A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

[Scooter]

23


[Greek text]


He did not tell the Leonards that he was working in the early
morning. He knew they would oppose his employment, and that their
opposition would manifest itself in the triumphant argument of
lowered grades. Also, Margaret Leonard, he knew, would talk
ominously of health undermined, of the promise of future years
destroyed, of the sweet lost hours of morning sleep that could
never be regained. He was really more robust now than he had ever
been. He was heavier and stronger. But he sometimes felt a
gnawing hunger for sleep: he grew heavy at mid-day, revived in the
afternoon, but found it difficult to keep his sleepy brain fixed on
a book after eight o'clock in the evening.

He learned little of discipline. Under the care of the Leonards he
came even to have a romantic contempt for it. Margaret Leonard had
the marvelous vision, of great people, for essences. She saw
always the dominant color, but she did not always see the shadings.
She was an inspired sentimentalist. She thought she "knew boys":
she was proud of her knowledge of them. In fact, however, she had
little knowledge of them. She would have been stricken with horror
if she could have known the wild confusion of adolescence, the
sexual nightmares of puberty, the grief, the fear, the shame in
which a boy broods over the dark world of his desire. She did not
know that every boy, caged in from confession by his fear, is to
himself a monster.

She did not have knowledge. But she had wisdom. She found
immediately a person's quality. Boys were her heroes, her little
gods. She believed that the world was to be saved, life redeemed,
by one of them. She saw the flame that burns in each of them, and
she guarded it. She tried somehow to reach the dark gropings
toward light and articulation, of the blunt, the stolid, the
shamefast. She spoke a calm low word to the trembling racehorse,
and he was still.

Thus, he made no confessions. He was still prison-pent. But he
turned always to Margaret Leonard as toward the light: she saw the
unholy fires that cast their sword-dance on his face, she saw the
hunger and the pain, and she fed him--majestic crime!--on poetry.

Whatever of fear or shame locked them in careful silence, whatever
decorous pretense of custom guarded their tongues, they found
release in the eloquent symbols of verse. And by that sign,
Margaret was lost to the good angels. For what care the
ambassadors of Satan, for all the small fidelities of the letter
and the word, if from the singing choir of earthly methodism we can
steal a single heart--lift up, flame-tipped, one great lost soul to
the high sinfulness of poetry?

The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of
poetry was inextinguishably mixed with her blood, entombed in her
flesh.

By the beginning of his fifteenth year Eugene knew almost every
major lyric in the language. He possessed them to their living
core, not in a handful of scattered quotations, but almost line for
line. His thirst was drunken, insatiate: he added to his hoard
entire scenes from Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, which he read by
himself in German; the lyrics of Heine, and several folk songs. He
committed to memory the entire passage in the Anabasis, the
mounting and triumphal Greek which described the moment when the
starving remnant of the Ten Thousand had come at length to the sea,
and sent up their great cry, calling it by name. In addition, he
memorized some of the sonorous stupidities of Cicero, because of
the sound, and a little of Caesar, terse and lean.

The great lyrics of Burns he knew from music, from reading, or from
hearing Gant recite them. But "Tam O'Shanter" Margaret Leonard
read to him, her eyes sparkling with laughter as she read:


"In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'."


The shorter Wordsworth pieces he had read at grammar school. "My
heart leaps up," "I wandered lonely as a cloud," and "Behold her,
single in the field," he had known for years; but Margaret read him
the sonnets and made him commit "The world is too much with us" to
memory. Her voice trembled and grew low with passion when she read
it.

He knew all the songs in Shakespeare's plays, but the two that
moved him most were: "O mistress mine, where are you roaming?"
which blew a far horn in his heart, and the great song from
Cymbeline: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun." He had tried to
read all the sonnets, and failed, because their woven density was
too much for his experience, but he had read, and forgotten,
perhaps half of them, and remembered a few which burned up from the
page, strangely, immediately, like lamps for him.

Those that he knew were: "When, in the chronicle of wasted time,"
"To me, fair friend, you never can be old," "Let me not to the
marriage of true minds," "The expense of spirit in a waste of
shame," "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought," "Shall I
compare thee to a summer's day?" "From you have I been absent in
the spring," and "That time of year thou mayest in me behold," the
greatest of all, which Margaret brought him to, and which shot
through him with such electric ecstasy when he came to "Bare ruined
choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," that he could hardly hold
his course unbroken through the rest of it.

He read all the plays save Timon, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, and
King John, but the only play that held his interest from first to
last was King Lear. With most of the famous declamatory passages
he had been familiar, for years, by Gant's recitation, and now they
wearied him. And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which
Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the
master's swingeing wit, he felt vaguely were very dull. He never
had any confidence in Shakespeare's humor--his Touchstones were not
only windy fools, but dull ones.

"For my part I had rather bear with you than bear you; yet I should
bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in
your purse."

This sort of thing reminded him unpleasantly of the Pentlands. The
Fool in "Lear" alone he thought admirable--a sad, tragic,
mysterious fool. For the rest, he went about and composed
parodies, which, with a devil's grin, he told himself would split
the sides of posterity. Such as: "Aye, nuncle, an if Shrove
Tuesday come last Wednesday, I'll do the capon to thy cock, as Tom
O'Ludgate told the shepherd when he found the cowslips gone. Dost
bay with two throats, Cerberus? Down, boy, down!"

The admired beauties he was often tired of, perhaps because he had
heard them so often, and it seemed to him, moreover, that
Shakespeare often spoke absurdly and pompously when he might better
have spoken simply, as in the scene where, being informed by the
Queen of the death of his sister by drowning, Laertes says:


"Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears."


You really can't beat that (he thought). Aye, Ben! Would he had
blotted a hundred! A thousand!

But he was deep in other passages which the elocutionist misses,
such as the terrible and epic invocation of Edmund, in King Lear,
drenched in evil, which begins:


"Thou, Nature, art my goddess,"


and ends,


"Now, gods, stand up for bastards."


It was as dark as night, as evil as Niggertown, as vast as the
elemental winds that howled down across the hills: he chanted it in
the black hours of his labor, into the dark and the wind. He
understood; he exulted in its evil--which was the evil of earth, of
illicit nature. It was a call to the unclassed; it was a cry for
those beyond the fence, for rebel angels, and for all of the men
who are too tall.

He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond Shakespeare's
plays. But he very early came to know a little of the poetry of
Ben Jonson, whom Margaret looked on as a literary Falstaff,
condoning, with the familiar weakness of the schoolmarm, his
Gargantuan excess as a pardonable whimsy of genius.

She was somewhat academically mirthful over the literary
bacchanalia, as a professor in a Baptist college smacks his lips
appetizingly and beams ruddily at his classes when he reads of sack
and porter and tankards foaming with the musty ale. All this is
part of the liberal tradition. Men of the world are broadminded.
Witness Professor Albert Thorndyke Firkins, of the University of
Chicago, at the Falcon in Soho. Smiling bravely, he sits over a
half-pint of bitter beer, in the company of a racing tout, a sway-
backed barmaid, broad in the stern, with adjustable teeth, and
three companionable tarts from Lisle street, who are making the
best of two pints of Guinness. With eager impatience he awaits the
arrival of G. K. Chesterton and E. V. Lucas.



"O rare Ben Jonson!" Margaret Leonard sighed with gentle laughter.
"Ah, Lord!"

"My God, boy!" Sheba roared, snatching the suggested motif of
conversation out of the air, and licking her buttered fingers
noisily as she stormed into action. "God bless him!" Her hairy
red face burned like clover, her veinous eyes were tearful bright.
"God bless him, 'Gene! He was as English as roast beef and a
tankard of musty ale!"

"Ah, Lord!" sighed Margaret. "He was a genius if ever there was
one." With misty eyes she gazed far off, a thread of laughter on
her mouth. "Whee!" she laughed gently. "Old Ben!"

"And say, 'Gene!" Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand
gripped upon her knee. "Do you know that the greatest tribute to
Shakespeare's genius is from his hand?"

"Ah, I tell you, boy!" said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her
voice was husky. He was afraid she was going to weep.

"And yet the fools!" Sheba yelled. "The mean little two-by-two
pusillanimous swill-drinking fools--"

"Whee!" gently Margaret moaned. John Dorsey turned his chalk-white
face to the boy and whined with vacant appreciation, winking his
head pertly. Ah absently!

"--for that's all they are, have had the effrontery to suggest that
he was jealous."

"Pshaw!" said Margaret impatiently. "There's nothing in that."

"Why, they don't know what they're talking about!" Sheba turned a
sudden grinning face upon him. "The little upstarts! It takes us
to tell 'em, 'Gene," she said.

He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair. John Dorsey
slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately,
drooling slightly at the mouth.

"The Lord a' mercy!" he wheezed, gasping.

"I was talking to a feller the other day," said Sheba, "a lawyer
that you'd think might know a LITTLE something, and I used a
quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that every schoolboy knows--
'The quality of mercy is not strained.' The man looked at me as
if he thought I was crazy!"

"Great heavens!" said Margaret in a still voice.

"I said, 'Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you
may have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are
a lot of things you don't know yet. There are a lot of things
money can't buy, my sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-
shered men and women.'"

"Why, pshaw!" said Mr. Leonard. "What do these little whipper-
snappers know about the things of the mind? You might as
well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to construe a
passage in Homer." He grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the
table, and tilting it intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a
lumpy spilth of curds which he slid, quivering, into his mouth.
"No, sir!" he laughed. "They may be Big Men on the tax collector's
books, but when they try to associate with educated men and women,
as the feller says, 'they--they--'" he began to whine, "'why, they
just ain't nothin'.'"

"What shall it profit a man," said Sheba, "if he gain the whole
world, and lose--"

"Ah, Lord!" sighed Margaret, shaking her smoke-dark eyes. "I tell
you!"

She told him. She told him of the Swan's profound knowledge of the
human heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his
enormous humor.

"Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!" She laughed. "The fat
rascal! Imagine a man keeping the time!"

And, carefully: "It was the custom of the time, 'Gene. As a
matter of fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries
you see how much purer he is than they are." But she avoided a
word, a line, here and there. The slightly spotty Swan--muddied
a little by custom. Then, too, the Bible.

The smoky candle-ends of time. Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai:
Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor McTavish (D.D.) of
Presbyterian College.

"And observe, Eugene," she said, "he never made vice attractive."

"Why didn't he?" he asked. "There's Falstaff."

"Yes," she replied, "and you know what happened to him, don't you?"

"Why," he considered, "he died!"

"You see, don't you?" she concluded, with triumphant warning.

I see, don't I? The wages of sin. What, by the way, are the wages
of virtue? The good die young.


Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!
I really feel so blue!
I was given to crime,
And cut off in my prime
When only eighty-two.


"Then, note," she said, "how none of his characters stand still.
You can see them grow, from first to last. No one is the same at
the end as he was in the beginning."

In the beginning was the word. I am Alpha and Omega. The growth
of Lear. He grew old and mad. There's growth for you.



This tin-currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses
at college, and in her reading. They were--are, perhaps, still--
part of the glib jargon of pedants. But they did her no real
injury. They were simply the things people said. She felt,
guiltily, that she must trick out her teaching with these gauds:
she was afraid that what she had to offer was not enough. What she
had to offer was simply a feeling that was so profoundly right, so
unerring, that she could no more utter great verse meanly than mean
verse well. She was a voice that God seeks. She was the reed of
demonic ecstasy. She was possessed, she knew not how, but she knew
the moment of her possession. The singing tongues of all the world
were wakened into life again under the incantation of her voice.
She was inhabited. She was spent.

She passed through their barred and bolted boy-life with the direct
stride of a spirit. She opened their hearts as if they had been
lockets. They said: "Mrs. Leonard is sure a nice lady."



He knew some of Ben Jonson's poems, including the fine Hymn to
Diana, "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair," and the great tribute
to Shakespeare which lifted his hair at


". . . But call forth thundering Æschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us."--


and caught at his throat at:


"He was not for an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime . . ."


The elegy to little Salathiel Pavy, the child actor, was honey from
the lion's mouth. But it was too long.

Of Herrick, sealed of the tribe of Ben, he knew much more. The
poetry sang itself. It was, he thought later, the most perfect and
unfailing lyrical voice in the language--a clean, sweet, small,
unfaltering note. It is done with the incomparable ease of an
inspired child. The young men and women of our century have tried
to recapture it, as they have tried to recapture Blake and, a
little more successfully, Donne.


Here a little child I stand
Heaving up my either hand;
Cold as paddocks though they be,

Here I lift them up to Thee,
For a benison to fall
On our meat and on us all. Amen.


There was nothing beyond this--nothing that surpassed it in
precision, delicacy, and wholeness.

Their names dropped musically like small fat bird-notes through the
freckled sunlight of a young world: prophetically he brooded on the
sweet lost bird-cries of their names, knowing they never would
return. Herrick, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, Campion, Lovelace,
Dekker. O sweet content, O sweet, O sweet content!

He read shelves of novels: all of Thackeray, all the stories of Poe
and Hawthorne, and Herman Melville's Omoo and Typee, which he found
at Gant's. Of Moby Dick he had never heard. He read a half-dozen
Coopers, all of Mark Twain, but failed to finish a single book of
Howells or James.

He read a dozen of Scott, and liked best of all Quentin Durward,
because the descriptions of food were as beautiful and appetizing
as any he had ever read.



Eliza went to Florida again during his fourteenth year and left him
to board with the Leonards. Helen was drifting, with crescent
weariness and fear, through the cities of the East and Middle-West.
She sang for several weeks in a small cabaret in Baltimore, she
moved on to Philadelphia and thumped out popular tunes on a
battered piano at the music counter of a five and ten cent store,
with studious tongue out-thrust as she puzzled through new scores.

Gant wrote her faithfully twice a week--a blue but copious log of
existence. Occasionally he enclosed small checks, which she saved,
uncashed.

"Your mother," he wrote, "has gone off on another wild-goose chase
to Florida, leaving me here alone to face the music, freeze, or
starve. God knows what we'll all come to before the end of this
fearful, hellish, and damnable winter, but I predict the poorhouse
and soup-kitchens like we had in the Cleveland administration.
When the Democrats are in, you may as well begin to count your
ribs. The banks have no money, people are out of work. You can
mark my words everything will go to the tax-collector under the
hammer before we're done. The temperature was 7 above when I
looked this morning, coal has gone up seventy-five cents a ton.
The Sunny South. Keep off the grass said Bill Nye. Jesus God! I
passed the Southern Fuel Co. yesterday and saw old Wagner at the
window with a fiendish smile of gloatation on his face as he looked
out on the sufferings of the widows and orphans. Little does he
care if they all freeze. Bob Grady dropped dead Tuesday morning as
he was coming out of the Citizen's Bank. I had known him twenty-
five years. He'd never been sick a day in his life. All, all are
gone, the old familiar faces. Old Gant will be the next. I have
been eating at Mrs. Sales' since your mother went away. You've
never seen such a table as she keeps in your life--a profusion of
fruits piled up in pyramids, stewed prunes, peaches, and preserves,
big roasts of pork, beef, lamb, cold cuts of ham and tongue, and a
half dozen vegetables in an abundance that beggars description.
How in God's name she does it for thirty-five cents I don't know.
Eugene is staying with the Leonards while your mother's away. I
take him up to Sales' with me once or twice a week and give him a
square meal. They look mighty serious when they see those long
legs coming. God knows where he puts it all--he can eat more than
any three people I ever saw. I suppose he gets pretty lean
pickings at the school. He's got the lean and hungry Gant look.
Poor child. He has no mother any more. I'll do the best I can for
him until the smash comes. Leonard comes and brags about him every
week. He says his equal is not to be found anywhere. Every one in
town has heard of him. Preston Carr (who's sure to be the next
governor) was talking to me about him the other day. He wants me
to send him to the State university law school where he will make
lifelong friends among the people of his own State, and then put
him into politics. It's what I should have done. I'm going to
give him a good education. The rest is up to him. Perhaps he'll
be a credit to the name. You haven't seen him since he put on long
pants. His mother picked out a beautiful suit at Moale's
Christmas. He went down to Daisy's for Christmas and put them on.
I bought him a cheap pair at the Racket Store for every-day wear.
He can save the good ones for Sunday. Your mother has let the Old
Barn to Mrs. Revell until she gets back. I went in the other day
and found it warm for the first time in my life. She keeps the
furnace going and she's not afraid to burn coal. I hardly ever see
Ben from one week to another. He comes in and prowls around in the
kitchen at one and two o'clock in the morning and I'm up and gone
hours before he's awake. You can get nothing out of him--he never
says a half-dozen words and if you ask him a civil question he cuts
you off short. I see him down-town late at night sometimes with
Mrs. P. They're thick as thieves together. I guess she's a bad
egg. This is all for this time. John Duke was shot and killed by
the house detective at the Whitstone hotel Sunday night. He was
drunk and threatening to shoot every one. It's a sad thing for his
wife. He left three children. She was in to see me to-day. He
was well-liked by every one but a terror when he drank. My heart
bled for her. She's a pretty little woman. Liquor has caused more
misery than all the other evils in the world put together. I curse
the day it was first invented. Enclosed find a small check to buy
yourself a present. God knows what we're coming to. Aff. Your
Father, W. O. Gant."

She saved carefully all his letters--written on his heavy slick
business stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his crippled right
hand.

In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared
thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at
Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length
to Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and citrous
fruits, the Pentlands waited her approach, Pett, with a cold lust
of battle on her face, Will with a grimace of itching nervousness
while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand.

[Scooter]

24


With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his
torso from loin to chin.

"Now, let me see," he whined with studious deliberation, "what he
gives on this." He fumbled for the notes.

Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the window, a low
sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips.

Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand stroking his
grave pallid face.

"Entgegen," said Eugene, in a small choked voice, "follows its
object."

John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head, still
searching the notes.

"I'm not so sure of that," he said.

Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds. Tom Davis hurled
himself violently downward over his desk. John Dorsey looked up,
adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth.

From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught him a little
German, a language of which he had been quite happily ignorant.
The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked it over
with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation in
order to enjoy his bewilderment. Sometimes, deliberately, they
salted their pages with glib false readings, sometimes they
interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting exultantly for his
cautious amendment of a word that did not exist.

"Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in which the old man was
sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and finally,"--Guy Doak
looked up slyly at his tutor, "giving him a good punch in the eye."

"No-o," said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin, "not exactly.
'Catching him squarely in the eye' gets the idiom better, I think."

Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling noises into his
desk, and waited for the classic evasion. It came at once.

"Let me see," said John Dorsey, turning the pages, "what he gives
on this."

Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled wad and thrust
it on Eugene's desk. Eugene read:


"Gebe mir ein Stuck Papier,
Before I bust you on the ear."


He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and wrote in answer:


"Du bist wie eine bum-me."


They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German tear-gulps:
Immensee, Höher als die Kirche, Der Zerbrochene Krug. Then,
Wilhelm Tell. The fine lyrical measure of the opening song, the
unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with its faery
music. The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed
to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the
escape by boat. As for the rest, it was, they wearily recognized,
Great Literature. Mr. Schiller, they saw, was religiously
impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Paul Revere,
with the beauties of Liberty. His embattled Swiss bounded
ponderously from crag to crag, invoking it in windy speeches.

"The mountains," observed John Dorsey, touched, in a happy moment,
by the genius of the place, "have been the traditional seat of
Liberty."

Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges. He heard, far
off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails.

During this season of Eliza's absence he roomed with Guy Doak.

Guy Doak was five years his senior. He was a native of Newark, New
Jersey: his speech was touched with Yankee nasality, his manner
with Yankee crispness. His mother, a boarding-house mistress, had
come to Altamont a year or two before to retrieve her health: she
was tubercular, and spent part of the winter in Florida.

Guy Doak had a trim cocky figure of medium height, black hair,
bright dark eyes, a pale, very smooth oval face, somehow
suggestive, Eugene thought, of a fish's belly, with somewhat
unhappily full jaws which made his lower features seem larger than
his upper. He was foppishly neat in his dress. People called him
a good-looking boy.

He made few friends. To the boys at Leonard's this Yankee was far
more remote than the rich Cuban boy, Manuel Quevado, whose fat dark
laughter and broken speech was all for girls. He belonged to a
richer South, but they knew him.

