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Title:      Of Time and The River (1935)
            A Legend of Man's Hunger in his Youth
Author:     Thomas Wolfe
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Of Time and The River (1935)
            A Legend of Man's Hunger in his Youth
Author:     Thomas Wolfe





"Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of
the beast that goeth downward to the earth?"



To

MAXWELL EVARTS PERKINS

A GREAT EDITOR AND A BRAVE AND HONEST MAN, WHO STUCK TO THE WRITER
OF THIS BOOK THROUGH TIMES OF BITTER HOPELESSNESS AND DOUBT AND
WOULD NOT LET HIM GIVE IN TO HIS OWN DESPAIR, A WORK TO BE KNOWN AS
"OF TIME AND THE RIVER" IS DEDICATED WITH THE HOPE THAT ALL OF IT
MAY BE IN SOME WAY WORTHY OF THE LOYAL DEVOTION AND THE PATIENT
CARE WHICH A DAUNTLESS AND UNSHAKEN FRIEND HAS GIVEN TO EACH PART
OF IT, AND WITHOUT WHICH NONE OF IT COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN



"Crito, my dear friend Crito, that, believe me, that is what I seem
to hear, as the Corybants hear flutes in the air, and the sound of
those words rings and echoes in my ears and I can listen to nothing
else."




CONTENTS


Book One

ORESTES: FLIGHT BEFORE FURY

Book Two

YOUNG FAUSTUS

Book Three

TELEMACHUS

Book Four

PROTEUS: THE CITY

Book Five

JASON'S VOYAGE

Book Six

ANTÆUS: EARTH AGAIN

Book Seven

KRONOS AND RHEA: THE DREAM OF TIME

Book Eight

FAUST AND HELEN




"Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht,
Kennst du es wohl?
             Dahin!  Dahin
Möcht' ich mit dir, O mein Geliebter, ziehn!

Kennst du das Haus, auf Säulen ruht sein Dach,
Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,
Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?
Kennst du es wohl?
             Dahin!  Dahin
Möcht' ich mit dir, O mein Beschützer, ziehn!

Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg,
In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut,
Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut:
Kennst du ihn wohl?
             Dahin!  Dahin
Geht unser Weg; O Vater, lass uns ziehn!"




BOOK I

ORESTES: FLIGHT BEFORE FURY


. . . of wandering for ever and the earth again . . . of seed-time,
bloom, and the mellow-dropping harvest.  And of the big flowers,
the rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers.

Where shall the weary rest?  When shall the lonely of heart come
home?  What doors are open for the wanderer?  And which of us shall
find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what
time, and in what land?  Where?  Where the weary of heart can abide
for ever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the
tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be for ever stilled.

Who owns the earth?  Did we want the earth that we should wander on
it?  Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it?
Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still
upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one
small room for ever.

Did he feel the need of a thousand tongues that he sought thus
through the moil and horror of a thousand furious streets?  He
shall need a tongue no longer, he shall need no tongue for silence
and the earth: he shall speak no word through the rooted lips, the
snake's cold eye will peer for him through sockets of the brain,
there will be no cry out of the heart where wells the vine.

The tarantula is crawling through the rotted oak, the adder lisps
against the breast, cups fall: but the earth will endure for ever.
The flower of love is living in the wilderness, and the elm-root
threads the bones of buried lovers.

The dead tongue withers and the dead heart rots, blind mouths crawl
tunnels through the buried flesh, but the earth will endure for
ever; hair grows like April on the buried breast and from the
sockets of the brain the death flowers grow and will not perish.

O flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in
all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand
days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her
kiss, but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone
and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent
from our loneliness.



I


About fifteen years ago, at the end of the second decade of this
century, four people were standing together on the platform of the
railway station of a town in the hills of western Catawba.  This
little station, really just a suburban adjunct of the larger town
which, behind the concealing barrier of a rising ground, swept away
a mile or two to the west and north, had become in recent years the
popular point of arrival and departure for travellers to and from
the cities of the east, and now, in fact, accommodated a much
larger traffic than did the central station of the town, which was
situated two miles westward around the powerful bend of the rails.
For this reason a considerable number of people were now assembled
here, and from their words and gestures, a quietly suppressed
excitement that somehow seemed to infuse the drowsy mid-October
afternoon with an electric vitality, it was possible to feel the
thrill and menace of the coming train.

