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 gray 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 lust 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 gray-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 quiet 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!” + 

Eugene’s first year at the university was filled for him with loneliness, pain, and failure. Within three weeks of his matriculation, he had been made the dupe of a half-dozen classic jokes, his ignorance of all campus tradition had been exploited, his gullibility was a byword. He was the greenest of all green Freshmen, past and present: he had listened attentively to a sermon in chapel by a sophomore with false whiskers; he had prepared studiously for an examination on the contents of the college catalogue; and he had been guilty of the inexcusable blunder of making a speech of acceptance on his election, with fifty others, to the literary society. + 

And these buffooneries⁠—a little cruel, but only with the cruelty of vacant laughter, and a part of the schedule of rough humor in an American college⁠—salty, extravagant, and national⁠—opened deep wounds in him, which his companions hardly suspected. He was conspicuous at once not only because of his blunders, but also because of his young wild child’s face, and his great raw length of body, with the bounding scissor legs. The undergraduates passed him in grinning clusters: he saluted them obediently, but with a sick heart. And the smug smiling faces of his own classmen, the wiser Freshmen, complacently guiltless of his own mistakes, touched him at moments with insane fury. + 

“Smile and smile and s-mile⁠—damn you!” he cursed through his grating teeth. For the first time in his life he began to dislike whatever fits too snugly in a measure. He began to dislike and envy the inconspicuous mould of general nature⁠—the multitudinous arms, legs, hands, feet, and figures that are comfortably shaped for ready-made garments. And the prettily regular, wherever he found it, he hated⁠—the vacantly handsome young men, with shining hair, evenly parted in the middle, with sure strong middling limbs meant to go gracefully on dancefloors. He longed to see them commit some awkward blunder⁠—to trip and sprawl, to be flatulent, to lose a strategic button in mixed company, to be unconscious of a hanging shirttail while with a pretty girl. But they made no mistakes. + 

As he walked across the campus, he heard his name called mockingly from a dozen of the impartial windows, he heard the hidden laughter, and he ground his teeth. And at night, he stiffened with shame in his dark bed, ripping the sheet between his fingers as, with the unbalanced vision, the swollen egotism of the introvert, the picture of a crowded student-room, filled with the grinning historians of his exploits, burned in his brain. He strangled his fierce cry with a taloned hand. He wanted to blot out the shameful moment, unweave the loom. It seemed to him that his ruin was final, that he had stamped the beginning of his university life with folly that would never be forgotten, and that the best he could do would be to seek out obscurity for the next four years. He saw himself in his clown’s trappings and thought of his former vision of success and honor with a lacerating self-contempt. + 

There was no one to whom he could turn: he had no friends. His conception of university life was a romantic blur, evoked from his reading and tempered with memories of Stover at Yale, Young Fred Fearnot, and jolly youths with affectionate linked arms, bawling out a cheer-song. No one had given him even the rudimentary data of the somewhat rudimentary life of an American university. He had not been warned of the general taboos. Thus, he had come greenly on his new life, unprepared, as he came ever thereafter on all new life, save for his opium visions of himself a stranger in Arcadias. + 

He was alone. He was desperately lonely. + 

But the university was a charming, an unforgettable place. It was situated in the little village of Pulpit Hill, in the central midland of the big State. Students came and departed by motor from the dreary tobacco town of Exeter, twelve miles away: the countryside was raw, powerful and ugly, a rolling land of field, wood, and hollow; but the university itself was buried in a pastoral wilderness, on a long tabling butte, which rose steeply above the country. One burst suddenly, at the hilltop, on the end of the straggling village street, flanked by faculty houses, and winding a mile in to the town centre and the university. The central campus sloped back and up over a broad area of rich turf, groved with magnificent ancient trees. A quadrangle of post-Revolutionary buildings of weathered brick bounded the upper end: other newer buildings, in the modern bad manner (the Pedagogic Neo-Greeky), were scattered around beyond the central design: beyond, there was a thickly forested wilderness. There was still a good flavor of the wilderness about the place⁠—one felt its remoteness, its isolated charm. It seemed to Eugene like a provincial outpost of great Rome: the wilderness crept up to it like a beast. + 

Its great poverty, its century-long struggle in the forest, had given the university a sweetness and a beauty it was later to forfeit. It had the fine authority of provincialism⁠—the provincialism of an older South. Nothing mattered but the State: the State was a mighty empire, a rich kingdom⁠—there was, beyond, a remote and semi-barbaric world. + 

Few of the university’s sons had been distinguished in the nation’s life⁠—there had been an obscure President of the United States, and a few Cabinet members, but few had sought such distinction: it was glory enough to be a great man in one’s State. Nothing beyond mattered very much. + 

In this pastoral setting a young man was enabled to loaf comfortably and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent years. There was, God knows, seclusion enough for monastic scholarship, but the rare romantic quality of the atmosphere, the prodigal opulence of Springtime, thick with flowers and drenched in a fragrant warmth of green shimmering light, quenched pretty thoroughly any incipient rash of bookishness. Instead, they loafed and invited their souls or, with great energy and enthusiasm, promoted the affairs of glee-clubs, athletic teams, class politics, fraternities, debating societies, and dramatic clubs. And they talked⁠—always they talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls, assembled in their rooms, they talked⁠—in limp sprawls⁠—incessant, charming, empty Southern talk; they talked with a large easy fluency about God, the Devil, and philosophy, the girls, politics, athletics, fraternities and the girls⁠—My God! how they talked! + 

“Observe,” lisped Mr. Torrington, the old Rhodes Scholar (Pulpit Hill and Merton, ’14), “observe how skilfully he holds suspense until the very end. Observe with what consummate art he builds up his climax, keeping his meaning hidden until the very last word.” Further, in fact. + 

At last, thought Eugene, I am getting an education. This must be good writing, because it seems so very dull. When it hurts, the dentist says, it does you good. Democracy must be real, because it is so very earnest. It must be a certainty, because it is so elegantly embalmed in this marble mausoleum of language. Essays For College Men⁠—Woodrow Wilson, Lord Bryce and Dean Briggs. + 

