A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

[Scooter]

3


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was vast whisky laughter.

"Who is she?" some one asked.

"She's Will Pentland's sister."

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

"You DRINK this! You better!"

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

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


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


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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy locked the door.

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

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

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

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

There was nothing but the white living silence.

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

There was no answer.

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

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

Silence answered.

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She pursed her mouth rapidly for some moments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Scooter]

4


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

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

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

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

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

The boy was gone over the fence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gant was outside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



This chosen incandescence, to whom a name had already been given,
and from whose centre most of the events in this chronicle must be
seen, was borne in, as we have said, upon the very spear-head of
history. But perhaps, reader, you have already thought of that?
You HAVEN'T? Then let us refresh your historical memory.

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

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

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



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

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

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

He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his
mind was caught in a net because he had no words to work with. He
had not even names for the objects around him: he probably defined
them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some mangling of the
speech that roared about him, to which he listened intently day
after day, realizing that his first escape must come through
language. He indicated as quickly as he could his ravenous hunger
for pictures and print: sometimes they brought him great books
profusely illustrated, and he bribed them desperately by cooing,
shrieking with delight, making extravagant faces, and doing all the
other things they understood in him. He wondered savagely how they
would feel if they knew what he really thought: at other times he
had to laugh at them and at their whole preposterous comedy of
errors as they pranced around for his amusement, waggled their
heads at him, tickled him roughly, making him squeal violently
against his will. The situation was at once profoundly annoying
and comic: as he sat in the middle of the floor and watched them
enter, seeing the face of each transformed by a foolish leer, and
hearing their voices become absurd and sentimental whenever they
addressed him, speaking to him words which he did not yet
understand, but which he saw they were mangling in the preposterous
hope of rendering intelligible that which has been previously
mutilated, he had to laugh at the fools, in spite of his vexation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, exactly at three minutes after eleven every morning, so
unfailing and perfect was the order of this great establishment, a
huge gray horse trotted slowly up the hill, drawing behind him a
heavy grocery wagon, musty, spicy, odorous with the fine smells of
grocery-stores and occupied exclusively by the Hilliard victuals,
and the driver, a young negro man who, at three minutes past eleven
every morning, according to ritual, was comfortably asleep.
Nothing could possibly go wrong: the horse could not have been
tempted even by a pavement of oats to betray his sacred mission.
Accordingly he trotted heavily up the hill, turned ponderously into
the alley ruts, and advanced heavily until, feeling the great
circle of his right forefoot obstructed by some foreign particle,
he looked down and slowly removed his hoof from what had recently
been the face of a little boy.

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

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

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

The negro girl, blubbering, had fled inward.

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

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

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

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

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

[Scooter]

5


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Go? Go where?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen stirred nervously.

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

"Pshaw!" said Eliza. "No one will ever notice her."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

"Swallowed a fly! Swallowed a fly!"

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


and so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

[Scooter]

6


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


But Eliza sat grimly on what they had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Scooter]

7


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

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

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



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

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

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

"Where you been, Mr. Gant?"

"California," said Gant.

"Thought I hadn't seen you," said the motorman.

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

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

"Jim Bowles died while you were gone, I reckon," said the motorman.

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

"Pneumonia," said the motorman. "He was dead four days after he
was took down."

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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



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

A paper-carrier, number 7, finished his route on the corner of Vine
Street, as the car stopped, turned eastwards now from Pisgah Avenue
toward the town core. The boy folded, bent, and flattened the
fresh sheets deftly, throwing the block angularly thirty yards upon
the porch of Shields the jeweller; it struck the boarding and
bounded back with a fresh plop. Then he walked off with fatigued
relief into time toward the twentieth century, feeling gratefully
the ghost-kiss of absent weight upon his now free but still leaning
right shoulder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their feet thudded almost simultaneously upon the floor.

"Papa's home!" they shrieked.

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

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

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



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

[Scooter]

8


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

"I have learned to write," he thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Or, in the frosty Autumn mornings:


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



Bessie walked in his brain.

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


"Old Miss Groody
Has Good Toody."


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes," said Eugene.

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

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

"N-n-nothing," said Eugene.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

"Aw!"



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

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

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


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


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

[Scooter]

9


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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He left his cherries," he said to his brother.

Or, they jeered Loney Shytle, who left a stale sharp odor as she
passed, her dirty dun hair covered in a wide plumed hat, her heels
out of her dirty white stockings. She had caused incestuous
rivalry between her father and her brother, she bore the scar of
her mother's razor in her neck, and she walked, in her rundown
shoes, with the wide stiff-legged hobble of disease.

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

"His mother takes in washin'."

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between the workroom and the ware-room, on the left as one entered,
was Gant's office, a small room, deep in the dust of twenty years,
with an old-fashioned desk, sheaves of banded dirty papers, a
leather sofa, a smaller desk layered with round and square samples
of marble and granite. The sloping market Square, pocketed
obliquely off the public Square, and filled with the wagons of
draymen and county peddlers, and on the lower side on a few Poor
White houses and on the warehouse and office of Will Pentland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'Day, Mr. Gant."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

"I am going," he said presently.

"Going?" she whispered. "Where?"

The organ music deepened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes?" she whispered.

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

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

He whirled as if he had been shot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Bruce," she answered softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it, Bruce?" she asked.

He answered her in a cold harsh voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Scooter]

10


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke had been the agent since his twelfth year: his reputation for
salesmanship was sown through the town; he came with wide grin,
exuberant vitality, wagging and witty tongue, hurling all his
bursting energy into an insane extraversion. He lived absolutely
in event: there was in him no secret place, nothing withheld and
guarded--he had an instinctive horror of all loneliness. He wanted
above all else to be esteemed and liked by the world, and the need
for the affection and esteem of his family was desperately
essential. The fulsome praise, the heartiness of hand and tongue,
the liberal display of sentiment were as the breath of life to him:
he was overwhelmingly insistent in the payment of drinks at the
fountain, the bringer-home of packed ice-cream for Eliza, and of
cigars to Gant and, as Gant gave publication to his generosity, the
boy's need for it increased--he built up an image of himself as the
Good Fellow, witty, unselfish, laughed at but liked by all--as Big-
Hearted Unselfish Luke. And this was the opinion people had of
him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, sir. Yes, sir," he would begin in a sonorous voice, dropping
wide-leggedly into the "prospect's" stride. "This week's edition
of The Saturday Evening Post, five cents, only a nickel, p-p-p-
purchased weekly by t-t-two million readers. In this week's issue
you have eighty-six pages of f-f-fact and fiction, to say n-n-
nothing of the advertisements. If you c-c-c-can't read you'll get
m-m-more than your money's worth out of the p-p-pictures. On page
13 this week, we have a very fine article, by I-I-I-Isaac F.
Marcosson, the f-f-f-famous traveller and writer on politics; on
page 29, you have a story by Irvin S. Cobb, the g-g-g-greatest
living humorist, and a new story of the prize-ring by J-J-Jack
London. If you b-b-bought it in a book, it'd c-c-cost you a d-d-
dollar-and-a-half."

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

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

"How are you, son?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gant surveyed the proceedings from afar with Jannadeau, grinning.

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

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

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

"Twenty."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eliza pursed her lips without speaking for a time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Scooter]

11


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

"Do you want it?" he said.

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

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

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

She looked at him.

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

Eliza pursed her lips and nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Forgetful of him during the day's press, she summoned him at night
over the telephone, demanding his return, and upbraiding Helen for
keeping him. There was a bitter submerged struggle over him
between Eliza and her daughter: absorbed in the management of
Dixieland for days, she would suddenly remember his absence from
meals, and call for him angrily across the phone.

"Good heavens, mama," Helen would answer irritably. "He's your
child, not mine. I'm not going to see him starve."

"What do you mean? What do you mean? He ran off while dinner was
on the table. I've got a good meal fixed for him here. H-m! A
GOOD meal."

Helen put her hand over the mouthpiece, making a face at him as he
stood catlike and sniggering by, burlesquing the Pentland manner,
tone, mouthing.

"H-m! Why, law me, child, yes--it's GOOD soup."

He was convulsed silently.

And then aloud: "Well, it's your own lookout, not mine. If he
doesn't want to stay up there, I can't help it."

When he returned to Dixieland, Eliza would question him with bitter
working lips; she would prick at his hot pride in an effort to keep
him by her.

"What do you mean by running off to your papa's like that? If I
were you, I'd have too much pride for that. I'd be a-sha-a-med!"
Her face worked with a bitter hurt smile. "Helen can't be bothered
with you. She doesn't want you around."

But the powerful charm of Gant's house, of its tacked and added
whimsy, its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its great gummed
trees, its roaring internal seclusiveness, the blistered varnish,
the hot calfskin, the comfort and abundance, seduced him easily
away from the great chill tomb of Dixieland, particularly in
winter, since Eliza was most sparing of coal.

Gant had already named it "The Barn"; in the morning now, after his
heavy breakfast at home, he would swing gauntly toward town by way
of Spring Street, composing en route the invective that he had
formerly reserved to his sitting-room. He would stride through the
wide chill hall of Dixieland, bursting in upon Eliza, and two or
three negresses, busy preparing the morning meal for the hungry
boarders who rocked energetically upon the porch. All of the
objections, all of the abuse that had not been uttered when she
bought the place, were vented now.

"Woman, you have deserted my bed and board, you have made a
laughing stock of me before the world, and left your children to
perish. Fiend that you are, there is nothing that you would not do
to torture, humiliate and degrade me. You have deserted me in my
old age; you have left me to die alone. Ah, Lord! It was a bitter
day for us all when your gloating eyes first fell upon this
damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody Barn. There is no
ignominy to which you will not stoop if you think it will put a
nickel in your pocket. You have fallen so low not even your own
brothers will come near you. 'Nor beast, nor man hath fallen so
far.'"

And in the pantries, above the stove, into the dining-room, the
rich voices of the negresses chuckled with laughter.

"Dat man sho' can tawk!"

Eliza got along badly with the negroes. She had all the dislike
and distrust for them of the mountain people. Moreover, she had
never been used to service, and she did not know how to accept or
govern it graciously. She nagged and berated the sullen negro
girls constantly, tortured by the thought that they were stealing
her supplies and her furnishings, and dawdling away the time for
which she paid them. And she paid them reluctantly, dribbling out
their small wages a coin or two at a time, nagging them for their
laziness and stupidity.

"What have you been doing all this time? Did you get those back
rooms done upstairs?"

"No'm," said the negress sullenly, slatting flatfootedly down the
kitchen.

"I'll vow," Eliza fretted. "I never saw such a good-for-nothing
shiftless darkey in my life. You needn't think I'm going to pay
you for wasting your time."

This would go on throughout the day. As a result, Eliza would
often begin the day without a servant: the girls departed at night
muttering sullenly, and did not appear the next morning. Moreover,
her reputation for bickering pettiness spread through the length
and breadth of Niggertown. It became increasingly difficult for
her to find any one at all who would work for her. Completely
flustered when she awoke to find herself without help, she would
immediately call Helen over the telephone, pouring her fretful
story into the girl's ear and entreating assistance:

"I'll declare, child, I don't know what I'm going to do. I could
wring that worthless nigger's neck. Here I am left all alone with
a house full of people."

"Mama, in heaven's name, what's the matter? Can't you keep a
nigger in the house? Other people do. What do you do to them,
anyway?"

But, fuming and irritable, she would leave Gant's and go to her
mother's, serving the tables with large heartiness, nervous and
animated good-humor. All the boarders were very fond of her: they
said she was a fine girl. Every one did. There was a spacious and
unsparing generosity about her, a dominant consuming vitality,
which ate at her poor health, her slender supply of strength, so
that her shattered nerves drew her frequently toward hysteria, and
sometimes toward physical collapse. She was almost six feet tall:
she had large hands and feet, thin straight legs, a big-boned
generous face, with the long full chin slightly adroop, revealing
her big gold-traced upper teeth. But, in spite of this gauntness,
she did not look hard-featured or raw-boned. Her face was full of
heartiness and devotion, sensitive, whole-souled, hurt, bitter,
hysterical, but at times transparently radiant and handsome.

It was a spiritual and physical necessity for her to exhaust herself
in service for others, and it was necessary for her to receive heavy
slatherings of praise for that service, and especially necessary
that she feel her efforts had gone unappreciated. Even at the
beginning, she would become almost frantic reciting her grievances,
telling the story of her service to Eliza in a voice that became
harsh and hysterical:

"Let the least little thing go wrong and she's at the phone. It's
not my place to go up there and work like a nigger for a crowd of
old cheap boarders. You know that, don't you? DON'T you?"

"Yes'm," said Eugene, meekly serving as audience.

"But she'd die rather than admit it. Do you ever hear her say a
word of thanks? Do I get," she said laughing suddenly, her
hysteria crossed for the moment with her great humor, "do I get so
much as 'go-to-hell' for it?"

"NO!" squealed Eugene, going off in fits of idiot laughter.

"Why, law me, child. H-m! Yes. It's GOOD soup," said she,
touched with her great earthy burlesque.

He tore his collar open, and undid his trousers, sliding to the
floor in an apoplexy of laughter.

"Sdop! Sdop! You're g-g-gilling me!"

"H-m! Why, law me! Yes," she continued, grinning at him as if she
hoped to succeed.

Nevertheless, whether Eliza was servantless or not, she went daily
at dinner, the mid-day meal, to help at table, and frequently at
night when Gant and the boys ate with Eliza instead of at home.
She went because of her deep desire to serve, because it satisfied
her need for giving more than was returned, and because, in spite
of her jibes, along with Gant, at the Barn, and the "cheap
boarders," the animation of feeding, the clatter of plates, the
braided clamor of their talk, stimulated and excited her.

Like Gant, like Luke, she needed extension in life, movement,
excitement: she wanted to dominate, to entertain, to be the life of
the party. On small solicitation, she sang for the boarders,
thumping the cheap piano with her heavy accurate touch, and singing
in her strong, vibrant, somewhat hard soprano a repertory of songs
classical, sentimental, and comic. Eugene remembered the soft cool
nights of summer, the assembled boarders and "I Wonder Who's
Kissing Her Now," which Gant demanded over and over; "Love Me and
the World Is Mine"; "Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold"; "Dear
Old Girl, the Rob-BIN Sings Above You"; "The End of a Perfect Day";
and "Alexander's Rag-Time Band," which Luke had practised in a
tortured house for weeks, and sung with thunderous success in the
High School Minstrels.

Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would hold forth
on the porch, his great voice carrying across the quiet
neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his torrential
eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his prejudiced but
bold opinion upon current news.

"--And what did WE do, gentlemen? We sank their navy in an action
that lasted only twenty minutes, stormed at by shot and shell,
Teddy and his Rough Riders took the hill at Santiago--it was all
over, as you well know, in a few months. We had declared war with
no thought of ulterior gain; we came because the indignation of a
GREAT people had been aroused at the oppression of a smaller one,
and then, with a magnanimity well worthy the greatest people of the
face of the earth, we paid our defeated enemy twenty millions of
dollars. Ah, Lord! That was magnanimity indeed! You don't think
any other nation would have done that, do you?"

"No, sir," said the boarders emphatically.

They didn't always agree with his political opinions--Roosevelt was
the faultless descendant of Julius Cæsar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and
Abraham Lincoln--but they felt he had a fine head and would have
gone far in politics.

"That man should have been a lawyer," said the boarders.



And yet, there was surging into these chosen hills the strong
thrust of the world, like a kissing tide, which swings lazily in
with a slapping glut of waters, and recoils into its parent
crescent strength, to be thrown farther inward once again.

It was an element of Eliza's primitive and focal reasoning that men
and women withered by the desert would seek an oasis, that those
who were thirsty would seek water, and that those panting on the
plains would look into the hills for comfort and relief. She had
that bull's-eye accuracy which has since been celebrated, when
plum-picking's over, under the name of "vision."

The streets, ten years before raw clay, were being paved: Gant went
into frenzies over the paving assessments, cursed the land, the day
of his birth, the machinations of Satan's children. But Eugene
followed the wheeled casks of boiling tar; watched the great
roller, a monster that crushed him in night-mares, powder the
layered rock; felt, as he saw the odorous pressed tongue of
pavement lengthen out, a swelling ecstasy.

From time to time, a stilted Cadillac gasped cylindrically up the
hill past Dixieland: Eugene said a spell, as it faltered, for its
success--Jim Sawyer, a young blood, came for Miss Cutler, the
Pittsburgh beauty: he opened a door behind in the fat red belly.
They got in.

Sometimes, when Eliza awoke to find her servants gone, he was sent
down into Niggertown to capture a new one: in that city of rickets
he searched into their fetid shacks, past the slow stench of little
rills of mire and sewage, in fetid cellars, through all the rank
labyrinth of the hill-sprawled settlement. He came, in the hot
sealed dungeons of their rooms, to know the wild grace of their
bodies, thrown upon a bed, their rich laughter, their smell of the
jungle tropics stewed in with frying cookery and a boiling wash.

"Do you want a job?"

"Whose little boy are you?"

"Mrs. Eliza Gant's."

Silence. Presently: "Dere's a gal up de street at Mis'
Cawpening's who's lookin' fo' wuk. YOU go see HUH."

Eliza watched them with a falcon's eye for thefts. Once, with a
detective, she searched a departed girl's room in Niggertown,
finding there sheets, towels, spoons that had been stolen from her.
The girl went to the penitentiary for two years. Eliza loved the
commotion of law, the smell and tension of the courts. Whenever
she could go to law she did so: she delighted in bringing suit
against people, or in having suit brought against her. She always
won.

When her boarders defaulted payments she seized their belongings
triumphantly, delighting particularly in eleventh-hour captures at
the railway station, with the aid of an obedient constabulary, and
ringed by the attentive offal of the town.

Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland. And he was again afraid to
express his shame. As with The Post, he felt thwarted, netted,
trapped. He hated the indecency of his life, the loss of dignity
and seclusion, the surrender to the tumultuous rabble of the four
walls which shield us from them. He felt, rather than understood,
the waste, the confusion, the blind cruelty of their lives--his
spirit was stretched out on the rack of despair and bafflement as
there came to him more and more the conviction that their lives
could not be more hopelessly distorted, wrenched, mutilated, and
perverted away from all simple comfort, repose, happiness, if they
set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein, twist the pattern.
He choked with fury: he thought of Eliza's slow speech, her endless
reminiscence, her maddening lip-pursing, and turned white with
constricted rage.

He saw plainly by this time that their poverty, the threat of the
poorhouse, the lurid references to the pauper's grave, belonged to
the insensate mythology of hoarding; anger smouldered like a brand
in him at their sorry greed. There was no place sacred unto
themselves, no place fixed for their own inhabitation, no place
proof against the invasion of the boarders.

As the house filled, they went from room to little room, going
successively down the shabby scale of their lives. He felt it
would hurt them, coarsen them: he had even then an intense faith in
food, in housing, in comfort--he felt that a civilized man must
begin with them; he knew that wherever the spirit had withered, it
had not withered because of food and plumbing.

As the house filled, in the summer season, and it was necessary to
wait until the boarders had eaten before a place could be found for
him, he walked sullenly about beneath the propped back porch of
Dixieland, savagely exploring the dark cellar, or the two dank
windowless rooms which Eliza rented, when she could, to negresses.

He felt now the petty cruelty of village caste. On Sunday for
several years, he had bathed, brushed, arrayed his anointed body in
clean underwear and shirting and departed, amid all the pleasurable
bustle of Sunday morning, for the Presbyterian Sunday School. He
had by this time been delivered from the instruction of the several
spinsters who had taught his infant faith the catechism, the
goodness of God, and the elements of celestial architecture. The
five-cent piece which formerly he had yielded up reluctantly,
thinking of cakes and ale, he now surrendered more gladly, since he
usually had enough left over for cold gaseous draughts at the soda-
fountain.

In the fresh Sunday morning air he marched off with brisk
excitement to do duty at the altars, pausing near the church where
the marshalled ranks of the boys' military school split cleanly
into regimented Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians.

The children assembled in a big room adjacent to the church, honey-
combed to right and left with small classrooms, which they entered
after the preliminary service was finished. They were exhorted
from the platform by the superintendent, a Scotch dentist with a
black-gray beard, fringed by a small area of embalmed skin, whose
cells, tissues, and chemical juices seemed to have been fixed in a
state of ageless suspension, and who looked no older from one
decade to another.

He read the text, or the parable of the day's study, commented on
it with Cæsarean dryness and concision, and surrendered the service
to his assistant, a shaven, spectacled, Wilsonian-looking man, also
Scotch, who smiled with cold affection at them over his high shiny
collar, and led them through the verses of a hymn, heaving up his
arms and leering at them encouragingly, as they approached the
chorus. A sturdy spinstress thumped heavily upon a piano which
shook like a leaf.

Eugene liked the high crystal voices of the little children, backed
by the substantial marrow of the older boys and girls, and based on
the strong volume of the Junior and Senior Baraccas and Philatheas.
They sang:


"Throw out the lifeline, throw out the lifeline,
Someone is sinking to-day-ee"--


on the mornings when the collection went for missionary work. And
they sang:


"Shall we gather at the river,
The bew-tee-ful, the bew-tee-ful r-hiver."


He liked that one very much. And the noble surge of "Onward,
Christian Soldiers."

Later, he went into one of the little rooms with his class. The
sliding doors rumbled together all around; presently there was a
quiet drone throughout the building.

He was now in a class composed entirely of boys. His teacher was a
tall white-faced young man, bent and thin, who was known to all the
other boys as secretary of the Y.M.C.A. He was tubercular; but the
boys admired him because of his former skill as a baseball and
basketball player. He spoke in a sad, sugary, whining voice; he
was oppressively Christ-like; he spoke to them intimately about the
lesson of the day, asking them what it might teach them in their
daily lives, in acts of obedience and love to their parents and
friends, in duty, courtesy, and Christian charity. And he told
them that when they were in doubt about their conduct they should
ask themselves what Jesus would say: he spoke of Jesus often in his
melancholy, somewhat discontented voice--Eugene became vaguely
miserable as he talked, thinking of something soft, furry, with a
wet tongue.

He was nervous and constrained: the other boys knew one another
intimately--they lived on, or in the neighborhood of, Montgomery
Avenue, which was the most fashionable street in town. Sometimes,
one of them said to him, grinning: "Do you want to buy The
Saturday Evening Post, Mister?"

Eugene, during the week, never touched the lives of any of them,
even in a remote way. His idea of their eminence was grossly
exaggerated; the town had grown rapidly from a straggling village--
it had few families as old as the Pentlands, and, like all resort
towns, its caste system was liquidly variable, depending chiefly
upon wealth, ambition, and boldness.

Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs were Baptists, as were most of the
people, the Scotch excepted, in Gant's neighborhood. In the social
scale the Baptists were the most populous and were considered the
most common: their minister was a large plump man with a red face
and a white vest, who reached great oratorical effects, roaring at
them like a lion, cooing at them like a dove, introducing his wife
into the sermon frequently for purposes of intimacy and laughing,
in a programme which the Episcopalians, who held the highest social
eminence, and the Presbyterians, less fashionable, but solidly
decent, felt was hardly chaste. The Methodists occupied the middle
ground between vulgarity and decorum.

This starched and well brushed world of Sunday morning
Presbyterianism, with its sober decency, its sense of restraint,
its suggestion of quiet wealth, solid position, ordered ritual,
seclusive establishment, moved him deeply with its tranquillity.
He felt concretely his isolation from it, he entered it from the
jangled disorder of his own life once a week, looking at it, and
departing from it, for years, with the sad heart of a stranger.
And from the mellow gloom of the church, the rich distant organ,
the quiet nasal voice of the Scotch minister, the interminable
prayers, and the rich little pictures of Christian mythology which
he had collected as a child under the instruction of the spinsters,
he gathered something of the pain, the mystery, the sensuous beauty
of religion, something deeper and greater than this austere
decency.

[Scooter]

12


It was the winter, and the sullen dying autumn that he hated most
at Dixieland--the dim fly-specked lights, the wretched progress
about the house in search of warmth, Eliza untidily wrapped in an
old sweater, a dirty muffler, a cast-off man's coat. She
glycerined her cold-cracked hands. The chill walls festered with
damp: they drank in death from the atmosphere: a woman died of
typhoid, her husband came quickly out into the hall and dropped his
hands. They were Ohio people.

Upstairs, upon a sleeping porch, a thin-faced Jew coughed through
the interminable dark.

"In heaven's name, mama," Helen fumed, "why do you take them in?
Can't you see he's got the bugs?"

"Why, no-o," said Eliza, pursing her lips. "He said he only had a
little bronchial trouble. I asked him about it, and he laughed
just as big as you please: 'Why, Mrs. Gant,' he said--" and there
would follow an endless anecdote, embellished with many a winding
rivulet. The girl raged: it was one of Eliza's basic traits to
defend blindly whatever brought her money.

The Jew was a kind man. He coughed gently behind his white hand
and ate bread fried in battered egg and butter. Eugene developed a
keen appetite for it: innocently he called it "Jew Bread" and asked
for more. Lichenfels laughed gently, coughed--his wife was full of
swart rich laughter. The boy did small services for him: he gave
him a coin from week to week. He was a clothier from a New Jersey
town. In the Spring he went to a sanitarium; he died there later.

In the winter a few chill boarders, those faces, those personalities
which become mediocre through repetition, sat for hours before the
coals of the parlor hearth, rocking interminably, dull of voice and
gesture, as hideously bored with themselves and Dixieland, no doubt,
as he with them.

He liked the summers better. There came slow-bodied women from the
hot rich South, dark-haired white-bodied girls from New Orleans,
corn-haired blondes from Georgia, nigger-drawling desire from South
Carolina. And there was malarial lassitude, tinged faintly with
yellow, from Mississippi but with white biting teeth. A red-faced
South Carolinian, with nicotined fingers, took him daily to the
baseball games; a lank yellow planter, malarial from Mississippi,
climbed hill, and wandered through the fragrant mountain valleys
with him; of nights he heard the rich laughter of the women, tender
and cruel, upon the dark porches, heard the florid throat-tones of
the men; saw the yielding stealthy harlotry of the South--the dark
seclusion of their midnight bodies, their morning innocence.
Desire, with bloody beak, tore at his heart like jealous virtue: he
was moral for that which was denied him.

Of mornings he stayed at Gant's with Helen playing ball with Buster
Isaacs, a cousin of Max, a plump jolly little boy who lived next
door; summoned later by the rich incense of Helen's boiling fudge.
She sent him to the little Jewish grocery down the street for the
sour relishes she liked so well: tabled in mid-morning they ate
sour pickles, heavy slabs of ripe tomatoes, coated with thick
mayonnaise, amber percolated coffee, fig-newtons and ladyfingers,
hot pungent fudge pebbled with walnuts and coated fragrantly with
butter, sandwiches of tender bacon and cucumber, iced belchy soft-
drinks.

His trust in her Gantian wealth was boundless: this rich store of
delight came from inexhaustible resources. Warm lively hens
cackled cheerfully throughout the morning neighborhood; powerful
negroes brought dripping ice in iron talons from their smoking
wagons; he stood beneath their droning saws and caught the flying
ice-pulp in his hands; he drank in the combined odor of their great
bodies together with the rich compost of the refrigeration, and the
sharp oiliness of the dining-room linoleum; and in the horsehair
walnut parlor at mid-day, good with the mellow piano-smell and the
smell of stale varnished wood, she played for him, and made him
sing: "William Tell," "My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice," "The Song
Without Words," "Celeste Aïda," "The Lost Chord," her long throat
lean and tendoned as her vibrant voice rang out.

She took insatiable delight in him, stuffing him with sour and
sugared relishes, tumbling him, in a random moment of her restless
activity, upon Gant's lounge, and pinioning him while she slapped
his squirming face sharply with her big hand.

Sometimes, frantic with some swift tangle of her nerves, she would
attack him viciously, hating him for his dark brooding face, his
full scalloped underlip, his deep absorption in a dream. Like
Luke, and like Gant, she sought in the world ceaseless entertainment
for her restless biting vitality; it infuriated her to see other
people seek absorption within themselves--she hated him at times
when, her own wires strumming, she saw his dark face brooding over
a book or on some vision. She would tear the book from his hands,
slap him, and stab him with her cruel savage tongue. She would
pout out her lip, goggle her face about stupidly on a drooping
neck, assume an expression of dopey idiocy, and pour out on him
the horrible torrent of her venom.

"You little freak--wandering around with your queer dopey face.
You're a regular little Pentland--you funny little freak, you.
Everybody's laughing at you. Don't you know that? Don't you?
We're going to dress you up as a girl, and let you go around like
that. You haven't got a drop of Gant blood in you--papa's
practically said as much--you're Greeley all over again; you're
queer. Pentland queerness sticking out all over you."

