would go away from Pulpit Hill, by night and
by day, when April was a young green blur, or when the Spring was deep
and ripe. But he liked best to go away by night, rushing across a cool
Spring countryside full of dew and starlight, under a great beach of the
moon ribbed with clouds.

He would go to Exeter or Sydney; sometimes he would go to little towns
he had never before visited. He would register at hotels as "Robert
Herrick", "John Donne", "George Peele", "William Blake", and "John
Milton". No one ever said anything to him about it. The people in those
towns had such names. Once he registered at a hotel, in a small Piedmont
town, as "Ben Jonson."

The clerk spun the book critically.

"Isn't there an _h_ in that name?" he said.

"No," said Eugene. "That's another branch of the family. I have an
uncle, Samuel, who spells his name that way."

Sometimes, at hotels of ill-repute, he would register, with dark buried
glee, as "Robert Browning", "Alfred Tennyson", and "William Wordsworth".

Once he registered as "Henry W. Longfellow."

"You can't fool me," said the clerk, with a hard grin of disbelief.
"That's the name of a writer."

He was devoured by a vast strange hunger for life. At night, he listened
to the million-noted ululation of little night things, the great brooding
symphony of dark, the ringing of remote church bells across the country.
And his vision widened out in circles over moon-drenched meadows,
dreaming woods, mighty rivers going along in darkness, and ten thousand
sleeping towns. He believed in the infinite rich variety of all the
towns and faces: behind any of a million shabby houses he believed there
was strange buried life, subtle and shattered romance, something dark
and unknown. At the moment of passing any house, he thought, some one
therein might be at the gate of death, lovers might lie twisted in hot
embrace, murder might be doing.

He felt a desperate frustration, as if he were being shut out from the
rich banquet of life. And against all caution, he determined to break
the pattern of custom, and look within. Driven on by this hunger, he
would suddenly rush away from Pulpit Hill, and, as dusk came on, prowl
up and down the quiet streets of towns. Finally, lifted beyond all
restraint, he would mount swiftly to a door and ring the bell. Then,
whoever came, reeling against the wall and clutching at his throat, he
would say:

"Water! In God's name, water! I am ill!"

Sometimes there were women, seductive and smiling, aware of his trick,
but loath to let him go; sometimes women touched with compassion and
tenderness. Then, having drunk, he would smile with brave apology into
startled and sympathetic faces, murmuring:

"Pardon me. It came on suddenly--one of my attacks. I had no time to go
for help. I saw your light."

Then they would ask him where his friends were.

"Friends!" he glanced about wildly and darkly. Then, with a bitter
laugh, he said, "Friends! I have none! I am a stranger here."

Then they would ask him what he did.

"I am a Carpenter," he would answer, smiling strangely.

Then they would ask him where he came from.

"Far away. Very far," he would say deeply. "You would not know if I told
you."

Then he would rise, looking about him with grandeur and compassion.

"And now I must go!" he would say mysteriously. "I have a long way to go
before my journey is done. God bless you all! I was a stranger and you
gave me shelter. The Son of Man was treated not so well."

Sometimes, he would ring bells with an air of timid inquiry, saying:

"Is this number 26? My name is Thomas Chatterton. I am looking for a
gentleman by the name of Coleridge--Mr. Samuel T. Coleridge. Does he
live here?... No? I'm sorry.... Yes, 26 is the number I have, I'm
sure.... Thank you ... I've made a mistake ... I'll look it up in the
telephone directory."

But what, thought Eugene, if one day, in the million streets of life, I
should really find him?

These were the golden years.




XXXIX

Gant and Eliza came to his graduation. He found them lodgings in the
town: it was early June--hot, green, fiercely and voluptuously Southern.
The campus was a green oven; the old grads went about in greasy pairs;
the cool pretty girls, who never sweated, came in to see their young men
graduate, and to dance; the mammas and papas were shown about dumbly and
shyly.

The college was charming, half-deserted. Most of the students, except
the graduating class, had departed. The air was charged with the fresh
sensual heat, the deep green shimmer of heavy leafage, a thousand spermy
earth and flower-scents. The young men were touched with sadness, with
groping excitement, with glory.

On this rich stage, Gant, who had left his charnel-house of death for
three days, saw his son Eugene. He came, gathered to life again, out of
his grave. He saw his son enthroned in all the florid sentiment of
commencement, and the whole of his heart was lifted out of the dust.
Upon the lordly sward, shaded by great trees, and ringed by his solemn
classmen and their families, Eugene read the Class Poem ("O Mother Of
Our Myriad Hopes"). Then Vergil Weldon, the philosophy professor, spoke,
high-husky, deep, and solemn-sad; and Living Truth welled in their
hearts. It was a Great Utterance. Be true! Be clean! Be good! Be men!
Absorb the Negation! The world has need of. Life was never so worth.
Never in history had there been. No other class had shown so great a
promise as. Among other achievements, the editor of the paper had lifted
the moral and intellectual level of the State two inches. The university
spirit! Character! Service! Leadership!

Eugene's face grew dark with pride and joy there in the lovely
wilderness. He could not speak. There was a glory in the world: life was
panting for his embrace.

Eliza and Gant listened attentively to all the songs and speeches. Their
son was a great man on the campus. They saw and heard him before his
class, on the campus, and at graduation, when his prizes and honours
were announced. And his teachers and companions spoke to them about him,
and said he would have "a brilliant career." And Eliza and Gant were
touched a little by the false golden glow of youth. They believed for a
moment that all things were possible.

"Well, son," said Gant, "the rest is up to you now. I believe you're
going to make a name for yourself." He laid a great dry hand clumsily
upon his son's shoulder, and for a moment Eugene saw in the dead eyes
the old dark of umber and unfound desire.

"Hm!" Eliza began, with a tremulous bantering smile, "your head will get
turned by all the things they're saying about you." She took his hand in
her rough warm grasp. Her eyes grew suddenly wet.

"Well, son," she said gravely. "I want you to go ahead now and try to be
Somebody. None of the others ever had your opportunity, and I hope you
do something with it. Your papa and I have done the best we could. The
rest is up to you."

He took her hand in a moment of wild devotion and kissed it.

"I'll do something," he said. "I will."