But there was no word here of the loud raucous voice of America, political conventions and the Big Brass Band, Tweed, Tammany, the Big Stick, lynching bees and black barbecue parties, the Boston Irish, and the damnable machinations of the Pope as exposed by the Babylon Hollow Trumpet (Dem.), the rape of the Belgian virgins, rum, oil, Wall Street and Mexico. + 

All that, Mr. Torrington would have said, was temporary and accidental. It was unsound. + 

Mr. Torrington smiled moistly at Eugene and urged him tenderly into a chair drawn intimately to his desk. + 

“Mr.⁠—? Mr.⁠—?⁠—” he said, fumbling at his index cards. + 

“Gant,” said Eugene. + 

“Ah, yes⁠—Mr. Gant,” he smiled his contrition. “Now⁠—about your outside reading?” he began. + 

But what, thought Eugene, about my inside reading? + 

Did he like to read? Ah⁠—that was good. He was so glad to hear it. The true university in these days, said Carlyle (he did hope Eugene liked rugged old Thomas), was a collection of books. + 

“Yes, sir,” said Eugene. + 

That, it seemed to him, was the Oxford Plan. Oh, yes⁠—he had been there, three years, in fact. His mild eye kindled. To loaf along the High on a warm Spring day, stopping to examine in the bookseller’s windows the treasures that might be had for so little. Then to Buol’s or to a friend’s room for tea, or for a walk in the meadows or Magdalen gardens, or to look down into the quad, at the gay pageant of youth below. Ah⁠—Ah! A great place? Well⁠—he’d hardly say that. It all depended what one meant by a great place. Half the looseness in thought⁠—unfortunately, he fancied, more prevalent among American than among English youth⁠—came from an indefinite exuberance of ill-defined speech. + 

“Yes, sir,” said Eugene. + 

A great place? Well, he’d scarcely say that. The expression was typically American. Butter-lipped, he turned on the boy a smile of soft unfriendliness: + 

“It kills,” he observed, “a man’s useless enthusiasms.” + 

Eugene whitened a little. + 

“That’s fine,” he said. + 

Now⁠—let him see. Did he like plays⁠—the modern drama? Excellent. They were doing some very interesting things in the modern drama. Barrie⁠—oh, a charming fellow! What was that? Shaw! + 

“Yes, sir,” said Eugene. “I’ve read all the others. There’s a new book out.” + 

“Oh, but really! My dear boy!” said Mr. Torrington with gentle amazement. He shrugged his shoulders and became politely indifferent. Very well, if he liked. Of course, he thought it rather a pity to waste one’s time so when they were really doing some first-rate things. That was just the trouble, however. The appeal of a man like that was mainly to the unformed taste, the uncritical judgment. He had a flashy attraction for the immature. Oh, yes! Undoubtedly an amusing fellow. Clever⁠—yes, but hardly significant. And⁠—didn’t he think⁠—a trifle noisy? Or had he noticed that? Yes⁠—there was to be sure an amusing Celtic strain, not without charm, but unsound. He was not in line with the best modern thought. + 

“I’ll take the Barrie,” said Eugene. + 

Yes, he rather thought that would be better. + 

“Well, good day. Mr.⁠—Mr.⁠—?⁠—?” he smiled, fumbling again with his cards. + 

“Gant.” + 

Oh yes, to be sure⁠—Gant. He held out his plump limp hand. He did hope Mr. Gant would call on him. Perhaps he’d be able to advise him on some of the little problems that, he knew, were constantly cropping up during the first year. Above all, he mustn’t get discouraged. + 

“Yes, sir,” said Eugene, backing feverishly to the door. When he felt the open space behind him, he fell through it, and vanished. + 

Anyway, he thought grimly, I’ve read all the damned Barries. I’ll write the damned report for him, and damned well read what I damn well please. + 

God save our King and Queen! + 

He had courses besides in Chemistry, Mathematics, Greek, and Latin. + 

He worked hard and with interest at his Latin. His instructor was a tall shaven man, with a yellow saturnine face. He parted his scant hair cleverly in such a way as to suggest horns. His lips were always twisted in a satanic smile, his eyes gleamed sideward with heavy malicious humor. Eugene had great hopes of him. When the boy arrived, panting and break-fastless, a moment after the class had settled to order, the satanic professor would greet him with elaborate irony: “Ah there, Brother Gant! Just in time for church again. Have you slept well?” + 

The class roared its appreciation of these subtleties. And later, in an expectant pause, he would deepen his arched brows portentously, stare up mockingly under his bushy eyebrows at his expectant audience, and say, in a deep sardonic voice: + 

“And now, I am going to request Brother Gant to favor us with one of his polished and scholarly translations.” + 

These heavy jibes were hard to bear because, of all the class, two dozen or more, Brother Gant was the only one to prepare his work without the aid of a printed translation. He worked hard on Livy and Tacitus, going over the lesson several times until he had dug out a smooth and competent reading of his own. This he was stupid enough to deliver in downright fashion, without hesitation, or a skilfully affected doubt here and there. For his pains and honesty he was handsomely rewarded by the Amateur Diabolist. The lean smile would deepen as the boy read, the man would lift his eyes significantly to the grinning class, and when it was over, he would say: + 

“Bravo, Brother Gant! Excellent! Splendid! You are riding a good pony⁠—but a little too smoothly, my boy. You ride a little too well.” + 

The class sniggered heavily. + 

When he could stand it no longer, he sought the man out one day after the class. + 

“See here, sir! See here!” he began in a voice choking with fury and exasperation. “Sir⁠—I assure you⁠—” he thought of all the grinning apes in the class, palming off profitably their stolen translations, and he could not go on. + 

The Devil’s Disciple was not a bad man; he was only, like most men who pride themselves on their astuteness, a foolish one. + 

“Nonsense, Mr. Gant,” said he kindly. “You don’t think you can fool me on a translation, do you? It’s all right with me, you know,” he continued, grinning. “If you’d rather ride a pony than do your own work, I’ll give you a passing grade⁠—so long as you do it well.” + 

“But⁠—” Eugene began explosively. + 

“But I think it’s a pity, Mr. Gant,” said the professor, gravely, “that you’re willing to slide along this way. See here, my boy, you’re capable of doing first-rate work. I can see that. Why don’t you make an effort? Why don’t you buckle down and really study, after this?” + 