Sometimes her sweltering and inchoate fury was so great that she
threw him on the floor and stamped on him.

He did not mind the physical assault so much as he did the
poisonous hatred of her tongue, insanely clever in fashioning the
most wounding barbs. He went frantic with horror, jerked
unexpectedly from Elfland into Hell, he bellowed madly, saw his
bountiful angel change in a moment to a snake-haired fury, lost all
his sublime faith in love and goodness. He rushed at the wall like
an insane little goat, battered his head screaming again and again,
wished desperately that his constricted and overloaded heart would
burst, that something in him would break, that somehow, bloodily,
he might escape the stifling prisonhouse of his life.

This satisfied her desire; it was what deeply she had wanted--she
had found purging release in her savage attack upon him, and now
she could drain herself cleanly in a wild smother of affection.
She would seize him, struggling and screaming, in her long arms,
plaster kisses all over his red mad face, soothing him with hearty
flattery addressed in the third person:

"Why, he didn't think I meant it, did he? Didn't he know I was
only joking? Why, he's strong as a little bull, isn't he? He's a
regular little giant, that's what he is. Why, he's perfectly wild,
isn't he? His eyes popping out of his head. I thought he was
going to knock a hole in the wall.--Yes, ma'am. Why, law me, yes,
child. It's GOOD soup," resorting to her broad mimicry in order to
make him laugh. And he would laugh against his will between his
sobs, in a greater torture because of this agony of affection and
reconciliation than because of the abuse.

Presently, when he had grown quiet, she would send him off to the
store for pickles, cakes, cold bottled drinks; he would depart with
red eyes, his cheeks furrowed dirtily by his tears, wondering
desperately as he went down the street why the thing had happened,
and drawing his foot sharply off the ground and craning his neck
convulsively as shame burnt in him.

There was in Helen a restless hatred of dullness, respectability.
Yet she was at heart a severely conventional person, in spite of
her occasional vulgarity, which was merely a manifestation of her
restless energy, a very naïve, a childishly innocent person about
even the simple wickedness of the village. She had several devoted
young men on her list--plain, hard-drinking country types: one, a
native, lean, red-faced, alcoholic, a city surveyor, who adored
her; another, a strapping florid blond from the Tennessee coal
fields; another, a young South Carolinian, townsman of her older
sister's fiancé.

These young men--Hugh Parker, Jim Phelps, and Joe Cathcart, were
innocently devoted; they liked her tireless and dominant energy,
the eager monopoly of her tongue, her big sincerity and deep
kindliness. She played and sang for them--threw all her energy
into entertaining them. They brought her boxes of candy, little
presents, were divided jealously among themselves, but united in
their affirmation that she was "a fine girl."

And she would get Jim Phelps and Hugh Parker to bring her a drink
of whisky as well: she had begun to depend on small potations of
alcohol for the stimulus it gave her fevered body--a small drink
was enough to operate electrically in her blood: it renewed her,
energized her, gave her a temporary and hectic vitality. Thus,
although she never drank much at a time and showed, beyond the
renewed vitality and gaiety, no sign of intoxication, she nibbled
at the bottle.

"I'll take a drink whenever I can get it," she said.

She liked, almost invariably, young fast women. She liked the
hectic pleasure of their lives, the sense of danger, their humor
and liberality. She was drawn magnetically to all the wedded
harlotry, which, escaping the Sunday discipline of a Southern
village, and the Saturday lust of sodden husbands, came gaily to
Altamont in summer. She liked people who, as she said, "didn't
mind taking a little drink now and then."

She liked Mary Thomas, a tall jolly young prostitute who came from
Kentucky: she was a manicurist in an Altamont Hotel.

"There are two things I want to see," said Mary, "a rooster's you-
know-what and a hen's what-is-it." She was full of loud compelling
laughter. She had a small room with a sleeping porch, at the front
of the house upstairs. Eugene brought her some cigarettes once:
she stood before the window in a thin petticoat, her feet wide
apart, her long sensual legs outlined against the light.

Helen wore her dresses, hats, and silk stockings. Sometimes they
drank together. And, with humorous sentimentality, she defended
her.

"Well, she's no hypocrite. That's one thing sure. She doesn't
care who knows it." Or,

"She's no worse than a lot of your little goody-goodies, if the
truth's known. She's only more open about it."

Or again, irritated at some implied criticism of her own
friendliness with the girl, she would say angrily:

"What do you know about her? You'd better be careful how you talk
about people. You'll get into trouble about it some day."

Nevertheless, she was scrupulous in her public avoidance of the
girl and, illogically, in a moment of unreasoning annoyance she
would attack Eliza:

"Why do you keep such people in your house, mama? Every one in
town knows about her. Your place is getting the reputation of a
regular chippyhouse all over town."

Eliza pursed her lips angrily:

"I don't pay any attention to them," she said. "I consider myself
as good as any one. I hold my head up, and I expect every one else
to do likewise. You don't catch me associating with them."

It was part of her protective mechanism. She pretended to be
proudly oblivious to any disagreeable circumstance which brought
her in money. As a result, by that curious impalpable advertisement
which exists among easy women, Dixieland became known to them--
they floated casually in--the semi-public, clandestine prostitutes
of a tourist town.

Helen had drifted apart from most of her friends of high school
days--the hard-working plain-faced Genevieve Pratt, daughter of a
schoolmaster, "Teeney" Duncan, Gertrude Brown. Her companions now
were livelier, if somewhat more vulgar, young women--Grace Deshaye,
a plumber's daughter, an opulent blonde; Pearl Hines, daughter of a
Baptist saddlemaker: she was heavy of body and face, but she had a
powerful rag-time singing voice.

Her closest companion, however, was a girl whose name was Nan
Gudger: she was a brisk, slender, vital girl, with a waist so
tightly corsetted that a man's hands might go around it. She was
the trusted, accurate, infallible bookkeeper of a grocery store.
She contributed largely to the support of her family--a mother whom
Eugene looked upon with sick flesh, because of the heavy goitre
that sagged from her loose neck; a crippled sister who moved about
the house by means of crutches and the propulsive strength of her
powerful shoulders; and two brothers, hulking young thugs of twenty
and eighteen years, who always bore upon their charmed bodies fresh
knife-wounds, blue lumps and swellings, and other marks of their
fights in poolroom and brothel. They lived in a two-story shack of
rickety lumber on Clingman Street: the women worked uncomplainingly
in the support of the young men. Eugene went here with Helen
often: she liked the vulgarity, the humor, the excitement of their
lives--and it amused her particularly to listen to Mary's obscene
earthy conversation.

Upon the first of every month, Nan and Mary gave to the boys a
portion of their earnings, for pocket money and for their monthly
visit to the women of Eagle Crescent.

"Oh, SURELY not, Mary? Good heavens!" said Helen with eager
unbelief.

"Why, hell yes, honey," said Mary, grinning her coarse drawl,
taking her snuff-stick out of the brown corner of her mouth, and
holding it in her strong hand. "We always give the boys money fer
a woman once a month."

"Oh, NO! You're joking," Helen said, laughing.

"Good God, child, don't you know THAT?" said Mary, spitting
inaccurately at the fire. "Hit's good for their health. They'd
git sick if we didn't."

Eugene began to slide helplessly toward the floor. He got an
instant panorama of the whole astonishing picture of humor and
solemn superstition--the women contributing their money, in the
interests of sanitation and health, to the debauches of the two
grinning hairy nicotined young louts.

"What're you laughin' at, son?" said Mary, gooching him roughly in
the ribs, as he lay panting and prostrate. "You ain't hardly out
of didies yet."

She had all the savage passion of a mountaineer: crippled, she
lived in the coarse heat of her brothers' lust. They were crude,
kindly, ignorant, and murderous people. Nan was scrupulously
respectable and well-mannered: she had thick negroid lips that
turned outward, and hearty tropical laughter. She replaced the
disreputable furniture of the house by new shiny Grand Rapids
chairs and tables. There was a varnished bookcase, forever locked,
stored with stiff sets of unread books--The Harvard Classics, and a
cheap encyclopædia.



When Mrs. Selborne first came to Dixieland from the hot South she
was only twenty-three but she looked older. Ripeness with her was
all: she was a tall heavy-bodied blonde, well kept and elegant.
She moved leisurely with a luxurious sensual swing of the body: her
smile was tender and full of vague allurement, her voice gentle,
her sudden laughter, bubbling out of midnight secrecy, rich and
full. She was one of several handsome and bacchic daughters of a
depleted South Carolinian of good family; she had married at
sixteen a red heavy man who came and went from her incomparable
table, eating rapidly and heartily, muttering, when pressed, a few
shy-sullen words, and departing to the closed leather-and-horse
smell of his little office in the livery-stable he owned. She had
two children by him, both girls: she moved with wasted stealth
around all the quiet slander of a South Carolina mill-town,
committing adultery carefully with a mill owner, a banker, and a
lumber man, walking circumspectly with her tender blonde smile by
day past all the sly smiles of town and trade, knowing that the
earth was mined below her feet, and that her name, with clerk and
merchant, was a sign for secret laughter. The natives, the men in
particular, treated her with even more elaborate respect than a
woman is usually given in a Southern town, but their eyes, behind
the courteous unctions of their masks, were shiny with invitation.

Eugene felt when he first saw her, and knew about her, that she
would never be caught and always known. His love for her was
desperate. She was the living symbol of his desire--the dim vast
figure of love and maternity, ageless and autumnal, waiting, corn-
haired, deep-breasted, blonde of limb, in the ripe fields of
harvest--Demeter, Helen, the ripe exhaustless and renewing energy,
the cradling nurse of weariness and disenchantment. Below the
thrust of Spring, the sharp knife, the voices of the young girls in
the darkness, the sharp inchoate expectancies of youth, his deep
desire burned inextinguishably: something turned him always to the
older women.

When Mrs. Selborne first came to Dixieland her oldest child was
seven years old, her youngest five. She received a small check
from her husband every week, and a substantial one from the lumber
man. She brought a negro girl with her: she was lavish in her
dispensations to the negress, and to her children: this
wastefulness, ease of living, and her rich seductive laughter
fascinated Helen, drew her to the older woman.

And, at night, as Eugene listened to the low sweet voice of the
woman, heard the rich sensual burst of her laughter, as she sat in
the dark porch with a commercial traveller or some merchant in the
town, his blood grew bitter with the morality of jealousy: he
withered with his hurt, thought of her little sleeping children,
and, with a passionate sense of fraternity, of her gulled husband.
He dreamed of himself as the redemptive hero, saving her in an hour
of great danger, making her penitent with grave reproof, accepting
purely the love she offered.

In the morning, he breathed the seminal odor of her fresh bathed
body as she passed him, gazed desperately into the tender
sensuality of her face and, with a sense of unreality, wondered
what change darkness wrought in this untelling face.

Steve returned from New Orleans after a year of vagabondage. The
old preposterous swagger, following the ancient whine, reappeared
as soon as he felt himself safely established at home again.

"Stevie doesn't have to work," said he. "He's smart enough to make
the others work for him." This was his defiance to his record of
petty forgeries against Gant: he saw himself as a clever swindler
although he had never had courage to swindle any one except his
father. People were reading the Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford
stories: there was an immense admiration for this romantic
criminal.

Steve was now a young man in the first twenties. He was somewhat
above the middle height, bumpy of face and sallow of skin, with a
light pleasing tenor voice. Eugene had a feeling of disgust and
horror whenever his oldest brother returned: he knew that those who
were physically least able to defend themselves, which included
Eliza and himself, would bear the brunt of his whining, petty
bullying, and drunken obscenity. He did not mind the physical
abuse so much as he did its cowardly stealth, weakness, and
slobbering reconciliations.

Once, Gant, making one of his sporadic efforts to get his son fixed
in employment, had sent him out to a country graveyard to put up a
small monument. Eugene was sent along. Steve worked steadily in
the hot sun for an hour, growing more and more irritable because of
the heat, the rank weedy stench of the graveyard, and his own deep
antipathy to work. Eugene waited intensely for the attack he knew
was coming.

"What are you standing there for?" screamed Big Brother at length,
looking up in an agony of petulance. He struck sharply at the
boy's shin with a heavy wrench he held in his hand, knocking him to
the ground, and crippling him for the moment. Immediately, he was
palsied, not with remorse, but with fear that he had injured him
badly and would be discovered.

"You're not hurt, are you, buddy? You're not hurt?" he began in a
quivering voice, putting his unclean yellow hands upon Eugene. And
he made the effort at reconciliation Eugene so dreaded, whimpering,
blowing his foul breath upon his brother's cringing flesh, and
entreating him to say nothing of the occurrence when he went home.
Eugene became violently nauseated: the stale odor of Steve's body,
the clammy and unhealthy sweat that stank with nicotine, the touch
of his tainted flesh filled him with horror.

There still remained, however, in the cast and carriage of his
head, in his swagger walk, the ghost of his ruined boyishness:
women were sometimes attracted to him. It was his fortune,
therefore, to secure Mrs. Selborne for his mistress the first
summer she came to Dixieland. At night her rich laughter welled up
from the dark porch, they walked through the quiet leafy streets,
they went to Riverside together, walking beyond the lights of the
carnival into the dark sandy paths by the river.

But, as her friendship with Helen ripened, as she saw the revulsion
of the Gants against their brother, and as she began to see what
damage she had already done to herself by her union with this
braggart who had brandished her name through every poolroom in
town as a tribute to his own power, she cast him off, quietly,
implacably, tenderly. When she returned now, summer by summer, she
met with her innocent and unwitting smile all of his obscene
innuendoes, his heavily suggestive threats, his bitter revelations
behind her back. Her affection for Helen was genuine, but it was
also, she felt, strategic and useful. The girl introduced her to
handsome young men, gave parties and dances at Gant's and Eliza's
for her, was really a partner in her intrigues, assuring her of
privacy, silence, and darkness, and defending her angrily when the
evil whispering began.

"What do you know about her? You don't know what she does. You'd
better be careful how you talk about her. She's got a husband to
defend her, you know. You'll get your head shot off some day."
Or, more doubtfully:

"Well, I don't care what they say, I like her. She's mighty sweet.
After all, what can we say about her for sure? No one can PROVE
anything on her."

And in the winters now she made short visits to the South Carolina
town where Mrs. Selborne lived, returning with an enthusiastic
description of her reception, the parties "in her honor," the food,
the lavish entertainment. Mrs. Selborne lived in the same town as
Joe Gambell, the young clerk to whom Daisy was engaged. He was
full of sly hints about the woman, but before her his manner was
obsequious, confused, reverential, and he accepted without
complaint the presents of food and clothing which she sent him
after their marriage.