They looked shyly at his strange dark face, with all its passionate and
nave ardour, and they felt tenderness and love for his youth and all
that was unknown to it. And a great love and pity welled up in him
because of their strange and awkward loneliness, and because he felt,
through some terrible intuition, that he was already indifferent to the
titles and honours they desired for him, and because those which he had
come to desire for himself were already beyond the scale of their value.
And, before the vision of pity and loss and loneliness, he turned away,
clutching his lean hand into his throat.


It was over. Gant, who under the stimulus of his son's graduation had
almost regained the vitality of his middle years, relapsed now into
whining dotage. The terrible heat came down and smote him. He faced with
terror and weariness the long hot trip into the hills again.

"Merciful God!" he whined. "Why did I ever come! O Jesus, how will I
ever face that trip again! I can't bear it. I'll die before I get there!
It's fearful, it's awful, it's cruel." And he wept weak snuffling sobs.

Eugene took them to Exeter and got them comfortably disposed in a
Pullman. He was remaining for a few days to gather his belongings--the
clutter of four years, letters, books, old manuscript, worthless rubbish
of every description, for he seemed to inherit Eliza's mania for blind
accumulation. Extravagant with money, and unable to husband it, he saved
everything else even when his spirit grew sick at the stale and dusty
weariness of the past.

"Well, son," said Eliza, in the quiet moment before departure. "Have you
thought yet of what you're going to do?"

"Yes," said Gant, wetting his thumb, "for you've got to shift for
yourself from now on. You've had the best education money can buy. The
rest is up to you."

"I'll talk to you in a few days when I see you at home," said Eugene.
"I'll tell you about it then."

Mercifully the train began to move: he kissed them quickly and ran down
the aisle.

He had nothing to tell them. He was nineteen; he had completed his
college course; but he did not know what he was going to do. His
father's plan that he should study law and "enter politics" had been
forgotten since his sophomore year, when it became apparent that the
impulse of his life was not toward law. His family felt obscurely that
he was an eccentric--"queer," they called it--and of an impractical or
"literary" turn.

Without asking sharply why, they felt the absurdity of clothing this
bounding figure, with the wild dark face, in a frock-coat and string
tie: he did not exist in business, trade, or law. More vaguely, they
classified him as bookish and a dreamer--Eliza referred to him as
"a good scholar," which, in fact, he had never been. He had simply
performed brilliantly in all things that touched his hunger, and dully,
carelessly, and indifferently in all things that did not. No one saw
very clearly what he was going to do--he, surely, least of all--but his
family, following the tack of his comrades, spoke vaguely and glibly
of "a career in journalism." This meant newspaper work. And, however
unsatisfactory this may have been, their inevitable question was drugged
for the moment by the glitter of success that had surrounded his life at
the university.

But Eugene was untroubled by thought of a goal. He was mad with such
ecstasy as he had never known. He was a centaur, moon-eyed and wild of
name, torn apart with hunger for the golden world. He became at times
almost incapable of coherent speech. While talking with people, he would
whinny suddenly into their startled faces, and leap away, his face
contorted with an idiot joy. He would hurl himself squealing through
the streets and along the paths, touched with the ecstasy of a thousand
unspoken desires. The world lay before him for his picking--full of
opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, lovely women, full
of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or
tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and
he could never die.

He went back to Pulpit Hill for two or three days of delightful
loneliness in the deserted college. He prowled through the empty campus
at midnight under the great moons of the late rich Spring; he breathed
the thousand rich odours of tree and grass and flower, of the opulent
and seductive South; and he felt a delicious sadness when he thought of
his departure, and saw there in the moon the thousand phantom shapes of
the boys he had known who would come no more.


He still loitered, although his baggage had been packed for days. With a
desperate pain, he faced departure from that Arcadian wilderness where
he had known so much joy. At night he roamed the deserted campus,
talking quietly until morning with a handful of students who lingered
strangely, as he did, among the ghostly buildings, among the phantoms of
lost boys. He could not face a final departure. He said he would return
early in autumn for a few days, and at least once a year thereafter.

Then one hot morning, on sudden impulse, he left. As the car that was
taking him to Exeter roared down the winding street, under the hot
green leafiness of June, he heard, as from the sea-depth of a dream,
far-faint, the mellow booming of the campus bell. And suddenly it seemed
to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the footfalls of
lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. Then, as he
listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners thudded into
oblivion.

The car roared up across the lip of the hill, and drove steeply down
into the hot parched countryside below. As the lost world faded from his
sight, Eugene gave a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the
elfin door had closed behind him, and that he would never come back
again.


He saw the vast rich body of the hills, lush with billowing greenery,
ripe-bosomed, dappled by far-floating cloud-shadows. But it was, he
knew, the end.

Far-forested, the horn-note wound. He was wild with the hunger for
release: the vast champaign of earth stretched out for him its limitless
seduction.

It was the end, the end. It was the beginning of the voyage, the quest
of new lands.

Gant was dead. Gant was living, death-in-life. In his big back room at
Eliza's he waited death, lost and broken in a semi-life of petulant
memory. He hung to life by a decayed filament, a corpse lit by
infrequent flares of consciousness. The sudden death whose menace they
had faced so long that it had lost its meaning, had never come to him.
It had come where they had least expected it--to Ben. And the conviction
which Eugene had had at Ben's death, more than a year and a half before,
was now a materialised certainty. The great wild pattern of the family
had been broken forever. The partial discipline that had held them
together had been destroyed by the death of their brother: the nightmare
of waste and loss had destroyed their hope. With an insane fatalism they
had surrendered to the savage chaos of life.

Except for Eliza. She was sixty, sound of body and mind, triumphantly
healthy. She still ran Dixieland, but she had given up the boarders for
roomers, and most of the duties of management she entrusted to an old
maid who lived in the house. Eliza devoted most of her time to real
estate.

She had, during the past year, got final control of Gant's property. She
had begun to sell it immediately and ruthlessly, over his indifferent
mutter of protest. She had sold the old house on Woodson Street for
$7,000--a good enough price, she had said, considering the neighbourhood.
But stark, bare, and raw, stripped of its girdling vines, annex now to a
quack's sanatorium for "nervous diseases," the rich labour of their life
was gone. In this, more than in anything else, Eugene saw the final
disintegration of his family.