An observer would have felt in the complexion of this gathering a
somewhat mixed quality--a quality that was at once strange and
familiar, alien and native, cosmopolitan and provincial.  It was
not the single native quality of the usual crowd that one saw on
the station platforms of the typical Catawba town as the trains
passed through.  This crowd was more mixed and varied, and it had a
strong colouring of worldly smartness, the element of fashionable
sophistication that one sometimes finds in a place where a native
and alien population have come together.  And such an inference was
here warranted: the town of Altamont a mile or so away was a well-
known resort and the mixed gathering on the station platform was
fairly representative of its population.  But all of these people,
both strange and native, had been drawn here by a common
experience, an event which has always been of first interest in the
lives of all Americans.  This event is the coming of the train.

It would have been evident to an observer that of the four people
who were standing together at one end of the platform three--the
two women and the boy--were connected by the relationship of blood.
A stranger would have known instantly that the boy and the young
woman were brother and sister and that the woman was their mother.
The relationship was somehow one of tone, texture, time, and
energy, and of the grain and temper of the spirit.  The mother was
a woman of small but strong and solid figure.  Although she was
near her sixtieth year, her hair was jet-black and her face, full
of energy and power, was almost as smooth and unlined as the face
of a girl.  Her hair was brushed back from a forehead which was
high, white, full, and naked-looking, and which, together with the
expression of her eyes, which were brown, and rather worn and weak,
but constantly thoughtful, constantly reflective, gave her face the
expression of straight grave innocence that children have, and also
of strong native intelligence and integrity.  Her skin was milk-
white, soft of texture, completely colourless save for the nose,
which was red, broad and fleshy at the base, and curiously
masculine.

A stranger seeing her for the first time would have known somehow
that the woman was a member of a numerous family, and that her face
had the tribal look.  He would somehow have felt certain that the
woman had brothers and that if he could see them, they would look
like her.  Yet, this masculine quality was not a quality of sex,
for the woman, save for the broad manlike nose, was as thoroughly
female as a woman could be.  It was rather a quality of tribe and
character--a tribe and character that was decisively masculine.

The final impression of the woman might have been this:--that her
life was somehow above and beyond a moral judgment, that no matter
what the course or chronicle of her life may have been, no matter
what crimes of error, avarice, ignorance, or thoughtlessness might
be charged to her, no matter what suffering or evil consequences
may have resulted to other people through any act of hers, her life
was somehow beyond these accidents of time, training, and occasion,
and the woman was as guiltless as a child, a river, an avalanche,
or any force of nature whatsoever.

The younger of the two women was about thirty years old.  She was a
big woman, nearly six feet tall, large, and loose of bone and limb,
almost gaunt.  Both women were evidently creatures of tremendous
energy, but where the mother suggested a constant, calm, and almost
tireless force, the daughter was plainly one of those big,
impulsive creatures of the earth who possess a terrific but
undisciplined vitality, which they are ready to expend with a
whole-souled and almost frenzied prodigality on any person,
enterprise, or object which appeals to their grand affections.

This difference between the two women was also reflected in their
faces.  The face of the mother, for all its amazing flexibility,
the startled animal-like intentness with which her glance darted
from one object to another, and the mobility of her powerful and
delicate mouth, which she pursed and convolved with astonishing
flexibility in such a way as to show the constant reflective effort
of her mind, was nevertheless the face of a woman whose spirit had
an almost elemental quality of patience, fortitude and calm.

The face of the younger woman was large, high-boned, and generous
and already marked by the frenzy and unrest of her own life.  At
moments it bore legibly and terribly the tortured stain of
hysteria, of nerves stretched to the breaking point, of the furious
impatience, unrest and dissonance of her own tormented spirit, and
of impending exhaustion and collapse for her overwrought vitality.
Yet, in an instant, this gaunt, strained, tortured, and almost
hysterical face could be transformed by an expression of serenity,
wisdom and repose that would work unbelievably a miracle of calm
and radiant beauty on the nervous, gaunt, and tortured features.

Now, each in her own way, the two women were surveying the other
people on the platform and the new arrivals with a ravenous and
absorptive interest, bestowing on each a wealth of information,
comment, and speculation which suggested an encyclopædic knowledge
of the history of every one in the community.

