Part + 

II + 

XIV + 

The plum tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. But in the Spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit and blossoms. She will grow young again. Red plums will ripen, will be shaken desperately upon the tiny stems. They will fall bursted on the loamy warm wet earth; when the wind blows in the orchard the air will be filled with dropping plums; the night will be filled with the sound of their dropping, and a great tree of birds will sing, burgeoning, blossoming richly, filling the air also with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-notes. + 

The harsh hill-earth has moistly thawed and softened, rich soaking rain falls, fresh-bladed tender grass like soft hair growing sparsely streaks the land. + 

My Brother Ben’s face, thought Eugene, is like a piece of slightly yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted fiercely by his old man’s scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile the flicker of light across a blade. His face is like a blade, and a knife, and a flicker of light: it is delicate and fierce, and scowls beautifully forever, and when he fastens his hard white fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he wants to fix, he sniffs with sharp and private concentration through his long pointed nose. Thus women, looking, feel a well of tenderness for his pointed, bumpy, always scowling face: his hair shines like that of a young boy⁠—it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce. + 

Into the April night-and-morning streets goes Ben. The night is brightly pricked with cool and tender stars. The orchard stirs leafily in the short fresh wind. Ben prowls softly out of the sleeping house. His thin bright face is dark within the orchard. There is a smell of nicotine and shoe leather under the young blossoms. His pigeon-toed tan shoes ring musically up the empty streets. Lazily slaps the water in the fountain on the Square; all the firemen are asleep⁠—but Big Bill Merrick, the brave cop, hog-jowled and red, leans swinishly over mince-pie and coffee in Uneeda Lunch. The warm good ink-smell beats in rich waves into the street: a whistling train howls off into the Springtime South. + 

By the cool orchards in the dark the paper-carriers go. The copper legs of negresses in their dark dens stir. The creek brawls cleanly. + 

A new one, Number 6, heard boys speak of Foxy: + 

“Who’s Foxy?” asked Number 6. + 

“Foxy’s a bastard, Number 6. Don’t let him catch you.” + 

“The bastard caught me three times last week. In the Greek’s every time. Why can’t they let us eat?” + 

Number 3 thought of Friday morning⁠—he had the Niggertown route. + 

“How many⁠—3?” + 

“One hundred and sixty-two.” + 

“How many Dead Heads you got, son?” said Mr. Randall cynically. “Do you ever try to collect from them?” he added, thumbing through the book. + 

“He takes it out in Poon-Tang,” said Foxy, grinning. “A week’s subscription free for a dose.” + 

“What you got to say about it?” asked Number 3 belligerently. “You’ve been knocking down on them for six years.” + 

“Jazz ’em all if you like,” said Randall, “but get the money. Ben, I want you to go round with him Saturday.” + 

Ben laughed silently and cynically into the air: + 

“Oh, my God!” he said. “Do you expect me to check up on the little thug? He’s been knocking down on you for the last six months.” + 

“All right! All right!” said Randall, annoyed. “That’s what I want you to find out.” + 

“Oh, for God’s sake, Randall,” said Ben contemptuously, “he’s got niggers on that book who’ve been dead for five years. That’s what you get for keeping every little crook that comes along.” + 

“If you don’t get a move on, 3, I’ll give your route to another boy,” said Randall. + 

“Hell, get another boy. I don’t care,” said Number 3, toughly. + 

“Oh, for God’s sake! Listen to this, won’t you?” said Ben, laughing thinly and nodding to his angel, indicating Number 3 with a scowling jerk of his head. + 

“Yes, listen to this, won’t you! That’s what I said,” Number 3 answered pugnaciously. + 

“All right, little boy. Run on and deliver your papers now, before you get hurt,” said Ben, turning his scowl quietly upon him and looking at him blackly for a moment. “Ah, you little crook,” he said with profound loathing, “I have a kid brother who’s worth six like you.” + 

Spring lay strewn lightly like a fragrant gauzy scarf upon the earth; the night was a cool bowl of lilac darkness, filled with fresh orchard scents. + 

Gant slept heavily, rattling the loose window-sash with deep rasping snores; with short explosive thunders, ripping the lilac night, 36 began to climb Saluda. She bucked helplessly like a goat, her wheels spun furiously on the rails, Tom Cline stared seriously down into the milky boiling creek, and waited. She slipped, spun, held, ploughed slowly up, like a straining mule, into the dark. Content, he leaned far out the cab and looked: the starlight glimmered faintly on the rails. He ate a thick sandwich of cold buttered fried meat, tearing it raggedly and glueily staining it under his big black fingers. There was a smell of dogwood and laurel in the cool slow passage of the world. The cars clanked humpily across the spur; the switchman, bathed murkily in the hot yellow light of his perilous bank-edged hut, stood sullen at the switch. + 

Arms spread upon his cab-sill, chewing thoughtfully, Tom, goggle-eyed, looked carefully down at him. They had never spoken. Then in silence he turned and took the milk-bottle, half full of cold coffee, that his fireman offered him. He washed his food down with the large easy gurgling swallows of a bishop. + 

At 18 Valley Street, the red shack-porch, slime-scummed with a greasy salve of yellow negroid mud, quaked rottenly. Number 3’s square-folded ink-fresh paper struck flat against the door, falling on its edge stiffly to the porch like a block of light wood. Within, May Corpening stirred nakedly, muttering as if doped and moving her heavy copper legs, in the fetid bed-warmth, with the slow noise of silk. + 

Harry Tugman lit a Camel, drawing the smoke deep into his powerful ink-stained lungs as he watched the press run down. His bare arms were heavy-muscled as his presses. He dropped comfortably into his pliant creaking chair and tilted back, casually scanning the warm pungent sheet. Luxurious smoke steamed slowly from his nostrils. He cast the sheet away. + 

“Christ!” he said. “What a makeup!” + 

Ben came downstairs, moody, scowling, and humped over toward the icebox. + 

“For God’s sake, Mac,” he called out irritably to the Makeup Man, as he scowled under the lifted lid, “don’t you ever keep anything except root-beer and sour milk?” + 

“What do you want, for Christ’s sake?” + 

“I’d like to get a Coca-Cola once in a while. You know,” he said bitingly, “Old Man Candler down in Atlanta is still making it.” + 

Harry Tugman cast his cigarette away. + 

“They haven’t got the news up here yet, Ben,” said he. “You’ll have to wait till the excitement over Lee’s surrender has died down. Come on,” he said abruptly, getting up, “let’s go over to the Greasy Spoon.” + 

He thrust his big head down into the deep well of the sink, letting the lukewarm water sluice refreshingly over his broad neck and blue-white sallow nighttime face, strong, tough, and humorous. He soaped his hands with thick slathering suds, his muscles twisting slowly like big snakes. + 

He sang in his powerful quartette baritone: + 

“Beware! Beware! Beware! + 

Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep, + 

So beware! Bee-ware!” + 

Comfortably they rested in the warm completed exhaustion of the quiet press-room: upstairs the offices, bathed in green-yellow light, sprawled like men relaxed after work. The boys had gone to their routes. The place seemed to breathe slowly and wearily. The dawn-sweet air washed coolly over their faces. The sky was faintly pearled at the horizon. + 

Strangely, in sharp broken fragments, life awoke in the lilac darkness. Clop-clopping slowly on the ringing street, Number Six, Mrs. Goulderbilt’s powerful brown mare, drew inevitably on the bottle-clinking cream-yellow wagon, racked to the top with creamy extra-heavy high-priced milk. The driver was a fresh-skinned young countryman, richly odorous with the smell of fresh sweat and milk. Eight miles, through the starlit dewy fields and forests of Biltburn, under the high brick English lodgegate, they had come into the town. + 

At the Pisgah Hotel, opposite the station, the last door clicked softly; the stealthy footfalls of the night ceased; Miss Bernice Redmond gave the negro porter eight one-dollar bills and went definitely to bed with the request that she be not disturbed until one o’clock; a shifting engine slatted noisily about in the yard; past the Biltburn crossing Tom Cline whistled with even, mournful respirations. By this time Number 3 had delivered 142 of his papers; he had only to ascend the rickety wooden stairs of the Eagle Crescent bank to finish the eight houses of the Crescent. He looked anxiously across the hill-and-dale-sprawled negro settlement to the eastern rim: behind Birdseye Gap the sky was pearl-gray⁠—the stars looked drowned. Not much time left, he thought. He had a blond meaty face, pale-colored and covered thickly with young blond hair. His jaw was long and fleshy: it sloped backward. He ran his tongue along his full cracked underlip. + 

A 1910 model, four-cylinder, seven-passenger Hudson, with mounting steady roar, shot drunkenly out from the station curbing, lurched into the level negro-sleeping stretch of South End Avenue, where the firemen had their tournaments, and zipped townward doing almost fifty. The station quietly stirred in its sleep: there were faint reverberating noises under the empty sheds; brisk hammer-taps upon car wheels, metallic heel-clicks in the tiled waiting-room. Sleepily a negress slopped water on the tiles, with languid sullen movement pushing a gray sopping rag around the floor. + 

It was now five-thirty. Ben had gone out of the house into the orchard at three twenty-five. In another forty minutes Gant would waken, dress, and build the morning fires. + 

“Ben,” said Harry Tugman, as they walked out of the relaxed office, “if Jimmy Dean comes messing around my press-room again they can get someone else to print their lousy sheet. What the hell! I can get a job on the Atlanta Constitution whenever I want it.” + 

“Did he come down tonight?” asked Ben. + 

“Yes,” said Harry Tugman, “and he got out again. I told him to take his little tail upstairs.” + 

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Ben. “What did he say?” + 

“He said, ‘I’m the editor! I’m the editor of this paper!’ ‘I don’t give a good goddam,’ I said, ‘If you’re the President’s snotrag. If you want any paper today keep out of the press-room.’ And believe me, he went!” + 

In cool blue-pearl darkness they rounded the end of the Post Office and cut diagonally across the street to Uneeda Lunch No. 3. It was a small beanery, twelve feet wide, wedged in between an optician’s and a Greek shoe parlor. + 

Within, Dr. Hugh McGuire sat on a stool patiently impaling kidney beans, one at a time, upon the prongs of his fork. A strong odor of corn whisky soaked the air about him. His thick skilful butcher’s hands, hairy on the backs, gripped the fork numbly. His heavy-jowled face was blotted by large brown patches. He turned round and stared owlishly as Ben entered, fixing the wavering glare of his bulbous red eyes finally upon him. + 

“Hello, son,” he said in his barking kindly voice, “what can I do for you?” + 

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ben laughing contemptuously, and jerking his head toward Tugman. “Listen to this, won’t you?” + 

They sat down at the lower end. At this moment, Horse Hines, the undertaker, entered, producing, although he was not a thin man, the effect of a skeleton clad in a black frock coat. His long lantern mouth split horsily in a professional smile displaying big horse teeth in his white heavily starched face. + 

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said for no apparent reason, rubbing his lean hands briskly as if it was cold. His palm-flesh rattled together like old bones. + 

Coker, the Lung Shark, who had not ceased to regard McGuire’s bean-hunt with sardonic interest, now took the long cigar out of his devil’s head and held it between his stained fingers as he tapped his companion. + 

“Let’s get out,” he grinned quietly, nodding toward Horse Hines. “It will look bad if we’re seen together here.” + 

“Good morning, Ben,” said Horse Hines, sitting down below him. “Are all the folks well?” he added, softly. + 

Sideways Ben looked at him scowling, then jerked his head back to the counterman, with a fast bitter flicker of his lips. + 

“Doctor,” said Harry Tugman with servile medicine-man respect, “what do you charge to operate?” + 

“Operate what?” McGuire barked presently, having pronged a kidney bean. + 

“Why⁠—appendicitis,” said Harry Tugman, for it was all he could think of. + 

“Three hundred dollars when we go into the belly,” said McGuire. He coughed chokingly to the side. + 

“You’re drowning in your own secretions,” said Coker with his yellow grin. “Like Old Lady Sladen.” + 

“My God!” said Harry Tugman, thinking jealously of lost news. “When did she go?” + 

“Tonight,” said Coker. + 

“God, I’m sorry to hear that,” said Harry Tugman, greatly relieved. + 

“I’ve just finished laying the old lady out,” said Horse Hines gently. “A bundle of skin and bones.” He sighed regretfully, and for a moment his boiled eye moistened. + 

Ben turned his scowling head around with an expression of nausea. + 

“Joe,” said Horse Hines with merry professionalism, “give me a mug of that embalming fluid.” He thrust his horsehead indicatively at the coffee urn. + 

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ben muttered in terms of loathing. “Do you ever wash your damned hands before you come in here?” he burst out irritably. + 

Ben was twenty. Men did not think of his age. + 

“Would you like some cold pork, son?” said Coker, with his yellow malicious grin. + 

Ben made a retching noise in his throat, and put his hand upon his stomach. + 

“What’s the matter, Ben?” Harry Tugman laughed heavily and struck him on the back. + 

Ben got off the stool, took his coffee mug and the piece of tanned mince pie he had ordered, and moved to the other side of Harry Tugman. Everyone laughed. Then he jerked his head toward McGuire with a quick frown. + 

“By God, Tug,” he said. “They’ve got us cornered.” + 

“Listen to him,” said McGuire to Coker. “A chip off the old block, isn’t he? I brought that boy into the world, saw him through typhoid, got the old man over seven hundred drunks, and I’ve been called eighteen different kinds of son of a bitch for my pains ever since. But let one of ’em get a belly ache,” he added proudly, “and you’ll see how quick they come running to me. Isn’t that right, Ben?” he said, turning to him. + 

“Oh, listen to this!” said Ben, laughing irritably and burying his peaked face in his coffee mug. His bitter savor filled the place with life, with tenderness, with beauty. They looked on him with drunken, kindly eyes⁠—at his gray scornful face and the lonely demon flicker of his smile. + 

“And I tell you something else,” said McGuire, ponderously wheeling around on Coker, “if one of them’s got to be cut open, see who gets the job. What about it, Ben?” he asked. + 

“By God, if you ever cut me open, McGuire,” said Ben, “I’m going to be damned sure you can walk straight before you do.” + 

“Come on, Hugh,” said Coker, prodding McGuire under his shoulder. “Stop chasing those beans around the plate. Crawl off or fall off that damned stool⁠—I don’t care which.” + 

McGuire, drunkenly lost in revery, stared witlessly down at his bean plate and sighed. + 

“Come on, you damned fool,” said Coker, getting up, “you’ve got to operate in forty-five minutes.” + 

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ben, lifting his face from the stained mug, “who’s the victim? I’ll send flowers.” + 

“… all of us sooner or later,” McGuire mumbled puffily through his puff-lips. “Rich and poor alike. Here today and gone tomorrow. Doesn’t matter⁠ ⁠… doesn’t matter at all.” + 

“In heaven’s name,” Ben burst out irritably to Coker. “Are you going to let him operate like that? Why don’t you shoot them instead?” + 

Coker plucked the cigar from his long malarial grinning face: + 

“Why, he’s just getting hot, son,” said he. + 

Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hill-flanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark. + 

At the curb now, young Dr. Jefferson Spaugh brought his Buick roadster to a halt, and got out, foppishly drawing off his gloves and flicking the silk lapels of his dinner jacket. His face, whisky-red, was high-boned and handsome; his mouth was straightlipped, cruel, and sensual. An inherited aura of mountain-cornfield sweat hung scentlessly but telepathically about him; he was a smartened-up mountaineer with country-club and University of Pennsylvania glossings. Four years in Philly change a man. + 

Thrusting his gloves carelessly into his coat, he entered. McGuire slid bearishly off his stool and gazed him into focus. Then he made beckoning round-arm gestures with his fat hands. + 

“Look at it, will you,” he said. “Does anyone know what it is?” + 

“It’s Percy,” said Coker. “You know Percy Van der Gould, don’t you?” + 

“I’ve been dancing all night at the Hilliards,” said Spaugh elegantly. “Damn! These new patent-leather pumps have ruined my feet.” He sat upon a stool, and elegantly displayed his large country feet, indecently broad and angular in the shoes. + 

“What’s he been doing?” said McGuire doubtfully, turning to Coker for enlightenment. + 

“He’s been dancing all night at the Hilliards,” said Coker in a mincing voice. + 

McGuire shielded his bloated face coyly with his hand. + 

“O crush me!” he said, “I’m a grape! Dancing at the Hilliards, were you, you damned Mountain Grill. You’ve been on a Poon-Tang Picnic in Niggertown. You can’t load that bunk on us.” + 

Bull-lunged, their laughter filled the nacreous dawn. + 

“Patent-leather pumps!” said McGuire. “Hurt his feet. By God, Coker, the first time he came to town ten years ago he’d never been curried above the knees. They had to throw him down to put shoes on him.” + 

Ben laughed thinly to the Angel. + 

“A couple of slices of buttered toast, if you please, not too brown,” said Spaugh delicately to the counterman. + 

“A mess of hog chitlings and sorghum, you mean, you bastard. You were brought up on salt pork and cornbread.” + 

“We’re getting too low and coarse for him, Hugh,” said Coker. “Now that he’s got drunk with some of the best families, he’s in great demand socially. He’s so highly thought of that he’s become the official midwife to all pregnant virgins.” + 

“Yes,” said McGuire, “he’s their friend. He helps them out. He not only helps them out, he helps them in again.” + 

“What’s wrong with that?” said Spaugh. “We ought to keep it in the family, oughtn’t we?” + 

Their laughter howled out into the tender dawn. + 

“This conversation is getting too rough for me,” said Horse Hines banteringly as he got off his stool. + 

“Shake hands with Coker before you go, Horse,” said McGuire. “He’s the best friend you’ve ever had. You ought to give him royalties.” + 

The light that filled the world now was soft and otherworldly like the light that fills the sea-floors of Catalina where the great fish swim. Flatfootedly, with kidney-aching back, Patrolman Leslie Roberts all unbuttoned slouched through the submarine pearl light and paused, gently agitating his club behind him, as he turned his hollow liverish face toward the open door. + 

“Here’s your patient,” said Coker softly, “the Constipated Cop.” + 

Aloud, with great cordiality, they all said: “How are you, Les?” + 

“Oh, tolable, tolable,” said the policeman mournfully. As draggled as his mustaches, he passed on, hocking into the gutter a slimy gob of phlegm. + 

“Well, good morning, gentlemen,” said Horse Hines, making to go. + 

“Remember what I told you, Horse. Be good to Coker, your best friend.” McGuire jerked a thumb toward Coker. + 

Beneath his thin joviality Horse Hines was hurt. + 

“I do remember,” said the undertaker gravely. “We are both members of honorable professions: in the hour of death when the storm-tossed ship puts into its haven of rest, we are the trustees of the Almighty.” + 

“Why, Horse!” Coker exclaimed, “this is eloquence!” + 

“The sacred rites of closing the eyes, of composing the limbs, and of preparing for burial the lifeless repository of the departed soul is our holy mission; it is for us, the living, to pour balm upon the broken heart of Grief, to soothe the widow’s ache, to brush away the orphan’s tears; it is for us, the living, to highly resolve that⁠—” + 

“⁠—Government of the people, for the people, and by the people,” said Hugh McGuire. + 

“Yes, Horse,” said Coker, “you are right. I’m touched. And what’s more, we do it all for nothing. At least,” he added virtuously, “I never charge for soothing the widow’s ache.” + 

“What about embalming the broken heart of Grief?” asked McGuire. + 

“I said balm,” Horse Hines remarked coldly. + 

“Say, Horse,” said Harry Tugman, who had listened with great interest, “didn’t you make a speech with all that in it last summer at the Undertakers’ Convention?” + 

“What’s true then is true now,” said Horse Hines bitterly, as he left the place. + 

“Jesus!” said Harry Tugman, “we’ve got him good and sore. I thought I’d bust a gut, doc, when you pulled that one about embalming the broken heart of Grief.” + 

At this moment Dr. Ravenel brought his Hudson to a halt across the street before the Post Office, and walked over rapidly, drawing his gauntlets off. He was bareheaded; his silver aristocratic hair was thinly rumpled; his surgical gray eyes probed restlessly below the thick lenses of his spectacles. He had a famous, calm, deeply concerned face, shaven, ashen, lean, lit gravely now and then by humor. + 

“Oh Christ!” said Coker. “Here comes Teacher!” + 

“Good morning, Hugh,” he said as he entered. “Are you going into training again for the bughouse?” + 

“Look who’s here!” McGuire roared hospitably. “Deadeye Dick, the literary sawbones, whose private collection of gallstones is the finest in the world. When d’jew get back, son?” + 

“Just in time, it seems,” said Ravenel, holding a cigarette cleanly between his long surgical fingers. He looked at his watch. “I believe you have a little engagement at the Ravenel hospital in about half an hour. Is that right?” + 

“By God, Dick, you’re always right,” McGuire yelled enthusiastically. “What’d you tell ’em up there, boy?” + 

“I told them,” said Dick Ravenel, whose affection was like a flower that grew behind a wall, “that the best surgeon in America when he was sober was a lousy bum named Hugh McGuire who was always drunk.” + 

“Now wait, wait. Hold on a minute!” said McGuire, holding up his thick hand. “I protest, Dick. You meant well, son, but you got that mixed up. You mean the best surgeon in America when he’s not sober.” + 

“Did you read one of your papers?” said Coker. + 

“Yes,” said Dick Ravenel. “I read one on carcinoma of the liver.” + 

“How about one on pyorrhea of the toenails?” said McGuire. “Did you read that one?” + 

Harry Tugman laughed heavily, not wholly knowing why. McGuire belched into the silence loudly and was witlessly adrift for a moment. + 

“Literature, literature, Dick,” he returned portentously. “It’s been the ruin of many a good surgeon. You read too much, Dick. Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. You know too much. The letter killeth the spirit, you know. Me⁠—Dick, did you ever know me to take anything out that I didn’t put back? Anyway, don’t I always leave ’em something to go on with? I’m no scholar, Dick. I’ve never had your advantages. I’m a self-made butcher. I’m a carpenter, Dick. I’m an interior decorator. I’m a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller. I’m a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I’m a practical man. I take out their works, spit upon them, trim off the dirty edges, and send them on their way again. I economize, Dick; I throw away everything I can’t use, and use everything I throw away. Who made the Pope a tail-bone from his knuckle? Who made the dog howl? Aha⁠—that’s why the governor looks so young. We are filled up with useless machinery, Dick. Efficiency, economy, power! Have you a Little Fairy in your Home? You haven’t! Then let the Gold Dust Twins do the work! Ask Ben⁠—he knows!” + 

“O my God!” laughed Ben thinly, “listen to that, won’t you?” + 

Two doors below, directly before the Post Office, Pete Mascari rolled upward with corrugated thunder the shutters of his fruit shop. The pearl light fell coolly upon the fruity architecture, on the pyramided masonry of spit-bright winesaps, the thin sharp yellow of the Florida oranges, the purple Tokays, sawdust-bedded. There was a stale fruity odor from the shop of ripening bananas, crated apples, and the acrid tang of powder; the windows are filled with Roman candles, crossed rockets, pinwheels, squat green Happy Hooligans, and mutilating Jack Johnsons, red cannoncrackers, and tiny acrid packets of crackling spattering firecrackers. Light fell a moment on the ashen corpsiness of his face and on the liquid Sicilian poison of his eyes. + 

“Don’ pincha da grape. Pinch da banan’!” + 

A streetcar, toy-green with new Spring paint, went squareward. + 

“Dick,” said McGuire more soberly, “take the job, if you like.” + 

Ravenel shook his head. + 

“I’ll stand by,” said he. “I won’t operate. I’m afraid of one like this. It’s your job, drunk or sober.” + 

“Removing a tumor from a woman, ain’t you?” said Coker. + 

“No,” said Dick Ravenel, “removing a woman from a tumor.” + 

“Bet you it weighs fifty pounds, if it weighs an ounce,” said McGuire with sudden professional interest. + 

Dick Ravenel winced ever so slightly. A cool spurt of young wind, clean as a kid, flowed by him. McGuire’s meaty shoulders recoiled burlily as if from the cold shock of water. He seemed to waken. + 

“I’d like a bath,” he said to Dick Ravenel, “and a shave.” He rubbed his hand across his blotched hairy face. + 

“You can use my room, Hugh, at the hotel,” said Jeff Spaugh, looking at Ravenel somewhat eagerly. + 

“I’ll use the hospital,” he said. + 

“You’ll just have time,” said Ravenel. + 

“In God’s name, let’s get a start on,” he cried impatiently. + 

“Did you see Kelly do this one at Hopkins?” asked McGuire. + 

“Yes,” said Dick Ravenel, “after a very long prayer. That’s to give power to his elbow. The patient died.” + 

“Damn the prayers!” said McGuire. “They won’t do much good to this one. She called me a low-down lickered-up whisky-drinking bastard last night: if she still feels like that she’ll get well.” + 

“These mountain women take a lot of killing,” said Jeff Spaugh sagely. + 

“Do you want to come along?” McGuire asked Coker. + 

“No, thanks. I’m getting some sleep,” he answered. “The old girl took a hell of a time. I thought she’d never get through dying.” + 

They started to go. + 

“Ben,” said McGuire, with a return to his former manner, “tell the Old Man I’ll beat hell out of him if he doesn’t give Helen a rest. Is he staying sober?” + 

“In heaven’s name, McGuire, how should I know?” Ben burst out irritably. “Do you think that’s all I’ve got to do⁠—watching your licker-heads?” + 

“That’s a great girl, boy,” said McGuire sentimentally. “One in a million.” + 

“Hugh, for God’s sake, come on,” cried Dick Ravenel. + 

The four medical men went out into the pearl light. The town emerged from the lilac darkness with a washed renascent cleanliness. All the world seemed as young as Spring. McGuire walked across to Ravenel’s car, and sank comfortably with a sense of invigoration into the cool leathers. Jeff Spaugh plunged off violently with a ripping explosion of his engine and a cavalier wave of his hand. + 

Admiringly Harry Tugman’s face turned to the slumped burly figure of Hugh McGuire. + 

“By God!” he boasted, “I bet he does the damnedest piece of operating you ever heard of.” + 

“Why, hell,” said the counterman loyally, “he ain’t worth a damn until he’s got a quart of corn licker under his belt. Give him a few drinks and he’ll cut off your damned head and put it on again without your knowing it.” + 

As Jeff Spaugh roared off Harry Tugman said jealously: “Look at that bastard. Mr. Vanderbilt. He thinks he’s hell, don’t he? A big pile of bull. Ben, do you reckon he was really out at the Hilliards tonight?” + 

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Ben irritably, “how the hell should I know! What difference does it make?” he added furiously. + 

“I guess Little Maudie will fill up the column tomorrow with some of her crap,” said Harry Tugman. “ ‘The Younger Set,’ she calls it! Christ! It goes all the way from every little bitch old enough to wear drawers, to Old Man Redmond. If Saul Gudger belongs to the Younger Set, Ben, you and I are still in the third grade. Why, hell, yes,” he said with an air of conviction to the grinning counterman, “he was bald as a pig’s knuckle when the Spanish American War broke out.” + 

The counterman laughed. + 

Foaming with brilliant slapdash improvisation Harry Tugman declaimed: + 

“Members of the Younger Set were charmingly entertained last night at a dinner dance given at Snotwood, the beautiful residence of Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Firkins, in honor of their youngest daughter, Gladys, who made her debut this season. Mr. and Mrs. Firkins, accompanied by their daughter, greeted each of the arriving guests at the threshold in a manner reviving the finest old traditions of Southern aristocracy, while Mrs. Firkins’ accomplished sister, Miss Catherine Hipkiss, affectionately known to members of the local younger set as Roaring Kate, supervised the checking of overcoats, evening wraps, jockstraps, and jewelry. + 

“Dinner was served promptly at eight o’clock, followed by coffee and Pluto Water at eight forty-five. A delicious nine-course collation had been prepared by Artaxerxes Papadopolos, the well-known confectioner and caterer, and proprietor of the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents. + 

“After first-aid and a thorough medical examination by Dr. Jefferson Reginald Alfonso Spaugh, the popular gin-ecologist, the guests adjourned to the Ball Room where dance music was provided by Zeke Buckner’s Upper Hominy Stringed Quartette, Mr. Buckner himself officiating at the trap drum and tambourine. + 

“Among those dancing were the Misses Aline Titsworth, Lena Ginster, Ophelia Legg, Gladys Firkins, Beatrice Slutsky, Mary Whitesides, Helen Shockett, and Lofta Barnes. + 

“Also the Messrs. I. C. Bottom, U. B. Freely, R. U. Reddy, O. I. Lovett, Cummings Strong, Sansom Horney, Preston Updyke, Dows Wicket, Pettigrew Biggs, Otis Goode, and J. Broad Stern.” + 

Ben laughed noiselessly, and bent his pointed face into the mug again. Then, he stretched his thin arms out, extending his body sensually upward, and forcing out in a wide yawn the nighttime accumulation of weariness, boredom, and disgust. + 

“Oh‑h‑h‑h my God!” + 

Virginal sunlight crept into the street in young moteless shafts. At this moment Gant awoke. + 

He lay quietly on his back for a moment in the pleasant yellow-shaded dusk of the sitting-room, listening to the rippling flutiness of the live piping birdy morning. He yawned cavernously and thrust his right hand scratching into the dense hairthicket of his breast. + 

The fast cackle-cluck of sensual hens. Come and rob us. All through the night for you, master. Rich protesting yielding voices of Jewesses. Do it, don’t it. Break an egg in them. + 

Sleepless, straight, alert, the counterpane moulded over his gaunt legs, he listened to the protesting invitations of the hens. + 

From the warm dust, shaking their fat feathered bodies, protesting but satisfied they staggered up. For me. The earth too and the vine. The moist new earth cleaving like cut pork from the plough. Or like water from a ship. The spongy sod spaded cleanly and rolled back like flesh. Or the earth loosened and hoed gently around the roots of the cherry trees. The earth receives my seed. For me the great lettuces. Spongy and full of sap now like a woman. The thick grapevine⁠—in August the heavy clustered grapes⁠—How there? Like milk from a breast. Or blood through a vein. Fattens and plumps them. + 

All through the night the blossoms dropping. Soon now the White Wax. Green apples end of May. Isaacs’ June Apple hangs half on my side. Bacon and fried green apples. + 

With sharp whetted hunger he thought of breakfast. He threw the sheet back cleanly, swung in an orbit to a sitting position and put his white somewhat phthisic feet on the floor. Standing up tenderly, he walked over to his leather rocker and put on a pair of clean white-footed socks. Then he pulled his nightgown over his head, looking for a moment in the dresser mirror at his great boned structure, the long stringy muscles of his arms, and his flat-meated hairy chest. His stomach sagged paunchily. He thrust his white flaccid calves quickly through the shrunken legs of a union suit, stretched it out elasticly with a comfortable widening of his shoulders and buttoned it. Then he stepped into his roomy sculpturally heavy trousers and drew on his soft-leathered laceless shoes. Crossing his suspender braces over his shoulders, he strode into the kitchen and had a brisk fire of oil and pine snapping in the range within three minutes. He was stimulated and alive in all the fresh wakefulness of the Spring morning. + 

Through Birdseye Gap, in the dewy richness of Lunn’s Cove, Judge Webster Tayloe, the eminent, prosperous, and aristocratic corporation counsel (retired, but occasional consultations), rose in the rich walnut twilight of his bedchamber, noted approvingly, through the black lenses of the glasses that gave his long, subtle, and contemptuous face its final advantage over the rabble, that one of his country bumpkins was coming from the third pasture with a slopping pail of new milk, another was sharpening a scythe in the young glint of the sun, and another, emulating his more intelligent fellow, the horse, was backing a buggy slowly under the carriage shed. + 

Approvingly he watched his young mulatto son come over the lawn with lazy cat-speed, noting with satisfaction the grace and quickness of his movements, the slender barrel strength of his torso, his smallboned resiliency. Also the well-shaped intelligent head, the eager black eyes, the sensitive oval face, and the beautiful copprous olive of the skin. He was very like a better-class Spaniard. Quod potui perfeci. By this fusion, perhaps, men like men. + 

By the river the reed-pipes, the muse’s temple, the sacred wood again. Why not? As in this cove. I, too, have lived in Arcady. + 

He took off his glasses for a moment and looked at the ptotic malevolence of his left eye, and the large harlequinesque wart in the cheek below it. The black glasses gave the suggestion that he was half-masked; they added a touch of unsearchable mystery to the subtle, sensual and disquieting intelligence of his face. His negro man appeared at this moment and told him his bath was ready. He drew the long thin nightgown over his freckled Fitzsimmons body and stepped vigorously into tepid water. Then for ten minutes he was sponged, scraped, and kneaded, upon a long table by the powerful plastic hands of the negro. He dressed in fresh laundered underwear and newly pressed clothes of black. He tied a black string carelessly below the wide belt of starched collar and buttoned across his straight long figure a frock coat that reached his knees. He took a cigarette from a box on his table and lighted it. + 

Bouncing tinnily down the coiling road that came through the Gap from the town, a flivver glinted momently through the trees. Two men were in it. His face hardened against it, he watched it go by his gates on the road with a scuffle of dust. Dimly he saw their lewd red mountain faces, and completed the image with sweat and corduroy. And in the town their city cousins. Brick, stucco, the white little eczema of Suburbia. Federated Half-Breeds of the World. + 

Into my Valley next with lawnmowers and front lawns. He ground out the life of the cigarette against an ashtray, and began a rapid window calculation of his horses, asses, kine, swine, and hens; the stored plenitude of his great barn, the heavy fruitage of his fields and orchards. A man came toward the house with a bucket of eggs in one hand and a bucket of butter in the other; each cake was stamped with a sheaf of wheat and wrapped loosely in clean white linen cloths. He smiled grimly: if attacked he could withstand a prolonged siege. + 

At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark room with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. Her chamber was festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and string; stacks of old newspapers and magazines were piled in the corners; and every shelf was loaded with gummed, labelled, half-filled medicine bottles. There was a smell in the air of mentholatum, Vick’s Pneumonia Cure, and sweet glycerine. The negress arrived, coming under the built-up house and climbing lazily the steep tunnel of back steps. She knocked at the door. + 

“Who’s there!” cried Eliza sharply, waking at once, and coming forward to the door. She wore a gray flannel nightgown over a heavy woollen undershirt that Ben had discarded: the pendant string floated gently to and fro as she opened the door, like some strange seamoss floating below the sea. Upstairs, in the small front room with the sleeping-porch, slept Miss Billie Edwards, twenty-four, of Missouri, the daring and masterful lion-tamer of Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, then playing in the field on the hill behind the Plum Street School. Next to her, in the large airy room at the corner, Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of an itinerant and usually absent drug salesman, lay deep in the pit of alcoholic slumber. Upon each end of the mantel was a small snapshot in a silver frame⁠—one of her absent daughter, Louise, eighteen, and one of Benjamin Gant, lying on the grass-bank in front of the house, propped on his elbow and wearing a wide straw hat that shaded all his face except his mouth. Also, in other chambers, front and back, Mr. Conway Richards, candy-wheel concessionaire with the Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six, trained nurse, Mr. William H. Baskett, fifty-three, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, cotton grower, banker, and sufferer from malaria, and his wife; in the large room at the head of the stairs Miss Annie Mitchell, nineteen, of Valdosta, Georgia, Miss Thelma Cheshire, twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina, and Mrs. Rose Levin, twenty-eight, of Chicago, Illinois, all members of the chorus of “Molasses” Evans and His Broadway Beauties, booked out of Atlanta, Georgia, by the Piedmont Amusement Agency. + 

“O G‑hirls! The Duke of Gorgonzola and the Count of Limburger are on their way here now. I want all you girls to be nice to them and to show them a good time when they arrive.” + 

“You bet we will.” + 

“And keep your eye on the little one⁠—he’s the one with all the money.” + 

“I’ll say we will. Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah!” + 

“We are the girls that have the fun, + 

We’re snappy and happy everyone; + 

We’re jolly and gay + 

And ready to play, + 

And that is why we say‑ee⁠—” + 

Behind a bill-plastered fence-boarding on upper Valley Street, opposite the Y.M.I. (colored), and in the very heart of the crowded amusement and commercial centre of Altamont’s colored population, Moses Andrews, twenty-six, colored, slept the last great sleep of white and black. His pockets, which only the night before had been full of the money Saul Stein, the pawnbroker, had given him in exchange for certain articles which he had taken from the home of Mr. George Rollins, the attorney (as an 18-carat Waltham gold watch with a heavy chain of twined gold, the diamond engagement ring of Mrs. Rollins, three pairs of the finest silk stockings, and two pairs of gentlemen’s underdrawers), were now empty, a half-filled bottle of Cloverleaf Bonded Kentucky Rye, with which he had retired behind the boards to slumber, lay unmolested in the flaccid grip of his left hand, and his broad black throat gaped cleanly open from ear to ear, as a result of the skilled razor-work of his hated and hating rival, Jefferson Flack, twenty-eight, who now lay peacefully, unsuspected and unsought, with their mutual mistress, Miss Molly Fiske, in her apartment on east Pine Street. Moses had been murdered in moonlight. + 

A starved cat walked softly along by the boards on Upper Valley: as the courthouse bell boomed out its solid six strokes, eight negro laborers, the bottoms of their overalls stiff with agglutinated cement, tramped by like a single animal, in a wedge, each carrying his lunch in a small lard bucket. + 

Meanwhile, the following events occurred simultaneously throughout the neighborhood. + 

Dr. H. M. McRae, fifty-eight, minister of the First Presbyterian Church, having washed his lean Scotch body, arrayed himself in stiff black and a boiled white shirt, and shaved his spare clean un-aging face, descended from his chamber in his residence on Cumberland Avenue, to his breakfast of oatmeal, dry toast, and boiled milk. His heart was pure, his mind upright, his faith and his life like a clean board scrubbed with sandstone. He prayed in thirty-minute prayers without impertinence for all men and the success of all good ventures. He was a white unwasting flame that shone through love and death; his speech rang out like steel with a steady passion. + 

In Dr. Frank Engel’s Sanitarium and Turkish Bath Establishment on Liberty Street, Mr. J. H. Brown, wealthy sportsman and publisher of the Altamont Citizen, sank into dreamless sleep, after five minutes in the steam-closet, ten in the tub, and thirty in the dry-room, where he had submitted to the expert osteopathy of “Colonel” Andrews (as Dr. Engel’s skilled negro masseur was affectionately known), from the soles of his gouty feet to the veinous silken gloss of his slightly purple face. + 

Across the street, at the corner of Liberty and Federal, and at the foot of Battery Hill, a white-jacketed negro sleepily restacked in boxes the scattered poker-chips that covered the centre table in the upstairs centre room of the Altamont City Club. The guests, just departed, were Mr. Gilbert Woodcock, Mr. Reeves Stikeleather, Mr. Henry Pentland, Jr., Mr. Sidney Newbeck, of Cleveland, Ohio (retired), and the aforementioned Mr. J. H. Brown. + 

“And, Jesus, Ben!” said Harry Tugman, emerging at this moment from Uneeda No. 3, “I thought I’d have a hemorrhage when they pulled the Old Man out of the closet. After all the stuff he printed about cleaning up the town, too.” + 

“It wouldn’t surprise me if Judge Sevier had them raid him,” said Ben. + 

“Why certainly, Ben,” said Harry Tugman impatiently, “that’s the idea, but Queen Elizabeth was behind it. You don’t think there’s anything she doesn’t hear about, do you? So help me Jesus, you never heard a yap out of him for a week. He was afraid to show his face out of the office.” + 

At the Convent School of Saint Catherine’s on Saint Clement’s Road, Sister Theresa, the Mother Superior, walked softly through the dormitory lifting the window-shade beside each cot, letting the orchard cherry-apple bloom come gently into the long cool glade of roseleaf sleeping girls. Their breath expired gently upon their dewy half-opened mouths, light fell rosily upon the pillowed curve of their arms, their slender young sides, and the crisp pink buds of their breasts. At the other end of the room a fat girl lay squarely on her back, her arms and legs outspread, and snored solidly through blubbering lips. They had yet an hour of sleep. + 

From one of the little white tables between the cots Theresa picked up an opened book incautiously left there the night before, read below her gray mustache with the still inward smile of her great-boned face, its title⁠—The Common Law, by Robert W. Chambers⁠—and gripping a pencil in her broad earthstained hand, scrawled briefly in jagged male letters: “Rubbish, Elizabeth⁠—but see for yourself.” Then, on her soft powerful tread, she went downstairs, and entered her study, where Sister Louise (French), Sister Mary (History), and Sister Bernice (Ancient Languages) were waiting for the morning consultation. When they had gone, she sat down to her desk and worked for an hour on the manuscript of that book, modestly intended for school children, which has since celebrated her name wherever the noble architecture of prose is valued⁠—the great Biology. + 

Then the gong rang in the dormitory, she heard the high laughter of young maidens, and rising saw, coming from the plum tree by the wall, a young nun, Sister Agnes, with blossoms in her arms. + 

Below, tree-hidden, in the Biltburn bottom, there was a thunder on the rails, a wailing whistle cry. + 

Beneath the City Hall, in the huge sloping cellar, the market booths were open. The aproned butchers swung their cleavers down on fresh cold joints, slapping the thick chops on heavy sheets of mottled paper, and tossing them, roughly tied, to the waiting negro delivery-boys. + 

The self-respecting negro, J. H. Jackson, stood in his square vegetable-stall, attended by his two grave-faced sons, and his spectacled businesslike daughter. He was surrounded by wide slanting shelves of fruit and vegetables, smelling of the earth and morning⁠—great crinkled lettuces, fat radishes still clotted damply with black loam, quill-stemmed young onions newly wrenched from gardens, late celery, spring potatoes, and the thin rinded citrous fruits of Florida. + 

Above him, Sorrell, the fish and oyster man, drew up from the depths of an enamelled ice-packed can dripping ladlefuls of oysters, pouring them into thick cardboard cartons. Wide-bellied heavy seafish⁠—carp, trout, bass, shad⁠—lay gutted in beds of ice. + 

Mr. Michael Walter Creech, the butcher, having finished his hearty breakfast of calves’ liver, eggs and bacon, hot biscuits and coffee, made a sign to one of the waiting row of negro boys. The line sprang forward like hounds; he stopped them with a curse and a lifted cleaver. The fortunate youth who had been chosen then came forward and took the tray, still richly morselled with food and a pot half full of coffee. As he had to depart at this moment on a delivery, he put it down in the sawdust at the end of the bench and spat copiously upon it in order to protect it from his scavenging comrades. Then he wheeled off, full of rich laughter and triumphant malice. Mr. Creech looked at his niggers darkly. + 

The town had so far forgotten Mr. Creech’s own African blood (an eighth on his father’s side, old Walter Creech, out of Yellow Jenny) that it was about ready to offer him political preferment; but Mr. Creech himself had not forgotten. He glanced bitterly at his brother, Jay, who, happily ignorant of hatred, that fanged poison which may taint even a brother’s heart, was enthusiastically cleaving spareribs on the huge bole of his own table, singing meanwhile in a rich tenor voice the opening bars of “The Little Gray Home in the West”: + 

“… there are blue eyes that shine + 

Just because they meet mine⁠ ⁠…” + 

Mr. Creech looked venomously at Jay’s yellow jowls, the fat throbbing of his jaundiced throat, the crisp singed whorl of his hair. + 

By God, he thought in his anguish of spirit, he might be taken for a Mexican. + 

Jay’s golden voice neared its triumph, breaking with delicate restraint, on the last note, into a high sweet falsetto which he maintained for more than twenty seconds. All of the butchers stopped working, several of them, big strong men with grown-up families dashed a tear out of their eyes. + 

The great audience was held spellbound. Not a soul stirred. Not even a dog or a horse stirred. As the last sweet note melted away in a gossamer tremolo, a silence profound as that of the tombs, nay, of death itself, betokened the highest triumph the artist is destined to know upon this earth. Somewhere in the crowd a woman sobbed and collapsed in a faint. She was immediately carried out by two Boy Scouts who happened to be present, and who administered first aid to her in the restroom, one of them hastily kindling a crackling fire of pine boughs by striking two flints together, while the other made a tourniquet, and tied several knots in his handkerchief. Then pandemonium broke loose. Women tore the jewels from their fingers, ropes of pearls from their necks, chrysanthemums, hyacinths, tulips and daisies from their expensive corsages, while the fashionably-dressed men in the nearby stalls kept up a constant bombardment of tomatoes, lettuces, new potatoes, beef-tallow, pigs’ knuckles, fish-heads, clams, loin-chops, and pork-sausages. + 

Among the stalls of the market, the boardinghouse keepers of Altamont walked with spying bargain-hunting eyes and inquisitive nose. They were of various sizes and ages, but they were all stamped with the print of haggling determination and a pugnacious closure of the mouth. They pried in among the fish and vegetables, pinching cabbages, weighing onions, exfoliating lettuce-heads. You’ve got to keep your eye on people or they’ll skin you. And if you leave things to a lazy shiftless nigger she’ll waste more than she cooks. They looked at one another hardfaced⁠—Mrs. Barrett of the Grosvenor at Mrs. Neville of Glen View; Mrs. Ambler of the Colonial at Miss Mamie Featherstone of Ravencrest; Mrs. Ledbetter of the Belvedere⁠— + 

“I hear you’re full up, Mrs. Coleman,” said she inquiringly. + 

“O, I’m full up all the time,” said Mrs. Coleman. “My people are all permanents, I don’t want to fool with the transients,” she said loftily. + 

“Well,” said Mrs. Ledbetter acidly, “I could fill my house up at any time with lungers who call themselves something else, but I won’t have them. I was saying the other day⁠—” + 

Mrs. Michalove of Oakwood at Mrs. Jarvis of The Waverley; Mrs. Cowan of Ridgmont at⁠— + 

The city is splendidly equipped to meet the demands of the great and steadily growing crowd of tourists that fill the Mountain Metropolis during the busy months of June, July, and August. In addition to eight hotels de luxe of the highest quality, there were registered at the Board of Trade in 1911 over 250 private hotels, boardinghouses and sanitariums all catering to the needs of those who come on missions of business, pleasure, or health. + 

Stop their baggage at the station. + 

At this moment Number 3, having finished his route, stepped softly on to the slime-scummed porch of the house on Valley Street, rapped gently at the door, and opened it quietly, groping his way through black miasmic air to the bed in which May Corpening lay. She muttered as if drugged as he touched her, turned toward him, and sleepily awakened, drew him down to her with heavied and sensual caress, yoked under her big coppery arms. Tom Cline clumped greasily up the steps of his residence on Bartlett Street, swinging his tin pail; Ben returned to the paper office with Harry Tugman; and Eugene, in the back room on Woodson Street, waking suddenly to Gant’s powerful command from the foot of the stairs, turned his face full into a momentary vision of roseflushed blue sky and tender blossoms that drifted slowly earthward. + 

XV + 

The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. Old haunt-eyed faces glimmered in his memory. He thought of Swain’s cow, St. Louis, death, himself in the cradle. He was the haunter of himself, trying for a moment to recover what he had been part of. He did not understand change, he did not understand growth. He stared at his framed baby picture in the parlor, and turned away sick with fear and the effort to touch, retain, grasp himself for only a moment. + 

And these bodiless phantoms of his life appeared with terrible precision, with all the mad nearness of a vision. That which was five years gone came within the touch of his hand, and he ceased at that moment to believe in his own existence. He expected someone to wake him; he would hear Gant’s great voice below the laden vines, would gaze sleepily from the porch into the rich low moon, and go obediently to bed. But still there would be all that he remembered before that and what if⁠—Cause flowed ceaselessly into cause. + 

He heard the ghostly ticking of his life; his powerful clairvoyance, the wild Scotch gift of Eliza, burned inward back across the phantom years, plucking out of the ghostly shadows a million gleams of light⁠—a little station by the rails at dawn, the road cleft through the pineland seen at twilight, a smoky cabin-light below the trestles, a boy who ran among the bounding calves, a wisp-haired slattern, with snuff-sticked mouth, framed in a door, floury negroes unloading sacks from freight-cars on a shed, the man who drove the Fair Grounds bus at Saint Louis, a cool-lipped lake at dawn. + 