Eugene stared at the man, with tears of anger in his eyes. He sputtered but could not speak. But suddenly, as he looked down into the knowing leer, the perfect and preposterous injustice of the thing⁠—like a caricature⁠—overcame him: he burst into an explosive laugh of rage and amusement which the teacher, no doubt, accepted as confession. + 

“Well, what do you say?” he asked. “Will you try?” + 

“All right! Yes!” the boy yelled. “I’ll try it.” + 

He bought at once a copy of the translation used by the class. Thereafter, when he read, faltering prettily here and there over a phrase, until his instructor should come to his aid, the satanic professor listened gravely and attentively, nodding his head in approval from time to time, and saying, with great satisfaction, when he had finished: “Good, Mr. Gant. Very good. That shows what a little real work will do.” + 

And privately, he would say: “You see the difference, don’t you? I knew at once when you stopped using that pony. Your translation is not so smooth, but it’s your own now. You’re doing good work, my boy, and you’re getting something out of it. It’s worth it, isn’t it?” + 

“Yes,” said Eugene gratefully, “it certainly is⁠—” + 

By far the most distinguished of his teachers this first year was Mr. Edward Pettigrew (“Buck”) Benson, the Greek professor. Buck Benson was a little man in the middle-forties, a bachelor, somewhat dandified, but old-fashioned, in his dress. He wore wing collars, large plump cravats, and suede-topped shoes. His hair was thick, heavily grayed, beautifully kept. His face was courteously pugnacious, fierce, with large yellow bulging eyeballs, and several bulldog pleatings around the mouth. It was an altogether handsome ugliness. + 

His voice was low, lazy, pleasant, with an indolent drawl, but without changing its pace or its inflection he could flay a victim with as cruel a tongue as ever wagged, and in the next moment wipe out hostility, restore affection, heal all wounds by the same agency. His charm was enormous. Among the students he was the subject for comical speculation⁠—in their myths, they made of him a passionate and sophisticated lover, and his midget cycle-car, which bounded like an overgrown toy around the campus, the scene of many romantic seductions. + 

He was a good Grecian⁠—an elegant indolent scholar. Under his instruction Eugene began to read Homer. The boy knew little grammar⁠—he had learned little at Leonard’s⁠—but, since he had had the bad judgment to begin Greek under someone other than Buck Benson, Buck Benson thought he knew even less than he did. He studied desperately, but the bitter dyspeptic gaze of the elegant little man frightened him into halting, timorous, clumsy performances. And as he proceeded, with thumping heart and tremulous voice, Buck Benson’s manner would become more and more weary, until finally, dropping his book, he would drawl: + 

“Mister Gant, you make me so damned mad I could throw you out the window.” + 

But, on the examination, he gave an excellent performance, and translated from sight beautifully. He was saved. Buck Benson commended his paper publicly with lazy astonishment, and gave him a fair grade. Thereafter, they slipped quickly into an easier relation: by Spring, he was reading Euripides with some confidence. + 

But that which remained most vividly, later, in the drowning years which cover away so much of beauty, was the vast sea-surge of Homer which beat in his brain, his blood, his pulses, as did the sea-sound in Gant’s parlor shells, when first he heard it to the slowly pacing feet and the hexametrical drawl of Buck Benson, the lost last weary son of Hellas. + 

Dwaney de clangay genett, argereoyo beeoyo⁠—above the whistle’s shriek, the harsh scream of the wheel, the riveter’s tattoo, the vast long music endures, and ever shall. What dissonance can quench it? What jangling violence can disturb or conquer it⁠—entombed in our flesh when we were young, remembered like “the apple tree, the singing, and the gold”? + 

XXIX + 

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. + 

He had come to Pulpit Hill with Hugh Barton, who met him at Exeter and drove him over in the big roadster. After his registration, he had secured lodging quickly at the house of an Altamont widow whose son was a student. Hugh Barton looked relieved and departed, hoping to reach home and his bride by nightfall. + 

With fine enthusiasm, but poor judgment, Eugene paid the widow two months in advance. Her name was Bradley: she was a flabby petulant woman with a white face and heart-disease. But her food was excellent. Mrs. Bradley’s student son answered to his initial letters⁠—“G. T.” G. T. Bradley, a member of the sophomore class, was a surly scowling youth of nineteen⁠—a mixture, in equal parts, of servility and insolence. His chief, but thwarted, ambition was to be elected to membership in a fraternity. Having failed to win recognition by the exercise of his natural talents, he was driven by an extraordinary obsession that fame and glory would come to him if he were known as the slave-driver of a number of Freshmen. + 

But these tactics, tried on Eugene, produced at once defiance and resentment. Their hostility was bitter: G. T. set himself to thwart and ruin the beginnings of the boy’s university life. He trapped him into public blunders, and solicited audiences to witness his humiliation; he wheedled his confidence and betrayed it. But there is a final mockery, an ultimate treachery that betrays us into shame; our capacity for villainy, like all our other capacities, is so small. The day came when Eugene was free from bondage. He was free to leave the widow’s house of sorrow. G. T. approached him, scowling, diffidently. + 

“I hear you’re leaving us, ’Gene,” he said. + 

“Yes,” said Eugene. + 

“Is it because of the way I’ve acted?” + 

“Yes,” said Eugene. + 

“You take things too seriously, ’Gene,” he said. + 

“Yes,” said Eugene. + 

“I don’t want you to go having hard feelings, ’Gene. Let’s shake hands and be friends.” + 

He thrust his hand out stiffly. Eugene looked at the hard weak face, the furtive, unhappy eyes casting about for something they might call their own. The thick black hair was plastered stiff with grease; he saw white points of dandruff at the roots. There was an odor of talcum powder. He had been borne and nourished in the body of his white-faced mother⁠—for what? To lap the scornful stroking fingers of position; to fawn miserably before an emblem. Eugene had a moment of nausea. + 

“Let’s shake hands, ’Gene,” said the boy once more, waggling his out-thrust fingers. + 

“No,” said Eugene. + 

“You don’t hate me, do you?” whined G. T. + 

“No,” said Eugene. + 

He had a moment of pity, of sickness. He forgave because it was necessary to forget. + 