Daisy had been married in the month of June following Eliza's
purchase of Dixieland: the wedding was arranged on a lavish scale,
and took place in the big dining-room of the house. Gant and his
two older sons grinned sheepishly in unaccustomed evening dress,
the Pentlands, faithful in their attendance at weddings and
funerals, sent gifts and came. Will and Pett gave a heavy set of
carving steels.

"I hope you always have something to use them on," said Will,
flensing his hand, and winking at Joe Gambell.

Eugene remembered weeks of frantic preparation, dress fittings,
rehearsals, the hysteria of Daisy, who stared at her nails until
they went blue, and the final splendor of the last two days--the
arriving gifts, the house, unnaturally cheerful with rich carpets
and flowers, the perilous moment when their lives joined, the big
packed dining-room, the droning interminable Scotch voice of the
Presbyterian minister, the mounting triumph of the music when the
grocery clerk got his bride. Later, the confusion, the greetings,
the hysteria of the women. Daisy sobbing uncontrollably in the
arms of a distant cousin, Beth Pentland, who had come up with her
hearty red husband, the owner of a chain of small groceries in a
South Carolina town, bringing gifts and a giant watermelon, and
whose own grief was enhanced by the discovery, after the wedding,
that the dress she had worked on weeks in advance she had put on,
in her frenzy, wrong side out.

Thus Daisy passed more or less definitely out of Eugene's life,
although he was to see her briefly on visits, but with decreasing
frequency, in the years that followed. The grocery clerk was
making the one daring gesture of his life: he was breaking away
from the cotton town, in which all the years of his life had been
passed, and from the long lazy hours of grocery clerks, the
languorous gossip of lank cotton farmers and townsmen, to which he
had been used. He had found employment as a commercial traveller
for a food products company: his headquarters was to be in Augusta,
Georgia, but he was to travel into the far South.

This rooting up of his life, this adventure into new lands, the
effort to improve his fortune and his state, was his wedding gift
to his wife--a bold one, but imperilled already by distrust, fear,
and his peasant suspicion of new scenes, new faces, new departures,
of any life that differed from that of his village.

"There's no place like Henderson," said he, with complacent and
annoying fidelity, referring to that haven of enervation, red clay,
ignorance, slander, and superstition, in whose effluent rays he had
been reared.

But he went to Augusta, and began his new life with Daisy in a
lodging house. She was twenty-one, a slender, blushing girl who
played the piano beautifully, accurately, academically, with a
rippling touch, and no imagination. Eugene could never remember
her very well.

In the early autumn after her marriage, Gant made the journey to
Augusta, taking Eugene with him. The inner excitement of both was
intense; the hot wait at the sleepy junction of Spartanburg, the
ride in the dilapidated day coaches of the branch line that ran to
Augusta, the hot baked autumnal land, rolling piedmont and pine
woods, every detail of the landscape they drank in with thirsty
adventurous eyes. Gant's roving spirit was parched for lack of
travel: for Eugene, Saint Louis was a faint unreality, but there
burned in him a vision of the opulent South, stranger even than his
passionate winter nostalgia for the snow-bound North, which the
drifted but short-lived snows in Altamont, the seizure of the
unaccustomed moment for sledding and skating on the steep hills
awakened in him with a Northern desire, a desire for the dark, the
storm, the winds that roar across the earth and the triumphant
comfort of warm walls which only a Southerner perhaps can know.

And he saw the town of Augusta first not in the drab hues of
reality, but as one who bursts a window into the faery pageant of
the world, as one who has lived in prison, and finds life and the
earth in rosy dawn, as one who has lived in all the fabulous
imagery of books, and finds in a journey only an extension and
verification of it--so did he see Augusta, with the fresh washed
eyes of a child, with glory, with enchantment.

They were gone two weeks. He remembered chiefly the brown stains
of the recent flood, which had flowed through the town and
inundated its lower floors, the broad main street, the odorous and
gleaming drugstore, scented to him with all the spices of his
fancy, the hills and fields of Aiken, in South Carolina, where he
sought vainly for John D. Rockefeller, a legendary prince who, he
heard, went there for sport, marvelling that two States could join
imperceptibly, without visible markings, and the cotton gin where
he saw the great press mash the huge raw bales cleanly into tight
bundles half their former size.

Once, some children on the street had taunted him because of his
long hair, and he had fallen into a cursing fury; once, in a rage
at some quarrel with his sister, he set off on a world adventure,
walking furiously for hours down a country road by the river and
cotton fields, captured finally by Gant who sought for him in a
hired rig.

They went to the theatre: it was one of the first plays he had
seen. The play was a biblical one, founded on the story of Saul
and Jonathan, and he whispered to Gant from scene to scene the
trend of coming events--a precocity which pleased his father
mightily, and to which he referred for months.

Just before they came home, Joe Gambell, in a fit of concocted
petulance, resigned his position, and announced that he was
returning to Henderson. His adventure had lasted three months.

[Scooter]

13


In the years that followed, up to his eleventh or twelfth year when
he could no longer travel on half fares, Eugene voyaged year by
year into the rich mysterious South. Eliza, who, during her first
winter at Dixieland, had been stricken by severe attacks of
rheumatism, induced partly by kidney trouble, which caused her
flesh to swell puffily, and which was diagnosed by the doctor as
Blight's Disease, began to make extensive, although economical,
voyages into Florida and Arkansas in search of health and, rather
vaguely, in search of wealth.

She always spoke hopefully of the possibility of opening a
boarding-house at some tropical winter resort, during the seasons
there and in Altamont. In winter now, she rented Dixieland for a
few months, sometimes for a year, although she really had no
intention of allowing the place to slip through her fingers during
the profitable summer season: usually, she let the place go, more
or less deliberately, to some unscrupulous adventuress of lodging
houses, good for a month's or two months' rent, but incapable of
the sustained effort that would support it for a longer time. On
her return from her journey, with rents in arrears, or with some
other violation of the contract as an entering wedge, Eliza would
surge triumphantly into battle, making a forced entrance with
police, plain-clothes men, warrants, summonses, writs, injunctions,
and all the other artillery of legal warfare, possessing herself
forcibly, and with vindictive pleasure, of her property.

But she turned always into the South--the North for her was a land
which she threatened often to explore, but which secretly she held
in suspicion: there was in her no deep animosity because of an old
war, her feeling was rather one of fear, distrust, alienation--the
"Yankee" to whom she humorously referred was foreign and remote.
So, she turned always into the South, the South that burned like
Dark Helen in Eugene's blood, and she always took him with her.
They still slept together.

His feeling for the South was not so much historic as it was
of the core and desire of dark romanticism--that unlimited and
inexplicable drunkenness, the magnetism of some men's blood that
takes them into the heart of the heat, and beyond that, into the
polar and emerald cold of the South as swiftly as it took the heart
of that incomparable romanticist who wrote The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, beyond which there is nothing. And this desire of his was
unquestionably enhanced by all he had read and visioned, by the
romantic halo that his school history cast over the section, by the
whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to
live in "mansions," and slavery was a benevolent institution,
conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesses of
the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy dependents, where
all women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, all men chivalrous and
brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking
cavaliers. Years later, when he could no longer think of the
barren spiritual wilderness, the hostile and murderous intrenchment
against all new life--when their cheap mythology, their legend of
the charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of their lives,
the quaint sweetness of their drawl, made him writhe--when he could
think of no return to their life and its swarming superstition
without weariness and horror, so great was his fear of the legend,
his fear of their antagonism, that he still pretended the most
fanatic devotion to them, excusing his Northern residence on
grounds of necessity rather than desire.

Finally, it occurred to him that these people had given him
nothing, that neither their love not their hatred could injure him,
that he owed them nothing, and he determined that he would say so,
and repay their insolence with a curse. And he did.



So did his boundaries stretch into enchantment--into fabulous and
solitary wonder broken only by Eliza's stingy practicality, by her
lack of magnificence in a magnificent world, by the meals of sweet
rolls and milk and butter in an untidy room, by the shoe boxes of
luncheon carried on the trains and opened in the diner, after a
lengthy inspection of the menu had led to the ordering of coffee,
by the interminable quarrels over price and charges in almost every
place they went, by her commands to him to "scrooch up" when the
conductor came through for the tickets, for he was a tall lank boy,
and his half-fare age might be called to question.

She took him to Florida in the late winter following Gant's return
from Augusta: they went to Tampa first, and, a few days later, to
Saint Petersburg. He plowed through the loose deep sand of the
streets, fished interminably with jolly old men at the end of the
long pier, devoured a chest full of dime novels that he found in
the rooms she had rented in a private house. They left abruptly,
after a terrific quarrel with the old Cracker who ran the place,
who thought himself tricked out of the best part of a season's
rent, and hurried off to South Carolina on receipt of a hysterical
message from Daisy which bade her mother to "come at once." They
arrived in the dingy little town, which was sticky with wet clay,
and clammy with rain, in late March: Daisy's first child, a boy,
had been born the day before. Eliza, annoyed at what she
considered the useless disruption of her holiday, quarrelled
bitterly with her daughter a day or two after her arrival, and
departed for Altamont with the declaration, which Daisy ironically
applauded, that she would never return again. But she did.

The following winter she went to New Orleans at the season of the
Mardi Gras, taking her youngest with her. Eugene remembered the
huge cisterns for rain-water, in the back yard of Aunt Mary's
house, the heavy window-rattling thunder of Mary's snores at night,
and the vast pageantry of carnival on Canal Street: the storied
floats, the smiling beauties, the marching troops, the masks
grotesque and fantastical. And once more he saw ships at anchor at
the foot of Canal Street; and their tall keels looked over on the
street behind the sea walls; and in the cemeteries all the graves
were raised above the ground "because," said Oll, Gant's nephew,
"the water rots 'em."

And he remembered the smells of the French market, the heavy
fragrance of the coffee he drank there, and the foreign Sunday
gaiety of the city's life--the theatres open, the sound of hammer
and saw, the gay festivity of crowds. He visited the Boyles, old
guests at Dixieland, who lived in the old French quarter, sleeping
at night with Frank Boyle in a vast dark room lighted dimly with
tapers: they had as cook an ancient negress who spoke only French,
and who returned from the Market early in the morning bearing a
huge basket loaded with vegetables, tropical fruits, fowls, meats.
She cooked strange delicious food that he had never tasted before--
heavy gumbo, garnished steaks, sauced fowls.

And he looked upon the huge yellow snake of the river, dreaming of
its distant shores, the myriad estuaries lush with tropical growth
that fed it, all the romantic life of plantation and canefields
that fringed it, of moonlight, of dancing darkies on the levee, of
slow lights on the gilded river boat, and the perfumed flesh of
black-haired women, musical wraiths below the phantom drooping
trees.

They had but shortly returned from Mardi Gras when, one howling
night in winter, as he lay asleep at Gant's, the house was wakened
by his father's terrible cries. Gant had been drinking heavily,
day after fearful day. Eugene had been sent in the afternoons to
his shop to fetch him home, and at sundown, with Jannadeau's aid,
had brought him, behind the negro's spavined horse, roaring drunk
to his house. There followed the usual routine of soup-feeding,
undressing, and holding him in check until Doctor McGuire arrived,
thrust his needle deeply into Gant's stringy arm, left sleeping-
powders, and departed. The girl was exhausted: Gant himself had
ravaged his strength, and had been brought down by two or three
painful attacks of rheumatism.

Now, he awoke in the dark, possessed by his terror and agony, for
the whole right side of his body was paralyzed by such pain as he
did not know existed. He cursed and supplicated God alternately in
his pain and terror. For days doctor and nurse strove with him,
hoping that the leaping inflammation would not strike at his heart.
He was gnarled, twisted, and bent with a savage attack of
inflammatory rheumatism. As soon as he had recovered sufficiently
to travel, he departed, under Helen's care, for Hot Springs.
Almost savagely, she drove all other assistance from him, devoting
every minute of the day to his care: they were gone six weeks--
occasionally post-cards and letters describing a life of hotels,
mineral baths, sickness and lameness, and the sport of the blooded
rich, came to add new colors to Eugene's horizon: when they
returned Gant was able again to walk, the rheumatism had been
boiled from his limbs, but his right hand, gnarled and stiff, was
permanently crippled. He was never again able to close it, and
there was something strangely chastened in his manner, a gleam of
awe and terror in his eyes.

But the union between Gant and his daughter was finally consummated.
Before Gant lay, half-presaged, a road of pain and terror which
led on to death, but as his great strength dwindled, palsied, broke
along that road, she went with him inch by inch, welding beyond
life, beyond death, beyond memory, the bond that linked them.

"I'd have died if it hadn't been for that girl," he said over and
over. "She saved my life. I couldn't get along without her." And
he boasted again and again of her devotion and loyalty, of the
expenses of his journey, of the hotels, the wealth, the life they
both had seen.

And, as the legend of Helen's goodness and devotion grew, and his
dependence upon her got further advertisement, Eliza pursed her
lips more and more thoughtfully, wept sometimes into the spitting
grease of a pan, smiled, beneath her wide red nose, a smile
tremulous, bitter, terribly hurt.

"I'll show them," she wept. "I'll show them." And she rubbed
thoughtfully at a red itching patch that had appeared during the
year upon the back of her left hand.

She went to Hot Springs in the winter that followed. They stopped
at Memphis for a day or two: Steve was at work there in a paint
store; he slipped quickly in and out of saloons, as he took Eugene
about the city, leaving the boy outside for a moment while he went
"in here to see a fellow"--a "fellow" who always sent him forth,
Eugene thought, with an added impetuosity to his swagger.

Dizzily they crossed the river: at night he saw the small bleared
shacks of Arkansas set in malarial fields.

Eliza sent him to one of the public schools of Hot Springs: he
plunged heavily into the bewildering new world--performed
brilliantly, and won the affection of the young woman who taught
him, but paid the penalty of the stranger to all the hostile and
banded little creatures of the class. Before his first month was
out, he had paid desperately for his ignorance of their customs.