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train. + 

And it was this that awed him⁠—the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge⁠—movement is petrified suddenly in midair, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition. + 

His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later? Where now? + 

I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then? + 

The fusion of the two strong egotisms, Eliza’s inbrooding and Gant’s expanding outward, made of him a fanatical zealot in the religion of Chance. Beyond all misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, confusion, unswerving necessity was on the rails; not a sparrow fell through the air but that its repercussion acted on his life, and the lonely light that fell upon the viscous and interminable seas at dawn awoke sea-changes washing life to him. The fish swam upward from the depth. + 

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern because a London cutpurse went unhung. Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas. + 

He believed himself thus at the centre of life; he believed the mountains rimmed the heart of the world; he believed that from all the chaos of accident the inevitable event came at the inexorable moment to add to the sum of his life. + 

Against the hidden other flanks of the immutable hills the world washed like a vast and shadowy sea, alive with the great fish of his imagining. Variety, in this unvisited world, was unending, but order and purpose certain: there would be no wastage in adventure⁠—courage would be regarded with beauty, talent with success, all merit with its true deserving. There would be peril, there would be toil, there would be struggle. But there would not be confusion and waste. There would not be groping. For collected Fate would fall, on its chosen moment, like a plum. There was no disorder in enchantment. + 

Spring lay abroad through all the garden of this world. Beyond the hills the land bayed out to other hills, to golden cities, to rich meadows, to deep forests, to the sea. Forever and forever. + 

Beyond the hills were the mines of King Solomon, the toy republics of Central America, and little tinkling fountains in a court; beyond, the moonlit roofs of Bagdad, the little grated blinds of Samarkand, the moonlit camels of Bythinia, the Spanish ranch-house of the Triple Z, and J. B. Montgomery and his lovely daughter stepping from their private car upon a western track; and the castle-haunted crags of Graustark; the fortune-yielding casino of Monte Carlo; and the blue eternal Mediterranean, mother of empires. And instant wealth ticked out upon a tape, and the first stage of the Eiffel Tower where the restaurant was, and Frenchmen setting fire to their whiskers, and a farm in Devon, white cream, brown ale, the winter’s chimney merriment, and Lorna Doone; and the hanging gardens of Babylon, and supper in the sunset with the queens, and the slow slide of the barge upon the Nile, or the wise rich bodies of Egyptian women couched on moonlit balustrades, and the thunder of the chariots of great kings, and tomb-treasure sought at midnight, and the wine-rich château land of France, and calico warm legs in hay. + 

Upon a field in Thrace Queen Helen lay, her lovely body dappled in the sun. + 

Meanwhile, business had been fairly good. Eliza’s earning power the first few years at Dixieland had been injured by her illnesses. Now, however, she had recovered, and had paid off the last installment on the house. It was entirely hers. The property at this time was worth perhaps $12,000. In addition she had borrowed $3,500 on a twenty-year $5,000 life insurance policy that had only two years more to run, and had made extensive alterations: she had added a large sleeping-porch upstairs, tacked on two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side, and extended a hallway, adding three bedrooms, two baths, and a water-closet, on the other. Downstairs she had widened the veranda, put in a large sun-parlor under the sleeping-porch, knocked out the archway in the dining-room, which she prepared to use as a big bedroom in the slack season, scooped out a small pantry in which the family was to eat, and added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her own occupancy. + 

The construction was after her own plans, and of the cheapest material: it never lost the smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and flimsy rough plastering, but she had added eight or ten rooms at a cost of only $3,000. The year before she had banked almost $2,000⁠—her bank account was almost $5,000. In addition, she owned jointly with Gant the shop on the Square, which had thirty feet of frontage, and was valued at $20,000, from which he got $65 a month in rent; $20 from Jannadeau, $25 from the McLean Plumbing Company in the basement, and $20 from the J. N. Gillespie Printing Co., which occupied all of the second story. + 

There were, besides, three good building-lots on Merrion Avenue valued at $2,000 apiece, or at $5,500 for all three; the house on Woodson Street valued at $5,000; 110 acres of wooded mountainside with a farmhouse, several hundred peach, apple and cherry trees, and a few acres of arable ground for which Gant received $120 a year in rent, and which they valued at $50 an acre, $5,500; two houses, one on Carter Street, and one on Duncan, rented to railway people, for which they received $25 a month apiece, and which they valued together at $4,500; forty-eight acres of land two miles above Biltburn, and four from Altamont, upon the important Reynoldsville Road, which they valued at $210 an acre, or $10,000; three houses in Niggertown⁠—one on lower Valley Street, one on Beaumont Crescent, just below the negro Johnson’s big house, and one on Short Oak, valued at $600, $900, and $1,600 respectively, and drawing a room-rental of $8, $12, and $17 a month (total: $3,100 and $37 rental); two houses across the river, four miles away in West Altamont, valued at $2,750 and at $3,500, drawing a rental of $22 and $30 a month; three lots, lost in the growth of a rough hillside, a mile from the main highway through West Altamont, $500; and a house, unoccupied, object of Gantian anathema, on Lower Hatton Avenue, $4,500. + 

In addition, Gant held 10 shares, which were already worth $200 each ($2,000), in the newly organized Fidelity Bank; his stock of stones, monuments, and fly-specked angels represented an investment of $2,700, although he could not have sold them outright for so much; and he had about $3,000 deposited in the Fidelity, the Merchants, and the Battery Hill banks. + 

Thus, at the beginning of 1912, before the rapid and intensive development of Southern industry, and the consequent tripling of Altamont’s population, and before the multiplication of her land values, the wealth of Gant and Eliza amounted to about $100,000, the great bulk of which was solidly founded in juicy well chosen pieces of property of Eliza’s selection, yielding them a monthly rental of more than $200, which, added to their own earning capacities at the shop and Dixieland, gave them a combined yearly income of $8,000 or $10,000. Although Gant often cried out bitterly against his business and declared, when he was not attacking property, that he had never made even a bare living from his tombstones, he was rarely short of ready money: he usually had one or two small commissions from country people, and he always carried a well-filled purse, containing $150 or $200 in five- and ten-dollar bills, which he allowed Eugene to count out frequently, enjoying his son’s delight, and the feel of abundance. + 

Eliza had suffered one or two losses in her investments, led astray by a strain of wild romanticism which destroyed for the moment her shrewd caution. She invested $1,200 in the Missouri Utopia of a colonizer, and received nothing for her money but a weekly copy of the man’s newspaper, several beautiful prospectuses of the look of things when finished, and a piece of clay sculpture, eight inches in height, showing Big Brother with his little sisters Jenny and Kate, the last with thumb in her mouth. + 

“By God,” said Gant, who made savage fun of the proceeding, “she ought to have it on her nose.” + 

And Ben sneered, jerking his head toward it, saying: + 

“There’s her $1,200.” + 

But Eliza was preparing to go on by herself. She saw that cooperation with Gant in the purchase of land was becoming more difficult each year. And with something like pain, something assuredly like hunger, she saw various rich plums fall into other hands or go unbought. She realized that in a very short time land values would soar beyond her present means. And she proposed to be on hand when the pie was cut. + 

Across the street from Dixieland was the Brunswick, a well-built red brick house of twenty rooms. The marble facings had been done by Gant himself twenty years before, the hardwood floors and oak timbering by Will Pentland. It was an ugly gabled Victorian house, the marriage gift of a rich Northerner to his daughter, who died of tuberculosis. + 

“Not a better built house in town,” said Gant. + 

Nevertheless he refused to buy it with Eliza, and with an aching heart she saw it go to St. Greenberg, the rich junk-man, for $8,500. Within a year he had sold off five lots at the back, on the Yancy Street side, for $1,000 each, and was holding the house for $20,000. + 

“We could have had our money back by now three times over,” Eliza fretted. + 

She did not have enough money at the time for any important investment. She saved and she waited. + 

Will Pentland’s fortune at this time was vaguely estimated at from $500,000 to $700,000. It was mainly in property, a great deal of which was situated⁠—warehouses and buildings⁠—near the passenger depot of the railway. + 

Sometimes Altamont people, particularly the young men who loafed about Collister’s drugstore, and who spent long dreamy hours estimating the wealth of the native plutocracy, called Will Pentland a millionaire. At this time it was a distinction in American life to be a millionaire. There were only six or eight thousand. But Will Pentland wasn’t one. He was really worth only a half million. + 

Mr. Goulderbilt was a millionaire. He was driven into town in a big Packard, but he got out and went along the streets like other men. + 

One time Gant pointed him out to Eugene. He was about to enter a bank. + 

“There he is,” whispered Gant. “Do you see him?” + 

Eugene nodded, wagging his head mechanically. He was unable to speak. Mr. Goulderbilt was a small dapper man, with black hair, black clothes, and a black mustache. His hands and feet were small. + 

“He’s got over $50,000,000,” said Gant. “You’d never think it to look at him, would you?” + 

And Eugene dreamed of these money princes living in a princely fashion. He wanted to see them riding down a street in a crested coach around which rode a teetering guard of liveried outriders. He wanted their fingers to be heavily gemmed, their clothes trimmed with ermine, their women coroneted with flashing mosaics of amethyst, beryl, ruby, topaz, sapphire, opal, emerald, and wearing thick ropes of pearls. And he wanted to see them living in palaces of alabaster columns, eating in vast halls upon an immense creamy table from vessels of old silver⁠—eating strange fabulous foods⁠—swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow, oiled mushrooms, calvered salmon, jugged hare, the beards of barbels dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, carps’ tongues, dormice and camels’ heels, with spoons of amber headed with diamond and carbuncle, and cups of agate, studded with emeralds, hyacinths, and rubies⁠—everything, in fact, for which Epicure Mammon wished. + 

Eugene met only one millionaire whose performances in public satisfied him, and he, unhappily, was crazy. His name was Simon. + 

Simon, when Eugene first saw him, was a man of almost fifty years. He had a strong, rather heavy figure of middling height, a lean brown face, with shadowy hollows across the cheeks, always closely shaven, but sometimes badly scarred by his gouging fingernails, and a long thin mouth that curved slightly downward, subtle, sensitive, lighting his whole face at times with blazing demoniac glee. He had straight abundant hair, heavily grayed, which he kept smartly brushed and flattened at the sides. His clothing was loose and well cut: he wore a dark coat above baggy gray flannels, silk shirt rayed with broad stripes, a collar to match, and a generous loosely knotted tie. His waistcoats were of a ruddy-brown chequered pattern. He had an appearance of great distinction. + 

Simon and his two keepers first came to Dixieland when difficulties with several of the Altamont hotels forced them to look for private quarters. The men took two rooms and a sleeping-porch, and paid generously. + 

“Why, pshaw!” said Eliza persuasively to Helen. “I don’t believe there’s a thing wrong with him. He’s as quiet and well-behaved as you please.” + 

At this moment there was a piercing yell upstairs, followed by a long peal of diabolical laughter. Eugene bounded up and down the hall in his exultancy and delight, producing little squealing noises in his throat. Ben, scowling, with a quick flicker of his mouth, drew back his hard white hand swiftly as if to cuff his brother. Instead, he jerked his head sideways to Eliza, and said with a soft, scornful laugh: “By God, mama, I don’t see why you have to take them in. You’ve got enough of them in the family already.” + 

“Mama, in heaven’s name⁠—” Helen began furiously. At this moment Gant strode in out of the dusk, carrying a mottled package of pork chops, and muttering rhetorically to himself. There was another long peal of laughter above. He halted abruptly, startled, and lifted his head. Luke, listening attentively at the foot of the stairs, exploded in a loud boisterous guffaw, and the girl, her annoyance changing at once to angry amusement, walked toward her father’s inquiring face, and prodded him several times in the ribs. + 

“Hey?” he said startled. “What is it?” + 

“Miss Eliza’s got a crazy man upstairs,” she sniggered, enjoying his amazement. + 

“Jesus God!” Gant yelled frantically, wetting his big thumb swiftly on his tongue, and glancing up toward his Maker with an attitude of exaggerated supplication in his small gray eyes and the thrust of his huge bladelike nose. Then, letting his arms slap heavily at his sides, in a gesture of defeat, he began to walk rapidly back and forth, clucking his deprecation loudly. Eliza stood solidly, looking from one to another, her lips working rapidly, her white face hurt and bitter. + 

There was another long howl of mirth above. Gant paused, caught Helen’s eye, and began to grin suddenly in an unwilling sheepish manner. + 

“God have mercy on us,” he chuckled. “She’ll have the place filled with all of Barnum’s freaks the next thing you know.” + 

At this moment, Simon, self-contained, distinguished and grave in his manner, descended the steps with Mr. Gilroy and Mr. Flannagan, his companions. The two guards were red in the face, and breathed stertorously as if from some recent exertion. Simon, however, preserved his habitual appearance of immaculate and well-washed urbanity. + 

“Good evening,” he remarked suavely. “I hope I have not kept you waiting long.” He caught sight of Eugene. + 

“Come here, my boy,” he said very kindly. + 

“It’s all right,” remarked Mr. Gilroy, encouragingly. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” + 

Eugene moved into the presence. + 

“And what is your name, young man?” said Simon with his beautiful devil’s smile. + 

“Eugene.” + 

“That’s a very fine name,” said Simon. “Always try to live up to it.” He thrust his hand carelessly and magnificently into his coat pocket, drawing out under the boy’s astonished eyes, a handful of shining five and ten-cent pieces. + 

“Always be good to the birds, my boy,” said Simon, and he poured the money into Eugene’s cupped hands. + 

Everyone looked doubtfully at Mr. Gilroy. + 

“Oh, that’s all right!” said Mr. Gilroy cheerfully. “He’ll never miss it. There’s lots more where that came from.” + 

“He’s a mul-tye-millionaire,” Mr. Flannagan explained proudly. “We give him four or five dollars in small change every morning just to throw away.” + 

Simon caught sight of Gant for the first time. + 

“Look out for the Stingaree,” he cried. “Remember the Maine.” + 

“I tell you what,” said Eliza laughing. “He’s not so crazy as you think.” + 

“That’s right,” said Mr. Gilroy, noting Gant’s grin. “The Stingaree’s a fish. They have them in Florida.” + 

“Don’t forget the birds, my friends,” said Simon, going out with his companions. “Be good to the birds.” + 

They became very fond of him. Somehow he fitted into the pattern of their life. None of them was uncomfortable in the presence of madness. In the flowering darkness of Spring, prisoned in a room, his satanic laughter burst suddenly out: Eugene listened, thrilled, and slept, unable to forget the smile of dark flowering evil, the loose pocket chinking heavily with coins. + 

Night, the myriad rustle of tiny wings. Heard lapping water of the inland seas. + 

—And the air will be filled with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-notes. He was almost twelve. He was done with childhood. As that Spring ripened he felt entirely, for the first time, the full delight of loneliness. Sheeted in his thin nightgown, he stood in darkness by the orchard window of the back room at Gant’s, drinking the sweet air down, exulting in his isolation in darkness, hearing the strange wail of the whistle going west. + 

The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination⁠—he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion. He no longer went through the torment of the recess flight and pursuit. He was now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys. His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter seige against Eliza’s obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the curls. But he had grown like a weed, he already topped his mother by an inch or two; his body was big-boned but very thin and fragile, with no meat on it; his legs were absurdly long, thin, and straight, giving him a curious scissored look as he walked with long bounding strides. + 

Stuck on a thin undeveloped neck beneath a big wide-browed head covered thickly by curling hair which had changed, since his infancy, from a light maple to dark brown-black, was a face so small, and so delicately sculptured, that it seemed not to belong to its body. The strangeness, the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool. The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply scooped and pouting. His rapt dreaming intensity set the face usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; he smiled, oftener than he laughed, inwardly, at some extravagant invention, or some recollection of the absurd, now fully appreciated for the first time. He did not open his lips to smile⁠—there was a swift twisted flicker across his mouth. His thick heavily arched eyebrows grew straight across the base of his nose. + 

That Spring he was more alone than ever. Eliza’s departure for Dixieland three or four years before, and the disruption of established life at Gant’s, had begun the loosening of his first friendships with the neighborhood boys, Harry Tarkinton, Max Isaacs, and the others, and had now almost completely severed them. Occasionally he saw these boys again, occasionally he resumed again, at sporadic intervals, his association with them, but he now had no steady companionship, he had only a series of associations with children whose parents stayed for a time at Dixieland, with Tim O’Doyle, whose mother ran the Brunswick, with children here and there who briefly held his interest. + 

But he became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements. Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of others⁠—his early distaste for Pett Pentland and her grim rusty aunts came from submerged memories of the old house on Central Avenue, the smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot room, the swooping howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone of their conversation on disease, death, and misery. He was filled with terror and anger against them because they were able to live, to thrive, in this horrible depression that sickened him. + 

Thus, the entire landscape, the whole physical background of his life, was now dappled by powerful prejudices of liking and distaste formed, God knows how, or by what intangible affinities of thought, feeling and connotation. Thus, one street would seem to him to be a “good street”⁠—to exist in the rich light of cheerful, abundant, and high-hearted living; another, inexplicably, a “bad street,” touching him somehow with fear, hopelessness, depression. + 

Perhaps the cold red light of some remembered winter’s afternoon, waning pallidly over a playing-field, with all its mockery of Spring, while lights flared up smokily in houses, the rabble-rout of children dirtily went in to supper, and men came back to the dull but warm imprisonment of home, oil lamps (which he hated), and bedtime, clotted in him a hatred of the place which remained even when the sensations that caused it were forgotten. + 

Or, returning from some country walk in late autumn, he would come back from Cove or Valley with dewy nose, clotted boots, the smell of a mashed persimmon on his knee, and the odor of wet earth and grass on the palms of his hands, and with a stubborn dislike and suspicion of the scene he had visited, and fear of the people who lived there. + 

He had the most extraordinary love of incandescence. He hated dull lights, smoky lights, soft, or sombre lights. At night he wanted to be in rooms brilliantly illuminated with beautiful, blazing, sharp, poignant lights. After that, the dark. + 

He played games badly, although he took a violent interest in sports. Max Isaacs continued to interest him as an athlete long after he had ceased to interest him as a person. The game Max Isaacs excelled in was baseball. Usually he played one of the outfield positions, ranging easily about in his field, when a ball was hit to him, with the speed of a panther, making impossible catches with effortless grace. He was a terrific hitter, standing at the plate casually but alertly, and meeting the ball squarely with a level swinging smack of his heavy shoulders. Eugene tried vainly to imitate the precision and power of this movement, which drove the ball in a smoking arc out of the lot, but he was never able: he chopped down clumsily and blindly, knocking a futile bounder to some nimble baseman. In the field he was equally useless: he never learned to play in a team, to become a limb of that single animal which united telepathically in a concerted movement. He became nervous, highly excited, and erratic in team-play, but he spent hours alone with another boy, or, after the midday meal, with Ben, passing a ball back and forth. + 

He developed blinding speed, bending all the young suppleness of his long thin body behind the ball, exulting as it smoked into the pocket of the mitt with a loud smack, or streaked up with a sharp dropping curve. Ben, taken by surprise by a fast drop, would curse him savagely, and in a rage hurl the ball back into his thin gloved hand. In the Spring and Summer he went as often as he could afford it, or was invited, to the baseball games in the district league, a fanatic partisan of the town club and its best players, making a fantasy constantly of himself in a heroic game-saving role. + 

But he was in no way able to submit himself to the discipline, the hard labor, the acceptance of defeat and failure that make a good athlete; he wanted always to win, he wanted always to be the general, the heroic spearhead of victory. And after that he wanted to be loved. Victory and love. In all of his swarming fantasies Eugene saw himself like this⁠—unbeaten and beloved. But moments of clear vision returned to him when all the defeat and misery of his life was revealed. He saw his gangling and absurd figure, his remote unpractical brooding face, too like a dark strange flower to arouse any feeling among his companions and his kin, he thought, but discomfort, bitterness, and mockery; he remembered, with a drained sick heart, the countless humiliations, physical and verbal, he had endured, at the hands of school and family, before the world, and as he thought, the horns of victory died within the wood, the battle-drums of triumph stopped, the proud clangor of the gongs quivered away in silence. His eagles had flown; he saw himself, in a moment of reason, as a madman playing Caesar. He craned his head aside and covered his face with his hand. + 

XVI + 

The Spring grew ripe. There was at midday a soft drowsiness in the sun. Warm sporting gusts of wind howled faintly at the eaves; the young grass bent; the daisies twinkled. + 

He pressed his high knees uncomfortably against the bottom of his desk, grew nostalgic on his dreams. Bessie Barnes scrawled vigorously two rows away, displaying her long full silken leg. Open for me the gates of delight. Behind her sat a girl named Ruth, dark, with milk-white skin, eyes as gentle as her name, and thick black hair, parted in middle. He thought of a wild life with Bessie and of a later resurrection, a pure holy life, with Ruth. + 

One day, after the noon recess, they were marshalled by the teachers⁠—all of the children in the three upper grades⁠—and marched upstairs to the big assembly hall. They were excited, and gossiped in low voices as they went. They had never been called upstairs at this hour. Quite often the bells rang in the halls: they sprang quickly into line and were marched out in double files. That was fire drill. They liked that. Once they emptied the building in four minutes. + 

This was something new. They marched into the big room and sat down in blocks of seats assigned to each class: they sat with a seat between each of them. In a moment the door of the principal’s office on the left⁠—where little boys were beaten⁠—was opened, and the principal came out. He walked around the corner of the big room and stepped softly up on the platform. He began to talk. + 

He was a new principal. Young Armstrong, who had smelled the flower so delicately, and who had visited Daisy, and who once had almost beaten Eugene because of the smutty rhymes, was gone. The new principal was older. He was about thirty-eight years old. He was a strong rather heavy man a little under six feet tall; he was one of a large family who had grown up on a Tennessee farm. His father was poor but he had helped his children to get an education. All this Eugene knew already, because the principal made long talks to them in the morning and said he had never had their advantages. He pointed to himself with some pride. And he urged the little boys, playfully but earnestly, to “be not like dumb driven cattle, be a hero in the strife.” That was poetry, Longfellow. + 

The principal had thick powerful shoulders; clumsy white arms, knotted with big awkward country muscles. Eugene had seen him once hoeing in the schoolyard; each of them had been given a plant to set out. He got those muscles on the farm. The boys said he beat very hard. He walked with a clumsy stealthy tread⁠—awkward and comical enough, it is true, but he could be up at a boy’s back before you knew it. Otto Krause called him Creeping Jesus. The name stuck, among the tough crowd. Eugene was a little shocked by it. + 

The principal had a white face of waxen transparency, with deep flat cheeks like the Pentlands, a pallid nose, a trifle deeper in its color than his face, and a thin slightly-bowed mouth. His hair was coarse, black, and thick, but he never let it grow too long. He had short dry hands, strong, and always coated deeply with chalk. When he passed near by, Eugene got the odor of chalk and of the schoolhouse: his heart grew cold with excitement and fear. The sanctity of chalk and school hovered about the man’s flesh. He was the one who could touch without being touched, beat without being beaten. Eugene had terrible fantasies of resistance, shuddering with horror as he thought of the awful consequences of fighting back: something like God’s fist in lighting. Then he looked around cautiously to see if anyone had noticed. + 

The principal’s name was Leonard. He made long speeches to the children every morning, after a ten-minute prayer. He had a high sonorous countrified voice which often trailed off in a comical drawl; he got lost very easily in revery, would pause in the middle of a sentence, gaze absently off with his mouth half-open and an expression of stupefaction on his face, and return presently to the business before him, his mind still loose, with witless distracted laugh. + 

He talked to the children aimlessly, pompously, dully for twenty minutes every morning: the teachers yawned carefully behind their hands, the students made furtive drawings, or passed notes. He spoke to them of “the higher life” and of “the things of the mind.” He assured them that they were the leaders of tomorrow and the hope of the world. Then he quoted Longfellow. + 

He was a good man, a dull man, a man of honor. He had a broad streak of coarse earthy brutality in him. He loved a farm better than anything in the world except a school. He had rented a big dilapidated house in a grove of lordly oaks on the outskirts of town: he lived there with his wife and his two children. He had a cow⁠—he was never without a cow: he would go out at night and morning to milk her, laughing his vacant silly laugh, and giving her a good smacking kick in the belly to make her come round into position. + 

He was a heavy-handed master. He put down rebellion with good cornfield violence. If a boy was impudent to him he would rip him powerfully from his seat, drag his wriggling figure into his office, breathing stertorously as he walked along at his clumsy rapid gait, and saying roundly, in tones of scathing contempt: “Why, you young upstart, we’ll just see who’s master here. I’ll just show you, my sonny, if I’m to be dictated to by every two-by-four whippersnapper who comes along.” And once within the office, with the glazed door shut, he published the stern warning of his justice by the loud exertion of his breathing, the cutting swish of his rattan, and the yowls of pain and terror that he exacted from his captive. + 

He had called the school together that day to command it to write him a composition. The children sat, staring dumbly up at him as he made a rambling explanation of what he wanted. Finally he announced a prize. He would give five dollars from his own pocket to the student who wrote the best paper. That aroused them. There was a rustle of interest. + 

They were to write a paper on the meaning of a French picture called The Song of the Lark. It represented a French peasant girl, barefooted, with a sickle in one hand, and with face upturned in the morning-light of the fields as she listened to the birdsong. They were asked to describe what they saw in the expression of the girl’s face. They were asked to tell what the picture meant to them. It had been reproduced in one of their readers. A larger print was now hung up on the platform for their inspection. Sheets of yellow paper were given them. They stared, thoughtfully masticating their pencils. Finally, the room was silent save for a minute scratching on paper. + 

The warm wind spouted about the eaves; the grasses bent, whistling gently. + 

Eugene wrote: “The girl is hearing the song of the first lark. She knows that it means Spring has come. She is about seventeen or eighteen years old. Her people are very poor, she has never been anywhere. In the winter she wears wooden shoes. She is making out as if she was going to whistle. But she doesn’t let on to the bird that she has heard him. The rest of her people are behind her, coming down the field, but we do not see them. She has a father, a mother, and two brothers. They have worked hard all their life. The girl is the youngest child. She thinks she would like to go away somewhere and see the world. Sometimes she hears the whistle of a train that is going to Paris. She has never ridden on a train in her life. She would like to go to Paris. She would like to have some fine clothes, she would like to travel. Perhaps she would like to start life new in America, the Land of Opportunity. The girl has had a hard time. Her people do not understand her. If they saw her listening to the lark they would poke fun at her. She has never had the advantages of a good education, her people are so poor, but she would profit by her opportunity if she did, more than some people who have. You can tell by looking at her that she’s intelligent.” + 

It was early in May; examinations came in another two weeks. He thought of them with excitement and pleasure⁠—he liked the period of hard cramming, the long reviews, the delight of emptying out abundantly on paper his stored knowledge. The big assembly room had about it the odor of completion, of sharp nervous ecstasy. All through the summer it would be drowsy-warm; if only here, alone, with the big plaster cast of Minerva, himself and Bessie Barnes, or Miss⁠—Miss⁠— + 

“We want this boy,” said Margaret Leonard. She handed Eugene’s paper over to her husband. They were starting a private school for boys. That was what the paper had been for. + 

Leonard took the paper, pretended to read half a page, looked off absently into eternity, and began to rub his chin reflectively, leaving a slight coating of chalk-dust on his face. Then, catching her eye, he laughed idiotically, and said: “Why, that little rascal! Huh? Do you suppose⁠—?” + 

Feeling delightfully scattered, he bent over with a long suction of whining laughter, slapping his knee and leaving a chalk print, making a slobbering noise in his mouth. + 

“The Lord have mercy!” he gasped. + 

“Here! Never you mind about that,” she said, laughing with tender sharp amusement. “Pull yourself together and see this boy’s people.” She loved the man dearly, and he loved her. + 

A few days later Leonard assembled the children a second time. He made a rambling speech, the purport of which was to inform them that one of them had won the prize, but to conceal the winner’s name. Then, after several divagations, which he thoroughly enjoyed, he read Eugene’s paper, announced his name, and called him forward. + 

Chalkface took chalkhand. The boy’s heart thundered against his ribs. The proud horns blared, he tasted glory. + 

Patiently, all through the summer, Leonard laid siege to Gant and Eliza. Gant fidgeted, spoke shiftily, finally said: + 

“You’ll have to see his mother.” Privately he was bitterly scornful, roared the merits of the public school as an incubator of citizenship. The family was contemptuous. Private school! Mr. Vanderbilt! Ruin him for good! + 

Which made Eliza reflective. She had a good streak of snobbism. Mr. Vanderbilt? She was as good as any of them. They’d just see. + 

“Who are you going to have?” she asked. “Have you drummed anyone up yet?” + 

Leonard mentioned the sons of several fashionable and wealthy people⁠—of Dr. Kitchen, the eye, ear, nose and throat man, Mr. Arthur, the corporation lawyer, and Bishop Raper, of the Episcopal diocese. + 

Eliza grew more reflective. She thought of Pett. She needn’t give herself airs. + 

“How much are you asking?” she said. + 

He told her the tuition was one hundred dollars a year. She pursed her lips lingeringly before she answered. + 

“Hm‑m!” she began, with a bantering smile, as she looked at Eugene. “That’s a whole lot of money. You know,” she continued with her tremulous smile, “as the darkey says, we’re pore-folks.” + 

Eugene squirmed. + 

“Well what about it, boy?” said Eliza banteringly. “Do you think you’re worth that much money?” + 

Mr. Leonard placed his white dry hand upon Eugene’s shoulders, affectionately sliding it down his back and across his kidneys, leaving white chalk prints everywhere. Then he clamped his meaty palm tightly around the slender bracelet of boy-arm. + 

“That boy’s worth it,” he said, shaking him gently to and fro. “Yes, sir!” + 

Eugene smiled painfully. Eliza continued to purse her lips. She felt a strong psychic relation to Leonard. They both took time. + 

“Say,” she said, rubbing her broad red nose, and smiling slyly, “I used to be a schoolteacher. You didn’t know that, did you? But I didn’t get any such prices as you’re asking,” she added. “I thought myself mighty lucky if I got my board and twenty dollars a month.” + 

“Is that so, Mrs. Gant?” said Mr. Leonard with great interest. “Well, sir!” He began to laugh in a vague whine, pulling Eugene about more violently and deadening his arm under his crushing grip. + 

“Yes,” said Eliza, “I remember my father⁠—it was long before you were born, boy,” she said to Eugene, “for I hadn’t laid eyes on your papa⁠—as the feller says, you were nothing but a dishrag hanging out in heaven⁠—I’d have laughed at anyone who suggested marriage then⁠—Well, I tell you what [she shook her head with a sad pursed deprecating mouth], we were mighty poor at the time, I can tell you.⁠—I was thinking about it the other day⁠—many’s the time we didn’t have food in the house for the next meal.⁠—Well, as I was saying, your grandfather [addressing Eugene] came home one night and said⁠—Look here, what about it?⁠—Who do you suppose I saw today?⁠—I remember him just as plain as if I saw him standing here⁠—I had a feeling⁠—[addressing Leonard with a doubtful smile] I don’t know what you’d call it but it’s pretty strange when you come to think about it, isn’t it?⁠—I had just finished helping Aunt Jane set the table⁠—she had come all the way from Yancey County to visit your grandmother⁠—when all of a sudden it flashed over me⁠—mind you [to Leonard] I never looked out the window or anything but I knew just as well as I knew anything that he was coming⁠—mercy I cried⁠—here comes⁠—why what on earth are you talking about, Eliza? said your grandma⁠—I remember she went to the door and looked out down the path⁠—there’s no one there⁠—He’s acoming, I said⁠—wait and see⁠—Who? said your grandmother⁠—Why, father, I said⁠—he’s carrying something on his shoulder⁠—and sure enough⁠—I had no sooner got the words out of my mouth than there he was just acoming it for all he was worth, up the path, with a tow-sack full of apples on his back⁠—you could tell by the way he walked that he had news of some sort⁠—well⁠—sure enough⁠—without stopping to say howdy-do⁠—I remembered he began to talk almost before he got into the house⁠—O father, I called out⁠—you’ve brought the apples⁠—it was the year after I had almost died of pneumonia⁠—I’d been spitting up blood ever since⁠—and having hemorrhages⁠—and I asked him to bring me some apples⁠—Well sir, mother said to him, and she looked mighty queer, I can tell you⁠—that’s the strangest thing I ever heard of⁠—and she told him what had happened⁠—Well, he looked pretty serious and said⁠—Yes, I’ll never forget the way he said it⁠—I reckon she saw me. I wasn’t there but I was thinking of being there and coming up the path at that very moment⁠—I’ve got news for you he said⁠—who do you suppose I saw today⁠—why, I’ve no idea, I said⁠—why old Professor Truman⁠—he came rushing up to me in town and said, see here: where’s Eliza⁠—I’ve got a job for her if she wants it, teaching school this winter out on Beaverdam⁠—why, pshaw, said your grandfather, she’s never taught school a day in her life⁠—and Professor Truman laughed just as big as you please and said never you mind about that⁠—Eliza can do anything she sets her mind on⁠—well sir, that’s the way it all came about.” High-sorrowful and sad, she paused for a moment, adrift, her white face slanting her life back through the aisled grove of years. + 

“Well, sir!” said Mr. Leonard vaguely, rubbing his chin, “You young rascal, you!” he said, giving Eugene another jerk, and beginning to laugh with narcissistic pleasure. + 

Eliza pursed her lips slowly. + 

“Well,” she said, “I’ll send him to you for a year.” That was the way she did business. Tides run deep in Sargasso. + 

So, on the hairline of million-minded impulse, destiny bore down on his life again. + 

Mr. Leonard had leased an old prewar house, set on a hill wooded by magnificent trees. It faced west and south, looking toward Biltburn, and abruptly down on South End, and the negro flats that stretched to the depot. One day early in September he took Eugene there. They walked across town, talking weightily of politics, across the Square, down Hatton Avenue, south into Church, and southwesterly along the bending road that ended in the schoolhouse on the abutting hill. + 

The huge trees made sad autumn music as they entered the grounds. In the broad hall of the squat rambling old house Eugene for the first time saw Margaret Leonard. She held a broom in her hands, and was aproned. But his first impression was of her shocking fragility. + 

Margaret Leonard at this time was thirty-four years old. She had borne two children, a son who was now six years old, and a daughter who was two. As she stood there, with her long slender fingers splayed about the broomstick, he noted, with a momentary cold nausea, that the tip of her right index finger was flattened out as if it had been crushed beyond healing by a hammer. But it was years before he knew that tuberculars sometimes have such fingers. + 

Margaret Leonard was of middling height, five feet six inches perhaps. As the giddiness of his embarrassment wore off he saw that she could not weigh more than eighty or ninety pounds. He had heard of the children. Now he remembered them, and Leonard’s white muscular bulk, with a sense of horror. His swift vision leaped at once to the sexual relation, and something in him twisted aside, incredulous and afraid. + 

She had on a dress of crisp gray gingham, not loose or lapping round her wasted figure, but hiding every line in her body, like a draped stick. + 

As his mind groped out of the pain of impression he heard her voice and, still feeling within him the strange convulsive shame, he lifted his eyes to her face. It was the most tranquil and the most passionate face he had ever seen. The skin was sallow with a dead ashen tinge; beneath, the delicate bone-carving of face and skull traced itself clearly: the cadaverous tightness of those who are about to die had been checked. She had won her way back just far enough to balance carefully in the scales of disease and recovery. It was necessary for her to measure everything she did. + 

Her thin face was given a touch of shrewdness and decision by the straight line of her nose, the fine long carving of her chin. Beneath the sallow minutely pitted skin in her cheeks, and about her mouth, several frayed nerve-centres twitched from moment to moment, jarring the skin slightly without contorting or destroying the passionate calm beauty that fed her inexhaustibly from within. This face was the constant field of conflict, nearly always calm, but always reflecting the incessant struggle and victory of the enormous energy that inhabited her, over the thousand jangling devils of depletion and weariness that tried to pull her apart. There was always written upon her the epic poetry of beauty and repose out of struggle⁠—he never ceased to feel that she had her hand around the reins of her heart, that gathered into her grasp were all the straining wires and sinews of disunion which would scatter and unjoint her members, once she let go. Literally, physically, he felt that, the great tide of valiance once flowed out of her, she would immediately go to pieces. + 

She was like some great general, famous, tranquil, wounded unto death, who, with his fingers clamped across a severed artery, stops for an hour the ebbing of his life⁠—sends on the battle. + 

Her hair was coarse and dull-brown, fairly abundant, tinged lightly with gray: it was combed evenly in the middle and bound tightly in a knot behind. Everything about her was very clean, like a scrubbed kitchen board: she took his hand, he felt the firm nervous vitality of her fingers, and he noticed how clean and scrubbed her thin somewhat labor-worn hands were. If he noticed her emaciation at all now, it was only with a sense of her purification: he felt himself in union not with disease, but with the greatest health he had ever known. She made a high music in him. His heart lifted. + 

“This,” said Mr. Leonard, stroking him gently across the kidneys, “is Mister Eugene Gant.” + 

“Well, sir,” she said, in a low voice, in which a vibrant wire was thrumming, “I’m glad to know you.” The voice had in it that quality of quiet wonder that he had sometimes heard in the voices of people who had seen or were told of some strange event, or coincidence, that seemed to reach beyond life, beyond nature⁠—a note of acceptance; and suddenly he knew that all life seemed eternally strange to this woman, that she looked directly into the beauty and the mystery and the tragedy in the hearts of men, and that he seemed beautiful to her. + 

Her face darkened with the strange passionate vitality that left no print, that lived there bodiless like life; her brown eyes darkened into black as if a bird had flown through them and left the shadow of its wings. She saw his small remote face burning strangely at the end of his long unfleshed body, she saw the straight thin shanks, the big feet turned awkwardly inward, the dusty patches on his stockings at the knees, and his thin wristy arms that stuck out painfully below his cheap ill-fitting jacket; she saw the thin hunched line of his shoulders, the tangled mass of hair⁠—and she did not laugh. + 

He turned his face up to her as a prisoner who recovers light, as a man long pent in darkness who bathes himself in the great pool of dawn, as a blind man who feels upon his eyes the white core and essence of immutable brightness. His body drank in her great light as a famished castaway the rain: he closed his eyes and let the great light bathe him, and when he opened them again, he saw that her own were luminous and wet. + 

Then she began to laugh. “Why, Mr. Leonard,” she said, “what in the world! He’s almost as tall as you. Here, boy. Stand up here while I measure.” Deft-fingered, she put them back to back. Mr. Leonard was two or three inches taller than Eugene. He began to whine with laughter. + 

“Why, the rascal,” he said. “That little shaver.” + 

“How old are you, boy?” she asked. + 

“I’ll be twelve next month,” he said. + 

“Well, what do you know about that!” she said wonderingly. “I tell you what, though,” she continued. “We’ve got to get some meat on those bones. You can’t go around like that. I don’t like the way you look.” She shook her head. + 

He was uncomfortable, disturbed, vaguely resentful. It embarrassed and frightened him to be told that he was “delicate”; it touched sharply on his pride. + 

She took him into a big room on the left that had been fitted out as a living-room and library. She watched his face light with eagerness as he saw the fifteen hundred or two thousand books shelved away in various places. He sat down clumsily in a wicker chair by the table and waited until she returned, bringing him a plate of sandwiches and a tall glass full of clabber, which he had never tasted before. + 

When he had finished, she drew a chair near to his, and sat down. She had previously sent Leonard out on some barnyard errands; he could be heard from time to time shouting in an authoritative country voice to his live stock. + 

“Well, tell me boy,” she said, “what have you been reading?” + 

Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of printery, naming as his favorites those books which he felt would win her approval. As he had read everything, good and bad, that the town library contained, he was able to make an impressive showing. Sometimes she stopped him to question about a book⁠—he rebuilt the story richly with a blazing tenacity of detail that satisfied her wholly. She was excited and eager⁠—she saw at once how abundantly she could feed this ravenous hunger for knowledge, experience, wisdom. And he knew suddenly the joy of obedience: the wild ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate baffled desire was now to be ruddered, guided, controlled. The way through the passage to India, that he had never been able to find, would now be charted for him. Before he went away she had given him a fat volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited engravings of love and battle, of the period he loved best. + 

He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who killed the bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of banditry, in all the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in valiant and beautiful Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of Erasmus. Eugene thought The Cloister and the Hearth the best story he had ever read. + 

The Altamont Fitting School was the greatest venture of their lives. All the delayed success that Leonard had dreamed of as a younger man he hoped to realize now. For him the school was independence, mastership, power, and, he hoped, prosperity. For her, teaching was its own exceeding great reward⁠—her lyric music, her life, the world in which plastically she built to beauty what was good, the lord of her soul that gave her spirit life while he broke her body. + 

In the cruel volcano of the boy’s mind, the little brier moths of his idolatry wavered in to their strange marriage and were consumed. One by one the merciless years reaped down his gods and captains. What had lived up to hope? What had withstood the scourge of growth and memory? Why had the gold become so dim? All of his life, it seemed, his blazing loyalties began with men and ended with images; the life he leaned on melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a statue; but enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested his hooded houseless soul. She remained. + 

O death in life that turns our men to stone! O change that levels down our gods! If only one lives yet, above the cinders of the consuming years, shall not this dust awaken, shall not dead faith revive, shall we not see God again, as once in morning, on the mountain? Who walks with us on the hills? + 

XVII + 

Eugene spent the next four years of his life in Leonard’s school. Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the dark road of pain and death down which the great limbs of Gant had already begun to slope, against all the loneliness and imprisonment of his own life which had gnawed him like hunger, these years at Leonard’s bloomed like golden apples. + 

From Leonard he got little⁠—a dry campaign over an arid waste of Latin prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent skirmishing among the rules of grammar, which frightened and bewildered him needlessly, and gave him for years an unhealthy dislike of syntax, and an absurd prejudice against the laws on which the language was built. Then, a year’s study of the lean, clear precision of Caesar, the magnificent structure of the style⁠—the concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed daily partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering cliché of pedantic translation: + 

“Having done all things that were necessary, and the season now being propitious for carrying on war, Caesar began to arrange his legions in battle array.” + 

All the dark pageantry of war in Gaul, the thrust of the Roman spear through the shield of hide, the barbaric parleys in the forests, and the proud clangor of triumph⁠—all that might have been supplied in the story of the great realist, by one touch of the transforming passion with which a great teacher projects his work, was lacking. + 

Instead, glibly, the wheels ground on into the hard rut of method and memory. March 12, last year⁠—three days late. Cogitata. Neut. pl. of participle used as substantive. Quo used instead of ut to express purpose when comparative follows. Eighty lines for tomorrow. + 

They spent a weary age, two years, on that dull dog, Cicero. “De Senectute.” “De Amicitia.” They skirted Virgil because John Dorsey Leonard was a bad sailor⁠—he was not at all sure of Virgilian navigation. He hated exploration. He distrusted voyages. Next year, he said. And the great names of Ovid, lord of the elves and gnomes, the Bacchic piper of Amores, or of Lucretius, full of the rhythm of tides. Nox est perpetua. + 

“Huh?” drawled Mr. Leonard, vacantly beginning to laugh. He was fingermarked with chalk from chin to crotch. Stephen (“Pap”) Rheinhart leaned forward gently and fleshed his penpoint in Eugene Gant’s left rump. Eugene grunted painfully. + 

“Why, no,” said Mr. Leonard, stroking his chin. “A different sort of Latin.” + 

“What sort?” Tom Davis insisted. “Harder than Cicero?” + 

“Well,” said Mr. Leonard, dubiously, “different. A little beyond you at present.” + 

“⁠—est perpetua. Una dormienda. Luna dies et nox.” + 

“Is Latin poetry hard to read?” Eugene said. + 

“Well,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head. “It’s not easy. Horace⁠—” he began carefully. + 

“He wrote Odes and Epodes,” said Tom Davis. “What is an Epode, Mr. Leonard?” + 

“Why,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively, “it’s a form of poetry.” + 

“Hell!” said “Pap” Rheinhart in a rude whisper to Eugene. “I knew that before I paid tuition.” + 

Smiling lusciously, and stroking himself with gentle fingers, Mr. Leonard turned back to the lesson. + 

“Now let me see,” he began. + 

“Who was Catullus?” Eugene shouted violently. Like a flung spear in his brain, the name. + 

“He was a poet,” Mr. Leonard answered thoughtlessly, quickly, startled. He regretted. + 

“What sort of poetry did he write?” asked Eugene. + 

There was no answer. + 

“Was it like Horace?” + 

“No‑o,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively. “It wasn’t exactly like Horace.” + 

“What was it like?” said Tom Davis. + 

“Like your granny’s gut,” “Pap” Rheinhart toughly whispered. + 

“Why⁠—he wrote on topics of general interest in his day,” said Mr. Leonard easily. + 

“Did he write about being in love?” said Eugene in a quivering voice. + 

Tom Davis turned a surprised face on him. + 

“Gre‑a‑at Day!” he exclaimed, after a moment. Then he began to laugh. + 

“He wrote about being in love,” Eugene cried with sudden certain passion. “He wrote about being in love with a lady named Lesbia. Ask Mr. Leonard if you don’t believe me.” + 

They turned thirsty faces up to him. + 

“Why⁠—no⁠—yes⁠—I don’t know about all that,” said Mr. Leonard, challengingly, confused. “Where’d you hear all this, boy?” + 

“I read it in a book,” said Eugene, wondering where. Like a flung spear, the name. + 

—Whose tongue was fanged like a serpent, flung spear of ecstasy and passion. + 

Odi et amo: quare id faciam⁠ ⁠… + 

“Well, not altogether,” said Mr. Leonard. “Some of them,” he conceded. + 

… fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. + 

“Who was she?” said Tom Davis. + 

“Oh, it was the custom in those days,” said Mr. Leonard carelessly. “Like Dante and Beatrice. It was a way the poet had of paying a compliment.” + 

The serpent whispered. There was a distillation of wild exultancy in his blood. The rags of obedience, servility, reverential awe dropped in a belt around him. + 

“She was a man’s wife!” he said loudly. “That’s who she was.” + 

Awful stillness. + 

“Why⁠—here⁠—who told you that?” said Mr. Leonard, bewildered, but considering matrimony a wild and possibly dangerous myth. “Who told you, boy?” + 

“What was she, then?” said Tom Davis pointedly. + 

“Why⁠—not exactly,” Mr. Leonard murmured, rubbing his chin. + 

“She was a Bad Woman,” said Eugene. Then, most desperately, he added: “She was a Little Chippie.” + 

“Pap” Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply. + 

“What’s that, what’s that, what’s that?” cried Mr. Leonard rapidly when he could speak. Fury boiled up in him. He sprang from his chair. “What did you say, boy?” + 

But he thought of Margaret and looked down, with a sudden sense of palsy, into the white ruination of boy-face. Too far beyond. He sat down again, shaken. + 

—Whose foulest cry was shafted with his passion, whose greatest music flowered out of filth⁠—. + 

Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam + 

Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea es. + 

“You should be more careful of your talk, Eugene,” said Mr. Leonard gently. + 

“See here!” he exclaimed suddenly, turning with violence to his book. “This is getting no work done. Come on, now!” he said heartily, spitting upon his intellectual hands. “You rascals you!” he said, noting Tom Davis’ grin. “I know what you’re after⁠—you want to take up the whole period.” + 

Tom Davis’ heavy laughter boomed out, mingling with his own whine. + 

“All right, Tom,” said Mr. Leonard briskly, “page 43, section 6, line 15. Begin at that point.” + 