Eliza had also sold a wild tract of mountain farmland for $6,000, fifty
acres on the Reynoldsville road for $15,000, and several smaller pieces.
Finally she had sold Gant's shop upon the Square for $25,000 to a
syndicate of real estate people who were going to erect on the site the
town's first "skyscraper." With this money as capital, she began to
"trade," buying, selling, laying down options, in an intricate and
bewildering web.

"Dixieland" itself had become enormously valuable. The street which she
had foreseen years before had been cut through behind her boundaries:
she lacked thirty feet of meeting the golden highway, but she had bought
the intervening strip, paying without complaint a stiff price. Since
then she had refused, with a puckered smile, an offer of $100,000 for
her property.

She was obsessed. She talked real estate unendingly. She spent half
her time talking to real estate men; they hovered about the house like
flesh-flies. She drove off with them several times a day to look at
property. As her land investments grew in amount and number, she became
insanely niggardly in personal expenditure. She would fret loudly if a
light was kept burning in the house, saying that ruin and poverty faced
her. She seldom ate unless the food was given to her; she went about
the house holding a cup of weak coffee and a crust of bread. A stingy
careless breakfast was the only meal to which Luke and Eugene could look
forward with any certainty: with angry guffaw and chortle, they ate,
wedged in the little pantry--the dining-room had been turned over to
the roomers.

Gant was fed and cared for by Helen. She moved back and forth in
ceaseless fret between Eliza's house and Hugh Barton's, in constant
rhythms of wild energy and depletion, anger, hysteria, weariness and
indifference. She had had no children and, it seemed, would have none.
For this reason, she had long periods of brooding morbidity, during
which she drugged herself with nibbling potations of patent tonics,
medicines with a high alcoholic content, home-made wines, and corn
whisky. Her large eyes grew lustreless and dull, her big mouth had a
strain of hysteria about it, she would pluck at her long chin and burst
suddenly into tears. She talked restlessly, fretfully, incessantly,
wasting and losing herself in a pet of snarled nerves, in endless
gossip, incoherent garrulity about the townsfolk, the neighbours,
disease, doctors, hospitals, death.

The deliberate calm of Hugh Barton sometimes goaded her to a frenzy. He
would sit at night, oblivious of her tirade, gravely chewing his long
cigar, absorbed in his charts, or in a late issue of _System_ or of _The
American Magazine_. This power of losing himself in solitary absorption
would madden her. She did not know what she wanted, but his silence
before her exasperated indictment of life drove her to frenzy. She would
rush at him with a sob of rage, knock the magazine from his hands, and
seize his thinning hair in the grip of her long fingers.

"You answer when I speak!" she cried, panting with hysteria. "I'm not
going to sit here, night after night, while you sit buried in a story.
The idea! The idea!" She burst into tears. "I might as well have married
a dummy."

"Well, I'm willing to talk to you," he protested sourly, "but nothing I
say to you seems to suit you. What do you want me to say?"

It seemed, indeed, when she was in this temper, that she could not be
pleased. She was annoyed and irritable if people agreed carefully with
all her utterances; she was annoyed equally by their disagreement and
by their silence. A remark about the weather, the most studiously
uncontroversial opinion, aroused her annoyance.

Sometimes at night she would weep hysterically upon her pillow, and turn
fiercely upon her mate.

"Leave me! Go away! Get out! I hate you!"

He would rise obediently and go downstairs, but before he reached the
living-room she would call fearfully after him, asking him to return.

She lavished kisses and abuse on him by turns: the mothering tenderness,
in which she was drowning for want of a child, she poured out on a dirty
little mongrel dog which had trotted in from the streets one night,
half-dead from starvation. He was a snarling little brute with a rough
black-and-white pelt, and an ugly lift of teeth for every one but his
master and mistress, but he had grown waddling-fat upon choice meats
and livers; he slept warmly on a velvet cushion and rode out with them,
snarling at passers-by. She smothered the little cur with slaps and
kisses, devoured him with baby-talk, and hated any one who disliked his
mongrel viciousness. But most of her time, her love, her blazing energy,
she gave to the care of her father. Her feeling toward Eliza was more
bitter than ever: it was one of constant chaffering irritability,
mounting at times to hatred. She would rail against her mother for
hours:

"I believe she's gone crazy. Don't you think so? Sometimes I think we
ought to get guardians appointed and keep her under custody. Do you know
that I buy almost every bite of food that goes into that house? Do you?
If it weren't for me, she'd let him die right under her eyes. Don't you
know she would? She's got so stingy she won't even buy food for herself.
Why, good heavens!" she burst out in strong exasperation. "It's not my
place to do those things. He's her husband, not mine! Do you think it's
right? Do you?" And she would almost weep with rage.

And she would burst out on Eliza, thus: "Mamma, in God's name! Are you
going to let that poor old man in there die for lack of proper care?
Can't you ever get it into your head that papa's a sick man? He's got to
have good food and decent treatment."

And Eliza, confused and disturbed, would answer: "Why, child! What on
earth do you mean? I took him in a big bowl of vegetable soup myself,
for his lunch: he ate it all up without stopping. 'Why, pshaw! Mr.
Gant,' I said (just to cheer him up), 'I don't believe there can be much
wrong with any one with an appetite like that. Why, say,' I said ..."

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" cried Helen furiously. "Papa's a sick man.
Aren't you ever going to understand that? Surely Ben's death should have
taught us something," her voice ended in a scream of exasperation.

Gant was a spectre in waxen yellow. His disease, which had thrust
out its branches to all parts of his body, gave him an appearance of
almost transparent delicacy. His mind was sunken out of life in a dim
shadowland: he listened wearily and indifferently to all the brawling
clamour around him, crying out and weeping when he felt pain, cold, or
hunger, smiling when he was comfortable and at ease. He was taken back
to Baltimore two or three times a year now for radium treatments: he had
a brief flare of vitality and ease after each visit, but every one knew
his relief would be only temporary. His body was a rotten fabric which
had thus far miraculously held together.

Meanwhile, Eliza talked incessantly about real estate, bought, sold and
traded. About her own ventures she was insanely secretive; she would
smile craftily when questioned about them, wink in a knowing fashion,
and make a bantering noise in her throat.

"I'm not telling all I know," she said.