Eliza boiled herself out at the baths daily; sometimes, he went
along with her, leaving her with a sensation of drunken independence,
while he went into the men's quarters, stripping himself in a cool
room, entering thence a hot one lined with couches, shutting himself
in a steam-closet where he felt himself momentarily dwindling into
the raining puddle of sweat at his feet, to emerge presently on
trembling legs and to be rolled and kneaded about magnificently in a
huge tub by a powerful grinning negro. Later, languorous, but with
a feeling of deep purification, he lay out on one of the couches,
victoriously his own man in a man's world. They talked from couch
to couch, or walked pot-belliedly about, sashed coyly with bath
towels--malarial Southerners with malarial drawls, paunch-eyed
alcoholics, purple-skinned gamblers, and broken down prize-fighters.
He liked the smell of steam and of the sweaty men.

Eliza sent him out on the streets at once with The Saturday Evening
Post.

"It won't hurt you to do a little light work after school," said
she. And as he trudged off with his sack slung from his neck, she
would call after him:

"Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Throw your shoulders back. Make
folks think you're somebody." And she gave him a pocketful of
printed cards, which bore this inscription:


SPEND YOUR SUMMERS AT
DIXIELAND
In Beautiful Altamont,
America's Switzerland.
Rates Reasonable--Both Transient and Tourist.
Apply Eliza E. Gant, Prop.


"You've got to help me drum up some trade, if we're to live, boy,"
she said again, with the lip-pursing, mouth-tremulous jocularity
that was coming to wound him so deeply, because he felt it was only
an obvious mask for a more obvious insincerity.

He writhed as he saw himself finally a toughened pachyderm in
Eliza's world--sprucing up confidently, throwing his shoulders back
proudly, making people "think he was somebody" as he cordially
acknowledged an introduction by producing a card setting forth the
joys of life in Altamont and at Dixieland, and seized every opening
in social relations for the purpose of "drumming up trade." He
hated the jargon of the profession, which she had picked up
somewhere long before, and which she used constantly with such
satisfaction--smacking her lips as she spoke of "transients," or of
"drumming up trade." In him, as in Gant, there was a silent horror
of selling for money the bread of one's table, the shelter of one's
walls, to the guest, the stranger, the unknown friend from out the
world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the broken, the knave,
the harlot, and the fool.

Thus, lost in the remote Ozarks, he wandered up Central Avenue,
fringed on both sides by the swift-sloping hills, for him, by the
borders of enchantment, the immediate portals of a land of timeless
and never-ending faery. He drank endlessly the water that came
smoking from the earth, hoping somehow to wash himself clean from
all pollution, beginning his everlasting fantasy of the miraculous
spring, or the bath, neck-high, of curative mud, which would draw
out of a man's veins each drop of corrupted blood, dry up in him a
cancerous growth, dwindle and absorb a cyst, remove all scorbutic
blemishes, scoop and suck and thread away the fibrous slime of all
disease, leaving him again with the perfect flesh of an animal.

And he gazed for hours into the entrances of the fashionable
hotels, staring at the ladies' legs upon the verandas, watching the
great ones of the land at their recreations, thinking, with a pang
of wonder, that here were the people of Chambers, of Phillips, of
all the society novelists, leading their godlike lives in flesh,
recording their fiction. He was deeply reverential before the
grand manner of these books, particularly before the grand manner
of the English books: there people loved, but not as other people,
elegantly; their speech was subtle, delicate, exquisite; even in
their passions there was no gross lust or strong appetite--they
were incapable of the vile thoughts or the meaty desire of common
people. As he looked at the comely thighs of the young women on
horses, fascinated to see their shapely legs split over the strong
good smell of a horse, he wondered if the warm sinuous vibration of
the great horse-back excited them, and what their love was like.
The preposterous elegance of their manner in the books awed him: he
saw seduction consummated in kid gloves, to the accompaniment of
subtle repartee. Such thoughts, when he had them, filled him with
shame at his own baseness--he imagined for these people a love
conducted beyond all the laws of nature, achieving the delight of
animals or of common men by the electrical touch of a finger, the
flicker of an eye, the intonation of a phrase--exquisitely and
incorruptibly.

And as they looked at his remote fabulous face, more strange now
that its thick fringing curls had been shorn, they bought of him,
paying him several times his fee, with the lazy penitence of
wasters.

Great fish within the restaurant windows swam in glass wells--eels
coiled snakily, white-bellied trout veered and sank: he dreamed of
strange rich foods within.

And sometimes men returned in carriages from the distant river,
laden with great fish, and he wondered if he would ever see that
river. All that lay around him, near but unexplored, filled him
with desire and longing.

And later, again, along the sandy coast of Florida, with Eliza, he
wandered down the narrow lanes of Saint Augustine, raced along the
hard packed beach of Daytona, scoured the green lawns of Palm
Beach, before the hotels, for cocoanuts, which Eliza desired as
souvenirs, filling a brown tow sack with them and walking, with the
bag hung from his shoulders, down the interminable aisles of the
Royal Poinciana or the Breakers, target of scorn, and scandal, and
amusement from slave and prince; or traversed the spacious palm-
cool walks that cut the peninsula, to see, sprawled in the sensual
loose sand the ladies' silken legs, the brown lean bodies of the
men, the long seaplunges in the unending scroll-work of the emerald
and infinite sea, which had beat in his brain from his father's
shells, which had played at his mountain heart, but which never,
until now, had he seen. Through the spattered sunlight of the
palms, in the smooth walks, princess and lord were wheeled: in
latticed bar-rooms, droning with the buzzing fans, men drank from
glacéd tall glasses.



Or again, they came to Jacksonville, lived there for several weeks
near Pett and Greeley; he studied under a little crippled man from
Harvard, going to lunch with his teacher at a buffet, where the man
consumed beer and pretzels. Eliza protested the tuition when she
left: the cripple shrugged his shoulders, took what she had to
offer. Eugene twisted his neck about, and lifted his foot from the
ground.



Thus did he see first, he the hill-bound, the sky-girt, of whom the
mountains were his masters, the fabulous South. The picture of
flashing field, of wood, and hill, stayed in his heart forever:
lost in the dark land, he lay the night-long through within his
berth, watching the shadowy and phantom South flash by, sleeping at
length, and waking suddenly, to see cool lakes in Florida at dawn,
standing quietly as if they had waited from eternity for this
meeting; or hearing, as the train in the dark hours of morning slid
into Savannah, the strange quiet voices of the men upon the
platform, the boding faint echoes of the station, or seeing, in
pale dawn, the phantom woods, a rutted lane, a cow, a boy, a drab,
dull-eyed against a cottage door, glimpsed, at this moment of
rushing time, for which all life had been aplot, to flash upon the
window and be gone.

The commonness of all things in the earth he remembered with a
strange familiarity--he dreamed of the quiet roads, the moonlit
woodlands, and he thought that some day he would come to them on
foot, and find them there unchanged, in all the wonder of
recognition. They had existed for him anciently and forever.

Eugene was almost twelve years old.

[Scooter]

PART TWO



14


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 down stairs, moody, scowling, and humped over toward the
ice-box.

"For God's sake, Mac," he called out irritably to the Make-up Man,
as he scowled under the lifted lid, "don't you ever keep anything
except root-beer and sour milk?"

"What do you want, for Christ's sake?"

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

Harry Tugman cast his cigarette away.

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

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

He sang in his powerful quartette baritone:


"Beware! Beware! Beware!
Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep,
So beware! Bee-WARE!"


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



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



At the Pisgah Hotel, opposite the station, the last door clicked
softly; the stealthy footfalls of the night ceased; Miss Bernice
Redmond gave the negro porter eight one-dollar bills and went
definitely to bed with the request that she be not disturbed until
one o'clock; a shifting engine slatted noisily about in the yard;
past the Biltburn crossing Tom Cline whistled with even, mournful
respirations. By this time Number 3 had delivered 142 of his
papers; he had only to ascend the rickety wooden stairs of the
Eagle Crescent bank to finish the eight houses of the Crescent. He
looked anxiously across the hill-and-dale-sprawled negro settlement
to the eastern rim: behind Birdseye Gap the sky was pearl-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 some one else to print their lousy sheet. What the hell! I
can get a job on the Atlanta Constitution whenever I want it."

"Did he come down to-night?" asked Ben.

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

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben. "What did he say?"

"He said, 'I'M the editor! I'm the editor of this paper!' 'I
don't give a good goddam,' I said, 'if you're the President's
snotrag. If you want any paper to-day keep out of the pressroom.'
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?"

"To-night," said Coker.

"God, I'm sorry to hear that," said Harry Tugman, greatly relieved.

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

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

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

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

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

"Would you like some cold pork, son?" said Coker, with his yellow
malicious grin.

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

"What's the matter, Ben?" Harry Tugman laughed heavily and struck
him on the back.

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

"By God, Tug," he said. "They've got us cornered."

"Listen to him," said McGuire to Coker. "A chip off the old block,
isn't he? I brought that boy into the world, saw him through
typhoid, got the old man over seven hundred drunks, and I've been
called eighteen different kinds of son of a bitch for my pains 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 to-day and gone to-
morrow. Doesn't matter . . . doesn't matter at all."

"In heaven's name," Ben burst out irritably to Coker. "Are you
going to let him operate like that? Why don't you shoot them
instead?"

Coker plucked the cigar from his long malarial grinning face:

"Why, he's just getting hot, son," said he.



Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac
darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the
hills. Morning moved like a pearl-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 highboned and handsome; his mouth was straightlipped,
cruel, and sensual. An inherited aura of mountain-cornfield sweat
hung scentlessly but telepathically about him; he was a smartened-up
mountaineer with country-club and University of Pennsylvania
glossings. Four years in Philly change a man.

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

"Look at it, will you," he said. "Does any one know what it is?"

"It's Percy," said Coker. "You know Percy Van der Gould, don't
you?"

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

"What's he been doing?" said McGuire doubtfully, turning to Coker
for enlightenment.

"He's been 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.

"Stay, 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. "Dead-eye 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 toe-nails?" said McGuire. "Did
you read that one?"

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

"Literature, literature, Dick," he returned portentously. "It's
been the ruin of many a good surgeon. You read too much, Dick.
Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. You know too much. The
letter killeth the spirit, you know. Me--Dick, did you ever know
me to take anything out that I didn't put back? Anyway, don't I
always leave 'em something to go on with? I'm no scholar, Dick.
I've never had your advantages. I'm a self-made butcher. I'm a
carpenter, Dick. I'm an interior decorator. I'm a mechanic, a
plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller. I'm a
jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I'm a practical man.
I take out their works, spit upon them, trim off the dirty edges,
and send them on their way again. I economize, Dick; I throw away
everything I can't use, and use everything I throw away. Who made
the Pope a tailbone from his knuckle? Who made the dog howl? Aha--
that's why the governor looks so young. We are 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 wine-saps, 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 multilating 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 street-car, 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 to-night?"

"Oh for God's sake," said Ben irritably, "how the hell should I
know! What difference does it make?" he added furiously.

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

The counterman laughed.

Foaming with brilliant slapdash improvisation Harry Tugman
declaimed:

"Members of the Younger Set were charmingly entertained last night
at a dinner dance given at Snotwood, the beautiful residence of Mr.
and Mrs. Clarence Firkins, in 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 threshhold in a manner reviving the finest old traditions of
Southern aristocracy, while Mrs. Firkins' accomplished sister, Miss
Catherine Hipkiss, affectionately known to members of the local
younger set as Roaring Kate, supervised the checking of overcoats,
evening wraps, jock-straps, and 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 Stem."

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

"Oh-h-h-h my God!"



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

He lay quietly on his back for a moment in the pleasant yellow-
shaded dusk of the sitting-room, listening to the rippling
flutiness of the live piping birdy morning. He yawned cavernously
and thrust his right hand scratching into the dense 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 coprous olive of the skin. He was very like a better-
class Spaniard. Quod potui perfeci. By this fusion, perhaps, men
like men.

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

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

Bouncing tinnily down the coiling road that came through the Gap
from the town, a flivver glinted 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 liontamer 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 every one;
We're jolly and gay
And ready to play,
And that is why we say-ee--"



Behind a bill-plastered fence-boarding on upper Valley Street,
opposite the Y. M. I. (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 under-drawers), 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 spare-ribs 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 rest-room, one of them hastily kindling a
crackling fire of pine boughs by striking two flints together,
while the other made a tourniquet, and tied several knots in his
handkerchief. Then pandemonium broke loose. Women tore the
jewels from their fingers, ropes of pearls from their necks,
chrysanthemums, hyacinths, tulips and daisies from their expensive
corsages, while the fashionably-dressed men in the near-by stalls
kept up a constant bombardment of tomatoes, lettuces, new potatoes,
beef-tallow, pigs' knuckles, fishheads, clams, loin-chops, and
pork-sausages.

Among the stalls of the market, the boarding-house keepers of
Altamont walked with spying bargain-hunting eyes and inquisitive
nose. They were of various sizes and ages, but they were all
stamped with the print of haggling determination and a pugnacious
closure of the mouth. They pried in among the fish and vegetables,
pinching cabbages, weighing onions, exfoliating lettuce-heads.
You've got to keep your eye on people or they'll skin you. And if
you leave things to a lazy shiftless nigger she'll waste more than
she cooks. They looked at one another 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 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 Waverly; Mrs. Cowan
of Ridgmont at--

The city is splendidly equipped to meet the demands of the great
and steadily growing crowd of tourists that fill the Mountain
Metropolis during the busy months of June, July, and August. In
addition to eight hotels de luxe of the highest quality, there were
registered at the Board of Trade in 1911 over 250 private hotels,
boarding-houses and 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 Barlett Street, swinging
his tin pail; Ben returned to the paper office with Harry Tugman;
and Eugene, in the back room on Woodson Street, waking suddenly to
Gant's powerful command from the foot of the stairs, turned his
face full into a momentary vision of rose-flushed blue sky and
tender blossoms that drifted slowly earthward.

[Scooter]

15


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 some one
to wake him; he would hear Gant's great voice below the laden
vines, would gaze sleepily from the porch into the rich low moon,
and go obediently to bed. But still there would be all that he
remembered before that and what if--Cause flowed ceaselessly into
cause.

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

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined
filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to
these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment,
the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of
accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked
out in white living brightness these 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 mid-air,
the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing
its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only,
these images that 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 cut-purse went unhung. Through
Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only
reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain
of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose
concentric circles widen across the seas.



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

Against the hidden other flanks of the immutable hills the world
washed like a vast and shadowy sea, alive with the great fish of
his imagining. Variety, in this unvisited world, was unending, but
order and purpose certain: there would be no wastage in adventure--
courage would be 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 chateau land of France, and
calico warm legs in hay.