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: skintight 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 Mrs. Bradley’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 tomorrow,” 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 profound 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 woodbox. + 

“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. O 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 wallpaper, 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 her now 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, trimmed 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 streetlamp, 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!” + 

He went to the curb, and vomited into the gutter. Then he straightened, mopping his mouth with a handkerchief. + 

“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 tonight.” + 

“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 cornerlamps 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 loins were black with vermin. 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 hill-born. 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 meaner 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 gray 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 labored 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 anteroom 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 halfway 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.” + 

“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 honor 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 mustache, 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 lunchroom 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 everyone 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-humor. + 

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, gray 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 boardinghouse schedules. The food was abundant, coarse, greasily and badly cooked. It was very cheap: at the college commons, twelve dollars a month; at the boardinghouses, 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 spinstress 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 gray tide of the years. They stood quietly, frightened, in that strange place, waiting to hear the summons of his voice, with expectant unbelief, as someone looking for the god in Brooklyn. + 

In April the nation 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. The fraternity men joined first⁠—those merry and extravagant snobs of whom he had never known, but who now represented for him the highest reach of urbane and aristocratic life. He had seen them, happy and idle, on the wide verandas of their chapter houses⁠—those temples where the last and awful rites of initiation were administered. He had seen them, always together, and from the herd of the uninitiated always apart, laughing over their mail at the post-office, or gambling for “black cows,” at the drug store. And, with a stab of failure, with regret, with pain at his social deficiency, he had watched their hot campaigns for the favor of some desirable freshman⁠—someone vastly more elegant than himself, someone with blood and with money. They were only the sons of the little rich men, the lords of the village and county, but as he saw them go so surely, with such laughing unconstraint, in well-cut clothes, well-groomed, well-brushed, among the crowd of humbler students, who stiffened awkwardly with peasant hostility and constraint⁠—they were the flower of chivalry, the sons of the mansion-house. They were Sydney, Raleigh, Nash. And now, like gentlemen, they were going to war. + 

The gymnasium was thick with the smell of steam and of sweating men coming in to the showers from the playing fields. Washed, with opened shirt, Eugene walked slowly away into the green budding shade of the campus, companioned by an acquaintance, Ralph Hendrix. + 

“Look!” said Ralph Hendrix, in a low angry tone. “Look at that, will you!” He nodded toward a group of students ahead. “That little Horse’s Neck is booting the Dekes all over the campus.” + 

Eugene looked, then turned to examine the bitter common face beside him. Every Saturday night, after the meeting of the literary society, Ralph Hendrix went to the drugstore and bought two cheap cigars. He had bent narrow shoulders, a white knobby face, and a low forehead. He spoke in a monotonous painful drawl. His father was foreman in a cotton mill. + 

“They’re all Horse’s Necks,” he said. “They can go to hell before I’ll boot to get in.” + 

“Yes,” said Eugene. + 

But he wanted to get in. He wanted to be urbane and careless. He wanted to wear well-cut clothes. He wanted to be a gentleman. He wanted to go to war. + 

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 Aeschylus. In fact, Aeschylus 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 favor 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 Greene 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 armor, the spirit 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, mama! Do you realize that this is the best neighborhood in town? We’re only two blocks from the Governor’s Mansion, you know. Mrs. Mathews is no common boardinghouse 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, speechmaking, 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, grayer. 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 around 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 anyone 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 armor. 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 boardinghouse 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 armbands. 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 chatter. 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, mama? 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—boardinghouse 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 mowing 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 bath room, 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. Everyone 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 everyone 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.” + 

“Mama, 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 armor of pride. The steel had sheared his side, had bitten to his heart. But under his armor 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 pretense 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 dishonored 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, mama. 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, mama. Papa’s a sick man. Can’t you realize that?” + 

“Pshaw!” said Eliza scornfully. “I don’t believe there’s a thing in the world wrong with him but that vile licker. 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 gray 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 anyone 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 tomorrow, 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 anyone?” + 

“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, mama. 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. “Mama, mama, 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, mama,” 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, mama! Please!” + 

“Nobody knows,” said Eliza. “Nobody knows. I need someone 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!” 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 everyone 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 minutae 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, mama? 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 coalmine? 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 everyone 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, mama. 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 today, 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 shoebox?” 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 today.” + 

“O mama! 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 shoebox 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 today,” 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 specialization. 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 anyone 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 fingernails, 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 shoebox 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 odor 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 watermarks. 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 cattle, 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 halfway 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 hole 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 odor 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 odor. 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 odor 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 gray 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 odor⁠—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 forever! 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 Maenad’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 reunion 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 400 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 gray 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. Tomorrow⁠—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 everyone 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. + 

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: + 

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 tomorrow and 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. Goodbye and God bless you. Oh, my darling, it was heaven! I shall never forget you. + 

When he had finished the letter, he reread 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, bloodred, 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 horseshoe 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!” 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 mailbox 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. O 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 streetcars: 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 gray 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-parlor 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 grapevine 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 anyone 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 flowerbed 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 homelike 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 anyone 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. Someone 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 anyone.” She smiled at him bitterly. + 

“Well, good night, mama,” 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 childlike 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 footfalls 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-parlor, 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 color, 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 hangdog 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 bookkeeper 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 gray 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. Anyone 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 battlefields 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 gray 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 anyone. 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 check 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, mama, 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 ever knew 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 Tomorrow! Of what use all labor for Tomorrow! 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 roommate 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. + 

Everyone 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, chafing 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 roommates⁠—one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name of L. K. Duncan (the L stood for Lawrence, but everyone 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 colored 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 sideshow: loquacious, patronizing, and cynical. + 

The other roommate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child. He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness 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 Damocles 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 all times⁠—she drank in nibbling draughts for stimulants, 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!” + 

It was necessary to speak to everyone. If one spoke to everyone, one was “democratic”; if one did not, one was a snob, and got few votes. The appraisal of personality, like all other appraisal with them, was coarse and blunt. They were suspicious of all eminence. They had a hard peasant hostility to the unusual. A man was brilliant? Was there a bright sparkle to him? Bad, bad! He was not safe; he was not sound. The place was a democratic microcosmos⁠—seething with political interests: national, regional, collegiate. + 