Guy Doak had none of their floridity. He was lacking in their
hearty violence. He did not laugh loudly. He had a sharp, bright,
shallow mind, inflexibly dogmatic. His companions were bad
Southern romantics, he was a false Yankee realist. They arrived,
thus, by different means, at a common goal of superstition. Guy
Doak had already hardened into the American city-dweller's mould of
infantile cynicism. He was occasionally merry with the other boys
in the classic manner of the city fellow with the yokels. He was
wise. Above all, he was wise. It was safe to assume, he felt,
that Truth was always on the scaffold, and Wrong forever on the
throne. So far from being depressed by the slaughter of the
innocents, the spectacle gave him much bitter amusement.

Outside of this, Guy Doak was a very nice fellow--sharp, obstinate,
unsubtle, and pleased with his wit. They lived on the first floor
at Leonard's: at night, by a roaring wood fire, they listened
carefully to the great thunder of the trees, and to the stealthy
creaking foot-steps of the master as he came softly down the
stairs, and paused by their door. They ate at table with Margaret,
John Dorsey, Miss Amy, the two children, John Dorsey, junior, nine,
and Margaret, five, and two of Leonard's Tennessee nephews--Tyson
Leonard, a ferret-faced boy of eighteen, foulmouthed and sly, and
Dirk Barnard, a tall slender boy, seventeen, with a bumpy face,
brown merry eyes, and a quick temper. At table they kept up a
secret correspondence of innuendo and hidden movement, fleshing a
fork in a grunting neighbor as John Dorsey said the blessing, and
choking with smothered laughter. At night, they tapped messages on
floor and ceiling, crept out for sniggering conventions in the
windy dark hall, and fled to their innocent beds as John Dorsey
stormed down on them.

Leonard was fighting hard to keep his little school alive. He had
less than twenty students the first year, and less than thirty the
second. From an income of not more than $3,000 he had to pay Miss
Amy, who had left a high school position to help him, a small
salary. The old house on its fine wooded hill was full of outmoded
plumbing and drafty corridors: he had leased it at a small rental.
But the rough usage of thirty boys demanded a considerable yearly
restoration. The Leonards were fighting very stubbornly and
courageously for their existence.

The food was scant and poor: at breakfast, a dish of blue, watery
oatmeal, eggs and toast; at lunch, a thin soup, hot sour cornbread,
and a vegetable boiled with a piece of fat pork; at dinner, hot
biscuits, a small meat loaf, and creamed or boiled potatoes. No
one was permitted coffee or tea, but there was an abundance of
fresh creamy milk. John Dorsey always kept and milked his own cow.
Occasionally there was a deep, crusted pie, hot, yolky muffins, or
spicy gingerbread of Margaret's make. She was a splendid cook.

Often, at night, Guy Doak slid quietly out through the window on to
the side porch, and escaped down the road under the concealing roar
of the trees. He would return from town within two hours, crawling
in exultantly with a bag full of hot frankfurter sandwiches coated
thickly with mustard, chopped onion, and a hot Mexican sauce. With
a crafty grin he unfoiled two five-cent cigars, which they smoked
magnificently, with a sharp tang of daring, blowing the smoke up
the chimney in order to thwart a possible irruption by the master.
And Guy brought back, from the wind and the night, the good salt
breath of gossip in street and store, news of the town, and the
brave swagger of the drugstore gallants.

As they smoked and stuffed fat palatable bites of sandwich into
their mouths, they would regard each other with pleased sniggers,
carrying on thus an insane symphony of laughter:

"Chuckle, chuckle!--laugh of gloatation."

"Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee! . . laugh of titterosity."

"Snuh-huh, snuh-huh, snuh-huh! . . laugh of gluttonotiousness."

The vigorous warmth of burning wood filled their room pleasantly:
over their sheltered heads the dark gigantic wind howled through
the earth. O sheltered love, nooked warmly in against this winter
night. O warm fair women, whether within a forest hut, or by the
town ledged high above the moaning seas, shot upon the wind, I
come.

Guy Doak toyed gently at his belly with his right hand, and stroked
his round chin slowly with his left.

"Now let me see," he whined, "what he gives on this."

Their laughter rang around the walls. Too late, they heard the
aroused stealthy foot-falls of the master, creaking down the hall.
Later--silence, the dark, the wind.



Miss Amy closed her small beautifully kept grade book, thrust her
great arms upward, and yawned. Eugene looked hopefully at her and
out along the playing court, reddened by the late sun. He was
wild, uncontrollable, erratic. His mad tongue leaped out in class.
He could never keep peace a full day. He amazed them. They loved
him, and they punished him piously, affectionately. He was never
released at the dismissal hour. He was always "kept in."

John Dorsey noted each whisper of disorder, or each failure in
preparation, by careful markings in a book. Each afternoon he read
the names of delinquents, amid a low mutter of sullen protest, and
stated their penalties. Once Eugene got through an entire day
without a mark. He stood triumphantly before Leonard while the
master searched the record.

John Dorsey began to laugh foolishly; he gripped his hand
affectionately around the boy's arm.

"Well, sir!" he said. "There must be a mistake. I'm going to keep
you in on general principles."

He bent to a long dribbling suction of laughter. Eugene's wild
eyes were shot with tears of anger and surprise. He never forgot.

Miss Amy yawned, and smiled on him with slow powerful affectionate
contempt.

"Go on!" she said, in her broad, lazy accent. "I don't want to
fool with you any more. You're not worth powder enough to blow you
up."

Margaret came in, her face furrowed deeply between smoke-dark eyes,
full of tender sternness and hidden laughter.

"What's wrong with the rascal?" she asked. "Can't he learn
algebra?"

"He can learn!" drawled Miss Amy. "He can learn anything. He's
lazy--that's what it is. Just plain lazy."

She smacked his buttock smartly with a ruler.

"I'd like to warm you a bit with this," she laughed, slowly and
richly. "You'd learn then."

"Here!" said Margaret, shaking her head in protest. "You leave
that boy alone. Don't look behind the faun's ears. Never mind
about algebra, here. That's for poor folks. There's no need for
algebra where two and two make five."

Miss Amy turned her handsome gypsy eyes on Eugene.

"Go on. I've seen enough of you." She made a strong weary gesture
of dismissal.

Hatless, with a mad whoop, he plunged through the door and leaped
the porch rail.

"Here, boy!" Margaret called. "Where's your hat?"

Grinning, he galloped back, picked up a limp rag of dirty green
felt, and pulled it over his chaotic hair. Curly tufts stuck
through the gaping crease-holes.

"Come here!" said Margaret gravely. Her nervous fingers pulled his
frayed necktie around to the front, tugged down his vest, and
buttoned his coat over tightly, while he peered at her with his
strange devil's grin. Suddenly she trembled with laughter.

"Good heavens, Amy," she said. "Look at that hat."

Miss Amy smiled at him with indifferent sleepy cat-warmth.

"You want to fix yourself up, 'Gene," she said, "so the girls will
begin to notice you."

He heard the strange song of Margaret's laughter.

"Can you see him out courting?" she said. "The poor girl would
think she had a demon lover, sure."


"As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover."


His eyes burned on her face, flowing with dark secret beauty.

"Get along, you scamp!" she ordered.

He turned, and, crying fiercely in his throat, tore down the road
with bounding strides.

All the dusk blurred in her eyes.

"Leave him alone!" she whispered to no one. "Leave him alone!"



A light wind of April fanned over the hill. There was a smell of
burning leaves and rubble around the school. In the field on the
hill flank behind the house a plowman drove his big horse with
loose clanking traces around a lessening square of dry fallow
earth. Gee, woa. His strong feet followed after. The big share
bit cleanly down, cleaving a deep spermy furrow of moist young
earth along its track.

John Dorsey Leonard stared fascinated out the window at the annual
rejuvenation of the earth. Before his eyes the emergent nymph was
scaling her hard cracked hag's pelt. The golden age returned.

Down the road a straggling queue of boys were all gone into the
world of light. Wet with honest sweat, the plowman paused at the
turn, and wiped the blue shirting of his forearm across his beaded
forehead. Meanwhile, his intelligent animal, taking advantage of
the interval, lifted with slow majesty a proud flowing tail, and
added his mite to the fertility of the soil with three moist oaty
droppings. Watching, John Dorsey grunted approvingly. They also
serve who only stand and wait.

"Please, Mr. Leonard," said Eugene, carefully choosing his moment,
"can I go?"

John Dorsey Leonard stroked his chin absently, and stared
sightlessly at his book. Others abide our question, thou art free.

"Huh?" he purred vaguely. Then, with a high vacant snigger he
turned suddenly, and said:

"You rascal, you! See if Mrs. Leonard wants you." He fastened his
brutal grip with keen hunger into the boy's thin arm. April is the
cruellest of months. Eugene winced, moved away, and then stood
quietly, checked by memory of the old revolt from awe.

He found Margaret in the library reading to the children from The
Water Babies.

"Mr. Leonard says to ask you if I can go?" he said.

And her eyes were darkened wholly.

"Yes, you scamp. Go on," she said. "Tell me, boy," she coaxed,
softly, "can't you be a little bit better?"

"Yes'm," he promised, easily. "I'll try." Say not the struggle
naught availeth.

She smiled at his high mettled prancing nervousness.

"In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'," she said gently. "Get
out of here."

He bounded away from the nunnery of the chaste breast and quiet
mind.

As he leaped down the stairs into the yard he heard Dirk Barnard's
lusty splashing bathtub solo. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end
my song. Tyson Leonard, having raked into every slut's corner of
nature with a thin satisfied grin, emerged from the barn with a cap
full of fresh eggs. A stammering cackle of protest followed him
from angry hens who found too late that men betray. At the
barnside, under the carriage shed, "Pap" Rheinhart tightened the
bellyband of his saddled brown mare, swinging strongly into the
saddle, and with a hard scramble of hoofs, came up the hill,
wheeled in behind the house, and drew up by Eugene.

"Jump on, 'Gene," he invited, patting the mare's broad rump. "I'll
take you home."

Eugene looked up at him grinning.

"You'll take me nowhere," he said. "I couldn't sit down for a week
last time."

"Pap" boomed with laughter.

"Why, pshaw, boy!" he said. "That was nothing but a gentle little
dog-trot."

"Dog-trot your granny," said Eugene. "You tried to kill me."

"Pap" Rheinhart turned his wry neck down on the boy with grave dry
humor.

"Come on," he said gruffly. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'll
teach you how to ride a horse."

"Much obliged, Pap," said Eugene ironically. "But I'm thinking of
using my tail a good deal in my old age. I don't want to wear it
out while I'm young."

Pleased with them both, "Pap" Rheinhart laughed loud and deep, spat
a brown quid back over the horse's crupper, and, digging his heels
in smartly, galloped away around the house, into the road. The
horse bent furiously to his work, like a bounding dog. With four-
hooved thunder he drummed upon the sounding earth. Quadrupedante
putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.

At the two-posted entry, by the bishop's boundary, the departing
students turned, split quickly to the sides, and urged the horseman
on with shrill cries. "Pap" bent low, with loose-reined hands
above the horse-mane, went through the gate like the whiz of a
cross-bow. Then, he jerked the mare back on her haunches with a
dusty skid of hoofs, and waited for the boys to come up.

"Hey!" With high bounding exultancy Eugene came down the road to
join them. Without turning, stolid Van Yeats threw up his hand
impatiently and greeted the unseen with a cheer. The others
turned, welcoming him with ironical congratulation.

"'Highpockets,'" said "Doc" Hines, comically puckering his small
tough face, "how'd you happen to git out on time?" He had an
affected, high-pitched nigger drawl. When he spoke he kept one
hand in his coat pocket, fingering a leather thong loaded with
buckshot.

"J. D. had to do his spring plowing," said Eugene.

"Well, if it ain't ole Handsome," said Julius Arthur. He grinned
squintily, revealing a mouthful of stained teeth screwed in a wire
clamp. His face was covered with small yellow pustulate sores.
How begot, how nourished?

"Shall we sing our little song for Handsome Hal?" said Ralph Rolls
to his copesmate Julius. He wore a derby hat jammed over his pert
freckled face. As he spoke he took a ragged twist of tobacco from
his pocket and bit off a large chew with a rough air of relish.

"Want a chew, Jule?" he said.

Julius took the twist, wiped off his mouth with a loose male grin,
and crammed a large quid into his cheek.

He brought me roots of relish sweet.

"Want one, Highpockets?" he asked Eugene, grinning.

I hate him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch me
out longer.

"Hell," said Ralph Rolls. "Handsome would curl up and die if he
ever took a chew."

In Spring like torpid snakes my enemies awaken.

At the corner of Church Street, across from the new imitation Tudor
of the Episcopal church, they paused. Above them, on the hill,
rose the steeples of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Ye
antique spires, ye distant towers!

"Who's going my way?" said Julius Arthur. "Come on, 'Gene. The
car's down here. I'll take you home."

"Thanks, but I can't," said Eugene. "I'm going up-town." Their
curious eyes on Dixieland when I get out.

"You going home, Villa?"

"No," said George Graves.

"Well, keep Hal out of trouble," said Ralph Rolls.

Julius Arthur laughed roughly and thrust his hand through Eugene's
hair. "Old Hairbreadth Hal," he said. "The cutthroat from Saw-
Tooth Gap!"

"Don't let 'em climb your frame, son," said Van Yeats, turning his
quiet pleasant face on Eugene. "If you need help, let me know."

"So long, boys."

"So long."

They crossed the street, mixing in nimble horse-play, and turned
down past the church along a sloping street that led to the
garages. George Graves and Eugene continued up the hill.

"Julius is a good boy," said George Graves. "His father makes more
money than any other lawyer in town."

"Yes," said Eugene, still brooding on Dixieland and his clumsy
deceptions.

A street-sweeper walked along slowly uphill, beside his deep wedge-
bodied cart. From time to time he stopped the big slow-footed
horse and, sweeping the littered droppings of street and gutter
into a pan, with a long-handled brush, dumped his collections into
the cart. Let not Ambition mock their useful toil.

Three sparrows hopped deftly about three fresh smoking globes of
horse-dung, pecking out tidbits with dainty gourmandism. Driven
away by the approaching cart, they skimmed briskly over to the
bank, with bright twitters of annoyance. One too like thee,
tameless, and swift, and proud.

George Graves ascended the hill with a slow ponderous rhythm,
staring darkly at the ground.

"Say, 'Gene!" he said finally. "I don't believe he makes that
much."

Eugene thought seriously for a moment. With George Graves, it was
necessary to resume a discussion where it had been left off three
days before.

"Who?" he said, "John Dorsey? Yes, I think he does," he added,
grinning.

"Not over $2,500, anyway," said George Graves gloomily.

"No--three thousand, three thousand!" he said, in a choking voice.

George Graves turned to him with a sombre, puzzled smile. "What's
the matter?" he asked.

"O you fool! You damn fool!" gasped Eugene. "You've been thinking
about it all this time."

George Graves laughed sheepishly, with embarrassment, richly.

From the top of the hill at the left, the swelling unction of the
Methodist organ welled up remotely from the choir, accompanied by a
fruity contralto voice, much in demand at funerals. Abide with me.

Most musical of mourners, weep again!

George Graves turned and examined the four large black houses,
ascending on flat terraces to the church, of Paston Place.

"That's a good piece of property, 'Gene," he said. "It belongs to
the Paston estate."

Fast falls the even-tide. Heaves the proud harlot her distended
breast, in intricacies of laborious song.

"It will all go to Gil Paston some day," said George Graves with
virtuous regret. "He's not worth a damn."

They had reached the top of the hill. Church Street ended levelly
a block beyond, in the narrow gulch of the avenue. They saw, with
quickened pulse, the little pullulation of the town.

A negro dug tenderly in the round loamy flowerbeds of the
Presbyterian churchyard, bending now and then to thrust his thick
fingers gently in about the roots. The old church, with its sharp
steeple, rotted slowly, decently, prosperously, like a good man's
life, down into its wet lichened brick. Eugene looked gratefully,
with a second's pride, at its dark decorum, its solid Scotch
breeding.

"I'm a Presbyterian," he said. "What are you?"

"An Episcopalian, when I go," said George Graves with irreverent
laughter.

"To hell with these Methodists!" Eugene said with an elegant,
disdainful face. "They're too damn common for us." God in three
persons--blessed Trinity. "Brother Graves," he continued, in a fat
well-oiled voice, "I didn't see you at prayer-meeting Wednesday
night. Where in Jesus' name were you?"

With his open palm he struck George Graves violently between his
meaty shoulders. George Graves staggered drunkenly with high
resounding laughter.

"Why, Brother Gant," said he, "I had a little appointment with one
of the Good Sisters, out in the cow-shed."

Eugene gathered a telephone pole into his wild embrace, and threw
one leg erotically over its second foot-wedge. George Graves
leaned his heavy shoulder against it, his great limbs drained with
laughter.

There was a hot blast of steamy air from the Appalachian Laundry
across the street and, as the door from the office of the washroom
opened, they had a moment's glimpse of negresses plunging their wet
arms into the liquefaction of their clothes.

George Graves dried his eyes. Laughing wearily, they crossed over.

"We oughtn't to talk like that, 'Gene," said George Graves
reproachfully. "Sure enough! It's not right."

He became moodily serious rapidly. "The best people in this town
are church members," he said earnestly. "It's a fine thing."

"Why?" said Eugene, with an idle curiosity.

"Because," said George Graves, "you get to know all the people who
are worth a damn."

Worth being damned, he thought quickly. A quaint idea.

"It helps you in a business way. They come to know you and respect
you. You won't get far in this town, 'Gene, without them. It
pays," he added devoutly, "to be a Christian."

"Yes," Eugene agreed seriously, "you're right." To walk together
to the kirk, with a goodly company.

He thought sadly of his lost sobriety, and of how once, lonely, he
had walked the decent lanes of God's Scotch town. Unbidden they
came again to haunt his memory, the shaven faces of good tradesmen,
each leading the well washed kingdom of his home in its obedient
ritual the lean hushed smiles of worship, the chained passion of
devotion, as they implored God's love upon their ventures, or
delivered their virgin daughters into the holy barter of marriage.
And from even deeper adyts of his brain there swam up slowly to the
shores of his old hunger the great fish whose names he scarcely
knew--whose names, garnered with blind toil from a thousand books,
from Augustine, himself a name, to Jeremy Taylor, the English
metaphysician, were brief evocations of scalded light, electric,
phosphorescent, illuminating by their magic connotations the vast
far depths of ritual and religion: They came--Bartholomew,
Hilarius, Chrysostomos, Polycarp, Anthony, Jerome, and the forty
martyrs of Cappadocia who walked the waves--coiled like their own
green shadows for a moment, and were gone.

"Besides," said George Graves, "a man ought to go anyway.
Honesty's the best policy."

Across the street, on the second floor of a small brick three-story
building that housed several members of the legal, medical,
surgical, and dental professions, Dr. H. M. Smathers pumped
vigorously with his right foot, took a wad of cotton from his
assistant, Miss Lola Bruce, and thrusting it securely into the jaw
of the unseen patient, bent his fashionable bald head intently. A
tiny breeze blew back the thin curtains, and revealed him, white-
jacketed, competent, drill in hand.

"Do you feel that?" he said tenderly.

"Wrogd gdo gurk!"

"Spit!" With thee conversing, I forget all time.

"I suppose," said George Graves thoughtfully, "the gold they use in
people's teeth is worth a lot of money."

"Yes," said Eugene, finding the idea attractive, "if only one
person in ten has gold fillings that would be ten million in the
United States alone. You can figure on five dollars' worth each,
can't you?"

"Easy!" said George Graves. "More than that." He brooded
lusciously a moment. "That's a lot of money," he said.

In the office of the Rogers-Malone Undertaking Establishment the
painful family of death was assembled, "Horse" Hines, tilted back
in a swivel chair, with his feet thrust out on the broad window-
ledge, chatted lazily with Mr. C. M. Powell, the suave silent
partner. How sleep the brave, who sink to rest. Forget not yet.

"There's good money in undertaking," said George Graves. "Mr.
Powell's well off."

Eugene's eyes were glued on the lantern face of "Horse" Hines. He
beat the air with a convulsive arm, and sank his fingers in his
throat.

"What's the matter?" cried George Graves.

