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Title:      Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
Author:     Thomas Wolfe
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
            A Story of the Buried Life
Author:     Thomas Wolfe





TO A. B.

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




TO THE READER

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

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

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




LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL



PART ONE


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

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

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

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

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



1


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

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

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

This is a moment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were new lands.  His heart lifted.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who is that?" he asked a man.

The man looked and grinned.

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

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

"Has Armageddon come yet?"

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Doing any business?" she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gant grinned with a thin false painting of mirth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



2


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



3


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was vast whisky laughter.

"Who is she?" some one asked.

"She's Will Pentland's sister."

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

"You DRINK this!  You better!"

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

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


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


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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy locked the door.

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

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

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

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

There was nothing but the white living silence.

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

There was no answer.

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

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

Silence answered.

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She pursed her mouth rapidly for some moments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



4


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

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

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

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

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

The boy was gone over the fence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gant was outside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The negro girl, blubbering, had fled inward.

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

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

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

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

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



5


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Go?  Go where?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen stirred nervously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

"Swallowed a fly!  Swallowed a fly!"

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


and so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



6


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gant was a great man, and not a singular one, because singularity
does no