At this moment the bell rang and Tom Davis’ laughter filled the room. + 

Nevertheless, in charted lanes of custom, he gave competent instruction. He would perhaps have had difficulty in constructing a page of Latin prose and verse with which he had not become literally familiar by years of repetition. In Greek, certainly, his deficiency would have been even more marked, but he would have known a second aorist or an optative in the dark (if he had ever met it before). There were two final years of precious Greek: they read the Anabasis. + 

“What’s the good of all this stuff?” said Tom Davis argumentatively. + 

Mr. Leonard was on sure ground here. He understood the value of the classics. + 

“It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer Things. It gives him the foundations of a liberal education. It trains his mind.” + 

“What good’s it going to do him when he goes to work?” said “Pap” Rheinhart. “It’s not going to teach him how to grow more corn.” + 

“Well⁠—I’m not so sure of that,” said Mr. Leonard with a protesting laugh. “I think it does.” + 

“Pap” Rheinhart looked at him with a comical cock of the head. He had a wry neck, which gave his humorous kindly face a sidelong expression of quizzical maturity. + 

He had a gruff voice; he was full of rough kindly humor, and chewed tobacco constantly. His father was wealthy. He lived on a big farm in the Cove, ran a dairy and had a foundry in the town. They were unpretending people⁠—German stock. + 

“Pshaw, Mr. Leonard,” said “Pap” Rheinhart. “Are you going to talk Latin to your farmhands?” + 

“Egibus wantibus a peckibus of cornibus,” said Tom Davis with sounding laughter. Mr. Leonard laughed with abstracted appreciation. The joke was his own. + 

“It trains the mind to grapple with problems of all sorts,” he said. + 

“According to what you say,” said Tom Davis, “a man who has studied Greek makes a better plumber than one who hasn’t.” + 

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head smartly, “you know, I believe he does.” He joined, pleased, with their pleasant laughter, a loose slobbering giggle. + 

He was on trodden ground. They engaged him in long debates: as he ate his lunch, he waved a hot biscuit around, persuasive, sweetly reasonable, exhaustively minute in an effort to prove the connection of Greek and groceries. The great wind of Athens had touched him not at all. Of the delicate and sensuous intelligence of the Greeks, their feminine grace, the constructive power and subtlety of their intelligence, the instability of their character, and the structure, restraint and perfection of their forms, he said nothing. + 

He had caught a glimpse, in an American college, of the great structure of the most architectural of languages: he felt the sculptural perfection of such a word as γυναικός but his opinions smelled of chalk, the classroom, and a very bad lamp⁠—Greek was good because it was ancient, classic, and academic. The smell of the East, the dark tide of the Orient that flowed below, touched the lives of poet and soldier, with something perverse, evil, luxurious, was as far from his life as Lesbos. He was simply the mouthpiece of a formula of which he was assured without having a genuine belief. + 

καὶ κατὰ γῆν καὶ κατὰ θάλατταν. + 

The mathematics and history teacher was John Dorsey’s sister Amy. She was a powerful woman, five feet ten inches tall, who weighed 185 pounds. She had very thick black hair, straight and oily, and very black eyes, giving a heavy sensuousness to her face. Her thick forearms were fleeced with light down. She was not fat, but she corsetted tightly, her powerful arms and heavy shoulders bulging through the cool white of her shirtwaists. In warm weather she perspired abundantly: her waists were stained below the armpits with big spreading blots of sweat; in the winter, as she warmed herself by the fire, she had about her the exciting odor of chalk, and the strong good smell of a healthy animal. Eugene, passing down the windswept back porch one day in winter, looked in on her room just as her tiny niece opened the door to come out. She sat before a dancing coal-fire, after her bath, drawing on her stockings. Fascinated, he stared at her broad red shoulders, her big body steaming cleanly like a beast. + 

She liked the fire and the radiance of warmth: sleepily alert she sat by the stove, with her legs spread, sucking in the heat, her large earth strength more heavily sensuous than her brother’s. Stroked by the slow heat-tingle she smiled slowly with indifferent affection on all the boys. No men came to see her: like a pool she was thirsty for lips. She sought no one. With lazy cat-warmth she smiled on all the world. + 

She was a good teacher of mathematics: number to her was innate. Lazily she took their tablets, worked answers lazily, smiling good-naturedly with contempt. Behind her, at a desk, Durand Jarvis moaned passionately to Eugene, and writhed erotically, gripping the leaf of his desk fiercely. + 

Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at the end of the second year⁠—cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with blood, seventy-three years old. They said he was forty-nine⁠—sickness made him look old. He was a tall man, six feet three, with long straight mustaches, waxen and emaciated as a mandarin. He painted pictures⁠—impressionist blobs⁠—sheep on a gorsey hill, fishboats at the piers, with a warm red jumble of brick buildings in the background. + 

Old Gloucester Town, Marblehead, Cape Cod Folks, Captains Courageous⁠—the rich salty names came reeking up with a smell of tarred rope, dry codheads rotting in the sun, rocking dories knee-deep in gutted fish, the strong loin-smell of the sea in harbors, and the quiet brooding vacancy of a seaman’s face, sign of his marriage with ocean. How look the seas at dawn in Spring? The cold gulls sleep upon the wind. But rose the skies. + 

They saw the waxen mandarin walk shakily three times up and down the road. It was Spring, there was a south wind high in the big trees. He wavered along on a stick, planted before him with a blue phthisic hand. His eyes were blue and pale as if he had been drowned. + 

He had begotten two children by Sheba⁠—girls. They were exotic tender blossoms, all black and milky white, as strange and lovely as Spring. The boys groped curiously. + 

“He must be a better man than he looks yet,” said Tom Davis. “The little ’un’s only two or three years old.” + 

“He’s not as old as he looks,” said Eugene. “He looks old because he’s been sick. He’s only forty-nine.” + 

“How do you know?” said Tom Davis. + 

“Miss Amy says so,” said Eugene innocently. + 

“Pap” Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene and carried his quid deftly on the end of his tongue to the other cheek. + 

“Forty-nine!” he said, “you’d better see a doctor, boy. He’s as old as God.” + 

“That’s what she said,” Eugene insisted doggedly. + 

“Why, of course she said it!” “Pap” Rheinhart replied. “You don’t think they’re going to let it out, do you? When they’re running a school here.” + 

“Son, you must be simple!” said Jack Candler who had not thought of it up to now. + 

“Hell, you’re their Pet. They know you’ll believe whatever they tell you,” said Julius Arthur. “Pap” Rheinhart looked at him searchingly, then shook his head as if a cure was impossible. They laughed at his faith. + 

“Well, if he’s so old,” said Eugene, “why did old Lady Lattimer marry him?” + 

“Why, because she couldn’t get anyone else, of course,” said “Pap” Rheinhart, impatient at this obtuseness. + 

“Do you suppose she has had to keep him up?” said Tom Davis curiously. Silently they wondered. And Eugene, as he saw the two lovely children fall like petals from their mother’s heavy breast, as he saw the waxen artist faltering his last steps to death, and heard Sheba’s strong voice leveling a conversation at its beginning, expanding in violent burlesque all of her opinions, was bewildered again before the unsearchable riddle⁠—out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth, a flower. + 

His faith was above conviction. Disillusion had come so often that it had awakened in him a strain of bitter suspicion, an occasional mockery, virulent, coarse, cruel, and subtle, which was all the more scalding because of his own pain. Unknowingly, he had begun to build up in himself a vast mythology for which he cared all the more deeply because he realized its untruth. Brokenly, obscurely, he was beginning to feel that it was not truth that men live for⁠—the creative men⁠—but for falsehood. At times his devouring, unsated brain seemed to be beyond his governance: it was a frightful bird whose beak was in his heart, whose talons tore unceasingly at his bowels. And this unsleeping demon wheeled, plunged, revolved about an object, returning suddenly, after it had flown away, with victorious malice, leaving stripped, mean, and common all that he had clothed with wonder. + 

But he saw hopefully that he never learned⁠—that what remained was the tinsel and the gold. He was so bitter with his tongue because his heart believed so much. + 

The merciless brain lay coiled and alert like a snake: it saw every gesture, every quick glance above his head, the shoddy scaffolding of all reception. But these people existed for him in a world remote from human error. He opened one window of his heart to Margaret, together they entered the sacred grove of poetry; but all dark desire, the dream of fair forms, and all the misery, drunkenness, and disorder of his life at home he kept fearfully shut. He was afraid they would hear. Desperately he wondered how many of the boys had heard of it. And all the facts that levelled Margaret down to life, that plunged her in the defiling stream of life, were as unreal and horrible as a nightmare. + 

That she had been near death from tuberculosis, that the violent and garrulous Sheba had married an old man, who had begotten two children and was now about to die, that the whole little family, powerful in cohesive fidelity, were nursing their great sores in privacy, building up before the sharp eyes and rattling tongues of young boys a barrier of flimsy pretense and evasion, numbed him with a sense of unreality. + 

Eugene believed in the glory and the gold. + 

He lived more at Dixieland now. He had been more closely bound to Eliza since he began at Leonard’s. Gant, Helen, and Luke were scornful of the private school. The children were resentful of it⁠—a little jealous. And their temper was barbed now with a new sting. They would say: + 

“You’ve ruined him completely since you sent him to a private school.” Or, “He’s too good to soil his hands now that he’s quit the public school.” + 

Eliza herself kept him sufficiently reminded of his obligation. She spoke often of the effort she had to make to pay the tuition fee, and of her poverty. She said, he must work hard, and help her all he could in his spare hours. He should also help her through the summer and “drum up trade” among the arriving tourists at the station. + 

“For God’s sake! What’s the matter with you?” Luke jeered. “You’re not ashamed of a little honest work, are you?” + 

This way, sir, for Dixieland. Mrs. Eliza E. Gant, proprietor. Just A Whisper Off The Square, Captain. All the comforts of the Modern Jail. Bisquits and homemade pies just like mother should have made but didn’t. + 

That boy’s a hustler. + 

At the end of Eugene’s first year at Leonard’s, Eliza told John Dorsey she could no longer afford to pay the tuition. He conferred with Margaret and, returning, agreed to take the boy for half price. + 

“He can help you drum up new prospects,” said Eliza. + 

“Yes,” Leonard agreed, “that’s the very thing.” + 

Ben bought a new pair of shoes. They were tan. He paid six dollars for them. He always bought good things. But they burnt the soles of his feet. In a scowling rage he loped to his room and took them off. + 

“Goddam it!” he yelled, and hurled them at the wall. Eliza came to the door. + 

“You’ll never have a penny, boy, as long as you waste money the way you do. I tell you what, it’s pretty bad when you think of it.” She shook her head sadly with puckered mouth. + 

“O for God’s sake!” he growled. “Listen to this! By God, you never hear me asking anyone for anything, do you?” he burst out in a rage. + 

She took the shoes and gave them to Eugene. + 

“It would be a pity to throw away a good pair of shoes,” she said. “Try ’em on, boy.” + 

He tried them on. His feet were already bigger than Ben’s. He walked about carefully and painfully a few steps. + 

“How do they feel?” asked Eliza. + 

“All right, I guess,” he said doubtfully. “They’re a little tight.” + 

He liked their clean strength, the good smell of leather. They were the best shoes he had ever had. + 

Ben entered the kitchen. + 

“You little brute!” he said. “You’ve a foot like a mule.” Scowling, he knelt and touched the straining leather at the toes. Eugene winced. + 

“Mama, for God’s sake,” Ben cried out irritably, “don’t make the kid wear them if they’re too small. I’ll buy him a pair myself if you’re too stingy to spend the money.” + 

“Why, what’s wrong with these?” said Eliza. She pressed them with her fingers. “Why, pshaw!” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with them. All shoes are a little tight at first. It won’t hurt him a bit.” + 

But he had to give up at the end of six weeks. The hard leather did not stretch, his feet hurt more every day. He limped about more and more painfully until he planted each step woodenly as if he were walking on blocks. His feet were numb and dead, sore on the palms. One day, in a rage, Ben flung him down and took them off. It was several days before he began to walk with ease again. But his toes that had grown through boyhood straight and strong were pressed into a pulp, the bones gnarled, bent and twisted, the nails thick and dead. + 

“It does seem a pity to throw those good shoes away,” sighed Eliza. + 

But she had strange fits of generosity. He didn’t understand. + 

A girl came down to Altamont from the west. She was from Sevier, a mountain town, she said. She had a big brown body, and black hair and eyes of a Cherokee Indian. + 

“Mark my words,” said Gant. “That girl’s got Cherokee blood in her somewhere.” + 

She took a room, and for days rocked back and forth in a chair before the parlor fire. She was shy, frightened, a little sullen⁠—her manners were country and decorous. She never spoke unless she was spoken to. + 

Sometimes she was sick and stayed in bed. Eliza took her food then, and was extremely kind to her. + 

Day after day the girl rocked back and forth, all through the stormy autumn. Eugene could hear her large feet as rhythmically they hit the floor, ceaselessly propelling the rocker. Her name was Mrs. Morgan. + 

One day as he laid large crackling lumps upon the piled glowing mass of coals, Eliza entered the room. Mrs. Morgan rocked away stolidly. Eliza stood by the fire for a moment, pursing her lips reflectively, and folding her hands quietly upon her stomach. She looked out the window at the stormy sky, the swept windy bareness of the street. + 

“I tell you what,” she said, “it looks like a hard winter for the poor folks.” + 

“Yes’m,” said Mrs. Morgan sullenly. She kept on rocking. + 

Eliza was silent a moment longer. + 

“Where’s your husband?” she asked presently. + 

“In Sevier,” Mrs. Morgan said. “He’s a railroad man.” + 

“What’s that, what’s that?” said Eliza quickly, comically. “A railroad man, you say?” she inquired sharply. + 

“Yes’m.” + 

“Well, it looks mighty funny to me he hasn’t been in to see you,” said Eliza, with enormous accusing tranquillity. “I’d call it a pretty poor sort of man who’d act like that.” + 

Mrs. Morgan said nothing. Her tar-black eyes glittered in fireflame. + 

“Have you got any money?” said Eliza. + 

“No’m,” said Mrs. Morgan. + 

Eliza stood solidly, enjoying the warmth, pursing her lips. “When do you expect to have your baby?” said Eliza suddenly. + 

Mrs. Morgan said nothing for a moment. She kept on rocking. + 

“In less’n a month now, I reckon,” she answered. + 

She had been getting bigger week after week. + 

Eliza bent over and pulled her skirt up, revealing her leg to the knee, cotton-stockinged and lumpily wadded with her heavy flannels. + 

“Whew!” she cried out coyly, noticing that Eugene was staring. “Turn your head, boy,” she commanded, snickering and rubbing her finger along her nose. The dull green of rolled banknotes shone through her stockings. She pulled the bills out. + 

“Well, I reckon you’ll have to have a little money,” said Eliza, peeling off two tens, and giving them to Mrs. Morgan. + 

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Morgan, taking the money. + 

“You can stay here until you’re able to work again,” said Eliza. “I know a good doctor.” + 

“Mama, in heaven’s name,” Helen fumed. “Where on earth do you get these people?” + 

“Merciful God!” howled Gant, “you’ve had ’em all⁠—blind, lame, crazy, chippies and bastards. They all come here.” + 

Nevertheless, when he saw Mrs. Morgan now, he always made a profound bow, saying with the most florid courtesy: + 

“How do you do, madam?” Aside, to Helen, he said: + 

“I tell you what⁠—she’s a fine-looking girl.” + 

“Hahahaha,” said Helen, laughing in an ironic falsetto, and prodding him, “you wouldn’t mind having her yourself, would you?” + 

“B’God,” he said humorously, wetting his thumb, and grinning slyly at Eliza, “she’s got a pair of pippins.” + 

Eliza smiled bitterly into popping grease. + 

“Hm!” she said disdainfully. “I don’t care how many he goes with. There’s no fool like an old fool. You’d better not be too smart. That’s a game two can play at.” + 

“Hahahahaha!” laughed Helen thinly, “she’s mad now.” + 

Helen took Mrs. Morgan often to Gant’s and cooked great meals for her. She also brought her presents of candy and scented soap from town. + 

They called in McGuire at the birth of the child. From below Eugene heard the quiet commotion in the upstairs room, the low moans of the woman, and finally a high piercing wail. Eliza, greatly excited, kept kettles seething with hot water constantly over the gas flame of the stove. From time to time she rushed upstairs with a boiling kettle, descending a moment later more slowly, pausing from step to step while she listened attentively to the sounds in the room. + 

“After all,” said Helen, banging kettles about restlessly in the kitchen, “what do we know about her? Nobody can say she hasn’t got a husband, can they? They’d better be careful! People have no right to say those things,” she cried out irritably against unknown detractors. + 

It was night. Eugene went out on to the veranda. The air was frosty, clear, not very cool. Above the black bulk of the eastern hills, and in the great bowl of the sky, far bright stars were scintillant as jewels. The light burned brightly in neighborhood houses, as bright and as hard as if carved from some cold gem. Across the wide yard-spaces wafted the warm odor of hamburger steak and fried onions. Ben stood at the veranda rail, leaning upon his cocked leg, smoking with deep lung inhalations. Eugene went over and stood by him. They heard the wail upstairs. Eugene snickered, looking up at the thin ivory mask. Ben lifted his white hand sharply to strike him, but dropped it with a growl of contempt, smiling faintly. Far before them, on the top of Birdseye, faint lights wavered in the rich Jew’s castle. In the neighborhood there was a slight mist of supper, and frost-far voices. + 

Deep womb, dark flower. The Hidden. The secret fruit, heart-red, fed by rich Indian blood. Womb-night brooding darkness flowering secretly into life. + 

Mrs. Morgan went away two weeks after her child was born. He was a little brown-skinned boy, with a tuft of elvish black hair, and very black bright eyes. He was like a little Indian. Before she left Eliza gave her twenty dollars. + 

“Where are you going?” she asked. + 

“I’ve got folks in Sevier,” said Mrs. Morgan. + 

She went up the street carrying a cheap imitation-crocodile valise. At her shoulder the baby waggled his head, and looked merrily back with his bright black eyes. Eliza waved to him and smiled tremulously; she turned back into the house sniffling, with wet eyes. + 

Why did she come to Dixieland, I wonder? Eugene thought. + 

Eliza was good to a little man with a mustache. He had a wife and a little girl nine years old. He was a hotel steward; he was out of work and he stayed at Dixieland until he owed her more than one hundred dollars. But he split kindling neatly, and carried up coal; he did handy jobs of carpentry, and painted up rusty places about the house. + 

She was very fond of him; he was what she called “a good family man.” She liked domestic people; she liked men who were housebroken. The little man was very kind and very tame. Eugene liked him because he made good coffee. Eliza never bothered him about the money. Finally, he got work at the Inn, and quarters there. He paid Eliza all he owed her. + 

Eugene stayed late at the school, returning in the afternoon at three or four o’clock. Sometimes it was almost dark when he came back to Dixieland. Eliza was fretful at his absences, and brought him his dinner crisped and dried from its long heating in the oven. There was a heavy vegetable soup thickly glutinous with cabbage, beans, and tomatoes, and covered on top with big grease blisters. There would also be warmed-over beef, pork or chicken, a dish full of cold lima beans, biscuits, slaw, and coffee. + 

But the school had become the centre of his heart and life⁠—Margaret Leonard his spiritual mother. He liked to be there most in the afternoons when the crowd of boys had gone, and when he was free to wander about the old house, under the singing majesty of great trees, exultant in the proud solitude of that fine hill, the clean windy rain of the acorns, the tang of burning leaves. He would read wolfishly until Margaret discovered him and drove him out under the trees or toward the flat court behind Bishop Raper’s residence at the entrance, which was used for basketball. Here, while the western sky reddened, he raced down toward the goal, passing the ball to a companion, exulting in his growing swiftness, agility, and expertness in shooting the basket. + 

Margaret Leonard watched his health jealously, almost morbidly, warning him constantly of the terrible consequences that followed physical depletion, the years required to build back what had once been thrown carelessly away. + 

“Look here, boy!” she would begin, stopping him in a quiet boding voice. “Come in here a minute. I want to talk to you.” + 

Somewhat frightened, extremely nervous, he would sit down beside her. + 

“How much sleep have you been getting?” she asked. + 

Hopefully, he said nine hours a night. That should be about right. + 

“Well, make it ten,” she commanded sternly. “See here, ’Gene, you simply can’t afford to take chances with your health. Lordy, boy, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve had to pay the price, I tell you. You can’t do anything in this world without your health, boy.” + 

“But I’m all right,” he protested desperately, frightened. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” + 

“You’re not strong, boy. You’ve got to get some meat on your bones. I tell you what, I’m worried by those circles under your eyes. Do you keep regular hours?” + 

He did not: he hated regular hours. The excitement, the movement, the constant moments of crisis at Gant’s and Eliza’s had him keyed to their stimulation. The order and convention of domestic life he had never known. He was desperately afraid of regularity. It meant dullness and inanition to him. He loved the hour of midnight. + 

But obediently he promised her that he would be regular⁠—regular in eating, sleeping, studying, and exercising. + 

But he had not yet learned to play with the crowd. He still feared, disliked and distrusted them. + 

He shrank from the physical conflict of boy life, but knowing her eye was upon him he plunged desperately into their games, his frail strength buffeted in the rush of strong legs, the heavy jar of strong bodies, picking himself up bruised and sore at heart to follow and join again the mill of the burly pack. Day after day to the ache of his body was added the ache and shame of his spirit, but he hung on with a pallid smile across his lips, and envy and fear of their strength in his heart. He parroted faithfully all that John Dorsey had to say about the “spirit of fair play,” “sportsmanship,” “playing the game for the game’s sake,” “accepting defeat or victory with a smile,” and so on, but he had no genuine belief or understanding. These phrases were current among all the boys at the school⁠—they had been made somewhat too conscious of them and, as he listened, at times the old, inexplicable shame returned⁠—he craned his neck and drew one foot sharply off the ground. + 

And Eugene noted, with the old baffling shame again, as this cheap tableau of self-conscious, robust, and raucously aggressive boyhood was posed, that, for all the mouthing of phrases, the jargon about fair play and sportsmanship, the weaker, at Leonard’s, was the legitimate prey of the stronger. Leonard, beaten by a boy in a play of wits, or in an argument for justice, would assert the righteousness of his cause by physical violence. These spectacles were ugly and revolting: Eugene watched them with sick fascination. + 

Leonard himself was not a bad man⁠—he was a man of considerable character, kindliness, and honest determination. He loved his family, he stood up with some courage against the bigotry in the Methodist church, where he was a deacon, and at length had to withdraw because of his remarks on Darwin’s theory. He was, thus, an example of that sad liberalism of the village⁠—an advanced thinker among the Methodists, a bearer of the torch at noon, an apologist for the toleration of ideas that have been established for fifty years. He tried faithfully to do his duties as a teacher. But he was of the earth⁠—even his heavy-handed violence was of the earth, and had in it the unconscious brutality of nature. Although he asserted his interest in “the things of the mind,” his interest in the soil was much greater, and he had added little to his stock of information since leaving college. He was slow-witted and quite lacking in the sensitive intuitions of Margaret, who loved the man with such passionate fidelity, however, that she seconded all his acts before the world. Eugene had even heard her cry out in a shrill, trembling voice against a student who had answered her husband insolently: “Why, I’d slap his head off! That’s what I’d do!” And the boy had trembled, with fear and nausea, to see her so. But thus, he knew, could love change one. Leonard thought his actions wise and good: he had grown up in a tradition that demanded strict obedience to the master, and that would not brook opposition to his rulings. He had learned from his father, a Tennessee patriarch who ran a farm, preached on Sundays, and put down rebellion in his family with a horsewhip and pious prayers, the advantages of being God! He thought little boys who resisted him should be beaten. + 

Upon the sons of his wealthiest and most prominent clients, as well as upon his own children, Leonard was careful to inflict no chastisement, and these young men, arrogantly conscious of their immunity, were studious in their insolence and disobedience. The son of the Bishop, Justin Raper, a tall thin boy of thirteen, with black hair, a thin dark bumpy face, and absurdly petulant lips, typed copies of a dirty ballad and sold them among the students at five cents a copy. + 

Madam, your daughter looks very fine, + 

Slapoon! + 

Madam, your daughter looks very fine, + 

Slapoon! + 

Moreover, Leonard surprised this youth one afternoon in Spring on the eastern flank of the hill, in the thick grass beneath a flowering dogwood, united in sexual congress with Miss Hazel Bradley, the daughter of a small grocer who lived below on Biltburn Avenue, and whose lewdness was already advertised in the town. Leonard, on second thought, did not go to the Bishop. He went to the Grocer. + 

“Well,” said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long mustache reflectively away from his mouth, “you ought to put up a no trespassin’ sign.” + 

The target of concentrated abuse, both for John Dorsey and the boys, was the son of a Jew. The boy’s name was Edward Michalove. His father was a jeweller, a man with a dark, gentle floridity of manner and complexion. He had white delicate fingers. His counters were filled with old brooches, gemmed buckles, ancient incrusted watches. The boy had two sisters⁠—large handsome women. His mother was dead. None of them looked Jewish: they all had a soft dark fluescence of appearance. + 

At twelve, he was a tall slender lad, with dark amber features, and the mincing effeminacy of an old maid. He was terrified in the company of other boys, all that was sharp, spinsterly, and venomous, would come protectively to the surface when he was ridiculed or threatened, and he would burst into shrill unpleasant laughter, or hysterical tears. His mincing walk, with the constant gesture of catching maidenly at the fringe of his coat as he walked along, his high husky voice, with a voluptuous and feminine current playing through it, drew upon him at once the terrible battery of their dislike. + 

They called him “Miss” Michalove; they badgered him into a state of constant hysteria, until he became an unpleasant snarling little cat, holding up his small clawed hands to scratch them with his long nails whenever they approached; they made him detestable, master and boys alike, and they hated him for what they made of him. + 

Sobbing one day when he had been kept in after school hours, he leaped up and rushed suddenly for the doors. Leonard, breathing stertorously, pounded awkwardly after him, and returned in a moment dragging the screaming boy along by the collar. + 

“Sit down!” yelled John Dorsey, hurling him into a desk. Then, his boiling fury unappeased, and baffled by fear of inflicting some crippling punishment on the boy, he added illogically: “Stand up!” and jerked him to his feet again. + 

“You young upstart!” he panted. “You little two-by-two whippersnapper! We’ll just see, my sonny, if I’m to be dictated to by the like of you.” + 

“Take your hands off me!” Edward screamed, in an agony of physical loathing. “I’ll tell my father on you, old man Leonard, and he’ll come down here and kick your big fat behind all over the lot. See if he don’t.” + 

Eugene closed his eyes, unable to witness the snuffing out of a young life. He was cold and sick about his heart. But when he opened his eyes again Edward, flushed and sobbing, was standing where he stood. Nothing had happened. + 

Eugene waited for God’s visitation upon the unhappy blasphemer. He gathered, from the slightly open paralysis that had frozen John Dorsey’s and Sister Amy’s face, that they were waiting too. + 

Edward lived. There was nothing beyond this⁠—nothing. + 

Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the old piercing shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the irrevocable moment of some cowardly or dishonorable act. For not only did he join in the persecution of the boy⁠—he was also glad at heart because of the existence of someone weaker than himself, someone at whom the flood of ridicule might be directed. Years later it came to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a burden he might otherwise have borne, that that overladen heart was swollen with a misery that might have been his. + 

Mr. Leonard’s “men of tomorrow” were doing nicely. The spirit of justice, of physical honor was almost unknown to them, but they were loud in proclaiming the letter. Each of them lived in a fear of discovery; each of them who was able built up his own defenses of swagger, pretense, and loud assertion⁠—the great masculine flower of gentleness, courage, and honor died in a foul tangle. The great clan of go-getter was emergent in young boys⁠—big in voice, violent in threat, withered and pale at heart⁠—the “He-men” were on the rails. + 

And Eugene, encysted now completely behind the walls of his fantasy, hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated, as best he could, the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows, joined, by act or spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself, and was compensated sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret say that he was “a boy with a fine spirit.” She said it very often. + 

He was, fortunately, thanks to Gant and Eliza, a creature that was dominantly masculine in its sex, but in all his life, either at home or in school, he had seldom known victory. Fear he knew well. And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the jostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them. + 

He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him with shame. But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne⁠—it must go to Parnassus. + 

XVIII + 

In the years that had followed Eliza’s removal to Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away from Helen’s earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben. This separation was inevitable. The great affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life. + 

The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his young flesh. He was not so attractive physically⁠—he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward. Moreover, he sank deeper year by year into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities. + 

And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could never understand, choked her with fury. It was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to fondle, love, and enslave it. Her boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch of the sun. It was necessary for her to dominate and enslave, all her virtues⁠—her strong lust to serve, to give, to nurse, to amuse⁠—came from the imperative need for dominance over almost all she touched. + 

She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield to her governance. In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound. She hated secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the unfathomable depths of otherworldliness goaded her to fury. + 

Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would caricature the pout of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding kangaroo walk. + 

“You little freak. You nasty little freak. You don’t even know who you are⁠—you little bastard. You’re not a Gant. Anyone can see that. You haven’t a drop of papa’s blood in you. Queer one! Queer one! You’re Greeley Pentland all over again.” + 

She always returned to this⁠—she was fanatically partisan, her hysterical superstition had already lined the family in embattled groups of those who were Gant and those who were Pentland. On the Pentland side, she placed Steve, Daisy, and Eugene⁠—they were, she thought, the “cold and selfish ones,” and the implication of the older sister and the younger brother with the criminal member of the family gave her an added pleasure. Her union with Luke was now inseparable. It had been inevitable. They were the Gants⁠—those who were generous, fine, and honorable. + 

The love of Luke and Helen was epic. They found in each other the constant effervescence, the boundless extraversion, the richness, the loudness, the desperate need to give and to serve that was life to them. They exacerbated the nerves of each other, but their love was beyond grievance, and their songs of praise were extravagant. + 

“I’ll criticise him if I like,” she said pugnaciously. “I’ve got the right to. But I won’t hear anyone else criticise him. He’s a fine generous boy⁠—the finest one in this family. That’s one thing sure.” + 

Ben alone seemed to be without the grouping. He moved among them like a shadow⁠—he was remote from their passionate full-blooded partisanship. But she thought of him as “generous”⁠—he was, she concluded, a “Gant.” + 

In spite of this violent dislike for the Pentlands, both Helen and Luke had inherited all Gant’s social hypocrisy. They wanted above all else to put a good face on before the world, to be well liked and to have many friends. They were profuse in their thanks, extravagant in their praise, cloying in their flattery. They slathered it on. They kept their ill-temper, their nervousness, and their irritability for exhibition at home. And in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland’s family their manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly with servility. Money impressed them. + 

It was a period of incessant movement in the family. Steve had married a year or two before a woman from a small town in lower Indiana. She was thirty-seven years old, twelve years his senior, a squat heavy German with a big nose and a patient and ugly face. She had come to Dixieland one summer with another woman, a spinster of lifelong acquaintance, and allowed him to seduce her before she left. The winter following, her father, a small manufacturer of cigars, had died, leaving her $9,000 in insurance, his home, a small sum of money in the bank, and a quarter share in his business, which was left to the management of his two sons. + 

Early in Spring the woman, whose name was Margaret Lutz, returned to Dixieland. One drowsy afternoon Eugene found them at Gant’s. The house was deserted save for them. They were sprawled out face downward, with their hands across each other’s hips, on Gant’s bed. They lay there silently, while he looked, in an ugly stupor. Steve’s yellow odor filled the room. Eugene began to tremble with insane fury. The Spring was warm and lovely, the air brooded slightly in a flowering breeze, there was a smell of soft tar. He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes. In a moment the world turned hag. + 

There was nothing that Steve touched that he did not taint. + 

Eugene hated him because he stunk, because all that he touched stunk, because he brought fear, shame, and loathing wherever he went; because his kisses were fouler than his curses, his whines nastier than his threats. He saw the woman’s hair blown gently by the blubbered exhalations of his brother’s foul breath. + 

“What are you doing there on papa’s bed?” he screamed. + 

Steve rose stupidly and seized him by the arm. The woman sat up, dopily staring, her short legs widened. + 

“I suppose you’re going to be a little Tattletale,” said Steve, bludgeoning him with heavy contempt. “You’re going to run right up and tell mama, aren’t you?” he said. He fastened his yellow fingers on Eugene’s arm. + 

“Get off papa’s bed,” said Eugene desperately. He jerked his arm away. + 

“You’re not going to tell on us, buddy, are you?” Steve wheedled, breathing pollution in his face. + 

He grew sick. + 

“Let me go,” he muttered. “No.” + 

Steve and Margaret were married soon after. With the old sense of physical shame Eugene watched them descend the stairs at Dixieland each morning for breakfast. Steve swaggered absurdly, smiled complacently, and hinted at great fortune about the town. There was rumor of a quarter-million. + 

“Put it there, Steve,” said Harry Tugman, slapping him powerfully upon the shoulder. “By God, I always said you’d get there.” + 

Eliza smiled at swagger and boast, her proud, pleased, tremulous sad smile. The firstborn. + 

“Little Stevie doesn’t have to worry any longer,” said he. “He’s on Easy Street. Where are all the Wise Guys now who said ‘I told you so’? They’re all mighty glad to give Little Stevie a Big Smile and the Glad Hand when he breezes down the street. Every Knocker is a Booster now all right, all right.” + 

“I tell you what,” said Eliza with proud smiles, “he’s no fool. He’s as bright as the next one when he wants to be.” Brighter, she thought. + 

Steve bought new clothes, tan shoes, striped silk shirts, and a wide straw hat with a red, white and blue band. He swung his shoulders in a wide arc as he walked, snapped his fingers nonchalantly, and smiled with elaborate condescension on those who greeted him. Helen was vastly annoyed and amused; she had to laugh at his absurd strut, and she had a great rush of feeling for Margaret Lutz. She called her “honey,” felt her eyes mist warmly with unaccountable tears as she looked into the patient, bewildered, and slightly frightened face of the German woman. She took her in her arms and fondled her. + 

“That’s all right, honey,” she said, “you let us know if he doesn’t treat you right. We’ll fix him.” + 

“Steve’s a good boy,” said Margaret, “when he isn’t drinking. I’ve nothing to say against him when he’s sober.” She burst into tears. + 

“That awful, that awful curse,” said Eliza, shaking her head sadly, “the curse of licker. It’s been responsible for the ruination of more homes than anything else.” + 

“Well, she’ll never win any beauty prizes, that’s one thing sure,” said Helen privately to Eliza. + 

“I’ll vow!” said Eliza. + 

“What on earth did he mean by doing such a thing!” she continued. “She’s ten years older than he if she’s a day.” + 

“I think he’s done pretty well, if you ask me,” said Helen, annoyed. “Good heavens, mama! You talk as if he’s some sort of prize. Everyone in town knows what Steve is.” She laughed ironically and angrily. “No, indeed! He got the best of the bargain. Margaret’s a decent girl.” + 

“Well,” said Eliza hopefully, “maybe he’s going to brace up now and make a new start. He’s promised that he’d try.” + 

“Well, I should hope so,” said Helen scathingly. “I should hope so. It’s about time.” + 

Her dislike for him was innate. She had placed him among the tribe of the Pentlands. But he was really more like Gant than anyone else. He was like Gant in all his weakness, with none of his cleanliness, his lean fibre, his remorse. In her heart she knew this and it increased her dislike for him. She shared in the fierce antagonism Gant felt toward his son. But her feeling was broken, as was all her feeling, by moments of friendliness, charity, tolerance. + 

“What are you going to do, Steve?” she asked. “You’ve got a family now, you know.” + 

“Little Stevie doesn’t have to worry any longer,” he said, smiling easily. “He lets the others do the worrying.” He lifted his yellow fingers to his mouth, drawing deeply at a cigarette. + 

“Good heavens, Steve,” she burst out angrily. “Pull yourself together and try to be a man for once. Margaret’s a woman. You surely don’t expect her to keep you up, do you?” + 

“What business is that of yours, for Christ’s sake?” he said in a high ugly voice. “Nobody’s asked your advice, have they? All of you are against me. None of you had a good word for me when I was down and out, and now it gets your goat to see me make good.” He had believed for years that he was persecuted⁠—his failure at home he attributed to the malice, envy, and disloyalty of his family, his failure abroad to the malice and envy of an opposing force that he called “the world.” + 

“No,” he said, taking another long puff at the moist cigarette, “don’t worry about Stevie. He doesn’t need anything from any of you, and you don’t hear him asking for anything. You see that, don’t you?” he said, pulling a roll of banknotes from his pocket and peeling off a few twenties. “Well, there’s lots more where that came from. And I’ll tell you something else: Little Stevie will be right up there among the Big Boys soon. He’s got a couple of deals coming off that’ll show the pikers in this town where to get off. You get that, don’t you?” he said. + 

Ben, who had been sitting on the piano stool all this time, scowling savagely at the keys, and humming a little recurrent tune to himself while he picked it out with one finger, turned now to Helen, with a sharp flicker of his mouth, and jerked his head sideways. + 

“I hear Mr. Vanderbilt’s getting jealous,” he said. + 

Helen laughed ironically, huskily. + 

“You think you’re a pretty wise guy, don’t you?” said Steve heavily. “But I don’t notice it’s getting you anywhere.” + 

Ben turned his scowling eyes upon him, and sniffed sharply, unconsciously. + 

“Now, I hope you’re not going to forget your old friends, Mr. Rockefeller,” he said in his subdued, caressing ominous voice. “I’d like to be vice-president if the job’s still open.” He turned back to the keyboard⁠—and searched with a hooked finger. + 

“All right, all right,” said Steve. “Go ahead and laugh, both of you, if you think it’s funny. But you notice that Little Stevie isn’t a fifteen-dollar clerk in a newspaper office, don’t you? And he doesn’t have to sing in moving-picture shows, either,” he added. + 

Helen’s big-boned face reddened angrily. She had begun to sing in public with the saddlemaker’s daughter. + 

“You’d better not talk, Steve, until you get a job and quit bumming around,” she said. “You’re a fine one to talk, hanging around poolrooms and drugstores all day on your wife’s money. Why, it’s absurd!” she said furiously. + 

“Oh for God’s sake!” Ben cried irritably, wheeling around. “What do you want to listen to him for? Can’t you see he’s crazy?” + 

As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink heavily again. His decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to ache simultaneously: he was wild with pain and cheap whisky. He felt that Eliza and Margaret were in some way responsible for his woe⁠—he sought them out day after day when they were alone, and screamed at them. He called them foul names and said they had poisoned his system. + 

In the early hours of morning, at two or three o’clock, he would waken, and walk through the house weeping and entreating release. Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his residence, in Eugene’s charge. The doctors, surly and half-awake, peeled back his shirtsleeve and drove a needle with morphine deep in his upper arm. After that, he found relief and sleep again. + 

One night, at the supper hour, he returned to Dixieland, holding his tortured jaws between his hands. He found Eliza bending over the spitting grease of the red-hot stove. He cursed her for bearing him, he cursed her for allowing him to have teeth, he cursed her for lack of sympathy, motherly love, human kindliness. + 

Her white face worked silently above the heat. + 

“Get out of here,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s that accursed licker that makes you so mean.” She began to weep, brushing at her broad red nose with her hand. + 

“I never thought I’d live to hear such talk from a son of mine,” she said. She held out her forefinger with the old powerful gesture. + 

“Now, I want to tell you,” she said, “I’m not going to put up with you any longer. If you don’t get out of here at once I’m going to call 38 and let them take you.” This was the police station. It awoke unpleasant memories. He had spent the day in jail on two similar occasions. He became more violent than before, screamed a vile name at her, and made a motion to strike her. At this moment, Luke entered; he was on his way to Gant’s. + 

The antagonism between the boy and his older brother was deep and deadly. It had lasted for years. Now, trembling with anger, Luke came to his mother’s defense. + 

“You m-m-m-miserable d-d-d-degenerate,” he stuttered, unconsciously falling into the swing of the Gantian rhetoric. “You ought to b-b-b-be horsewhipped.” + 

He was a well grown and muscular young fellow of nineteen years, but too sensitive to all the taboos of brotherhood to be prepared for the attack Steve made on him. Steve drove at him viciously, smashing drunkenly at his face with both hands. He was driven gasping and blinded across the kitchen. + 

Wrong forever on the throne. + 

Somewhere, through fear and fury, Eugene heard Ben’s voice humming unconcernedly, and the slow picked tune on the piano. + 

“Ben!” he screamed, dancing about and grasping a hammer. + 

Ben entered like a cat. Luke was bleeding warmly from the nose. + 

“Come on, come on, you big bastard,” said Steve, exalted by his success, throwing himself into a fancy boxing posture. “I’ll take you on now. You haven’t got a chance, Ben,” he continued, with elaborate pity. “You haven’t got a chance, boy. I’ll tear your head off with what I know.” + 

Ben scowled quietly at him for a moment while he pranced softly about, proposing his fists in Police Gazette attitudes. Then, exploding suddenly in maniacal anger, the quiet one sprang upon the amateur pugilist with one bound, and flattened him with a single blow of his fist. Steve’s head bounced upon the floor in a most comforting fashion. Eugene gave a loud shriek of ecstasy and danced about, insane with joy, while Ben, making little snarling noises in his throat, leaped on his brother’s prostrate body and thumped his bruised skull upon the boards. There was a beautiful thoroughness about his wakened anger⁠—it never made inquiries till later. + 

“Good old Ben,” screamed Eugene, howling with insane laughter, “Good old Ben.” + 

Eliza, who had been calling out loudly for help, the police, and the interference of the general public, now succeeded, with Luke’s assistance, in checking Ben’s assault, and pulling him up from his dazed victim. She wept bitterly, her heart laden with pain and sadness, while Luke, forgetful of his bloody nose, sorrowful and full of shame only because brother had struck brother, assisted Steve to his feet and brushed him off. + 

A terrible shame started up in each of them⁠—they were unable to meet one another’s gaze. Ben’s thin face was very white; he trembled violently and, catching sight of Steve’s bleared eyes for a moment, he made a retching noise in his throat, went over to the sink, and drank a glass of cold water. + 

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Eliza wept. + 

Helen came in from town with a bag of warm bread and cakes. + 

“What’s the matter?” she said, noting at once all that had happened. + 

“I don’t know,” said Eliza, her face working, shaking her head for several moments before she spoke. “It seems that the judgment of God is against us. There’s been nothing but misery all my life. All I want is a little peace.” She wept softly, wiping her weak bleared eyes with the back of her hand. + 

“Well, forget about it,” said Helen quietly. Her voice was casual, weary, sad. “How do you feel, Steve?” she asked. + 

“I wouldn’t make any trouble for anyone, Helen,” he said, with a maudlin whimper. “No! No!” he continued in a brooding voice, “They’ve never given Steve a chance. They’re all down on him. They jumped on me, Helen. My own brothers jumped on me, sick as I am, and beat me up. It’s all right. I’m going away somewhere and try to forget. Stevie doesn’t hold any grudge against anyone. He’s not built that way. Give me your hand, buddy,” he said, turning to Ben with nauseous sentimentality and extending his yellow fingers, “I’m willing to shake your hand. You hit me tonight, but Steve’s willing to forget.” + 

“Oh my God,” said Ben, grasping his stomach. He leaned weakly across the sink and drank another glass of water. + 

“No. No.” Steve began again. “Stevie isn’t built⁠—” + 

He would have continued indefinitely in this strain, but Helen checked him with weary finality. + 

“Well, forget about it,” she said, “all of you. Life’s too short.” + 

Life was. At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion, antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with sad tranquillity. They were like men who, driving forward desperately at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their footprints stretching interminably away across the waste land of the desert; or I should say, they were like those who have been mad, and who will be mad again, but who see themselves for a moment quietly, sanely, at morning, looking with sad untroubled eyes into a mirror. + 

Their faces were sad. There was great age in them. They felt suddenly the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless nihilism of life. + 

Margaret came in fearfully. Her eyes were red, her broad German face white and tearful. A group of excited boarders whispered in the hall. + 

“I’ll lose them all now,” Eliza fretted. “The last time three left. Over twenty dollars a week and money so hard to get. I don’t know what’s to become of us all.” She wept again. + 

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Helen impatiently. “Forget about the boarders once in a while.” + 

Steve sank stupidly into a chair by the long table. From time to time he muttered sentimentally to himself. Luke, his face sensitive, hurt, ashamed around his mouth, stood by him attentively, spoke gently to him, and brought him a glass of water. + 

“Give him a cup of coffee, mama,” Helen cried irritably. “For heaven’s sake, you might do a little for him.” + 

“Why here, here,” said Eliza, rushing awkwardly to the gas range and lighting a burner. “I never thought⁠—I’ll have some in a minute.” + 

Margaret sat in a chair on the other side of the disorderly table, leaning her face in her hand and weeping. Her tears dredged little gulches through the thick compost of rouge and powder with which she coated her rough skin. + 

“Cheer up, honey,” said Helen, beginning to laugh. “Christmas is coming.” She patted the broad German back comfortingly. + 

Ben opened the torn screen door and stepped out on the back porch. It was a cool night in the rich month of August; the sky was deeply pricked with great stars. He lighted a cigarette, holding the match with white trembling fingers. There were faint sounds from summer porches, the laughter of women, a distant throb of music at a dance. Eugene went and stood beside him: he looked up at him with wonder, exultancy, and with sadness. He prodded him half with fear, half with joy. + 

Ben snarled softly at him, made a sudden motion to strike him, but stopped. A swift light flickered across his mouth. He smoked. + 

Steve went away with the German woman to Indiana, where, at first, came news of opulence, fatness, ease, and furs (with photographs), later of brawls with her honest brothers, and talk of divorce, reunion and renaissance. He gravitated between the two poles of his support, Margaret and Eliza, returning to Altamont every summer for a period of drugs and drunkenness that ended in a family fight, jail, and a hospital cure. + 

“Hell commences,” howled Gant, “as soon as he comes home. He’s a curse and a care, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. Woman, you have given birth to a monster who will not rest until he has done me to death, fearful, cruel, and accursed reprobate that he is!” + 

But Eliza wrote her oldest son regularly, enclosed sums of money from time to time, and revived her hopes incessantly, against nature, against reason, against the structure of life. She did not dare to come openly to his defense, to reveal frankly the place he held in her heart’s core, but she would produce each letter in which he spoke boastfully of his successes, or announced his monthly resurrection, and read them to an unmoved family. They were florid, foolish letters, full of quotation marks and written in a large fancy hand. She was proud and pleased at all their extravagances; his flowery illiteracy was another proof to her of his superior intelligence. + 

Dear Mama: + 

Yours of the 11th to hand and must say I was glad to know you were in “the land of the living” again as I had begun to feel it was a “long time between drinks” since your last. (“I tell you what,” said Eliza, looking up and sniggering with pleasure, “he’s no fool.” Helen, with a smile that was half ribald, half annoyed, about her big mouth, made a face at Luke, and lifted her eyes patiently upward to God as Eliza continued. Gant leaned forward tensely with his head craned upward, listening carefully with a faint grin of pleasure.) Well, mama, since I last wrote you things have been coming my way and it now looks as if the “Prodigal Son” will come home some day in his own private car. (“Hey, what’s that?” said Gant, and she read it again for him. He wet his thumb and looked about with a pleased grin. “Wh-wh-what’s the matter?” asked Luke. “Has he b-b-bought the railroad?” Helen laughed hoarsely. “I’m from Missouri,” she said.) It took me a long time to get started, mama, but things were breaking against me and all that little Stevie has ever asked from anyone in this “vale of tears” is a fair chance. (Helen laughed her ironical husky falsetto. “All that little S-S-Stevie has ever asked,” said Luke, reddening with annoyance, “is the whole g-g-g-goddam world with a few gold mines thrown in.”) But now that I’m on my feet at last, mama, I’m going to show the world that I haven’t forgotten those who stood by me in my “hour of need,” and that the best friend a man ever had is his mother. (“Where’s the shovel?” said Ben, snickering quietly.) + 