This goaded her daughter's bitter curiosity almost past endurance, for,
despite her angry mockery, the mania for property had bitten into her
and Hugh Barton as well: secretly they respected Eliza's shrewdness and
got her advice on property into which he was putting all his surplus
earnings. But when Eliza refused to reveal her own investments, the girl
would cry out in a baffled hysteria:

"She has no right to do that! Don't you know she hasn't? It's papa's
property just as much as hers, you know. If she should die now, that
estate would be in a terrible mess. No one knows what she's done: how
much she's bought and sold. I don't think she knows herself. She keeps
her notes and papers hidden away in little drawers and boxes."

Her distrust and fear had been so great that, much to Eliza's annoyance,
she had persuaded Gant, a year or two before, to make a will: he had
left $5,000 to each of his five children, and the remainder of his
property and money to his wife. And, as the summer advanced, she again
persuaded him to appoint as executors the two people in whose honesty
she had the greatest trust: Hugh Barton and Luke Gant.

To Luke, who, since his discharge from the navy, had been salesman, in
the mountain district, for electrical farm-lighting plants, she said:

"We're the ones who've always had the interests of the family at heart,
and we've had nothing for it. We've been the generous ones, but Eugene
and Steve will get it all in the end. 'Gene's had everything: we've
had nothing. Now he's talking of going to Harvard. Had you heard about
that?"

"His m-m-m-majesty!" said Luke ironically. "Who's going to p-p-p-pay the
bills?"

Thus, as the summer waned, over the slow horror of Gant's death was
waged this ugly warfare of greed and hatred. Steve came in from Indiana;
within four days he was insane from whisky and veronal. He began to
follow Eugene around the house, backing him ominously into corners,
seizing him belligerently by the arm, as he breathed upon him his foul
yellow stench, and spoke to him with maudlin challenge.

"I've never had your chance. Every one was down on Stevie. If he'd had
the chance some folks have, he'd be right up there with the Big Boys
now. And at that, he's got more brains than a lot of people I know
who've been to college. You get that, don't you?"

He thrust his pustulate face, foul and snarling, close to Eugene's.

"Get away, Steve! Get away!" the boy muttered. He tried to move, but his
brother blocked him. "I tell you to get away, you swine!" he screamed
suddenly, and he struck the evil face away from him.

Then, as Steve sprawled dazed and witless on the floor, Luke sprang upon
him with stammering curse, and, past reason, began to drag him up and
down. And Eugene sprang upon Luke to stop him, and all three stammered
and cursed and begged and accused, while the roomers huddled at the
door, and Eliza wept, calling for help, and Daisy, who was up from the
South with her children, wrung her plump hands, moaning "Oh, they'll
kill him! They'll kill him. Have mercy on me and my poor little
children, I beg of you."

Then the shame, the disgust, the maudlin grievance, the weeping women,
the excited men.

"You m-m-m-miserable degenerate!" cried Luke. "You c-c-came home because
you thought p-p-p-papa would die and leave you a little money. You
d-d-don't deserve a penny!"

"I know what you're trying to do," Steve screamed in an agony of
suspicion. "You're all against me! You've framed up on me and you're
trying to beat me out of my share."

He was weeping with genuine rage and fear, with the angry suspicion of
a beaten child. Eugene looked at him with pity and nausea: he was so
foul, whipped, and frightened. Then, with a sense of unreal horror and
disbelief, he listened while they bawled out their accusations. This
disease of money and greed tainted other people, the people in books,
not one's own. They were snarling like curs over one bone--their little
shares in the money of an unburied dead man who lay, with low moanings
of disease, not thirty feet away.

The family drew off in two camps of hostile watchfulness: Helen and Luke
on one side and Daisy and Steve, subdued but stubborn, on the other.
Eugene, who had no talent for parties, cruised through sidereal space
with momentary anchorings to earth. He loafed along the avenue, and
lounged in Wood's; he gossiped with the pharmacy rakes; he courted the
summer girls on boarding-house porches; he visited Roy Brock in a high
mountain village, and lay with a handsome girl in the forest; he went to
South Carolina; he was seduced by a dentist's wife at Dixieland. She was
a prim ugly woman of forty-three, who wore glasses and had sparse hair.
She was a Daughter of the Confederacy and wore the badge constantly on
her starched waists.

He thought of her only as a very chill and respectable woman. He played
Casino--the only game he knew--with her and the other boarders, and
called her "ma'am." Then one night she took his hand, saying she would
show him how to make love to a girl. She tickled the palm, put it around
her waist, lifted it to her breast, and plumped over on his shoulder,
breathing stertorously through her pinched nostrils and saying "God,
boy!" over and over. He plunged around the dark cool streets until three
in the morning, wondering what he would do about it. Then he came back
to the sleeping house, and crept on shoeless feet into her room. Fear
and disgust were immediate. He climbed the hills to ease his tortured
spirit and stayed away from the house for hours. But she would follow
him down the halls or open her door suddenly on him, clad in a red
kimono. She became very ugly and bitter, and accused him of betraying,
dishonouring, and deserting her. She said that where she came from--the
good old State of South Carolina--a man who treated a woman in such
fashion would get a bullet in him. Eugene thought of new lands. He was
in an agony of repentance and guilty abasement: he framed a long plea
for pardon and included it in his prayers at night, for he still prayed,
not from devout belief, but from the superstition of habit and number,
muttering a set formula over sixteen times, while he held his breath.
Since childhood he had believed in the magical efficacy of certain
numbers--on Sunday he would do only the second thing that came into his
head and not the first--and this intricate ritual of number and prayer
he was a slave to, not to propitiate God, but to fulfil a mysterious
harmonic relation with the universe, or to pay worship to the demonic
force that brooded over him. He could not sleep of nights until he did
this.

Eliza finally grew suspicious of the woman, picked a quarrel with her,
and ejected her.

No one said very much to him about going to Harvard. He himself had no
very clear reason for going, and only in September, a few days before
the beginning of the term, decided to go. He talked about it at
intervals during the summer, but, like all his family, he needed the
pressure of immediacy to force a decision. He was offered employment
on several newspapers in the State, and on the teaching staff of the
run-down military academy that topped a pleasant hill two miles from
town.

But in his heart he knew he was going to leave. And no one opposed him
very much. Helen railed against him at times to Luke but made only a few
indifferent and unfriendly comments to himself about it. Gant moaned
wearily, saying: "Let him do as he likes. I can't pay out any more money
on his education. If he wants to go, his mother must send him." Eliza
pursed her lips thoughtfully, made a bantering noise, and said:

"Hm! Harvard! That's mighty big talk, boy. Where are you going to get
the money?"