The campus had its candidates, its managers, its bosses, its machines, as had the State. A youngster developed in college the political craft he was later to exert in Party affairs. The son of a politician was schooled by his crafty sire before the down was off his cheeks: at sixteen, his life had been plotted ahead to the governorship, or to the proud dignities of a Congressman. The boy came deliberately to the university to bait and set his first traps: deliberately he made those friendships that were most likely to benefit him later. By his junior year, if he was successful, he had a political manager, who engineered his campus ambitions; he moved with circumspection, and spoke with a trace of pomp nicely weighed with cordiality: + 

“Ah, there, gentlemen.” “Gentlemen, how are you?” “A nice day, gentlemen.” + 

The vast champaign of the world stretched out its limitless wonder, but few were seduced away from the fortress of the State, few ever heard the distant reverberation of an idea. They could get no greater glory for themselves than a seat in the Senate, and the way to glory⁠—the way to all power, highness, and distinction whatsoever⁠—was through the law, a string tie, and a hat. Hence politics, law schools, debating societies, and speechmaking. The applause of listening senates to command. + 

The yokels, of course, were in the saddle⁠—they composed nine-tenths of the student body: the proud titles were in their gift, and they took good care that their world should be kept safe for yokelry and the homespun virtues. Usually, these dignities⁠—the presidencies of student bodies, classes, Y.M.C.A.’s, and the managerships of athletic teams⁠—were given to some honest serf who had established his greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in all directions. Such an industrious hack was called an “all-round man.” He was safe, sound, and reliable. He would never get notions. He was the fine flower of university training. He was a football scrub, and a respectable scholar in all subjects. He was a universal Two Man. He always got Two on everything, except Moral Character, where he shone with a superlative Oneness. If he did not go into the law or the ministry, he was appointed a Rhodes Scholar. + 

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 that 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 buoyance, 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 favor. Everyone knew him at sight: everyone called him by name, and spoke to him kindly. He was not disliked. He was happy, full of expansive joy, he greeted everyone 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 colored ribbons in his coat lapel, and a waistcoat plastered with pins, badges, symbols, and Greek letterings. + 

But not without labor 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 anyone. 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, mama!” 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 realize 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 rawboned 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 gray 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, mama! 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 parlor 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 organizations,” 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. Everyone 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. Mama, old girl,” he said, as he embraced her, “how’re they going? Still hitting on all six. Fine!” he yelled, before anyone 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. + 

Everyone 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 whiskey. + 

“There!” she said cheerfully. “That’s not going to hurt him.” + 

“Son,” said Eliza gravely, balancing her wineglass, “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 whiskey, 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 night 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. Bareheaded 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 anyone 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 passersby. 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 cockeyed 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 parlor, 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 paralyzed. + 

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 burned 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 honor? 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 moralizing. “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 honor today, 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 mama, 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-humored 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. + 

Everyone 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 hangdog; 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 thunderbolts 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 whiskey 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 everyone 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 recognizably 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 parlor. 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 armchair, 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 honor. 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 weekend, 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 gray-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. “O 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 façades. + 

There was a Square on high ground; in the centre a courthouse. Cars were parked in close lines. Young men loitered in the drugstore. + 

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 rumors 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 color 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 lunchroom 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 unlaborious fatigue at the railhead. 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 antennae 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 blue. 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 gray 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 lunchrooms; 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 neighborhood, 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 labor 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 rumor 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 laborer and searched by the sentry, who made him open his valise. Then he labored across the bridge, kneeing his heavy bag, which bulged with his soiled and disorderly belongings, before him. + 

He staggered at length into the rude company office and sought out the superintendent, a man in the thirties, shaven, pale, weary, who wore a blue eyeshade, armbands, and talked with a limp cigarette plastered on his lip. + 

Eugene thrust out his employment slip in shaking fingers. The man looked briefly at it. + 

“College boy, aren’t you, son?” he said, glancing at Eugene. + 

“Yes, sir,” said Eugene. + 

“Did you ever do day labor before?” said the man. + 

“No, sir,” said Eugene. + 

“How old are you, son?” the man asked. + 

Eugene was silent for a moment. “I’m⁠—nineteen,” he said at length, wondering, since he had lied, why he had not had courage to say twenty. + 

The superintendent grinned wearily. + 

“It’s hard work, son,” the man said. “You’ll be among the wops and the Swedes and the hunkies. You’ll live in the same bunkhouse, you’ll eat with them. They don’t smell nice, son.” + 

“I have no money,” said Eugene. “I’ll work hard. I won’t get sick. Give me the job. Please!” + 

“No,” said the man. “No, I won’t do that.” + 

Eugene turned blindly away. + 

“I tell you what I’ll do,” said the superintendent. “I’ll give you a job as a checker. You’ll be with the office force. That’s where you belong. You’ll live with them in their own bunkhouse. They’re nice fellows,” he said elegantly, “college fellows, like yourself.” + 

“Thank you,” said Eugene, clenching his fingers, with husky emotion. “Thank you.” + 

“The checker we’ve got is quitting,” said the superintendent. “You’ll go to the stables with him in the morning to get your horse.” + 

“H-h-h-horse?” said Eugene. + 

“You’ll have a horse,” said the superintendent, “to ride around on.” + 

With strong bowel-excitement Eugene began to think of the horse, with joy, with fear. He turned to go. He could not bear to talk of money. + 

“H-h-how much⁠—?” he finally croaked, feeling that he must. Business. + 

“I’ll give you $80 a month to begin with,” said the manager with a touch of magnificence. “If you make good, I’ll give you a hundred.” + 