“That boy writes a good letter,” said Gant appreciatively. “I’m damned if he’s not the smartest one of the lot when he wants to be.” + 

“Yes,” said Luke angrily, “he’s so smart that you’ll b-b-believe any fairy tale he wants to tell you. B-b-b-but the one who’s stuck by you through thick and thin gets no c-c-credit at all.” He glanced meaningly at Helen. “It’s a d-d-damn shame.” + 

“Forget about it,” she said wearily. + 

“Well,” said Eliza thoughtfully, holding the letter in her folded hands and gazing away, “perhaps he’s going to turn over a new leaf now. You never know.” Lost in pleased revery she looked into vacancy, pursing her lips. + 

“I hope so!” said Helen wearily. “You’ve got to show me.” + 

Privately: “You see how it is, don’t you?” she said to Luke, mounting to hysteria. “Do I get any credit? Do I? I can work my fingers to the bone for them, but do I get so much as Go to Hell for my trouble? Do I?” + 

In these years Helen went off into the South with Pearl Hines, the saddlemaker’s daughter. They sang together at moving-picture theatres in country towns. They were booked from a theatrical office in Atlanta. + 

Pearl Hines was a heavily built girl with a meaty face and negroid lips. She was jolly and vital. She sang ragtime and nigger songs with a natural passion, swinging her hips and shaking her breasts erotically. + 

“Here comes my da-dad-dy now + 

O pop, O pop, O-o pop.” + 

They earned as much as $100 a week sometimes. They played in towns like Waycross, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. + 

They brought with them the great armor of innocency. They were eager and decent girls. Occasionally the village men made cautious explorative insults, relying on the superstition that lives in small towns concerning “show girls.” But generally they were well treated. + 

For them, these ventures into new lands were eager with promise. The vacant idiot laughter, the ribald enthusiasm with which South Carolina or Georgia countrymen, filling a theatre with the strong smell of clay and sweat, greeted Pearl’s songs, left them unwounded, pleased, eager. They were excited to know that they were members of the profession; they bought Variety regularly, they saw themselves finally a celebrated high-salaried team on “big time” in great cities. Pearl was to “put over” the popular songs, to introduce the rag melodies with the vital rhythm of her dynamic meatiness, Helen was to give operatic dignity to the programme. In a respectful hush, bathed in a pink spot, she sang ditties of higher quality⁠—Tosti’s “Goodbye,” “The End of a Perfect Day,” and “The Rosary.” She had a big, full, somewhat metallic voice: she had received training from her Aunt Louise, the splendid blonde who had lived in Altamont for several years after her separation from Elmer Pentland. Louise gave music lessons and enjoyed her waning youth with handsome young men. She was one of the ripe, rich, dangerous women that Helen liked. She had a little girl and went away to New York with the child when tongues grew fanged. + 

But she said: “Helen, that voice ought to be trained for grand opera.” + 

Helen had not forgotten. She fantasied of France and Italy: the big crude glare of what she called “a career in opera,” the florid music, the tiered galleries winking with gems, the torrential applause directed toward the full-blooded, dominant all-shadowing songsters struck up great anthems in her. It was a scene, she thought, in which she was meant to shine. And as the team of Gant and Hines (The Dixie Melody Twins) moved on their jagged circuit through the South, this desire, bright, fierce, and formless, seemed, in some way, to be nearer realization. + 

She wrote home frequently, usually to Gant. Her letters beat like great pulses; they were filled with the excitement of new cities, presentiments of abundant life. In every town they met “lovely people”⁠—everywhere, in fact, good wives and mothers, and nice young men, were attracted hospitably to these two decent, happy, exciting girls. There was a vast decency, an enormous clean vitality about Helen that subjugated good people and defeated bad ones. She held under her dominion a score of young men⁠—masculine, red-faced, hard-drinking and shy. Her relation to them was maternal and magistral, they came to listen and to be ruled; they adored her, but few of them tried to kiss her. + 

Eugene was puzzled and frightened by these lamblike lions. Among men, they were fierce, bold, and combative; with her, awkward and timorous. One of them, a city surveyor, lean, high-boned, alcoholic, was constantly involved in police-court brawls; another, a railroad detective, a large fair young man, split the skulls of negroes when he was drunk, shot several men, and was himself finally killed in a Tennessee gunfight. + 

She never lacked for friends and protectors wherever she went. Occasionally, Pearl’s happy and vital sensuality, the innocent gusto with which she implored + 

“Some sweet old daddy + 

Come make a fuss over me.” + 

drew on village rakedom to false conjectures. Unpleasant men with wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial drink of corn whisky, call them “girley,” and suggest a hotel room or a motorcar as a meeting-place. When this happened, Pearl was stricken into silence; helpless and abashed, she appealed to Helen. + 

And she, her large loose mouth tense and wounded at the corners, her eyes a little brighter, would answer: + 

“I don’t know what you mean by that remark. I guess you’ve made a mistake about us.” This did not fail to exact stammering apologies and excuses. + 

She was painfully innocent, temperamentally incapable of wholly believing the worst about anyone. She lived in the excitement of rumor and suggestion: it never seemed to her actually possible that the fast young women who excited her had, in the phrase she used, “gone the limit.” She was skilled in gossip, and greedily attentive to it, but of the complex nastiness of village life she had little actual knowledge. Thus, with Pearl Hines, she walked confidently and joyously over volcanic crust, scenting only the odor of freedom, change, and adventure. + 

But this partnership came to an end. The intention of Pearl Hines’ life was direct and certain. She wanted to get married, she had always wanted to get married before she was twenty-five. For Helen, the singing partnership, the exploration of new lands, had been a gesture toward freedom, an instinctive groping toward a centre of life and purpose to which she could fasten her energy, a blind hunger for variety, beauty, and independence. She did not know what she wanted to do with her life; it was probable that she would never control even partially her destiny: she would be controlled, when the time came, by the great necessity that lived in her. That necessity was to enslave and to serve. + 

For two or three years Helen and Pearl supported themselves by these tours, leaving Altamont during its dull winter lassitude, and returning to it in Spring, or in Summer, with money enough to suffice them until their next season. + 

Pearl juggled carefully with the proposals of several young men during this period. She had the warmest affection for a ballplayer, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont team. He was a tough handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down in a frenzy of despair during the course of a game, and rushing belligerently at the umpire. She liked his hard assurance, his rapid twang, his tanned lean body. + 

But she was in love with no one⁠—she would never be⁠—and caution told her that the life-risk on bush-league ballplayers was very great. She married finally a young man from Jersey City, heavy of hand, hoof, and voice, who owned a young but flourishing truck and livery business. + 

Thus, the partnership of the Dixie Melody Twins was dissolved. Helen, left alone, turned away from the drear monotony of the small towns to the gaiety, the variety, and the slaking fulfilment of her desires, which she hoped somehow to find in the cities. + 

She missed Luke terribly. Without him she felt incomplete, unarmored. He had been enrolled in the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta for two years. He was taking the course in electrical engineering, the whole direction of his life had been thus shaped by Gant’s eulogies, years before, of the young electrical expert, Liddell. He was failing in his work⁠—his mind had never been forced to the discipline of study. All purpose with him was broken by a thousand impulses: his brain stammered as did his tongue, and as he turned impatiently and irritably to the logarithm tables, he muttered the number of the page in idiot repetition, keeping up a constant wild vibration of his leg upon the ball of his foot. + 

His great commercial talent was salesmanship; he had superlatively that quality that American actors and men of business call “personality”⁠—a wild energy, a Rabelaisian vulgarity, a sensory instinct for rapid and swingeing repartee, and a hypnotic power of speech, torrential, meaningless, mad, and evangelical. He could sell anything because in the jargon of salesmen, he could sell himself; and there was a fortune in him in the fantastic elasticity of American business, the club of all the queer trades, of wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he could have chanted the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from their coats, doing every one, everything, and finally himself. He was not an electrical engineer⁠—he was electrical energy. He had no gift for study⁠—he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with it desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus and the mechanical sciences. + 

Enormous humor flowed from him like crude light. Men who had never known him seethed with strange internal laughter when they saw him, and roared helplessly when he began to speak. Yet, his physical beauty was astonishing. His head was like that of a wild angel⁠—coils and whorls of living golden hair flashed from his head, his features were regular, generous, and masculine, illuminated by the strange inner smile of idiot ecstasy. + 

His broad mouth, even when stammering irritably or when nervousness clouded his face, was always cocked for laugher⁠—unearthly, exultant, idiot laughter. There was in him demonic exuberance, a wild intelligence that did not come from the brain. Eager for praise, for public esteem, and expert in ingratiation, this demon possessed him utterly at the most unexpected moments, in the most decorous surroundings, when he was himself doing all in his power to preserve the good opinion in which he was held. + 

Thus, listening to an old lady of the church, who with all her power of persuasion and earnestness was unfolding the dogmas of Presbyterianism to him, he would lean forward in an attitude of exaggerated respectfulness and attention, one broad hand clinched about his knee, while he murmured gentle agreement to what she said: + 

“Yes?⁠ ⁠… Ye-e-es?⁠ ⁠… Ye-e-e-es?⁠ ⁠… Ye-e-es?⁠ ⁠… Is that right?⁠ ⁠… Ye-e-es?” + 

Suddenly the demonic force would burst in him. Insanely tickled at the cadences of his agreement, the earnest placidity and oblivion of the old woman, and the extravagant pretense of the whole situation, his face flooded with wild exultancy, he would croon in a fat luscious bawdily suggestive voice: + 

“Y-ah-s?⁠ ⁠… Y-a-h-s?⁠ ⁠… Y-ah-s?⁠ ⁠… Y-ah-s?” + 

And when at length too late she became aware of this drowning flood of demonic nonsense, and paused, turning an abrupt startled face to him, he would burst into a wild “Whah-whah-whah-whah” of laughter, beyond all reason, with strange throat noises, tickling her roughly in the ribs. + 

Often Eliza, in the midst of long, minutely replenished reminiscence, would grow conscious, while she was purse-lipped in revery, of this annihilating mockery, would slap at his hand angrily as he gooched her, and shake a pursed piqued face at him, saying, with a heavy scorn that set him off into fresh “whah-whahs”: “I’ll declare, boy! You act like a regular idiot,” and then shaking her head sadly, with elaborate pity: “I’d be ash-a-amed! A-sha-a-med.” + 

His quality was extraordinary; he had something that was a great deal better than most intelligence; he saw the world in burlesque, and his occasional answer to its sham, hypocrisy, and intrigue was the idiot devastation of “whah-whah!” But he did not possess his demon; it possessed him from time to time. If it had possessed him wholly, constantly, his life would have prevailed with astonishing honesty and precision. But when he reflected, he was a child⁠—with all the hypocrisy, sentimentality and dishonest pretense of a child. + 

His face was a church in which beauty and humor were married⁠—the strange and the familiar were at one in him. Men, looking at Luke, felt a start of recognition as if they saw something of which they had never heard, but which they had known forever. + 

Once or twice, during the Winter and Spring, while she was touring with Pearl Hines, Helen got into Atlanta to see him. In Spring they attended the week of Grand Opera. He would find employment for one night as a spearman in Aïda and pass the doorman for the remainder of the week with the assurance that he was “a member of the company⁠—Lukio Gantio.” + 

His large feet spread tightly out in sandals; behind the shingreaves his awkward calves were spined thickly with hair; a thick screw of hair writhed under the edge of his tin helmet, as he loafed in the wings, leaning comically on his spear, his face lit with exultancy. + 

Caruso, waiting his entrance, regarded him from time to time with a wide Wop smile. + 

“Wotta you call yourself, eh?” asked Caruso, approaching and looking him over. + 

“W-w-w-why,” he said, “d-don’t you know one of your s-s-s-soldiers when you see him?” + 

“You’re one hell of a soldier,” said Caruso. + 

“Whah-whah-whah!” Luke answered. With difficulty he restrained his prodding fingers. + 

In the summer now he returned to Altamont, finding employment with a firm of land-auctioneers, and assisting them at the sale of a tract or a parcel of lots. He moved about above the crowd in the bed of a wagon, exhorting them to bid, with his hand at the side of his mouth, in a harangue compounded of frenzy, passionate solicitation, and bawdry. The work intoxicated him. With wide grins of expectancy they crowded round the spokes. In a high throaty tenor he called to them: + 

“Step right up, gentlemen, lot number 17, in beautiful Homewood⁠—we furnish the wood, you furnish the home. Now gentlemen, this handsome building-site has a depth of 179 feet, leaving plenty of room for garden and backhouse (grow your own corn cobs in beautiful Homewood) with a frontage of 114 feet on a magnificent new macadam road.” + 

“Where is the road?” someone shouted. + 

“On the blueprint, of course, Colonel. You’ve got it all in black and white. Now, gentlemen, the opportunity of your lives is kicking you in the pants. Are you men of vision? Think what Ford, Edison, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Julius Caesar would do. Obey that impulse. You can’t lose. The town is coming this way. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? Swell. The new courthouse will be built on yonder hill, the undertaker and the village bakery will occupy handsome edifices of pressed brick just above you. Oyez, oyez, oyez. What am I offered? What am I offered? Own your own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannonshot of all railway, automobile, and airplane connections. Running water abounds within a Washingtonian stone’s throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all trains. Gentlemen, here’s your chance to make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources⁠—gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the trees.” + 

“What about the bushes, Luke?” yelled Mr. Halloran, the dairy-lunch magnate. + 

“Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes,” Luke answered amid general tumult. “All right, Major. You with the face. What am I offered? What am I offered?” + 

When there was no sale, he greeted incoming tourists at the station-curbing with eloquent invitations to Dixieland, rich, persuasive, dominant above all the soliciting babel of the car-drivers, negro hotel-porters, and boardinghouse husbands. + 

“I’ll give you a dollar apiece for every one you drum up,” said Eliza. + 

“O that’s all right.” O modestly. Generously. + 

“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” said Gant. + 

A fine boy. As she cooled from her labors in the summer night, he brought her little boxes of ice-cream from town. + 

He was a hustler: he sold patent washboards, trick potato-peelers, and powdered cockroach-poison from house to house. To the negroes he sold hair-oil guaranteed to straighten kinky hair, and religious lithographs, peopled with flying angels, white and black, and volant cherubs, black and white, sailing about the knees of an impartial and crucified Saviour, and subtitled “God Loves Them Both.” + 

They sold like hot cakes. + 

Otherwise, he drove Gant’s car⁠—a 1913 five-passenger Ford, purchase of an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half Gant’s conversation, object of abuse, boast, and anathema. It was before everyone owned a car. Gant was awed and terrified by his rash act, exalted at the splendor of his chariot, appalled at its expense. Each bill for gasoline, repairs, or equipment brought a howl of anguish from him; a puncture, a breakdown, a minor disorder caused him to circle about in maddened strides, cursing, praying, weeping. + 

“I’ve never had a moment’s peace since I bought it,” he howled. “Accursed and bloody monster that it is, it will not be content until it has sucked out my lifeblood, sold the roof over my head, and sent me out to the pauper’s grave to perish. Merciful God,” he wept, “it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s cruel that I should be afflicted thus in my old age.” Turning to his constrained and apologetic son abruptly, he said: “How much is the bill? Hey?” His eyes roved wildly in his head. + 

“D-d-d-don’t get excited, papa,” Luke answered soothingly, teetering from foot to foot, “it’s only $8.92.” + 

“Jesus God!” Gant screamed. “I’m ruined.” Sobbing in loud burlesque sniffles, he began his caged pacing. + 

But it was pleasant at dusk or in the cool summer nights, with Eliza or one of his daughters beside him, and a fragrant weed between his pallid lips, to hinge his long body into the back seat, and ride out into the fragrant countryside, or through the long dark streets of town. At the approach of another car he cried out in loud alarm, by turns cursing and entreating his son to caution. Luke drove nervously, erratically, wildly⁠—his stammering impatient hands and knees communicated their uneven fidget to the flivver. He cursed irritably, plunged in exacerbated fury at the brake, and burst out in an annoyed “tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh,” when the car stalled. + 

As the hour grew late, and the streets silent, his madness swelled in him. Lipping the rim of a long hill street, tree-arched and leafy and shelving in even terraces, he would burst suddenly into insane laughter, bend over the wheel, and pull the throttle open, his idiot “whah-whahs” filling the darkness as Gant screamed curses at him. Down through the night they tore at murderous speed, the boy laughing at curse and prayer alike as they shot past the blind menace of street-crossings. + 

“You Goddamned scoundrel!” Gant yelled. “Stop, you mountain grill, or I’ll put you in jail.” + 

“Whah-whah.”⁠—His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto. + 

Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness, quite blue with terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual arrivals to her breast, melodramatically, and moan: + 

“I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my innocent motherless babes⁠—” + 

“Whah-whah-whah!” + 

“He’s a fiend out of hell,” cried Gant, beginning to weep. “Cruel and criminal monster that he is, he will batter our brains out against a tree, before he’s done.” They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car that, with a startled screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like a frightened horse. + 

“You damned thug!” Gant roared, plunging forward and fastening his great hands around Luke’s throat. “Will you stop?” + 

Luke added another notch of blazing speed. Gant fell backward with a howl of terror. + 

On Sunday they made long tours into the country. Often they drove to Reynoldsville, twenty-two miles away. It was an ugly little resort, noisy with arriving and departing cars, with a warm stench of oil and gasoline heavy above its broad main street. But people were coming and going from several States: Southward they came up from South Carolina and Georgia, cotton-farmers, small tradesmen and their families in battered cars coated with red sandclay dust. They had a heavy afternoon dinner of fried chicken, corn, string beans, and sliced tomatoes, at one of the big wooden boardinghouse hotels, spent another hour in a drugstore over a chocolate nut-sundae, watched the summer crowd of fortunate tourists and ripe cool-skinned virgins flow by upon the wide sidewalk in thick pullulation, and returned again, after a brief tour of the town, on the winding immediate drop to the hot South. New lands. + 

Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South filled summer porches. + 

Luke was a darling. He was a dear, a fine boy, a bighearted generous fellow, and just the cutest thing. Women liked him, laughed at him, pulled fondly the thick golden curls of his hair. He was sentimentally tender to children⁠—girls of fourteen years. He had a grand romantic feeling for Delia Selborne, the oldest daughter of Mrs. Selborne. He bought her presents, was tender and irritable by turns. Once, at Gant’s, on the porch under an August moon and the smell of ripening grapes, he caressed her while Helen sang in the parlor. He caressed her gently, leaned his head over her, and said he would like to lay it on her b-b-b-b-breast. Eugene watched them bitterly, with an inch of poison round his heart. He wanted the girl for himself: she was stupid, but she had the wise body and faint hovering smile of her mother. He wanted Mrs. Selborne more, he fantasied passionately about her yet, but her image lived again in Delia. As a result, he was proud, cold, scornful and foolish before them. They disliked him. + 

Enviously, with gnawn heart, he observed Luke’s ministrations to Mrs. Selborne. His service was so devout, so extravagant that even Helen grew annoyed and occasionally jealous. And nightly, from a remote corner at Gant’s or Eliza’s, or from a parked automobile before the house, he heard her rich welling laughter, full of tenderness, surrender, and mystery. Sometimes, waiting in pitch darkness on the stairs at Eliza’s, at one or two o’clock in the morning, he felt her pass him. As she touched him in the dark, she gave a low cry of terror; with an uncivil grunt he reassured her, and descended to bed with a pounding heart and burning face. + 

Ah, yes, he thought, with green morality, observing his brother throned in laughter and affection, you Big Fool, you⁠—you’re just a sucker! You show off and act big, my sonny, and spend your money bringing ice-cream for them⁠—but what do you get out of it? How do you feel when she gets out of an automobile at two o’clock in the morning after grunting in the dark with some damned travelling-man, or with old Poxy Logan who’s been keeping a nigger woman up for years. “May I p-p-p-put my head on your breast?” You make me sick, you damned fool. She’s no better, only you don’t know beans. She’ll let you spend all your money on her and then she’ll run off with some little pimp in an automobile for the rest of the night. Yes, that’s so. Do you want to make anything out of it? You big bluff. Come out into the back yard.⁠ ⁠… I’ll show you⁠ ⁠… take that⁠ ⁠… and that⁠ ⁠… and that⁠ ⁠… + 

Pumping his fists wildly, he fought his phantom into defeat and himself into exhaustion. + 

Luke had several hundred dollars saved from The Saturday Evening Post days, when he went off to school. He accepted very little money from Gant. He waited on tables, he solicited for college boardinghouses, he was the agent for a tailor who made Kippy Kampus Klothes. Gant boasted of these efforts. The town shifted its quid, nodded pertly, and spat, saying: + 

“That boy’ll make his mark.” + 

Luke worked as hard for an education as any other self-made man. He made every sacrifice. He did everything but study. + 

He was an immense popular success, so very extra, so very Luky. The school sought and adored him. Twice, after football games, he mounted a hearse and made funeral orations over the University of Georgia. + 

But, in spite of all his effort, toward the end of his third year he was still a sophomore, with every prospect of remaining one. One day in Spring he wrote the following letter to Gant: + 

“The b-b-b-bastards who r-r-run this place have it in for me. I’ve been c-c-c-crooked good and proper. They take your hard-earned m-m-money here and skin you. I’m g-g-g-going to a real school.” + 

He went to Pittsburgh and found work with the Westinghouse Electric Company. Three times a week at night he attended courses at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He made friends. + 

The war had come. After fifteen months in Pittsburgh he moved on to Dayton where he got employment at a boiler factory engaged in the fabrication of war materials. + 

From time to time, in summer for a few weeks, at Christmas for a few days, he returned to celebrate his holidays with his family. Always he brought Gant a suitcase stocked with beer and whisky. That boy was “good to his father.” + 

XIX + 

One afternoon in the young summer, Gant leaned upon the rail, talking to Jannadeau. He was getting on to sixty-five, his erect body had settled, he stooped a little. He spoke of old age often, and he wept in his tirades now because of his stiffened hand. Soaked in pity, he referred to himself as “the poor old cripple who has to provide for them all.” + 

The indolence of age and disintegration was creeping over him. He now rose a full hour later, he came to his shop punctually, but he spent long hours of the day extended on the worn leather couch of his office, or in gossip with Jannadeau, bawdy old Liddell, Cardiac, and Fagg Sluder, who had salted away his fortune in two big buildings on the Square and was at the present moment tilted comfortably in a chair before the fire department, gossiping eagerly with members of the ball club, whose chief support he was. It was after five o’clock, the game was over. + 

Negro laborers, grisly with a white coating of cement, sloped down past the shop on their way home. The draymen dispersed slowly, a slouchy policeman loafed down the steps of the city hall picking his teeth, and on the market side, from high grilled windows, there came the occasional howls of a drunken negress. Life buzzed slowly like a fly. + 

The sun had reddened slightly, there was a cool flowing breath from the hills, a freshening relaxation over the tired earth, the hope, the ecstasy of evening in the air. In slow pulses the thick plume of fountain rose, fell upon itself, and slapped the pool in lazy rhythms. A wagon rattled leanly over the big cobbles; beyond the firemen, the grocer Bradley wound up his awning with slow creaking revolutions. + 

Across the Square, at its other edge, the young virgins of the eastern part of town walked lightly home in chattering groups. They came to town at four o’clock in the afternoon, walked up and down the little avenue several times, entered a shop to purchase small justifications, and finally went into the chief drugstore, where the bucks of the town loafed and drawled in lazy alert groups. It was their club, their brasserie, the forum of the sexes. With confident smiles the young men detached themselves from their group and strolled back to booth and table. + 

“Hey theah! Wheahd you come from?” + 

“Move ovah theah, lady. I want to tawk to you.” + 

Eyes as blue as Southern skies looked roguishly up to laughing gray ones, the winsome dimples deepened, and the sweetest little tail in dear old Dixie slid gently over on the polished board. + 

Gant spent delightful hours now in the gossip of dirty old men⁠—their huddled bawdry exploded in cracked high wheezes on the Square. He came home at evening stored with gutter tidings, wetting his thumb and smiling slyly as he questioned Helen hopefully: + 

“She’s no better than a regular little chippie⁠—eh?” + 

“Ha-ha-ha-ha,” she laughed mockingly. “Don’t you wish you knew?” + 

His age bore certain fruits, emoluments of service. When she came home in the evening with one of her friends, she presented the girl with jocose eagerness to his embrace. And, crying out paternally, “Why, bless her heart! Come kiss the old man,” he planted bristling mustache kisses on their white throats, their soft lips, grasping the firm meat of one arm tenderly with his good hand and cradling them gently. They shrieked with throaty giggle-twiddles of pleasure because it tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tickled so. + 

“Ooh! Mr. Gant! Whah-whah-whah!” + 

“Your father’s such a nice man,” they said. “Such lovely manners.” + 

Helen’s eyes fed fiercely on them. She laughed with husky-harsh excitement. + 

“Hah-ha-ha! He likes that, doesn’t he? It’s too bad, old boy, isn’t it? No more monkey business.” + 

He talked with Jannadeau, while his fugitive eyes roved over the east end of the Square. Before the shop the comely matrons of the town came up from the market. From time to time they smiled, seeing him, and he bowed sweepingly. Such lovely manners. + 

“The King of England,” he observed, “is only a figurehead. He doesn’t begin to have the power of the President of the United States.” + 

“His power is severely limited,” said Jannadeau gutturally, “by custom but not by statute. In actuality he is still one of the most powerful monarchs in the world.” His thick black fingers probed carefully into the viscera of a watch. + 

“The late King Edward for all his faults,” said Gant, wetting his thumb, “was a smart man. This fellow they’ve got now is a nonentity and a nincompoop.” He grinned faintly, craftily, with pleasure at the big words, glancing slyly at the Swiss to see if they had told. + 

His uneasy eyes followed carefully the stylish carriage of “Queen” Elizabeth’s well clad figure as she went down by the shop. She smiled pleasantly, and for a moment turned her candid stare upon smooth marble slabs of death, carved lambs and cherubim. Gant bowed elaborately. + 

“Good evening, madam,” he said. + 

She disappeared. In a moment she came back decisively and mounted the broad steps. He watched her approach with quickened pulses. Twelve years. + 

“How’s the madam?” he said gallantly. “Elizabeth, I was just telling Jannadeau you were the most stylish woman in town.” + 

“Well, that’s mighty sweet of you, Mr. Gant,” she said in her cool poised voice. “You’ve always got a word for everyone.” + 

She gave a bright pleasant nod to Jannadeau, who swung his huge scowling head ponderously around and muttered at her. + 

“Why, Elizabeth,” said Gant, “you haven’t changed an inch in fifteen years. I don’t believe you’re a day older.” + 

She was thirty-eight and pleasantly aware of it. + 

“Oh, yes,” she said laughing. “You’re only saying that to make me feel good. I’m no chicken any more.” + 

She had a pale clear skin, pleasantly freckled, carrot-colored hair, and a thin mouth live with humor. Her figure was trim and strong⁠—no longer young. She had a great deal of energy, distinction, and elegance in her manner. + 

“How are all the girls, Elizabeth?” he asked kindly. + 

Her face grew sad. She began to pull her gloves off. + 

“That’s what I came to see you about,” she said. “I lost one of them last week.” + 

“Yes,” said Gant gravely, “I was sorry to hear of that.” + 

“She was the best girl I had,” said Elizabeth. “I’d have done anything in the world for her. We did everything we could,” she added. “I’ve no regrets on that score. I had a doctor and two trained nurses by her all the time.” + 

She opened her black leather handbag, thrust her gloves into it, and pulling out a small bluebordered handkerchief, began to weep quietly. + 

“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh,” said Gant, shaking his head. “Too bad, too bad, too bad. Come back to my office,” he said. They went back and sat down. Elizabeth dried her eyes. + 

“What was her name?” he asked. + 

“We called her Lily⁠—her full name was Lillian Reed.” + 

“Why, I knew that girl,” he exclaimed. “I spoke to her not over two weeks ago.” + 

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, “she went like that⁠—one hemorrhage right after another, down here.” She tapped her abdomen. “Nobody ever knew she was sick until last Wednesday. Friday she was gone.” She wept again. + 

“T-t-t-t-t-t,” he clucked regretfully. “Too bad, too bad. She was pretty as a picture.” + 

“I couldn’t have loved her more, Mr. Gant,” said Elizabeth, “if she had been my own daughter.” + 

“How old was she?” he asked. + 

“Twenty-two,” said Elizabeth, beginning to weep again. + 

“What a pity! What a pity!” he agreed. “Did she have any people?” + 

“No one who would do anything for her,” Elizabeth said. “Her mother died when she was thirteen⁠—she was born out here on the Beetree Fork⁠—and her father,” she added indignantly, “is a mean old bastard who’s never done anything for her or anyone else. He didn’t even come to her funeral.” + 

“He will be punished,” said Gant darkly. + 

“As sure as there’s a God in heaven,” Elizabeth agreed, “he’ll get what’s coming to him in hell. The old bastard!” she continued virtuously, “I hope he rots!” + 

“You can depend upon it,” he said grimly. “He will. Ah, Lord.” He was silent a moment while he shook his head with slow regret. + 

“A pity, a pity,” he muttered. “So young.” He had the moment of triumph all men have when they hear someone has died. A moment, too, of grisly fear. Sixty-four. + 

“I couldn’t have loved her more,” said Elizabeth, “if she’d been one of my own. A young girl like that, with all her life before her.” + 

“It’s pretty sad when you come to think of it,” he said. “By God, it is.” + 

“And she was such a fine girl, Mr. Gant,” said Elizabeth, weeping softly. “She had such a bright future before her. She had more opportunities than I ever had, and I suppose you know”⁠—she spoke modestly⁠—“what I’ve done.” + 

“Why,” he exclaimed, startled, “you’re a rich woman, Elizabeth⁠—damned if I don’t believe you are. You own property all over town.” + 

“I wouldn’t say that,” she answered, “but I’ve got enough to live on without ever doing another lick of work. I’ve had to work hard all my life. From now on I don’t intend to turn my hand over.” + 

She regarded him with a shy pleased smile, and touched a coil of her fine hair with a small competent hand. He looked at her attentively, noting with pleasure her firm uncorseted hips, moulded compactly into her tailored suit, and her cocked comely legs tapering to graceful feet, shod in neat little slippers of tan. She was firm, strong, washed, and elegant⁠—a faint scent of lilac hovered over her: he looked at her candid eyes, lucently gray, and saw that she was quite a great lady. + 

“By God, Elizabeth,” he said, “you’re a fine-looking woman.” + 

“I’ve had a good life,” she said. “I’ve taken care of myself.” + 

They had always known each other⁠—since first they met. They had no excuses, no questions, no replies. The world fell away from them. In the silence they heard the pulsing slap of the fountain, the high laughter of bawdry in the Square. He took a book of models from the desk, and began to turn its slick pages. They showed modest blocks of Georgia marble and Vermont granite. + 

“I don’t want any of those,” she said impatiently. “I’ve already made up my mind. I know what I want.” + 

He looked up surprised. “What is it?” + 

“I want the angel out front.” + 

His face was shocked and unwilling. He gnawed the corner of his thin lip. No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked. But it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy. + 

In his rages, Gant sometimes directed vast climaxes of abuse at the angel. “Fiend out of Hell!” he roared. “You have impoverished me, you have ruined me, you have cursed my declining years, and now you will crush me to death, fearful, awful, and unnatural monster that you are.” + 

But sometimes when he was drunk he fell weeping on his knees before it, called it Cynthia, and entreated its love, forgiveness, and blessing for its sinful but repentant boy. There was laughter from the Square. + 

“What’s the matter?” said Elizabeth. “Don’t you want to sell it?” + 

“It will cost you a good deal, Elizabeth,” he said evasively. + 

“I don’t care,” she answered, positively. “I’ve got the money. How much do you want?” + 

He was silent, thinking for a moment of the place where the angel stood. He knew he had nothing to cover or obliterate that place⁠—it left a barren crater in his heart. + 

“All right,” he said. “You can have it for what I paid for it⁠—$420.” + 

She took a thick sheaf of banknotes from her purse and counted the money out for him. He pushed it back. + 

“No. Pay me when the job’s finished and it has been set up. You want some sort of inscription, don’t you?” + 

“Yes. There’s her full name, age, place of birth, and so on,” she said, giving him a scrawled envelope. “I want some poetry, too⁠—something that suits a young girl taken off like this.” + 

He pulled his tattered little book of inscriptions from a pigeonhole, and thumbed its pages, reading her a quatrain here and there. To each she shook her head. Finally, he said: + 

“How’s this one, Elizabeth?” He read: + 

“She went away in beauty’s flower, + 

Before her youth was spent; + 

Ere life and love had lived their hour + 

God called her, and she went. + 

Yet whispers Faith upon the wind: + 

No grief to her was given. + 

She left your love and went to find + 

A greater one in heaven.” + 

“Oh, that’s lovely⁠—lovely,” she said. “I want that one.” + 

“Yes,” he agreed, “I think that’s the best one.” + 

In the musty cool smell of his little office they got up. Her gallant figure reached his shoulder. She buttoned her kid gloves over the small pink haunch of her palms and glanced about her. His battered sofa filled one wall, the line of his long body was printed in the leather. She looked up at him. His face was sad and grave. They remembered. + 

“It’s been a long time, Elizabeth,” he said. + 

They walked slowly to the front through aisled marbles. Sentinelled just beyond the wooden doors, the angel leered vacantly down. Jannadeau drew his great head turtlewise a little further into the protective hunch of his burly shoulders. They went out on to the porch. + 

The moon stood already, like its own phantom, in the clear washed skies of evening. A little boy with an empty paper-delivery bag swung lithely by, his freckled nostrils dilating pleasantly with hunger and the fancied smell of supper. He passed, and for a moment, as they stood at the porch edge, all life seemed frozen in a picture: the firemen and Fagg Sluder had seen Gant, whispered, and were now looking toward him; a policeman, at the high side-porch of the Police Court, leaned on the rail and stared; at the near edge of the central grass-plot below the fountain, a farmer bent for water at a bubbling jet, rose dripping, and stared; from the Tax Collector’s office, City Hall, upstairs, Yancey, huge, meaty, shirtsleeved, stared. And in that second the slow pulse of the fountain was suspended, life was held, like an arrested gesture, in photographic abeyance, and Gant felt himself alone move deathward in a world of seemings as, in 1910, a man might find himself again in a picture taken on the grounds of the Chicago Fair, when he was thirty and his mustache black, and, noting the bustled ladies and the derbied men fixed in the second’s pullulation, remember the dead instant, seek beyond the borders for what was there (he knew); or as a veteran who finds himself upon his elbow near Ulysses Grant, before the march, in pictures of the Civil War, and sees a dead man on a horse; or I should say, like some completed Don, who finds himself again before a tent in Scotland in his youth, and notes a cricket-bat long lost and long forgotten, the face of a poet who has died, and young men and the tutor as they looked that Long Vacation when they read nine hours a day for “Greats.” + 

Where now? Where after? Where then? + 

XX + 

Gant, during these years in which Helen and Luke, the two for whom he felt the deepest affection, were absent a large part of the time, lived a splintered existence at home and at Eliza’s. He feared and hated a lonely life, but habit was deeply rooted in him, and he was unwilling to exchange the well-used comfort of his own home for the bald wintriness of Eliza’s. She did not want him. She fed him willingly enough, but his tirades and his nightly sojourns, both longer and more frequent now that his daughter was absent, annoyed her more than they ever had before. + 

“You have a place of your own,” she cried fretfully. “Why don’t you stay in it? I don’t want you around making trouble.” + 

“Send him on,” he moaned bitterly. “Send him on. Over the stones rattle his bones, he’s only a beggar that nobody owns. Ah, Lord! The old dray-horse has had its day. Its race is run. Kick him out: the old cripple can no longer provide them with victuals, and they will throw him on the junk-heap, unnatural and degenerate monsters that they are.” + 

But he remained at Dixieland as long as there was anyone to listen to him, and to the bleak little group of winter boarders he brought magic. They fed hungrily on all the dramatic gusto with which, lunging back and forth in the big rocker, before the blazing parlor fire, he told and retold the legends of his experience, taking, before their charmed eyes, an incident that had touched him romantically, and embellishing, weaving and building it up. A whole mythology grew up as, goggle-eyed, they listened: + 

General Fitzhugh Lee, who had reined up before the farmer boy and asked for a drink of water, now tossed off an oaken bucketful, questioned him closely concerning the best roads into Gettysburg, asked if he had seen detachments of the enemy, wrote his name down in a small book, and went off saying to his staff: “That boy will make his mark. It is impossible to defeat an enemy which breeds boys like that.” + 

The Indians, whom he had passed amicably as he rode out into the New Mexican desert on a burro, seeking the ancient fort, now spurred after him with fell intent and wild scalping whoops. He rode furiously through muttering redskin villages, and found the protection of two cattlemen in the nick of time. The thief who had entered his room at dead of night in New Orleans, and picked up his clothes, and whom he had fought desperately upon the floor, he now pursued naked for seventeen blocks (not five) down Canal Street. + 

He went several times a week to the moving-picture shows, taking Eugene, and sitting, bent forward in hunched absorption, through two full performances. They came out at ten-thirty or eleven o’clock, on cold ringing pavements, into a world frozen bare⁠—a dead city of closed shops, dressed windows, milliners’ and clothiers’ models posturing with waxen gaiety at congealed silence. + 

On the Square the slackened fountain dropped a fat spire of freezing water into its thickening rim of ice. In summer, a tall spire blown in blue sheets of spray. When they turned it down it wilted⁠—that was like a fountain, too. No wind blew. + 

His eyes fixed on the clean concrete walk, Gant strode on, muttering dramatically, composing a narrative of the picture. The cold steel of new sewing-machines glinted in dim light. The Singer building. Tallest in the world. The stitching hum of Eliza’s machine. Needle through your finger before you know it. He winced. They passed the Sluder Building at the corner of the Square and turned left. Gets over $700 a month in officerent from this alone. The window on the corner was filled with rubber syringes and thermos bottles. Drink Coca-Cola. They say he stole the formula from old mountain woman. $50,000,000 now. Rats in the vats. Dope at Wood’s better. Too weak here. He had recently acquired a taste for the beverage and drank four or five glasses a day. + 

D. Stern had his old shack on that corner twenty years before Fagg bought it. Belonged to Paston estate. Could have bought it for a song. Rich man now. D. moved to North Main now. The Jew’s rich. Fortune out of winnies. They’re hot, they’re hot. In a broken pot. If I had a little time I’d make a little rhyme. Thirteen kids⁠—she had one every year. As broad as she’s long. They all get fat. Everyone works. Sons pay father board. None of mine, I can assure you. The Jews get there. + 

The hunchback⁠—what did they call him? One of Nature’s Cruel Jests. Ah, Lord! What’s become of old John Bunny? I used to like his pictures. Oh yes. Dead. + 

That pure look they have, at the end, when he kisses her, mused Eugene. Later⁠—A Warmer Clime. Her long lashes curled down over her wet eyes, she was unable to meet his gaze. The sweet lips trembled with desire as, clasping her in a grip of steel, he bent down over her yielding body and planted hungry kisses on her mouth. When the purple canopy of dawn had been reft asunder by the rays of the invading sun. The Stranger. It wouldn’t do to say the next morning. They have a thick coat of yellow paint all over their face. Meanwhile, in Old England. I wonder what they say to each other. They’re a pretty tough lot, I suppose. + 

A swift thrust of conviction left him unperturbed. The other was better. + 

He thought of the Stranger. Steel-gray eyes. A steady face. An eighth of a second faster on the draw than anyone else. Two-gun Bill Hart. Anderson of the Essanay. Strong quiet men. + 

He clapped his hand against his buttock with a sharp smack and shot the murderous forefinger at an ashcan, a lamppost, and a barber-pole, with a snapping wrist. Gant, startled in composition, gave him a quick uneasy look. They walked on. + 

Came a day when Spring put forth her blossoms on the earth again. No, no⁠—not that. Then all grew dark. Picture of a lily trampled on the earth. That means he bigged her. Art. Filled her with thee a baby fair. You can’t go away now. Why? Because⁠—because⁠—her eyes dropped shyly, a slow flush mantled her cheek. He stared at her blankly for a moment, then his puzzled gaze⁠—(O good!)⁠—fell to the tiny object she was fingering nervously, with dawning comprehension. Blushing rosily, she tried to conceal the little jacket behind her. Grace! A great light broke on him! Do you mean it? She went to him with a cry, half laugh, half sob, and buried her burning face in his neck. You silly boy. Of course I mean it (you bastard!). The little dance girl. Smiling with wet lechery and manipulating his moist rope of cigar, Faro Jim shuffled a pack of cards slowly and fixed on her his vulturesque eye. A knife in his shiny boots, a small derringer and three aces up his ruffled sleeve, and suave murder in his heart. But the cold gray eyes of the Stranger missed nothing. Imperturbably he drank his Scotch, wheeled from the mirror with barking Colt just one-sixth of a second before the gambler could fire. Faro coughed and slid forward slowly upon the floor. + 

There was no sound now in the crowded room of the Triple Y. Men stood petrified. The face of Bad Bill and the two Mexicans had turned a dirty gray. Finally, the sheriff spoke, turning with awe from the still figure on the sawdust floor. + 

“By God, stranger!” he ejaculated, “I never knew the man lived who could beat Faro to the draw. What’s yore name?” + 

“In the fam’ly Bible back home, pardner,” the Stranger drawled, “it’s Eugene Gant, but folks out here generally calls me The Dixie Ghost.” + 

There was a slow gasp of wonder from the crowd. + 

“Gawd!” someone whispered. “It’s the Ghost!” + 

As the Ghost turned coolly back to finish his interrupted drink, he found himself face to face with the little dancing girl. Two smoking globes of brine welled from the pellucid depths of her pure eyes and fell with a hot splash on his bronzed hand. + 

“How can I ever thank you!” she cried. “You have saved me from a fate far worse than death.” + 

But the Ghost, who had faced death many times without a flicker of a lash, was unable to face something he saw now in a pair of big brown eyes. He took off his sombrero and twisted it shyly in his big hands. + 

“Why, that’s all right, ma’am,” he gulped awkwardly. “Glad to be of service to a lady any time.” + 

By this time the two bartenders had thrown a tablecloth over Faro Bill, carried the limp body into the back room, and returned to their positions behind the bar. The crowd clustered about in little groups, laughing and talking excitedly, and in a moment, as the pianist began to hammer out a tune on the battered piano, broke into the measures of a waltz. + 

In the wild West of those days, passions were primitive, vengeance sudden, and retribution immediate. + 

Two dimples sentinelled a platoon of milk-white teeth. + 

“Won’t you dance with me, Mr. Ghost?” she coaxed. + 

Thoughtfully he pondered on love’s mystery. Pure but passionate. Appearances against her, ’tis true. The foul breath of slander. She worked in a bawdyhouse but her heart was clean. Outside of that, what can one say against her? He thought pleasantly of murder. With child’s eyes he regarded his extinct enemies. Men died violently but cleanly, in the movies. Bang-bang. Goodbye, boys, I’m through. Through the head or heart⁠—a clean hole, no blood. He had kept innocency. Do their guts or their brains come spilling out? Currant jelly where a face was, the chin shot off. Or down there that other⁠—His arm beat the air like a wing: he writhed. If you lose that? Done, die. He clutched his throat in his anguish. + 

They bent down eastward along Academy Street, having turned right from the little caudal appendage that gave on the northeastern corner of the Square. The boy’s mind flamed with bright streaming images, sharp as gems, mutable as chameleons. His life was the shadow of a shadow, a play within a play. He became the hero-actor-star, the lord of the cinema, and the lover of a beautiful movie-queen, as heroic as his postures, with a superior actuality for every make-believe. He was the Ghost and he who played the Ghost, the cause that minted legend into fact. + 

He was those heroes whom he admired, and the victor, in beauty, nobility, and sterling worth, over those whom he despised because they always triumphed and were forever good and pretty and beloved of women. He was chosen and beloved of a bevy of internationally renowned beauties, vampires and pure sweet girls alike, with fruity blondes in the lead, all contesting for his favors, and some of the least scrupulous resorting to underhand practices in order to win him. Their pure eyes turned up to him in everlasting closeups: he feasted virtuously upon their proffered lips and, conflict over, murder sanctified, and virtue crowned, walked away with his siren into the convenient blaze of a constantly setting sun. + 

With burning sidelong face he looked quickly up at Gant, twisting his convulsive neck. + 

Across the street, a calcium glare from the corner light bathed coldly the new brick façade of the Orpheum Theatre. All This Week Gus Nolan and His Georgia Peaches. Also the Piedmont Comedy Four and Miss Bobbie Dukane. + 

The theatre was dark, the second show was over. They stared curiously across the street at the posters. In this cold silence where were the Peaches? At the Athens now, upon the Square. They always went there after. Gant looked at his watch. 11:12. Big Bill Messler outside swinging his club and watching them. On the counter stools a dozen bucks and ogling rakehells. I’ve got a car outside. Dalliance under difficulties. Later, the Genevieve on Liberty Street. They all stay there. Whisperings. Footfalls. Raided. + 

Girls from good families, some of them, I suppose, Gant thought. + 

Opposite the Baptist Church a hearse was drawn up before Gorham’s Undertaking Parlors. A light burned dimly through the ferns. Who can that be? he wondered. Miss Annie Patton critically ill. She’s past eighty. Some lunger from New York. A little Jew with a peaked face. Someone all the time. Await alike th’ inevitable hour. Ah, Lord! + 

With loss of hunger, he thought of undertaking and undertakers, and in particular of Mr. Gorham. He was a man with blond hair and white eyebrows. + 

Waited to marry her when that rich young Cuban died, so they could take honeymoon to Havana. + 

They turned down Spring Street by the Baptist Church. This is really like a city of the dead, Eugene thought. The town, rimed with frost, lay frozen below the stars in a cataleptic trance. The animacy of life hung in abeyance. Nothing grew old, nothing decayed, nothing died. It was triumph over time. If a great demon snapped his fingers and stopped all life in the world for an instant that should be a hundred years, who would know the difference? Every man a Sleeping Beauty. If you’re waking call me early, call me early, mother dear. + 

He tried to see life and movement behind the walls, and failed. He and Gant were all that lived. For a house betrays nothing: there may be murder behind its very quiet face. He thought that Troy should be like this⁠—perfect, undecayed as the day when Hector died. Only they burned it. To find old cities as they were, unruined⁠—the picture charmed him. The Lost Atlantis. Ville d’Ys. The old lost towns, seasunken. Great vacant ways, un-rusted, echoed under his lonely feet; he haunted vast arcades, he pierced the atrium, his shoes rang on the temple flags. + 

Or to be, he lusciously meditated, left alone with a group of pretty women in a town whence all the other people had fled from some terror of plague, earthquake, volcano, or other menace to which he, quite happily was immune. Lolling his tongue delicately, he saw himself loafing sybaritically through first-class confectioners’ and grocers’ shops, gorging like an anaconda on imported dainties: exquisite small fish from Russia, France, and Sardinia; coal-black hams from England; ripe olives, brandied peaches, and liqueur chocolates. He would loot old cellars for fat Burgundies, crack the gold necks of earth-chilled bottles of Pol Roger against the wall, and slake his noonday thirst at the spouting bung of a great butt of Münchener dunkels. When his linen was soiled he would outfit himself anew with silk underwear and the finest shirtings; he would have a new hat every day in the week and new suits whenever he pleased. + 

He would occupy a new house every day, and sleep in a different bed every night, selecting the most luxurious residence ultimately for permanent occupancy, and bringing together in it the richest treasures of every notable library in the city. Finally, when he wanted a woman from the small group that remained and that spent its time in weaving new enticements for him, he would summons her by ringing out the number he had given her on the Court House bell. + 

He wanted opulent solitude. His dark vision burned on kingdoms under the sea, on windy castle crags, and on the deep elf kingdoms at the earth’s core. He groped for the doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone. And no birds sing. + 