"I can get it," he said darkly. "People will lend it to me."

"No, son," she said with instant grave caution. "I don't want you to do
anything like that. You mustn't start life by accumulating debts."

He was silent, trying to force the terrible sentence through his parched
lips.

"Then," he said finally, "why can't I pay my way from my share in papa's
estate?"

"Why, child!" said Eliza angrily. "You talk as if we were millionaires.
I don't even know that there's going to be any share for anybody. Your
papa was persuaded into that against his better judgment," she added
fretfully.

Eugene began to beat suddenly against his ribs.

"I want to go!" he said. "I've got to have it now! Now!"

He was mad with a sense of frustration.

"I don't want it when I'm rotten! I want it now! To hell with the real
estate! I want none of your dirt! I hate it! Let me go!" he screamed;
and in his fury he began to beat his head against the wall.

Eliza pursed her lips for a moment.

"Well," she said, at length. "I'll send you for a year. Then we'll see."


But, two or three days before his departure, Luke, who was taking Gant
to Baltimore the next day, thrust a sheet of typed paper into his hand.

"What is it?" he asked, looking at it with sullen suspicion.

"Oh, just a little form Hugh wants you to sign, in case anything should
happen. It's a release."

"A release from what?" said Eugene, staring at it.

Then, as his mind picked its way slowly through the glib jargon of the
law, he saw that the paper was an acknowledgment that he had already
received the sum of five thousand dollars in consideration of college
fees and expenses. He lifted his scowling face to his brother. Luke
looked at him for a moment, then burst into a crazy whah-whah, digging
him in the ribs. Eugene grinned sullenly and said:

"Give me your pen."

He signed the paper and gave it back to his brother with a feeling of
sad triumph.

"Whah-whah! Now you've done it!" said Luke, with witless guffaw.

"Yes," said Eugene, "and you think me a fool for it. But I'd rather be
done now than later. That's my release, not yours."

He thought of Hugh Barton's grave foxy face. There was no victory for
him there and he knew it. After all, he thought, I have my ticket and
the money for my escape in my pocket. Now, I am done with it cleanly.
It's a good ending, after all.

When Eliza heard of this occurrence, she protested sharply:

"Why here!" she said. "They've no right to do that. The child's still a
minor. Your papa always said he intended to give him his education."

Then, after a thoughtful pause, she said doubtfully: "Well, we'll see,
then. I've promised to send him for a year."

In the darkness by the house, Eugene clutched at his throat. He wept for
all the lovely people who would not come again.


Eliza stood upon the porch, her hands clasped loosely across her
stomach. Eugene was leaving the house and going toward the town. It
was the day before his departure; dusk was coming on, the hills were
blooming in strange purple dusk. Eliza watched him go.

"Spruce up there, boy!" she called. "Spruce up! Throw your shoulders
back!"

In the dusk he knew that she was smiling tremulously at him, pursing her
lips. She caught his low mutter of annoyance:

"Why, yes," she said, nodding briskly. "I'd show them! I'd act as if
I thought I was Somebody. Son," she said more gravely, with a sudden
change from her tremulous banter, "it worries me to see you walk like
that. You'll get lung-trouble as sure as you're born if you go all
humped over. That's one thing about your papa: he always carried himself
as straight as a rod. Of course, he's not as straight now as he used to
be--as the fellow says" (she smiled tremulously)--"I reckon we all have
a tendency to shrink up a little as we get older. But in his young days
there wasn't a straighter man in town."

And then the terrible silence came between them again. He had turned
sullenly upon her while she talked. Indecisively she stopped, peered
down at him with white pursed face, and in that silence, behind the
trivial arras of her talk, he heard the bitter song of all her life.

The marvellous hills were blooming in the dusk. Eliza pursed her lips
reflectively a moment, then continued:

"Well, when you get way up there--as the fellow says--in Yankee-dom, you
want to look up your Uncle Emerson and all your Boston kin. Your Aunt
Lucy took a great liking to you when they were down here--they always
said they'd be glad to see any of us if we ever came up--when you're a
stranger in a strange land it's mighty good sometimes to have some one
you know. And say--when you see your Uncle Emerson, you might just tell
him not to be surprised to see me at any time now" (She nodded pertly at
him)--"I reckon I can pick right up and light out the same as the next
fellow when I get ready--I may just pack up and come--without saying a
word to any one--I'm not going to spend all my days slaving away in the
kitchen--it don't pay--if I can turn a couple of trades here this Fall,
I may start out to see the world like I always intended to--I was
talking to Cash Rankin about it the other day--'Why, Mrs. Gant,' he
said, 'if I had your head I'd be a rich man in five years--you're the
best trader in this town,' he said. 'Don't you talk to me about any more
trades,' I said--'when I get rid of what I've got now I'm going to get
out of it, and not even listen to any one who says real-estate to me--we
can't take any of it with us, Cash,' I said--'there are no pockets in
shrouds and we only need six feet of earth to bury us in the end--so I'm
going to pull out and begin to enjoy life--as the feller says--before
it's too late'--'Well, I don't know that I blame you, Mrs. Gant,' he
said--'I reckon you're right--we can't take any of it with us,' he
said--'and besides, even if we could, what good would it do us where
we're goin'?'--Now here" (she addressed Eugene with sudden change, with
the old loose masculine gesture of her hand)--"here's the thing I'm
going to do--you know that lot I told you I owned on Sunset
Crescent----"

And now the terrible silence came between them once again.

The marvellous hills were blooming in the dusk. We shall not come again.
We never shall come back again.

Without speech now they faced each other, without speech they knew each
other. In a moment Eliza turned quickly from him and with the queer
unsteady steps with which she had gone out from the room where Ben lay
dying, she moved toward the door.

He rushed back across the walk and with a single bound took the steps
that mounted to the porch. He caught the rough hands that she held
clasped across her body, and drew them swiftly, fiercely, to his breast.