"--Why, yes, child," the mother was saying impatiently, as she
turned her quick glance from a group of people who at the moment
were the subject of discussion--"that's what I'm telling you!--
Don't I know? . . .  Didn't I grow up with all those people? . . .
Wasn't Emma Smathers one of my girlhood friends? . . .  That boy's
not this woman's child at all.  He's Emma Smathers' child by that
first marriage."

"Well, that's news to me," the younger woman answered.  "That's
certainly news to me.  I never knew Steve Randolph had been married
more than once.  I'd always thought that all that bunch were Mrs.
Randolph's children."

"Why, of course not!" the mother cried impatiently.  "She never had
any of them except Lucille.  All the rest of them were Emma's
children.  Steve Randolph was a man of forty-five when he married
her.  He'd been a widower for years--poor Emma died in childbirth
when Bernice was born--nobody ever thought he'd marry again and
nobody ever expected this woman to have any children of her own,
for she was almost as old as he was--why, yes!--hadn't she been
married before, a widow, you know, when she met him, came here
after her first husband's death from some place way out West--oh,
Wyoming, or Nevada or Idaho, one of those States, you know--and had
never had chick nor child, as the saying goes--till she married
Steve.  And that woman was every day of forty-four years old when
Lucille was born."

"Uh-huh! . . .  Ah-hah! the younger woman muttered absently, in a
tone of rapt and fascinated interest, as she looked distantly at
the people in the other group, and reflectively stroked her large
chin with a big, bony hand.  "So Lucille, then, is really John's
half-sister?"

"Why, of course!" the mother cried.  "I thought every one knew
that.  Lucille's the only one that this woman can lay claim to.
The rest of them were Emma's."

"--Well, that's certainly news to me," the younger woman said
slowly as before.  "It's the first _I_ ever heard of it. . . .  And
you say she was forty-four when Lucille was born?"

"Now, she was all of THAT," the mother said.  "I know.  And she may
have been even older."

"Well," the younger woman said, and now she turned to her silent
husband, Barton, with a hoarse snigger, "it just goes to show that
while there's life there's hope, doesn't it?  So cheer up, honey,"
she said to him, "we may have a chance yet."  But despite her air
of rough banter her clear eyes for a moment had a look of deep pain
and sadness in them.

"Chance!" the mother cried strongly, with a little scornful pucker
of the lips--"why, of course there is!  If I was your age again I'd
have a dozen--and never think a thing of it."  For a moment she was
silent, pursing her reflective lips.  Suddenly a faint sly smile
began to flicker at the edges of her lips, and turning to the boy,
she addressed him with an air of sly and bantering mystery:

"Now, boy," she said--"there's lots of things that you don't know
. . . you always thought you were the last--the youngest--didn't
you?"

"Well, wasn't I?" he said.

"H'm!" she said with a little scornful smile and an air of great
mystery--"There's lots that I could tell you--"

"Oh, my God!" he groaned, turning towards his sister with an
imploring face.  "More mysteries! . . .  The next thing I'll find
that there were five sets of triplets after I was born--Well, come
on, Mama," he cried impatiently.  "Don't hint around all day about
it. . . .  What's the secret now--how many were there?"

"H'm!" she said with a little bantering, scornful, and significant
smile.

"O Lord!" he groaned again--"Did she ever tell you what it was?"
Again he turned imploringly to his sister.

She snickered hoarsely, a strange high-husky and derisive falsetto
laugh, at the same time prodding him stiffly in the ribs with her
big fingers:

"Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi," she laughed.  "More spooky business, hey?
You don't know the half of it.  She'll be telling you next you were
only the fourteenth."

"H'm!" the older woman said, with a little scornful smile of her
pursed lips.  "Now I could tell him more than that!  The
fourteenth!  Pshaw!" she said contemptuously--"I could tell him--"

"O God!" he groaned miserably.  "I knew it! . . .  I don't want to
hear it."

"K, k, k, k, k," the younger woman snickered derisively, prodding
him in the ribs again.

"No, sir," the older woman went on strongly--"and that's not all
either!--Now, boy, I want to tell you something that you didn't
know," and as she spoke she turned the strange and worn stare of
her serious brown eyes on him, and levelled a half-clasped hand,
fingers pointing, a gesture loose, casual, and instinctive and
powerful as a man's.--"There's a lot I could tell you that you
never heard.  Long years after you were born, child--why, at the
time I took you children to the Saint Louis Fair--" here her face
grew stern and sad, she pursed her lips strongly and shook her head
with a short convulsive movement--"oh, when I think of it--to think
what I went through--oh, awful, awful, you know," she whispered
ominously.