“And my keep?” whispered Eugene. + 

“Sure!” said the manager. “That’s thrown in.” + 

Eugene reeled away with his valise, and with a head full of exploding rockets. + 

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. Three times a day he rode around the field to check the numbers of two dozen gangs who were engaged in the work of grading, levelling, blasting from the spongy earth the ragged stumps of trees and filling interminably, ceaselessly, like the weary and fruitless labor of a nightmare, the marshy earth-craters, which drank their shovelled toil without end. The gangs were of all races and conditions: Portugee niggers, ebony-black, faithful and childlike, who welcomed him with great toothy grins, each pointing to his big white pin, on which was printed his number, crying out in strange outlandish voices, “feefety-nine, nine-net-ty seex,” and so on; Bowery bums, in greasy serge and battered derbies, toying distastefully with pick-handles that shredded their dirty uncalloused palms⁠—their hard evil faces, with their smudge of beard, were like things corrupt, green-yellow, that grow under barrels. And there were also drawling fishermen from the Virginia coast, huge gorilla niggers from Georgia and the lower South, Italians, Swedes, Irishmen⁠—part of the huge compost of America. + 

He came to know them and their overseers⁠—tough reckless men, gray-haired and lustful, full of swift action and coarse humor. + 

Stuck like a jigging doll upon the horse, whom he feared, he rode, staring into heaven, sometimes almost unconscious of the great engine expanding and contracting below him with a brown sensual rhythm. The bird-men filled the blue Virginia weather with the great drone of the Liberties. + 

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. + 

Thus the day. They found a lodging in a dingy house where, as an appropriate climax to his folly, Sinker Jordan surrendered their remaining capital into the greedy palm of the landlady⁠—and a real lady too, she admitted. But, having previously eaten, they had all the hope of a full belly and their youth⁠—they slept, Sinker without care and without effort. + 

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 waterfront, which were stored with munitions for the war. After a morning tramping up and down the dusty road outside the guarded enclosure, 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 meagerly until payday⁠—which was only a few days off. This money slipped quickly through their careless fingers. Down to a few coins again, with the next payday 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 trunks. 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 today. 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—Caesar 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 figures 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 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 payday. 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. + 

He was like a man who had died, and had been reborn. All that had gone before lived in a ghostly world. He thought of his family, of Ben, of Laura James, as if they were ghosts. The world itself turned ghost. All through that month of August, while the war marched to its ending, he looked upon its dying carnival. Nothing seemed any longer hard and hot and raw and new. Everything was old. Everything was dying. A vast aerial music, forever far-faint, like the language of his forgotten world, sounded in his ears. He had known birth. He had known pain and love. He had known hunger. Almost he had known death. + 

At night, when he was not called back for work he rode out by trolley to one of the Virginia beaches. But the only sound that was real, that was near and present, was the sound in his heart, in his brain, of the everlasting sea. He turned his face toward it: behind him, the cheap million lights of the concessionaires, the clatter, the racket, the confetti, the shrill blare of the saxophones, all the harsh joyless noise of his country, was softened, was made sad, far, and phantom. The wheeling merry-go-round, the blaring dance-orchestra, played “K-K-K-Katy Beautiful Katy,” “Poor Little Buttercup,” and “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight.” + 

And that cheap music turned elfin and lovely; it was mixed into magic⁠—it became a part of the romantic and lovely Virginias, of the surge of the sea, as it rolled in from the eternal dark, across the beach, and of his own magnificent sorrow⁠—his triumphant loneliness after pain and love and hunger. + 

His face was thin and bright as a blade, below the great curling shock of his hair; his body as lean as a starved cat’s; his eyes bright and fierce. + 

O sea! (he thought) I am the hill-born, the prison-pent, the ghost, the stranger, and I walk here at your side. O sea, I am lonely like you, I am strange and far like you, I am sorrowful like you; my brain, my heart, my life, like yours, have touched strange shores. You are like a woman lying below yourself on the coral floor. You are an immense and fruitful woman with vast thighs and a great thick mop of curling woman’s hair floating like green moss above your belly. And you will bring me to the happy land, you will wash me to glory in bright ships. + 

There by the sea of the dark Virginias, he thought of the forgotten faces, of all the million patterns of himself, the ghost of his lost flesh. The child that heard Swain’s cow, the lost boy in the Ozarks, the carrier of news among the blacks, and the boy who went in by the lattice with Jim Trivett. And the waitress, and Ben, and Laura? Dead, too? Where? How? Why? Why has the web been woven? Why do we die so many deaths? How came I here beside the sea? O lost, O far and lonely, where? + 

Sometimes, as he walked back among the dancers, a scarecrow in flapping rags, he looked and saw himself among them. He seemed to be two people: he constantly saw himself with dark bent face sitting upon the top rail of a fence, watching himself go by with a bright herd of young people. He saw himself among the crowds, several inches shorter than he was, fitting comfortably into a world where everything was big enough for him. + 

And while he stared and saw himself beloved and admitted, he heard them laugh: he felt suddenly the hard white ring of their faces about him, and he plunged away, with cursing mouth. + 

O my sweet bitches! My fine cheap sluts! You little crawling itch of twiddlers: you will snigger at me! At me! At me! (He beat his hands against his ribs.) You will mock at me, with your drugstore pimps, your Jazz-bo apes, your gorilla gobs, you cute little side-porch chippies! What do you understand? The lust of a goat, the stink of your kind⁠—that does for you, my girls. And yet you laugh at me! Ah, but I’ll tell you why you laugh: you are afraid of me because I am not like the others. You hate me because I do not belong. You see I am finer and greater than anyone you know: you cannot reach me and you hate me. That’s it! The ethereal (yet manly) beauty of my features, my boyish charm (for I am Just a Boy) blended with the tragic wisdom of my eyes (as old as life and filled with the brooding tragedy of the ages), the sensitive and delicate flicker of my mouth, and my marvellous dark face blooming inward on strange loveliness like a flower⁠—all this you want to kill because you cannot touch it. Ah me! (Thinking of his strange beauty, his eyes grew moist with love and glory, and he was forced to blow his nose.) Ah, but She will know. The love of a lady. Proudly, with misty eyes, he saw her standing beside him against the rabble: her elegant small head, wound with a bracelet of bright hair, against his shoulder, and with two splendid pearls in her ears. Dearest! Dearest! We stand here on a star. We are beyond them now. Behold! They shrink, they fade, they pass⁠—victorious, enduring, marvellous love, my dearest, we remain. + 

Brooding thus on the vision of his own beauty, stirred by his own heroic music, with misty eyes, he would pass over into the forbidden settlement, with its vigilant patrols of naval and military police on the watch for their own, and prowl softly down a dark little street to a dingy frame house with drawn blinds, where dwelt a love that for three dollars could be bought and clothed with his own fable. Her name was Stella Blake. She was never in a hurry. + 