"They shall not bury me alive," he said.

"You can't tell," George Graves said gloomily. "It's been known to
happen. They've dug them up later and found them turned over on
their faces."

Eugene shuddered. "I think," he suggested painfully, "they're
supposed to take out your insides when they embalm you."

"Yes," said George Graves more hopefully, "and that stuff they use
would kill you anyway. They pump you full of it."

With shrunken heart, Eugene considered. The ghost of old fear,
that had been laid for years, walked forth to haunt him.

In his old fantasies of death he had watched his living burial, had
foreseen his waking life-in-death, his slow, frustrated efforts to
push away the smothering flood of earth until, as a drowning
swimmer claws the air, his mute and stiffened fingers thrust from
the ground a call for hands.

Fascinated, they stared through screen-doors down the dark central
corridor, flanked by jars of weeping ferns. A sweet funereal odor
of carnations and cedar-wood floated on the cool heavy air. Dimly,
beyond a central partition, they saw a heavy casket, on a wheeled
trestle, with rich silver handles and velvet coverings. The thick
light faded there in dark.

"They're laid out in the room behind," said George Graves, lowering
his voice.

To rot away into a flower, to melt into a tree with the friendless
bodies of unburied men.

At this moment, having given to misery all he had (a tear), the
very Reverend Father James O'Haley, S.J., among the faithless
faithful only he, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, emerged plumply
from the chapel, walked up the soft aisle rug with brisk short-
legged strides, and came out into the light. His pale blue eyes
blinked rapidly for a moment, his plump uncreased face set firmly
in a smile of quiet benevolence; he covered himself with a small
well-kept hat of black velvet, and set off toward the avenue.
Eugene shrank back gently as the little man walked past him: that
small priestly figure in black bore on him the awful accolade of
his great Mistress, that smooth face had heard the unutterable,
seen the unknowable. In this remote outpost of the mighty Church,
he was the standard-bearer of the one true faith, the consecrate
flesh of God.

"They don't get any pay," said George Graves sorrowfully.

"How do they live, then?" Eugene asked.

"Don't you worry!" said George Graves, with a knowing smile.

"They get all that's coming to them. He doesn't seem to be
starving, does he?"

"No," said Eugene, "he doesn't."

"He lives on the fat of the land," said George Graves. "Wine at
every meal. There are some rich Catholics in this town."

"Yes," said Eugene. "Frank Moriarty's got a pot full of money that
he made selling licker."

"Don't let them hear you," said George Graves, with a surly laugh.
"They've got a family tree and a coat of arms already."

"A beer-bottle rampant on a field of limburger cheese, gules," said
Eugene.

"They're trying to get the Princess Madeleine into Society," said
George Graves.

"Hell fire!" Eugene cried, grinning. "Let's let her in, if that's
all she wants. We belong to the Younger Set, don't we?"

"You may," said George Graves, reeling with laughter, "but I don't.
I wouldn't be caught dead with the little pimps."

"Mr. Eugene Gant was the host last night at a hot wienie roast
given to members of the local Younger Set at Dixieland, the
beautiful old ancestral mansion of his mother, Mrs. Eliza Gant."

George Graves staggered. "You oughtn't to say that, 'Gene," he
gasped. He shook his head reproachfully. "Your mother's a fine
woman."

"During the course of the evening, the Honorable George Graves, the
talented scion of one of our oldest and wealthiest families, the
Chesterfield Graveses, ($10 a week and up), rendered a few
appropriate selections on the jews-harp."

Pausing deliberately, George Graves wiped his streaming eyes, and
blew his nose. In the windows of Bain's millinery store, a waxen
nymph bore a confection of rakish plumes upon her false tresses,
and extended her simpering fingers in elegant counterpoise. Hats
For Milady. O that those lips had language.

At this moment, with a smooth friction of trotting rumps, the
death-wagon of Rogers-Malone turned swiftly in from the avenue, and
wheeled by on ringing hoofs. They turned curiously and watched it
draw up to the curb.

"Another Redskin bit the dust," said George Graves.

Come, delicate death, serenely arriving, arriving.

"Horse" Hines came out quickly on long flapping legs, and opened
the doors behind. In another moment, with the help of the two men
on the driver's seat, he had lowered the long wicker basket gently,
and vanished, quietly, gravely, into the fragrant gloom of his
establishment.

As Eugene watched, the old fatality of place returned. Each day,
he thought, we pass the spot where some day we must die; or shall
I, too, ride dead to some mean building yet unknown? Shall this
bright clay, the hill-bound, die in lodgings yet unbuilt? Shall
these eyes, drenched with visions yet unseen, stored with the
viscous and interminable seas at dawn, with the sad comfort of
unfulfilled Arcadias, seal up their cold dead dreams upon a tick,
as this, in time, in some hot village of the plains?

He caught and fixed the instant. A telegraph messenger wheeled
vigorously in from the avenue with pumping feet, curved widely into
the alley at his right, jerking his wheel up sharply as he took the
curb and coasted down to the delivery boy's entrance. And post
o'er land and ocean without rest. Milton, thou shouldst be living
at this hour.

Descending the dark stairs of the Medical Building slowly, Mrs.
Thomas Hewitt, the comely wife of the prominent attorney (of
Arthur, Hewitt, and Grey), turned out into the light, and advanced
slowly toward the avenue. She was greeted with flourishing
gestures of the hat by Henry T. Merriman (Merriman and Merriman),
and Judge Robert C. Allan, professional colleagues of her husband.
She smiled and shot each quickly with a glance. Pleasant is this
flesh. When she had passed they looked after her a moment. Then
they continued their discussion of the courts.

On the third floor of the First National Bank building on the right
hand corner, Fergus Paston, fifty-six, a thin lecherous mouth
between iron-gray dundrearies, leaned his cocked leg upon his open
window, and followed the movements of Miss Bernie Powers, twenty-
two, crossing the street. Even in our ashes live their wonted
fires.

On the opposite corner, Mrs. Roland Rawls, whose husband was
manager of the Peerless Pulp Company (Plant No. 3), and whose
father owned it, emerged from the rich seclusion of Arthur N.
Wright, jeweller. She clasped her silver mesh-bag and stepped into
her attendant Packard. She was a tall black-haired woman of
thirty-three with a good figure: her face was dull, flat, and Mid-
western.

"She's the one with the money," said George Graves. "He hasn't a
damn thing. It's all in her name. She wants to be an opera
singer."

"Can she sing?"

"Not worth a damn," said George Graves. "I've heard her. There's
your chance, 'Gene. She's got a daughter about your age."

"What does she do?" said Eugene.

"She wants to be an actress," said George Graves, laughing
throatily.

"You have to work too damn hard for your money," said Eugene.

They had reached the corner by the Bank, and now halted,
indecisively, looking up the cool gulch of afternoon. The street
buzzed with a light gay swarm of idlers: the faces of the virgins
bloomed in and out like petals on a bough. Advancing upon him, an
inch to the second, Eugene saw, ten feet away, the heavy paralyzed
body of old Mr. Avery. He was a very great scholar, stone-deaf,
and seventy-eight years old. He lived alone in a room above the
Public Library. He had neither friends nor connections. He was a
myth.

"Oh, my God!" said Eugene. "Here he comes!"

It was too late for escape.

Gasping a welcome, Mr. Avery bore down on him, with a violent
shuffle of his feet and a palsied tattoo of his heavy stick which
brought him over the intervening three yards in forty seconds.

"Well, young fellow," he panted, "how's Latin?"

"Fine," Eugene screamed into his pink ear.

"Poeta nascitur, non fit," said Mr. Avery, and went off into a
silent wheeze of laughter which brought on a fit of coughing
strangulation. His eyes bulged, his tender pink skin grew crimson,
he roared his terror out in a phlegmy rattle, while his goose-white
hand trembled frantically for his handkerchief. A crowd gathered.
Eugene quickly drew a dirty handkerchief from the old man's pocket,
and thrust it into his hands. He tore up from his convulsed organs
a rotting mass, and panted rapidly for breath. The crowd dispersed
somewhat dejectedly.

George Graves grinned darkly. "That's too bad," he said. "You
oughtn't to laugh, 'Gene." He turned away, gurgling.

"Can you conjugate?" gasped Mr. Avery. "Here's the way I learned:


"Amo, amas,
I love a lass.
Amat,
He loves her, too."


Quivering with tremors of laughter, he launched himself again.
Because he could not leave them, save by the inch, they moved off
several yards to the curb. Grow old along with me!

"That's a damn shame," said George Graves, looking after him and
shaking his head. "Where's he going?"

"To supper," said Eugene.

"To supper!" said George Graves. "It's only four o'clock. Where
does he eat?"

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.

"At the Uneeda," said Eugene, beginning to choke, "It takes him two
hours to get there."

"Does he go every day?" said George Graves, beginning to laugh.

"Three times a day," Eugene screamed. "He spends all morning going
to dinner, and all afternoon going to supper."

A whisper of laughter came from their weary jaws. They sighed like
sedge.

At this moment, dodging briskly through the crowd, with a loud and
cheerful word for every one, Mr. Joseph Bailey, secretary of the
Altamont Chamber of Commerce, short, broad, and ruddy, came up by
them with a hearty gesture of the hand:

"Hello, boys!" he cried. "How're they going?" But before either
of them could answer, he had passed on, with an encouraging shake
of his head, and a deep applauding "THAT'S right."

"WHAT'S right?" said Eugene.

But before George Graves could answer, the great lung specialist,
Dr. Fairfax Grinder, scion of one of the oldest and proudest
families in Virginia, drove in viciously from Church Street, with
his sinewy length of six feet and eight inches coiled tensely in
the deep pit of his big Buick roadster. Cursing generally the
whole crawling itch of Confederate and Yankee postwar rabbledom,
with a few special parentheses for Jews and niggers, he drove full
tilt at the short plump figure of Joe Zamschnick, men's furnishings
("Just a Whisper Off The Square").

Joseph, two yards away from legal safety, hurled himself with a
wild scream headlong at the curb. He arrived on hands and knees,
but under his own power.

"K-hurses!" said Eugene. "Foiled again."

'Twas true! Dr. Fairfax Grinder's lean bristled upper lip drew
back over his strong yellow teeth. He jammed on his brakes, and
lifted his car round with a complete revolution of his long arms.
Then he roared away through scattering traffic, in a greasy blue
cloud of gasoline and burnt rubber.

Joe Zamschnick frantically wiped his gleaming bald head with a silk
handkerchief and called loudly on the public to bear witness.

"What's the matter with him?" said George Graves, disappointed.
"He usually goes up on the sidewalk after them if he can't get them
on the street."

On the other side of the street, attracting no more than a languid
stare from the loafing natives, the Honorable William Jennings
Bryan paused benevolently before the windows of the H. Martin
Grimes Bookstore, allowing the frisking breeze to toy pleasantly
with his famous locks. The tangles of Neaera's hair.

The Commoner stared carefully at the window display which included
several copies of Before Adam, by Jack London. Then he entered,
and selected a dozen views of Altamont and the surrounding hills.

"He may come here to live," said George Graves. "Dr. Doak's
offered to give him a house and lot in Doak Park."

"Why?" said Eugene.

"Because the advertising will be worth a lot to the town," said
George Graves.

A little before them, that undaunted daughter of desires, Miss
Elizabeth Scragg, emerged from Woolworth's Five and Ten Cent Store,
and turned up toward the Square. Smiling, she acknowledged the
ponderous salute of Big Jeff White, the giant half-owner of the
Whitstone hotel, whose fortunes had begun when he had refused to
return to his old comrade, Dickson Reese, the embezzling cashier,
ninety thousand dollars of entrusted loot. Dog eat dog. Thief
catch thief. It is not growing like a tree, in bulk doth make man
better be.

His six-and-a-half-foot shadow flitted slowly before them. He
passed, in creaking number twelves, a massive smooth-jowled man
with a great paunch girdled in a wide belt.

Across the street again, before the windows of the Van W. Yeats
Shoe Company, the Reverend J. Brooks Gall, Amherst ('61), and as
loyal a Deke as ever breathed, but looking only sixty of his
seventy-three years, paused in his brisk walk, and engaged in
sprightly monologue, three of his fellow Boy Scouts--the Messrs.
Lewis Monk, seventeen, Bruce Rogers, thirteen, and Malcolm Hodges,
fourteen. None knew as well as he the heart of a boy. He, too, it
seems, had once been one himself. Thus, as one bright anecdote
succeeded, or suggested, a half-dozen others, they smiled
dutifully, with attentive respect, below the lifted barrier of his
bristly white mustache, into the gleaming rhyme of his false teeth.
And, with rough but affectionate camaraderie, he would pause from
time to time to say: "Old Male!" or "Old Bruce!" gripping firmly
his listener's arm, shaking him gently. Pallidly, on restless
feet, they smiled, plotting escape with slant-eyed stealth.

Mr. Buse, the Oriental rug merchant, came around the corner below
them from Liberty Street. His broad dark face was wreathed in
Persian smiles. I met a traveller from an antique land.

In the Bijou Cafe for Ladies and Gents, Mike, the counter man,
leaned his hairy arms upon the marble slab, and bent his wrinkled
inch of brow upon a week-old copy of Atlantis. Fride Chicken To-
day with Sweet Potatos. Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou
never wert. A solitary fly darted swiftly about the greasy cover
of a glass humidor, under which a leathery quarter of mince pie lay
weltering. Spring had come.

Meanwhile, having completed twice their parade up and down the
street from the Square to the post-office, the Misses Christine
Ball, Viola Powell, Aline Rollins, and Dorothy Hazzard were
accosted outside Wood's Drug Store by Tom French, seventeen, Roy
Duncan, nineteen, and Carl Jones, eighteen.

"Where do you think you're going?" said Tom French, insolently.

Gayly, brightly, in unison, they answered:

"Hey--ee!"

"Hay's seven dollars a ton," said Roy Duncan, and immediately burst
into a high cackle of laughter, in which all the others joined,
merrily.

"You craz-ee!" said Viola Powell tenderly. Tell me, ye merchants'
daughters, did ye see another creature fair and wise as she.

"Mr. Duncan," said Tom French, turning his proud ominous face upon
his best friend, "I want you to meet a friend of mine, Miss
Rollins."

"I think I've met this man somewhere before," said Aline Rollins.
Another Splendor on his mouth alit.

"Yes," said Roy Duncan, "I go there often."

His small tight freckled impish face creased again by his high
cackle. All I could never be. They moved into the store, where
drouthy neibors neibors meet, through the idling group of fountain
gallants.

Mr. Henry Sorrell (It Can Be Done), and Mr. John T. Howland (We
Sell Lots and Lots of Lots), emerged, beyond Arthur N. Wright's,
jeweller, from the gloomy dusk of the Gruner Building. Each looked
into the sub-divisions of the other's heart; their eyes kept the
great Vision of the guarded mount as swiftly they turned into
Church Street where Sorrell's Hudson was parked.

White-vested, a trifle paunchy, with large broad feet, a shaven
moon of red face, and abundant taffy-colored hair, the Reverend
John Smallwood, pastor of the First Baptist Church, walked heavily
up the street, greeting his parishioners warmly, and hoping to see
his Pilot face to face. Instead, however, he encountered the
Honorable William Jennings Bryan, who was coming slowly out of the
bookstore. The two close friends greeted each other affectionately,
and, with a firm friendly laying on of hands, gave each to each
the Christian aid of a benevolent exorcism.

"Just the man I was looking for," said Brother Smallwood. In
silence, slowly, they shook hands for several seconds. Silence was
pleased.

"That," observed the Commoner with grave humor, "is what I thought
the Great American People said to me on three occasions." It was a
favorite jest--ripe with wisdom, mellowed by the years, yet,
withal, so characteristic of the man. The deep furrows of his
mouth widened in a smile. Our master--famous, calm, and dead.

Passed, on catspaw rubber tread, from the long dark bookstore,
Professor L. B. Dunn, principal of Graded School No. 3, Montgomery
Avenue. He smiled coldly at them with a gimlet narrowing of his
spectacled eyes. The tell-tale cover of The New Republic peeked
from his pocket. Clamped under his lean and freckled arm were new
library copies of The Great Illusion, by Norman Angell, and The
Ancient Grudge, by Owen Wister. A lifelong advocate of a union of
the two great English-speaking (sic) nations, making together
irresistibly for peace, truth, and righteousness in a benevolent
but firm authority over the less responsible elements of
civilization, he passed, the Catholic man, pleasantly dedicated to
the brave adventuring of minds and the salvaging of mankind. Ah,
yes!

"And how are you and the Good Woman enjoying your sojourn in the
Land of the Sky?" said the Reverend John Smallwood.

"Our only regret," said the Commoner, "is that our visit here must
be measured by days and not by months. Nay, by years."

Mr. Richard Gorman, twenty-six, city reporter of The Citizen,
strode rapidly up the street, with proud cold news-nose lifted.
His complacent smile, hard-lipped, loosened into servility.

"Ah, there, Dick," said John Smallwood, clasping his hand
affectionately, and squeezing his arm. "Just the man I was looking
for. Do you know Mr. Bryan?"

"As fellow newspaper men," said the Commoner, "Dick and I have been
close friends for--how many years is it, my boy?"

"Three, I think, sir," said Mr. Gorman, blushing prettily.

"I wish you could have been here, Dick," said the Reverend
Smallwood, "to hear what Mr. Bryan was saying about us. The good
people of this town would be mighty proud to hear it."

"I'd like another statement from you before you go, Mr. Bryan,"
said Richard Gorman. "There's a story going the rounds that you
may make your home with us in the future."

When questioned by a Citizen reporter, Mr. Bryan refused either to
confirm or deny the rumor:

"I may have a statement to make later," he observed with a
significant smile, "but at present I must content myself by saying
that if I could have chosen the place of my birth, I could not have
found a fairer spot than this wonderland of nature."

Earthly Paradise, thinks Commoner.

"I have travelled far in my day," continued the man who had been
chosen three times by a great Party to contend for the highest
honor within the gift of the people. "I have gone from the woods
of Maine to the wave-washed sands of Florida, from Hatteras to
Halifax, and from the summits of the Rockies to where Missouri
rolls her turgid flood, but I have seen few spots that equal, and
none that surpass, the beauty of this mountain Eden."

The reporter made notes rapidly.

The years of his glory washed back to him upon the rolling tides of
rhetoric--the great lost days of the first crusade when the money
barons trembled beneath the shadow of the Cross of Gold, and Bryan!
Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! burned through the land like a comet. Ere I
was old. 1896. Ah, woeful ere, which tells me youth's no longer
here.

Foresees Dawn of New Era.

When pressed more closely by the reporter as to his future plans,
Mr. Bryan replied:

"My schedule is completely filled, for months to come, with
speaking engagements that will take me from one end of the country
to the other, in the fight I am making for the reduction of the
vast armaments that form the chief obstacle to the reign of peace
on earth, good-will to men. After that, who knows?" he said,
flashing his famous smile. "Perhaps I shall come back to this
beautiful region, and take up my life among my good friends here as
one who, having fought the good fight, deserves to spend the
declining years of his life not only within sight, but within the
actual boundaries, of the happy land of Canaan."

Asked if he could predict with any certainty the date of his
proposed retirement, the Commoner answered characteristically with
the following beautiful quotation from Longfellow:


"When the war-drum throbbed no longer,
And the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of man,
The Federation of the world."


The magic cell of music--the electric piano in the shallow tiled
lobby of Altamont's favorite cinema, the Ajax, stopped playing with
firm, tinny abruptness, hummed ominously for a moment, and without
warning commenced anew. It's a long way to Tipperary. The world
shook with the stamp of marching men.

Miss Margaret Blanchard and Mrs. C. M. McReady, the druggist's
drugged wife who, by the white pitted fabric of her skin, and the
wide bright somnolence of her eyes, on honey-dew had fed too often,
came out of the theatre and turned down toward Wood's pharmacy.

[Scooter]

To-day: Maurice Costello and Edith M. Storey in Throw Out the
Lifeline, a Vitagraph Release.