"Now, Mama, for God's sake, I don't want to hear it!" he fairly
shouted, beside himself with exasperation and foreboding.  "God-
damn it, can we have no peace--even when I go away!" he cried
bitterly, and illogically.  "Always these damned gloomy hints and
revelations--this Pentland spooky stuff," he yelled--"this damned
I-could-if-I-wanted-to-tell-you air of mystery, horror, and
damnation!" he shouted incoherently.  "Who cares?  What does it
matter?" he cried, adding desperately, "I don't want to hear about
it--No one cares."

"Why, child, now, I was only saying--" she began hastily and
diplomatically.

"All right, all right, all right," he muttered.  "I don't care--"

"But, as I say, now," she resumed.

"I don't care!" he shouted.  "Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace,"
he muttered in a crazy tone as he turned to his sister.  "A
moment's peace for all of us before we die.  A moment of peace,
peace, peace."

"Why, boy, I'll vow," the mother said in a vexed tone, fixing her
reproving glance on him, "what on earth's come over you?  You act
like a regular crazy man.  I'll vow you do."

"A moment's peace!" he muttered again, thrusting one hand wildly
through his hair.  "I beg and beseech you for a moment's peace
before we perish!"

"K, k, k, k, k," the younger woman snickered derisively, as she
poked him stiffly in the ribs--"There's no peace for the weary.
It's like that river that goes on for ever," she said with a faint
loose curving of lewd humour around the edges of her generous big
mouth--"Now you see, don't you?" she said, looking at him with this
lewd and challenging look.  "You see what it's like now, don't
you? . . .  YOU'RE the lucky one!  YOU got away!  You're smart enough
to go way off somewhere to college--to Boston--Harvard--anywhere--
but YOU'RE away from it.  You get it for a short time when you come
home.  How do you think _I_ stand it?" she said challengingly.  "I
have to hear it ALL the time. . . .  Oh, ALL the time, and ALL the
time, and ALL the time!" she said with a kind of weary desperation.
"If they'd only leave me ALONE for five minutes some time I think
I'd be able to pull myself together, but it's this way ALL the time
and ALL the time and ALL the time.  You see, don't you?"

But now, having finished, in a tone of hoarse and panting
exasperation, her frenzied protest, she relapsed immediately into a
state of marked, weary, and dejected resignation.

"Well, I know, I know," she said in a weary and indifferent voice.
". . . Forget about it . . .  Talking does no good . . .  Just try
to make the best of it the little time you're here. . . .  I used
to think something could be done about it . . . but I know
different now," she muttered, although she would have been unable
to explain the logical meaning of these incoherent and disjointed
phrases.

"Hah? . . .  What say?" the mother now cried sharply, darting her
glances from one to another with the quick, startled, curiously
puzzled intentness of an animal or a bird.  "What say?" she cried
sharply again, as no one answered.  "I thought--"

But fortunately, at this moment, this strange and disturbing flash
in which had been revealed the blind and tangled purposes, the
powerful and obscure impulses, the tormented nerves, the whole
tragic perplexity of soul which was of the very fabric of their
lives, was interrupted by a commotion in one of the groups upon the
platform, and by a great guffaw of laughter which instantly roused
these three people from this painful and perplexing scene, and
directed their startled attention to the place from which the
laughter came.

And now again they heard the great guffaw--a solid "Haw!  Haw!
Haw!" which was full of such an infectious exuberance of animal
good-nature that other people on the platform began to smile
instinctively, and to look affectionately towards the owner of the
laugh.

Already, at the sound of the laugh, the young woman had forgotten
the weary and dejected resignation of the moment before, and with
an absent and yet eager look of curiosity in her eyes, she was
staring towards the group from which the laugh had come, and
herself now laughing absently, she was stroking her big chin in a
gesture of meditative curiosity, saying:

"Hah!  Hah!  Hah! . . .  That's George Pentland. . . .  You can
tell him anywhere by his laugh."