More practically, he saw for himself great mansions in the ground, grottoes buried in the deep heart of a hill, vast chambers of brown earth, sumptuously appointed with his bee-like plunder. Cool hidden cisterns would bring him air; from a peephole in the hillside he could look down on a winding road and see armed men seeking for him, or hear their thwarted gropings overhead. He would pull fat fish from subterranean pools, his great earth cellars would be stocked with old wine, he could loot the world of its treasures, including the handsomest women, and never be caught. + 

King Solomon’s mines. She. Proserpine. Ali Baba. Orpheus and Eurydice. Naked came I from my mother’s womb. Naked shall I return. Let the mothering womb of earth engulf me. Naked, a valiant wisp of man, in vast brown limbs engulfed. + 

They neared the corner above Eliza’s. For the first time the boy noted that their pace had quickened, and that he had almost broken into a trot in order to keep up with Gant’s awkward plunging strides. + 

His father was moaning softly with long quivering exhalations of breath, and he had one hand clasped over his pain. The boy spluttered idiotically with laughter. Gant turned a glance full of reproach and physical torture upon him. + 

“Oh-h-h-h-h! Merciful God,” he whined, “it’s hurting me.” + 

Abruptly, Eugene was touched with pity. For the first time he saw plainly that great Gant had grown old. The sallow face had yellowed and lost its sinew. The thin mouth was petulant. The chemistry of decay had left its mark. + 

No, there was no return after this. Eugene saw now that Gant was dying very slowly. The vast resiliency, the illimitable power of former times had vanished. The big frame was breaking up before him like a beached ship. Gant was sick. He was old. + 

He had a disease that is very common among old men who have lived carelessly and lustily⁠—enlargement of the prostate gland. It was not often in itself a fatal disease⁠—it was more often one of the flags of age and death, but it was ugly and uncomfortable. It was generally treated successfully by surgery⁠—the operation was not desperate. But Gant hated and feared the knife: he listened eagerly to all persuasions against it. + 

He had no gift for philosophy. He could not view with amusement and detachment the death of the senses, the waning of desire, the waxing of physical impotence. He fed hungrily, lewdly, on all news of seduction: his amusement had in it the eyes of eagerness, the hot breath of desire. He was incapable of the pleasant irony by which the philosophic spirit mocks that folly it is no longer able to enjoy. + 

Gant was incapable of resignation. He had the most burning of all lusts⁠—the lust of memory, the ravenous hunger of the will which tries to waken what is dead. He had reached the time of life when he read the papers greedily for news of death. As friends and acquaintances died he shook his head with the melancholy hypocrisy of old men, saying: “They’re all going, one by one. Ah, Lord! The old man will be the next.” But he did not believe it. Death was still for the others, not for himself. + 

He grew old very rapidly. He began to die before their eyes⁠—a quick age, and a slow death, impotent, disintegrating, horrible because his life had been so much identified with physical excess⁠—huge drinking, huge eating, huge rioting debauchery. It was fantastic and terrible to see the great body waste. They began to watch the progress of his disease with something of the horror with which one watches the movements of a dog with a broken leg, before he is destroyed⁠—a horror greater than that one feels when a man has a similar hurt, because a man may live without legs. A dog is all included in his hide. + 

His wild bombast was tempered now by senile petulance. He cursed and whined by intervals. At the dead of night he would rise, full of pain and terror, blaspheming vilely against his God at one moment, and frantically entreating forgiveness at the next. Through all this tirade ran the high quivering exhalation of physical pain⁠—actual and undeniable. + 

“Oh-h-h-h-h! I curse the day I was born!⁠ ⁠… I curse the day I was given life by that bloodthirsty Monster up above⁠ ⁠… Oh-h-h-h-h! Jesus! I beg of you. I know I’ve been bad. Forgive me. Have mercy and pity upon me! Give me another chance, in Jesus’ name⁠ ⁠… Oh-h-h-h-h!” + 

Eugene had moments of furious anger because of these demonstrations. He was angry that Gant, having eaten his cake, now howled because he had stomachache and at the same time begged for more. Bitterly he reflected that his father’s life had devoured whatever had served it, and that few men had had more sensuous enjoyment, or had been more ruthless in their demands on others. He found these exhibitions, these wild denunciations and cowardly grovellings in propitiation of a God none of them paid any attention to in health, ugly and abominable. The constant meditation of both Gant and Eliza on the death of others, their morbid raking of the news for items announcing the death of some person known to them, their weird absorption with the death of some toothless hag who, galled by bedsores, at length found release after her eightieth year, while fire, famine, and slaughter in other parts of the world passed unnoticed by them, their extravagant superstition over what was local and unimportant, seeing the intervention of God in the death of a peasant, and the suspension of divine law and natural order in their own, filled him with choking fury. + 

But Eliza was in splendid condition now to ponder upon the death of others. Her health was perfect. She was in her middle fifties: she had grown triumphantly stronger after the diseases of the middle years. White, compact, a great deal heavier now than she had ever been, she performed daily tasks of drudgery in the maintenance of Dixieland, that would have floored a strong negro. She hardly ever got to bed before two o’clock in the morning, and was up again before seven. + 

She admitted her health grudgingly. She made the most of every ache, and she infuriated Gant by meeting every complaint with a corresponding account of her own disorders. When badgered by Helen because of her supposed neglect of the sick man or when the concentration of attention upon the invalid piqued her jealousy, she smiled with white tremulous bitterness, hinting darkly: + 

“He may not be the first to go. I had a premonition⁠—I don’t know what else you’d call it⁠—the other day. I tell you what⁠—it may not be long now⁠—” Her eyes bleared with pity⁠—shaking her puckered mouth, she wept at her own funeral. + 

“Good heavens, mama!” Helen burst out furiously. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Papa’s a sick man! Don’t you realize that?” + 

She didn’t. + 

“Pshaw!” she said. “There’s nothing much wrong with him. McGuire told me two men out of three have it after they’re fifty.” + 

His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of hatred against her crescent health. It made him mad to see her stand so strong. Murderous impotent, baffled⁠—a maniacal anger against her groped for an outlet in him, sometimes exploding in a wild inchoate scream. + 

He yielded weakly to invalidism, he became tyrannous of attention, jealous of service. Her indifference to his health maddened him, created a morbid hunger for pity and tears. At times he got insanely drunk and tried to frighten her by feigning death, one time so successfully that Ben, bending over his rigid form in the hallway, was whitened with conviction. + 

“I can’t feel his heart, mama,” he said, with a nervous whicker of his lips. + 

“Well,” she said, picking her language with deliberate choosiness, “the pitcher went to the well once too often. I knew it would happen sooner or later.” + 

Through a slotted eye he glared murderously at her. Judicially, with placid folded hands, she studied him. Her calm eye caught the slow movement of a stealthy inhalation. + 

“You get his purse, son, and any papers he may have,” she directed. “I’ll call the undertaker.” + 

With an infuriate scream the dead awakened. + 

“I thought that would bring you to,” she said complacently. + 

He scrambled to his feet. + 

“You hellhound!” he yelled. “You would drink my heart’s blood. You are without mercy and without pity⁠—inhuman and bloody monster that you are.” + 

“Some day,” Eliza observed, “you’ll cry wolf-wolf once too often.” + 

He went three times a week to Cardiac’s office for treatment. The dry doctor had grown old; behind his dusty restraint, the prim authority of his manner, there was a deepening well of senile bawdry. He had a comfortable fortune, he cared little for his dwindling practice. He was still a brilliant bacteriologist: he spent hours over slides etched in flowering patterns of bacilli, and he was sought after by diseased prostitutes, to whom he rendered competent service. + 

He dissuaded the Gants from surgery. He was jealously absorbed in the treatment of Gant’s disease, scoffed at operations, and insisted he could give adequate relief by manipulation of the affected parts and the use of the catheter. + 

The two men became devoted friends. The doctor gave up entire mornings to the treatment of Gant’s disease. The consulting-room was filled with their sly laughter while scrofulous mountaineers glared dully at the pages of Life in the antechamber. As Gant sprawled out voluptuously on the table after his masseur had finished his work, he listened appreciatively to the secrets of light women, or to tidbits from books of pseudoscientific pornography, of which the doctor had a large number. + 

“You say,” he demanded eagerly, “that the monks petitioned the archbishop?” + 

“Yes,” said the doctor. “They suffered during the hot weather. He wrote ‘granted’ across the petition. Here’s a photograph of the document.” He held the book open in his clean parched fingers. + 

“Merciful God!” said Gant, staring. “I suppose it’s pretty bad in those hot countries.” + 

He licked his thumb, smiling lewdly to himself. The late Oscar Wilde, for instance. + 

XXI + 

During the first years of this illness Gant showed a diminished, but not a seriously impaired, energy. At first he had, under the doctor’s treatment, periods of tranquillity when he almost believed himself well. There were also times when he became a whining dotard over night, lay indolently abed for days, and was flabbily acquiescent to his disorder. These climaxes usually came on the heels of a roaring spree. The saloons had been closed for years: the town had been one of the first to vote on “local option.” + 

Gant had piously contributed his vote for purity. Eugene remembered the day, years before, when he went proudly with his father to the polls. The militant “drys” had agreed to advertise their vote by wearing a scrap of white silk in their lapels. That was for purity. The defiant wets wore “red.” + 

Announced by violent trumpetings in the Protestant churches, the day of atonement dawned on a seasoned army of well drilled teetotalers. Those wets who had victoriously withstood the pressure of hearth and pulpit⁠—their number (aië, aië,) was small⁠—went to their death with the gallant swagger, and with the gleam of purloined honor, of men who are to die fighting most desperately against the engulfing mob. + 

They did not know how gallant was their cause: they knew only that they had stood against the will of a priest-ridden community⁠—the most annihilating force in the village. They had never been told they stood for liberty; they stood rubily, stubbornly, with the strong brown smell of shame in their nostrils, for the bloodshot, malt-mouthed, red-nosed, loose-pursed Demon Rum. So, they came down with vine leaves in their hair, and a good fog of rye upon their breaths, and with brave set smiles around their determined mouths. + 

As they approached the polls, glancing, like surrounded knights, for an embattled brother, the church women of the town, bent like huntresses above the straining leash, gave the word to the eager children of the Sunday schools. Dressed all in white, and clutching firmly in their small hands the tiny stems of American flags, the pygmies, monstrous as only children can be when they become the witless mouths of slogans and crusades, charged hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their Gulliver. + 

“There he is, children. Go get him.” + 

Swirling around the marked man in wild elves’ dance, they sang with piping empty violence: + 

“We are some fond mother’s treasure, + 

Men and women of tomorrow, + 

For a moment’s empty pleasure + 

Would you give us lifelong sorrow? + 

Think of sisters, wives, and mothers, + 

Of helpless babes in some low slum, + 

Think not of yourself, but others, + 

Vote against the Demon Rum.” + 

Eugene shuddered, and looked up at Gant’s white emblem with coy pride. They walked happily by unhappy alcoholics, deltaed in foaming eddies of innocence, and smiling murderously down at some fond mother’s treasure. + 

If they were mine I’d warm their little tails, they thought⁠—privately. + 

Outside the corrugated walls of the warehouse, Gant paused for a moment to acknowledge the fervent congratulation of a group of ladies from the First Baptist Church: Mrs. Tarkinton, Mrs. Fagg Sluder, Mrs. C. M. McDonnel, and Mrs. W. H. (Pett) Pentland, who, heavily powdered, trailed her long skirt of gray silk with a musty rustle, and sneered elegantly down over her whaleboned collar. She was very fond of Gant. + 

“Where’s Will?” he asked. + 

“Feathering the pockets of the licker interests, when he ought to be down here doing the Lord’s Work,” she replied with Christian bitterness. “Nobody but you knows what I’ve had to put up with, Mr. Gant. You’ve had to put up with the queer Pentland streak, in your own home,” she added with lucid significance. + 

He shook his head regretfully, and stared sorrowfully at the gutter. + 

“Ah, Lord, Pett! We’ve been through the mill⁠—both of us.” + 

A smell of drying roots and sassafras twisted a sharp spiral from the warehouse into the thin slits of his nostrils. + 

“When the time comes to speak up for the right,” Pett announced to several of the ladies, “you’ll always find Will Gant ready to do his part.” + 

With farseeing statesmanship he looked westward toward Pisgah. + 

“Licker,” he said, “is a curse and a care. It has caused the sufferings of untold millions⁠—” + 

“Amen, Amen,” Mrs. Tarkinton chanted softly, swaying her wide hips rhythmically. + 

“⁠—it has brought poverty, disease, and suffering to hundreds of thousands of homes, broken the hearts of wives and mothers, and taken bread from the mouths of little orphaned children.” + 

“Amen, brother.” + 

“It has been,” Gant began, but at this moment his uneasy eye lighted upon the broad red face of Tim O’Doyle and the fierce whiskered whiskiness of Major Ambrose Nethersole, two prominent publicans, who were standing near the entrance not six feet away and listening attentively. + 

“Go on!” Major Nethersole urged, with the deep chest notes of a bullfrog. “Go on, W. O., but for God’s sake, don’t belch!” + 

“Begod!” said Tim O’Doyle, wiping a tiny rill of tobacco juice from the thick simian corner of his mouth, “I’ve seen him start for the door and step through the windey. When we see him coming we hire two extra bottle openers. He used to give the barman a bonus to get up early.” + 

“Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of you,” said Gant scathingly. “They are the lowest of the low, the whisky-besotted dregs of humanity, who deserve to bear not even the name of men, so far have they retrograded backwards.” + 

With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he departed into the warehouse. + 

“By God!” said Ambrose Nethersole approvingly. “It takes W. O. to tie a knot in the tail of the English language. It always did.” + 

But within two months he moaned bitterly his unwetted thirst. For several years he ordered, from time to time, the alloted quota⁠—a gallon of whisky every two weeks⁠—from Baltimore. It was the day of the blind tiger. The town was mined thickly with them. Bad rye and moonshine corn were the prevailing beverages. He grew old, he was sick, he still drank. + 

A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the parched gulley of desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery. He made pretty young summer widows at Dixieland presents of money, underwear, and silk stockings, which he drew on over their shapely legs in the dusty gloom of his little office. Smiling with imperturbable tenderness, Mrs. Selborne thrust out her heavy legs slowly to swell with warm ripe smack his gift of flowered green-silk garters. Wetting his thumb with sly thin after-smile, he told. + 

A grass widow, forty-nine, with piled hair of dyed henna, corseted breasts and hips architecturally protuberant in a sharp diagonal, meaty mottled arms, and a gulched face of leaden flaccidity puttied up brightly with cosmetics, rented the upstairs of Woodson Street while Helen was absent. + 

“She looks like an adventuress, hey?” said Gant hopefully. + 

She had a son. He was fourteen, with a round olive face, a soft white body, and thin legs. He bit his nails intently. His hair and eyes were dark, his face full of sad stealth. He was wise and made himself unobtrusively scarce at proper times. + 

Gant came home earlier. The widow rocked brightly on the porch. He bowed sweepingly, calling her madam. Coy-kittenish, she talked down at him, slogged against the creaking stair rail. She leered cosily at him. She came and went freely through his sitting-room, where he now slept. One evening, just after he had entered, she came in from the bathroom, scented lightly with the best soap, and beefily moulded into a flame-red kimono. + 

A handsome woman yet, he thought. Good evening, madam. + 

He got up from his rocker, put aside the crackling sheets of the evening paper (Republican), and unclipped his steel-rimmed glasses from the great blade of his nose. + 

She came over with sprightly gait to the empty hearth, clasping her wrapper tightly with veinous hands. + 

Swiftly, with a gay leer, she opened the garment, disclosing her thin legs, silk-shod, and her lumpy hips, gaudily clothed in ruffled drawers of blue silk. + 

“Aren’t they pretty?” she twittered invitingly but obscurely. Then, as he took an eager stride forward, she skipped away like a ponderous maenad soliciting Bacchic pursuit. + 

“A pair of pippins,” he agreed, inclusively. + 

After this, she prepared breakfast for him. From Dixieland, Eliza surveyed them with a bitter eye. He had no talent for concealment. His visits morning and evening were briefer, his tongue more benevolent. + 

“I know what you’re up to down there,” she said. “You needn’t think I don’t.” + 

He grinned sheepishly and wet his thumb. Her mouth worked silently at attempted speech for a moment. She speared a frying steak and flipped it over on its raw back, smiling vengefully in a mounting column of greasy blue vapor. He poked her clumsily with his stiff fingers; she shrieked a protest mixed of anger and amusement, and moved awkwardly out of his reach with bridling gait. + 

“Get away! I don’t want you round me! It’s too late for that.” She laughed with nagging mockery. + 

“Don’t you wish you could, though? I’ll vow!” she continued, kneading her lips for several seconds in an effort to speak. “I’d be ashamed. Everyone’s laughing at you behind your back.” + 

“You lie! By God, you lie!” he thundered magnificently, touched. Hammer-hurling Thor. + 

But he tired very quickly of his new love. He was weary, and frightened by his depletion. For a time he gave the widow small sums of money, and forgot the rent. He transferred to her his storming abuse, muttered ominously to himself in long aisle-pacings at his shop, when he saw that he had lost the ancient freedom of his house and saddled himself with a tyrannous hag. One evening he returned insanely drunk, routed her out of her chamber and pursued her unfrocked, untoothed, unputtied, with a fluttering length of kimono in her palsied hand, driving her finally into the yard beneath the big cherry tree, which he circled, howling, making frantic lunges for her as she twittered with fear, casting splintered glances all over the listening neighborhood as she put on the crumpled wrapper, hid partially the indecent jigging of her breasts, and implored succor. It did not come. + 

“You bitch!” he screamed. “I’ll kill you. You have drunk my heart’s-blood, you have driven me to the brink of destruction, and you gloat upon my misery, listening with fiendish delight to my death-rattle, bloody and unnatural monster that you are.” + 

She kept the tree deftly between them and, when his attention was diverted for a moment to the flood of anathema, tore off on fear-quick feet, streetward to the haven of the Tarkintons’ house. As she rested there, in Mrs. Tarkinton’s consolatory arms, weeping hysterically and dredging gullies in her poor painted face, they heard his chaotic footsteps blundering within his house, the heavy crash of furniture, and his fierce curses when he fell. + 

“He’ll kill himself! He’ll kill himself!” she cried. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Oh, my God!” she wept. “I’ve never been talked to that way by any man in my life!” + 

Gant fell heavily within his house. There was silence. She rose fearfully. + 

“He’s not a bad man,” she whispered. + 

One morning in early summer, after Helen had returned, Eugene was wakened by scuffling feet and excited cries along the small boardwalk that skirted the house on its upper side and led to the playhouse, a musty little structure of pine with a single big room, which he could almost touch from the sloping roof that flowed about his gabled backroom window. The playhouse was another of the strange extravagancies of Gantian fancy: it had been built for the children when they were young. It had been for many years closed, it was a retreat of delight; its imprisoned air, stale and cool, was scented permanently with old pine boards, cased books, and dusty magazines. + 

For some weeks now it had been occupied by Mrs. Selborne’s South Carolina cook, Annie, a plump comely negress of thirty-five, with a rich coppery skin. The woman had come into the mountains for the summer: she was a good cook and expected work at hotels or boardinghouses. Helen engaged her for five dollars a week. It was an act of pride. + 

That morning, Gant had wakened earlier and stared at his ceiling thoughtfully. He had risen, dressed, and wearing his leather slippers, walked softly back, along the boards, to the playhouse. Helen was roused by Annie’s loud protests. Tingling with premonition she came downstairs, and found Gant wringing his hands and moaning as he walked up and down the washroom. Through the open doors she heard the negress complaining loudly to herself as she banged out drawers and slammed her belongings together. + 

“I ain’t used to no such goins-on. I’se a married woman, I is. I ain’t goin’ to stay in dis house anothah minnit.” + 

Helen turned furiously upon Gant and shook him. + 

“You rotten old thing, you!” she cried. “How dare you!” + 

“Merciful God!” he whined, stamping his foot like a child, and pacing up and down. “Why did this have to come upon me in my old age!” He began to sniffle affectedly. “Boo-hoo-hoo! O Jesus, it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s cruel that you should put this affliction on me.” His contempt for reason was Parnassian. He accused God for exposing him; he wept because he had been caught. + 

Helen rushed out to the playhouse and with large gesture and hearty entreaty strove to appease outraged Annie. + 

“Come on, Annie,” she coaxed. “I’ll give you a dollar a week more if you stay. Forget about it!” + 

“No’m,” said Annie stubbornly. “I cain’t stay heah any longer. I’se afraid of dat man.” + 

Gant paused in his distracted pacing from time to time long enough to cock an eager ear. At each iteration of Annie’s firm refusals, he fetched out a deep groan and took up his lament again. + 

Luke, who had descended, had fidgeted about in a nervous prance from one large bare foot to another. Now he went to the door and looked out, bursting suddenly into a large Whah-Whah as he caught sight of the sullen respectability of the negress’ expression. Helen came back into the house with an angry perturbed face. + 

“She’ll tell this all over town,” she announced. + 

Gant moaned in lengthy exhalations. Eugene, shocked at first, and frightened, flung madly across the kitchen linoleum in twisting leaps, falling catlike on his bare soles. He squealed ecstatically at Ben who loped in scowling, and began to snicker in short contemptuous fragments. + 

“And of course she’ll tell Mrs. Selborne all about it, as soon as she goes back to Henderson,” Helen continued. + 

“O my God!” Gant whined, “why was this put on me⁠—” + 

“O gotohell! Gotohell!” she said comically, her wrath loosened suddenly by a ribald and exasperated smile. They howled. + 

“I shall dy-ee.” + 

Eugene choked in faint hiccups and began to slide gently down the kitchen-washroom door jamb. + 

“Ah! you little idiot!” Ben snarled, lifting his white hand sharply. He turned away quickly with a flickering smile. + 

At this moment, Annie appeared on the walk outside the door, with a face full of grieved decorum. + 

Luke looked nervously and gravely from his father to the negress, fidgeting from one big foot to the other. + 

“I’se a married woman,” said Anna. “I ain’t used to nothin’ like dis. I wants my money.” + 

Luke blew up in an explosion of wild laughter. + 

“Whah-whah!” He pronged her larded ribs with scooped fingers. She moved away angrily, muttering. + 

Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one leg out gently as if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling blindly at the neckband of his nightshirt. A faint clucking sound came at intervals from his wide-open mouth. + 

They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad laughter all the welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered in them, washing out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and fatality of their lives, the pain of age and death. + 

Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament against God’s lidless stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with uneasy prying eyes, a faint tickled grin playing craftily about his wailing mouth. + 

Roofing the deep tides, swinging in their embrace, rocked Eliza’s life Sargassic, as when, at morning, a breath of kitchen air squirmed through her guarded crack of door, and fanned the pendant clusters of old string in floating rhythm. She rubbed the sleep gently from her small weak eyes, smiling dimly as she thought, unwakened, of ancient losses. Her worn fingers still groped softly in the bed beside her, and when she found it vacant, she awoke. Remembered. My youngest, my oldest, final bitter fruit, O dark of soul, O far and lonely, where? Remembered O his face! Death-son, partner of my peril, last coinage of my flesh, who warmed my flanks and nestled to my back. Gone? Cut off from me? When? Where? + 

The screen slammed, the market boy dumped ground sausage on the table, a negress fumbled at the stove. Awake now. + 

Ben moved quietly, but not stealthily, about, confessing and denying nothing. His thin laughter pierced the darkness softly above the droning creak of the wooden porch-swing. Mrs. Pert laughed gently, comfortingly. She was forty-three: a large woman of gentle manners, who drank a great deal. When she was drunk, her voice was soft, low, and fuzzy, she laughed uncertainly, mildly, and walked with careful alcoholic gravity. She dressed well: she was well fleshed, but not sensual-looking. She had good features, soft oaken hair, blue eyes, a little bleared. She laughed with a comfortable, happy chuckle. They were all very fond of her. Helen called her “Fatty.” + 

Her husband was a drug salesman: he travelled through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and returned to Altamont for a fortnight every four months. Her daughter, Catherine, who was almost Ben’s age, came to Dixieland for a few weeks each summer. She was a schoolteacher in a public school in a Tennessee village. Ben squired both. + 

Mrs. Pert chuckled softly when she spoke to him, and called him “Old Ben.” In the darkness he sat, talking a little, humming a little, laughing occasionally in his thin minor key, quietly, with a cigarette between his forked ivory fingers, drawing deeply. He would buy a flask of whisky and they would drink it very quietly. Perhaps they talked a little more. But they were never riotous. Occasionally, they would rise at midnight from the swing, and go out into the street, departing under leafy trees. They would not return during the night. Eliza, ironing out a great pile of rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would listen. Presently, she would mount the stairs, peer carefully into Mrs. Pert’s room, and descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded. + 

She had to speak these things to Helen. There was a strange defiant communion between them. They laughed or were bitter together. + 

“Why, of course,” said Helen, impatiently, “I’ve known it all along.” But she looked beyond the door curiously, her big gold-laced teeth half-shown in her open mouth, the child look of belief, wonder, scepticism, and hurt innocency in her big high-boned face. + 

“Do you suppose he really does? Oh surely not mama. She’s old enough to be his mother.” + 

Across Eliza’s white puckered face, thoughtful and reproving, a sly smile broke. She rubbed her finger under the broad wings of her nose to conceal it, and snickered. + 

“I tell you what!” she said. “He’s a chip off the old block. His father over again,” she whispered. “It’s in the blood.” + 

Helen laughed huskily, picking vaguely at her chin, and gazing out across the weedy garden. + 

“Poor old Ben!” she said, and her eyes, she did not know why, were sheeted with tears. “Well, ‘Fatty’s’ a lady. I like her⁠—I don’t care who knows it,” she added defiantly. “It’s their business anyway. They’re quiet about it. You’ve got to say that much for them.” + 

She was silent a moment. + 

“Women are crazy about him,” she said. “They like the quiet ones, don’t they? He’s a gentleman.” + 

Eliza shook her head portentously for several moments. + 

“What do you think!” she whispered, and shook her pursed lips again. “Always ten years older at least.” + 

“Poor old Ben!” Helen said again. + 

“The quiet one, the sad one. I tell you what!” Eliza shook her head, unable to speak. Her eyes too were wet. + 

They thought of sons and lovers: they drew closer in their communion, they drank the cup of their twin slavery as they thought of the Gant men who would always know hunger, the strangers on the land, the unknown farers who had lost their way. O lost! + 

The hands of women were hungry for his crisp hair. When they came to the paper office to insert advertisements they asked for him. Frowning gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet crossed, reading, in a somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had written. His thin hairy wrists slatted leanly against his starched white cuffs, his strong nervous fingers, ivoried by nicotine, smoothed out the crumples. Scowling intently, he bent his fine head, erasing, arranging. Emphatic ladyfingers twitched. “How’s that?” Answers vague-voiced, eyes tangled in crisp hair. “Oh, much better, thank you.” + 

Wanted: frowning boy-man head for understanding fingers of mature and sympathetic woman. Unhappily married. Address Mrs. B. J. X., Box 74. Eight cents a word for one insertion. “Oh, [tenderly] thank you, Ben.” + 

“Ben,” said Jack Eaton, the advertising manager, thrusting his plump face into the city editor’s office, “one of your harem’s out there. She wanted to murder me when I tried to take it. See if she’s got a friend.” + 

“Oh, listen to this, won’t you?” Ben snickered fiercely to the City Editor. “You missed your calling, Eaton. What you want is the endman’s job with Honeyboy Evans.” + 

Scowling, he cast the cigarette from his ivory hand, and loped out into the office. Eaton remained a moment to laugh with the City Editor. O rare Ben Gant! + 

Sometimes, returning late at night to Woodson Street, in the crowded summer season, he slept with Eugene in the front room upstairs where they had all been born. Propped high on pillows in the old cream-colored bed, painted gaily at head and foot with round medals of clustering fruit, he read aloud in a quiet puzzled voice, fumbling over pronunciation, the baseball stories of Ring Lardner. You know me, Al. Just outside the windows the flat veranda roof was still warm from its daytime exhalations of tar-calked tin. Rich cobwebbed grapes hung in packed clusters among the broad leaves. I didn’t raise my boy to be a southpaw. I’ve a good mind to give Gleason a sock in the eye. + 

Ben read painfully, pausing a moment later to snicker. Thus, like a child, he groped intently at all meanings, with scowling studiousness. Women liked to see him scowl and study so. He was sudden only in anger, and in his quick communications with his angel. + 

XXII + 

Toward the beginning of Eugene’s fourteenth year, when he had been a student at Leonard’s for two years, Ben got work for him as a paper carrier. Eliza grumbled at the boy’s laziness. She complained that she could get him to do little or nothing for her. In fact, he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of boardinghouse routine. Her demands on him were not heavy, but they were frequent and unexpected. He was depressed at the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure of all daily labor. If she had given him position, the daily responsibility of an ordered task, he could have fulfilled it with zeal. But her own method was much too random: she wanted to keep him on tap for an occasional errand, and he did not have her interest. + 

Dixieland was the heart of her life. It owned her. It appalled him. When she sent him to the grocer’s for bread, he felt wearily that the bread would be eaten by strangers, that nothing out of the effort of their lives grew younger, better, or more beautiful, that all was erased in a daily wash of sewage. She sent him forth in the rank thicket of her garden to hoe out the swarming weeds that clustered about her vegetables, which flourished, as did all the earth, under her careless touch. He knew, as he chopped down in a weary frenzy, that the weeds would grow again in the hot sun-stench, that her vegetables⁠—weeded or not⁠—would grow fat and be fed to her boarders, and that her life, hers alone, would endure to something. As he looked at her, he felt the weariness and horror of time: all but her must die in a smothering Sargasso. Thus, flailing the clotted earth drunkenly, he would be brought to suddenly by her piercing scream from the high back porch, and realize that he had destroyed totally a row of young bladed corn. + 

“Why, what on earth, boy!” she fretted angrily, peering down at him through a shelving confusion of washtubs, limp drying stockings, empty milk-bottles, murky and unwashed, and rusty lard-buckets. “I’ll vow!” she said, turning to Mr. Baskett, the Hattiesburg cotton merchant, who grinned down malarially through his scraggly mustaches, “what am I going to do with him? He’s chopped down every stock of corn in the row.” + 

“Yes,” Mr. Baskett said, peering over, “and missed every weed. Boy,” he added judicially, “you need two months on a farm.” + 

The bread that I fetch will be eaten by strangers. I carry coal and split up wood for fires to warm them. Smoke. Fuimus fumus. All of our life goes up in smoke. There is no structure, no creation in it, not even the smoky structure of dreams. Come lower, angel; whisper in our ears. We are passing away in smoke and there is nothing today but weariness to pay us for yesterday’s toil. How may we save ourselves? + 

He was given the Niggertown route⁠—the hardest and least profitable of all. He was paid two cents a copy for weekly deliveries, given ten percent of his weekly collections, and ten cents for every new subscription. Thus, he was able to earn four or five dollars a week. His thin undeveloped body drank sleep with insatiable thirst, but it was now necessary for him to get up at half-past three in the morning with darkness and silence making an unreal humming in his drugged ears. + 

Strange aerial music came fluting out of darkness, or over his slow-wakening senses swept the great waves of symphonic orchestration. Fiend-voices, beautiful and sleep-loud, called down through darkness and light, developing the thread of ancient memory. + 

Staggering blindly in the whitewashed glare, his eyes, sleepcorded opened slowly as he was born anew, umbilically cut, from darkness. + 

Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness. Waken, phantom, O into us. Try, try, O try the way. Open the wall of light. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O lost. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O whisper-tongued laughter. Eugene! Eugene! Here, O here, Eugene. Here, Eugene. The way is here, Eugene. Have you forgotten? The leaf, the rock, the wall of light. Lift up the rock, Eugene, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door. Return, return. + 

A voice, sleep-strange and loud, forever far-near, spoke. + 

Eugene! + 

Spoke, ceased, continued without speaking, to speak. In him spoke. Where darkness, son, is light. Try, boy, the word you know remember. In the beginning was the logos. Over the border the borderless green-forested land. Yesterday, remember? + 

Far-forested, a horn-note wound. Sea-forested, water-far, the grotted coral sea-far horn-note. The pillioned ladies witch-faced in bottle-green robes saddle-swinging. Merwomen unscaled and lovely in sea-floor colonnades. The hidden land below the rock. The flitting wood-girls growing into bark. Far-faint, as he wakened, they besought him with lessening whir. Then deeper song, fiend-throated, wind-shod. Brother, O brother! They shot down the brink of darkness, gone on the wind like bullets. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. + 

He dressed and descended the stairs gently to the back porch. The cool air, charged with blue starlight, shocked his body into wakefulness, but as he walked townward up the silent streets, the strange ringing in his ears persisted. He listened like his own ghost, to his footsteps, heard from afar the winking flicker of the streetlamps, saw, from sea-sunk eyes, the town. + 

There sounded in his heart a solemn music. It filled the earth, the air, the universe; it was not loud, but it was omnipresent, and it spoke to him of death and darkness, and of the focal march of all who lived or had lived, converging on a plain. The world was filled with silent marching men: no word was spoken, but in the heart of each there was a common knowledge, the word that all men knew and had forgotten, the lost key opening the prison gates, the lane-end into heaven, and as the music soared and filled him, he cried: “I will remember. When I come to the place, I shall know.” + 

Hot bands of light streamed murkily from the doors and windows of the office. From the press-room downstairs there was an ascending roar as the big press mounted to its capacity. As he entered the office and drank in the warm tides of steel and ink that soaked the air, he awoke suddenly, his light-drugged limbs solidifying with a quick shock, as would some aerial spirit, whose floating body corporealizes the instant it touches earth. The carriers, waiting in a boisterous line, filed up to the circulation manager’s desk, depositing their collections, cold handfuls of greasy coin. Seated beneath a green-shaded light, he ran swiftly down their books, totalling up their figures and counting nickels, dimes, and pennies into little spooned trays of a drawer. Then he gave to each a scrawled order for his morning quota. + 

They ran downstairs, eager as whippets to be off, brandishing their slips at a sullen counter whose black fingers galloped accurately across the stiff ridges of a great sheaf. He allowed them two “extras.” If the carrier was not scrupulous, he increased his number of spare copies by keeping on his book the names of a half-dozen discontinued subscribers. These surplus copies were always good for coffee and pie with the lunchman, or as tribute to a favorite policeman, fireman, or motorman. + 

In the press-pit Harry Tugman loafed under their stare comfortably, a fat trickle of cigarette smoke coiling from his nostrils. He glanced over the press with professional carelessness, displaying his powerful chest with its thick bush, which lay a dark blot under his sweat-wet undershirt. An assistant pressman climbed nimbly among roaring pistons and cylinders, an oilcan and a bunch of waste in his hand. A broad river of white paper rushed constantly up from the cylinder and leaped into a mangling chaos of machinery whence it emerged a second later, cut, printed, folded and stacked, sliding along a board with a hundred others in a fattening sheaf. + 

Machine-magic! Why not men, like that? Doctor, surgeon, poet, priest⁠—stacked, folded, printed. + 

Harry Tugman cast away his wet fragment of cigarette with a luxurious grimace. The carriers eyed him reverently. Once he had knocked a sub-pressman down for sitting in his chair. He was Boss. He got $55 a week. If he was not pleased he could get work at any time on the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Louisville Courier Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, the Knoxville Sentinel, the Norfolk Pilot. He could travel. + 

In a moment more they were out on the streets, hobbling along rapidly under the accustomed weight of the crammed canvas bags. + 

He was most desperately afraid of failure. He listened with constricted face to Eliza’s admonition. + 

“Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Make them think you are somebody!” + 

He had little confidence in himself; he recoiled in advance from the humiliation of dismissal. He feared the sabre-cut of language, and before his own pride he drew back and was afraid. + 

For three mornings he accompanied the retiring carrier, gathering his mind to focal intensity while he tried to memorize each stereotyped movement of the delivery, tracing again and again the labyrinthine web of Niggertown, wreaking his plan out among the sprawled chaos of clay and slime, making incandescent those houses to which a paper was delivered, and forgetting the others. Years later, alone in darkness, when he had forgotten the twisted anarchy of that pattern, he still remembered a corner where he left his bag while he climbed a spur of hill, a bank down which he clambered to three rotting shacks, a high porched house into which accurately he shot his folded block of news. + 

The retiring carrier was a robust country boy of seventeen who had been given better employment at the paper office. His name was Jennings Ware. He was tough, good-humored, a little cynical, and he smoked a great many cigarettes. He was clothed in vitality and comfort. He taught his pupil when and where to expect the prying face of “Foxy,” how to escape discovery under the lunchroom counter, and how to fold a paper and throw it with the speed and accuracy of a ball. + 

In the fresh prenatal morning they began their route, walking down the steep hill of Valley Street into tropical sleep, past the stabled torpor of black sleepers, past all the illicit loves, the casual and innumerable adulteries of Niggertown. As the stiff block of paper thudded sharply on the flimsy porch of a shack, or smacked the loose boarding of a door, they were answered by a long sullen moan of discontent. They sniggered. + 

“Check this one off,” said Jennings Ware, “if you can’t collect next time. She owes for six weeks now.” + 

“This one,” he said, flipping a paper quietly on a door mat, “is good pay. They’re good niggers. You’ll get your money every Wednesday.” + 

“There’s a High Yaller in here,” he said, hurling the paper against the door with a whizzing smack and smiling, as a young full-meated woman’s yell of indignation answered, a thin devil’s grin. “You can have that if you want it.” + 

A wan smile of fear struggled across Eugene’s mouth. Jennings Ware looked at him shrewdly, but did not press him. Jennings Ware was a good-hearted boy. + 

“She’s a pretty good old girl,” he said. “You’ve got a right to a few deadheads. Take it out in trade.” + 

They walked on down the dark unpaved street, folding papers rapidly during the intervals between delivery. + 

“It’s a hell of a route,” said Jennings Ware. “When it rains it’s terrible. You’ll go into mud up to your knees. And you can’t collect from half the bastards.” He hurled a paper viciously. + 

“But, oh man,” he said, after a moment. “If you want Jelly Roll you’ve come to the right place. I ain’t kidding you!” + 

“With⁠—with niggers?” Eugene whispered, moistening his dry lips. + 

Jennings Ware turned his red satirical face on him. + 

“You don’t see any Society Belles around here, do you?” he said. + 

“Are niggers good?” Eugene asked in a small dry voice. + 

“Boy!” The word blew out of Jennings Ware’s mouth like an explosion. He was silent a moment. + 

“There ain’t nothing better,” he said. + 

At first, the canvas strap of the paper-bag bit cruelly across his slender shoulders. He strained against the galling weight that pulled him earth-wards. The first weeks were like a warring nightmare: day after day he fought his way up to liberation. He knew all the sorrow of those who carry weight; he knew, morning by morning, the aerial ecstasy of release. As his load lightened with the progress of his route, his leaning shoulder rose with winged buoyancy, his straining limbs grew light: at the end of his labor his flesh, touched sensuously by fatigue, bounded lightly from the earth. He was Mercury chained by fardels, Ariel bent beneath a pack: freed, his wingshod feet trod brightness. He sailed in air. The rapier stars glinted upon his serfdom: dawn reddened on release. He was like a sailor drowned within the hold, who gropes to life and morning through a hatch; a diver twined desperately in octopal feelers, who cuts himself from death and mounts slowly from the sea-floor into light. + 

Within a month a thick hummock of muscle hardened on his shoulder: he bent jubilantly into his work. He had now no fear of failure. His heart lifted like a proud crested cock. He had been dropped among others without favor, and he surpassed them. He was a lord of darkness; he exulted in the lonely sufficiency of his work. He walked into the sprawled chaos of the settlement, the rifleman of news for sleeping men. His fast hands blocked the crackling sheet, he swung his lean arm like a whip. He saw the pale stars drown, and ragged light break open on the hills. Alone, the only man alive, he began the day for men, as he walked by the shuttered windows and heard the long denned snore of the tropics. He walked amid this close thick sleep, hearing again the ghostly ring of his own feet, and the vast orchestral music of darkness. As the gray tide of morning surged westward he awoke. + 

And Eugene watched the slow fusion of the seasons; he saw the royal processional of the months; he saw the summer light eat like a river into dark; he saw dark triumph once again; and he saw the minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death. + 

In summer, full day had come before he finished: he walked home in a world of wakenings. The first cars were grouped on the Square as he passed, their new green paint giving them the pleasant appearance of fresh toys. The huge battered cans of the milkmen glinted cleanly in the sun. Light fell hopefully upon the swarthy greasiness of George Chakales, nightman of the Athens Café. The Hellenic Dawn. And in Uneeda No. 1, upon the Square, Eugene sat, washing an egg-sandwich down with long swallows of pungent coffee, stooled in a friendly company of motormen, policemen, chauffeurs, plasterers, and masons. It was very pleasant, he felt, to complete one’s work when all the world was beginning theirs. He went home under singing trees of birds. + 

In autumn, a late red moon rode low in the skies till morning. The air was filled with dropping leaves, there was a solemn thunder of great trees upon the hills; sad phantasmal whisperings and the vast cathedral music deepened in his heart. + 

In winter, he went down joyously into the dark howling wind, leaning his weight upon its advancing wall as it swept up a hill; and when in early Spring the small cold rain fell from the reeking sky he was content. He was alone. + 

He harried his deficient subscribers for payment, with a wild tenacity. He accepted their easy promises without question; he hunted them down in their own rooms, or in the rooms of a neighbor, he pressed so doggedly that, at length, sullenly or good-humoredly, they paid a part of their debt. This was more than any of his predecessors had accomplished, but he fretted nervously over his accounts until he found that he had become, for the circulation manager, the exemplar for indolent boys. As he dumped his desperately gathered pile of “chicken feed” upon the man’s desk, his employer would turn accusingly to a delinquent boy, saying: + 

“Look at that! He does it every week! Niggers, too!” + 

His pallid face would flame with joy and pride. When he spoke to the great man his voice trembled. He could hardly speak. + 

As the wind yelled through the dark, he burst into maniacal laughter. He leaped high into the air with a scream of insane exultancy, burred in his throat idiot animal-squeals, and shot his papers terrifically into the flimsy boarding of the shacks. He was free. He was alone. He heard the howl of a train-whistle, and it was not so far away. In the darkness he flung his arm out to the man on the rails, his goggled brother with steel-steady rail-fixed eyes. + 

He did not shrink so much, beneath the menace of the family fist. He was more happily unmindful of his own unworthiness. + 

Assembled with three or four of the carriers in the lunchroom, he learned to smoke: in the sweet blue air of Spring, as he sloped down to his route, he came to know the beauty of Lady Nicotine, the delectable wraith who coiled into his brain, left her poignant breath in his young nostrils, her sharp kiss upon his mouth. + 

He was a sharp blade. + 

The Spring drove a thorn into his heart, it drew a wild cry from his lips. For it, he had no speech. + 

He knew hunger. He knew thirst. A great flame rose in him. He cooled his hot face in the night by bubbling water jets. Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and ecstasy. At home the frightened silence of his childhood was now touched with savage restraint. He was wired like a racehorse. A white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him like a rocket, and for a moment he would be cursing mad. + 

“What’s wrong with him? Is it the Pentland crazy streak coming out?” Helen asked, seated in Eliza’s kitchen. + 

Eliza moulded her lips portentously for some time, shaking her head slowly. + 

“Why,” she said, with a cunning smile, “don’t you know, child?” + 

His need for the negroes had become acute. He spent his afternoons after school combing restlessly through the celled hive of Niggertown. The rank stench of the branch, pouring its thick brown sewage down a bed of worn boulders, the smell of wood-smoke and laundry stewing in a black iron yard-pot, and the low jungle cadences of dusk, the forms that slid, dropped, and vanished, beneath a twinkling orchestration of small sounds. Fat ropes of language in the dusk, the larded sizzle of frying fish, the sad faint twanging of a banjo, and the stamp, far-faint, of heavy feet; voices Nilotic, river-wailing, and the greasy light of four thousand smoky lamps in shack and tenement. + 

From the worn central butte round which the colony swarmed, the panting voices of the Calvary Baptist Church mounted, in an exhausting and unceasing frenzy, from seven o’clock until two in the morning, in their wild jungle wail of sin and love and death. The dark was hived with flesh and mystery. Rich wells of laughter bubbled everywhere. The cat-forms slid. Everything was immanent. Everything was far. Nothing could be touched. + 

In this old witch-magic of the dark, he began to know the awful innocence of evil, the terrible youth of an ancient race; his lips slid back across his teeth, he prowled in darkness with loose swinging arms, and his eyes shone. Shame and terror, indefinable, surged through him. He could not face the question in his heart. + 

A good part of his subscription list was solidly founded among decent and laborious darkies⁠—barbers, tailors, grocers, pharmacists, and ginghamed black housewives, who paid him promptly on a given day each week, greeting him with warm smiles full of teeth, and titles of respect extravagant and kindly: “Mister,” “Colonel,” “General,” “Governor,” and so on. They all knew Gant. + 

But another part⁠—the part in which his desire and wonder met⁠—were “floaters,” young men and women of precarious means, variable lives, who slid mysteriously from cell to cell, who peopled the night with their flitting stealth. He sought these phantoms fruitlessly for weeks, until he discovered that he might find them only on Sunday morning, tossed like heavy sacks across one another, in the fetid dark of a tenement room, a half-dozen young men and women, in a snoring exhaustion of whisky-stupor and sexual depletion. + 

One Saturday evening, in the fading red of a summer twilight, he returned to one of these tenements, a rickety three-story shack, that cropped its two lower floors down a tall clay bank at the western ledge, near the whites. Two dozen men and women lived here. He was on the search for a woman named Ella Corpening. He had never been able to find her: she was weeks behind in her subscriptions. But her door stood open tonight: a warm waft of air and cooking food came up to him. He descended the rotten steps that climbed the bank. + 

Ella Corpening sat facing the door in a rocking chair, purring lazily in the red glow of a little kitchen range, with her big legs stretched comfortably out on the floor. She was a mulatto of twenty-six years, a handsome woman of Amazonian proportions, with smooth tawny skin. + 

She was dressed in the garments of some former mistress: she wore a brown woollen skirt, patent-leather shoes with high suede tops pearl-buttoned, and gray silk hose. Her long heavy arms shone darkly through the light texture of a freshly laundered white shirtwaist. A lacing of cheap blue ribbon gleamed across the heavy curve of her breasts. + 

There was a bubbling pot of cabbage and sliced fat pork upon the stove. + 

“Paper boy,” said Eugene. “Come to collect.” + 

“Is you de boy?” drawled Ella Corpening with a lazy movement of her arm. “How much does I owe?” + 

“$1.20,” he answered. He looked meaningfully at one extended leg, where, thrust in below the knee, a wadded banknote gleamed dully. + 

“Dat’s my rent money,” she said. “Can’t give you dat. Dollah-twenty!” She brooded. “Uh! Uh!” she grunted pleasantly. “Don’t seem lak it ought to be dat much.” + 

“It is, though,” he said, opening his account book. + 

“It mus’ is,” she agreed, “if de book say so.” + 

She meditated luxuriously for a moment. + 

“Does you collec’ Sunday mawnin’?” she asked. + 

“Yes,” he said. + 

“You come roun’ in de mawnin’,” she said hopefully. “I’ll have somethin’ fo’ yuh, sho. I’se waitin’ fo’ a white gent’man now. He’s goin’ gib me a dollah.” + 

She moved her great limbs slowly, and smiled at him. Forked pulses beat against his eyes. He gulped dryly: his legs were rotten with excitement. + 

“What’s⁠—what’s he going to give you a dollar for?” he muttered, barely audible. + 

“Jelly Roll,” said Ella Corpening. + 

He moved his lips twice, unable to speak. She got up from her chair. “What yo’ want?” she asked softly. “Jelly Roll?” + 