Goggling, his great idiot's head lolling on his scrawny neck,
wearing the wide-rimmed straw hat that covered him winter and
summer, Willie Goff, the pencil merchant, jerked past, with inward
lunges of his crippled right foot. The fingers of his withered arm
pointed stiffly toward himself, beckoning to him, and touching him
as he walked with stiff jerking taps, in a terrible parody of
vanity. A gaudy handkerchief with blue, yellow and crimson
patterns hung in a riotous blot from his breast-pocket over his
neatly belted gray Norfolk jacket, a wide loose collar of silk
barred with red and orange stripes flowered across his narrow
shoulders. In his lapel a huge red carnation. His thin face,
beneath the jutting globular head, grinned constantly, glutting his
features with wide, lapping, receding, returning, idiot smiles.
For should he live a thousand years, he never will be out of humor.
He burred ecstatically at the passers-by, who grinned fondly at
him, and continued down to Wood's where he was greeted with loud
cheers and laughter by a group of young men who loitered at the
fountain's end. They gathered around him boisterously, pounding
his back and drawing him up to the fountain. Pleased, he looked at
them warmly, gratefully. He was touched and happy.

"What're you having, Willie?" said Mr. Tobias Pottle.

"Give me a dope," said Willie Goff to the grinning jerker, "a dope
and lime."

Pudge Carr, the politician's son, laughed hilariously. "Want a
dope and lime, do you, Willie?" he said, and struck him heavily on
the back. His thick stupid face composed itself.

"Have a cigarette, Willie," he said, offering the package to Willie
Goff.

"What's yours?" said the jerker to Toby Pottle.

"Give me a dope, too."

"I don't want anything," said Pudge Carr. Such drinks as made them
nobly wild, not mad.

Pudge Carr held a lighted match to Willie's cigarette, winking
slowly at Brady Chalmers, a tall, handsome fellow, with black hair,
and a long dark face. Willie Goff drew in on his cigarette,
lighting it with dry smacking lips. He coughed, removed the weed,
and held it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger, looking at
it, curiously.

They sputtered with laughter, involved and lost in clouds of fume,
and guzzling deep, the boor, the lackey, and the groom.

Brady Chalmers took Willie's colored handkerchief gently from his
pocket and held it up for their inspection. Then he folded it
carefully and put it back.

"What are you all dressed up about, Willie?" he said. "You must be
going to see your girl."

Willie Goff grinned cunningly.

Toby Pottle blew a luxurious jet of smoke through his nostrils. He
was twenty-four, carefully groomed, with slick blond hair, and a
pink massaged face.

"Come on, Willie," he said, blandly, quietly, "you've got a girl,
haven't you?"

Willie Goff leered knowingly; at the counter-end, Tim McCall,
twenty-eight, who had been slowly feeding cracked ice from his
cupped fist into his bloated whisky-fierce jowls, collapsed
suddenly, blowing a bright rattling hail upon the marble ledge.

"I've got several," said Willie Goff. "A fellow's got to have a
little Poon-Tang, hasn't he?"

Flushed with high ringing laughter, they smiled, spoke respectfully,
uncovered before Miss Tot Webster, Miss Mary McGraw, and Miss
Martha Cotton, older members of the Younger Set. They called for
stronger music, louder wine.

"How do you do?"

"Aha! Aha!" said Brady Chalmers to Miss Mary McGraw. "Where were
YOU that time?"

"YOU'LL never know," she called back. It was between them--their
little secret. They laughed knowingly with joy of possession.

"Come on back, Pudge," said Euston Phipps, their escort. "You too,
Brady." He followed the ladies back--tall, bold, swagger--a young
alcoholic with one sound lung. He was a good golfer.

Pert boys rushed from the crowded booths and tables to the
fountain, coming up with a long slide. They shouted their orders
rudely, nagging the swift jerkers glibly, stridently.

"All right, son. Two dopes and a mint Limeade. Make it snappy."

"Do you work around here, boy?"

The jerkers moved in ragtime tempo, juggling the drinks, tossing
scooped globes of ice-cream into the air and catching them in
glasses, beating swift rhythms with a spoon.

Seated alone, with thick brown eyes above her straw regardant, Mrs.
Thelma Jarvis, the milliner, drew, in one swizzling guzzle, the
last beaded chain of linked sweetness long drawn out from the
bottom of her glass. Drink to me only with thine eyes. She rose
slowly, looking into the mirror of her open purse. Then,
fluescent, her ripe limbs moulded in a dress of silk henna, she
writhed carefully among the crowded tables, with a low rich murmur
of contrition. Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low--an
excellent thing in a woman. The high light chatter of the tables
dropped as she went by. For God's sake, hold your tongue and let
me love! On amber undulant limbs she walked slowly up the aisle
past perfume, stationery, rubber goods, and toilet preparations,
pausing at the cigar counter to pay her check. Her round, melon-
heavy breasts nodded their heads in slow but sprightly dance. A
poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.

But--at the entrance, standing in the alcove by the magazine rack,
Mr. Paul Goodson, of the Dependable Life, closed his long grinning
dish-face abruptly, and ceased talking. He doffed his hat without
effusiveness, as did his companion, Coston Smathers, the furniture
man (you furnish the girl, we furnish the house). They were both
Baptists.

Mrs. Thelma Jarvis turned her warm ivory stare upon them, parted
her full small mouth in a remote smile, and passed, ambulant. When
she had gone they turned to each other, grinning quietly. We'll be
waiting at the river. Swiftly they glanced about them. No one had
seen.

Patroness of all the arts, but particular sponsor for Music,
Heavenly Maid, Mrs. Franz Wilhelm Von Zeck, wife of the noted lung
specialist, and the discoverer of Von Zeck's serum, came imperially
from the doors of the Fashion Mart, and was handed tenderly into
the receiving cushions of her Cadillac by Mr. Louis Rosalsky.
Benevolently but distantly she smiled down upon him: the white
parchment of his hard Polish face was broken by a grin of cruel
servility curving up around the wings of his immense putty-colored
nose. Frau Von Zeck settled her powerful chins upon the coarse
shelving of her Wagnerian breasts and, her ponderous gaze already
dreaming on remote philanthropies, was charioted smoothly away from
the devoted tradesman. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was Ich
leide.

Mr. Rosalsky returned into his store.

For the third time the Misses Mildred Shuford, Helen Pendergast,
and Mary Catherine Bruce drove by, clustered together like unpicked
cherries in the front seat of Miss Shuford's Reo. They passed,
searching the pavements with eager, haughty eyes, pleased at their
proud appearance. They turned up Liberty Street on their fourth
swing round the circle. Waltz me around again, Willie.

"Do you know how to dance, George?" Eugene asked. His heart was
full of bitter pride and fear.

"Yes," said George Graves absently, "a little bit. I don't like
it." He lifted his brooding eyes.

"Say, 'Gene," he said, "how much do you think Dr. Von Zeck is
worth?"

He answered Eugene's laughter with a puzzled sheepish grin.

"Come on," said Eugene. "I'll match you for a drink."

They dodged nimbly across the narrow street, amid the thickening
afternoon traffic.

"It's getting worse all the time," said George Graves. "The people
who laid the town out didn't have any vision. What's it going to
be like, ten years from now?"

"They could widen the streets, couldn't they?" said Eugene.

"No. Not now. You'd have to move all the buildings back. Wonder
how much it would cost?" said George Graves thoughtfully.

"And if we don't," Professor L. B. Dunn's precise voice sounded its
cold warning, "their next move will be directed against us. You
may yet live to see the day when the iron heel of militarism is on
your neck, and the armed forces of the Kaiser do the goose-step up
and down this street. When that day comes--"

"I don't put any stock in those stories," said Mr. Bob Webster
rudely and irreverently. He was a small man, with a gray, mean
face, violent and bitter. A chronic intestinal sourness seemed to
have left its print upon his features. "In my opinion, it's all
propaganda. Those Germans are too damn good for them, that's all.
They're beginning to call for calf-rope."

"When that day comes," Professor Dunn implacably continued,
"remember what I told you. The German government has imperialistic
designs upon the whole of the world. It is looking to the day when
it shall have all mankind under the yoke of Krupp and Kultur. The
fate of civilization is hanging in the balance. Mankind is at the
crossroads. I pray God it shall not be said that we were found
wanting. I pray God that this free people may never suffer as
little Belgium suffered, that our wives and daughters may not be
led off into slavery or shame, our children maimed and slaughtered."

"It's not our fight," said Mr. Bob Webster. "I don't want to send
my boys three thousand miles across the sea to get shot for those
foreigners. If they come over here, I'll shoulder a gun with the
best of them, but until they do they can fight it out among
themselves. Isn't that right, Judge?" he said, turning toward the
party of the third part, Judge Walter C. Jeter, of the Federal
Circuit, who had fortunately been a close friend of Grover
Cleveland. Ancestral voices prophesying war.

"Did you know the Wheeler boys?" Eugene asked George Graves. "Paul
and Clifton?"

"Yes," said George Graves. "They went away and joined the French
army. They're in the Foreign Legion."

"They're in the aviation part of it," said Eugene. "The Lafayette
Eskydrill. Clifton Wheeler has shot down more than six Germans."

"The boys around here didn't like him," said George Graves. "They
thought he was a sissy."

Eugene winced slightly at the sound of the word.

"How old was he?" he asked.

"He was a grown man," said George. "Twenty-two or three."

Disappointed, Eugene considered his chance of glory. (Ich bin ja
noch ein Kind.)

"--But fortunately," continued Judge Walter C. Jeter deliberately,
"we have a man in the White House on whose far-seeing statesmanship
we can safely rely. Let us trust to the wisdom of his leadership,
obeying, in word and spirit, the principles of strict neutrality,
accepting only as a last resort a course that would lead this great
nation again into the suffering and tragedy of war, which," his
voice sank to a whisper, "God forbid!"

Thinking of a more ancient war, in which he had borne himself
gallantly, Colonel James Buchanan Pettigrew, head of the Pettigrew
Military Academy (Est. 1789), rode by in his open victoria, behind
an old negro driver and two well-nourished brown mares. There was
a good brown smell of horse and sweat-cured leather. The old negro
snaked his whip gently across the sleek trotting rumps, growling
softly.

Colonel Pettigrew was wrapped to his waist in a heavy rug, his
shoulders were covered with a gray Confederate cape. He bent
forward, leaning his old weight upon a heavy polished stick, which
his freckled hand gripped upon the silver knob. Muttering, his
proud powerful old head turned shakily from side to side, darting
fierce splintered glances at the drifting crowd. He was a very
parfit gentil knight.

He muttered.

"Suh?" said the negro, pulling in on his reins, and turning around.

"Go on! Go on, you scoundrel!" said Colonel Pettigrew.

"Yes, suh," said the negro. They drove on.

In the crowd of loafing youngsters that stood across the threshold
of Wood's pharmacy, Colonel Pettigrew's darting eyes saw two of his
own cadets. They were pimply youths, with slack jaws and a sloppy
carriage.

He muttered his disgust. Not the same! Not the same! Nothing the
same! In his proud youth, in the only war that mattered, Colonel
Pettigrew had marched at the head of his own cadets. There were
117, sir, all under nineteen. They stepped forward to a man . . .
until not a single commissioned officer was left . . . 36 came back
. . . since 1789 . . . it must go on! . . . 19, sir--all under one
hundred and seventeen . . . must . . . go . . . on!

His sagging cheek-flanks trembled gently. The horses trotted out
of sight around the corner, with a smooth-spoked rumble of rubber
tires.

George Graves and Eugene entered Wood's pharmacy and stood up to
the counter. The elder soda-jerker, scowling, drew a sopping rag
across a puddle of slop upon the marble slab.

"What's yours?" he said irritably.

"I want a chock-lut milk," said Eugene.

"Make it two," added George Graves.

O for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled a long age in the
deep-delvèd earth!

[Scooter]

25


Yes. The enormous crime had been committed. And, for almost a
year, Eugene had been maintaining a desperate neutrality. His
heart, however, was not neutral. The fate of civilization, it
appeared, hung in the balance.

The war had begun at the peak of the summer season. Dixieland was
full. His closest friend at the time was a sharp old spinstress
with frayed nerves, who had been for thirty years a teacher of
English in a New York City public school. Day by day, after the
murder of the Grand Duke, they watched the tides of blood and
desolation mount through the world. Miss Crane's thin red nostrils
quivered with indignation. Her old gray eyes were sharp with
anger. The idea! The idea!

For, of all the English, none can show a loftier or more inspired
love for Albion's Isle than American ladies who teach its noble
tongue.

Eugene was also faithful. With Miss Crane he kept a face of
mournful regret, but his heart drummed a martial tattoo against his
ribs. The air was full of fifes and flutes; he heard the ghostly
throbbing of great guns.

"We must be fair!" said Margaret Leonard. "We must be fair!" But
her eyes darkened when she read the news of England's entry, and
her throat was trembling like a bird's. When she looked up her
eyes were wet.

"Ah, Lord!" she said. "You'll see things now."

"Little Bobs!" roared Sheba.

"God bless him! Did you see where he's going to take the field?"

John Dorsey Leonard laid down the paper, and bent over with high
drooling laughter.

"Lord a'mercy!" he gasped. "Let the rascals come now!"

Ah, well--they came.

All through that waning summer, Eugene shuttled frantically from
the school to Dixieland, unable, in the delirium of promised glory,
to curb his prancing limbs. He devoured every scrap of news, and
rushed to share it with the Leonards or Miss Crane. He read every
paper he could lay his hands on, exulting in the defeats that were
forcing the Germans back at every point. For, he gathered from
this wilderness of print, things were going badly with the Huns.
At a thousand points they fled squealing before English steel at
Mons, fell suppliantly before the French charge along the Marne;
withdrew here, gave way there, ran away elsewhere. Then, one
morning, when they should have been at Cologne, they were lined up
at the walls of Paris. They had run in the wrong direction. The
world grew dark. Desperately, he tried to understand. He could
not. By the extraordinary strategy of always retreating, the
German army had arrived before Paris. It was something new in
warfare. It was several years, in fact, before Eugene could
understand that some one in the German armies had done some
fighting.

John Dorsey Leonard was untroubled.

"You wait!" he said confidently. "You just wait, my sonny. That
old fellow Joffer knows what he's about. This is just what he's
been waiting for. Now he's got them where he wants them."

Eugene wondered for what subtle reason a French general might want
a German army in Paris.

Margaret lifted her troubled eyes from the paper.

"It looks mighty serious," she said. "I tell you!" She was silent
a moment, a torrent of passion rose up in her throat. Then she
added in a low trembling voice: "If England goes, we all go."

"God bless her!" Sheba yelled.

"God bless her, 'Gene," she continued, tapping him on the knee.
"When I stepped ashore on her dear old soil that time, I just
couldn't help myself. I didn't care what any one thought. I knelt
right down there in the dirt, and pretended to tie my shoe, but
say, boy"--her bleared eyes glistened through her tears--"God bless
her, I couldn't help it. Do you know what I did? I leaned over
and kissed her earth." Large gummy tears rolled down her red
cheeks. She was weeping loudly, but she went on. "I said: This
is the earth of Shakespeare, and Milton, and John Keats and, by
God, what's more, it's mine as well! God bless her! God bless
her!"

Tears flowed quietly from Margaret Leonard's eyes. Her face was
wet. She could not speak. They were all deeply moved.

"She won't go," said John Dorsey Leonard. "We'll have a word to
say to that! She won't go! You wait!"

In Eugene's fantasy there burned the fixed vision of the great
hands clasped across the sea, the flowering of green fields, and
the developing convolutions of a faery London--mighty, elfin, old,
a romantic labyrinth of ancient crowded ways, tall, leaning houses,
Lucullan food and drink, and the mad imperial eyes of genius
burning among the swarm of quaint originality.

As the war developed, and the literature of war-enchantment began
to appear, Margaret Leonard gave him book after book to read. They
were the books of the young men--the young men who fought to blot
out the evil of the world with their blood. In her trembling voice
she read to him Rupert Brooke's sonnet--"If I should die, think
only this of me"--and she put a copy of Donald Hankey's A Student
in Arms into his hand, saying:

"Read this, boy. It will stir you as you've never been stirred
before. Those boys have seen the vision!"

He read it. He read many others. He saw the vision. He became a
member of this legion of chivalry--young Galahad-Eugene--a
spearhead of righteousness. He had gone a-Grailing. He composed
dozens of personal memoirs, into which quietly, humorously, with
fine-tempered English restraint, he poured the full measure of his
pure crusading heart. Sometimes, he came through to the piping
times of peace minus an arm, a leg, or an eye, diminished but
ennobled; sometimes his last radiant words were penned on the eve
of the attack that took his life. With glistening eyes, he read
his own epilogue, enjoyed his post-mortem glory, as his last words
were recorded and explained by his editor. Then, witness of his
own martyrdom, he dropped two smoking tears upon his young slain
body. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.



Ben loped along, scowling, by Wood's pharmacy. As he passed the
idling group at the tiled entrance, he cast on them a look of
sudden fierce contempt. Then he laughed quietly, savagely.

"Oh, my God!" he said.

At the corner, scowling, he waited for Mrs. Pert to cross from the
Post Office. She came over slowly, reeling.

Having arranged to meet her later in the pharmacy, he crossed over,
and turned angularly down Federal Street behind the Post Office.
At the second entrance to the Doctors' and Surgeons' Building, he
turned in, and began to mount the dark creaking stairs. Somewhere,
with punctual developing monotony, a single drop of water was
falling into the wet black basin of a sink. He paused in the wide
corridor of the first floor to control the nervous thudding of his
heart. Then he walked half-way down and entered the waiting-room
of Dr. J. H. Coker. It was vacant. Frowning, he sniffed the air.
The whole building was sharp with the clean nervous odor of
antiseptics. A litter of magazines--Life, Judge, The Literary
Digest, and The American--on the black mission table, told its
story of weary and distressed fumbling. The inner door opened and
the doctor's assistant, Miss Ray, came out. She had on her hat.
She was ready to depart.

"Do you want to see the doctor?" she asked.

"Yes," said Ben, "is he busy?"

"Come on in, Ben," said Coker, coming to the door. He took his
long wet cigar from his mouth, grinning yellowly. "That's all for
to-day, Laura. You can go."

"Good-bye," said Miss Laura Ray, departing.

Ben went into Coker's office. Coker closed the door and sat down
at his untidy desk.

"You'll be more comfortable if you lie down on that table," he said
grinning.

Ben gave the doctor's table a look of nausea.

"How many have died on that thing?" he asked. He sat down
nervously in a chair by the desk, and lighted a cigarette, holding
the flame to the charred end of cigar Coker thrust forward.

"Well, what can I do for you, son?" he asked.

"I'm tired of pushing daisies here," said Ben. "I want to push
them somewhere else."

"What do you mean, Ben?"

"I suppose you've heard, Coker," said Ben quietly and insultingly,
"that there's a war going on in Europe. That is, if you've learned
to read the papers."

"No, I hadn't heard about it, son," said Coker, puffing slowly and
deeply. "I read a paper--the one that comes out in the morning. I
suppose they haven't got the news yet." He grinned maliciously.
"What do you want, Ben?"

"I'm thinking of going to Canada and enlisting," said Ben. "I want
you to tell me if I can get in."

Coker was silent a moment. He took the long chewed weed from his
mouth and looked at it thoughtfully.

"What do you want to do that for, Ben?" he said.

Ben got up suddenly, and went to the window. He cast his cigarette
away into the court. It struck the cement well with a small dry
plop. When he turned around, his sallow face had gone white and
passionate.

"In Christ's name, Coker," he said, "what's it all about? Are you
able to tell me? What in heaven's name are we here for? You're a
doctor--you ought to know something."

Coker continued to look at his cigar. It had gone out again.

"Why?" he said deliberately. "Why should I know anything?"

"Where do we come from? Where do we go to? What are we here for?
What the hell is it all about?" Ben cried out furiously in a rising
voice. He turned bitterly, accusingly, on the older man. "For
God's sake, speak up, Coker. Don't sit there like a damned
tailor's dummy. Say something, won't you?"

"What do you want me to say?" said Coker. "What am I? a
mindreader? A spiritualist? I'm your physician, not your priest.
I've seen them born, and I've seen them die. What happens to them
before or after, I can't say."

"Damn that!" said Ben. "What happens to them in between?"

"You're as great an authority on that as I am, Ben," said Coker.
"What you want, son, is not a doctor, but a prophet."