"Why, yes," the mother was saying briskly, with satisfaction.
"That's George all right.  I'd know him in the dark the minute that
I heard that laugh.--And say, what about it?  He's always had it--
why, ever since he was a kid-boy--and was going around with
Steve. . . .  Oh, he'd come right out with it anywhere, you know,
in Sunday school, church, or while the preacher was sayin' prayers
before collection--that big, loud laugh, you know, that you could
hear, from here to yonder, as the sayin' goes. . . .  Now I don't
know where it comes from--none of the others ever had it in our
family; now we all liked to laugh well enough, but I never heard no
such laugh as that from any of 'em--there's one thing sure, Will
Pentland never laughed like that in his life--Oh, Pett, you know!
Pett!"--a scornful and somewhat malicious look appeared on the
woman's face as she referred to her brother's wife in that whining
and affected tone with which women imitate the speech of other
women whom they do not like--"Pett got so mad at him one time when
he laughed right out in church that she was goin' to take the child
right home an' whip him.--Told me, says to me, you know--'Oh, I
could wring his neck!  He'll disgrace us all,' she says, 'unless I
cure him of it,' says, 'He burst right out in that great roar of
his while Doctor Baines was sayin' his prayers this morning until
you couldn't hear a word the preacher said.'  Said, 'I was so
mortified to think he could do a thing like that that I'd a-beat
the blood right out of him if I'd had my buggy whip,' says, 'I
don't know where it comes from'--oh, sneerin'-like, you know," the
woman said, imitating the other woman's voice with a sneering and
viperous dislike--"'I don't know where it comes from unless it's
some of that common Pentland blood comin' out in him'--'Now you
listen to me,' I says; oh, I looked her in the eye, you know"--here
the woman looked at her daughter with the straight steady stare of
her worn brown eyes, illustrating her speech with the loose and
powerful gesture of the half-clasped finger-pointing hand--"'you
listen to me.  I don't know where that child gets his laugh,' I
says, 'but you can bet your bottom dollar that he never got it from
his father--or any other Pentland that I ever heard of--for none of
them ever laughed that way--Will, or Jim, or Sam, or George, or Ed,
or Father, or even Uncle Bacchus,' I said--'no, nor old Bill
Pentland either, who was that child's great-grandfather--for I've
seen an' heard 'em all,' I says.  'And as for this common Pentland
blood you speak of, Pett'--oh, I guess I talked to her pretty
straight, you know," she said with a little bitter smile, and the
short, powerful, and convulsive tremor of her strong pursed lips--
"'as for that common Pentland blood you speak of, Pett,' I says, 'I
never heard of that either--for we stood high in the community,' I
says, 'and we all felt that Will was lowerin' himself when he
married a Creasman!'"

"Oh, you didn't say that, Mama, surely not," the young woman said
with a hoarse, protesting, and yet abstracted laugh, continuing to
survey the people on the platform with a bemused and meditative
curiosity, and stroking her big chin thoughtfully as she looked at
them, pausing from time to time to grin in a comical and rather
formal manner, bow graciously and murmur:

"How-do-you-do? ah-hah!  How-do-you-do, Mrs. Willis?"

"Haw!  Haw!  Haw!"  Again the great laugh of empty animal good
nature burst out across the station platform, and this time George
Pentland turned from the group of which he was a member and looked
vacantly around him, his teeth bared with savage joy, as, with two
brown fingers of his strong left hand, he dug vigorously into the
muscular surface of his hard thigh.  It was an animal reflex,
instinctive and unconscious, habitual to him in moments of strong
mirth.

He was a powerful and handsome young man in his early thirties,
with coal-black hair, a strong thick neck, powerful shoulders, and
the bull vitality of the athlete.  He had a red, sensual, curiously
animal and passionate face, and when he laughed his great guffaw,
his red lips were bared over two rows of teeth that were white and
regular and solid as ivory.

--But now, the paroxysm of that savage and mindless laughter having
left him, George Pentland had suddenly espied the mother and her
children, waved to them in genial greeting, and excusing himself
from his companions--a group of young men and women who wore the
sporting look and costume of "the country club crowd"--he was
walking towards his kinsmen at an indolent swinging stride, pausing
to acknowledge heartily the greetings of people on every side, with
whom he was obviously a great favourite.