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



Meanwhile, business had been fairly good. Eliza's earning power
the first few years at Dixieland had been injured by her illnesses.
Now, however, she had recovered, and had paid off the last
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 farm-house, 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 weakly copy of
the man's newspaper, several beautiful prospectuses of the look of
things when finished, and a piece of clay sculpture, eight inches
in height, showing Big Brother with his little sisters Jenny and
Kate, the last with thumb in her mouth.

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

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

"There's her $1,200."

But Eliza was preparing to go on by herself. She saw that co-
operation with Gant in the purchase of land was becoming more
difficult each year. And with something like pain, something
assuredly like hunger, she saw various rich plums fall into other
hands or go unbought. She 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 drug-store, and who spent long dreamy hours
estimating the wealth of the native plutocracy, called Will
Pentland a millionaire. At this time it was a distinction in
American life to be a millionaire. There were only six or eight
thousand. But Will Pentland wasn't one. He was really worth only
a half million.

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

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

"There he is," whispered Gant. "Do you see him?"

Eugene nodded, wagging his head mechanically. He was unable to
speak. Mr. Goulderbilt was a small dapper man, with black hair,
black clothes, and a black 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.

Every one looked doubtfully at Mr. Gilroy.

"Oh, that's all right!" said Mr. Gilroy cheerfully. "He'll never
miss it. There's lots more where that came from."

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

Simon caught sight of Gant for the first time.

"Look out for the Stingaree," he cried. "Remember the Maine."

"I tell you what," said Eliza laughing. "He's not so crazy as you
think."

'That's right," said Mr. Gilroy, noting Gant's grin. "The
Stingaree's a fish. They have them in Florida."

"Don't forget the birds, my friends," said Simon, going out with
his companions. "Be good to the birds."

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

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



--And the air will be filled with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-
notes. He was almost twelve. He was done with childhood. As that
Spring ripened he felt entirely, for the first time, the full
delight of loneliness. Sheeted in 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 siege against Eliza's
obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the curls. But he had
grown like a weed, he already topped his mother by an inch or two;
his body was big-boned but very thin and fragile, with no meat on
it; his legs were absurdly long, thin, and straight, giving him a
curious scissored look as he walked with long bounding strides.

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

That Spring he was more alone than ever. Eliza's departure for
Dixieland three or four years before, and the disruption of
established life at Gant's, had begun the loosening of his first
friendships with the 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 mid-
day 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 rôle.

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 spear-head of victory. And after that he
wanted to be loved. Victory and love. In all of his swarming
fantasies Eugene saw himself like this--unbeaten and beloved. But
moments of clear vision returned to him when all the defeat and
misery of his life was revealed. He saw his gangling and absurd
figure, his remote unpractical brooding face, too like a dark
strange flower to arouse any feeling among his companions and his
kin, he thought, but discomfort, bitterness, and mockery; he
remembered, with a drained sick heart, the countless humiliations,
physical and verbal, he had endured, at the hands of school and
family, before the world, and as he thought, the horns of victory
died within the wood, the battle-drums of triumph stopped, the
proud clangor of the gongs quivered away in silence. His eagles
had flown; he saw himself, in a moment of reason, as a madman
playing Cæsar. He craned his head aside and covered his face with his hand.

[Scooter]

16


The Spring grew ripe. There was at mid-day 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 lightning. Then he looked
around cautiously to see if any one had noticed.

The principal's name was Leonard. He made long speeches to the
children every morning, after a ten-minute prayer. He had a high
sonorous countrified voice which often trailed off in a comical
drawl; he got lost very easily in 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 to-morrow 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
show you, my sonny, if I'm to be dictated to by every two-by-four
whippersnapper who comes along." And once within the office, with
the glazed door shut, he published the stern warning of his justice
by the loud exertion of his breathing, the cutting swish of his
rattan, and the yowls of pain and terror that he exacted from his
captive.

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

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

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

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

It was early in May; examinations came in another two weeks. He
thought of them with excitement and pleasure--he liked the period
of hard cramming, the long reviews, the delight of emptying out
abundantly on paper his stored knowledge. The big assembly room
had about it the 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 any one
up yet?"

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

Eliza grew more reflective. She thought of Pett. She needn't give
herself airs.

"How much are you asking?" she said.

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

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

Eugene squirmed.

"Well what about it, boy?" said Eliza banteringly. "Do you think
you're worth that much money?"

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

"That boy's worth it," he said, shaking him gently to and fro.
"Yes, sir!"

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

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

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

"Yes," said Eliza, "I remember my father--it was long before you
were born, boy," she said to Eugene, "for I hadn't laid eyes on
your papa--as the feller says, you were nothing but a dish-rag
hanging out in heaven--I'd have laughed at any one who suggested
marriage then--Well, I tell you what [she shook her head with a sad
pursed deprecating mouth], we were mighty poor at the time, I can
tell you.--I was thinking about it the other day--many's the time
we didn't have food in the house for the next meal.--Well, as I was
saying, your grandfather [addressing Eugene] came home one night
and said--Look here, what about it?--Who do you suppose I saw to-
day?--I remember him just as plain as if I saw him standing here--I
had a feeling--[addressing Leonard with a doubtful smile] I don't
know what you'd call it but it's pretty strange when you come to
think about it, isn't it?--I had just finished helping Aunt Jane
set the table--she had come all the way from Yancey County to visit
your grandmother--when all of a sudden it flashed over me--mind you
[to Leonard] I never looked out the window or anything but I knew
just as well as I knew anything that he was coming--mercy I cried--
here 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 to-day--why, I've no idea, I said--why old Professor
Truman--he came rushing up to me in town and said, see here:
where's Eliza--I've got a job for her if she wants it, teaching
school this winter out on Beaverdam--why, pshaw, said your
grandfather, she's never taught school a day in her life--and
Professor Truman laughed just as big as you please and said never
you mind about that--Eliza can do anything she sets her mind on--
well sir, that's the way it all came about." High-sorrowful and
sad, she paused for a moment, adrift, her white face slanting her
life back through the aisled grove of years.

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

Eliza pursed her lips slowly.

"Well," she said, "I'll send him to you for a year." That was the
way she did business. Tides run deep in Sargasso.

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



Mr. Leonard had leased an old pre-war house, set on a hill wooded
by magnificent trees. It faced west and south, looking toward
Biltburn, and abruptly down on South End, and the negro flats that
stretched to the depot. One day early in September he took Eugene
there. They walked across town, talking weightily of politics,
across the Square, down Hatton Avenue, south into Church, and
southwesterly along the bending road that ended in the schoolhouse
on the abutting hill. The huge trees made sad autumn music as they
entered the grounds. In the broad hall of the squat rambling old
house Eugene for the first time saw Margaret Leonard. She held a
broom in her hands, and was aproned. But his first impression was
of her shocking fragility.

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

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

She had on a dress of crisp 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 minute 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?

[Scooter]

17


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 Cæsar,
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, Cæsar began to arrange his
legions in battle array."

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

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

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

"Huh?" drawled Mr. Leonard, vacantly beginning to laugh. He was
fingermarked with chalk from chin to crotch. Stephen ("Pap")
Rheinhart leaned forward gently and fleshed his 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: quore 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' hearty 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 [Greek word], 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.

[Greek phrase]


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

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

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

Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at the end of the
second year--cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with blood,
seventy-three years old. They said he was forty-nine--sickness
made him look old. He was a tall man, six feet three, with long
straight 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 any one else, of course," said "Pap"
Rheinhart, impatient at this obtuseness.

"Do you suppose she has had to keep him up?" said Tom Davis
curiously. Silently they wondered. And Eugene, as he saw the two
lovely children fall like petals 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. Biscuits and home-made pies just like mother should
have made but didn't.

That boy's a hustler.

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

"He can help you drum up new prospects," said Eliza.

"Yes," Leonard agreed, "that's the very thing."



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

"Goddam it!" he yelled, and hurled them at the wall. Eliza came to
the door.

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

"O for God's sake!" he growled. "Listen to this! By God, you
never hear me asking any one for anything, do you?" he burst out in
a rage.

She took the shoes and gave them to Eugene.

"It would be a pity to throw away a good pair of shoes," she said.
"Try 'em on, boy."

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

"How do they feel?" asked Eliza.

"All right, I guess," he said doubtfully. "They're a little
tight."

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

Ben entered the kitchen.

"You little brute!" he said. "You've a foot like a mule."
Scowling, he knelt and touched the straining leather at the toes.
Eugene winced.

"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 over 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 flames 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 house-
broken. 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 horse-whip and pious
prayers, the advantages of being God! He thought little boys who
resisted him should be beaten.

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


"Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
Slapoon!
Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
Slapoon!"


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

"Well," said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long 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 some one weaker than himself, some one
at whom the flood of ridicule might be directed. Years later it
came to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a burden
he might otherwise have borne, that that overladen heart was
swollen with a misery that might have been his.

Mr. Leonard's "men of to-morrow" were doing nicely. The spirit of
justice, of physical 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.

[Scooter]

18


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

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

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

She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield
to her governance. In his loneliness he would have yielded his
spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her
love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to
reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable
fantasies in which his life was bound. She hated secrecy; an air
of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the unfathomable
depths of other-wordliness 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. Any one 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 any one 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 fullblooded
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 Tattle-tale," 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 first-born.

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

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

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

"That's all right, honey," she said, "you let us know if he doesn't
treat you right. We'll fix him."

"Steve's a good boy," said Margaret, "when he isn't drinking. I've
nothing to say against him when he's sober." She burst into tears.

"That awful, that awful curse," said Eliza, shaking her head sadly,
"the curse of licker. It's been responsible for the ruination of
more homes than anything else."

"Well, she'll never win any beauty prizes, that's one thing sure,"
said Helen privately to Eliza.

"I'll vow!" said Eliza.

"What on earth did he mean by doing such a thing!" she continued.
"She's ten years older than he if she's a day."

"I think he's done pretty well, if you ask me," said Helen,
annoyed. "Good heavens, mama! You talk as if he's some sort of
prize. Every one 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 any one
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
pool-rooms and drug-stores all day on your wife's money. Why, it's
absurd!" she said furiously.

"Oh for God's sake!" Ben cried irritably, wheeling around. "What
do you want to listen to him for? Can't you see he's crazy?"

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

In the early hours of morning, at two or three o'clock, he would
waken, and walk through the house weeping and entreating release.
Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his
residence, in Eugene's charge. The doctors, surly and half-awake,
peeled back his 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-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 any one, 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 any one.
He's not built that way. Give me your hand, buddy," he said,
turning to Ben with nauseous sentimentality and extending his
yellow fingers, "I'm willing to shake your hand. You hit me to-
night, but Steve's willing to forget."

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

"No. No." Steve began again. "Stevie isn't built--"

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

"Well, forget about it," she said, "all of you. Life's too short."

Life was. At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion,
antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of
strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves
with sad tranquillity. They were like men who, driving forward
desperately at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their
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 renascence. He gravitated between the two poles of his
support, Margaret and Eliza, returning to Altamont every summer for
a period of drugs and drunkenness that ended in a family fight,
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 any one 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-be-lieve
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 lamb-like lions. Among
men, they were fierce, bold, and combative; with her, awkward and
timorous. One of them, a city surveyor, lean, highboned,
alcoholic, was constantly involved in police-court brawls; another,
a railroad detective, a large fair young man, split the skulls of
negroes when he was drunk, shot several men, and was himself
finally killed in a Tennessee gun-fight.

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


"Some sweet old daddy
Come make a fuss over me."


drew on village rakedom to false conjectures. Unpleasant men with
wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial drink of corn whisky,
call them "girley," and suggest a hotel room or a 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 any one. 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 ball-
player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont team. He
was a tough handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down
in a frenzy of despair during the course of a game, and rushing
belligerently at the umpire. She liked his hard assurance, his
rapid twang, his tanned lean body.

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



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

She missed Luke terribly. Without him she felt incomplete,
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 swinging 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 laughter--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-a-h-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?" some one 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 boarding-house 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 every one 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 life-blood, sold the roof over my head,
and sent me out to the pauper's grave to perish. Merciful God," he
wept, "it's fearful, it's awful, it's cruel that I should be
afflicted thus in my old age." Turning to his constrained and
apologetic son abruptly, he said: "How much is the bill? Hey?"
His eyes roved wildly in his head.

"D-d-d-don't get excited, papa," Luke answered soothingly,
teetering from foot to foot, "it's only $8.92."

"Jesus God!" Gant screamed. "I'm ruined." Sobbing in loud
burlesque sniffles, he began his caged pacing.

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

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

"You Goddamned scoundrel!" Gant yelled. "Stop, you mountain grill,
or I'll put you in jail."

"Whah-whah."--His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto.

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

"I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my
innocent motherless babes--"

"Whah-whah-whah!"

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

"You damned thug!" Gant roared, plunging forward and fastening his
great hands around Luke's throat. "Will you stop?"

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

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

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

Luke was a darling. He was a dear, a fine boy, a big-hearted
generous fellow, and just the cutest thing. Women liked him,
laughed at him, pulled fondly the thick golden curls of his hair.
He was sentimentally tender to children--girls of fourteen years.
He had a grand romantic feeling for Delia Selborne, the oldest
daughter of Mrs. Selborne. He bought her presents, was tender and
irritable by turns. Once, at Gant's, on the porch under an August
moon and the smell of ripening grapes, he caressed her while Helen
sang in the 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
boarding-houses, he was the agent for a tailor who made Kippy
Kampus Klothes. Gant boasted of these efforts. The town shifted
its quid, nodded pertly, and spat, saying:

"That boy'll make his mark."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Scooter]

19


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 late, 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 li-MIT-ed," said Jannadeau gutturally, "by
custom but not by statute. In actua-LITY 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 slily 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 every one."

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

"Why, Elizabeth," said Gant, "you haven't changed an inch in
fifteen years. I don't believe you're a day older."

She was thirty-eight and pleasantly aware of it.

"Oh, yes," she said laughing. "You're only saying that to make me
feel good. I'm no chicken any more."

She had a pale clear skin, pleasantly freckled, carrot-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 any one else. He
didn't even come to her funeral."

"He will be punished," said Gant darkly.

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

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

"A pity, a pity," he muttered. "So young." He had the moment of
triumph all men have when they hear some one has died. A moment,
too, of grisly fear. Sixty-four.

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

"It's pretty sad when you come to think of it," he said. "By God,
it is."

"And she was such a fine girl, Mr. Gant," said Elizabeth, weeping
softly. "She had such a bright future before her. She had more
opportunities than I ever had, and I suppose you know"--she spoke
modestly--"what I've done."