"Good-bye," he muttered harshly. "Good-bye! Good-bye, mamma!" A wild,
strange cry, like that of a beast in pain, was torn from his throat. His
eyes were blind with tears; he tried to speak, to get into a word, a
phrase, all the pain, the beauty, and the wonder of their lives--every
step of that terrible voyage which his incredible memory and intuition
took back to the dwelling of her womb. But no word came, no word could
come; he kept crying hoarsely again and again, "Good-bye, good-bye."

She understood, she knew all he felt and wanted to say, her small weak
eyes were wet as his with tears, her face was twisted in the painful
grimace of sorrow, and she kept saying:

"Poor child! Poor child! Poor child!" Then she whispered huskily,
faintly: "We must try to love one another."

The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the
earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily.
It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our
lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no
hating.

O mortal and perishing love, born with this flesh and dying with this
brain, your memory will haunt the earth forever.

And now the voyage out. Where?




XL


The Square lay under blazing moonlight. The fountain pulsed with a
steady breezeless jet: the water fell upon the pool with a punctual
slap. No one came into the Square.

The chimes of the bank's clock struck the quarter after three as Eugene
entered from the northern edge, by Academy Street.

He came slowly over past the fire department and the City Hall. On
Gant's corner, the Square dipped sharply down toward Niggertown, as if
it had been bent at the edge.

Eugene saw his father's name, faded, on the old brick in moonlight. On
the stone porch of the shop, the angels held their marble posture. They
seemed to have frozen, in the moonlight.

Leaning against the iron railing of the porch, above the sidewalk, a man
stood smoking. Troubled and a little afraid, Eugene came over. Slowly,
he mounted the long wooden steps, looking carefully at the man's face.
It was half-obscured in shadow.

"Is there anybody there?" said Eugene.

No one answered.

But, as Eugene reached the top, he saw that the man was Ben.

Ben stared at him a moment without speaking. Although Eugene could not
see his face very well under the obscuring shadow of his grey felt hat,
he knew that he was scowling.

"Ben?" said Eugene doubtfully, faltering a little on the top step. "Is
it you, Ben?"

"Yes," said Ben. In a moment, he added in a surly voice: "Who did you
think it was, you little idiot?"

"I wasn't sure," said Eugene somewhat timidly. "I couldn't see your
face."

They were silent a moment. Then Eugene, clearing his throat in his
embarrassment, said: "I thought you were dead, Ben."

"Ah-h!" said Ben contemptuously, jerking his head sharply upward.
"Listen to this, won't you?"

He drew deeply on his cigarette: the spiral fumes coiled out and melted
in the moon-bright silence.

"No," he said in a moment, quietly. "No, I am not dead."

Eugene came up on the porch and sat down on a limestone base, up-ended.
Ben turned, in a moment, and climbed up on the rail, bending forward
comfortably upon his knees.

Eugene fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette, with fingers that were
stiff and trembling. He was not frightened: he was speechless with
wonder and strong eagerness, and afraid to betray his thoughts to
ridicule. He lighted a cigarette. Presently he said, painfully,
hesitantly, in apology:

"Ben, are you a ghost?"

Ben did not mock.

"No," he said. "I am not a ghost."

There was silence again, while Eugene sought timorously for words.

"I hope," he began presently, with a small cracked laugh, "I hope, then,
this doesn't mean that I'm crazy?"

"Why not?" said Ben, with a swift flickering grin. "Of course you're
crazy."

"Then," said Eugene slowly, "I'm imagining all this?"

"In heaven's name!" Ben cried irritably. "How should I know? Imagining
all what?"

"What I mean," said Eugene, "is, are we here talking together, or not?"

"Don't ask me," said Ben. "How should I know?"

With a strong rustle of marble and a cold sigh of weariness, the angel
nearest Eugene moved her stone foot and lifted her arm to a higher
balance. The slender lily stipe shook stiffly in her elegant cold
fingers.

"Did you see that?" Eugene cried excitedly.

"Did I see what?" said Ben, annoyed.

"Th-th-that angel there!" Eugene chattered, pointing with a trembling
finger. "Did you see it move? It lifted its arm."

"What of it?" Ben asked irritably. "It has a right to, hasn't it? You
know," he added with biting sarcasm, "there's no law against an angel
lifting its arm if it wants to."

"No, I suppose not," Eugene admitted slowly, after a moment. "Only, I've
always heard----"

"Ah! Do you believe all you hear, fool?" Ben cried fiercely. "Because,"
he added more calmly, in a moment, drawing on his cigarette, "you're in
a bad way if you do."

There was again silence while they smoked. Then Ben said:

"When are you leaving, 'Gene?"

"To-morrow," Eugene answered.

"Do you know why you are going, or are you just taking a ride on the
train?"

"I know! Of course--I know why I'm going!" Eugene said angrily,
confused. He stopped abruptly, bewildered, chastened. Ben continued to
scowl at him. Then, quietly, with humility, Eugene said:

"No, Ben. I don't know why I'm going. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I
just want a ride on the train."

"When are you coming back, 'Gene?" said Ben.

"Why--at the end of the year, I think," Eugene answered.

"No," said Ben, "you're not."

"What do you mean, Ben?" Eugene said, troubled.

"You're not coming back, 'Gene," said Ben softly. "Do you know that?"

There was a pause.

"Yes," said Eugene, "I know it."

"Why aren't you coming back?" said Ben.

Eugene caught fiercely at the neckband of his shirt with a clawed hand.

"I want to go! Do you hear!" he cried.

"Yes," said Ben. "So did I. Why do you want to go?"

"There's nothing here for me," Eugene muttered.

"How long have you felt like this?" said Ben.

"Always," said Eugene. "As long as I can remember. But I didn't know
about it until you----" He stopped.

"Until I what?" said Ben.

There was a pause.

"You are dead, Ben," Eugene muttered. "You must be dead. I saw you die,
Ben." His voice rose sharply. "I tell you, I saw you die. Don't you
remember? The front room upstairs that the dentist's wife has now? Don't
you remember, Ben? Coker, Helen, Bessie Gant who nursed you, Mrs. Pert?
The oxygen tank? I tried to hold your hands together when they gave it
to you." His voice rose to a scream. "Don't you remember? I tell you,
you are dead, Ben."

"Fool," said Ben fiercely. "I am not dead."

There was a silence.

"Then," said Eugene very slowly, "which of us is the ghost, I wonder?"

Ben did not answer.