"They come to you when they're sick, don't they?" said Ben. "They
all want to get well, don't they? You do your best to cure them,
don't you?"

"No," said Coker. "Not always. But I'll grant that I'm supposed
to. What of it?"

"You must all think that it's about something," said Ben, "or you
wouldn't do it!"

"A man must live, mustn't he?" said Coker with a grin.

"That's what I'm asking you, Coker. Why must he?"

"Why," said Coker, "in order to work nine hours a day in a
newspaper office, sleep nine hours, and enjoy the other six in
washing, shaving, dressing, eating at the Greasy Spoon, loafing in
front of Wood's, and occasionally taking the Merry Widow to see
Francis X. Bushman. Isn't that reason enough for any man? If a
man's hard-working and decent, and invests his money in the
Building and Loan every week, instead of squandering it on
cigarettes, coca-cola, and Kuppenheimer clothes, he may own a
little home some day." Coker's voice sank to a hush of reverence.
"He may even have his own car, Ben. Think of that! He can get in
it, and ride, and ride, and ride. He can ride all over these
damned mountains. He can be very, very happy. He can take
exercise regularly in the Y. M. C. A. and think only clean
thoughts. He can marry a good pure woman and have any number of
fine sons and daughters, all of whom may be brought up in the
Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian faiths, and given splendid
courses in Economics, Commercial Law, and the Fine Arts, at the
State university. There's plenty to live for, Ben. There's
something to keep you busy every moment."

"You're a great wit, Coker," Ben said, scowling. "You're as funny
as a crutch." He straightened his humped shoulders self-
consciously, and filled his lungs with air.

"Well, what about it?" he asked, with a nervous grin. "Am I fit to
go?"

"Let's see," said Coker deliberately, beginning to look him over.
"Feet--pigeon-toed, but good arch." He looked at Ben's tan
leathers closely.

"What's the matter, Coker?" said Ben. "Do you need your toes to
shoot a gun with?"

"How're your teeth, son?"

Ben drew back his thin lips and showed two rows of hard white
grinders. At the same moment, casually, swiftly, Coker prodded him
with a strong yellow finger in the solar plexis. His distended
chest collapsed; he bent over, laughing, and coughed dryly. Coker
turned away to his desk and picked up his cigar.

"What's the matter, Coker?" said Ben. "What's the idea?"

"That's all, son. I'm through with you," said Coker.

"Well, what about it?" said Ben nervously.

"What about what?"

"Am I all right?"

"Certainly you're all right," said Coker. He turned with burning
match. "Who said you weren't all right?"

Ben stared at him, scowling, with fear-bright eyes.

"Quit your kidding, Coker," he said. "I'm three times seven, you
know. Am I fit to go?"

"What's the rush?" said Coker. "The war's not over yet. We may
get into it before long. Why not wait a bit?"

"That means I'm not fit," said Ben. "What's the matter with me,
Coker?"

"Nothing," said Coker carefully. "You're a bit thin. A little run
down, aren't you, Ben? You need a little meat on those bones, son.
You can't sit on a stool at the Greasy Spoon, with a cigarette in
one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, and get fat."

"Am I all right or not, Coker?"

Coker's long death's-head widened in a yellow grin.

"Yes," he said. "You're all right, Ben. You're one of the most
all right people I know."

Ben read the true answer in Coker's veined and weary eyes. His own
were sick with fear. But he said bitingly:

"Thanks, Coker. You're a lot of help. I appreciate what you've
done a lot. As a doctor, you're a fine first baseman."

Coker grinned. Ben left the office.

As he went out on the street he met Harry Tugman going down to the
paper office.

"What's the matter, Ben?" said Harry Tugman. "Feeling sick?"

"Yes," said Ben, scowling at him. "I've just had a shot of 606."

He went up the street to meet Mrs. Pert.

[Methuselah]

In a prior post ( Nov 17, 2020 10:36 am) the two components of the user base here were named “Cordials” and "FightClubbers”. I’ll drop the usual long definitions of these terms, with the observation that the first word is not effective for attracting Newbies, my announced goal here. Can someone suggest a better term?
Update: “Geezer” is also inappropriate for distinguishing from a Flight Clubber(FC), because some Geezers are full-time Fight Clubbers. Bye/Don (Trump) is a case in point. He wouldn’t think twice about using a technique such as malicious cluttering. Others occasionally dip their toes in FC techniques, but it does not become an obsession with them. Senior Citizen is perhaps a euphemism, but it shares the problem of dual FC membership. I suggest the hybrid name FBGeezer. We can define characteristics of this class, such as verbosity, but our definition includes that the person is not a full time FCer. FBGeezers can not be expected to meet prior promises not to be verbose. They just can’t help it, poor dears.

[Scooter]

26


In the autumn, at the beginning of his fifteenth year--his last
year at Leonard's--Eugene went to Charleston on a short excursion.
He found a substitute for his paper route.

"Come on!" said Max Isaacs, whom he still occasionally saw. "We're
going to have a good time, son."

"Yeah, man!" said Malvin Bowden, whose mother was conducting the
tour. "You can still git beer in Charleston," he added with a
dissipated leer.

"You can go swimmin' in the ocean at the Isle of Palms," said Max
Isaacs. Then, reverently, he added: "You can go to the Navy Yard
an' see the ships."

He was waiting until he should be old enough to join the navy. He
read the posters greedily. He knew all the navy men at the
enlistment office. He had read all the booklets--he was deep in
naval lore. He knew to a dollar the earnings of firemen, second
class, of radio men, and of all kinds of C. P. O's.

His father was a plumber. He did not want to be a plumber. He
wanted to join the navy and see the world. In the navy, a man was
given good pay and a good education. He learned a trade. He got
good food and good clothing. It was all given to him free, for
nothing.

"H'm!" said Eliza, with a bantering smile. "Why, say, boy, what do
you want to do that for? You're my baby!"

It had been years since he was. She smiled tremulously.

"Yes'm," said Eugene. "Can I go? It's only for five days. I've
got the money." He thrust his hand into his pocket, feeling.

"I tell you what!" said Eliza, working her lips, smiling. "You may
wish you had that money before this winter's over. You're going to
need new shoes and a warm overcoat when the cold weather comes.
You must be mighty rich. I wish I could afford to go running off
on a trip like that."

"Oh, my God!" said Ben, with a short laugh. He tossed his
cigarette into one of the first fires of the year.

"I want to tell you, son," said Eliza, becoming grave, "you've got
to learn the value of a dollar or you'll never have a roof to call
your own. I want you to have a good time, boy, but you mustn't
squander your money."

"Yes'm," said Eugene.

"For heaven's sake!" Ben cried. "It's the kid's own money. Let
him do what he likes with it. If he wants to throw it out the
damned window, it's his own business."

She clasped her hands thoughtfully upon her waist and stared away,
pursing her lips.

"Well, I reckon it'll be all right," she said. "Mrs. Bowden will
take care of you."

It was his first journey to a strange place alone. Eliza packed an
old valise carefully, and stowed away a box of sandwiches and eggs.
He went away at night. As he stood by his valise, washed, brushed,
excited, she wept a little. He was again, she felt, a little
farther off. The hunger for voyages was in his face.

"Be a good boy," she said. "Don't get into any trouble down
there." She thought carefully a moment, looking away. Then she
went down in her stocking, and pulled out a five-dollar bill.

"Don't waste your money," she said. "Here's a little extra. You
may need it."

"Come here, you little thug!" said Ben. Scowling, his quick hands
worked busily at the boy's stringy tie. He jerked down his vest,
slipping a wadded ten-dollar bill into Eugene's pocket. "Behave
yourself," he said, "or I'll beat you to death."

Max Isaacs whistled from the street. He went out to join them.

There were six in Mrs. Bowden's party: Max Isaacs, Malvin Bowden,
Eugene, two girls named Josie and Louise, and Mrs. Bowden. Josie
was Mrs. Bowden's niece and lived with her. She was a tall
beanpole of a girl with a prognathous mouth and stick-out grinning
teeth. She was twenty. The other girl, Louise, was a waitress.
She was small, plump, a warm brunette. Mrs. Bowden was a little
sallow woman with ratty brown hair. She had brown worn-out eyes.
She was a dressmaker. Her husband, a carpenter, had died in the
Spring. There was a little insurance money. That was how she came
to take the trip.

Now, by night, he was riding once more into the South. The day-
coach was hot, full of the weary smell of old red plush. People
dozed painfully, distressed by the mournful tolling of the bell,
and the grinding halts. A baby wailed thinly. Its mother, a gaunt
wisp-haired mountaineer, turned the back of the seat ahead, and
bedded the child on a spread newspaper. Its wizened face peeked
dirtily out of its swaddling discomfort of soiled jackets and pink
ribbon. It wailed and slept. At the front of the car, a young
hill-man, high-boned and red, clad in corduroys and leather
leggings, shelled peanuts steadily, throwing the shells into the
aisle. People trod through them with a sharp masty crackle. The
boys, bored, paraded restlessly to the car-end for water. There
was a crushed litter of sanitary drinking-cups upon the floor, and
a stale odor from the toilets.

The two girls slept soundly on turned seats. The small one
breathed warmly and sweetly through moist parted lips.

The weariness of the night wore in upon their jaded nerves, lay
upon their dry hot eyeballs. They flattened noses against the
dirty windows, and watched the vast structure of the earth sweep
past--clumped woodlands, the bending sweep of the fields, the huge
flowing lift of the earth-waves, cyclic intersections bewildering--
the American earth--rude, immeasurable, formless, mighty.

His mind was bound in the sad lulling magic of the car wheels.
Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack.
He thought of his life as something that had happened long ago. He
had found, at last, his gateway to the lost world. But did it lie
before or behind him? Was he leaving or entering it? Above the
rhythm of the wheels he thought of Eliza's laughter over ancient
things. He saw a brief forgotten gesture, her white broad
forehead, a ghost of old grief in her eyes. Ben, Gant--their
strange lost voices. Their sad laughter. They swam toward him
through green walls of fantasy. They caught and twisted at his
heart. The green ghost-glimmer of their faces coiled away. Lost.
Lost.

"Let's go for a smoke," said Max Isaacs.

They went back and stood wedged for stability on the closed
platform of the car. They lighted cigarettes.

Light broke against the east, in a murky rim. The far dark was
eaten cleanly away. The horizon sky was barred with hard fierce
strips of light. Still buried in night, they looked across at the
unimpinging sheet of day. They looked under the lifted curtain at
brightness. They were knifed sharply away from it. Then, gently,
light melted across the land like dew. The world was gray.

The east broke out in ragged flame. In the car, the little
waitress breathed deeply, sighed, and opened her clear eyes.

Max Isaacs fumbled his cigarette awkwardly, looked at Eugene, and
grinned sheepishly with delight, craning his neck along his collar,
and making a nervous grimace of his white fuzz-haired face. His
hair was thick, straight, the color of taffy. He had blond
eyebrows. There was much kindness in him. They looked at each
other with clumsy tenderness. They thought of the lost years at
Woodson Street. They saw with decent wonder their awkward bulk of
puberty. The proud gate of the years swung open for them. They
felt a lonely glory. They said farewell.

[Scooter]

Charleston, fat weed that roots itself on Lethe wharf, lived in
another time. The hours were days, the days weeks.

They arrived in the morning. By noon, several weeks had passed,
and he longed for the day's ending. They were quartered in a small
hotel on King Street--an old place above stores, with big rooms.
After lunch, they went out to see the town. Max Isaacs and Malvin
Bowden turned at once toward the Navy Yard. Mrs. Bowden went with
them. Eugene was weary for sleep. He promised to meet them later.

When they had gone, he pulled off his shoes and took off his coat
and shirt, and lay down to sleep in a big dark room, into which the
warm sun fell in shuttered bars. Time droned like a sleepy October
fly.

At five o'clock, Louise, the little waitress, came to wake him.
She, too, had wanted to sleep. She knocked gently at the door.
When he did not answer, she opened it quietly and came in, closing
it behind her. She came to the side of the bed and looked at him
for a moment.

"Eugene!" she whispered. "Eugene."

He murmured drowsily, and stirred. The little waitress smiled and
sat down on the bed. She bent over him and tickled him gently in
the ribs, chuckling to see him squirm. Then she tickled the soles
of his feet. He wakened slowly, yawning, rubbing sleep from his
eyes.

"What is it?" he said.

"It's time to go out there," she said.

"Out where?"

"To the Navy Yard. We promised to meet them."

"Oh, damn the Navy Yard!" he groaned. "I'd rather sleep."

"So would I!" she agreed. She yawned luxuriously, stretching her
plump arms above her head. "I'm so sleepy. I could stretch out
anywhere." She looked meaningly at the bed.



He wakened at once, sensuously alert. He lifted himself upon one
elbow: a hot torrent of blood swarmed through his cheeks. His
pulses beat thickly.

"We're all alone up here," said Louise smiling. "We've got the
whole floor to ourselves."

"Why don't you lie down and take a nap, if you're still sleepy?" he
asked. "I'll wake you up," he added, with gentle chivalry.

"I've got such a little room. It's hot and stuffy. That's why I
got up," said Louise. "What a nice big room you've got!"

"Yes," he said. "It's a nice big bed, too." They were silent a
waiting moment.

"Why don't you lie down here, Louise?" he said, in a low unsteady
voice. "I'll get up," he added hastily, sitting up. "I'll wake
you."

"Oh, no," she said, "I wouldn't feel right."

They were again silent. She looked admiringly at his thin young
arms.

"My!" she said. "I bet you're strong."

He flexed his long stringy muscles manfully, and expanded his
chest.

"My!" she said. "How old are you, 'Gene?"

He was just at his fifteenth year.

"I'm going on sixteen," he said. "How old are you, Louise?"

"I'm eighteen," she said. "I bet you're a regular heart-breaker,
'Gene. How many girls have you got?"

"Oh--I don't know. Not many," he said truthfully enough. He
wanted to talk--he wanted to talk madly, seductively, wickedly. He
would excite her by uttering, in grave respectful tones, honestly,
matter-of-factly, the most erotic suggestions.

"I guess you like the tall ones, don't you?" said Louise. "A tall
fellow wouldn't want a little thing like me, would he? Although,"
she said quickly, "you never know. They say opposites attract each
other."

"I don't like tall girls," said Eugene. "They're too skinny. I
like them about your size, when they've got a good build."

"Have I got a good build, 'Gene?" said Louise, holding her arms up
and smiling.

"Yes, you have a pretty build, Louise--a fine build," said Eugene
earnestly. "The kind I like."

"I haven't got a pretty face. I've got an ugly face," she said
invitingly.

"You haven't got an ugly face. You have a pretty face," said
Eugene firmly. "Anyway, the face doesn't matter much with me," he
added, subtly.

"What do you like best, 'Gene?" Louise asked.

He thought carefully and gravely.

"Why," he said, "a woman ought to have pretty legs. Sometimes a
woman has an ugly face, but a pretty leg. The prettiest legs I
ever saw were on a High Yellow."

"Were they prettier than mine?" said the waitress, with an easy
laugh.

She crossed her legs slowly and displayed her silk-shod ankle.

"I don't know, Louise," he said, staring critically. "I can't see
enough."

"Is that enough?" she said, pulling her tight skirt above her
calves.

"No," said Eugene.

"Is that?" she pulled her skirt back over her knees, and displayed
her plump thighs, gartered with a ruffled band of silk and red
rosettes. She thrust her small feet out, coyly turning the toes
in.

"Lord!" said Eugene, staring with keen interest at the garter. "I
never saw any like that before. That's pretty." He gulped
noisily. "Don't those things hurt you, Louise?"

"Uh-uh," she said, as if puzzled, "why?"

"I should think they'd cut into your skin," he said. "I know mine
do if I wear them too tight. See."

He pulled up his trousers' leg and showed his young gartered shank,
lightly spired with hair.

Louise looked, and felt the garter gravely with a plump hand.

"Mine don't hurt me," she said. She snapped the elastic with a
ripe smack. "See!"

"Let me see," he said. He placed his trembling fingers lightly
upon her garter.

"Yes," he said unsteadily. "I see."

Her round young weight lay heavy against him, her warm young face
turned blindly up to his own. His brain reeled as if drunken, he
dropped his mouth awkwardly upon her parted lips. She sank back
heavily on the pillows. He planted dry and clumsy kisses upon her
mouth, her eyes, in little circles round her throat and face. He
fumbled at the throat-hook of her waist, but his fingers shook so
violently that he could not unfasten it. She lifted her smooth
hands with a comatose gesture, and unfastened it for him.

Then he lifted his beet-red face, and whispered tremulously, not
knowing well what he said:

"You're a nice girl, Louise. A pretty girl."

She thrust her pink fingers slowly through his hair, drew back his
face into her breasts again, moaned softly as he kissed her, and
clutched his hair in an aching grip. He put his arms around her
and drew her to him. They devoured each other with young wet
kisses, insatiate, unhappy, trying to grow together in their
embrace, draw out the last distillation of desire in a single kiss.

He lay sprawled, scattered and witless with passion, unable to
collect and focus his heat. He heard the wild tongueless cries of
desire, the inchoate ecstasy that knows no gateway of release. But
he knew fear--not the social fear, but the fear of ignorance, of
discovery. He feared his potency. He spoke to her thickly,
wildly, not hearing himself speak.

"Do you want me to? Do you want me to, Louise?"

She drew his face down, murmuring:

"You won't hurt me, 'Gene? You wouldn't do anything to hurt me,
honey? If anything happens--" she said drowsily.

He seized the straw of her suggestion.

"I won't be the first. I won't be the one to begin you. I've
never started a girl off," he babbled, aware vaguely that he was
voicing an approved doctrine of chivalry. "See here, Louise!" he
shook her--she seemed drugged. "You've got to tell me before--. I
won't do THAT! I may be a bad fellow, but nobody can say I ever
did that. Do you hear!" His voice rose shrilly; his face worked
wildly; he was hardly able to speak.

"I say, do you hear? Am I the first one, or not? You've got to
answer! Did you ever--before?"

She looked at him lazily. She smiled.

"No," she said.

"I may be mad, but I won't do that." He had become inarticulate;
his voice went off into a speechless jargon. Gasping, stammering,
with contorted and writhing face, he sought for speech.

She rose suddenly, and put her warm arms comfortingly around him.
Soothing and caressing him, she drew him down on her breast. She
stroked his head, and talked quietly to him.

"I know you wouldn't, honey. I know you wouldn't. Don't talk.
Don't say anything. Why, you're all excited, dear. There. Why,
you're shaking like a leaf. You're high-strung, honey. That's
what it is. You're a bundle of nerves."

He wept soundlessly into her arm.

He became quieter. She smiled, and kissed him softly.

"Put on your clothes," said Louise. "We ought to get started if
we're going out there."

In his confusion he tried to draw on a pair of Mrs. Bowden's cast-
off pumps. Louise laughed richly, and thrust her fingers through
his hair.

[Scooter]

At the Navy Yard, they could not find the Bowdens nor Max Isaacs.
A young sailor took them over a destroyer. Louise went up a railed
iron ladder with an emphatic rhythm of her shapely thighs. She
showed her legs. She stared impudently at a picture of a chorus
lady, cut from the Police Gazette. The young sailor rolled his
eyes aloft with an expression of innocent debauchery. Then he
winked heavily at Eugene.

The deck of the Oregon.

"What's that for?" said Louise, pointing to the outline in nails of
Admiral Dewey's foot.

"That's where he stood during the fight," said the sailor.

Louise put her small foot within the print of the greater one. The
sailor winked at Eugene. You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.



"She's a nice girl," said Eugene.

"Yeah," said Max Isaacs. "She's a nice lady." He craned his neck
awkwardly, and squinted. "About how old is she?"

"She's eighteen," said Eugene.

Malvin Bowden stared at him.

"You're crazy!" said he. "She's twenty-one."

"No," said Eugene, "she's eighteen. She told me so."

"I don't care," said Malvin Bowden, "she's no such thing. She's
twenty-one. I reckon I ought to know. My folks have known her for
five years. She had a baby when she was eighteen."

"Aw!" said Max Isaacs.

"Yes," said Malvin Bowden, "a travelling man got her in trouble.
Then he ran away."

"Aw!" said Max Isaacs. "Without marryin' her or anything?"