“Want to see⁠—to see!” he gasped. + 

She closed the door opening on the bank and locked it. The stove cast a grated glow from its open ashpan. There was a momentary rain of red cinders into the pit. + 

Ella Corpening opened the door beyond that, leading to another room. There were two dirty rumpled beds; the single window was bolted and covered by an old green shade. She lit a smoky little lamp, and turned the wick low. + 

There was a battered little dresser with a mottled glass, from which the blistered varnish was flaking. Over the screened hearth, on a low mantel, there was a Kewpie doll, sashed with pink ribbon, a vase with fluted edges and gilt flowers, won at a carnival, and a paper of pins. A calendar, also, by courtesy of the Altamont Coal and Ice Company, showing an Indian maid paddling her canoe down an alley of paved moonlight, and a religious motto in flowered scrollwork, framed in walnut: God Loves Them Both. + 

“What yo’ want?” she whispered, facing him. + 

Far off, he listened to the ghost of his own voice. + 

“Take off your clothes.” + 

Her skirt fell in a ring about her feet. She took off her starched waist. In a moment, save for her hose, she stood naked before him. Her breath came quickly, her full tongue licked across her mouth. + 

“Dance!” he cried. “Dance!” + 

She began to moan softly, while an undulant tremor flowed through her great yellow body; her hips and her round heavy breasts writhed slowly in a sensual rhythm. + 

Her straight oiled hair fell across her neck in a thick shock. She extended her arms for balance, the lids closed over her large yellow eyeballs. She came near him. He felt her hot breath on his face, the smothering flood of her breasts. He was whirled like a chip in the wild torrent of her passion. Her powerful yellow hands gripped his slender arms round like bracelets. She shook him to and fro slowly, fastening him tightly against her pelt. + 

He strained back desperately against the door, drowning in her embrace. + 

“Get-’way nigger. Get-’way,” he panted thickly. + 

Slowly she released him: without opening her eyes, moaning, she slid back as if he had been a young tree. She sang, in a wailing minor key, with unceasing iteration: + 

“Jelly Roll! Je‑e‑e‑lly Roll!⁠—” + 

her voice falling each time to a low moan. + 

Her face, the broad column of her throat, and her deep-breasted torso were rilled with sweat. He fumbled blindly for the door, lunged across the outer room and, gasping, found his way into the air. Her chant, unbroken and undisturbed by his departure, followed him up the flimsy steps. He did not pause to get his breath until he came to the edge of the market square. Below him in the valley, across on the butte, the smoky lamps of Niggertown flared in the dusk. Faint laughter, rich, jungle-wild, welled up from hived darkness. He heard lost twangling notes, the measured thump of distant feet; beyond, above, more thin, more far than all, the rapid wail of sinners in a church. + 

He did not tell the Leonards that he was working in the early morning. He knew they would oppose his employment, and that their opposition would manifest itself in the triumphant argument of lowered grades. Also, Margaret Leonard, he knew, would talk ominously of health undermined, of the promise of future years destroyed, of the sweet lost hours of morning sleep that could never be regained. He was really more robust now than he had ever been. He was heavier and stronger. But he sometimes felt a gnawing hunger for sleep: he grew heavy at midday, revived in the afternoon, but found it difficult to keep his sleepy brain fixed on a book after eight o’clock in the evening. + 

He learned little of discipline. Under the care of the Leonards he came even to have a romantic contempt for it. Margaret Leonard had the marvellous vision, of great people, for essences. She saw always the dominant color, but she did not always see the shadings. She was an inspired sentimentalist. She thought she “knew boys”: she was proud of her knowledge of them. In fact, however, she had little knowledge of them. She would have been stricken with horror if she could have known the wild confusion of adolescence, the sexual nightmares of puberty, the grief, the fear, the shame in which a boy broods over the dark world of his desire. She did not know that every boy, caged in from confession by his fear, is to himself a monster. + 

She did not have knowledge. But she had wisdom. She found immediately a person’s quality. Boys were her heroes, her little gods. She believed that the world was to be saved, life redeemed, by one of them. She saw the flame that burns in each of them, and she guarded it. She tried somehow to reach the dark gropings toward light and articulation, of the blunt, the stolid, the shamefast. She spoke a calm low word to the trembling racehorse, and he was still. + 

Thus, he made no confessions. He was still prison-pent. But he turned always to Margaret Leonard as toward the light: she saw the unholy fires that cast their sword-dance on his face, she saw the hunger and the pain, and she fed him⁠—majestic crime!⁠—on poetry. + 

Whatever of fear or shame locked them in careful silence, whatever decorous pretense of custom guarded their tongues, they found release in the eloquent symbols of verse. And by that sign, Margaret was lost to the good angels. For what care the ambassadors of Satan, for all the small fidelities of the letter and the word, if from the singing choir of earthly methodism we can steal a single heart⁠—lift up, flame-tipped, one great lost soul to the high sinfulness of poetry? + 

The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of poetry was inextinguishably mixed with her blood, entombed in her flesh. + 

By the beginning of his fifteenth year Eugene knew almost every major lyric in the language. He possessed them to their living core, not in a handful of scattered quotations, but almost line for line. His thirst was drunken, insatiate: he added to his hoard entire scenes from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, which he read by himself in German; the lyrics of Heine, and several folk songs. He committed to memory the entire passage in the Anabasis, the mounting and triumphal Greek which described the moment when the starving remnant of the Ten Thousand had come at length to the sea, and sent up their great cry, calling it by name. In addition, he memorized some of the sonorous stupidities of Cicero, because of the sound, and a little of Caesar, terse and lean. + 

The great lyrics of Burns he knew from music, from reading, or from hearing Gant recite them. But “Tam O’Shanter” Margaret Leonard read to him, her eyes sparkling with laughter as she read: + 

“In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin’.” + 

The shorter Wordsworth pieces he had read at grammar school. “My heart leaps up,” “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” and “Behold her, single in the field,” he had known for years; but Margaret read him the sonnets and made him commit “The world is too much with us” to memory. Her voice trembled and grew low with passion when she read it. + 

He knew all the songs in Shakespeare’s plays, but the two that moved him most were: “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” which blew a far horn in his heart, and the great song from Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” He had tried to read all the sonnets, and failed, because their woven density was too much for his experience, but he had read, and forgotten, perhaps half of them, and remembered a few which burned up from the page, strangely, immediately, like lamps for him. + 

Those that he knew were: “When, in the chronicle of wasted time,” “To me, fair friend, you never can be old,” “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” “From you have I been absent in the spring,” and “That time of year thou mayest in me behold,” the greatest of all, which Margaret brought him to, and which shot through him with such electric ecstasy when he came to “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” that he could hardly hold his course unbroken through the rest of it. + 

He read all the plays save Timon, Titus Andronicus, Pericles, Coriolanus, and King John, but the only play that held his interest from first to last was King Lear. With most of the famous declamatory passages he had been familiar, for years, by Gant’s recitation, and now they wearied him. And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the master’s swingeing wit, he felt vaguely were very dull. He never had any confidence in Shakespeare’s humor⁠—his Touchstones were not only windy fools, but dull ones. + 

“For my part I had rather bear with you than bear you; yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your purse.” + 

This sort of thing reminded him unpleasantly of the Pentlands. The Fool in Lear alone he thought admirable⁠—a sad, tragic, mysterious fool. For the rest, he went about and composed parodies, which, with a devil’s grin, he told himself would split the sides of posterity. Such as: “Aye, nuncle, an if Shrove Tuesday come last Wednesday, I’ll do the capon to thy cock, as Tom O’Ludgate told the shepherd when he found the cowslips gone. Dost bay with two throats, Cerberus? Down, boy, down!” + 

The admired beauties he was often tired of, perhaps because he had heard them so often, and it seemed to him, moreover, that Shakespeare often spoke absurdly and pompously when he might better have spoken simply, as in the scene where, being informed by the Queen of the death of his sister by drowning, Laertes says: + 

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, + 

And therefore I forbid my tears. + 

You really can’t beat that (he thought). Aye, Ben! Would he had blotted a hundred! A thousand! + 

But he was deep in other passages which the elocutionist misses, such as the terrible and epic invocation of Edmund, in King Lear, drenched in evil, which begins: + 

Thou, Nature, art my goddess, + 

and ends, + 

Now, gods, stand up for bastards. + 

It was as dark as night, as evil as Niggertown, as vast as the elemental winds that howled down across the hills: he chanted it in the black hours of his labor, into the dark and the wind. He understood; he exulted in its evil⁠—which was the evil of earth, of illicit nature. It was a call to the unclassed; it was a cry for those beyond the fence, for rebel angels, and for all of the men who are too tall. + 

He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond Shakespeare’s plays. But he very early came to know a little of the poetry of Ben Jonson, whom Margaret looked on as a literary Falstaff, condoning, with the familiar weakness of the schoolmarm, his Gargantuan excesses as a pardonable whimsy of genius. + 

She was somewhat academically mirthful over the literary bacchanalia, as a professor in a Baptist college smacks his lips appetizingly and beams ruddily at his classes when he reads of sack and porter and tankards foaming with the musty ale. All this is part of the liberal tradition. Men of the world are broad-minded. Witness Professor Albert Thorndyke Firkins, of the University of Chicago, at the Falcon in Soho. Smiling bravely, he sits over a half-pint of bitter beer, in the company of a racing tout, a swaybacked barmaid, broad in the stern, with adjustable teeth, and three companionable tarts from Lisle street, who are making the best of two pints of Guinness. With eager impatience he awaits the arrival of G. K. Chesterton and E. V. Lucas. + 

“O rare Ben Jonson!” Margaret Leonard sighed with gentle laughter. “Ah, Lord!” + 

“My God, boy!” Sheba roared, snatching the suggested motif of conversation out of the air, and licking her buttered fingers noisily as she stormed into action. “God bless him!” Her hairy red face burned like clover, her veinous eyes were tearful bright. “God bless him, ’Gene! He was as English as roast beef and a tankard of musty ale!” + 

“Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret. “He was a genius if ever there was one.” With misty eyes she gazed far off, a thread of laughter on her mouth. “Whee!” she laughed gently. “Old Ben!” + 

“And say, ’Gene!” Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand gripped upon her knee. “Do you know that the greatest tribute to Shakespeare’s genius is from his hand?” + 

“Ah, I tell you, boy!” said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her voice was husky. He was afraid she was going to weep. + 

“And yet the fools!” Sheba yelled. “The mean little two-by-two pusillanimous swill-drinking fools⁠—” + 

“Whee!” gently Margaret moaned. John Dorsey turned his chalk-white face to the boy and whined with vacant appreciation, winking his head pertly. Ah absently! + 

“⁠—for that’s all they are, have had the effrontry to suggest that he was jealous.” + 

“Pshaw!” said Margaret impatiently. “There’s nothing in that.” + 

“Why, they don’t know what they’re talking about!” Sheba turned a sudden grinning face upon him. “The little upstarts! It takes us to tell ’em, ’Gene,” she said. + 

He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair. John Dorsey slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately, drooling slightly at the mouth. + 

“The Lord a’ mercy!” he wheezed, gasping. + 

“I was talking to a feller the other day,” said Sheba, “a lawyer that you’d think might know a little something, and I used a quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that every schoolboy knows⁠—‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ The man looked at me as if he thought I was crazy!” + 

“Great heavens!” said Margaret in a still voice. + 

“I said, ‘Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you may have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are a lot of things you don’t know yet. There are a lot of things money can’t buy, my sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.’ ” + 

“Why, pshaw!” said Mr. Leonard. “What do these little whippersnappers know about the things of the mind? You might as well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to construe a passage in Homer.” He grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the table, and tilting it intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds which he slid, quivering, into his mouth. “No, sir!” he laughed. “They may be Big Men on the tax collector’s books, but when they try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says, ‘they⁠—they⁠—’ ” he began to whine, “ ‘why, they just ain’t nothin’.’ ” + 

“What shall it profit a man,” said Sheba, “if he gain the whole world, and lose⁠—” + 

“Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret, shaking her smoke-dark eyes. “I tell you!” + 

She told him. She told him of the Swan’s profound knowledge of the human heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his enormous humor. + 

“Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!” She laughed. “The fat rascal! Imagine a man keeping the time!” + 

And, carefully: “It was the custom of the time, ’Gene. As a matter of fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries you see how much purer he is than they are.” But she avoided a word, a line, here and there. The slightly spotty Swan⁠—muddied a little by custom. Then, too, the Bible. + 

The smoky candle-ends of time. Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai: Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor McTavish (D.D.) of Presbyterian College. + 

“And observe, Eugene,” she said, “he never made vice attractive.” + 

“Why didn’t he?” he asked. “There’s Falstaff.” + 

“Yes,” she replied, “and you know what happened to him, don’t you?” + 

“Why,” he considered, “he died!” + 

“You see, don’t you?” she concluded, with triumphant warning. + 

I see, don’t I? The wages of sin. What, by the way, are the wages of virtue? The good die young. + 

Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! + 

I really feel so blue! + 

I was given to crime, + 

And cut off in my prime + 

When only eighty-two. + 

“Then, note,” she said, “how none of his characters stand still. You can see them grow, from first to last. No one is the same at the end as he was in the beginning.” + 

In the beginning was the word. I am Alpha and Omega. The growth of Lear. He grew old and mad. There’s growth for you. + 

This tin-currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses at college, and in her reading. They were⁠—are, perhaps, still⁠—part of the glib jargon of pedants. But they did her no real injury. They were simply the things people said. She felt, guiltily, that she must trick out her teaching with these gauds: she was afraid that what she had to offer was not enough. What she had to offer was simply a feeling that was so profoundly right, so unerring, that she could no more utter great verse meanly than mean verse well. She was a voice that God seeks. She was the reed of demonic ecstasy. She was possessed, she knew not how, but she knew the moment of her possession. The singing tongues of all the world were wakened into life again under the incantation of her voice. She was inhabited. She was spent. + 

She passed through their barred and bolted boy-life with the direct stride of a spirit. She opened their hearts as if they had been lockets. They said: “Mrs. Leonard is sure a nice lady.” + 

He knew some of Ben Jonson’s poems, including the fine “Hymn to Diana,” “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and the great tribute to Shakespeare which lifted his hair at + 

… But call forth thundering Aeschylus, + 

Euripides and Sophocles to us⁠— + 

and caught at his throat at: + 

He was not for an age, but for all time! + 

And all the Muses still were in their prime⁠ ⁠… + 

The elegy to little Salathiel Pavy, the child actor, was honey from the lion’s mouth. But it was too long. + 

Of Herrick, sealed of the tribe of Ben, he knew much more. The poetry sang itself. It was, he thought later, the most perfect and unfailing lyrical voice in the language⁠—a clean, sweet, small, unfaltering note. It is done with the incomparable ease of an inspired child. The young men and women of our century have tried to recapture it, as they have tried to recapture Blake and, a little more successfully, Donne. + 

Here a little child I stand + 

Heaving up my either hand; + 

Cold as paddocks though they be, + 

Here I lift them up to Thee, + 

For a benison to fall + 

On our meat and on us all. Amen. + 

There was nothing beyond this⁠—nothing that surpassed it in precision, delicacy, and wholeness. + 

Their names dropped musically like small fat bird-notes through the freckled sunlight of a young world: prophetically he brooded on the sweet lost bird-cries of their names, knowing they never would return. Herrick, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, Campion, Lovelace, Dekker. O sweet content, O sweet, O sweet content! + 

He read shelves of novels: all of Thackeray, all the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and Herman Melville’s Omoo and Typee, which he found at Gant’s. Of Moby Dick he had never heard. He read a half-dozen Coopers, all of Mark Twain, but failed to finish a single book of Howells or James. + 

He read a dozen of Scott, and liked best of all Quentin Durward, because the descriptions of food were as bountiful and appetizing as any he had ever read. + 

Eliza went to Florida again during his fourteenth year and left him to board with the Leonards. Helen was drifting, with crescent weariness and fear, through the cities of the East and Middle-West. She sang for several weeks in a small cabaret in Baltimore, she moved on to Philadelphia and thumped out popular tunes on a battered piano at the music counter of a five and ten cent store, with studious tongue out-thrust as she puzzled through new scores. + 

Gant wrote her faithfully twice a week⁠—a blue but copious log of existence. Occasionally he enclosed small checks, which she saved, uncashed. + 

“Your mother,” he wrote, + 

“has gone off on another wild-goose chase to Florida, leaving me here alone to face the music, freeze, or starve. God knows what we’ll all come to before the end of this fearful, hellish, and damnable winter, but I predict the poorhouse and soup-kitchens like we had in the Cleveland administration. When the Democrats are in, you may as well begin to count your ribs. The banks have no money, people are out of work. You can mark my words everything will go to the tax-collector under the hammer before we’re done. The temperature was 7 above when I looked this morning, coal has gone up seventy-five cents a ton. The Sunny South. Keep off the grass said Bill Nye. Jesus God! I passed the Southern Fuel Co. yesterday and saw old Wagner at the window with a fiendish smile of gloatation on his face as he looked out on the sufferings of the widows and orphans. Little does he care if they all freeze. Bob Grady dropped dead Tuesday morning as he was coming out of the Citizen’s Bank. I had known him twenty-five years. He’d never been sick a day in his life. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. Old Gant will be the next. I have been eating at Mrs. Sales’ since your mother went away. You’ve never seen such a table as she keeps in your life⁠—a profusion of fruits piled up in pyramids, stewed prunes, peaches, and preserves, big roasts of pork, beef, lamb, cold cuts of ham and tongue, and a half dozen vegetables in an abundance that beggars description. How in God’s name she does it for thirty-five cents I don’t know. Eugene is staying with the Leonards while your mother’s away. I take him up to Sales’ with me once or twice a week and give him a square meal. They look mighty serious when they see those long legs coming. God knows where he puts it all⁠—he can eat more than any three people I ever saw. I suppose he gets pretty lean pickings at the school. He’s got the lean and hungry Gant look. Poor child. He has no mother any more. I’ll do the best I can for him until the smash comes. Leonard comes and brags about him every week. He says his equal is not to be found anywhere. Everyone in town has heard of him. Preston Carr (who’s sure to be the next governor) was talking to me about him the other day. He wants me to send him to the State university law school where he will make lifelong friends among the people of his own State, and then put him into politics. It’s what I should have done. I’m going to give him a good education. The rest is up to him. Perhaps he’ll be a credit to the name. You haven’t seen him since he put on long pants. His mother picked out a beautiful suit at Moale’s Christmas. He went down to Daisy’s for Christmas and put them on. I bought him a cheap pair at the Racket Store for everyday wear. He can save the good ones for Sunday. Your mother has let the Old Barn to Mrs. Revell until she gets back. I went in the other day and found it warm for the first time in my life. She keeps the furnace going and she’s not afraid to burn coal. I hardly ever see Ben from one week to another. He comes in and prowls around in the kitchen at one and two o’clock in the morning and I’m up and gone hours before he’s awake. You can get nothing out of him⁠—he never says a half-dozen words and if you ask him a civil question he cuts you off short. I see him downtown late at night sometimes with Mrs. P. They’re thick as thieves together. I guess she’s a bad egg. This is all for this time. John Duke was shot and killed by the house detective at the Whitstone hotel Sunday night. He was drunk and threatening to shoot everyone. It’s a sad thing for his wife. He left three children. She was in to see me today. He was well-liked by everyone but a terror when he drank. My heart bled for her. She’s a pretty little woman. Liquor has caused more misery than all the other evils in the world put together. I curse the day it was first invented. Enclosed find a small check to buy yourself a present. God knows what we’re coming to. + 

She saved carefully all his letters⁠—written on his heavy slick business stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his crippled right hand. + 

In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length to Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and citrous fruits, the Pentlands waited her approach, Pett with a cold lust of battle on her face, Will with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand. + 

XXIV + 

With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his torso from loin to chin. + 

“Now, let me see,” he whined with studious deliberation, “what he gives on this.” He fumbled for the notes. + 

Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the window, a low sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips. + 

Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand stroking his grave pallid face. + 

“Entgegen,” said Eugene, in a small choked voice, “follows its object.” + 

John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head, still searching the notes. + 

“I’m not so sure of that,” he said. + 

Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds. Tom Davis hurled himself violently downward over his desk. John Dorsey looked up, adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth. + 

From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught him a little German, a language of which he had been quite happily ignorant. The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked it over with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation in order to enjoy his bewilderment. Sometimes, deliberately, they salted their pages with glib false readings, sometimes they interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting exultantly for his cautious amendment of a word that did not exist. + 

“Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in which the old man was sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and finally,”⁠—Guy Doak looked up slyly at his tutor, “giving him a good punch in the eye.” + 

“No‑o,” said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin, “not exactly. ‘Catching him squarely in the eye’ gets the idiom better, I think.” + 

Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling noises into his desk, and waited for the classic evasion. It came at once. + 

“Let me see,” said John Dorsey, turning the pages, “what he gives on this.” + 

Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled wad and thrust it on Eugene’s desk. Eugene read: + 

Gebe mir ein Stück Papier, + 

Before I bust you on the ear. + 

He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and wrote in answer: + 

Du bist wie eine bum-me. + 

They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German tear-gulps: “Immensee,” “Höher als die Kirche,” Der Zerbrochene Krug. Then, Wilhelm Tell. The fine lyrical measure of the opening song, the unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with its faery music. The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the escape by boat. As for the rest, it was, they wearily recognized, Great Literature. Mr. Schiller, they saw, was religiously impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Paul Revere, with the beauties of Liberty. His embattled Swiss bounded ponderously from crag to crag, invoking it in windy speeches. + 

“The mountains,” observed John Dorsey, touched, in a happy moment, by the genius of the place, “have been the traditional seat of Liberty.” + 

Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges. He heard, far off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails. + 

During this season of Eliza’s absence he roomed with Guy Doak. + 

Guy Doak was five years his senior. He was a native of Newark, New Jersey: his speech was touched with Yankee nasality, his manner with Yankee crispness. His mother, a boardinghouse mistress, had come to Altamont a year or two before to retrieve her health: she was tubercular, and spent part of the winter in Florida. + 

Guy Doak had a trim cocky figure of medium height, black hair, bright dark eyes, a pale, very smooth oval face, somehow suggestive, Eugene thought, of a fish’s belly, with somewhat unhappily full jaws which made his lower features seem larger than his upper. He was foppishly neat in his dress. People called him a good-looking boy. + 

He made few friends. To the boys at Leonard’s this Yankee was far more remote than the rich Cuban boy, Manuel Quevado, whose fat dark laughter and broken speech was all for girls. He belonged to a richer South, but they knew him. + 

Guy Doak had none of their floridity. He was lacking in their hearty violence. He did not laugh loudly. He had a sharp, bright, shallow mind, inflexibly dogmatic. His companions were bad Southern romantics, he was a false Yankee realist. They arrived, thus, by different means, at a common goal of superstition. Guy Doak had already hardened into the American city-dweller’s mould of infantile cynicism. He was occasionally merry with the other boys in the classic manner of the city fellow with the yokels. He was wise. Above all, he was wise. It was safe to assume, he felt, that Truth was always on the scaffold, and Wrong forever on the throne. So far from being depressed by the slaughter of the innocents, the spectacle gave him much bitter amusement. + 

Outside of this, Guy Doak was a very nice fellow⁠—sharp, obstinate, unsubtle, and pleased with his wit. They lived on the first floor at Leonard’s: at night, by a roaring wood fire, they listened carefully to the great thunder of the trees, and to the stealthy creaking footsteps of the master as he came softly down the stairs, and paused by their door. They ate at table with Margaret, John Dorsey, Miss Amy, the two children, John Dorsey, junior, nine, and Margaret, five, and two of Leonard’s Tennessee nephews⁠—Tyson Leonard, a ferret-faced boy of eighteen, foulmouthed and sly, and Dirk Barnard, a tall slender boy, seventeen, with a bumpy face, brown merry eyes, and a quick temper. At table they kept up a secret correspondence of innuendo and hidden movement, fleshing a fork in a grunting neighbor as John Dorsey said the blessing, and choking with smothered laughter. At night, they tapped messages on floor and ceiling, crept out for sniggering conventions in the windy dark hall, and fled to their innocent beds as John Dorsey stormed down on them. + 

Leonard was fighting hard to keep his little school alive. He had less than twenty students the first year, and less than thirty the second. From an income of not more than $3,000 he had to pay Miss Amy, who had left a high school position to help him, a small salary. The old house on its fine wooded hill was full of outmoded plumbing and drafty corridors: he had leased it at a small rental. But the rough usage of thirty boys demanded a considerable yearly restoration. The Leonards were fighting very stubbornly and courageously for their existence. + 

The food was scant and poor: at breakfast, a dish of blue, watery oatmeal, eggs and toast; at lunch, a thin soup, hot sour cornbread, and a vegetable boiled with a piece of fat pork; at dinner, hot biscuits, a small meat loaf, and creamed or boiled potatoes. No one was permitted coffee or tea, but there was an abundance of fresh creamy milk. John Dorsey always kept and milked his own cow. Occasionally there was a deep, crusted pie, hot, yolky muffins, or spicy gingerbread of Margaret’s make. She was a splendid cook. + 

Often, at night, Guy Doak slid quietly out through the window on to the side porch, and escaped down the road under the concealing roar of the trees. He would return from town within two hours, crawling in exultantly with a bag full of hot frankfurter sandwiches coated thickly with mustard, chopped onion, and a hot Mexican sauce. With a crafty grin he unfoiled two five-cent cigars, which they smoked magnificently, with a sharp tang of daring, blowing the smoke up the chimney in order to thwart a possible irruption by the master. And Guy brought back, from the wind and the night, the good salt breath of gossip in street and store, news of the town, and the brave swagger of the drugstore gallants. + 

As they smoked and stuffed fat palatable bites of sandwich into their mouths, they would regard each other with pleased sniggers, carrying on thus an insane symphony of laughter: + 

“Chuckle, chuckle!⁠—laugh of gloatation.” + 

“Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee!⁠ ⁠… laugh of titterosity.” + 

“Snuh-huh, snuh-huh, snuh-huh!⁠ ⁠… laugh of gluttonotiousness.” + 

The vigorous warmth of burning wood filled their room pleasantly: over their sheltered heads the dark gigantic wind howled through the earth. O sheltered love, nooked warmly in against this winter night. O warm fair women, whether within a forest hut, or by the town ledged high above the moaning seas, shot upon the wind, I come. + 

Guy Doak toyed gently at his belly with his right hand, and stroked his round chin slowly with his left. + 

“Now let me see,” he whined, “what he gives on this.” + 

Their laughter rang around the walls. Too late, they heard the aroused stealthy footfalls of the master, creaking down the hall. Later⁠—silence, the dark, the wind. + 

Miss Amy closed her small beautifully kept grade book, thrust her great arms upward, and yawned. Eugene looked hopefully at her and out along the playing court, reddened by the late sun. He was wild, uncontrollable, erratic. His mad tongue leaped out in class. He could never keep peace a full day. He amazed them. They loved him, and they punished him piously, affectionately. He was never released at the dismissal hour. He was always “kept in.” + 

John Dorsey noted each whisper of disorder, or each failure in preparation, by careful markings in a book. Each afternoon he read the names of delinquents, amid a low mutter of sullen protest, and stated their penalties. Once Eugene got through an entire day without a mark. He stood triumphantly before Leonard while the master searched the record. + 

John Dorsey began to laugh foolishly; he gripped his hand affectionately around the boy’s arm. + 

“Well, sir!” he said. “There must be a mistake. I’m going to keep you in on general principles.” + 

He bent to a long dribbling suction of laughter. Eugene’s wild eyes were shot with tears of anger and surprise. He never forgot. + 

Miss Amy yawned, and smiled on him with slow powerful affectionate contempt. + 

“Go on!” she said, in her broad, lazy accent. “I don’t want to fool with you any more. You’re not worth powder enough to blow you up.” + 

Margaret came in, her face furrowed deeply between smoke-dark eyes, full of tender sternness and hidden laughter. + 

“What’s wrong with the rascal?” she asked. “Can’t he learn algebra?” + 

“He can learn!” drawled Miss Amy. “He can learn anything. He’s lazy⁠—that’s what it is. Just plain lazy.” + 

She smacked his buttock smartly with a ruler. + 

“I’d like to warm you a bit with this,” she laughed, slowly and richly. “You’d learn then.” + 

“Here!” said Margaret, shaking her head in protest. “You leave that boy alone. Don’t look behind the faun’s ears. Never mind about algebra, here. That’s for poor folks. There’s no need for algebra where two and two make five.” + 

Miss Amy turned her handsome gypsy eyes on Eugene. + 

“Go on. I’ve seen enough of you.” She made a strong weary gesture of dismissal. + 

Hatless, with a mad whoop, he plunged through the door and leaped the porch rail. + 

“Here, boy!” Margaret called. “Where’s your hat?” + 

Grinning, he galloped back, picked up a limp rag of dirty green felt, and pulled it over his chaotic hair. Curly tufts stuck through the gaping crease-holes. + 

“Come here!” said Margaret gravely. Her nervous fingers pulled his frayed necktie around to the front, tugged down his vest, and buttoned his coat over tightly, while he peered at her with his strange devil’s grin. Suddenly she trembled with laughter. + 

“Good heavens, Amy,” she said. “Look at that hat.” + 

Miss Amy smiled at him with indifferent sleepy cat-warmth. + 

“You want to fix yourself up, ’Gene,” she said, “so the girls will begin to notice you.” + 

He heard the strange song of Margaret’s laughter. + 

“Can you see him out courting?” she said. “The poor girl would think she had a demon lover, sure.” + 

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted + 

By woman wailing for her demon lover. + 

His eyes burned on her face, flowing with dark secret beauty. + 

“Get along, you scamp!” she ordered. + 

He turned, and, crying fiercely in his throat, tore down the road with bounding strides. + 

All the dusk blurred in her eyes. + 

“Leave him alone!” she whispered to no one. “Leave him alone!” + 

A light wind of April fanned over the hill. There was a smell of burning leaves and rubble around the school. In the field on the hill flank behind the house a plowman drove his big horse with loose clanking traces around a lessening square of dry fallow earth. Gee, woa. His strong feet followed after. The big share bit cleanly down, cleaving a deep spermy furrow of moist young earth along its track. + 

John Dorsey Leonard stared fascinated out the window at the annual rejuvenation of the earth. Before his eyes the emergent nymph was scaling her hard cracked hag’s pelt. The golden age returned. + 

Down the road a straggling queue of boys were all gone into the world of light. Wet with honest sweat, the plowman paused at the turn, and wiped the blue shirting of his forearm across his beaded forehead. Meanwhile, his intelligent animal, taking advantage of the interval, lifted with slow majesty a proud flowing tail, and added his mite to the fertility of the soil with three moist oaty droppings. Watching, John Dorsey grunted approvingly. They also serve who only stand and wait. + 

“Please, Mr. Leonard,” said Eugene, carefully choosing his moment, “can I go?” + 

John Dorsey Leonard stroked his chin absently, and stared sightlessly at his book. Others abide our question, thou art free. + 

“Huh?” he purred vaguely. Then, with a high vacant snigger he turned suddenly, and said: + 

“You rascal, you! See if Mrs. Leonard wants you.” He fastened his brutal grip with keen hunger into the boy’s thin arm. April is the cruellest of months. Eugene winced, moved away, and then stood quietly, checked by memory of the old revolt from awe. + 

He found Margaret in the library reading to the children from The Water Babies. + 

“Mr. Leonard says to ask you if I can go?” he said. + 

And her eyes were darkened wholly. + 

“Yes, you scamp. Go on,” she said. “Tell me, boy,” she coaxed, softly, “can’t you be a little bit better?” + 

“Yes’m,” he promised, easily. “I’ll try.” Say not the struggle naught availeth. + 

She smiled at his high mettled prancing nervousness. + 

“In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin’,” she said gently. “Get out of here.” + 

He bounded away from the nunnery of the chaste breast and quiet mind. + 

As he leaped down the stairs into the yard he heard Dirk Barnard’s lusty splashing bathtub solo. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. Tyson Leonard, having raked into every slut’s corner of nature with a thin satisfied grin, emerged from the barn with a cap full of fresh eggs. A stammering cackle of protest followed him from angry hens who found too late that men betray. At the barnside, under the carriage shed, “Pap” Rheinhart tightened the bellyband of his saddled brown mare, swinging strongly into the saddle, and with a hard scramble of hoofs, came up the hill, wheeled in behind the house, and drew up by Eugene. + 

“Jump on, ’Gene,” he invited, patting the mare’s broad rump. “I’ll take you home.” + 

Eugene looked up at him grinning. + 

“You’ll take me nowhere,” he said. “I couldn’t sit down for a week last time.” + 

“Pap” boomed with laughter. + 

“Why, pshaw, boy!” he said. “That was nothing but a gentle little dogtrot.” + 

“Dogtrot your granny,” said Eugene. “You tried to kill me.” + 

“Pap” Rheinhart turned his wry neck down on the boy with grave dry humor. + 

“Come on,” he said gruffly. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll teach you how to ride a horse.” + 

“Much obliged, Pap,” said Eugene ironically. “But I’m thinking of using my tail a good deal in my old age. I don’t want to wear it out while I’m young.” + 

Pleased with them both, “Pap” Rheinhart laughed loud and deep, spat a brown quid back over the horse’s crupper, and, digging his heels in smartly, galloped away around the house, into the road. The horse bent furiously to his work, like a bounding dog. With four-hooved thunder he drummed upon the sounding earth. Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum. + 

At the two-posted entry, by the bishop’s boundary, the departing students turned, split quickly to the sides, and urged the horseman on with shrill cries. “Pap” bent low, with loose-reined hands above the horse-mane, went through the gate like the whiz of a crossbow. Then, he jerked the mare back on her haunches with a dusty skid of hoofs, and waited for the boys to come up. + 

“Hey!” With high bounding exultancy Eugene came down the road to join them. Without turning, stolid Van Yeats threw up his hand impatiently and greeted the unseen with a cheer. The others turned, welcoming him with ironical congratulation. + 

“ ‘Highpockets,’ ” said “Doc” Hines, comically puckering his small tough face, “how’d you happen to git out on time?” He had an affected, high-pitched nigger drawl. When he spoke he kept one hand in his coat pocket, fingering a leather thong loaded with buckshot. + 

“J. D. had to do his spring plowing,” said Eugene. + 

“Well, if it ain’t ole Handsome,” said Julius Arthur. He grinned squintily, revealing a mouthful of stained teeth screwed in a wire clamp. His face was covered with small yellow pustulate sores. How begot, how nourished? + 

“Shall we sing our little song for Handsome Hal?” said Ralph Rolls to his copesmate Julius. He wore a derby hat jammed over his pert freckled face. As he spoke he took a ragged twist of tobacco from his pocket and bit off a large chew with a rough air of relish. + 

“Want a chew, Jule?” he said. + 

Julius took the twist, wiped off his mouth with a loose male grin, and crammed a large quid into his cheek. + 

He brought me roots of relish sweet. + 

“Want one, Highpockets?” he asked Eugene, grinning. + 

I hate him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch me out longer. + 

“Hell,” said Ralph Rolls. “Handsome would curl up and die if he ever took a chew.” + 

In Spring like torpid snakes my enemies awaken. + 

At the corner of Church Street, across from the new imitation Tudor of the Episcopal church, they paused. Above them, on the hill, rose the steeples of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Ye antique spires, ye distant towers! + 

“Who’s going my way?” said Julius Arthur. “Come on, ’Gene. The car’s down here. I’ll take you home.” + 

“Thanks, but I can’t,” said Eugene. “I’m going uptown.” Their curious eyes on Dixieland when I get out. + 

“You going home, Villa?” + 

“No,” said George Graves. + 

“Well, keep Hal out of trouble,” said Ralph Rolls. + 

Julius Arthur laughed roughly and thrust his hand through Eugene’s hair. “Old Hairbreadth Hal,” he said. “The cutthroat from Sawtooth Gap!” + 

“Don’t let ’em climb your frame, son,” said Van Yeats, turning his quiet pleasant face on Eugene. “If you need help, let me know.” + 

“So long, boys.” + 

“So long.” + 

They crossed the street, mixing in nimble horseplay, and turned down past the church along a sloping street that led to the garages. George Graves and Eugene continued up the hill. + 

“Julius is a good boy,” said George Graves. “His father makes more money than any other lawyer in town.” + 

“Yes,” said Eugene, still brooding on Dixieland and his clumsy deceptions. + 

A street-sweeper walked along slowly uphill, beside his deep wedge-bodied cart. From time to time he stopped the big slow-footed horse and, sweeping the littered droppings of street and gutter into a pan, with a long-handled brush, dumped his collections into the cart. Let not Ambition mock their useful toil. + 

Three sparrows hopped deftly about three fresh smoking globes of horse-dung, pecking out tidbits with dainty gourmandism. Driven away by the approaching cart, they skimmed briskly over to the bank, with bright twitters of annoyance. One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud. + 

George Graves ascended the hill with a slow ponderous rhythm, staring darkly at the ground. + 

“Say, ’Gene!” he said finally. “I don’t believe he makes that much.” + 

Eugene thought seriously for a moment. With George Graves, it was necessary to resume a discussion where it had been left off three days before. + 

“Who?” he said, “John Dorsey? Yes, I think he does,” he added, grinning. + 

“Not over $2,500, anyway,” said George Graves gloomily. + 

“No⁠—three thousand, three thousand!” he said, in a choking voice. + 

George Graves turned to him with a sombre, puzzled smile. “What’s the matter?” he asked. + 

“O you fool! You damn fool!” gasped Eugene. “You’ve been thinking about it all this time.” + 

George Graves laughed sheepishly, with embarrassment, richly. + 

From the top of the hill at the left, the swelling unction of the Methodist organ welled up remotely from the choir, accompanied by a fruity contralto voice, much in demand at funerals. Abide with me. + 

Most musical of mourners, weep again! + 

George Graves turned and examined the four large black houses, ascending on flat terraces to the church, of Paston Place. + 

“That’s a good piece of property, ’Gene,” he said. “It belongs to the Paston estate.” + 

Fast falls the eventide. Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast, in intricacies of laborious song. + 

“It will all go to Gil Paston some day,” said George Graves with virtuous regret. “He’s not worth a damn.” + 

They had reached the top of the hill. Church Street ended levelly a block beyond, in the narrow gulch of the avenue. They saw, with quickened pulse, the little pullulation of the town. + 

A negro dug tenderly in the round loamy flowerbeds of the Presbyterian churchyard, bending now and then to thrust his thick fingers gently in about the roots. The old church, with its sharp steeple, rotted slowly, decently, prosperously, like a good man’s life, down into its wet lichened brick. Eugene looked gratefully, with a second’s pride, at its dark decorum, its solid Scotch breeding. + 

“I’m a Presbyterian,” he said. “What are you?” + 

“An Episcopalian, when I go,” said George Graves with irreverent laughter. + 

“To hell with these Methodists!” Eugene said with an elegant, disdainful face. “They’re too damn common for us.” God in three persons⁠—blessed Trinity. “Brother Graves,” he continued, in a fat well-oiled voice, “I didn’t see you at prayer-meeting Wednesday night. Where in Jesus’ name were you?” + 

With his open palm he struck George Graves violently between his meaty shoulders. George Graves staggered drunkenly with high resounding laughter. + 

“Why, Brother Gant,” said he, “I had a little appointment with one of the Good Sisters, out in the cowshed.” + 

Eugene gathered a telephone pole into his wild embrace, and threw one leg erotically over its second foot-wedge. George Graves leaned his heavy shoulder against it, his great limbs drained with laughter. + 

There was a hot blast of steamy air from the Appalachian Laundry across the street and, as the door from the office of the washroom opened, they had a moment’s glimpse of negresses plunging their wet arms into the liquefaction of their clothes. + 

George Graves dried his eyes. Laughing wearily, they crossed over. + 

“We oughtn’t to talk like that, ’Gene,” said George Graves reproachfully. “Sure enough! It’s not right.” + 

He became moodily serious rapidly. “The best people in this town are church members,” he said earnestly. “It’s a fine thing.” + 

“Why?” said Eugene, with an idle curiosity. + 

“Because,” said George Graves, “you get to know all the people who are worth a damn.” + 

Worth being damned, he thought quickly. A quaint idea. + 

“It helps you in a business way. They come to know you and respect you. You won’t get far in this town, ’Gene, without them. It pays,” he added devoutly, “to be a Christian.” + 

“Yes,” Eugene agreed seriously, “you’re right.” To walk together to the kirk, with a goodly company. + 

He thought sadly of his lost sobriety, and of how once, lonely, he had walked the decent lanes of God’s Scotch town. Unbidden they came again to haunt his memory, the shaven faces of good tradesmen, each leading the well washed kingdom of his home in its obedient ritual, the lean hushed smiles of worship, the chained passion of devotion, as they implored God’s love upon their ventures, or delivered their virgin daughters into the holy barter of marriage. And from even deeper adyts of his brain there swam up slowly to the shores of his old hunger the great fish whose names he scarcely knew⁠—whose names, garnered with blind toil from a thousand books, from Augustine, himself a name, to Jeremy Taylor, the English metaphysician, were brief evocations of scalded light, electric, phosphorescent, illuminating by their magic connotations the vast far depths of ritual and religion: They came⁠—Bartholomew, Hilarius, Chrysostomos, Polycarp, Anthony, Jerome, and the forty martyrs of Cappadocia who walked the waves⁠—coiled like their own green shadows for a moment, and were gone. + 

“Besides,” said George Graves, “a man ought to go anyway. Honesty’s the best policy.” + 

Across the street, on the second floor of a small brick three-story building that housed several members of the legal, medical, surgical, and dental professions, Dr. H. M. Smathers pumped vigorously with his right foot, took a wad of cotton from his assistant, Miss Lola Bruce, and thrusting it securely into the jaw of his unseen patient, bent his fashionable bald head intently. A tiny breeze blew back the thin curtains, and revealed him, white-jacketed, competent, drill in hand. + 

“Do you feel that?” he said tenderly. + 

“Wrogd gdo gurk!” + 

“Spit!” With thee conversing, I forget all time. + 

“I suppose,” said George Graves thoughtfully, “the gold they use in people’s teeth is worth a lot of money.” + 

“Yes,” said Eugene, finding the idea attractive, “if only one person in ten has gold fillings that would be ten million in the United States alone. You can figure on five dollars’ worth each, can’t you?” + 

“Easy!” said George Graves. “More than that.” He brooded lusciously a moment. “That’s a lot of money,” he said. + 

In the office of the Rogers-Malone Undertaking Establishment the painful family of death was assembled. “Horse” Hines, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his feet thrust out on the broad window-ledge, chatted lazily with Mr. C. M. Powell, the suave silent partner. How sleep the brave, who sink to rest. Forget not yet. + 

“There’s good money in undertaking,” said George Graves. “Mr. Powell’s well off.” + 

Eugene’s eyes were glued on the lantern face of “Horse” Hines. He beat the air with a convulsive arm, and sank his fingers in his throat. + 

“What’s the matter?” cried George Graves. + 

“They shall not bury me alive,” he said. + 

“You can’t tell,” George Graves said gloomily. “It’s been known to happen. They’ve dug them up later and found them turned over on their faces.” + 

Eugene shuddered. “I think,” he suggested painfully, “they’re supposed to take out your insides when they embalm you.” + 

“Yes,” said George Graves more hopefully, “and that stuff they use would kill you anyway. They pump you full of it.” + 

With shrunken heart, Eugene considered. The ghost of old fear, that had been laid for years, walked forth to haunt him. + 

In his old fantasies of death he had watched his living burial, had foreseen his waking life-in-death, his slow, frustrated efforts to push away the smothering flood of earth until, as a drowning swimmer claws the air, his mute and stiffened fingers thrust from the ground a call for hands. + 

Fascinated, they stared through screen-doors down the dark central corridor, flanked by jars of weeping ferns. A sweet funereal odor of carnations and cedarwood floated on the cool heavy air. Dimly, beyond a central partition, they saw a heavy casket, on a wheeled trestle, with rich silver handles and velvet coverings. The thick light faded there in dark. + 

“They’re laid out in the room behind,” said George Graves, lowering his voice. + 

To rot away into a flower, to melt into a tree with the friendless bodies of unburied men. + 

At this moment, having given to misery all he had (a tear), the very Reverend Father James O’Haley, S.J., among the faithless faithful only he, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, emerged plumply from the chapel, walked up the soft aisle rug with brisk short-legged strides, and came out into the light. His pale blue eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, his plump uncreased face set firmly in a smile of quiet benevolence; he covered himself with a small well-kept hat of black velvet, and set off toward the avenue. Eugene shrank back gently as the little man walked past him: that small priestly figure in black bore on him the awful accolade of his great Mistress, that smooth face had heard the unutterable, seen the unknowable. In this remote outpost of the mighty Church, he was the standard-bearer of the one true faith, the consecrate flesh of God. + 

“They don’t get any pay,” said George Graves sorrowfully. + 

“How do they live, then?” Eugene asked. + 

“Don’t you worry!” said George Graves, with a knowing smile. + 

“They get all that’s coming to them. He doesn’t seem to be starving, does he?” + 

“No,” said Eugene, “he doesn’t.” + 

“He lives on the fat of the land,” said George Graves. “Wine at every meal. There are some rich Catholics in this town.” + 

“Yes,” said Eugene. “Frank Moriarty’s got a pot full of money that he made selling licker.” + 

“Don’t let them hear you,” said George Graves, with a surly laugh. “They’ve got a family tree and a coat of arms already.” + 

“A beer-bottle rampant on a field of limburger cheese, gules,” said Eugene. + 

“They’re trying to get the Princess Madeleine into Society,” said George Graves. + 

“Hell fire!” Eugene cried, grinning. “Let’s let her in, if that’s all she wants. We belong to the Younger Set, don’t we?” + 

“You may,” said George Graves, reeling with laughter, “but I don’t. I wouldn’t be caught dead with the little pimps.” + 

“Mr. Eugene Gant was the host last night at a hot wienie roast given to members of the local Younger Set at Dixieland, the beautiful old ancestral mansion of his mother, Mrs. Eliza Gant.” + 

George Graves staggered. “You oughtn’t to say that, ’Gene,” he gasped. He shook his head reproachfully. “Your mother’s a fine woman.” + 

“During the course of the evening, the Honorable George Graves, the talented scion of one of our oldest and wealthiest families, the Chesterfield Graveses ($10 a week and up), rendered a few appropriate selections on the jews-harp.” + 

Pausing deliberately, George Graves wiped his streaming eyes, and blew his nose. In the windows of Bain’s millinery store, a waxen nymph bore a confection of rakish plumes upon her false tresses, and extended her simpering fingers in elegant counterpoise. Hats For Milady. O that those lips had language. + 

At this moment, with a smooth friction of trotting rumps, the death-wagon of Rogers-Malone turned swiftly in from the avenue, and wheeled by on ringing hoofs. They turned curiously and watched it draw up to the curb. + 

“Another Redskin bit the dust,” said George Graves. + 

Come, delicate death, serenely arriving, arriving. + 

“Horse” Hines came out quickly on long flapping legs, and opened the doors behind. In another moment, with the help of the two men on the driver’s seat, he had lowered the long wicker basket gently, and vanished, quietly, gravely, into the fragrant gloom of his establishment. + 

As Eugene watched, the old fatality of place returned. Each day, he thought, we pass the spot where some day we must die; or shall I, too, ride dead to some mean building yet unknown? Shall this bright clay, the hillbound, die in lodgings yet unbuilt? Shall these eyes, drenched with visions yet unseen, stored with the viscous and interminable seas at dawn, with the sad comfort of unfulfilled Arcadias, seal up their cold dead dreams upon a tick, as this, in time, in some hot village of the plains? + 

He caught and fixed the instant. A telegraph messenger wheeled vigorously in from the avenue with pumping feet, curved widely into the alley at his right, jerking his wheel up sharply as he took the curb and coasted down to the delivery boy’s entrance. And post o’er land and ocean without rest. Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. + 