With her lived a young corn-haired girl of twenty years whose family lived in Pulpit Hill. Sometimes he went to see her. + 

Twice a week the troops went through. They stood densely in brown and weary thousands on the pier while a council of officers, tabled at the gangways, went through their clearance papers. Then, each below the sweating torture of his pack, they were filed from the hot furnace of the pier into the hotter prison of the ship. The great ships, with their motley jagged patches of deception, waited in the stream: they slid in and out in unending squadrons. + 

Sometimes the troops were black⁠—labor regiments from Georgia and Alabama; big gorilla bucks from Texas. They gleamed with sweat and huge rich laughter: they were obedient as children and called their cursing officers “boss.” + 

“And don’t you call me ‘boss’ again, you bastards!” screamed a young Tennessee lieutenant, who had gone slowly insane during the moving, as he nursed his charges through hell. They grinned at him cheerfully, with affection, like good obedient children, as he stamped, raving, up and down the pier. From time to time they goaded him into a new frenzy with complaints about lost hats, bayonets, small arms, and papers. Somehow he found things for them; somehow he cursed his way through, keeping them in order. They grinned affectionately, therefore, and called him boss. + 

“And what in Jesus’ name have you done now?” he yelled, as a huge black sergeant with several enlisted men, who had gathered at the examiner’s table, burst suddenly into loud roars of grief. + 

The fiery lieutenant rushed at the table, cursing. + 

The sergeant and several enlisted men, all Texas darkies, had come away from camp without a clean bill of health: they were venereals and had not been cured. + 

“Boss,” blubbered the big black sergeant, “we wants to go to France. We don’t want to git lef ’ in dis Gawd-dam hole.” + 

(Nor do I blame them, thought Eugene.) + 

“I’ll kill you! So help me God, I’ll kill you!” screamed the officer, hurling his trim cap upon the ground and stamping upon it. But, a moment later, with a medical officer he was leading them away for examination behind the great wall of sacked oats. Five minutes later they emerged. The negroes were cavorting with joy: they pressed around their fierce commander, seizing and kissing his hand, fawning upon him, adoring him. + 

“You see,” said the dish-faced checker, while he and Eugene watched, “that’s what it takes to hold a crowd of niggers. You can’t be nice to ’em. They’d do anything for that guy.” + 

“He would for them,” said Eugene. + 

These negroes, he thought, who came from Africa, were sold at the block in Louisiana, and live in Texas, are now on their way to France. + 

Mr. Finch, the chief checker with the ugly slit eyes, approached Eugene with a smile of false warmth. His gray 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 tonight.” + 

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 nitroglycerin. 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 1200 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 labor: + 

“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 bought 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 gray 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-whiskey 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 them,” 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 anyone? 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 postcard? 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, mama. 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 streetwalkers. 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! Mama, 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 chafed 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 63 Huns to his credit by his nineteenth year. He saw himself walking up the Champs-Élysées, with a handsome powdering of gray 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 Mobilized 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. Everyone was in the army. With the exception of a few dozen ratty Freshmen, a few cripples, and himself, everyone, 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 shavetails. 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. Everyone 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 gray 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 lunchroom a man sat sprawled faced 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 parlor, 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 grayly, 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 parlor 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 mustache. 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. “O 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 mama?” 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, mama?” 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.’ ” + 

“Mama, 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!’ ” + 

“O mama! 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 sickroom 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 gray 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 gray; 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 to face the fear in Ben’s gray 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 stentorously and smoking a cigarette, and Eliza, working her lips, stood with an attentive ear cocked to the door of the sickroom. She was holding a useless kettle of hot water. + 

“Huh? Hah? What say?” asked Eliza, before anyone 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 sickroom. + 

“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 ‘O 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 mama!” 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 gray 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 sickroom; 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. + 

“O mama! Mama! It’s all right! It’s all right! It’s all right.” + 

And Eliza, stripped suddenly of her pretenses, 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—” + 

“O 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 today. I’ll vow I do!” + 

“Mama, 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 parlor 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 sickroom 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 labor 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 sickroom⁠—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 boardinghouse 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, mama!” 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 semiprivate bathroom, his messy discomfort while he sat at stool and stared at the tub filled with dirty wash, sloppily puffed and ballooned by cold gray 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 adyts of his childhood; but always he returned, in his quiet humming voice, to a popular song of wartime⁠—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 recognized 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 halfway down the stairs. + 

As darkness came upon the gray wet day, the family gathered in the parlor, 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 sickroom. 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 parlor 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 sickroom. 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 pretense, 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 semiconscious 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 clamor 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 gray 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 and 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 at the gray 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 gray 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 gray 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 revery 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 gray 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. + 

“Mama!” he whispered. “Mama!” + 

She gave no sign that she had heard him. Her face did not move; she did not turn her eyes from their fixed stare. + 

“Mama!” he said more loudly. “Mama!” + 

He touched her. She made no response. + 

“Mama! Mama!” + 

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 singsong repetition, he began to mutter over and over again: “Whoever You Are, be good to Ben tonight. Show him the way⁠ ⁠… Whoever You Are, be good to Ben tonight. 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 gray 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 gray 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 gray 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 everyone 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. Mama, 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 coffeepot 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 mama’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, mama!” 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 gray 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 fife. 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 flanged wheels, and the long retreating wail of the whistle. And slowly, up the chill deserted street, he heard the heavy ringing clangor 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 paperboy 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 chamberpot⁠—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 grayly 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 counterman, 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 counterman. “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 anyone 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 à 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 streetcar 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 heartbroken. 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 parlor?” + 

“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 gray light, there was a brisk wakening of life. A streetcar curved slowly into the avenue, the motorman 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 anaemically, 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 lunchroom 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 motormen 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 odor 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 color. I don’t like black,” he added. “Haven’t you got any other color?” + 

Horse Hines stared at him a moment. + 

“Black is the color,” 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 gray-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 odor. + 