As he approached, he bared his strong white teeth again in
greeting, and in a drawling, rich-fibred voice, which had
unmistakably the Pentland quality of sensual fullness, humour, and
assurance, and a subtle but gloating note of pleased self-
satisfaction, he said:

"Hello, Aunt Eliza, how are you?  Hello, Helen--how are you, Hugh?"
he said in his high, somewhat accusing, but very strong and
masculine voice, putting his big hand in an easy affectionate way
on Barton's arm.  "Where the hell you been keepin' yourself,
anyway?" he said accusingly.  "Why don't some of you folks come
over to see us sometime?  Elk was askin' about you all the other
day--wanted to know why Helen didn't come round more often."

"Well, George, I tell you how it is," the young woman said with an
air of great sincerity and earnestness.  "Hugh and I have intended
to come over a hundred times, but life has been just one damned
thing after another all summer long.  If I could only have a
moment's peace--if I could only get away by myself for a moment--if
THEY would only leave me ALONE for an hour at a time, I think I
could get myself together again--do you know what I mean, George?"
she said hoarsely and eagerly, trying to enlist him in her
sympathetic confidence--"If they'd only do something for THEMSELVES
once in a while--but they ALL come to me when anything goes wrong--
they never let me have a moment's peace--until at times I think I'm
going crazy--I get QUEER--funny, you know," she said vaguely and
incoherently.  "I don't know whether something happened Tuesday or
last week or if I just imagined it."  And for a moment her big
gaunt face had the dull strained look of hysteria.

"The strain on her has been very great this summer," said Barton in
a deep and grave tone.  "It's--it's," he paused carefully, deeply,
searching for a word, and looked down as he flicked an ash from his
long cigar, "it's--been too much for her.  Everything's on her
shoulders," he concluded in his deep grave voice.

"My God, George, what is it?" she said quietly and simply, in the
tone of one begging for enlightenment.  "Is it going to be this way
all our lives?  Is there never going to be any peace or happiness
for us?  Does it always have to be this way?  Now I want to ask
you--is there nothing in the world but trouble?"

"Trouble!" he said derisively.  "Why, I've had more trouble than
any one of you ever heard of. . . .  I've had enough to kill a
dozen people . . . but when I saw it wasn't goin' to kill me, I
quit worryin'. . . .  So you do the same thing," he advised
heartily.  "Hell, don't WORRY, Helen! . . .  It never got you
anywhere. . . .  You'll be all right," he said.  "You got nothin'
to worry over.  You don't know what trouble is."

"Oh, I'd be all right, George--I think I could stand anything--all
the rest of it--if it wasn't for Papa. . . .  I'm almost crazy from
worrying about him this summer.  There were three times there when
I knew he was gone. . . .  And I honestly believe I pulled him back
each time by main strength and determination--do you know what I
mean?" she said hoarsely and eagerly--"I was just determined not to
let him go.  If his heart had stopped beating I believe I could
have done something to make it start again--I'd have stood over him
and blown my breath into him--got my blood into him--shook him,"
she said with a powerful, nervous movement of her big hands--
"anything just to keep him alive."

"She's--she's--saved his life--time after time," said Barton
slowly, flicking his cigar ash carefully away, and looking down
deeply, searching for a word.

"He'd--he'd--have been a dead man long ago--if it hadn't been for
her."

"Yeah--I know she has," George Pentland drawled agreeably.  "I know
you've sure stuck by Uncle Will--I guess he knows it, too."

"It's not that I mind it, George--you know what I mean?" she said
eagerly.  "Good heavens!  I believe I could give away a dozen lives
if I thought it was going to save his life! . . .  But it's the
STRAIN of it. . . .  Month after month . . . year after year . . .
lying awake at night wondering if he's all right over there in that
back room in Mama's house--wondering if he's keeping warm in that
old cold house--"

"Why, no, child," the older woman said hastily.  "I kept a good
fire burnin' in that room all last winter--that was the warmest
room in the whole place--there wasn't a warmer--"

But immediately she was engulfed, swept aside, obliterated in the
flood-tide of the other's speech.