Descending the dark stairs of the Medical Building slowly, Mrs. Thomas Hewitt, the comely wife of the prominent attorney (of Arthur, Hewitt, and Grey), turned out into the light, and advanced slowly toward the avenue. She was greeted with flourishing gestures of the hat by Henry T. Merriman (Merriman and Merriman), and Judge Robert C. Allan, professional colleagues of her husband. She smiled and shot each quickly with a glance. Pleasant is this flesh. When she had passed they looked after her a moment. Then they continued their discussion of the courts. + 

On the third floor of the First National Bank building on the right hand corner, Fergus Paston, fifty-six, a thin lecherous mouth between iron-gray dundrearies, leaned his cocked leg upon his open window, and followed the movements of Miss Bernie Powers, twenty-two, crossing the street. Even in our ashes live their wonted fires. + 

On the opposite corner, Mrs. Roland Rawls, whose husband was manager of the Peerless Pulp Company (Plant No. 3), and whose father owned it, emerged from the rich seclusion of Arthur N. Wright, jeweller. She clasped her silver meshbag and stepped into her attendant Packard. She was a tall black-haired woman of thirty-three with a good figure: her face was dull, flat, and Mid-western. + 

“She’s the one with the money,” said George Graves. “He hasn’t a damn thing. It’s all in her name. She wants to be an opera singer.” + 

“Can she sing?” + 

“Not worth a damn,” said George Graves. “I’ve heard her. There’s your chance, ’Gene. She’s got a daughter about your age.” + 

“What does she do?” said Eugene. + 

“She wants to be an actress,” said George Graves, laughing throatily. + 

“You have to work too damn hard for your money,” said Eugene. + 

They had reached the corner by the Bank, and now halted, indecisively, looking up the cool gulch of afternoon. The street buzzed with a light gay swarm of idlers: the faces of the virgins bloomed in and out like petals on a bough. Advancing upon him, an inch to the second, Eugene saw, ten feet away, the heavy paralyzed body of old Mr. Avery. He was a very great scholar, stone-deaf, and seventy-eight years old. He lived alone in a room above the Public Library. He had neither friends nor connections. He was a myth. + 

“Oh, my God!” said Eugene. “Here he comes!” + 

It was too late for escape. + 

Gasping a welcome, Mr. Avery bore down on him, with a violent shuffle of his feet and a palsied tattoo of his heavy stick which brought him over the intervening three yards in forty seconds. + 

“Well, young fellow,” he panted, “how’s Latin?” + 

“Fine,” Eugene screamed into his pink ear. + 

“Poeta nascitur, non fit,” said Mr. Avery, and went off into a silent wheeze of laughter which brought on a fit of coughing strangulation. His eyes bulged, his tender pink skin grew crimson, he roared his terror out in a phlegmy rattle, while his goose-white hand trembled frantically for his handkerchief. A crowd gathered. Eugene quickly drew a dirty handkerchief from the old man’s pocket, and thrust it into his hands. He tore up from his convulsed organs a rotting mass, and panted rapidly for breath. The crowd dispersed somewhat dejectedly. + 

George Graves grinned darkly. “That’s too bad,” he said. “You oughtn’t to laugh, ’Gene.” He turned away, gurgling. + 

“Can you conjugate?” gasped Mr. Avery. “Here’s the way I learned: + 

“Amo, amas, + 

I love a lass. + 

Amat, + 

He loves her, too.” + 

Quivering with tremors of laughter, he launched himself again. Because he could not leave them, save by the inch, they moved off several yards to the curb. Grow old along with me! + 

“That’s a damn shame,” said George Graves, looking after him and shaking his head. “Where’s he going?” + 

“To supper,” said Eugene. + 

“To supper!” said George Graves. “It’s only four o’clock. Where does he eat?” + 

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. + 

“At the Uneeda,” said Eugene, beginning to choke. “It takes him two hours to get there.” + 

“Does he go every day?” said George Graves, beginning to laugh. + 

“Three times a day,” Eugene screamed. “He spends all morning going to dinner, and all afternoon going to supper.” + 

A whisper of laughter came from their weary jaws. They sighed like sedge. + 

At this moment, dodging briskly through the crowd, with a loud and cheerful word for everyone, Mr. Joseph Bailey, secretary of the Altamont Chamber of Commerce, short, broad, and ruddy, came by them with a hearty gesture of the hand: + 

“Hello, boys!” he cried. “How’re they going?” But before either of them could answer, he had passed on, with an encouraging shake of his head, and a deep applauding “That’s right.” + 

“What’s right?” said Eugene. + 

But before George Graves could answer, the great lung specialist, Dr. Fairfax Grinder, scion of one of the oldest and proudest families in Virginia, drove in viciously from Church Street, with his sinewy length of six feet and eight inches coiled tensely in the deep pit of his big Buick roadster. Cursing generally the whole crawling itch of Confederate and Yankee postwar rabbledom, with a few special parentheses for Jews and niggers, he drove full tilt at the short plump figure of Joe Zamschnick, men’s furnishings (“Just a Whisper Off The Square”). + 

Joseph, two yards away from legal safety, hurled himself with a wild scream headlong at the curb. He arrived on hands and knees, but under his own power. + 

“K‑hurses!” said Eugene. “Foiled again.” + 

’Twas true! Dr. Fairfax Grinder’s lean bristled upper lip drew back over his strong yellow teeth. He jammed on his brakes, and lifted his car round with a complete revolution of his long arms. Then he roared away through scattering traffic, in a greasy blue cloud of gasoline and burnt rubber. + 

Joe Zamschnick frantically wiped his gleaming bald head with a silk handkerchief and called loudly on the public to bear witness. + 

“What’s the matter with him?” said George Graves, disappointed. “He usually goes up on the sidewalk after them if he can’t get them on the street.” + 

On the other side of the street, attracting no more than a languid stare from the loafing natives, the Honorable William Jennings Bryan paused benevolently before the windows of the H. Martin Grimes Bookstore, allowing the frisking breeze to toy pleasantly with his famous locks. The tangles of Neæra’s hair. + 

The Commoner stared carefully at the window display which included several copies of Before Adam, by Jack London. Then he entered, and selected a dozen views of Altamont and the surrounding hills. + 

“He may come here to live,” said George Graves. “Dr. Doak’s offered to give him a house and lot in Doak Park.” + 

“Why?” said Eugene. + 

“Because the advertising will be worth a lot to the town,” said George Graves. + 

A little before them, that undaunted daughter of desires, Miss Elizabeth Scragg, emerged from Woolworth’s Five and Ten Cent Store, and turned up toward the Square. Smiling, she acknowledged the ponderous salute of Big Jeff White, the giant half-owner of the Whitstone hotel, whose fortunes had begun when he had refused to return to his old comrade, Dickson Reese, the embezzling cashier, ninety thousand dollars of entrusted loot. Dog eat dog. Thief catch thief. It is not growing like a tree, in bulk doth make man better be. + 

His six-and-a-half-foot shadow flitted slowly before them. He passed, in creaking number twelves, a massive smooth-jowled man with a great paunch girdled in a wide belt. + 

Across the street again, before the windows of the Van W. Yeats Shoe Company, the Reverend J. Brooks Gall, Amherst (’61), and as loyal a Deke as ever breathed, but looking only sixty of his seventy-three years, paused in his brisk walk, and engaged in sprightly monologue, three of his fellow Boy Scouts⁠—the Messrs. Lewis Monk, seventeen, Bruce Rogers, thirteen, and Malcolm Hodges, fourteen. None knew as well as he the heart of a boy. He, too, it seems, had once been one himself. Thus, as one bright anecdote succeeded, or suggested, a half-dozen others, they smiled dutifully, with attentive respect, below the lifted barrier of his bristly white mustache, into the gleaming rhyme of his false teeth. And, with rough but affectionate camaraderie, he would pause from time to time to say: “Old Mal!” or “Old Bruce!” gripping firmly his listener’s arm, shaking him gently. Pallidly, on restless feet, they smiled, plotting escape with slant-eyed stealth. + 

Mr. Buse, the Oriental rug merchant, came around the corner below them from Liberty Street. His broad dark face was wreathed in Persian smiles. I met a traveller from an antique land. + 

In the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents, Mike, the counter man, leaned his hairy arms upon the marble slab, and bent his wrinkled inch of brow upon a week-old copy of Atlantis. Fride Chicken Today with Sweet Potatos. Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert. A solitary fly darted swiftly about the greasy cover of a glass humidor, under which a leathery quarter of mince pie lay weltering. Spring had come. + 

Meanwhile, having completed twice their parade up and down the street from the Square to the post-office, the Misses Christine Ball, Viola Powell, Aline Rollins, and Dorothy Hazzard were accosted outside Wood’s Drug Store by Tom French, seventeen, Roy Duncan, nineteen, and Carl Jones, eighteen. + 

“Where do you think you’re going?” said Tom French, insolently. + 

Gayly, brightly, in unison, they answered: + 

“Hey⁠—ee!” + 

“Hay’s seven dollars a ton,” said Roy Duncan, and immediately burst into a high cackle of laughter, in which all the others joined, merrily. + 

“You craz-ee!” said Viola Powell tenderly. Tell me, ye merchants’ daughters, did ye see another creature fair and wise as she. + 

“Mr. Duncan,” said Tom French, turning his proud ominous face upon his best friend, “I want you to meet a friend of mine, Miss Rollins.” + 

“I think I’ve met this man somewhere before,” said Aline Rollins. Another Splendor on his mouth alit. + 

“Yes,” said Roy Duncan, “I go there often.” + 

His small tight freckled impish face was creased again by his high cackle. All I could never be. They moved into the store, where drouthy neibors neibors meet, through the idling group of fountain gallants. + 

Mr. Henry Sorrell (It Can Be Done), and Mr. John T. Howland (We Sell Lots and Lots of Lots), emerged, beyond Arthur N. Wright’s, jeweller, from the gloomy dusk of the Gruner Building. Each looked into the subdivisions of the other’s heart; their eyes kept the great Vision of the guarded mount as swiftly they turned into Church Street where Sorrell’s Hudson was parked. + 

White-vested, a trifle paunchy, with large broad feet, a shaven moon of red face, and abundant taffy-colored hair, the Reverend John Smallwood, pastor of the First Baptist Church, walked heavily up the street, greeting his parishioners warmly, and hoping to see his Pilot face to face. Instead, however, he encountered the Honorable William Jennings Bryan, who was coming slowly out of the bookstore. The two close friends greeted each other affectionately, and, with a firm friendly laying on of hands, gave each to each the Christian aid of a benevolent exorcism. + 

“Just the man I was looking for,” said Brother Smallwood. In silence, slowly, they shook hands for several seconds. Silence was pleased. + 

“That,” observed the Commoner with grave humor, “is what I thought the Great American People said to me on three occasions.” It was a favorite jest⁠—ripe with wisdom, mellowed by the years, yet, withal, so characteristic of the man. The deep furrows of his mouth widened in a smile. Our master⁠—famous, calm, and dead. + 

Passed, on catspaw rubber tread, from the long dark bookstore, Professor L. B. Dunn, principal of Graded School No. 3, Montgomery Avenue. He smiled coldly at them with a gimlet narrowing of his spectacled eyes. The telltale cover of The New Republic peeked from his pocket. Clamped under his lean and freckled arm were new library copies of The Great Illusion, by Norman Angell, and The Ancient Grudge, by Owen Wister. A lifelong advocate of a union of the two great English-speaking (sic) nations, making together irresistibly for peace, truth, and righteousness in a benevolent but firm authority over the less responsible elements of civilization, he passed, the Catholic man, pleasantly dedicated to the brave adventuring of minds and the salvaging of mankind. Ah, yes! + 

“And how are you and the Good Woman enjoying your sojourn in the Land of the Sky?” said the Reverend John Smallwood. + 

“Our only regret,” said the Commoner, “is that our visit here must be measured by days and not by months. Nay, by years.” + 

Mr. Richard Gorman, twenty-six, city reporter of The Citizen, strode rapidly up the street, with proud cold news-nose lifted. His complacent smile, hard-lipped, loosened into servility. + 

“Ah, there, Dick,” said John Smallwood, clasping his hand affectionately, and squeezing his arm, “Just the man I was looking for. Do you know Mr. Bryan?” + 

“As fellow newspaper men,” said the Commoner, “Dick and I have been close friends for⁠—how many years is it, my boy?” + 

“Three, I think sir,” said Mr. Gorman, blushing prettily. + 

“I wish you could have been here, Dick,” said the Reverend Smallwood, “to hear what Mr. Bryan was saying about us. The good people of this town would be mighty proud to hear it.” + 

“I’d like another statement from you before you go, Mr. Bryan,” said Richard Gorman. “There’s a story going the rounds that you may make your home with us in the future.” + 

When questioned by a Citizen reporter, Mr. Bryan refused either to confirm or deny the rumor: + 

“I may have a statement to make later,” he observed with a significant smile, “but at present I must content myself by saying that if I could have chosen the place of my birth, I could not have found a fairer spot than this wonderland of nature.” + 

Earthly Paradise, thinks Commoner. + 

“I have travelled far in my day,” continued the man who had been chosen three times by a great Party to contend for the highest honor within the gift of the people. “I have gone from the woods of Maine to the wave-washed sands of Florida, from Hatteras to Halifax, and from the summits of the Rockies to where Missouri rolls her turgid flood, but I have seen few spots that equal, and none that surpass, the beauty of this mountain Eden.” + 

The reporter made notes rapidly. + 

The years of his glory washed back to him upon the rolling tides of rhetoric⁠—the great lost days of the first crusade when the money barons trembled beneath the shadow of the Cross of Gold, and Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! burned through the land like a comet. Ere I was old. 1896. Ah, woeful ere, which tells me youth’s no longer here. + 

Foresees Dawn of New Era. + 

When pressed more closely by the reporter as to his future plans, Mr. Bryan replied: + 

“My schedule is completely filled, for months to come, with speaking engagements that will take me from one end of the country to the other, in the fight I am making for the reduction of the vast armaments that form the chief obstacle to the reign of peace on earth, goodwill to men. After that, who knows?” he said, flashing his famous smile. “Perhaps I shall come back to this beautiful region, and take up my life among my good friends here as one who, having fought the good fight, deserves to spend the declining years of his life not only within sight, but within the actual boundaries, of the happy land of Canaan.” + 

Asked if he could predict with any certainty the date of his proposed retirement, the Commoner answered characteristically with the following beautiful quotation from Longfellow: + 

“When the war-drum throbbed no longer, + 

And the battle-flags were furled + 

In the Parliament of man, + 

The Federation of the world.” + 

The magic cell of music⁠—the electric piano in the shallow tiled lobby of Altamont’s favorite cinema, the Ajax, stopped playing with firm, tinny abruptness, hummed ominously for a moment, and without warning commenced anew. It’s a long way to Tipperary. The world shook with the stamp of marching men. + 

Miss Margaret Blanchard and Mrs. C. M. McReady, the druggist’s drugged wife who, by the white pitted fabric of her skin, and the wide bright somnolence of her eyes, on honeydew had fed too often, came out of the theatre and turned down toward Wood’s pharmacy. + 

Today: Maurice Costello and Edith M. Storey in Throw Out the Lifeline, a Vitagraph Release. + 

Goggling, his great idiot’s head lolling on his scrawny neck, wearing the wide-rimmed straw hat that covered him winter and summer, Willie Goff, the pencil merchant, jerked past, with inward lunges of his crippled right foot. The fingers of his withered arm pointed stiffly toward himself, beckoning to him, and touching him as he walked with stiff jerking taps, in a terrible parody of vanity. A gaudy handkerchief with blue, yellow and crimson patterns hung in a riotous blot from his breast-pocket over his neatly belted gray Norfolk jacket, a wide loose collar of silk barred with red and orange stripes flowered across his narrow shoulders. In his lapel a huge red carnation. His thin face, beneath the jutting globular head, grinned constantly, glutting his features with wide, lapping, receding, returning, idiot smiles. For should he live a thousand years, he never will be out of humor. He burred ecstatically at the passersby, who grinned fondly at him, and continued down to Wood’s where he was greeted with loud cheers and laughter by a group of young men who loitered at the fountain’s end. They gathered around him boisterously, pounding his back and drawing him up to the fountain. Pleased, he looked at them warmly, gratefully. He was touched and happy. + 

“What’re you having, Willie?” said Mr. Tobias Pottle. + 

“Give me a dope,” said Willie Goff to the grinning jerker, “a dope and lime.” + 

Pudge Carr, the politician’s son, laughed hilariously. “Want a dope and lime, do you, Willie?” he said, and struck him heavily on the back. His thick stupid face composed itself. + 

“Have a cigarette, Willie,” he said, offering the package to Willie Goff. + 

“What’s yours?” said the jerker to Toby Pottle. + 

“Give me a dope, too.” + 

“I don’t want anything,” said Pudge Carr. Such drinks as made them nobly wild, not mad. + 

Pudge Carr held a lighted match to Willie’s cigarette, winking slowly at Brady Chalmers, a tall, handsome fellow, with black hair, and a long dark face. Willie Goff drew in on his cigarette, lighting it with dry smacking lips. He coughed, removed the weed, and held it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it, curiously. + 

They sputtered with laughter, involved and lost in clouds of fume, and guzzling deep, the boor, the lackey, and the groom. + 

Brady Chalmers took Willie’s colored handkerchief gently from his pocket and held it up for their inspection. Then he folded it carefully and put it back. + 

“What are you all dressed up about, Willie?” he said. “You must be going to see your girl.” + 

Willie Goff grinned cunningly. + 

Toby Pottle blew a luxurious jet of smoke through his nostrils. He was twenty-four, carefully groomed, with slick blond hair, and a pink massaged face. + 

“Come on, Willie,” he said, blandly, quietly, “you’ve got a girl, haven’t you?” + 

Willie Goff leered knowingly; at the counter-end, Tim McCall, twenty-eight, who had been slowly feeding cracked ice from his cupped fist into his bloated whisky-fierce jowls, collapsed suddenly, blowing a bright rattling hail upon the marble ledge. + 

“I’ve got several,” said Willie Goff. “A fellow’s got to have a little Poon-Tang, hasn’t he?” + 

Flushed with high ringing laughter, they smiled, spoke respectfully, uncovered before Miss Tot Webster, Miss Mary McGraw, and Miss Martha Cotton, older members of the Younger Set. They called for stronger music, louder wine. + 

“How do you do?” + 

“Aha! Aha!” said Brady Chalmers to Miss Mary McGraw. “Where were you that time?” + 

“You’ll never know,” she called back. It was between them⁠—their little secret. They laughed knowingly with joy of possession. + 

“Come on back, Pudge,” said Euston Phipps, their escort. “You too, Brady.” He followed the ladies back⁠—tall, bold, swagger⁠—a young alcoholic with one sound lung. He was a good golfer. + 

Pert boys rushed from the crowded booths and tables to the fountain, coming up with a long slide. They shouted their orders rudely, nagging the swift jerkers glibly, stridently. + 

“All right, son. Two dopes and a mint limeade. Make it snappy.” + 

“Do you work around here, boy?” + 

The jerkers moved in ragtime tempo, juggling the drinks, tossing scooped globes of ice-cream into the air and catching them in glasses, beating swift rhythms with a spoon. + 

Seated alone, with thick brown eyes above her straw regardant, Mrs. Thelma Jarvis, the milliner, drew, in one swizzling guzzle, the last beaded chain of linked sweetness long drawn out from the bottom of her glass. Drink to me only with thine eyes. She rose slowly, looking into the mirror of her open purse. Then, fluescent, her ripe limbs moulded in a dress of silk henna, she writhed carefully among the crowded tables, with a low rich murmur of contrition. Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low⁠—an excellent thing in a woman. The high light chatter of the tables dropped as she went by. For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love! On amber undulant limbs she walked slowly up the aisle past perfume, stationery, rubber goods, and toilet preparations, pausing at the cigar counter to pay her check. Her round, melon-heavy breasts nodded their heads in slow but sprightly dance. A poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company. + 

But⁠—at the entrance, standing in the alcove by the magazine rack, Mr. Paul Goodson, of the Dependable Life, closed his long grinning dish-face abruptly, and ceased talking. He doffed his hat without effusiveness, as did his companion, Coston Smathers, the furniture man (you furnish the girl, we furnish the house). They were both Baptists. + 

Mrs. Thelma Jarvis turned her warm ivory stare upon them, parted her full small mouth in a remote smile, and passed, ambulant. When she had gone they turned to each other, grinning quietly. We’ll be waiting at the river. Swiftly they glanced about them. No one had seen. + 

Patroness of all the arts, but particular sponsor for Music, Heavenly Maid, Mrs. Franz Wilhelm Von Zeck, wife of the noted lung specialist, and the discoverer of Von Zeck’s serum, came imperially from the doors of the Fashion Mart, and was handed tenderly into the receiving cushions of her Cadillac by Mr. Louis Rosalsky. Benevolently but distantly she smiled down upon him: the white parchment of his hard Polish face was broken by a grin of cruel servility curving up around the wings of his immense putty-colored nose. Frau Von Zeck settled her powerful chins upon the coarse shelving of her Wagnerian breasts and, her ponderous gaze already dreaming on remote philanthropies, was charioted smoothly away from the devoted tradesman. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was Ich leide. + 

Mr. Rosalsky returned into his store. + 

For the third time the Misses Mildred Shuford, Helen Pendergast, and Mary Catherine Bruce drove by, clustered together like unpicked cherries in the front seat of Miss Shuford’s Reo. They passed, searching the pavements with eager, haughty eyes, pleased at their proud appearance. They turned up Liberty Street on their fourth swing round the circle. Waltz me around again, Willie. + 

“Do you know how to dance, George?” Eugene asked. His heart was full of bitter pride and fear. + 

“Yes,” said George Graves absently, “a little bit. I don’t like it.” He lifted his brooding eyes. + 

“Say, ’Gene,” he said, “how much do you think Dr. Von Zeck is worth?” + 

He answered Eugene’s laughter with a puzzled sheepish grin. + 

“Come on,” said Eugene. “I’ll match you for a drink.” + 

They dodged nimbly across the narrow street, amid the thickening afternoon traffic. + 

“It’s getting worse all the time,” said George Graves. “The people who laid the town out didn’t have any vision. What’s it going to be like, ten years from now?” + 

“They could widen the streets, couldn’t they?” said Eugene. + 

“No. Not now. You’d have to move all the buildings back. Wonder how much it would cost?” said George Graves thoughtfully. + 

“And if we don’t,” Professor L. B. Dunn’s precise voice sounded its cold warning, “their next move will be directed against us. You may yet live to see the day when the iron heel of militarism is on your neck, and the armed forces of the Kaiser do the goose-step up and down this street. When that day comes⁠—” + 

“I don’t put any stock in those stories,” said Mr. Bob Webster rudely and irreverently. He was a small man, with a gray, mean face, violent and bitter. A chronic intestinal sourness seemed to have left its print upon his features. “In my opinion, it’s all propaganda. Those Germans are too damn good for them, that’s all. They’re beginning to call for calf-rope.” + 

“When that day comes,” Professor Dunn implacably continued, “remember what I told you. The German government has imperialistic designs upon the whole of the world. It is looking to the day when it shall have all mankind under the yoke of Krupp and Kultur. The fate of civilization is hanging in the balance. Mankind is at the crossroads. I pray God it shall not be said that we were found wanting. I pray God that this free people may never suffer as little Belgium suffered, that our wives and daughters may not be led off into slavery or shame, our children maimed and slaughtered.” + 

“It’s not our fight,” said Mr. Bob Webster. “I don’t want to send my boys three thousand miles across the sea to get shot for those foreigners. If they come over here, I’ll shoulder a gun with the best of them, but until they do they can fight it out among themselves. Isn’t that right, Judge?” he said, turning toward the party of the third part, Judge Walter C. Jeter, of the Federal Circuit, who had fortunately been a close friend of Grover Cleveland. Ancestral voices prophesying war. + 

“Did you know the Wheeler boys?” Eugene asked George Graves. “Paul and Clifton?” + 

“Yes,” said George Graves. “They went away and joined the French army. They’re in the Foreign Legion.” + 

“They’re in the aviation part of it,” said Eugene. “The Lafayette Eskydrill. Clifton Wheeler has shot down more than six Germans.” + 

“The boys around here didn’t like him,” said George Graves. “They thought he was a sissy.” + 

Eugene winced slightly at the sound of the word. + 

“How old was he?” he asked. + 

“He was a grown man,” said George. “Twenty-two or three.” + 

Disappointed, Eugene considered his chance of glory. (Ich bin ja noch ein Kind.) + 

“⁠—But fortunately,” continued Judge Walter C. Jeter deliberately, “we have a man in the White House on whose farseeing statesmanship we can safely rely. Let us trust to the wisdom of his leadership, obeying, in word and spirit, the principles of strict neutrality, accepting only as a last resort a course that would lead this great nation again into the suffering and tragedy of war, which,” his voice sank to a whisper, “God forbid!” + 

Thinking of a more ancient war, in which he had borne himself gallantly, Colonel James Buchanan Pettigrew, head of the Pettigrew Military Academy (Est. 1789), rode by in his open victoria, behind an old negro driver and two well-nourished brown mares. There was a good brown smell of horse and sweat-cured leather. The old negro snaked his whip gently across the sleek trotting rumps, growling softly. + 

Colonel Pettigrew was wrapped to his waist in a heavy rug, his shoulders were covered with a gray Confederate cape. He bent forward, leaning his old weight upon a heavy polished stick, which his freckled hands gripped upon the silver knob. Muttering, his proud powerful old head turned shakily from side to side, darting fierce splintered glances at the drifting crowd. He was a very parfit gentil knight. + 

He muttered. + 

“Suh?” said the negro, pulling in on his reins, and turning around. + 

“Go on! Go on, you scoundrel!” said Colonel Pettigrew. + 

“Yes, suh,” said the negro. They drove on. + 

In the crowd of loafing youngsters that stood across the threshold of Wood’s pharmacy, Colonel Pettigrew’s darting eyes saw two of his own cadets. They were pimply youths, with slack jaws and a sloppy carriage. + 

He muttered his disgust. Not the same! Not the same! Nothing the same! In his proud youth, in the only war that mattered, Colonel Pettigrew had marched at the head of his own cadets. There were 117, sir, all under nineteen. They stepped forward to a man⁠ ⁠… until not a single commissioned officer was left⁠ ⁠… 36 came back⁠ ⁠… since 1789⁠ ⁠… it must go on!⁠ ⁠… 19, sir⁠—all under one hundred and seventeen⁠ ⁠… must⁠ ⁠… go⁠ ⁠… on! + 

His sagging cheek-flanks trembled gently. The horses trotted out of sight around the corner, with a smooth-spoked rumble of rubber tires. + 

George Graves and Eugene entered Wood’s pharmacy and stood up to the counter. The elder soda-jerker, scowling, drew a sopping rag across a puddle of slop upon the marble slab. + 

“What’s yours?” he said irritably. + 

“I want a chock-lut milk,” said Eugene. + 

“Make it two,” added George Graves. + 

O for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth! + 

XXV + 

Yes. The enormous crime had been committed. And, for almost a year, Eugene had been maintaining a desperate neutrality. His heart, however, was not neutral. The fate of civilization, it appeared, hung in the balance. + 

The war had begun at the peak of the summer season. Dixieland was full. His closest friend at the time was a sharp old spinstress with frayed nerves, who had been for thirty years a teacher of English in a New York City public school. Day by day, after the murder of the Grand Duke, they watched the tides of blood and desolation mount through the world. Miss Crane’s thin red nostrils quivered with indignation. Her old gray eyes were sharp with anger. The idea! The idea! + 

For, of all the English, none can show a loftier or more inspired love for Albion’s Isle than American ladies who teach its noble tongue. + 

Eugene was also faithful. With Miss Crane he kept a face of mournful regret, but his heart drummed a martial tattoo against his ribs. The air was full of fifes and flutes; he heard the ghostly throbbing of great guns. + 

“We must be fair!” said Margaret Leonard. “We must be fair!” But her eyes darkened when she read the news of England’s entry, and her throat was trembling like a bird’s. When she looked up her eyes were wet. + 

“Ah, Lord!” she said. “You’ll see things now.” + 

“Little Bobs!” roared Sheba. + 

“God bless him! Did you see where he’s going to take the field?” + 

John Dorsey Leonard laid down the paper, and bent over with high drooling laughter. + 

“Lord a’mercy!” he gasped. “Let the rascals come now!” + 

Ah, well⁠—they came. + 

All through that waning summer, Eugene shuttled frantically from the school to Dixieland, unable, in the delirium of promised glory, to curb his prancing limbs. He devoured every scrap of news, and rushed to share it with the Leonards or Miss Crane. He read every paper he could lay his hands on, exulting in the defeats that were forcing the Germans back at every point. For, he gathered from this wilderness of print, things were going badly with the Huns. At a thousand points they fled squealing before English steel at Mons, fell suppliantly before the French charge along the Marne; withdrew here, gave way there, ran away elsewhere. Then, one morning, when they should have been at Cologne, they were lined up at the walls of Paris. They had run in the wrong direction. The world grew dark. Desperately, he tried to understand. He could not. By the extraordinary strategy of always retreating, the German army had arrived before Paris. It was something new in warfare. It was several years, in fact, before Eugene could understand that someone in the German armies had done some fighting. + 

John Dorsey Leonard was untroubled. + 

“You wait!” he said confidently. “You just wait, my sonny. That old fellow Joffer knows what he’s about. This is just what he’s been waiting for. Now he’s got them where he wants them.” + 

Eugene wondered for what subtle reason a French general might want a German army in Paris. + 

Margaret lifted her troubled eyes from the paper. + 

“It looks mighty serious,” she said. “I tell you!” She was silent a moment, a torrent of passion rose up in her throat. Then she added in a low trembling voice: “If England goes, we all go.” + 

“God bless her!” Sheba yelled. + 

“God bless her, ’Gene,” she continued, tapping him on the knee. “When I stepped ashore on her dear old soil that time, I just couldn’t help myself. I didn’t care what anyone thought. I knelt right down there in the dirt, and pretended to tie my shoe, but say, boy”⁠—her bleared eyes glistened through her tears⁠—“God bless her, I couldn’t help it. Do you know what I did? I leaned over and kissed her earth.” Large gummy tears rolled down her red cheeks. She was weeping loudly, but she went on. “I said: This is the earth of Shakespeare, and Milton, and John Keats and, by God, what’s more, it’s mine as well! God bless her! God bless her!” + 

Tears flowed quietly from Margaret Leonard’s eyes. Her face was wet. She could not speak. They were all deeply moved. + 

“She won’t go,” said John Dorsey Leonard. “We’ll have a word to say to that! She won’t go! You wait!” + 

In Eugene’s fantasy there burned the fixed vision of the great hands clasped across the sea, the flowering of green fields, and the developing convolutions of a faery London⁠—mighty, elfin, old, a romantic labyrinth of ancient crowded ways, tall, leaning houses, Lucullan food and drink, and the mad imperial eyes of genius burning among the swarm of quaint originality. + 

As the war developed, and the literature of war-enchantment began to appear, Margaret Leonard gave him book after book to read. They were the books of the young men⁠—the young men who fought to blot out the evil of the world with their blood. In her trembling voice she read to him Rupert Brooke’s sonnet⁠—“If I should die, think only this of me”⁠—and she put a copy of Donald Hankey’s A Student in Arms into his hand, saying: + 

“Read this, boy. It will stir you as you’ve never been stirred before. Those boys have seen the vision!” + 

He read it. He read many others. He saw the vision. He became a member of this legion of chivalry⁠—young Galahad-Eugene⁠—a spearhead of righteousness. He had gone a-Grailing. He composed dozens of personal memoirs, into which quietly, humorously, with fine-tempered English restraint, he poured the full measure of his pure crusading heart. Sometimes, he came through to the piping times of peace minus an arm, a leg, or an eye, diminished but ennobled; sometimes his last radiant words were penned on the eve of the attack that took his life. With glistening eyes, he read his own epilogue, enjoyed his postmortem glory, as his last words were recorded and explained by his editor. Then, witness of his own martyrdom, he dropped two smoking tears upon his young slain body. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. + 

Ben loped along, scowling, by Wood’s pharmacy. As he passed the idling group at the tiled entrance, he cast on them a look of sudden fierce contempt. Then he laughed quietly, savagely. + 

“Oh, my God!” he said. + 

At the corner, scowling, he waited for Mrs. Pert to cross from the Post Office. She came over slowly, reeling. + 

Having arranged to meet her later in the pharmacy, he crossed over, and turned angularly down Federal Street behind the Post Office. At the second entrance to the Doctors’ and Surgeons’ Building, he turned in, and began to mount the dark creaking stairs. Somewhere, with punctual developing monotony, a single drop of water was falling into the wet black basin of a sink. He paused in the wide corridor of the first floor to control the nervous thudding of his heart. Then he walked halfway down and entered the waiting-room of Dr. J. H. Coker. It was vacant. Frowning, he sniffed the air. The whole building was sharp with the clean nervous odor of antiseptics. A litter of magazines⁠—Life, Judge, The Literary Digest, and The American⁠—on the black mission table, told its story of weary and distressed fumbling. The inner door opened and the doctor’s assistant, Miss Ray, came out. She had on her hat. She was ready to depart. + 

“Do you want to see the doctor?” she asked. + 

“Yes,” said Ben, “is he busy?” + 

“Come on in, Ben,” said Coker, coming to the door. He took his long wet cigar from his mouth, grinning yellowly. “That’s all for today, Laura. You can go.” + 

“Goodbye,” said Miss Laura Ray, departing. + 

Ben went into Coker’s office. Coker closed the door and sat down at his untidy desk. + 

“You’ll be more comfortable if you lie down on that table,” he said grinning. + 

Ben gave the doctor’s table a look of nausea. + 

“How many have died on that thing?” he asked. He sat down nervously in a chair by the desk, and lighted a cigarette, holding the flame to the charred end of cigar Coker thrust forward. + 

“Well, what can I do for you, son?” he asked. + 

“I’m tired of pushing daisies here,” said Ben. “I want to push them somewhere else.” + 

“What do you mean, Ben?” + 

“I suppose you’ve heard, Coker,” said Ben quietly and insultingly, “that there’s a war going on in Europe. That is, if you’ve learned to read the papers.” + 

“No, I hadn’t heard about it, son,” said Coker, puffing slowly and deeply. “I read a paper⁠—the one that comes out in the morning. I suppose they haven’t got the news yet.” He grinned maliciously. “What do you want, Ben?” + 

“I’m thinking of going to Canada and enlisting,” said Ben. “I want you to tell me if I can get in.” + 

Coker was silent a moment. He took the long chewed weed from his mouth and looked at it thoughtfully. + 

“What do you want to do that for, Ben?” he said. + 

Ben got up suddenly, and went to the window. He cast his cigarette away into the court. It struck the cement well with a small dry plop. When he turned around, his sallow face had gone white and passionate. + 

“In Christ’s name, Coker,” he said, “what’s it all about? Are you able to tell me? What in heaven’s name are we here for? You’re a doctor⁠—you ought to know something.” + 

Coker continued to look at his cigar. It had gone out again. + 

“Why?” he said deliberately. “Why should I know anything?” + 

“Where do we come from? Where do we go to? What are we here for? What the hell is it all about?” Ben cried out furiously in a rising voice. He turned bitterly, accusingly, on the older man. “For God’s sake, speak up, Coker. Don’t sit there like a damned tailor’s dummy. Say something, won’t you?” + 

“What do you want me to say?” said Coker. “What am l? A mind-reader? A spiritualist? I’m your physician, not your priest. I’ve seen them born, and I’ve seen them die. What happens to them before or after, I can’t say.” + 

“Damn that!” said Ben. “What happens to them in between?” + 

“You’re as great an authority on that as I am, Ben,” said Coker. “What you want, son, is not a doctor, but a prophet.” + 

“They come to you when they’re sick, don’t they?” said Ben. “They all want to get well, don’t they? You do your best to cure them, don’t you?” + 

“No,” said Coker. “Not always. But I’ll grant that I’m supposed to. What of it?” + 

“You must all think that it’s about something,” said Ben, “or you wouldn’t do it!” + 

“A man must live, mustn’t he?” said Coker with a grin. + 

“That’s what I’m asking you, Coker. Why must he?” + 

“Why,” said Coker, “in order to work nine hours a day in a newspaper office, sleep nine hours, and enjoy the other six in washing, shaving, dressing, eating at the Greasy Spoon, loafing in front of Wood’s, and occasionally taking the Merry Widow to see Francis X. Bushman. Isn’t that reason enough for any man? If a man’s hardworking and decent, and invests his money in the Building and Loan every week, instead of squandering it on cigarettes, coca-cola, and Kuppenheimer clothes, he may own a little home some day.” Coker’s voice sank to a hush of reverence. “He may even have his own car, Ben. Think of that! He can get in it, and ride, and ride, and ride. He can ride all over these damned mountains. He can be very, very happy. He can take exercise regularly in the Y.M.C.A. and think only clean thoughts. He can marry a good pure woman and have any number of fine sons and daughters, all of whom may be brought up in the Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian faiths, and given splendid courses in Economics, Commercial Law, and the Fine Arts, at the State university. There’s plenty to live for, Ben. There’s something to keep you busy every moment.” + 

“You’re a great wit, Coker,” Ben said, scowling. “You’re as funny as a crutch.” He straightened his humped shoulders self-consciously, and filled his lungs with air. + 

“Well, what about it?” he asked, with a nervous grin. “Am I fit to go?” + 

“Let’s see,” said Coker deliberately, beginning to look him over. “Feet⁠—pigeon-toed, but good arch.” He looked at Ben’s tan leathers closely. + 

“What’s the matter, Coker?” said Ben. “Do you need your toes to shoot a gun with?” + 

“How’re your teeth, son?” + 

Ben drew back his thin lips and showed two rows of hard white grinders. At the same moment, casually, swiftly, Coker prodded him with a strong yellow finger in the solar plexus. His distended chest collapsed; he bent over, laughing, and coughed dryly. Coker turned away to his desk and picked up his cigar. + 

“What’s the matter, Coker?” said Ben. “What’s the idea?” + 

“That’s all, son. I’m through with you,” said Coker. + 

“Well, what about it?” said Ben nervously. + 

“What about what?” + 

“Am I all right?” + 

“Certainly you’re all right,” said Coker. He turned with burning match. “Who said you weren’t all right?” + 

Ben stared at him, scowling, with fear-bright eyes. + 

“Quit your kidding, Coker,” he said. “I’m three times seven, you know. Am I fit to go?” + 

“What’s the rush?” said Coker. “The war’s not over yet. We may get into it before long. Why not wait a bit?” + 

“That means I’m not fit,” said Ben. “What’s the matter with me, Coker?” + 

“Nothing,” said Coker carefully. “You’re a bit thin. A little run down, aren’t you, Ben? You need a little meat on those bones, son. You can’t sit on a stool at the Greasy Spoon, with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, and get fat.” + 

“Am I all right or not, Coker?” + 

Coker’s long death’s-head widened in a yellow grin. + 

“Yes,” he said. “You’re all right, Ben. You’re one of the most all right people I know.” + 

Ben read the true answer in Coker’s veined and weary eyes. His own were sick with fear. But he said bitingly: + 

“Thanks, Coker. You’re a lot of help. I appreciate what you’ve done a lot. As a doctor, you’re a fine first baseman.” + 

Coker grinned. Ben left the office. + 

As he went out on the street he met Harry Tugman going down to the paper office. + 

“What’s the matter, Ben?” said Harry Tugman. “Feeling sick?” + 

“Yes,” said Ben, scowling at him. “I’ve just had a shot of 606.” + 

He went up the street to meet Mrs. Pert. + 

XXVI + 

In the autumn, at the beginning of his fifteenth year⁠—his last year at Leonard’s⁠—Eugene went to Charleston on a short excursion. He found a substitute for his paper route. + 

“Come on!” said Max Isaacs, whom he still occasionally saw. “We’re going to have a good time, son.” + 

“Yeah, man!” said Malvin Bowden, whose mother was conducting the tour. “You can still git beer in Charleston,” he added with a dissipated leer. + 

“You can go swimmin’ in the ocean at the Isle of Palms,” said Max Isaacs. Then, reverently, he added: “You can go to the Navy Yard an’ see the ships.” + 

He was waiting until he should be old enough to join the navy. He read the posters greedily. He knew all the navy men at the enlistment office. He had read all the booklets⁠—he was deep in naval lore. He knew to a dollar the earnings of firemen, second class, of radio men, and of all kinds of C.P.O.’s. + 

His father was a plumber. He did not want to be a plumber. He wanted to join the navy and see the world. In the navy, a man was given good pay and a good education. He learned a trade. He got good food and good clothing. It was all given to him free, for nothing. + 

“H’m!” said Eliza, with a bantering smile. “Why, say, boy, what do you want to do that for? You’re my baby!” + 

It had been years since he was. She smiled tremulously. + 

“Yes’m,” said Eugene. “Can I go? It’s only for five days. I’ve got the money.” He thrust his hand into his pocket, feeling. + 

“I tell you what!” said Eliza, working her lips, smiling. “You may wish you had that money before this winter’s over. You’re going to need new shoes and a warm overcoat when the cold weather comes. You must be mighty rich. I wish I could afford to go running off on a trip like that.” + 

“Oh, my God!” said Ben, with a short laugh. He tossed his cigarette into one of the first fires of the year. + 

“I want to tell you, son,” said Eliza, becoming grave, “you’ve got to learn the value of a dollar or you’ll never have a roof to call your own. I want you to have a good time, boy, but you musn’t squander your money.” + 

“Yes’m,” said Eugene. + 

“For heaven’s sake!” Ben cried. “It’s the kid’s own money. Let him do what he likes with it. If he wants to throw it out the damned window, it’s his own business.” + 

She clasped her hands thoughtfully upon her waist and stared away, pursing her lips. + 

“Well, I reckon it’ll be all right,” she said. “Mrs. Bowden will take good care of you.” + 

It was his first journey to a strange place alone. Eliza packed an old valise carefully, and stowed away a box of sandwiches and eggs. He went away at night. As he stood by his valise, washed, brushed, excited, she wept a little. He was again, she felt, a little farther off. The hunger for voyages was in his face. + 

“Be a good boy,” she said. “Don’t get into any trouble down there.” She thought carefully a moment, looking away. Then she went down in her stocking, and pulled out a five-dollar bill. + 

“Don’t waste your money,” she said. “Here’s a little extra. You may need it.” + 

“Come here, you little thug!” said Ben. Scowling, his quick hands worked busily at the boy’s stringy tie. He jerked down his vest, slipping a wadded ten-dollar bill into Eugene’s pocket. “Behave yourself,” he said, “or I’ll beat you to death.” + 

Max Isaacs whistled from the street. He went out to join them. + 

There were six in Mrs. Bowden’s party: Max Isaacs, Malvin Bowden, Eugene, two girls named Josie and Louise, and Mrs. Bowden. Josie was Mrs. Bowden’s niece and lived with her. She was a tall beanpole of a girl with a prognathous mouth and stick-out grinning teeth. She was twenty. The other girl, Louise, was a waitress. She was small, plump, a warm brunette. Mrs. Bowden was a little sallow woman with ratty brown hair. She had brown worn-out eyes. She was a dressmaker. Her husband, a carpenter, had died in the Spring. There was a little insurance money. That was how she came to take the trip. + 

Now, by night, he was riding once more into the South. The day-coach was hot, full of the weary smell of old red plush. People dozed painfully, distressed by the mournful tolling of the bell, and the grinding halts. A baby wailed thinly. Its mother, a gaunt wisp-haired mountaineer, turned the back of the seat ahead, and bedded the child on a spread newspaper. Its wizened face peeked dirtily out of its swaddling discomfort of soiled jackets and pink ribbon. It wailed and slept. At the front of the car, a young hill-man, high-boned and red, clad in corduroys and leather leggings, shelled peanuts steadily, throwing the shells into the aisle. People trod through them with a sharp masty crackle. The boys, bored, paraded restlessly to the car-end for water. There was a crushed litter of sanitary drinking-cups upon the floor, and a stale odor from the toilets. + 

The two girls slept soundly on turned seats. The small one breathed warmly and sweetly through moist parted lips. + 

The weariness of the night wore in upon their jaded nerves, lay upon their dry hot eyeballs. They flattened noses against the dirty windows, and watched the vast structure of the earth sweep past⁠—clumped woodlands, the bending sweep of the fields, the huge flowing lift of the earth-waves, cyclic intersections bewildering⁠—the American earth⁠—rude, immeasurable, formless, mighty. + 

His mind was bound in the sad lulling magic of the car wheels. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. He thought of his life as something that had happened long ago. He had found, at last, his gateway to the lost world. But did it lie before or behind him? Was he leaving or entering it? Above the rhythm of the wheels he thought of Eliza’s laughter over ancient things. He saw a brief forgotten gesture, her white broad forehead, a ghost of old grief in her eyes. Ben, Gant⁠—their strange lost voices. Their sad laughter. They swam toward him through green walls of fantasy. They caught and twisted at his heart. The green ghost-glimmer of their faces coiled away. Lost. Lost. + 

“Let’s go for a smoke,” said Max Isaacs. + 

They went back and stood wedged for stability on the closed platform of the car. They lighted cigarettes. + 

Light broke against the east, in a murky rim. The far dark was eaten cleanly away. The horizon sky was barred with hard fierce strips of light. Still buried in night, they looked across at the unimpinging sheet of day. They looked under the lifted curtain at brightness. They were knifed sharply away from it. Then, gently, light melted across the land like dew. The world was gray. + 

The east broke out in ragged flame. In the car, the little waitress breathed deeply, sighed, and opened her clear eyes. + 

Max Isaacs fumbled his cigarette awkwardly, looked at Eugene, and grinned sheepishly with delight, craning his neck along his collar, and making a nervous grimace of his white fuzz-haired face. His hair was thick, straight, the color of taffy. He had blond eyebrows. There was much kindness in him. They looked at each other with clumsy tenderness. They thought of the lost years at Woodson Street. They saw with decent wonder their awkward bulk of puberty. The proud gate of the years swung open for them. They felt a lonely glory. They said farewell. + 

Charleston, fat weed that roots itself on Lethe wharf, lived in another time. The hours were days, the days weeks. + 

They arrived in the morning. By noon, several weeks had passed, and he longed for the day’s ending. They were quartered in a small hotel on King Street⁠—an old place above stores, with big rooms. After lunch, they went out to see the town. Max Isaacs and Malvin Bowden turned at once toward the Navy Yard. Mrs. Bowden went with them. Eugene was weary for sleep. He promised to meet them later. + 

When they had gone, he pulled off his shoes and took off his coat and shirt, and lay down to sleep in a big dark room, into which the warm sun fell in shuttered bars. Time droned like a sleepy October fly. + 

At five o’clock, Louise, the little waitress, came to wake him. She, too, had wanted to sleep. She knocked gently at the door. When he did not answer, she opened it quietly and came in, closing it behind her. She came to the side of the bed and looked at him for a moment. + 

“Eugene!” she whispered. “Eugene.” + 

He murmured drowsily, and stirred. The little waitress smiled and sat down on the bed. She bent over him and tickled him gently in the ribs, chuckling to see him squirm. Then she tickled the soles of his feet. He wakened slowly, yawning, rubbing sleep from his eyes. + 

“What is it?” he said. + 

“It’s time to go out there,” she said. + 

“Out where?” + 

“To the Navy Yard. We promised to meet them.” + 

“Oh, damn the Navy Yard!” he groaned. “I’d rather sleep.” + 

“So would I!” she agreed. She yawned luxuriously, stretching her plump arms above her head. “I’m so sleepy. I could stretch out anywhere.” She looked meaningly at the bed. + 

He wakened at once, sensuously alert. He lifted himself upon one elbow: a hot torrent of blood swarmed through his cheeks. His pulses beat thickly. + 