"Why," he exclaimed, startled, "you're a rich woman, Elizabeth--
damned if I don't believe you are. You own property all over
town."

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

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

[Scooter]

20


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

"You have a place of your own," she cried fretfully. "Why don't
you stay in it? I don't want you around making trouble."

"Send him on," he moaned bitterly. "Send him on. Over the stones
rattle his bones, he's only a beggar that nobody owns. Ah, Lord!
The old drayhorse has had its day. Its race is run. Kick him out:
the old cripple can no longer provide them with victuals, and they
will throw him on the junkheap, unnatural and degenerate monsters
that they are."

But he remained at Dixieland as long as there was any one to listen
to him, and to the bleak little group of winter boarders he brought
magic. They fed hungrily on all the dramatic gusto with which,
lunging back and forth in 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 office-rent from
this alone. The window on the corner was filled with rubber
syringes and thermos bottles. Drink Coca Cola. They say he stole
the formula from old mountain woman. $50,000,000 now. Rats in the
vats. Dope at Wood's better. Too weak here. He had recently
acquired a taste for the beverage and drank four or five glasses a
day.

D. Stern had his old shack on that corner twenty years before Fagg
bought it. Belonged to Paston estate. Could have bought it for a
song. Rich man now. D. moved to North Main now. The Jew's rich.
Fortune out of winnies. They're hot, they're hot. In a broken
pot. If I had a little time I'd make a little rhyme. Thirteen
kids--she had one every year. As broad as she's long. They all
get fat. Every one works. Sons pay father board. None of mine, I
can assure you. The Jews get there.

The hunchback--what did they call him? One of Nature's Cruel
Jests. Ah, Lord! What's become of old John Bunny? I used to like
his pictures. Oh yes. Dead.

That pure look they have, at the end, when he kisses her, mused
Eugene. Later--A Warmer Clime. Her long lashes curled down over
her wet eyes, she was unable to meet his gaze. The sweet lips
trembled with desire as, clasping her in a grip of steel, he bent
down over her yielding body and planted hungry kisses on her mouth.
When the purple canopy of dawn had been reft asunder by the rays of
the invading sun. The Stranger. It wouldn't do to say the next
morning. They have a thick coat of yellow paint all over their
face. Meanwhile, in Old England. I wonder what they say to each
other. They're a pretty tough lot, I suppose.

A swift thrust of conviction left him unperturbed. The other was
better.

He thought of the Stranger. Steel-gray eyes. A steady face. An
eighth of a second faster on the draw than any one else. Two-gun
Bill Hart. Anderson of the Essanay. Strong quiet men.

He clapped his hand against his buttock with a sharp smack and shot
the murderous forefinger at an ashcan, a lamp-post, and a barber-
pole, with a snapping wrist. Gant, startled in composition, gave
him a quick uneasy look. They walked on.

Came a day when Spring put forth her blossoms on the earth again.
No, no--not that. Then all grew dark. Picture of a lily trampled
on the earth. That means he bigged her. Art. Filled her with
thee a baby fair. You can't go away now. Why? Because--because--
her eyes dropped shyly, a slow flush mantled her cheek. He stared
at her blankly for a moment, then his puzzled gaze--(O good!)--fell
to the tiny object she was fingering nervously, with dawning
comprehension. Blushing rosily, she tried to conceal the little
jacket behind her. Grace! A great light broke on him! Do you
mean it? She went to him with a cry, half laugh, half sob, and
buried her burning face in his neck. You silly boy. Of course I
mean it (you bastard!). The little dance girl. Smiling with wet
lechery and manipulating his moist rope of cigar, Faro Jim shuffled
a pack of cards slowly and fixed on her his vulturesque eye. A
knife in his shiny boots, a small derringer and three aces up his
ruffled sleeve, and suave murder in his heart. But the cold 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!" some one whispered. "It's the Ghost!"

As the Ghost turned coolly back to finish his interrupted drink, he
found himself face to face with the little dancing girl. Two
smoking globes of brine welled from the pellucid depths of her pure
eyes and fell with a hot splash on his bronzed hand.

"How can I ever thank you!" she cried. "You have saved me from a
fate far worse than death."

But the Ghost, who had faced death many times without a flicker of
a lash, was unable to face something he saw now in a pair of big
brown eyes. He took off his sombrero and twisted it shyly in his
big hands.

"Why, that's all right, ma'am," he gulped awkwardly. "Glad to be
of service to a lady any time."

By this time the two bartenders had thrown a table-cloth over Faro
Bill, carried the limp body into the back room, and returned to
their positions behind the bar. The crowd clustered about in
little groups, laughing and talking excitedly, and in a moment, as
the pianist began to hammer out a tune on the battered piano, broke
into the measures of a waltz.

In the wild West of those days, passions were primitive, vengeance
sudden, and retribution immediate.

Two dimples sentinelled a platoon of milk-white teeth.

"Won't you dance with me, Mr. Ghost?" she coaxed.

Thoughtfully he pondered on love's mystery. Pure but passionate.
Appearances against her, 'tis true. The foul breath of slander.
She worked in a bawdy-house but her heart was clean. Outside of
that, what can one say against her? He thought pleasantly of
murder. With child's eyes he regarded his extinct enemies. Men
died violently but cleanly, in the movies. Bang-bang. Good-by,
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 close-ups: he
feasted virtuously upon their proffered lips and, conflict over,
murder sanctified, and virtue crowned, walked away with his siren
into the convenient blaze of a constantly setting sun.

With burning sidelong face he looked quickly up at Gant, twisting
his convulsive neck.



Across the street, a calcium glare from the corner light bathed
coldly the new brick facade 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 Messier 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. Some one all the time. Await alike th' inevitable
hour. Ah, Lord!

With loss of hunger, he thought of undertaking and undertakers, and
in particular of Mr. Gorham. He was a man with blond hair and
white eyebrows.

Waited to marry her when that rich young Cuban died, so they could
take honeymoon to Havana.

They turned down Spring Street by the Baptist Church. This is
really like a city of the dead, Eugene thought. The town, rimmed
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, unrusted, echoed
under his lonely feet; he haunted vast arcades, he pierced the
atrium, his shoes rang on the temple flags.

Or to be, he lusciously meditated, left alone with a group of
pretty women in a town whence all the other people had fled from
some terror of plague, earthquake, volcano, or other menace to
which he, quite happily, was immune. Lolling his tongue
delicately, he saw himself loafing sybaritically through first-
class confectioners' and grocers' shops, gorging like an anaconda
on imported dainties: exquisite small fish from Russia, France, and
Sardinia; coal-black hams from England; ripe olives, brandied
peaches, and liqueur chocolates. He would loot old cellars for fat
Burgundies, crack the gold necks of earth-chilled bottles of Pol
Roger against the wall, and slake his noonday thirst at the
spouting bung of a great butt of 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! 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 stomach-ache and at the same time begged for
more. Bitterly he reflected that his father's life had devoured
whatever had served it, and that few men had had more sensuous
enjoyment, or had been more ruthless in their demands on others.
He found these exhibitions, these wild denunciations and cowardly
grovellings in propitiation of a God none of them paid any
attention to in health, ugly and abominable. The constant
meditation of both Gant and Eliza on the death of others, their
morbid raking of the news for items announcing the death of some
person known to them, their weird absorption with the death of some
toothless hag who, galled by bedsores, at length found release
after her eightieth year, while fire, famine, and slaughter in
other parts of the world passed unnoticed by them, their
extravagant superstition over what was local and unimportant,
seeing the intervention of God in the death of a peasant, and the
suspension of divine law and natural order in their own, filled him
with choking fury.

But Eliza was in splendid condition now to ponder upon the death of
others. Her health was perfect. She was in her middle-fifties:
she had grown triumphantly stronger after the diseases of the
middle years. White, compact, a great deal heavier now than she
had ever been, she performed daily tasks of drudgery in the
maintenance of Dixieland, that would have floored a strong negro.
She hardly ever got to bed before two o'clock in the morning, and
was up again before seven.

She admitted her health grudgingly. She made the most of every
ache, and she infuriated Gant by meeting every complaint with a
corresponding account of her own disorders. When badgered by Helen
because of her supposed neglect of the sick man or when the
concentration of attention upon the invalid piqued her jealousy,
she smiled with white tremulous bitterness, hinting darkly:

"He may not be the first to go. I had a premonition--I don't know
what else you'd call it--the other day. I tell you what--it may
not be long now--" Her eyes bleared with pity--shaking her
puckered mouth, she wept at her own funeral.

"Good heavens, 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 hell-hound!" he yelled. "You would drink my heart's blood.
You are without mercy and without pity--inhuman and bloody monster
that you are."

"Some day," Eliza observed, "you'll cry wolf-wolf once too often."



He went three times a week to Cardiac's office for treatment. The
dry doctor had grown old; behind his dusty restraint, the prim
authority of his manner, there was a deepening well of senile
bawdry. He had a comfortable fortune, he cared little for his
dwindling practice. He was still a brilliant bacteriologist: he
spent hours over slides etched in flowering patterns of bacilli,
and he was sought after by diseased prostitutes, to whom he
rendered competent service.

He dissuaded the Gants from surgery. He was jealously absorbed in
the treatment of Gant's disease, scoffed at operations, and
insisted he could give adequate relief 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.

[Scooter]

21


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 pigmies, monstrous as only children can be when they
become the witless mouths of slogans and crusades, charged
hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their Gulliver.

"There he is, children. Go get him."

Swirling around the marked man in wild elves' dance, they sang with
piping empty violence:


"We are some fond mother's treasure,
Men and women of to-morrow,
For a moment's empty pleasure
Would you give us lifelong sorrow?

Think of sisters, wives, and mothers,
Of helpless babes in some low slum,
Think not of yourself, but others,
Vote against the Demon Rum."


Eugene shuddered, and looked up at Gant's white emblem with coy
pride. They walked happily by unhappy alcoholics, deltaed in
foaming eddies of innocence, and smiling murderously down at some
fond mother's treasure.

If they were mine I'd warm their little tails, they thought--
privately.

Outside the corrugated walls of the warehouse, Gant paused for a
moment to acknowledge the fervent congratulation of a group of
ladies from the First Baptist Church: Mrs. Tarkinton, Mrs. Fagg
Sluder, Mrs. C. M. McDonnel, and Mrs. W. H. (Pert) 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 far-seeing statesmanship he looked westward toward Pisgah.

"Licker," he said, "is a curse and a care. It has caused the
sufferings of untold millions--"

"Amen, Amen," Mrs. Tarkinton chanted softly, swaying her wide hips
rhythmically.

"--it has brought poverty, disease, and suffering to hundreds of
thousands of homes, broken the hearts of wives and mothers, and
taken bread from the mouths of little orphaned children."

"Amen, brother."

"It has been," Gant began, but at this moment his uneasy eye
lighted upon the broad red face of Tim O'Doyle and the fierce
whiskered whiskiness of Major Ambrose Nethersole, two prominent
publicans, who were standing near the entrance not six feet away
and listening attentively.

"Go on!" Major Nethersole urged, with the deep chest notes of a
bullfrog. "Go on, W. O., but for God's sake, don't belch!"

"Begod!" said Tim O'Doyle, wiping a tiny rill of tobacco juice from
the thick simian corner of his mouth, "I've seen him start for the
door and step through the windey. When we see him coming we hire
two extra bottle openers. He used to give the barman a bonus to
get up early."

"Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of you," said Gant
scathingly. "They are the lowest of the low, the whisky-besotted
dregs of humanity, who deserve to bear not even the name of men, so
far have they retrograded backwards."

With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he departed into the
warehouse.

"By God!" said Ambrose Nethersole approvingly. "It takes W. O. to
tie a knot in the tail of the English language. It always did."



But within two months he moaned bitterly his unwetted thirst. For
several years he ordered, from time to time, the alloted quota--a
gallon of whisky every two weeks--from Baltimore. It was the day
of the blind tiger. The town was mined thickly with them. Bad rye
and moonshine corn were the prevailing beverages. He grew old, he
was sick, he still drank.

A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the parched gulley of
desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery. He made pretty
young summer widows at Dixieland presents of money, underwear, and
silk stockings, which he drew on over their shapely legs in the
dusty gloom of his little office. Smiling with imperturbable
tenderness, Mrs. Selborne thrust out her heavy legs slowly to swell
with warm ripe smack his gift of flowered green-silk garters.
Wetting his thumb with sly thin aftersmile, 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 undipped his steel-rimmed glasses
from the great blade of his nose.

She came over with sprightly gait to the empty hearth, clasping her
wrapper tightly with veinous hands.

Swiftly, with a gay leer, she opened the garment, disclosing her
thin legs, silkshod, and her lumpy hips, gaudily clothed in ruffled
drawers of blue silk.

"Aren't they pretty?" she twittered invitingly but obscurely.
Then, as he took an eager stride forward, she skipped away like a
ponderous 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. Every one's laughing at you behind your back."

"You lie! By God, you lie!" he thundered magnificently, touched.
Hammer-hurling Thor.

But he tired very quickly of his new love. He was weary, and
frightened by his depletion. For a time he gave the widow small
sums of money, and forgot the rent. He transferred to her his
storming abuse, muttered ominously to himself in long aisle-pacings
at his shop, when he saw that he had lost the ancient freedom of
his house and saddled himself with a tyrannous hag. One evening he
returned insanely drunk, routed her out of her chamber and pursued
her unfrocked, untoothed, unputtied, with a fluttering length of
kimono in her palsied hand, driving her finally into the yard
beneath the big cherry tree, which he circled, howling, making
frantic lunges for her as she twittered with fear, casting
splintered glances all over the listening 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
boarding-houses. Helen engaged her for five dollars a week. It
was an act of pride.

That morning, Gant had wakened earlier and stared at his ceiling
thoughtfully. He had risen, dressed, and wearing his leather
slippers, walked softly back, along the boards, to the playhouse.
Helen was roused by Annie's loud protests. Tingling with
premonition she came down stairs, 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 say 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 hiccoughs and began to slide gently down the
kitchen-washroom door jamb.

"Ah! you little idiot!" Ben snarled, lifting his white hand
sharply. He turned away quickly with a flickering smile.

At this moment, Annie appeared on the walk outside the door, with a
face full of grieved decorum.

Luke looked nervously and gravely from his father to the negress,
fidgeting from one big foot to the other.

"I'se a married woman," said Annie. "I ain't used to nothin' like
dis. I wants my money."