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 the cold bright carrion, that bungling semblance which had not even the power of a good waxwork 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 fisheye 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 gray 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 color in his gray 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 necktie. 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 gray 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 bookkeeper, the youngest and poorest of the three. He was a man past fifty, with a pleasant red face, brown mustaches, 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 humor, 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 gray 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 parlor, 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—gray 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 onto 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 gravediggers 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 gray 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 tonight.” + 

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 realize 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, mama,” he said, falling to his knees. “Yes, mama.” He hugged her to him frantically. “Yes, mama. God bless you, mama. It’s all right, mama. 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 windowpanes, 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 sanitarium. 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 tonight. 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?” + 

“Tomorrow,” he said. + 

“Then Fatty will have to say goodbye,” 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. + 

“Goodbye, 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 odor 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 gray 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 humor 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 Caesar, 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 lunchrooms, haircuts, 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, someone 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 someone 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 anyone 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. He would get some loud pompous yokel⁠—the student president of the Y.M.C.A., or the class president⁠—and bear down on him with evil gentle matter-of-factness. + 

“Don’t you think,” he would begin with earnest piety, “don’t you think that a man should kiss his wife on her belly?” + 

And he would fasten all the eager innocence of his face into a stare. + 

“For, after all, the belly is sometimes more beautiful than the mouth, and far cleaner. Or do you believe in the belly-less marriage? I, for one,” he went on with proud passion, “do not! I stand for more and better Belly-Kissing. Our wives, our mothers, and our sisters expect it of us. It is an act of reverence to the seat of life. Nay! it is even an act of religious worship. If we could get our prominent business men and all the other right-thinking people interested in it, it would bring about the mightiest revolution ever known in a nation’s life. In five years it would do away with divorce and reestablish the prestige of the home. In twenty years it would make our nation the proud centre of civilization and the arts. Don’t you think so? Or do you?” + 

Eugene thought so. It was one of his few Utopias. + 

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 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 of 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 François-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 this 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 mustache 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?” + 

“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 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 someone 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 tonight 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 small 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 churchbells 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, someone 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, to 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 mamas 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 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 honors 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 naive ardor, 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 honors 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 mane, 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 odors 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. + 

And in the day he went to talk with Vergil Weldon. The old man was charming, confidential, full of wise intimacy, gentle humor. They sat beneath the great trees of his yard and drank iced tea. Eugene was thinking of California, Peru, Asia, Alaska, Europe, Africa, China. But he mentioned Harvard. For him, it was not the name of a university⁠—it was rich magic, wealth, elegance, joy, proud loneliness, rich books and golden browsing; it was an enchanted name like Cairo and Damascus. And he felt somehow that it gave a reason, a goal of profit, to his wild ecstasy. + 

“Yes,” said Vergil Weldon approvingly. “It’s the place for you, Mr. Gant. It doesn’t matter about the others. They’re ready now. But a mind like yours must not be pulled green. You must give it a chance to ripen. There you will find yourself.” + 

And he talked enchantingly about the good free life of the mind, cloistered study, the rich culture of the city, and about the food. “They give you food there that a man can eat, Mr. Gant,” he said. “Your mind can do its work on it.” Then he spoke of his own student days there, and of the great names of Royce and Everett, and William James. + 

Eugene looked with passionate devotion at the grand old head, calm, wise and comforting. In a moment of vision, he saw that, for him, here was the last of the heroes, the last of those giants to whom we give the faith of our youth, believing like children that the riddle of our lives may be solved by their quiet judgment. He believed, and no experience, he knew, would ever make him disbelieve, that one of the great lives of his time had unfolded itself quietly in the little college town. + 

Oh, my old Sophist, he thought. What were all the old philosophies that you borrowed and pranked up to your fancy, to you, who were greater than all? What was the Science of Thinking, to you, who were Thought? What if all your ancient game of metaphysics never touched the dark jungle of my soul? Do you think you have replaced my childhood’s God with your Absolute? No, you have only replaced his beard with a mustache, and a glint of demon hawk-eyes. To me, you were above good, above truth, above righteousness. To me, you were the sufficient negation to all your teachings. Whatever you did was, by its doing, right. And now I leave you throned in memory. You will see my dark face burning on your bench no more; the memory of me will grow mixed and broken; new boys will come to win your favor and your praise. But you? Forever fixed, unfading, bright, my lord. + 

Then, while the old man talked, Eugene leaped suddenly to his feet, and grasped the lean hand tightly in his own. + 

“Mr. Weldon!” he said. “Mr. Weldon! You are a great man! I shall never forget you!” + 

Then, turning, he plunged off blindly down the path. + 

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. Soon the car roared up by Vergil Weldon’s house, and as he passed, he saw the old man sitting below his tree. + 

Eugene stood up in the car and waved his long arm in a gesture of farewell. + 

“Goodbye,” he cried. “Goodbye.” + 

The old man stood up with a quiet salute of parting, slow, calm, eloquently tender. + 

Then, even while Eugene stood looking back upon the street, the car roared up across the lip of the hill, and drove steeply down into the hot parched countryside below. But 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 materialized 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 neighborhood. But, stark, bare, and raw, stripped of its girdling vines, annex now to a quack’s sanitarium for “nervous diseases,” the rich labor 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, homemade wines, and corn whiskey. 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 net of snarled nerves, in endless gossip, incoherent garrulity about the townsfolk, the neighbors, 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 everyone 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 passersby. She smothered the little cur with slaps and kisses, devoured him with babytalk, and hated anyone 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: “Mama, 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 anyone 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 clamor 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 everyone 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 whiskey 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. Everyone 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 boardinghouse 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, dishonoring, 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 rundown 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 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 Yankeedom, 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 someone 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 anyone⁠—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 anyone 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—or 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. + 

“Goodbye,” he muttered harshly. “Goodbye! Goodbye, mama!” 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, “Goodbye, goodbye.” + 

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 gray 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, upended. 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?” + 

“Tomorrow,” 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 through 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 clangor; 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 lunchroom.” + 

The bank-chimes struck the half hour. + 

“And there’s the bank,” he cried. + 

“That 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. Tomorrow 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 façades; 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 façades 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 prenatal 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 password. 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 ushabti 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 splendors turn to dingy gray. 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 harbors 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. Apexical 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 footfalls 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 clangor 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. + 