"He didn't do nothing for her. He ran away," said Malvin Bowden.
"Her people are raising the kid now."

"Great Day!" said Max Isaacs slowly. Then, sternly, he added, "A
man who'd do a thing like that ought to be shot."

"You're right!" said Malvin Bowden.



They loafed along the Battery, along the borders of ruined Camelot.

"Those are nice old places," said Max Isaacs. "They've been good
houses in their day."

He looked greedily at wrought-iron gateways; the old lust of his
childhood for iron-scraps awoke.

"Those are old Southern mansions," said Eugene, reverently.

The bay was still: there was a green stench of warm standing water.

"They've let the place run down," said Malvin. "It's no bigger now
than it was before the Civil War."

No, sir, and, by heaven, so long as one true Southern heart is left
alive to remember Appomattox, Reconstruction, and the Black
parliaments, we will defend with our dearest blood our menaced, but
sacred, traditions.

"They need some Northern capital," said Max Isaacs sagely. They
all did.

An old woman, wearing a tiny bonnet, was led out on a high veranda
from one of the houses, by an attentive negress. She seated
herself in a porch rocker and stared blindly into the sun. Eugene
looked at her sympathetically. She had probably not been informed
by her loyal children of the unsuccessful termination of the war.
United in their brave deception, they stinted themselves daily,
reining in on their proud stomachs in order that she might have all
the luxury to which she had been accustomed. What did she eat?
The wing of a chicken, no doubt, and a glass of dry sherry.
Meanwhile, all the valuable heirlooms had been pawned or sold.
Fortunately, she was almost blind, and could not see the wastage of
their fortune. It was very sad. But did she not sometimes think
of that old time of the wine and the roses? When knighthood was in
flower?

"Look at that old lady," whispered Malvin Bowden.

"You can TELL she's a lady," said Max Isaacs. "I bet she's never
turned her hand over."

"An old family," said Eugene gently. "The Southern aristocracy."

An old negro came by, fringed benevolently by white whiskers. A
good old man--an ante-bellum darkey. Dear Lord, their number was
few in these unhappy days.

Eugene thought of the beautiful institution of human slavery, which
his slaveless maternal ancestry had fought so valiantly to
preserve. Bress de Lawd, Marse! Ole Mose doan' wan' to be free
niggah. How he goan' lib widout marse? He doan' wan' stahve wid
free niggahs. Har, har, har!

Philanthropy. Pure philanthropy. He brushed a tear from his een.

[Scooter]

They were going across the harbor to the Isle of Palms. As the
boat churned past the round brick cylinder of Fort Sumter, Malvin
Bowden said:

"They had the most men. If things had been even, we'd have beaten
them."

"They didn't beat us," said Max Isaacs. "We wore ourselves out
beating them."

"We were defeated," said Eugene, quietly, "not beaten."

Max Isaacs stared at him dumbly.

"Aw!" he said.

They left the little boat, and ground away toward the beach in a
street-car. The land had grown dry and yellow in the enervation of
the summer. The foliage was coated with dust: they rattled past
cheap summer houses, baked and blistered, stogged drearily in the
sand. They were small, flimsy, a multitudinous vermin--all with
their little wooden sign of lodging. "The Ishkabibble," "Seaview,"
"Rest Haven," "Atlantic Inn,"--Eugene looked at them, reading with
weariness the bleached and jaded humor of their names.

"There are a lot of boarding-houses in the world," said he.

A hot wind of beginning autumn rustled dryly through the long
parched leaves of stunted palms. Before them rose the huge rusted
spokes of a Ferris Wheel. St. Louis. They had reached the beach.

Malvin Bowden leaped joyously from the car.

"Last one in's a rotten egg!" he cried, and streaked for the
bathhouse.

"Kings! I've got kings, son," yelled Max Isaacs. He held up his
crossed fingers. The beach was bare: two or three concessions
stood idly open for business. The sky curved over them, a
cloudless blue burnished bowl. The sea offshore was glazed
emerald: the waves rode heavily in, thickening murkily as they
turned with sunlight and sediment to a beachy yellow.

They walked slowly down the beach toward the bathhouse. The
tranquil, incessant thunder of the sea made in them a lonely music.
Seawards, their eyes probed through the seething glare.

"I'm going to join the navy, 'Gene," said Max Isaacs. "Come on and
go with me."

"I'm not old enough," said Eugene. "You're not, either."

"I'll be sixteen in November," said Max Isaacs defensively.

'That's not old enough."

"I'm going to lie to get in," said Max Isaacs. "They won't bother
you. You can get in. Come on."

"No," said Eugene. "I can't."

"Why not?" said Max Isaacs. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to college," said Eugene. "I'm going to get an
education and study law."

"You'll have lots of time," said Max Isaacs. "You can go to
college when you come out. They teach you a lot in the navy. They
give you a good training. You go everywhere."

"No," said Eugene. "I can't."

But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely thunder of the
sea. He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage, and heard the
little tinkling sounds of Asia. He believed in harbors at the end.

Mrs. Bowden's niece and the waitress came out on the next car.
After his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the gusty
wind, upon the beach. A fine tang of salt was on his lips. He
licked his clean young flesh.

Louise came from the bathhouse and walked slowly toward him. She
came proudly, her warm curves moulded into her bathing-suit: her
legs were covered with stockings of green silk.

Far out, beyond the ropes, Max Isaacs lifted his white heavy arms,
and slid swiftly through a surging wall of green water. His body
glimmered greenly for a moment; he stood erect wiping his eyes and
shaking water from his ears.

Eugene took the waitress by the hand and led her into the water.
She advanced slowly, with little twittering cries. An undulant
surge rolled in deceptively, and rose suddenly to her chin,
drinking her breath. She gasped and clung to him. Initiated, they
bucked deliciously through a roaring wall of water, and, while her
eyes were still closed, he caught her to him with young salty
kisses.

Presently they came out, and walked over the wet strip of beach
into the warm loose sand, bedding their dripping bodies gratefully
in its warmth. The waitress shivered: he moulded sand over her
legs and hips, until she was half buried. He kissed her, stilling
his trembling lips upon her mouth.

"I like you! I like you a lot!" he said.

"What did they tell you about me?" she said. "Did they talk about
me?"

"I don't care," he said. "I don't care about that. I like you."

"You won't remember me, honey, when you start going with the girls.
You'll forget about me. Some day you'll see me, and you won't even
know me. You won't recognize me. You'll pass without speaking."

"No," he said. "I'll never forget you, Louise. So long as I
live."

Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of the sea. She
kissed him. They were hill-born.



He returned in late September.

In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for Baltimore. The
operation, too long deferred, was now inevitable. His disease had
grown steadily worse. He had gone through a period of incessant
pain. He was enfeebled. He was frightened.

Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house with his cries,
commanding terror with his old magnificence.

"I see it! I see it! The knife! The knife! . . . Do you see its
shadow? . . . There! There! There!"

With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to invulnerable nothings.

"Do you see him standing there in the shadows? So you've come at
last to take the old man with you? . . . There he stands--the Grim
Reaper--as I always knew he would. Jesus, have mercy on my soul!"



Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at Johns
Hopkins. Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in and
looked at his chart. He talked happily and went away. He was one
of the greatest surgeons in the country.

"Don't worry," said the nurse encouragingly, "the mortality's only
four per cent. It used to be thirty. He's reduced it."

Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his daughter's vital
grasp.

"Don't worry, old boy!" she said, "you're going to be as good as
you ever were, after this."

She fed him with her life, her hope, her love. He was almost
tranquil when they wheeled him in to his operation.

But the little gray-haired man looked, shook his head regretfully,
and trimmed deftly.

"All right!" he said, four minutes later, to his assistant. "Close
the wound."

Gant was dying of cancer.



Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor veranda,
looking out through bright October air at the city spread far into
the haze before him. He looked very clean, almost fragile. A
faint grin of happiness and relief hovered about his thin mouth.
He smoked a long cigar, with fresh-awakened senses.

"There," he said pointing, "is where I spent part of my boyhood.
Old Jeff Streeter's hotel stood about there," he pointed.

"Dig down!" said Helen, grinning.

Gant thought of the years between, and the vexed pattern of fate.
His life seemed strange to him.

"We'll go to see all those places when you get out of here.
They're going to let you out of here, day after to-morrow. Did you
know that? Did you know you're almost well?" she cried with a big
smile.

"I'm going to be a well man after this," said Gant. "I feel twenty
years younger!"

"Poor old papa!" she said. "Poor old papa!"

Her eyes were wet. She put her big hands on his face, and drew his
head against her.

[Scooter]

27


My Shakespeare, rise! He rose. The bard rose throughout the
length and breadth of his brave new world. He was not for an age,
but for all time. Then, too, his tercentenary happened only once--
at the end of three hundred years. It was observed piously
from Maryland to Oregon. Eighty-one members of the House of
Representatives, when asked by literate journalists for their
favorite lines, replied instantly with a quotation from Polonius:
"This above all: to thine own self be true." The Swan was played,
and pageanted, and essayed in every schoolhouse in the land.

Eugene tore the Chandos portrait from the pages of the Independent
and nailed it to the calcimined wall of the backroom. Then, still
full of the great echoing paean of Ben Jonson's, he scrawled below
it in large trembling letters: "My Shakespeare, rise!" The large
plump face--"as damned silly a head as ever I looked at"--stared
baldly at him with goggle eyes, the goatee pointed ripe with
hayseed vanity. But, lit by the presence, Eugene plunged back into
the essay littered across his table.

He was discovered. In an unwise absence, he left the Bard upon the
wall. When he returned, Ben and Helen had read his scrawl.
Thereafter, he was called poetically to table, to the telephone, to
go an errand.

"My Shakespeare, rise!"

With red resentful face, he rose.

"Will My Shakespeare pass the biscuit?" or, "Could I trouble My
Shakespeare for the butter?" said Ben, scowling at him.

"My Shakespeare! My Shakespeare! Do you want another piece of
pie?" said Helen. Then, full of penitent laughter, she added:
"That's a shame! We oughtn't to treat the poor kid like that."
Laughing, she plucked at her large straight chin, gazing out the
window, and laughing absently--penitently, laughing.

But--"his art was universal. He saw life clearly and he saw it
whole. He was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched every
shore of thought. He was all things in one: lawyer, merchant,
soldier, doctor, statesman. Men of science have been amazed by the
depth of his learning. In The Merchant of Venice, he deals with
the most technical questions of law with the skill of an attorney.
In King Lear, he boldly prescribes sleep as a remedy for Lear's
insanity. 'Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care.'
Thus, he has foreseen the latest researches of modern science by
almost three centuries. In his sympathetic and well-rounded sense
of characterization, he laughs with, not at, his characters."

Eugene won the medal--bronze or of some other material even more
enduring. The Bard's profile murkily indented. W. S. 1616-1916.
A long and useful life.



The machinery of the pageant was beautiful and simple. Its author--
Dr. George B. Rockham, at one time, it was whispered, a trouper
with the Ben Greet players--had seen to that. All the words had
been written by Dr. George B. Rockham, and all the words,
accordingly, had been written for Dr. George B. Rockham. Dr.
George B. Rockham was the Voice of History. The innocent children
of Altamont's schools were the mute illustrations of that voice.

Eugene was Prince Hal. The day before the pageant his costume
arrived from Philadelphia. At John Dorsey Leonard's direction he
put it on. Then he came out sheepishly before John Dorsey on the
school veranda, fingering his tin sword and looking somewhat
doubtfully at his pink silk hose which came three quarters up his
skinny shanks, and left exposed, below his doublet, a six-inch
hiatus of raw thigh.

John Dorsey Leonard looked gravely.

"Here, boy," he said. "Let me see!"

He pulled strongly at the top of the deficient hose, with no result
save to open up large runs in them. Then John Dorsey Leonard began
to laugh. He slid helplessly down upon the porch rail, and bent
over, palsied with silent laughter, from which a high whine, full
of spittle, presently emerged.

"O-oh my Lord!" he gasped. "Egscuse me!" he panted, seeing the
boy's angry face. "It's the funniest thing I ever--" at this
moment his voice died of paralysis.

"I'll fix you," said Miss Amy. "I've got just the thing for you."

She gave him a full baggy clown's suit, of green linen. It was a
relic of a Hallowe'en party; its wide folds were gartered about his
ankles.

He turned a distressed, puzzled face toward Miss Amy.

"That's not right, is it?" he asked. "He never wore anything like
this, did he?"

Miss Amy looked. Her deep bosom heaved with full contralto
laughter.

"Yes, that's right! That's fine!" she yelled. "He was like that,
anyway. No one will ever notice, boy." She collapsed heavily into
a wicker chair which widened with a protesting creak.

"Oh, Lord!" she groaned, wet-cheeked. "I don't believe I ever
saw--"

[Scooter]

The pageant was performed on the embowered lawns of the Manor
House. Dr. George B. Rockham stood in a green hollow--a natural
amphitheatre. His audience sat on the turf of the encircling
banks. As the phantom cavalcade of poetry and the drama wound down
to him, Dr. George B. Rockham disposed of each character neatly in
descriptive pentameter verse. He was dressed in the fashion of the
Restoration--a period he coveted because it understood the charms
of muscular calves. His heavy legs bulged knottily below a coy
fringe of drawer-ruffles.

Eugene stood waiting on the road above, behind an obscuring wall of
trees. It was rich young May. "Doc" Hines (Falstaff) waited
beside him. His small tough face grinned apishly over garments
stuffed with yards of wadding. Grinning, he smote himself upon his
swollen paunch: the blow left a dropsical depression.

He turned, with a comical squint, on Eugene:

"Hal," said he, "you're a hell of a looking prince."

"You're no beauty, Jack," said Eugene.

Behind him, Julius Arthur (Macbeth), drew his sword with a
flourish.

"I challenge you, Hal," said he.

In the young shimmering light their tin swords clashed rapidly.
Twittered with young bird-laughter, on bank and saddle sprawled,
all of the Bard's personæ. Julius Arthur thrust swiftly, was
warded, then, with loose grin, buried his brand suddenly in "Doc"
Hines' receiving paunch. The company of the immortal shrieked
happily.

Miss Ida Nelson, the assistant director, rushed angrily among them.

"Sh!" she hissed loudly. "Sh-h!" She was very angry. She had
spent the afternoon hissing loudly.

Swinging gently in her side-saddle, Rosalind, on horseback, a ripe
little beauty from the convent, smiled warmly at him. Looking, he
forgot.

Below them, on the road, the crowded press loosened slowly, broke
off in minute fragments, and disappeared into the hidden gulch of
Dr. George Rockham's receiving voice. With fat hammy sonority he
welcomed them.

But he had not come to Shakespeare. The pageant had opened with
the Voices of Past and Present--voices a trifle out of harmony with
the tenor of event--but necessary to the commercial success of the
enterprise. These voices now moved voicelessly past--four
frightened sales-ladies from Schwartzberg's, clad decently in
cheese-cloth and sandals, who came by bearing the banner of their
concern. Or, as the doctor's more eloquent iambics had it:


"Fair Commerce, sister of the arts, thou, too,
Shalt take thy lawful place upon our stage."


They came and passed: Ginsberg's--"the glass of fashion and the
mould of form"; Bradley the Grocer--"when first Pomona held her
fruity horn"; The Buick Agency--"the chariots of Oxus and of Ind."

Came, passed--like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

Behind them, serried ranks of cherubim, the marshalled legions of
Altamont's Sunday schools, each in white arrayed and clutching
grimly in tiny hands two thousand tiny flags of freedom, God's
small angels, and surely there for God knows what far-off event,
began to move into the hollow. Their teachers nursed them gently
into action, with tapping feet and palms.

"One, two, THREE, four. One, two, THREE, four. Quickly,
children!"

A hidden orchestra, musical in the trees, greeted them, as they
approached, with holy strains: the Baptists, with the simple
doctrine of "It's the Old-time Religion"; the Methodists, with
"I'll Be Waiting at the River"; the Presbyterians, with "Rock of
Ages," the Episcopalians, with "Jesus, Lover of My Soul"; and
rising to lyrical climactic passion, the little Jews, with the
nobly marching music of "Onward, Christian Soldiers."

They passed without laughter. There was a pause.

"Well, thank God for that!" said Ralph Rolls coarsely in a solemn
quiet. The Bard's strewn host laughed, rustled noisily into line.

"Sh-h! Sh-h!" hissed Miss Ida Nelson.

"What the hell does she think she is?" said Julius Arthur, "a steam
valve?"

Eugene looked attentively at the shapely legs of the page, Viola.

"Wow!" said Ralph Rolls, with his accustomed audibility. "Look
who's here!"

She looked on them all with a pert impartial smile. But she never
told her love.

Miss Ida Nelson caught the doctor's stealthy sign. Carefully, in
slow twos, she fed them down to him.

The Moor of Venice (Mr. George Graves), turned his broad back upon
their jibes, and lurched down with sullen-sheepish grin, unable to
conceal the massive embarrassment of his calves.

"Tell him who you are, Villa," said Doc Hines. "You look like Jack
Johnson."

The town, in its first white shirting of Spring, sat on the turfy
banks, and looked down gravely upon the bosky little comedy of
errors; the encircling mountains, and the gods thereon, looked down
upon the slightly larger theatre of the town; and, figuratively,
from mountains that looked down on mountains, the last stronghold
of philosophy, the author of this chronicle looked down on
everything.

"Here we go, Hal," said Doc Hines, nudging Eugene.

"Give 'em hell, son," said Julius Arthur. "You're dressed for the
part."

"He looks it, you mean," said Ralph Rolls. "Boy, you'll knock 'em
dead," he added with an indecent laugh.

They descended into the hollow, accompanied by a low but growing
titter of amazement from the audience. Before them, the doctor had
just disposed of Desdemona, who parted with a graceful obeisance.
He was now engaged on Othello, who stood, bullish and shy, till his
ordeal should finish. In a moment, he strode away, and the doctor
turned to Falstaff, reading the man by his padded belly, briskly,
with relief:


"Now, Tragedy, begone, and to our dell
Bring antic Jollity with cap and bells:
Falstaff, thou prince of jesters, lewd old man
Who surfeited a royal prince with mirth,
And swayed a kingdom with his wanton quips--"


Embarrassed by the growing undertone of laughter, Doc Hines
squinted around with a tough grin, gave a comical hitch to his
padded figure, and whispered a hoarse aside to Eugene: "Hear that,
Hal? I'm hell on wheels, ain't I?"

Eugene saw him depart in a green blur, and presently became aware
that an unnatural silence had descended upon Doctor George B.
Rockham. The Voice of History was, for the moment, mute. Its long
jaw, in fact, had fallen ajar.

Dr. George B. Rockham looked wildly about him for succor. He
rolled his eyes entreatingly upwards at Miss Ida Nelson. She
turned her head away.

"Who are you?" he said hoarsely, holding a hairy hand carefully
beside his mouth.

"Prince Hal," said Eugene, likewise hoarsely and behind his hand.

Dr. George B. Rockham staggered a little. Their speech had reached
the stalls. But firmly, before the tethered chafing laughter, he
began:


"Friend to the weak and comrade of the wild,
By folly sired to wisdom, dauntless Hal--"


Laughter, laughter unleashed and turbulent, laughter that rose
flood by flood upon itself, laughter wild, earth-shaking, thunder-
cuffing, drowned Dr. George B. Rockham and all he had to say.
Laughter! Laughter! Laughter!



Helen was married in the month of June--a month sacred, it is said,
to Hymen, but used so often for nuptials that the god's blessing is
probably not infallible.

She had returned to Altamont in May, from her last singing
engagement. She had been in Atlanta for the week of opera, and had
come back by way of Henderson, where she had visited Daisy and Mrs.
Selborne. There she had found her mate.

He was not a stranger to her. She had known him years before in
Altamont, where he had lived for a short time as district agent for
the great and humane corporation that employed him--the Federal
Cash Register Company. Since that time he had gone to various
parts of the country at his master's bidding, carrying with him his
great message of prosperity and thrift. At the present time, he
lived with his sister and his aged mother, whose ponderous
infirmity of limb had not impaired her appetite, in a South
Carolina town. He was devoted and generous to them both. And the
Federal Cash Register Company, touched by his devotion to duty,
rewarded him with a good salary. His name was Barton. The Bartons
lived well.