Luke blew up in an explosion of wild laughter.

"Whah-whah!" He pronged her larded ribs with scooped fingers. She
moved away angrily, muttering.

Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one leg out gently
as if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling blindly at the
neckband of his nightshirt. A faint clucking sound came at
intervals from his wide-open mouth.

They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad laughter all the
welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered in them, washing
out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and fatality of
their lives, the pain of age and death.

Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament against God's
lidless stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with uneasy prying
eyes, a faint tickled grin playing craftily about his wailing
mouth.



Roofing the deep tides, swinging in their embrace, rocked Eliza's
life Sargassic, as when, at morning, a breath of kitchen air
squirmed through her guarded crack of door, and fanned the pendant
clusters of old string in floating rhythm. She rubbed the sleep
gently from her small weak eyes, smiling dimly as she thought,
unwakened, of ancient losses. Her worn fingers still groped softly
in the bed beside her, and when she found it vacant, she awoke.
Remembered. My youngest, my oldest, final bitter fruit, O dark of
soul, O far and lonely, where? Remembered O his face! Death-son,
partner of my peril, last coinage of my flesh, who warmed my flanks
and nestled to my back. Gone? Cut off from me? When? Where?

The screen slammed, the market boy dumped ground sausage on the
table, a negress fumbled at the stove. Awake now.



Ben moved quietly, but not stealthily, about, confessing and
denying nothing. His thin laughter pierced the darkness softly
above the droning creak of the wooden porch-swing. Mrs. Pert
laughed gently, comfortingly. She was forty-three: a large woman
of gentle manners, who drank a great deal. When she was drunk, her
voice was soft, low, and fuzzy, she laughed uncertainly, mildly,
and walked with careful alcoholic gravity. She dressed well: she
was well fleshed, but not sensual-looking. She had good features,
soft oaken hair, blue eyes, a little bleared. She laughed with a
comfortable, happy chuckle. They were all very fond of her. Helen
called her "Fatty."

Her husband was a drug salesman: he travelled through Tennessee,
Arkansas, and Mississippi, and returned to Altamont for a fortnight
every four months. Her daughter, Catherine, who was almost Ben's
age, came to Dixieland for a few weeks each summer. She was a
school-teacher in a public school in a Tennessee village. Ben
squired both.

Mrs. Pert chuckled softly when she spoke to him, and called him
"Old Ben." In the darkness he sat, talking a little, humming a
little, laughing occasionally in his thin minor key, quietly, with
a cigarette between his forked ivory fingers, drawing deeply. He
would buy a flask of whisky and they would drink it very quietly.
Perhaps they talked a little more. But they were never riotous.
Occasionally, they would rise at midnight from the swing, and go
out into the street, departing under leafy trees. They would not
return during the night. Eliza, ironing out a great pile of
rumpled laundry in the kitchen, would listen. Presently, she would
mount the stairs, peer carefully into Mrs. Pert's room, and
descend, her lips thoughtfully kneaded.

She had to speak these things to Helen. There was a strange
defiant communion between them. They laughed or were bitter
together.

"Why, of course," said Helen, impatiently, "I've known it all
along." But she looked beyond the door curiously, her big gold-
laced teeth half-shown in her open mouth, the child look of belief,
wonder, skepticism, and hurt innocency in her big highboned 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 lady-fingers twitched. "How's that?"
Answers vague-voiced, eyes tangled in crisp hair. "Oh, much
better, thank you."

Wanted: frowning boy-man head for understanding fingers of mature
and sympathetic woman. Unhappily married. Address Mrs. B. J. X.,
Box 74. Eight cents a word for one insertion. "Oh, [tenderly]
thank you, Ben."

"Ben," said Jack Eaton, the advertising manager, thrusting his
plump face into the city editor's office, "one of your harem's out
there. She wanted to murder me when I tried to take it. See if
she's got a friend."

"Oh, listen to this, won't you?" Ben snickered fiercely to the City
Editor. "You missed your calling, Eaton. What you want is the
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 cob-webbed 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.

[Scooter]

22


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
boarding-house routine. Her demands on him were not heavy, but
they were frequent and unexpected. He was depressed at the
uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure of
all daily 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 wash-tubs, limp drying stockings,
empty milk-bottles, murky and unwashed, and rusty lard-buckets.
"I'll vow!" she said, turning to Mr. Baskett, the Hattiesburg
cotton merchant, who grinned down malarially through his scraggly
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. Fuimas fumus.
All of our life goes up in smoke. There is no structure, no
creation in it, not even the smoky structure of dreams. Come
lower, angel; whisper in our ears. We are passing away in smoke
and there is nothing to-day but weariness to pay for yesterday's
toil. How may we save ourselves?



He was given the Niggertown route--the hardest and least profitable
of all. He was paid two cents a copy for weekly deliveries, given
ten per cent of his weekly collections, and ten cents for every new
subscription. Thus, he was able to earn four or five dollars a
week. His thin undeveloped body drank sleep with insatiable
thirst, but it was now necessary for him to get up at half-past
three in the morning with darkness and silence making an unreal
humming in his drugged ears.

Strange aerial music came fluting out of darkness, or over his
slow-wakening senses swept the great waves of symphonic
orchestration. Fiend-voices, beautiful and sleep-loud, called down
through darkness and light, developing the thread of ancient
memory.

Staggering blindly in the whitewashed glare, his eyes, sleep-corded
opened slowly as he was born anew, umbilically cut, from darkness.

Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness. Waken, phantom, O into
us. Try, try, O try the way. Open the wall of light. Ghost,
ghost, who is the ghost? O lost. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost?
O whisper-tongued laughter. Eugene! Eugene! Here, O here,
Eugene. Here, Eugene. The way is here, Eugene. Have you
forgotten? The leaf, the rock, the wall of light. Lift up the
rock, Eugene, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door. Return,
return.

A voice, sleep-strange and loud, forever far-near, spoke.

Eugene!

Spoke, ceased, continued without speaking, to speak. In him spoke.
Where darkness, son, is light. Try, boy, the word you know
remember. In the beginning was the logos. Over the border the
borderless green-forested land. Yesterday, remember?

Far-forested, a horn-note wound. Sea-forested, water-far, the
grotted coral sea-far horn-note. The pillioned ladies witch-faced
in bottle-green robes saddle-swinging. Merwomen unsealed 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
street-lamps, saw, from sea-sunk eyes, the town.

There sounded in his heart a solemn music. It filled the earth,
the air, the universe; it was not loud, but it was omnipresent, and
it spoke to him of death and darkness, and of the focal march of
all who lived or had lived, converging on a plain. The world was
filled with silent marching men: no word was spoken, but in the
heart of each there was a common knowledge, the word that all men
knew and had forgotten, the lost key opening the prison gates, the
lane-end into heaven, and as the music soared and filled him, he
cried: "I will remember. When I come to the place, I shall know."



Hot bands of light streamed murkily from the doors and windows of
the office. From the press-room downstairs there was an ascending
roar as the big press mounted to its capacity. As he entered the
office and drank in the warm tides of steel and ink that soaked the
air, he awoke suddenly, his light-drugged limbs solidifying with a
quick shock, as would some aerial spirit, whose floating body
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 under-shirt. An assistant pressman climbed nimbly
among roaring pistons and cylinders, an oil-can and a bunch of
waste in his hand. A broad river of white paper rushed constantly
up from the cylinder and leaped into a mangling chaos of machinery
whence it emerged a second later, cut, printed, folded and stacked,
sliding along a board with a hundred others in a fattening sheaf.

Machine-magic! Why not men, like that? Doctor, surgeon, poet,
priest--stacked, folded, printed.

Harry Tugman cast away his wet fragment of cigarette with a
luxurious grimace. The carriers eyed him reverently. Once he had
knocked a sub-pressman down for sitting in his chair. He was Boss.
He got $55 a week. If he was not pleased he could get work at any
time on the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Louisville Courier
Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, the Knoxville Sentinel, the
Norfolk Pilot. He could travel.

In a moment more they were out on the streets, hobbling along
rapidly under the accustomed weight of the crammed canvas bags.



He was most desperately afraid of failure. He listened with
constricted face to Eliza's admonition.

"Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Make them think you are somebody!"

He had little confidence in himself; he recoiled in advance from
the humiliation of dismissal. He feared the sabre-cut of language,
and before his own pride he drew back and was afraid.

For three mornings he accompanied the retiring carrier, gathering
his mind to focal intensity while he tried to 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 pre-natal morning they began their route, walking down
the steep hill of Valley Street into tropical sleep, past the
stabled torpor of black sleepers, past all the illicit loves, the
casual and innumerable adulteries of Niggertown. As the stiff
block of paper thudded sharply on the flimsy porch of a shack, or
smacked the loose boarding of a door, they were answered by a long
sullen moan of discontent. They sniggered.

"Check this one off," said Jennings Ware, "if you can't collect
next time. She owes for six weeks now."

"This one," he said, flipping a paper quietly on a door mat, "is
good pay. They're good niggers. You'll get your money every
Wednesday."

"There's a High Yaller in here," he said, hurling the paper against
the door with a whizzing smack and smiling, as a young full-meated
woman's yell of indignation answered, a thin devil's grin. "You
can have that if you want it."

A wan smile of fear struggled across Eugene's mouth. Jennings Ware
looked at him shrewdly, but did not press him. Jennings Ware was a
good-hearted boy.

"She's a pretty good old girl," he said. "You've got a right to a
few dead-heads. Take it out in trade."

They walked on down the dark unpaved street, folding papers rapidly
during the intervals between delivery.

"It's a hell of a route," said Jennings Ware. "When it rains it's
terrible. You'll go into mud up to your knees. And you can't
collect from half the bastards." He hurled a paper viciously.

"But, oh man," he said, after a moment. "If you want Jelly Roll
you've come to the right place. I ain't kidding you!"

"With--with niggers?" Eugene whispered, moistening his dry lips.

Jennings Ware turned his red satirical face on him.

"You don't see any Society Belles around here, do you?" he said.

"Are niggers good?" Eugene asked in a small dry voice.

"Boy!" The word blew out of Jennings Ware's mouth like an
explosion. He was silent a moment.

"There ain't nothing better," he said.



At first, the canvas strap of the paper-bag bit cruelly across his
slender shoulders. He strained against the galling weight that
pulled him earthwards. The first weeks were like a warring
nightmare: day after day he fought his way up to liberation. He
knew all the sorrow of those who carry weight; he knew, morning by
morning, the aerial ecstasy of release. As his load lightened with
the progress of his route, his leaning shoulder rose with winged
buoyancy, his straining limbs grew light: at the end of his 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 hopefuly upon the swarthy
greasiness of George Chakales, nightman of the Athens Cafe. 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 race-horse. 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 catforms 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 to-night: a warm waft of
air and cooking food came up to him. He descended the rotten steps
that climbed the bank.

Ella Corpening sat facing the door in a rocking chair, purring
lazily in the red glow of a little kitchen range, with her big legs
stretched comfortably out on the floor. She was a mulatto of
twenty-six years, a handsome woman of Amazonian proportions, with
smooth tawny skin.

She was dressed in the garments of some former mistress: she wore a
brown woollen skirt, patent-leather shoes with high suede tops
pearl-buttoned, and 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 bank-note gleamed dully.

"Dat's my rent money," she said. "Can't give you dat. Dollah-
twenty!" She brooded. "Uh! Uh!" she grunted pleasantly. "Don't
seem lak it ought to be dat much."

"It is, though," he said, opening his account book.

"It mus' is," she agreed, "if de book say so."

She meditated luxuriously for a moment.

"Does you collec' Sunday mawnin'?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"You come roun' in de mawnin'," she said hopefully. "I'll have
somethin' fo' yuh, sho. I'se waitin' fo' a white gent'man now.
He's goin' gib me a dollah."

She moved her great limbs slowly, and smiled at him. Forked pulses
beat against his eyes. He gulped dryly: his legs were rotten with
excitement.

"What's--what's he going to give you a dollar for?" he muttered,
barely audible.

"Jelly Roll," said Ella Corpening.

He moved his lips twice, unable to speak. She got up from her
chair.

"What yo' want?" she asked softly. "Jelly Roll?"

"Want to see--to see!" he gasped.

She closed the door opening on the bank and locked it. The stove
cast a grated glow from its open ashpan. There was a momentary
rain of red cinders into the pit.

Ella Corpening opened the door beyond that, leading to another
room. There were two dirty rumpled beds; the single window was
bolted and covered by an old green shade. She lit a smoky little
lamp, and turned the wick low.

There was a battered little dresser with a mottled glass, from
which the blistered varnish was flaking. Over the screened hearth,
on a low mantel, there was a Kewpie doll, sashed with pink ribbon,
a vase with fluted edges and gilt flowers, won at a carnival, and a
paper of pins. A calendar, also, by courtesy of the Altamont Coal
and Ice Company, showing an Indian maid paddling her canoe down an
alley of paved moonlight, and a religious motto in flowered
scrollwork, framed in walnut: God Loves Them Both.

"What yo' want?" she whispered, facing him.

Far off, he listened to the ghost of his own voice.

"Take off your clothes."

Her skirt fell in a ring about her feet. She took off her starched
waist. In a moment, save for her hose, she stood naked before him.

Her breath came quickly, her full tongue licked across her mouth.

"Dance!" he cried. "Dance!"

She began to moan softly, while an undulant tremor flowed through
her great yellow body; her hips and her round heavy breasts writhed
slowly in a sensual rhythm.

Her straight oiled hair fell across her neck in a thick shock. She
extended her arms for balance, the lids closed over her large
yellow eyeballs. She came near him. He felt her hot breath on his
face, the smothering flood of her breasts. He was whirled like a
chip in the wild torrent of her passion. Her powerful yellow hands
gripped his slender arms round like bracelets. She shook him to
and fro slowly, fastening him 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-ly Roll!"--


her voice falling each time to a low moan.

Her face, the broad column of her throat, and her deep-breasted
torso were rilled with sweat. He fumbled blindly for the door,
lunged across the outer room and, gasping, found his way into the
air. Her chant, unbroken and undisturbed by his departure,
followed him up the flimsy steps. He did not pause to get his
breath until he came to the edge of the market square. Below him
in the valley, across on the butte, the smoky lamps of Niggertown
flared in the dusk. Faint laughter, rich, jungle-wild, welled up
from hived darkness. He heard lost twangling notes, the measured
thump of distant feet; beyond, above, more thin, more far than all,
the rapid wail of sinners in a church.