"Is this the Square, Ben? Is it you I'm talking to? Am I really here or
not? And is this moonlight in the Square? Has all this happened?"

"How should I know?" said Ben again.

Within Gant's shop there was the ponderous tread of marble feet. Eugene
leaped up and peered through the broad sheet of Jannadeau's dirty window.
Upon his desk the strewn vitals of a watch winked with a thousand tiny
points of bluish light. And beyond the jeweller's fenced space, where
moonlight streamed into the ware-room though the tall side-window, the
angels were walking to and fro like huge wound dolls of stone. The long
cold pleats of their raiment rang with brittle clangour; their full
decent breasts wagged in stony rhythms, and through the moonlight, with
clashing wings the marble cherubim flew round and round. With cold
ewe-bleatings the carved lambs grazed stiffly across the moon-drenched
aisle.

"Do you see it?" cried Eugene. "Do you see it, Ben?"

"Yes," said Ben. "What about it? They have a right to, haven't they?"

"Not here! Not here!" said Eugene passionately. "It's not right, here!
My God, this is the Square! There's the fountain! There's the City Hall!
There's the Greek's lunch-room."

The bank-chimes struck the half hour.

"And there's the bank!" he cried.

"That's makes no difference," said Ben.

"Yes," said Eugene, "it does!"

I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the
night----

"But not here! Not here, Ben!" said Eugene.

"Where?" said Ben wearily.

"In Babylon! In Thebes! In all the other places. But not here!" Eugene
answered with growing passion. "There is a place where all things
happen! But not here, Ben!"

My gods, with bird-cries in the sun, hang in the sky.

"Not here, Ben! It is not right!" Eugene said again.

The manifold gods of Babylon. Then, for a moment, Eugene stared at the
dark figure on the rail, muttering in protest and disbelief: "Ghost!
Ghost!"

"Fool," said Ben again, "I tell you I am not a ghost."

"Then, what are you?" said Eugene with strong excitement. "You are dead,
Ben."

In a moment, more quietly, he added: "Or do men die?"

"How should I know," said Ben.

"They say papa is dying. Did you know that, Ben?" Eugene asked.

"Yes," said Ben.

"They have bought his shop. They are going to tear it down and put up a
skyscraper here."

"Yes," said Ben, "I know it."

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.

"Everything is going. Everything changes and passes away. To-morrow I
shall be gone and this----" he stopped.

"This--what?" said Ben.

"This will be gone or--O God! Did all this happen?" cried Eugene.

"How should I know, fool?" cried Ben angrily.

"What happens, Ben? What really happens?" said Eugene. "Can you remember
some of the same things that I do? I have forgotten the old faces. Where
are they, Ben? What were their names? I forget the names of people I
knew for years. I get their faces mixed. I get their heads stuck on
other people's bodies. I think one man has said what another said. And I
forget--forget. There is something I have lost and have forgotten. I
can't remember, Ben."

"What do you want to remember?" said Ben.

A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. And the forgotten faces.

"I have forgotten names. I have forgotten faces. And I remember little
things," said Eugene. "I remember the fly I swallowed on the peach, and
the little boys on tricycles at Saint Louis, and the mole on Grover's
neck, and the Lackawanna freight-car, number 16356, on a siding near
Gulfport. Once, in Norfolk, an Australian soldier on his way to France
asked me the way to a ship; I remember that man's face."

He stared for an answer into the shadow of Ben's face, and then he
turned his moon-bright eyes upon the Square.

And for a moment all the silver space was printed with the thousand
forms of himself and Ben. There, by the corner in from Academy Street,
Eugene watched his own approach; there, by the City Hall, he strode with
lifted knees; there, by the curb upon the step, he stood, peopling the
night with the great lost legion of himself--the thousand forms that
came, that passed, that wove and shifted in unending change, and that
remained unchanging Him.

And through the Square, unwoven from lost time, the fierce bright horde
of Ben spun in and out its deathless loom. Ben in a thousand moments,
walked the Square: Ben of the lost years, the forgotten days, the
unremembered hours; prowled by the moonlit faades; vanished, returned,
left and rejoined himself, was one and many--deathless Ben in
search of the lost dead lusts, the finished enterprise, the unfound
door--unchanging Ben multiplying himself in form, by all the brick
faades entering and coming out.

And as Eugene watched the army of himself and Ben, which were not
ghosts, and which were lost, he saw himself--his son, his boy, his lost
and virgin flesh--come over past the fountain, leaning against the
loaded canvas bag, and walking down with rapid crippled stride past
Gant's toward Niggertown in young pre-natal dawn. And as he passed the
porch where he sat watching, he saw the lost child-face below the lumpy
ragged cap, drugged in the magic of unheard music, listening for the
far-forested horn-note, the speechless almost captured pass-word. The
fast boy-hands folded the fresh sheets, but the fabulous lost face went
by, steeped in its incantations.

Eugene leaped to the railing.

"You! You! My son! My child! Come back! Come back!"

His voice strangled in his throat: the boy had gone, leaving the memory
of his bewitched and listening face turned to the hidden world. O lost!

And now the Square was thronging with their lost bright shapes, and all
the minutes of lost time collected and stood still. Then, shot from them
with projectile speed, the Square shrank down the rails of destiny, and
was vanished with all things done, with all forgotten shapes of himself
and Ben.


And in his vision he saw the fabulous lost cities, buried in the drifted
silt of the earth--Thebes, the seven-gated, and all the temples of the
Daulian and Phocian lands, and all Oenotria to the Tyrrhene gulf. Sunk
in the burial-urn of earth he saw the vanished cultures: the strange
sourceless glory of the Incas, the fragments of lost epics upon a broken
shard of Gnossic pottery, the buried tombs of the Memphian kings, and
imperial dust, wound all about with gold and rotting linen, dead with
their thousand bestial gods, their mute unwakened _ushabtii_, in their
finished eternities.

He saw the billion living of the earth, the thousand billion dead: seas
were withered, deserts flooded, mountains drowned; and gods and demons
came out of the South, and ruled above the little rocket-flare of
centuries, and sank--came to their Northern Lights of death, the
muttering death-flared dusk of the completed gods.

But, amid the fumbling march of races to extinction, the giant
rhythms of the earth remained. The seasons passed in their majestic
processionals, and germinal Spring returned forever on the land--new
crops, new men, new harvests, and new gods.