Helen returned with the unexpectedness in which all returning Gants
delighted. She came in on members of her family, one afternoon, in
the kitchen at Dixieland.

"Hello, everybody!" she said.

"Well, for G-g-god's sake," said Luke after a moment. "Look who's
here!"

They embraced heartily,

"Why, what on earth!" cried Eliza, putting her iron down on the
board, and wavering on her feet, in an effort to walk in two
directions at once. They kissed.

"I was just thinking to myself," said Eliza, more calmly, "that it
wouldn't surprise me a bit if you should come walking in. I had a
premonition, I don't know what else you'd call it--"

"Oh, my God!" groaned the girl, good-humoredly, but with a shade of
annoyance. "Don't start that Pentland spooky stuff! It makes my
flesh crawl."

She exchanged a glance of burlesque entreaty with Luke. Winking,
he turned suddenly, and with an idiotic laugh, tickled Eliza
sharply.

"Get away!" she shrieked.

He chortled madly.

"I'll declare, boy!" she said fretfully. "I believe you're crazy.
I'll vow I do!"

Helen laughed huskily.

"Well," said Eliza, "how'd you leave Daisy and the children?"

"They're all right, I suppose," said Helen wearily. "Oh, my God!
Deliver me!" she laughed. "You never saw such pests! I spent
fifty dollars on them in toys and presents alone! You'd never
think it from the thanks I get. Daisy takes it all as her due!
Selfish! Selfish! Selfish!"

"For G-g-god's sake!" said Luke loyally.

She was one fine girl.

"I paid for everything I got at Daisy's, I can assure you!" she
said, sharply, challengingly. "I spent no more time there than I
had to. I was at Mrs. Selborne's nearly all the time. I had
practically all my meals there."

Her need for independence had become greater; her hunger for
dependents acute. Her denial of obligation to others was militant.
She gave more than she received.

"Well, I'm in for it," she said presently, trying to mask her
strong eagerness.

"In for what?" asked Luke.

"I've gone and done it at last," she said.

"Mercy!" shrieked Eliza. "You're not married, are you?"

"Not yet," said Helen, "but I will be soon."

Then she told them about Mr. Hugh T. Barton, the cash register
salesman. She spoke loyally and kindly of him, without great love.

"He's ten years older than I am," she said.

"Well," said Eliza thoughtfully, moulding her lips. "They
sometimes make the best husbands." After a moment, she asked:
"Has he got any property?"

"No," said Helen, "they live up all he makes. They live in style,
I tell you. There are two servants in that house all the time.
The old lady doesn't turn her hand over."

"Where are you going to live?" said Eliza sharply. "With his
folks?"

"Well, I should say not! I should say not!" said Helen slowly and
emphatically. "Good heavens, mama!" she continued irritably. "I
want a home of my own. Can't you realize that? I've been doing
for others all my life. Now I'm going to let them do for me. I
want no in-laws about. No, sir!" she said emphatically.

Luke bit his nails nervously.

"Well, he's g-g-getting a great g-g-girl," he said. "I hope he has
sense enough to realize that."

Moved, she laughed bigly, ironically.

"I've got one booster, haven't I?" she said. She looked at him
seriously with clear affectionate eyes. "Well, thanks, Luke.
You're one of the lot that's always had the interests of the family
at heart."

Her big face was for a moment tranquil and eager. A great calm lay
there: the radiant decent beauty of dawn and rainwater. Her eyes
were as luminous and believing as a child's. No evil dwelt in her.
She had learned nothing.

"Have you told your papa?" said Eliza, presently.

"No," she said, after a pause, "I haven't."

They thought of Gant in silence, with wonder. Her going was a
marvel.

"I have a right to my own life," said Helen angrily, as if some one
disputed that right, "as much as any one. Good heavens, mama! You
and papa have lived your lives--don't you know that? Do you think
it's right that I should go on forever looking after him? Do you?"
Her voice rose under the stress of hysteria.

"Why, no-o. I never said--" Eliza began, flustered and
conciliatory.

"You've spent your life f-f-finking of others and not of yourself,"
said Luke. "That's the trouble. They don't appreciate it."

"Well, I'm not going to any longer. That's one thing sure! No,
indeed! I want a home and some children. I'm going to have them!"
she said defiantly. In a moment, she added tenderly:

"Poor old papa! I wonder what he's going to say?"

He said very little. The Gants, after initial surprise, moulded
new events very quickly into the texture of their lives. Abysmal
change widened their souls out in a brooding unconsciousness.

[Scooter]

Mr. Hugh Barton came up into the hills to visit his affianced kin.
He came, to their huge delight, lounging in the long racing chassis
of a dusty brown 1911 Buick roadster. He came, in a gaseous coil,
to the roaring explosion of great engines. He descended, a tall,
elegant figure, dyspeptic, lean almost to emaciation, very
foppishly laundered and tailored. He looked the car over slowly,
critically, a long cigar clamped in the corner of his saturnine
mouth, drawing his gauntlets off deliberately. Then, in the same
unhurried fashion, he removed from his head the ten-gallon gray
sombrero--the only astonishing feature of his otherwise undebatable
costume--and shook each long thin leg delicately for a moment to
straighten out the wrinkles. But there were none. Then,
deliberately, he came up the walk to Dixieland, where the Gants
were assembled. As he came, unhurried, he took the cigar from his
mouth calmly and held it in the fingers of his lean, hairy,
violently palsied hand. His thin black hair, fine spun, was fanned
lightly from its elegance by a wantoning breeze. He espied his
betrothed and grinned, with dignity, sardonically, with big nuggets
of gold teeth. They greeted and kissed.

"This is my mother, Hugh," said Helen.

Hugh Barton bent slowly, courteously, from his thin waist. He
fastened on Eliza a keen penetrating stare that discomposed her.
His lips twisted again in an impressive sardonic smile. Every one
felt he was going to say something very, very important.

"How do you do?" he asked, and took her hand.

Every one then felt that Hugh Barton had said something very, very
important.

With equal slow gravity he greeted each one. They were somewhat
awed by his lordliness. Luke, however, burst out uncontrollably:

"You're g-g-getting a fine girl, Mr. B-b-barton."

Hugh Barton turned on him slowly and fixed him with his keen stare.

"I think so," he said gravely. His voice was deep, deliberate,
with an impressive rasp. He was selling himself.

In an awkward silence he turned, grinning amiably, on Eugene.

"Have a cigar?" he asked, taking three long powerful weeds from his
upper vest pocket, and holding them out in his clean twitching
fingers.

"Thanks," said Eugene with a dissipated leer, "I'll smoke a Camel."

He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. Gravely, Hugh
Barton held a match for him.

"Why do you wear the big hat?" asked Eugene.

"Psychology," he said. "It makes 'em talk."

"I tell you what!" said Eliza, beginning to laugh. "That's pretty
smart, isn't it?"

"Sure!" said Luke. "That's advertising! It pays to advertise!"

"Yes," said Mr. Barton slowly, "you've got to get the other
fellow's psychology."

The phrase seemed to describe an action of modified assault and
restrained pillage.

They liked him very much. They all went into the house.



Hugh Barton's mother was in her seventy-fourth year, but she had
the strength of a healthy woman of fifty, and the appetite of two
of forty. She was a powerful old lady, six feet tall, with the big
bones of a man, and a heavy full-jawed face, sensuous and
complacent, and excellently equipped with a champing mill of strong
yellow horse-teeth. It was cake and pudding to see her at work on
corn on the cob. A slight paralysis had slowed her tongue and
thickened her speech a little, so that she spoke deliberately, with
a ponderous enunciation of each word. This deformity, which she
carefully hid, added to, rather than subtracted from, the
pontifical weight of her opinions: she was an earnest Republican--
in memory of her departed mate--and she took a violent dislike to
any one who opposed her political judgment. When thwarted or
annoyed in any way, the heavy benevolence of her face was dislodged
by a thunder-cloud of petulance, and her wide pouting underlip
rolled out like a window-shade. But, as she barged slowly along,
one big hand gripping a heavy stick on which she leaned her massive
weight, she was an impressive dowager.

"She's a lady--a real lady," said Helen proudly. "Any one can see
that! She goes out with all the best people."

Hugh Barton's sister, Mrs. Genevieve Watson, was a sallow woman of
thirty-eight years, tall, wren-like and emaciated, like her
brother; dyspeptic, and very elegantly kept. The divorced Watson
was conspicuous for his absence from all conversations: there was
once or twice a heavy flutter around his name, a funereal hush, and
a muttered suggestion of oriental debauchery.

"He was a beast," said Hugh Barton, "a low dog. He treated sister
very badly."

Mrs. Barton wagged her great head with the slow but emphatic
approval she accorded all her son's opinions.

"O-o-h!" she said. "He was a ter-rib-bul man."

He had, they inferred, been given to hellish practices. He had
"gone after other women."

Sister Veve had a narrow discontented face, a metallic vivacity, an
effusive cordiality. She was always very smartly dressed. She had
somewhat vague connections in the real estate business; she spoke
grandly of obscure affairs; she was always on the verge of an
indefinite "Big Deal."

"I'm getting them lined up, brother," she would say with cheerful
confidence. "Things are coming my way. J. D. came in to-day and
said: 'Veve--you're the only woman in the world that can put this
thing across. Go to it, little girl. There's a fortune in it for
you.'" And so on.

Her conversation, Eugene thought, was not unlike Brother Steve's.

But their affection and loyalty for one another was beautiful. Its
unaccustomed faith, its abiding tranquillity, puzzled and disturbed
the Gants. They were touched indefinably, a little annoyed,
because of it.

The Bartons came to Woodson Street two weeks before the wedding.
Within three days after their arrival, Helen and old lady Barton
were at odds. It was inevitable. The heat of the girl's first
affection for Barton's family wore off very quickly: her possessive
instinct asserted itself--she would halve no one's love, she would
share with no other a place in the heart. She would own, she would
possess completely. She would be generous, but she would be
mistress. She would give. It was the law of her nature.

She began immediately, by force of this essential stress, to make
out a case against the old woman.

Mrs. Barton, too, felt the extent of her loss. She wanted to be
sure that Helen realized the extent of her acquisition of one of
the latter-day saints.

Rocking ponderously in the dark on Gant's veranda, the old woman
would say:

"You are get-ting a good boy, Hel-en." She would wag her powerful
head from side to side, pugnaciously emphatic. "Though I do say it
myself, you are get-ting one good boy, Hel-en. A bet-ter boy than
Hugh does-ent live."

"Oh, I don't know!" said Helen, annoyed. "I don't think it's such
a bad bargain for him either, you know. I think pretty well of
myself, too." And she would laugh, huskily, heartily, trying in
laughter to conceal her resentment, but visibly, to every eye but
Mrs. Barton's, angered.

A moment later, on some pretext, she would be back into the house,
where, with a face contorted by her rising hysteria, to Luke,
Eugene, or any sympathetic audience, she would burst out:

"You heard that, didn't you? You heard that? You see what I've
got to put up with, don't you? Do you see? Do you blame me for
not wanting that damned old woman around? Do you? You see how she
wants to run things, don't you? Do you see how she rubs it into me
whenever she gets a chance? She can't bear to give him up. Of
course not! He's her meal-ticket. They've bled him white. Why,
even now, if it came to a question of choosing between us--" her
face worked strongly. She could not continue. In a moment she
quieted herself, and said decisively: "I suppose you know now why
we're going to live away from them. You see, don't you? Do you
blame me?"

"No'm," said Eugene, obedient after pumping.

"It's a d-d-damn shame!" said Luke loyally.

At this moment Mrs. Barton, kindly but authoritative, called from
the veranda:

"Hel-en! Where are you, Hel-en?"

"O gotohell. Gotohell!" said Helen, in a comic undertone.

"Yes? What is it?" she called out sharply.

You see, don't you?

She was married at Dixieland, because she was having a big wedding.
She knew a great many people.

As her wedding-day approached, her suppressed hysteria mounted.
Her sense of decorum grew militant: she attacked Eliza bitterly for
keeping certain dubious people in the house.

"Mama, in heaven's name! What do you mean by allowing such goings-
on right in the face of Hugh and his people? What do you suppose
they think of it? Have you no respect for my feelings? Good
heavens, are you going to have the house full of chippies on the
night of my wedding?" Her voice was high and cracked. She almost
wept.

"Why, child!" said Eliza, with troubled face. "What do you mean?
I've never noticed anything."

"Are you blind! Every one's talking about it! They're practically
living together!" This last was a reference to a condition
existing between a dissipated and alcoholic young man and a darkly
handsome young woman, slightly tubercular.

To Eugene was assigned the task of digging this couple out of their
burrow. He waited sternly outside the girl's room, watching the
shadow dance at the door crack. At the end of the sixth hour, the
besieged surrendered--the man came out. The boy--pallid, but proud
of his trust--told the house-defiler that he must go. The young
man agreed with cheerful alcoholism. He went at once.

Mrs. Pert was saved in the house-cleaning.

"After all," said Helen, "what do we know about her? They can say
what they like about Fatty. I like her."

[Scooter]

Fems, flowers, potted plants, presents and guests arriving. The
long nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The packed crowd.
The triumphant booming of "The Wedding March."

A flashlight: Hugh Barton and his bride limply astare--frightened;
Gant, Ben, Luke, and Eugene, widely, sheepishly agrin; Eliza, high-
sorrowful and sad; Mrs. Selborne and a smile of subtle mystery; the
pert flower-girls; Pearl Hines' happy laughter.

When it was over, Eliza and her daughter hung in each other's arms,
weeping.

Eliza repeated over and over, from guest to guest:


"A son is a son till he gets him a wife,
But a daughter's a daughter all the days of her life."


She was comforted.

They escaped at length, wilted, from the thronging press of well-
wishing guests. White-faced, scared witless, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh
Barton got into a closed car. It was done! They would spend the
night at the Battery Hill. Ben had engaged the wedding-suite. To-
morrow, a honeymoon to Niagara.

Before they went, the girl kissed Eugene with something of the old
affection.

"I'll see you in the Fall, honey. Come over as soon as you're
settled."

For Hugh Barton was beginning life with his bride in a new place.
He was going to the capital of the State. And it had already been
determined, chiefly by Gant, that Eugene was going to the State
University.



But Hugh and Helen did not go honeymooning the next morning, as
they had planned. During the night, as she lay at Dixieland, old
Mrs. Barton was taken with a violent, a retching sickness. For
once, her massive digestive mechanism failed to meet the heavy
demands she had put upon it during the pre-nuptial banqueting. She
came near death.

Hugh and Helen returned abruptly next morning to a scene of dismal
tinsellings and jaded lilies. Helen hurled her vitality into the
sick woman's care; dominant, furious, all-mastering, she blew back
her life into her. Within three days, Mrs. Barton was out of
danger; but her complete recovery was slow, ugly, and painful. As
the days lengthened out wearily, the girl became more and more
bitter over her thwarted honeymoon. Rushing out of the sick-room,
she would enter Eliza's kitchen with writhen face, unable to
control her anger:

"That damned old woman! Sometimes I believe she did it on purpose.
My God, am I to get no happiness from life? Will they never leave
me alone? Urr-p! Urr-p!"--Her rough bacchic smile played loosely
over her large unhappy face. "Mama, in God's name where does it
all come from?" she said, grinning tearfully. "I do nothing but
mop up after her. Will you please tell me how long it's going to
last?"

Eliza laughed slyly, passing her finger under her broad nosewing.

"Why, child!" she said. "What in the world! I've never seen the
like! She must have saved up for the last six months."

"Yes, sir!" said Helen, looking vaguely away, with a profane smile
playing across her mouth, "I'd just like to know where the hell it
all comes from. I've had everything else," she said, with a rough
angry laugh, "I'm expecting one of her kidneys at any minute."

"Whew-w!" cried Eliza, shaken with laughter.

"Hel-en! Oh Hel'en!" Mrs. Barton's voice came feebly in to them.

"O gotohell!" said the girl, sotto-voce. "Urr-p! Urr-p!" She
burst suddenly into tears: "Is it going to be like this always! I
sometimes believe the judgment of God is against us all. Papa was
right."

"Pshaw!" said Eliza, wetting her fingers, and threading a needle
before the light. "I'd go on and pay no more attention to her.
There's nothing wrong with her. It's all imagination!" It was
Eliza's rooted conviction that most human ills, except her own,
were "all imagination."

"Hel-en!"

"All right! I'm coming!" the girl cried cheerfully, turning an
angry grin on Eliza as she went. It was funny. It was ugly. It
was terrible.



It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the chief
celestial Cloud-Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter moderns
have sometimes called "the ancient Jester"--had turned his frown
upon their fortunes.

It began to rain--rain incessant, spouting, torrential rain, fell
among the reeking hills, leaving grass and foliage drowned upon the
slopes, starting the liquid avalanche of earth upon a settlement,
glutting lean rocky mountain-streams to a foaming welter of yellow
flood. It mined the yellow banks away with unheard droppings; it
caved in hillsides; it drank the steep banked earth away below the
rails, leaving them strung to their aerial ties across a gutted
canyon.

There was a flood in Altamont. It swept down in a converging width
from the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its
banks in a wide waste Mississippi. It looted the bottomlands of
the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as
it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all
who dwelt therein.

The town was cut off from every communication with the world. At
the end of the third week, as the waters slid back into their
channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great
pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads, crawled
desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible wrath of
water to achieve their wilted anti-climactic honeymoon.

[Scooter]

"He will go where I send him or not at all," Gant spoke his final
word, not loudly.

Thus, it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University.

Eugene did not want to go to the State University.

For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard about his
future education. It was proposed that, in view of his youth, he
should attend Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years, go to Harvard
for two years more, and then, having arrived by easy stages at
Paradise, "top things off" with a year or two at Oxford.

"Then," said John Dorsey Leonard, who talked enchantingly on the
subject, between mouthfuls of clabber, "then, my sonny, a man may
begin to say he's really 'cultsherd.' After that, of course," he
continued with a spacious carelessness, "he may travel for a year
or so."

But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him.

"You're too young, boy," said Margaret Leonard. "Can't you
persuade your father to wait another year? You're only a child in
years, Eugene. You have all the time in the world." Her eyes
darkened as she talked.

Gant would not be persuaded.

"He's old enough," he said. "When I was his age I had been earning
my living for years. I'm getting old. I won't be here much
longer. I want him to begin to make a name for himself before I
die."

He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement. In his
youngest son he saw the last hope of his name's survival in
laurels--in the political laurels he so valued. He wanted his son
to be a great and far-seeing statesman and a member of the
Republican or Democratic party. His choice of a university was
therefore a measure of political expediency, founded upon the
judgment of his legal and political friends.

"He's ready to go," said Gant, "and he's going to the State
University, and nowhere else. He'll be given as good an education
there as he can get anywhere. Furthermore, he will make friends
there who will stand by him the rest of his life." He turned upon
his son a glance of bitter reproach. "There are very few boys who
have had your chance," said he, "and you ought to be grateful
instead of turning up your nose at it. Mark my words, you'll live
to see the day when you'll thank me for sending you there. Now,
I've given you my last word: you'll go where I send you or you'll
go nowhere at all."

[Scooter]

PART THREE



28


Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the
university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches
tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds. He had been sick very little
in his life, but his rapid growth had eaten sharply at his
strength: he was full of a wild energy of mind and body that
devoured him and left him exhausted. He tired very quickly.

He was a child when he went away: he was a child who had looked
much on pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the Ideal.
Walled up in his great city of visions, his tongue had learned to
mock, his lip to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no
grooving in the secret life. Again and again he had been bogged in
the gray slough of factuality. His cruel eyes had missed the
meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter heart had sweltered in
him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at the glow of
his imagination. He was not a child when he reflected, but when he
dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his
belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men:
he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly
lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave
heroic lives. He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and
gentleness he had little known. He believed in beauty and in
order, and that he would wreak out their mighty forms upon the
distressful chaos of his life. He believed in love, and in the
goodness and glory of women. He believed in valiance, and he hoped
that, like Socrates, he would do nothing mean or common in the hour
of danger. He exulted in his youth, and he believed that he could
never die.

Four years later, when he was graduated, he had passed his
adolescence, the kiss of love and death burned on his lips, and he
was still a child.