“We’re all alone up here,” said Louise smiling. “We’ve got the whole floor to ourselves.” + 

“Why don’t you lie down and take a nap, if you’re still sleepy?” he asked. “I’ll wake you up,” he added, with gentle chivalry. + 

“I’ve got such a little room. It’s hot and stuffy. That’s why I got up,” said Louise. “What a nice big room you’ve got!” + 

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a nice big bed, too.” They were silent a waiting moment. + 

“Why don’t you lie down here, Louise?” he said, in a low unsteady voice. “I’ll get up,” he added hastily, sitting up. “I’ll wake you.” + 

“Oh, no,” she said, “I wouldn’t feel right.” + 

They were again silent. She looked admiringly at his thin young arms. + 

“My!” she said. “I bet you’re strong.” + 

He flexed his long stringy muscles manfully, and expanded his chest. + 

“My!” she said. “How old are you, ’Gene?” + 

He was just at his fifteenth year. + 

“I’m going on sixteen,” he said. “How old are you, Louise?” + 

“I’m eighteen,” she said. “I bet you’re a regular heartbreaker, ’Gene. How many girls have you got?” + 

“Oh⁠—I don’t know. Not many,” he said truthfully enough. He wanted to talk⁠—he wanted to talk madly, seductively, wickedly. He would excite her by uttering, in grave respectful tones, honestly, matter-of-factly, the most erotic suggestions. + 

“I guess you like the tall ones, don’t you?” said Louise. “A tall fellow wouldn’t want a little thing like me, would he? Although,” she said quickly, “you never know. They say opposites attract each other.” + 

“I don’t like tall girls,” said Eugene. “They’re too skinny. I like them about your size, when they’ve got a good build.” + 

“Have I got a good build, ’Gene?” said Louise, holding her arms up and smiling. + 

“Yes, you have a pretty build, Louise⁠—a fine build,” said Eugene earnestly. “The kind I like.” + 

“I haven’t got a pretty face. I’ve got an ugly face,” she said invitingly. + 

“You haven’t got an ugly face. You have a pretty face,” said Eugene firmly. “Anyway, the face doesn’t matter much with me,” he added, subtly. + 

“What do you like best, ’Gene?” Louise asked. + 

He thought carefully and gravely. + 

“Why,” he said, “a woman ought to have pretty legs. Sometimes a woman has an ugly face, but a pretty leg. The prettiest legs I ever saw were on a High Yellow.” + 

“Were they prettier than mine?” said the waitress, with an easy laugh. + 

She crossed her legs slowly and displayed her silk-shod ankle. + 

“I don’t know, Louise,” he said, staring critically. “I can’t see enough.” + 

“Is that enough?” she said, pulling her tight skirt above her calves. + 

“No,” said Eugene. + 

“Is that?” she pulled her skirt back over her knees, and displayed her plump thighs, gartered with a ruffled band of silk and red rosettes. She thrust her small feet out, coyly turning the toes in. + 

“Lord!” said Eugene, staring with keen interest at the garter. “I never saw any like that before. That’s pretty.” He gulped noisily. “Don’t those things hurt you, Louise?” + 

“Uh-uh,” she said, as if puzzled, “why?” + 

“I should think they’d cut into your skin,” he said. “I know mine do if I wear them too tight. See.” + 

He pulled up his trousers’ leg and showed his young gartered shank, lightly spired with hair. + 

Louise looked, and felt the garter gravely with a plump hand. + 

“Mine don’t hurt me,” she said. She snapped the elastic with a ripe smack. “See!” + 

“Let me see,” he said. He placed his trembling fingers lightly upon her garter. + 

“Yes,” he said unsteadily. “I see.” + 

Her round young weight lay heavy against him, her warm young face turned blindly up to his own. His brain reeled as if drunken, he dropped his mouth awkwardly upon her parted lips. She sank back heavily on the pillows. He planted dry and clumsy kisses upon her mouth, her eyes, in little circles round her throat and face. He fumbled at the throat-hook of her waist, but his fingers shook so violently that he could not unfasten it. She lifted her smooth hands with a comatose gesture, and unfastened it for him. + 

Then he lifted his beet-red face, and whispered tremulously, not knowing well what he said: + 

“You’re a nice girl, Louise. A pretty girl.” + 

She thrust her pink fingers slowly through his hair, drew back his face into her breasts again, moaned softly as he kissed her, and clutched his hair in an aching grip. He put his arms around her and drew her to him. They devoured each other with young wet kisses, insatiate, unhappy, trying to grow together in their embrace, draw out the last distillation of desire in a single kiss. + 

He lay sprawled, scattered and witless with passion, unable to collect and focus his heat. He heard the wild tongueless cries of desire, the inchoate ecstasy that knows no gateway of release. But he knew fear⁠—not the social fear, but the fear of ignorance, of discovery. He feared his potency. He spoke to her thickly, wildly, not hearing himself speak. + 

“Do you want me to? Do you want me to, Louise?” + 

She drew his face down, murmuring: + 

“You won’t hurt me, ’Gene? You wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, honey? If anything happens⁠—” she said drowsily. + 

He seized the straw of her suggestion. + 

“I won’t be the first. I won’t be the one to begin you. I’ve never started a girl off,” he babbled, aware vaguely that he was voicing an approved doctrine of chivalry. “See here, Louise!” he shook her⁠—she seemed drugged. “You’ve got to tell me before⁠—. I won’t do that! I may be a bad fellow, but nobody can say I ever did that. Do you hear!” His voice rose shrilly; his face worked wildly; he was hardly able to speak. + 

“I say, do you hear? Am I the first one, or not? You’ve got to answer! Did you ever⁠—before?” + 

She looked at him lazily. She smiled. + 

“No,” she said. + 

“I may be bad, but I won’t do that.” He had become inarticulate; his voice went off into a speechless jargon. Gasping, stammering, with contorted and writhing face, he sought for speech. + 

She rose suddenly, and put her warm arms comfortingly around him. Soothing and caressing him, she drew him down on her breast. She stroked his head, and talked quietly to him. + 

“I know you wouldn’t, honey. I know you wouldn’t. Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. Why, you’re all excited, dear. There. Why, you’re shaking like a leaf. You’re high-strung, honey. That’s what it is. You’re a bundle of nerves.” + 

He wept soundlessly into her arm. + 

He became quieter. She smiled, and kissed him softly. + 

“Put on your clothes,” said Louise. “We ought to get started if we’re going out there.” + 

In his confusion he tried to draw on a pair of Mrs. Bowden’s cast-off pumps. Louise laughed richly, and thrust her fingers through his hair. + 

At the Navy Yard, they could not find the Bowdens nor Max Isaacs. A young sailor took them over a destroyer. Louise went up a railed iron ladder with an emphatic rhythm of her shapely thighs. She showed her legs. She stared impudently at a picture of a chorus lady, cut from the Police Gazette. The young sailor rolled his eyes aloft with an expression of innocent debauchery. Then he winked heavily at Eugene. + 

The deck of the Oregon. + 

“What’s that for?” said Louise, pointing to the outline in nails of Admiral Dewey’s foot. + 

“That’s where he stood during the fight,” said the sailor. + 

Louise put her small foot within the print of the greater one. The sailor winked at Eugene. You may fire when you are ready, Gridley. + 

“She’s a nice girl,” said Eugene. + 

“Yeah,” said Max Isaacs. “She’s a nice lady.” He craned his neck awkwardly, and squinted. “About how old is she?” + 

“She’s eighteen,” said Eugene. + 

Malvin Bowden stared at him. + 

“You’re crazy!” said he. “She’s twenty-one.” + 

“No,” said Eugene, “she’s eighteen. She told me so.” + 

“I don’t care,” said Malvin Bowden, “she’s no such thing. She’s twenty-one. I reckon I ought to know. My folks have known her for five years. She had a baby when she was eighteen.” + 

“Aw!” said Max Isaacs. + 

“Yes,” said Malvin Bowden, “a travelling man got her in trouble. Then he ran away.” + 

“Aw!” said Max Isaacs. “Without marryin’ her or anything?” + 

“He didn’t do nothing for her. He ran away,” said Malvin Bowden. “Her people are raising the kid now.” + 

“Great Day!” said Max Isaacs slowly. Then, sternly, he added, “A man who’d do a thing like that ought to be shot.” + 

“You’re right!” said Malvin Bowden. + 

They loafed along the Battery, along the borders of ruined Camelot. + 

“Those are nice old places,” said Max Isaacs. “They’ve been good houses in their day.” + 

He looked greedily at wrought-iron gateways; the old lust of his childhood for iron-scraps awoke. + 

“Those are old Southern mansions,” said Eugene, reverently. + 

The bay was still: there was a green stench of warm standing water. + 

“They’ve let the place run down,” said Malvin. “It’s no bigger now than it was before the Civil War.” + 

No, sir, and, by heaven, so long as one true Southern heart is left alive to remember Appomattox, Reconstruction, and the Black parliaments, we will defend with our dearest blood our menaced, but sacred, traditions. + 

“They need some Northern capital,” said Max Isaacs sagely. They all did. + 

An old woman, wearing a tiny bonnet, was led out on a high veranda from one of the houses, by an attentive negress. She seated herself in a porch rocker and stared blindly into the sun. Eugene looked at her sympathetically. She had probably not been informed by her loyal children of the unsuccessful termination of the war. United in their brave deception, they stinted themselves daily, reining in on their proud stomachs in order that she might have all the luxury to which she had been accustomed. What did she eat? The wing of a chicken, no doubt, and a glass of dry sherry. Meanwhile, all the valuable heirlooms had been pawned or sold. Fortunately, she was almost blind, and could not see the wastage of their fortune. It was very sad. But did she not sometimes think of that old time of the wine and the roses? When knighthood was in flower? + 

“Look at that old lady,” whispered Malvin Bowden. + 

“You can tell she’s a lady,” said Max Isaacs. “I bet she’s never turned her hand over.” + 

“An old family,” said Eugene gently. “The Southern aristocracy.” + 

An old negro came by, fringed benevolently by white whiskers. A good old man⁠—an antebellum darkey. Dear Lord, their number was few in these unhappy days. + 

Eugene thought of the beautiful institution of human slavery, which his slaveless maternal ancestry had fought so valiantly to preserve. Bress de Lawd, Marse! Ole Mose doan’ wan’ to be free niggah. How he goan’ lib widout marse? He doan’ wan’ stahve wid free niggahs. Har, har, har! + 

Philanthropy. Pure philanthropy. He brushed a tear from his een. + 

They were going across the harbor to the Isle of Palms. As the boat churned past the round brick cylinder of Fort Sumter, Malvin Bowden said: + 

“They had the most men. If things had been even, we’d have beaten them.” + 

“They didn’t beat us,” said Max Isaacs. “We wore ourselves out beating them.” + 

“We were defeated,” said Eugene, quietly, “not beaten.” + 

Max Isaacs stared at him dumbly. + 

“Aw!” he said. + 

They left the little boat, and ground away toward the beach in a streetcar. The land had grown dry and yellow in the enervation of the summer. The foliage was coated with dust: they rattled past cheap summer houses, baked and blistered, stogged drearily in the sand. They were small, flimsy, a multitudinous vermin⁠—all with their little wooden sign of lodging. “The Ishkabibble,” “Seaview,” “Rest Haven,” “Atlantic Inn,”⁠—Eugene looked at them, reading with weariness the bleached and jaded humor of their names. + 

“There are a lot of boardinghouses in the world,” said he. + 

A hot wind of beginning autumn rustled dryly through the long parched leaves of stunted palms. Before them rose the huge rusted spokes of a Ferris Wheel. St. Louis. They had reached the beach. + 

Malvin Bowden leaped joyously from the car. + 

“Last one in’s a rotten egg!” he cried, and streaked for the bathhouse. + 

“Kings! I’ve got kings, son,” yelled Max Isaacs. He held up his crossed fingers. The beach was bare: two or three concessions stood idly open for business. The sky curved over them, a cloudless blue burnished bowl. The sea offshore was glazed emerald: the waves rode heavily in, thickening murkily as they turned with sunlight and sediment to a beachy yellow. + 

They walked slowly down the beach toward the bathhouse. The tranquil, incessant thunder of the sea made in them a lonely music. Seawards, their eyes probed through the seething glare. + 

“I’m going to join the navy, ’Gene,” said Max Isaacs. “Come on and go with me.” + 

“I’m not old enough,” said Eugene. “You’re not, either.” + 

“I’ll be sixteen in November,” said Max Isaacs defensively. + 

“That’s not old enough.” + 

“I’m going to lie to get in,” said Max Isaacs. “They won’t bother you. You can get in. Come on.” + 

“No,” said Eugene. “I can’t.” + 

“Why not?” said Max Isaacs. “What are you going to do?” + 

“I’m going to college,” said Eugene. “I’m going to get an education and study law.” + 

“You’ll have lots of time,” said Max Isaacs. “You can go to college when you come out. They teach you a lot in the navy. They give you a good training. You go everywhere.” + 

“No,” said Eugene. “I can’t.” + 

But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely thunder of the sea. He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage, and heard the little tinkling sounds of Asia. He believed in harbors at the end. + 

Mrs. Bowden’s niece and the waitress came out on the next car. After his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the gusty wind, upon the beach. A fine tang of salt was on his lips. He licked his clean young flesh. + 

Louise came from the bathhouse and walked slowly toward him. She came proudly, her warm curves moulded into her bathing-suit: her legs were covered with stockings of green silk. + 

Far out, beyond the ropes, Max Isaacs lifted his white heavy arms, and slid swiftly through a surging wall of green water. His body glimmered greenly for a moment; he stood erect wiping his eyes and shaking water from his ears. + 

Eugene took the waitress by the hand and led her into the water. She advanced slowly, with little twittering cries. An undulant surge rolled in deceptively, and rose suddenly to her chin, drinking her breath. She gasped and clung to him. Initiated, they bucked deliciously through a roaring wall of water, and, while her eyes were still closed, he caught her to him with young salty kisses. + 

Presently they came out, and walked over the wet strip of beach into the warm loose sand, bedding their dripping bodies gratefully in its warmth. The waitress shivered: he moulded sand over her legs and hips, until she was half buried. He kissed her, stilling his trembling lips upon her mouth. + 

“I like you! I like you a lot!” he said. + 

“What did they tell you about me?” she said. “Did they talk about me?” + 

“I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care about that. I like you.” + 

“You won’t remember me, honey, when you start going with the girls. You’ll forget about me. Some day you’ll see me, and you won’t even know me. You won’t recognize me. You’ll pass without speaking.” + 

“No,” he said. “I’ll never forget you, Louise. So long as I live.” + 

Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of the sea. She kissed him. They were hill-born. + 

He returned in late September. + 

In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for Baltimore. The operation, too long deferred, was now inevitable. His disease had grown steadily worse. He had gone through a period of incessant pain. He was enfeebled. He was frightened. + 

Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house with his cries, commanding terror with his old magnificence. + 

“I see it! I see it! The knife! The knife!⁠ ⁠… Do you see its shadow?⁠ ⁠… There! There! There!” + 

With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to invulnerable nothings. + 

“Do you see him standing there in the shadows? So you’ve come at last to take the old man with you?⁠ ⁠… There he stands⁠—the Grim Reaper⁠—as I always knew he would. Jesus, have mercy on my soul!” + 

Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins. Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in and looked at his chart. He talked happily and went away. He was one of the greatest surgeons in the country. + 

“Don’t worry,” said the nurse encouragingly, “the mortality’s only four percent. It used to be thirty. He’s reduced it.” + 

Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his daughter’s vital grasp. + 

“Don’t worry, old boy!” she said, “you’re going to be as good as you ever were, after this.” + 

She fed him with her life, her hope, her love. He was almost tranquil when they wheeled him in to his operation. + 

But the little gray-haired man looked, shook his head regretfully, and trimmed deftly. + 

“All right!” he said, four minutes later, to his assistant. “Close the wound.” + 

Gant was dying of cancer. + 

Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor veranda, looking out through bright October air at the city spread far into the haze before him. He looked very clean, almost fragile. A faint grin of happiness and relief hovered about his thin mouth. He smoked a long cigar, with fresh-awakened senses. + 

“There,” he said pointing, “is where I spent part of my boyhood. Old Jeff Streeter’s hotel stood about there,” he pointed. + 

“Dig down!” said Helen, grinning. + 

Gant thought of the years between, and the vexed pattern of fate. His life seemed strange to him. + 

“We’ll go to see all those places when you get out of here. They’re going to let you out of here, day after tomorrow. Did you know that? Did you know you’re almost well?” she cried with a big smile. + 

“I’m going to be a well man after this,” said Gant. “I feel twenty years younger!” + 

“Poor old papa!” she said. “Poor old papa!” + 

Her eyes were wet. She put her big hands on his face, and drew his head against her. + 

XXVII + 

My Shakespeare, rise! He rose. The bard rose throughout the length and breadth of his brave new world. He was not for an age, but for all time. Then, too, his tercentenary happened only once⁠—at the end of three hundred years. It was observed piously from Maryland to Oregon. Eighty-one members of the House of Representatives, when asked by literate journalists for their favorite lines, replied instantly with a quotation from Polonius: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” The Swan was played, and pageanted, and essayed in every schoolhouse in the land. + 

Eugene tore the Chandos portrait from the pages of the Independent and nailed it to the calcimined wall of the backroom. Then, still full of the great echoing paean of Ben Jonson’s, he scrawled below it in large trembling letters: “My Shakespeare, rise!” The large plump face⁠—“as damned silly a head as ever I looked at”⁠—stared baldly at him with goggle eyes, the goatee pointed ripe with hayseed vanity. But, lit by the presence, Eugene plunged back into the essay littered across his table. + 

He was discovered. In an unwise absence, he left the Bard upon the wall. When he returned, Ben and Helen had read his scrawl. Thereafter, he was called poetically to table, to the telephone, to go an errand. + 

“My Shakespeare, rise!” + 

With red resentful face, he rose. + 

“Will My Shakespeare pass the biscuit?” or, “Could I trouble My Shakespeare for the butter?” said Ben, scowling at him. + 

“My Shakespeare! My Shakespeare! Do you want another piece of pie?” said Helen. Then, full of penitent laughter, she added: “That’s a shame! We oughtn’t to treat the poor kid like that.” Laughing, she plucked at her large straight chin, gazing out the window, and laughing absently⁠—penitently, laughing. + 

But⁠—“his art was universal. He saw life clearly and he saw it whole. He was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched every shore of thought. He was all things in one: lawyer, merchant, soldier, doctor, statesman. Men of science have been amazed by the depth of his learning. In The Merchant of Venice, he deals with the most technical questions of law with the skill of an attorney. In King Lear, he boldly prescribes sleep as a remedy for Lear’s insanity. ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.’ Thus, he has foreseen the latest researches of modern science by almost three centuries. In his sympathetic and well-rounded sense of characterization, he laughs with, not at, his characters.” + 

Eugene won the medal⁠—bronze or of some other material even more enduring. The Bard’s profile murkily indented. W. S. 1616⁠–⁠1916. A long and useful life. + 

The machinery of the pageant was beautiful and simple. Its author⁠—Dr. George B. Rockham, at one time, it was whispered, a trouper with the Ben Greet players⁠—had seen to that. All the words had been written by Dr. George B. Rockham, and all the words, accordingly, had been written for Dr. George B. Rockham. Dr. George B. Rockham was the Voice of History. The innocent children of Altamont’s schools were the mute illustrations of that voice. + 

Eugene was Prince Hal. The day before the pageant his costume arrived from Philadelphia. At John Dorsey Leonard’s direction he put it on. Then he came out sheepishly before John Dorsey on the school veranda, fingering his tin sword and looking somewhat doubtfully at his pink silk hose which came three quarters up his skinny shanks, and left exposed, below his doublet, a six-inch hiatus of raw thigh. + 

John Dorsey Leonard looked gravely. + 

“Here, boy,” he said. “Let me see!” + 

He pulled strongly at the top of the deficient hose, with no result save to open up large runs in them. Then John Dorsey Leonard began to laugh. He slid helplessly down upon the porch rail, and bent over, palsied with silent laughter, from which a high whine, full of spittle, presently emerged. + 

“O-oh my Lord!” he gasped. “Egscuse me!” he panted, seeing the boy’s angry face. “It’s the funniest thing I ever⁠—” at this moment his voice died of paralysis. + 

“I’ll fix you,” said Miss Amy. “I’ve got just the thing for you.” + 

She gave him a full baggy clown’s suit, of green linen. It was a relic of a Halloween party; its wide folds were gartered about his ankles. + 

He turned a distressed, puzzled face toward Miss Amy. + 

“That’s not right, is it?” he asked. “He never wore anything like this, did he?” + 

Miss Amy looked. Her deep bosom heaved with full contralto laughter. + 

“Yes, that’s right! That’s fine!” she yelled. “He was like that, anyway. No one will ever notice, boy.” She collapsed heavily into a wicker chair which widened with a protesting creak. + 

“Oh, Lord!” she groaned, wet-cheeked. “I don’t believe I ever saw⁠—” + 

The pageant was performed on the embowered lawns of the Manor House. Dr. George B. Rockham stood in a green hollow⁠—a natural amphitheatre. His audience sat on the turf of the encircling banks. As the phantom cavalcade of poetry and the drama wound down to him, Dr. George B. Rockham disposed of each character neatly in descriptive pentameter verse. He was dressed in the fashion of the Restoration⁠—a period he coveted because it understood the charms of muscular calves. His heavy legs bulged knottily below a coy fringe of drawer-ruffles. + 

Eugene stood waiting on the road above, behind an obscuring wall of trees. It was rich young May. “Doc” Hines (Falstaff) waited beside him. His small tough face grinned apishly over garments stuffed with yards of wadding. Grinning, he smote himself upon his swollen paunch: the blow left a dropsical depression. + 

He turned, with a comical squint, on Eugene: + 

“Hal,” said he, “you’re a hell of a looking prince.” + 

“You’re no beauty, Jack,” said Eugene. + 

Behind him, Julius Arthur (Macbeth), drew his sword with a flourish. + 

“I challenge you, Hal,” said he. + 

In the young shimmering light their tin swords clashed rapidly. Twittered with young bird-laughter, on bank and saddle sprawled, all of the Bard’s personæ. Julius Arthur thrust swiftly, was warded, then, with loose grin, buried his brand suddenly in “Doc” Hines’ receiving paunch. The company of the immortal shrieked happily. + 

Miss Ida Nelson, the assistant director, rushed angrily among them. + 

“Sh!” she hissed loudly. “Sh-h!” She was very angry. She had spent the afternoon hissing loudly. + 

Swinging gently in her sidesaddle, Rosalind, on horseback, a ripe little beauty from the convent, smiled warmly at him. Looking, he forgot. + 

Below them, on the road, the crowded press loosened slowly, broke off in minute fragments, and disappeared into the hidden gulch of Dr. George Rockham’s receiving voice. With fat hammy sonority he welcomed them. + 

But he had not come to Shakespeare. The pageant had opened with the Voices of Past and Present⁠—voices a trifle out of harmony with the tenor of event⁠—but necessary to the commercial success of the enterprise. These voices now moved voicelessly past⁠—four frightened salesladies from Schwartzberg’s, clad decently in cheesecloth and sandals, who came by bearing the banner of their concern. Or, as the doctor’s more eloquent iambics had it: + 

“Fair Commerce, sister of the arts, thou, too, + 

Shalt take thy lawful place upon our stage.” + 

They came and passed: Ginsberg’s⁠—“the glass of fashion and the mould of form”; Bradley the Grocer⁠—“when first Pomona held her fruity horn”; The Buick Agency⁠—“the chariots of Oxus and of Ind.” + 

Came, passed⁠—like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream. + 

Behind them, serried ranks of cherubim, the marshalled legions of Altamont’s Sunday schools, each in white arrayed and clutching grimly in tiny hands two thousand tiny flags of freedom, God’s small angels, and surely there for God knows what far-off event, began to move into the hollow. Their teachers nursed them gently into action, with tapping feet and palms. + 

“One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Quickly, children!” + 

A hidden orchestra, musical in the trees, greeted them, as they approached, with holy strains: the Baptists, with the simple doctrine of “It’s the Old-Time Religion”; the Methodists, with “I’ll Be Waiting at the River”; the Presbyterians, with “Rock of Ages”; the Episcopalians, with “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”; and rising to lyrical climactic passion, the little Jews, with the nobly marching music of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” + 

They passed without laughter. There was a pause. + 

“Well, thank God for that!” said Ralph Rolls coarsely in a solemn quiet. The Bard’s strewn host laughed, rustled noisily into line. + 

“Sh-h! Sh-h!” hissed Miss Ida Nelson. + 

“What the hell does she think she is?” said Julius Arthur, “a steam valve?” + 

Eugene looked attentively at the shapely legs of the page, Viola. + 

“Wow!” said Ralph Rolls, with his accustomed audibility. “Look who’s here!” + 

She looked on them all with a pert impartial smile. But she never told her love. + 

Miss Ida Nelson caught the doctor’s stealthy sign. Carefully, in slow twos, she fed them down to him. + 

The Moor of Venice (Mr. George Graves), turned his broad back upon their jibes, and lurched down with sullen-sheepish grin, unable to conceal the massive embarrassment of his calves. + 

“Tell him who you are, Villa,” said Doc Hines. “You look like Jack Johnson.” + 

The town, in its first white shirting of Spring, sat on the turfy banks, and looked down gravely upon the bosky little comedy of errors; the encircling mountains, and the gods thereon, looked down upon the slightly larger theatre of the town; and, figuratively, from mountains that looked down on mountains, the last stronghold of philosophy, the author of this chronicle looked down on everything. + 

“Here we go, Hal,” said Doc Hines, nudging Eugene. + 

“Give ’em hell, son,” said Julius Arthur. “You’re dressed for the part.” + 

“He looks it, you mean,” said Ralph Rolls. “Boy, you’ll knock ’em dead,” he added with an indecent laugh. + 

They descended into the hollow, accompanied by a low but growing titter of amazement from the audience. Before them, the doctor had just disposed of Desdemona, who parted with a graceful obeisance. He was now engaged on Othello, who stood, bullish and shy, till his ordeal should finish. In a moment, he strode away, and the doctor turned to Falstaff, reading the man by his padded belly, briskly, with relief: + 

“Now, Tragedy, begone, and to our dell + 

Bring antic Jollity with cap and bells: + 

Falstaff, thou prince of jesters, lewd old man + 

Who surfeited a royal prince with mirth, + 

And swayed a kingdom with his wanton quips⁠—” + 

Embarrassed by the growing undertone of laughter, Doc Hines squinted around with a tough grin, gave a comical hitch to his padded figure, and whispered a hoarse aside to Eugene: “Hear that, Hal? I’m hell on wheels, ain’t I?” + 

Eugene saw him depart in a green blur, and presently became aware that an unnatural silence had descended upon Doctor George B. Rockham. The Voice of History was, for the moment, mute. Its long jaw, in fact, had fallen ajar. + 

Dr. George B. Rockham looked wildly about him for succor. He rolled his eyes entreatingly upwards at Miss Ida Nelson. She turned her head away. + 

“Who are you?” he said hoarsely, holding a hairy hand carefully beside his mouth. + 

“Prince Hal,” said Eugene, likewise hoarsely and behind his hand. + 

Dr. George B. Rockham staggered a little. Their speech had reached the stalls. But firmly, before the tethered chafing laughter, he began: + 

“Friend to the weak and comrade of the wild, + 

By folly sired to wisdom, dauntless Hal⁠—” + 

Laughter, laughter unleashed and turbulent, laughter that rose flood by flood upon itself, laughter wild, earthshaking, thunder-cuffing, drowned Dr. George B. Rockham and all he had to say. Laughter! Laughter! Laughter! + 

Helen was married in the month of June⁠—a month sacred, it is said, to Hymen, but used so often for nuptials that the god’s blessing is probably not infallible. + 

She had returned to Altamont in May, from her last singing engagement. She had beeen in Atlanta for the week of opera, and had come back by way of Henderson, where she had visited Daisy and Mrs. Selborne. There she had found her mate. + 

He was not a stranger to her. She had known him years before in Altamont, where he had lived for a short time as district agent for the great and humane corporation that employed him⁠—the Federal Cash Register Company. Since that time he had gone to various parts of the country at his master’s bidding, carrying with him his great message of prosperity and thrift. At the present time, he lived with his sister and his aged mother, whose ponderous infirmity of limb had not impaired her appetite, in a South Carolina town. He was devoted and generous to them both. And the Federal Cash Register Company, touched by his devotion to duty, rewarded him with a good salary. His name was Barton. The Bartons lived well. + 

Helen returned with the unexpectedness in which all returning Gants delighted. She came in on members of her family, one afternoon, in the kitchen at Dixieland. + 

“Hello, everybody!” she said. + 

“Well, for G-g-god’s sake,” said Luke after a moment. “Look who’s here!” + 

They embraced heartily. + 

“Why, what on earth!” cried Eliza, putting her iron down on the board, and wavering on her feet, in an effort to walk in two directions at once. They kissed. + 

“I was just thinking to myself,” said Eliza, more calmly, “that it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if you should come walking in. I had a premonition, I don’t know what else you’d call it⁠—” + 

“Oh, my God!” groaned the girl, good-humoredly, but with a shade of annoyance. “Don’t start that Pentland spooky stuff! It makes my flesh crawl.” + 

She exchanged a glance of burlesque entreaty with Luke. Winking, he turned suddenly, and with an idiotic laugh, tickled Eliza sharply. + 

“Get away!” she shrieked. + 

He chortled madly. + 

“I’ll declare, boy!” she said fretfully. “I believe you’re crazy. I’ll vow I do!” + 

Helen laughed huskily. + 

“Well,” said Eliza, “how’d you leave Daisy and the children?” + 

“They’re all right, I suppose,” said Helen wearily. “Oh, my God! Deliver me!” she laughed. “You never saw such pests! I spent fifty dollars on them in toys and presents alone! You’d never think it from the thanks I get. Daisy takes it all as her due! Selfish! Selfish! Selfish!” + 

“For G-g-god’s sake!” said Luke loyally. + 

She was one fine girl. + 

“I paid for everything I got at Daisy’s, I can assure you!” she said, sharply, challengingly. “I spent no more time there than I had to. I was at Mrs. Selborne’s nearly all the time. I had practically all my meals there.” + 

Her need for independence had become greater; her hunger for dependents acute. Her denial of obligation to others was militant. She gave more than she received. + 

“Well, I’m in for it,” she said presently, trying to mask her strong eagerness. + 

“In for what?” asked Luke. + 

“I’ve gone and done it at last,” she said. + 

“Mercy!” shrieked Eliza. “You’re not married, are you?” + 

“Not yet,” said Helen, “but I will be soon.” + 

Then she told them about Mr. Hugh T. Barton, the cash register salesman. She spoke loyally and kindly of him, without great love. + 

“He’s ten years older than I am,” she said. + 

“Well,” said Eliza thoughtfully, moulding her lips. “They sometimes make the best husbands.” After a moment, she asked: “Has he got any property?” + 

“No,” said Helen, “they live up all he makes. They live in style, I tell you. There are two servants in that house all the time. The old lady doesn’t turn her hand over.” + 

“Where are you going to live?” said Eliza sharply. “With his folks?” + 

“Well, I should say not! I should say not!” said Helen slowly and emphatically. “Good heavens, mama!” she continued irritably. “I want a home of my own. Can’t you realize that? I’ve been doing for others all my life. Now I’m going to let them do for me. I want no in-laws about. No, sir!” she said emphatically. + 

Luke bit his nails nervously. + 

“Well, he’s g-g-getting a great g-g-girl,” he said. “I hope he has sense enough to realize that.” + 

Moved, she laughed bigly, ironically. + 

“I’ve got one booster, haven’t I?” she said. She looked at him seriously with clear affectionate eyes. “Well, thanks, Luke. You’re one of the lot that’s always had the interests of the family at heart.” + 

Her big face was for a moment tranquil and eager. A great calm lay there: the radiant decent beauty of dawn and rainwater. Her eyes were as luminous and believing as a child’s. No evil dwelt in her. She had learned nothing. + 

“Have you told your papa?” said Eliza, presently. + 

“No,” she said, after a pause, “I haven’t.” + 

They thought of Gant in silence, with wonder. Her going was a marvel. + 

“I have a right to my own life,” said Helen angrily, as if someone disputed that right, “as much as anyone. Good heavens, mama! You and papa have lived your lives⁠—don’t you know that? Do you think it’s right that I should go on forever looking after him? Do you?” Her voice rose under the stress of hysteria. + 

“Why, no-o. I never said⁠—” Eliza began, flustered and conciliatory. + 

“You’ve spent your life f-f-finking of others and not of yourself,” said Luke. “That’s the trouble. They don’t appreciate it.” + 

“Well, I’m not going to any longer. That’s one thing sure! No, indeed! I want a home and some children. I’m going to have them!” she said defiantly. In a moment, she added tenderly: + 

“Poor old papa! I wonder what he’s going to say?” + 

He said very little. The Gants, after initial surprise, moulded new events very quickly into the texture of their lives. Abysmal change widened their souls out in a brooding unconsciousness. + 

Mr. Hugh Barton came up into the hills to visit his affianced kin. He came, to their huge delight, lounging in the long racing chassis of a dusty brown 1911 Buick roadster. He came, in a gaseous coil, to the roaring explosion of great engines. He descended, a tall, elegant figure, dyspeptic, lean almost to emaciation, very foppishly laundered and tailored. He looked the car over slowly, critically, a long cigar clamped in the corner of his saturnine mouth, drawing his gauntlets off deliberately. Then, in the same unhurried fashion, he removed from his head the ten-gallon gray sombrero⁠—the only astonishing feature of his otherwise undebatable costume⁠—and shook each long thin leg delicately for a moment to straighten out the wrinkles. But there were none. Then, deliberately, he came up the walk to Dixieland, where the Gants were assembled. As he came, unhurried, he took the cigar from his mouth calmly and held it in the fingers of his lean, hairy, violently palsied hand. His thin black hair, fine spun, was fanned lightly from its elegance by a wantoning breeze. He espied his betrothed and grinned, with dignity, sardonically, with big nuggets of gold teeth. They greeted and kissed. + 

“This is my mother, Hugh,” said Helen. + 

Hugh Barton bent slowly, courteously, from his thin waist. He fastened on Eliza a keen penetrating stare that discomposed her. His lips twisted again in an impressive sardonic smile. Everyone felt he was going to say something very, very important. + 

“How do you do?” he asked, and took her hand. + 

Everyone then felt that Hugh Barton had said something very, very important. + 

With equal slow gravity he greeted each one. They were somewhat awed by his lordliness. Luke, however, burst out uncontrollably: + 

“You’re g-g-getting a fine girl, Mr. B-b-barton.” + 

Hugh Barton turned on him slowly and fixed him with his keen stare. + 

“I think so,” he said gravely. His voice was deep, deliberate, with an impressive rasp. He was selling himself. + 

In an awkward silence he turned, grinning amiably, on Eugene. + 

“Have a cigar?” he asked, taking three long powerful weeds from his upper vest pocket, and holding them out in his clean twitching fingers. + 

“Thanks,” said Eugene with a dissipated leer, “I’ll smoke a Camel.” + 

He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. Gravely, Hugh Barton held a match for him. + 

“Why do you wear the big hat?” asked Eugene. + 

“Psychology,” he said. “It makes ’em talk.” + 

“I tell you what!” said Eliza, beginning to laugh. “That’s pretty smart, isn’t it?” + 

“Sure!” said Luke. “That’s advertising! It pays to advertise!” + 

“Yes,” said Mr. Barton slowly, “you’ve got to get the other fellow’s psychology.” + 

The phrase seemed to describe an action of modified assault and restrained pillage. + 

They liked him very much. They all went into the house. + 

Hugh Barton’s mother was in her seventy-fourth year, but she had the strength of a healthy woman of fifty, and the appetite of two of forty. She was a powerful old lady, six feet tall, with the big bones of a man, and a heavy full-jawed face, sensuous and complacent, and excellently equipped with a champing mill of strong yellow horse-teeth. It was cake and pudding to see her at work on corn on the cob. A slight paralysis had slowed her tongue and thickened her speech a little, so that she spoke deliberately, with a ponderous enunciation of each word. This deformity, which she carefully hid, added to, rather than subtracted from, the pontifical weight of her opinions: she was an earnest Republican⁠—in memory of her departed mate⁠—and she took a violent dislike to anyone who opposed her political judgment. When thwarted or annoyed in any way, the heavy benevolence of her face was dislodged by a thundercloud of petulance, and her wide pouting underlip rolled out like a window-shade. But, as she barged slowly along, one big hand gripping a heavy stick on which she leaned her massive weight, she was an impressive dowager. + 

“She’s a lady⁠—a real lady,” said Helen proudly. “Anyone can see that! She goes out with all the best people.” + 

Hugh Barton’s sister, Mrs. Genevieve Watson, was a sallow woman of thirty-eight years, tall, wren-like and emaciated, like her brother; dyspeptic, and very elegantly kept. The divorced Watson was conspicuous for his absence from all conversations: there was once or twice a heavy flutter around his name, a funereal hush, and a muttered suggestion of oriental debauchery. + 

“He was a beast,” said Hugh Barton, “a low dog. He treated sister very badly.” + 

Mrs. Barton wagged her great head with the slow but emphatic approval she accorded all her son’s opinions. + 

“O-o-h!” she said. “He was a ter-rib-bul man.” + 

He had, they inferred, been given to hellish practices. He had “gone after other women.” + 

Sister Veve had a narrow discontented face, a metallic vivacity, an effusive cordiality. She was always very smartly dressed. She had somewhat vague connections in the real estate business; she spoke grandly of obscure affairs; she was always on the verge of an indefinite “Big Deal.” + 

“I’m getting them lined up, brother,” she would say with cheerful confidence. “Things are coming my way. J. D. came in today and said: ‘Veve⁠—you’re the only woman in the world that can put this thing across. Go to it, little girl. There’s a fortune in it for you.’ ” And so on. + 

Her conversation, Eugene thought, was not unlike Brother Steve’s. + 

But their affection and loyalty for one another was beautiful. Its unaccustomed faith, its abiding tranquillity, puzzled and disturbed the Gants. They were touched indefinably, a little annoyed, because of it. + 

The Bartons came to Woodson Street two weeks before the wedding. Within three days after their arrival, Helen and old lady Barton were at odds. It was inevitable. The heat of the girl’s first affection for Barton’s family wore off very quickly: her possessive instinct asserted itself⁠—she would halve no one’s love, she would share with no other a place in the heart. She would own, she would possess completely. She would be generous, but she would be mistress. She would give. It was the law of her nature. + 

She began immediately, by force of this essential stress, to make out a case against the old woman. + 

Mrs. Barton, too, felt the extent of her loss. She wanted to be sure that Helen realized the extent of her acquisition of one of the latter-day saints. + 

Rocking ponderously in the dark on Gant’s veranda, the old woman would say: + 

“You are get-ting a good boy, Hel-en.” She would wag her powerful head from side to side, pugnaciously emphatic. “Though I do say it myself, you are get-ting one good boy, Hel-en. A bet-ter boy than Hugh does-ent live.” + 

“Oh, I don’t know!” said Helen, annoyed. “I don’t think it’s such a bad bargain for him either, you know. I think pretty well of myself, too.” And she would laugh, huskily, heartily, trying in laughter to conceal her resentment, but visibly, to every eye but Mrs. Barton’s, angered. + 

A moment later, on some pretext, she would be back into the house, where, with a face contorted by her rising hysteria, to Luke, Eugene, or any sympathetic audience, she would burst out: + 

“You heard that, didn’t you? You heard that? You see what I’ve got to put up with, don’t you? Do you see? Do you blame me for not wanting that damned old woman around? Do you? You see how she wants to run things, don’t you? Do you see how she rubs it into me whenever she gets a chance? She can’t bear to give him up. Of course not! He’s her meal-ticket. They’ve bled him white. Why, even now, if it came to a question of choosing between us⁠—” Her face worked strongly. She could not continue. In a moment she quieted herself, and said decisively: “I suppose you know now why we’re going to live away from them. You see, don’t you? Do you blame me?” + 

“No’m,” said Eugene, obedient after pumping. + 

“It’s a d-d-damn shame!” said Luke loyally. + 

At this moment Mrs. Barton, kindly but authoritative, called from the veranda: + 

“Hel-en! Where are you, Hel-en?” + 

“O gotohell. Gotohell!” said Helen, in a comic undertone. + 

“Yes? What is it?” she called out sharply. + 

You see, don’t you? + 

She was married at Dixieland, because she was having a big wedding. She knew a great many people. + 

As her wedding-day approached, her suppressed hysteria mounted. Her sense of decorum grew militant: she attacked Eliza bitterly for keeping certain dubious people in the house. + 

“Mama, in heaven’s name! What do you mean by allowing such goings-on right in the face of Hugh and his people? What do you suppose they think of it? Have you no respect for my feelings? Good heavens, are you going to have the house full of chippies on the night of my wedding?” Her voice was high and cracked. She almost wept. + 

“Why, child!” said Eliza, with troubled face. “What do you mean? I’ve never noticed anything.” + 

“Are you blind! Everyone’s talking about it! They’re practically living together!” This last was a reference to a condition existing between a dissipated and alcoholic young man and a darkly handsome young woman, slightly tubercular. + 

To Eugene was assigned the task of digging this couple out of their burrow. He waited sternly outside the girl’s room, watching the shadow dance at the door crack. At the end of the sixth hour, the besieged surrendered⁠—the man came out. The boy⁠—pallid, but proud of his trust⁠—told the house-defiler that he must go. The young man agreed with cheerful alcoholism. He went at once. + 

Mrs. Pert was saved in the housecleaning. + 

“After all,” said Helen, “what do we know about her? They can say what they like about Fatty. I like her.” + 

Ferns, flowers, potted plants, presents and guests arriving. The long nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The packed crowd. The triumphant booming of “The Wedding March.” + 

A flashlight: Hugh Barton and his bride limply astare⁠—frightened; Gant, Ben, Luke, and Eugene, widely, sheepishly agrin; Eliza, high-sorrowful and sad; Mrs. Selborne and a smile of subtle mystery; the pert flower-girls; Pearl Hines’ happy laughter. + 

When it was over, Eliza and her daughter hung in each other’s arms, weeping. + 

Eliza repeated over and over, from guest to guest: + 

“A son is a son till he gets him a wife, + 

But a daughter’s a daughter all the days of her life.” + 

She was comforted. + 

They escaped at length, wilted, from the thronging press of well-wishing guests. White-faced, scared witless, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Barton got into a closed car. It was done! They would spend the night at the Battery Hill. Ben had engaged the wedding-suite. Tomorrow, a honeymoon to Niagara. + 

Before they went, the girl kissed Eugene with something of the old affection. + 

“I’ll see you in the Fall, honey. Come over as soon as you’re settled.” + 

For Hugh Barton was beginning life with his bride in a new place. He was going to the capital of the State. And it had already been determined, chiefly by Gant, that Eugene was going to the State University. + 

But Hugh and Helen did not go honeymooning the next morning, as they had planned. During the night, as she lay at Dixieland, old Mrs. Barton was taken with a violent, a retching sickness. For once, her massive digestive mechanism failed to meet the heavy demands she had put upon it during the prenuptial banqueting. She came near death. + 

Hugh and Helen returned abruptly next morning to a scene of dismal tinsellings and jaded lilies. Helen hurled her vitality into the sick woman’s care; dominant, furious, all-mastering, she blew back her life into her. Within three days, Mrs. Barton was out of danger; but her complete recovery was slow, ugly, and painful. As the days lengthened out wearily, the girl became more and more bitter over her thwarted honeymoon. Rushing out of the sickroom, she would enter Eliza’s kitchen with writhen face, unable to control her anger: + 

“That damned old woman! Sometimes I believe she did it on purpose. My God, am I to get no happiness from life? Will they never leave me alone? Urr-p! Urr-p!”⁠—Her rough bacchic smile played loosely over her large unhappy face. “Mama, in God’s name where does it all come from?” she said, grinning tearfully. “I do nothing but mop up after her. Will you please tell me how long it’s going to last?” + 

Eliza laughed slyly, passing her finger under her broad nosewing. + 

“Why, child!” she said. “What in the world! I’ve never seen the like! She must have saved up for the last six months.” + 

“Yes, sir!” said Helen, looking vaguely away, with a profane smile playing across her mouth, “I’d just like to know where the hell it all comes from. I’ve had everything else,” she said, with a rough angry laugh, “I’m expecting one of her kidneys at any minute.” + 

“Whew-w!” cried Eliza, shaken with laughter. + 

“Hel-en! Oh Hel’en!” Mrs. Barton’s voice came feebly in to them. + 

“O gotohell!” said the girl, sotto-voce. “Urr-p! Urr-p!” She burst suddenly into tears: “Is it going to be like this always! I sometimes believe the judgment of God is against us all. Papa was right.” + 

“Pshaw!” said Eliza, wetting her fingers, and threading a needle before the light. “I’d go on and pay no more attention to her. There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s all imagination!” It was Eliza’s rooted conviction that most human ills, except her own, were “all imagination.” + 

“Hel-en!” + 

“All right! I’m coming!” the girl cried cheerfully, turning an angry grin on Eliza as she went. It was funny. It was ugly. It was terrible. + 

It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the chief celestial Cloud-Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter moderns have sometimes called “the ancient Jester”⁠—had turned his frown upon their fortunes. + 

It began to rain⁠—rain incessant, spouting, torrential rain, fell among the reeking hills, leaving grass and foliage drowned upon the slopes, starting the liquid avalanche of earth upon a settlement, glutting lean rocky mountain-streams to a foaming welter of yellow flood. It mined the yellow banks away with unheard droppings; it caved in hillsides; it drank the steep banked earth away below the rails, leaving them strung to their aerial ties across a gutted canyon. + 

There was a flood in Altamont. It swept down in a converging width from the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its banks in a wide waste Mississippi. It looted the bottomlands of the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all who dwelt therein. + 

The town was cut off from every communication with the world. At the end of the third week, as the waters slid back into their channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads, crawled desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible wrath of water to achieve their wilted anticlimactic honeymoon. + 

“He will go where I send him or not at all,” Gant spoke his final word, not loudly. + 

Thus, it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University. + 

Eugene did not want to go to the State University. + 

For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard about his future education. It was proposed that, in view of his youth, he should attend Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years, go to Harvard for two years more, and then, having arrived by easy stages at Paradise, “top things off” with a year or two at Oxford. + 

“Then,” said John Dorsey Leonard, who talked enchantingly on the subject, between mouthfuls of clabber, “then, my sonny, a man may begin to say he’s really ‘cultsherd.’ After that, of course,” he continued with a spacious carelessness, “he may travel for a year or so.” + 

But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him. + 

“You’re too young, boy,” said Margaret Leonard. “Can’t you persuade your father to wait another year? You’re only a child in years, Eugene. You have all the time in the world.” Her eyes darkened as she talked. + 

Gant would not be persuaded. + 

“He’s old enough,” he said. “When I was his age I had been earning my living for years. I’m getting old. I won’t be here much longer. I want him to begin to make a name for himself before I die.” + 

He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement. In his youngest son he saw the last hope of his name’s survival in laurels⁠—in the political laurels he so valued. He wanted his son to be a great and farseeing statesman and a member of the Republican or Democratic party. His choice of a university was therefore a measure of political expediency, founded upon the judgment of his legal and political friends. + 

“He’s ready to go,” said Gant, “and he’s going to the State University, and nowhere else. He’ll be given as good an education there as he can get anywhere. Furthermore, he will make friends there who will stand by him the rest of his life.” He turned upon his son a glance of bitter reproach. “There are very few boys who have had your chance,” said he, “and you ought to be grateful instead of turning up your nose at it. Mark my words, you’ll live to see the day when you’ll thank me for sending you there. Now, I’ve given you my last word: you’ll go where I send you or you’ll go nowhere at all.” + 