And then the voyages, the search for the happy land. In his moment of
terrible vision he saw, in the tortuous ways of a thousand alien places,
his foiled quest of himself. And his haunted face was possessed of that
obscure and passionate hunger that had woven its shuttle across the
seas, that had hung its weft among the Dutch in Pennsylvania, that
had darkened his father's eyes to impalpable desire for wrought stone
and the head of an angel. Hill-haunted, whose vision of the earth was
mountain-walled, he saw the golden cities sicken in his eye, the opulent
dark splendours turn to dingy grey. His brain was sick with the million
books, his eyes with the million pictures, his body sickened on a
hundred princely wines.

And rising from his vision, he cried: "I am not there among the cities.
I have sought down a million streets, until the goat-cry died within
my throat, and I have found no city where I was, no door where I had
entered, no place where I had stood."

Then, from the edges of moon-bright silence, Ben replied: "Fool, why do
you look in the streets?"

Then Eugene said: "I have eaten and drunk the earth, I have been lost
and beaten, and I will go no more."

"Fool," said Ben, "what do you want to find?"

"Myself, and an end to hunger, and the happy land," he answered. "For I
believe in harbours at the end. O Ben, brother, and ghost, and stranger,
you who could never speak, give me an answer now!"

Then, as he thought, Ben said: "There is no happy land. There is no end
to hunger."

"And a stone, a leaf, a door? Ben?" Spoke, continued without speaking,
to speak. "Who are, who never were, Ben, the seeming of my brain, as I
of yours, my ghost, my stranger, who died, who never lived, as I? But
if, lost seeming of my dreaming brain, you have what I have not--an
answer?"

Silence spoke. ("I cannot speak of voyages. I belong here. I never got
away," said Ben.)

"Then I of yours the seeming, Ben? Your flesh is dead and buried in
these hills: my unimprisoned soul haunts through the million streets of
life, living its spectral nightmare of hunger and desire. Where, Ben?
Where is the world?"

"Nowhere," Ben said. "_You_ are your world."

Inevitable catharsis by the threads of chaos. Unswerving punctuality of
chance. Summation, from the billion deaths of possibility, of things
done.

"I shall save one land unvisited," said Eugene. _Et ego in Arcadia._

And as he spoke, he saw that he had left the million bones of cities,
the skein of streets. He was alone with Ben, and their feet were planted
on darkness, their faces were lit with the cold high terror of the
stars.

On the brink of the dark he stood, with only the dream of the cities,
the million books, the spectral images of the people he had loved, who
had loved him, whom he had known and lost. They will not come again.
They never will come back again.

With his feet upon the cliff of darkness, he looked and saw the lights
of no cities. It was, he thought, the strong good medicine of death.

"Is this the end?" he said. "Have I eaten life and have not found him?
Then I will voyage no more."

"Fool," said Ben, "_this_ is life. You have been nowhere."

"But in the cities?"

"There are none. There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only
one."

"On coasts more strange than Cipango, in a place more far than Fez, I
shall hunt him, the ghost and haunter of myself. I have lost the blood
that fed me; I have died the hundred deaths that lead to life. By the
slow thunder of the drums, the flare of dying cities, I have come to
this dark place. And this is the true voyage, the good one, the best.
And now prepare, my soul, for the beginning hunt. I will plumb seas
stranger than those haunted by the Albatross."

He stood naked and alone in darkness, far from the lost world of the
streets and faces; he stood upon the ramparts of his soul, before the
lost land of himself; heard inland murmurs of lost seas, the far
interior music of the horns. The last voyage, the longest, the best.

"O sudden and impalpable faun, lost in the thickets of myself, I will
hunt you down until you cease to haunt my eyes with hunger. I heard your
foot-falls in the desert. I saw your shadow in old buried cities, I
heard your laughter running down a million streets, but I did not find
you there. And no leaf hangs for me in the forest; I shall lift no stone
upon the hills; I shall find no door in any city. But in the city of
myself, upon the continent of my soul, I shall find the forgotten
language, the lost world, a door where I may enter, and music strange as
any ever sounded; I shall haunt you, ghost, along the labyrinthine ways
until----until? O Ben, my ghost, an answer?"

But as he spoke, the phantom years scrolled up their vision, and only
the eyes of Ben burned terribly in darkness, without an answer.

And day came, and the song of waking birds, and the Square, bathed in
the young pearl light of morning. And a wind stirred lightly in the
Square, and, as he looked, Ben, like a fume of smoke, was melted into
dawn.

And the angels on Gant's porch were frozen in hard marble silence, and
at a distance life awoke, and there was a rattle of lean wheels, a slow
clangour of shod hoofs. And he heard the whistle wail along the river.

Yet, as he stood for the last time by the angels of his father's porch,
it seemed as if the Square already were far and lost; or, I should say,
he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet
does not say "The town is near," but turns his eyes upon the distant
soaring ranges.

THE END




  NEW & RECENT FICTION

  HER FATHER'S HOUSE
  _Hilda Vaughan_

  SHRIMPS FOR TEA
  _Josephine Blumenfeld_

  GONDOLAS PASS
  _Helen Mackay_

  OTHER MAN'S SAUCER
  _J. Keith Winter_

  THE WOODEN WOMAN
  _Alexander Townsend_

  MY LORD LUCIFER
  _Bertha Selous_




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

Some minor changes have been made to punctuation; inconsistencies in
hyphenation and the spacing of abbreviations have been retained, as have
unusual spellings. The advertising matter was moved to the end.

The following additional changes have been made to the text; the
original appears in the first line, the changed text in the second.

  Give my succour!
    Give _me_ succour.

  the solititous Pullman porter
    the _solicitous_ Pullman porter

  Those in the East should should always go West.
    Those in the East _should_ always go West.

  a white arm curved reaching for a wondow
    a white arm curved reaching for a _window_

  scawled obscenities to the little girls.
    _scrawled_ obscenities to the little girls.

  What a nice big room you're got!
    What a nice big room _you've_ got!

  and sqiunted
    and _squinted_

  the round brick cyclinder of Fort Sumter
    the round brick _cylinder_ of Fort Sumter

  the atom for which all life had been aplot
    the atom for which all life had been _a plot_




[End of _Look Homeward, Angel_ by Thomas Wolfe]