When it was at last plain that Gant's will was on this inflexible,
Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:

"Well, then, go your ways, boy. Go your ways. God bless you."

She looked a moment at his long thin figure and turned to John
Dorsey Leonard with wet eyes:

"Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who came to us four
years ago? Can you believe it?"

John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary gentle relaxation.

"What do you know about it?" he said.

When Margaret turned to him again her voice, low and gentle, was
charged with the greatest passion he had ever heard in it.

"You are taking a part of our heart with you, boy. Do you know
that?"

She took his trembling hand gently between her own lean fingers.
He lowered his head and closed his eyelids tightly.

"Eugene," she continued, "we could not love you more if you were
our own child. We wanted to keep you with us for another year, but
since that cannot be, we are sending you out with our hopes pinned
to you. Oh, boy, you are fine. There is no atom in you that is
not fine. A glory and a chrism of bright genius rest upon you.
God bless you: the world is yours."

The proud words of love and glory sank like music to his heart,
evoking their bright pictures of triumph, and piercing him with the
bitter shame of his concealed desires. Love bade him enter, but
his soul drew back, guilty of lust and sin.

He tore his hand from her grasp, clinching, with the strangled cry
of an animal, his convulsive throat.

"I can't!" he choked. "You mustn't think--" He could not go on;
his life groped blindly to confessional.

Later, after he left her, her light kiss upon his cheek, the first
she had ever given him, burned like a ring of fire.



That summer he was closer to Ben than ever before. They occupied
the same room at Woodson Street. Luke had returned to the
Westinghouse plant at Pittsburgh after Helen's marriage.

Gant still occupied his sitting-room, but the rest of the house he
had rented to a sprightly gray-haired widow of forty. She looked
after them beautifully, but she served Ben with an especial
tenderness. At night, on the cool veranda, Eugene would find them
below the ripening clusters, hear the quiet note of his brother's
voice, his laugh, see the slow red arc of his cigarette in
darkness.

The quiet one was more quiet and morose than he had ever been
before: he stalked through the house scowling ferociously. All his
conversation with Eliza was short and bitterly scornful; with Gant
he spoke hardly at all. They had never talked together. Their
eyes never met--a great shame, the shame of father and son, that
mystery that goes down beyond motherhood, beyond life, that
mysterious shame that seals the lips of all men, and lives in their
hearts, had silenced them.

But to Eugene, Ben talked more freely than ever before. As they
sat upon their beds at night, reading and smoking before they
slept, all of the pain and bitterness of Benjamin Gant's life burst
out in violent denunciation. He began to speak with slow sullen
difficulty, halting over his words as he did when he read, but
speaking more rapidly as his quiet voice became more passionate.

"I suppose they've told you how poor they are?" he began, tossing
his cigarette away.

"Well," said Eugene, "I've got to go easy. I mustn't waste my
money."

"Ah-h!" said Ben, making an ugly face. He laughed silently, with a
thin and bitter contortion of his lips.

"Papa said that a lot of boys pay their own way through college by
waiting on tables and so on. Perhaps I can do something like
that."

Ben turned over on his side until he faced his brother, propping
himself on his thin hairy forearm.

"Now listen, 'Gene," he said sternly, "don't be a damned little
fool, do you hear? You take every damn cent you can get out of
them," he added savagely.

"Well, I appreciate what they're doing. I'm getting a lot more
than the rest of you had. They're doing a lot for me," said the
boy.

"For YOU, you little idiot!" said Ben, scowling at him in disgust.
"They're doing it all for themselves. Don't let them get away with
that. They think you'll make good and bring a lot of credit to
them some day. They're rushing you into it two years too soon, as
it is. No, you take everything you can get. The rest of us never
had anything, but I want to see you get all that's coming to you.
My God!" he cried furiously.

"Their money's doing no one any good rotting in the damned bank, is
it? No, 'Gene, get all you can. When you get down there, if you
find you need more to hold your own with the other boys, make the
old man give it to you. You've never had a chance to hold your
head up in your own home town, so make the most of your chances
when you get away."

He lighted a cigarette and smoked in bitter silence for a moment.

"To hell with it all!" he said. "What in God's name are we living
for!"

[Scooter]

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

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

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

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

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

He was alone. He was desperately lonely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mr.--? Mr.--?--" he said, fumbling at his index cards.

"Gant," said Eugene.

"Ah, yes--Mr. Gant," he smiled his contrition. "Now--about your
outside reading?" he began.

But what, thought Eugene, about my inside reading?

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

"Yes, sir," said Eugene.

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

"Yes, sir," said Eugene.

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

"It kills," he observed, "a man's useless enthusiasms."

Eugene whitened a little.

"That's fine," he said.

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

"Yes, sir," said Eugene. "I've read all the others. There's a new
book out."

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

"I'll take the Barrie," said Eugene.

Yes, he rather thought that would be better.

"Well, good day. Mr.--Mr.--?--?" he smiled, fumbling again with
his cards.

"Gant."

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

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

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

God save our King and Queen!

[Scooter]

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

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

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

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

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

"Bravo, Brother Gant! Excellent! Splendid! You are riding a good
pony--but a little too smoothly, my boy. You ride a little too
well."

The class sniggered heavily.

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

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

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

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

"But--" Eugene began explosively.

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

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

"Well, what do you say?" he asked. "Will you try?"

"All right! Yes!" the boy yelled. "I'll try it."

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

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

"Yes," said Eugene gratefully, "it certainly is--"

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

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

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

"Mister Gant, you make me so damned mad I could throw you out the
window."

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

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

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

[Scooter]

29


Before his first year was ended, the boy had changed his lodging
four or five times. He finished the year living alone in a big
bare carpetless room--an existence rare at Pulpit Hill, where the
students, with very few exceptions, lived two or three to a room.
In that room began a physical isolation, hard enough to bear at
first, which later became indispensable to him, mind and body.

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

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

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

"I hear you're leaving us, 'Gene," he said.

"Yes," said Eugene.

"Is it because of the way I've acted?"

"Yes," said Eugene.

"You take things too seriously, 'Gene," he said.

"Yes," said Eugene.

"I don't want you to go having hard feelings, 'Gene. Let's shake
hands and be friends."

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

"Let's shake hands, 'Gene," said the boy once more, waggling his
out-thrust fingers.

"No," said Eugene.

"You don't hate me, do you?" whined G. T.

"No," said Eugene.

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

Eugene lived in a small world, but its ruins for him were actual.
His misfortunes were trifling, but their effect upon his spirit was
deep and calamitous. He withdrew deeply and scornfully into his
cell. He was friendless, whipped with scorn and pride. He set his
face blindly against all the common united life around him.

It was during this bitter and desperate autumn that Eugene first
met Jim Trivett.

Jim Trivett, the son of a rich tobacco farmer in the eastern part
of the State, was a good tempered young tough of twenty years. He
was a strong, rather foul-looking boy, with a coarse protruding
mouth, full-meated and slightly ajar, constantly rayed with a faint
loose smile and blotted at the comer with a brown smear of tobacco
juice. He had bad teeth. His hair was light-brown, dry, and
unruly: it stuck out in large untidy mats. He was dressed in the
last cheap extreme of the dreadful fashion of the time: skin-tight
trousers that ended an inch above his oxford shoes exposing an inch
of clocked hose, a bobtailed coat belted in across his kidneys,
large striped collars of silk. Under his coat he wore a big
sweater with high-school numerals.

Jim Trivett lived with several other students from his community in
a lodging-house near Mrs. Bradley's but closer to the west gate of
the university. There were four young men banded together for
security and companionship in two untidy rooms heated to a baking
dryness by small cast-iron stoves. They made constant preparations
for study, but they never studied: one would enter sternly,
announcing that he had "a hell of a day tomorrow," and begin the
most minute preparations for a long contest with his books: he
would sharpen his pencils carefully and deliberately, adjust his
lamp, replenish the red-hot stove, move his chair, put on an eye-
shade, clean his pipe, stuff it carefully with tobacco, light,
relight, and empty it, then, with an expression of profound relief,
hear a rapping on his door.

"Come in the house, Goddamn it!" he would roar hospitably.

"Hello, 'Gene! Pull up a chair, son, and sit down," said Tom
Grant. He was a thickly built boy, gaudily dressed; he had a low
forehead, black hair, and a kind, stupid, indolent temper.

"Have you been working?"

"Hell, yes!" shouted Jim Trivett. "I've been working like a son-
of-a-bitch."

"God!" said Tom Grant, turning slowly to look at him. "Boy, you're
going to choke to death on one of those some day." He shook his
head slowly and sadly, then continued with a rough laugh: "If old
man Trivett knew what you were doing with his money, damn if he
wouldn't bust a gut."

"Gene!" said Jim Trivett, "what the hell do you know about this
damned English, anyway?"

"What he doesn't know about it," said Tom Grant, "you could write
out on the back of a postage stamp. Old man Sanford thinks you're
hell, 'Gene."

"I thought you had Torrington," said Jim Trivett.

"No," said Eugene, "I wasn't English enough. Young and crude. I
changed, thank God! What is it you want, Jim?" he asked.

"I've got a long paper to write. I don't know what to write
about," said Jim Trivett.

"What do you want me to do? Write it for you?"

"Yes," said Jim Trivett.

"Write your own damn paper," said Eugene with mimic toughness, "I
won't do it for you. I'll help you if I can."

"When are you going to let Hard Boy take you to Exeter?" said Tom
Grant, winking at Jim Trivett.

Eugene flushed, making a defensive answer.

"I'm ready to go any time he is," he said uneasily.

"Look here, Legs!" said Jim Trivett, grinning loosely. "Do you
really want to go with me or are you just bluffing?"

"I'll go with you! I've told you I'd go with you!" Eugene said
angrily. He trembled a little.

Tom Grant grinned slyly at Jim Trivett.

"It'll make a man of you, 'Gene," he said. "Boy, it'll sure put
hair on your chest." He laughed, not loudly, but uncontrollably,
shaking his head as at some secret thought.

Jim Trivett's loose smile widened. He spat into the wood-box.

"Gawd!" he said. "They'll think Spring is here when they see old
Legs. They'll need a stepladder to git at him."

Tom Grant was shaken with hard fat laughter.

"They sure God will!" he said.

"Well, what about it, 'Gene?" Jim Trivett demanded suddenly. "Is
it a go? Saturday?"

"Suits me!" said Eugene.

When he had gone, they grinned thirstily at each other for a
moment, the pleased corrupters of chastity.

"Pshaw!" said Tom Grant. "You oughtn't to do that, Hard Boy.
You're leading the boy astray."

"It's not going to hurt him," said Jim Trivett. "It'll be good for
him."

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grinning.

[Scooter]

"Wait a minute!" whispered Jim Trivett. "I think this is the
place."

They had turned away from the centre of the dreary tobacco town.
For a quarter of an hour they had walked briskly through drab
autumnal streets, descending finally a long rutted hill that led
them, past a thinning squalor of cheap houses, almost to the
outskirts. It was three weeks before Christmas: the foggy air was
full of chill menace. There was a brooding quietness, broken by
far small sounds. They turned into a sordid little road, unpaved,
littered on both sides with negro shacks and the dwellings of poor
whites. It was a world of rickets. The road was unlighted. Their
feet stirred dryly through fallen leaves.

They paused before a two-storey frame house. A lamp burned dimly
behind lowered yellow shades, casting a murky pollen out upon the
smoky air.

"Wait a minute," said Jim Trivett, in a low voice, "I'll find out."

They heard scuffling steps through the leaves. In a moment a negro
man prowled up.

"Hello, John," said Jim Trivett, almost inaudibly.

"Evenin', boss!" the negro answered wearily, but in the same tone.

"We're looking for Lily Jones' house," said Jim Trivett. "Is this
it?"

"Yes, suh," said the negro, "dis is it."

Eugene leaned against a tree, listening to their quiet conspiratorial
talk. The night, vast and listening, gathered about him its evil
attentive consciousness. His lips were cold and trembled. He
thrust a cigarette between them and, shivering, turned up the thick
collar of his overcoat.

"Does Miss Lily know you're comin'?" the negro asked.

"No," said Jim Trivett. "Do you know her?"

"Yes, suh," said the negro. "I'll go up dar wid yo'."

Eugene waited in the shadow of the tree while the two men went up
to the house. They avoided the front veranda, and went around to
the side. The negro rapped gently at a latticed door. There were
always latticed doors. Why?

He waited, saying farewell to himself. He stood over his life, he
felt, with lifted assassin blade. He was mired to his neck,
inextricably, in complication. There was no escape.

There had been a faint closed noise from the house: voices and
laughter, and the cracked hoarse tone of an old phonograph. The
sound stopped quickly as the negro rapped: the shabby house seemed
to listen. In a moment, a hinge creaked stealthily: he caught the
low startled blur of a woman's voice. Who is it? Who?

In another moment Jim Trivett returned to him, and said quietly:

"It's all right, 'Gene. Come on."

He slipped a coin into the negro's hand, thanking him. Eugene
looked for a moment into the black broad friendliness of the man's
face. He had a flash of warmth through his cold limbs. The black
bawd had done his work eagerly and kindly: over their bought
unlovely loves lay the warm shadow of his affection.

They ascended the path quietly and, mounting two or three steps,
went in under the latticed door. A woman stood beside it, holding
it open. When they had entered, she closed it securely. Then they
crossed the little porch and entered the house.

They found themselves in a little hall which cleft the width of the
house. A smoky lamp, wicked low, cast its dim circle into the
dark. An uncarpeted stair mounted to the second floor. There were
two doors both to left and right, and an accordion hat-rack, on
which hung a man's battered felt hat.

Jim Trivett embraced the woman immediately, grinning, and fumbling
in her breast.

"Hello, Lily," he said.

"Gawd!" She smiled crudely, and continued to peer at Eugene,
curious at what the maw of night had thrown in to her. Then,
turning to Jim Trivett with a coarse laugh, she said:

"Lord a' mercy! Any woman that gits him will have to cut off some
of them legs."

"I'd like to see him with Thelma," said Jim Trivett, grinning.

Lily Jones laughed hoarsely. The door to the right opened and
Thelma, a small woman, slightly built, came out, followed by high
empty yokel laughter. Jim Trivett embraced her affectionately.

"My Gawd!" said Thelma, in a tinny voice. "What've we got here?"
She thrust out her sharp wrenny face, and studied Eugene
insolently.

"I brought you a new beau, Thelma," said Jim Trivett.

"Ain't he the lankiest feller you ever seen?" said Lily Jones
impersonally. "How tall are you, son?" she added, addressing him
in a kind drawl.

He winced a little.

"I don't know," he said. "I think about six three."

"He's more than that!" said Thelma positively. "He's seven foot
tall or I'm a liar."

"He hasn't measured since last week," said Jim Trivett. "He can't
be sure about it."

"He's young, too," said Lily, staring at him intently. "How old
are you, son?"

Eugene turned his pallid face away, indefinitely.

"Why," he croaked, "I'm about--"

"He's going on eighteen," said Jim Trivett loyally. "Don't you
worry about him. Old Legs knows all the ropes, all right. He's a
bearcat. I wouldn't kid you. He's been there."

"He don't look that old," said Lily doubtfully. "I wouldn't call
him more'n fifteen, to look at his face. Ain't he got a little
face, though?" she demanded in a slow puzzled voice.

"It's the only one I've got," said Eugene angrily. "Sorry I can't
change it for a larger one."

"It looks so funny stickin' way up there above you," she went on
patiently.

Thelma nudged her sharply.

"That's because he's got a big frame," she said. "Legs is all
right. When he begins to fill out an' put some meat on them bones
he's goin' to make a big man. You'll be a heartbreaker sure,
Legs," she said harshly, taking his cold hand and squeezing it. In
him the ghost, his stranger, turned grievously away. O God! I
shall remember, he thought.

"Well," said Jim Trivett, "let's git goin'." He embraced Thelma
again. They fumbled amorously.

"You go on upstairs, son," said Lily. "I'll be up in a minute.
The door's open."

"See you later, 'Gene," said Jim Trivett. "Stay with them, son."

He hugged the boy roughly with one arm, and went into the room to
the left with Thelma.

Eugene mounted the creaking stairs slowly and entered the room with
the open door. A hot mass of coals glowed flamelessly in the
hearth. He took off his hat and overcoat and threw them across a
wooden bed. Then he sat down tensely in a rocker and leaned
forward, holding his trembling fingers to the heat. There was no
light save that of the coals; but, by their dim steady glow, he
could make out the old and ugly wall-paper, stained with long
streaks of water rust, and scaling, in dry tattered scrolls, here
and there. He sat quietly, bent forward, but he shook violently,
as with an ague, from time to time. Why am I here? This is not I,
he thought.

Presently he heard the woman's slow heavy tread upon the stairs:
she entered in a swimming tide of light, bearing a lamp before her.
She put the lamp down on a table and turned the wick. He could see
her now more plainly. Lily was a middle-aged country woman, with a
broad heavy figure, unhealthily soft. Her smooth peasant face was
mapped with fine little traceries of wrinkles at the corners of
mouth and eyes, as if she had worked much in the sun. She had
black hair, coarse and abundant. She was whitely plastered with
talcum powder. She was dressed shapelessly in a fresh loose dress
of gingham, unbelted. She was dressed like a housewife, but she
conceded to her profession stockings of red silk, and slippers of
red felt, trimmed with fur, in which she walked with a flat-footed
tread.

The woman fastened the door, and returned to the hearth where the
boy was now standing. He embraced her with feverish desire,
fondling her with his long nervous hands. Indecisively, he sat in
the rocker and drew her down clumsily on his knee. She yielded her
kisses with the coy and frigid modesty of the provincial harlot,
turning her mouth away. She shivered as his cold hands touched
her.

"You're cold as ice, son," she said. "What's the matter?"

She chafed him with rough embarrassed professionalism. In a moment
she rose impatiently.

"Let's git started," she said. "Where's my money?"

He thrust two crumpled bills into her hand.

Then he lay down beside her. He trembled, unnerved and impotent.
Passion was extinct in him.

The massed coals caved in the hearth. The lost bright wonder died.

[Scooter]

When he went down stairs, he found Jim Trivett waiting in the hall,
holding Thelma by the hand. Lily led them out quietly, after
peering through the lattice into the fog, and listening for a
moment.

"Be quiet," she whispered, "there's a man across the street.
They've been watching us lately."

"Come again, Slats," Thelma murmured, pressing his hand.

They went out softly, treading gently until they reached the road.
The fog had thickened: the air was saturated with fine stinging
moisture.

At the corner, in the glare of the street-lamp, Jim Trivett
released his breath with loud relief, and stepped forward boldly.

"Damn!" he said. "I thought you were never coming. What were you
trying to do with the woman, Legs?" Then, noting the boy's face,
he added quickly, with warm concern: "What's the matter, 'Gene?
Don't you feel good?"

"Wait a minute!" said Eugene thickly. "Be all right!"

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

"How do you feel?" asked Jim Trivett. "Better?"

"Yes," said Eugene, "I'm all right now."

"Why didn't you tell me you were sick?" said Jim Trivett chidingly.

"It came on all of a sudden," said Eugene. He added presently: "I
think it was something I ate at that damn Greek's to-night."

"I felt all right," said Jim Trivett. "A cup of coffee will fix
you up," he added with cheerful conviction.

They mounted the hill slowly. The light from winking cornerlamps
fell with a livid stare across the fronts of the squalid houses.

"Jim," said Eugene, after a moment's pause.

"Yes. What is it?"

"Don't say anything about my getting sick," he said awkwardly.

Surprised, Jim Trivett stared at him.

"Why not? There's nothing in that," he said. "Pshaw, boy, any
one's likely to get sick."

"Yes, I know. But I'd rather you wouldn't."

"Oh, all right. I won't. Why should I?" said Jim Trivett.

Eugene was haunted by his own lost ghost: he knew it to be
irrecoverable. For three days he avoided every one: the brand of
his sin, he felt, was on him. He was published by every gesture,
by every word. His manner grew more defiant, his greeting to life
more unfriendly. He clung more closely to Jim Trivett, drawing a
sad pleasure from his coarse loyal praise. His unappeased desire
began to burn anew: it conquered his bodily disgust and made new
pictures. At the end of the week he went again, alone, to Exeter,
No more of him, he felt, could be lost. This time he sought out
Thelma.