"--Wondering if he's sick or needs me--if he's begun to bleed
again--oh! George, it makes me sick to think about it--that poor
old man left there all alone, rotting away with that awful cancer,
with that horrible smell about him all the time--everything he
wears gets simply STIFF with that rotten corrupt matter--Do you
know what it is to wait, wait, wait, year after year, and year
after year, never knowing when he's going to die, to have him hang
on by a thread until it seems you've lived forever--that there'll
never be an end--that you'll never have a chance to live your own
life--to have a moment's peace or rest or happiness yourself?  My
God, does it always have to be this way? . . .  Can I never have a
moment's happiness? . . .  Must they ALWAYS come to me?  Does
EVERYTHING have to be put on my shoulders? . . .  Will you tell me
that?"  Her voice had risen to a note of frenzied despair.  She was
glaring at her cousin with a look of desperate and frantic
entreaty, her whole gaunt figure tense and strained with the stress
of her hysteria.

"That's--that's the trouble now," said Barton, looking down and
searching for the word.  "She's . . .  She's . . . made the goat
for every one. . . .  She . . . she has to do it all. . . .
That's . . . that's the thing that's got her down."

"Not that I mind--if it will do any good. . . .  Good heaven's,
Papa's life means more to me than anything on earth. . . .  I'd
keep him alive at any cost as long as there was a breath left in
him. . . .  But it's the strain of it, the STRAIN of it--to wait,
to wait year after year, to feel it hanging over you all the time,
never to know when he will die--always the STRAIN, the strain--do
you see what I mean, George?" she said hoarsely, eagerly, and
pleadingly.  "You see, don't you?"

"I sure do, Helen," he said sympathetically, digging at his thigh,
and with a swift, cat-like grimace of his features.  "I know it's
been mighty tough on you. . . .  How is Uncle Will now?" he said.
"Is he any better?"

"Why, yes," the mother was saying, "he seemed to improve--" but she
was cut off immediately.

"Oh, yes," the daughter said in a tone of weary dejection.  "He
pulled out of this last spell and got well enough to make the trip
to Baltimore--we sent him back a week ago to take another course of
treatments. . . .  But it does no real good, George. . . .  They
can't cure him. . . .  We know that now. . . .  They've told us
that. . . .  It only prolongs the agony. . . .  They help him for a
little while and then it all begins again. . . .  Poor old man!"
she said, and her eyes were wet.  "I'd give everything I have--my
own blood, my own life--if it would do him any good--but, George,
he's gone!" she said desperately.  "Can't you understand that? . . .
They can't save him! . . .  Nothing can save him! . . .  Papa's
a dead man now!"

George looked gravely sympathetic for a moment, winced swiftly, dug
hard fingers in his thigh, and then said:

"Who went to Baltimore with him?"

"Why, Luke's up there," the mother said.  "We had a letter from him
yesterday--said Mr. Gant looks much better already--eats well, you
know, has a good appetite--and Luke says he's in good spirits.
Now--"

"Oh, Mama, for heaven's sake!" the daughter cried.  "What's the use
of talking that way? . . .  He's not getting any better. . . .
Papa's a sick man--dying--good God!  Can no one ever get that into
their heads!" she burst out furiously.  "Am I the only one that
realizes how sick he is?"

"No, now I was only sayin'," the mother began hastily--"Well, as I
say, then," she went on, "Luke's up there with him--and Gene's on
his way there now--he's goin' to stop off there tomorrow on his way
up north to school."

"Gene!" cried George Pentland in a high, hearty, bantering tone,
turning to address the boy directly for the first time.  "What's
all this I hear about you, son?"  He clasped his muscular hand
around the boy's arm in a friendly but powerful grip.  "Ain't one
college enough for you, boy?" he drawled, becoming deliberately
ungrammatical and speaking good-naturedly but with a trace of the
mockery which the wastrel and ne'er-do-well sometimes feels towards
people who have had the energy and application required for steady
or concentrated effort.  "Are you one of those fellers who needs
two or three colleges to hold him down?"

The boy flushed, grinned uncertainly, and said nothing.

"Why, son," drawled George in his hearty, friendly and yet
bantering tone, in which a note of malice was evident, "you'll be
gettin' so educated an' high-brow here before long that you won't
be able to talk to the rest of us at all. . . .  You'll be floatin'
around there so far up in the clouds that you won't even see a
roughneck like me, much less talk to him"--As he went on with this
kind of sarcasm, his speech had become almost deliberately
illiterate, as if trying to emphasize the superior virtue of the
rough, hearty, home-grown fellow in comparison with the bookish
scholar.

"--Where's he goin' to this time, Aunt Eliza?" he said, turning to
her questioningly, but still holding the boy's arm in his strong
grip "Where's he headin' for now?"

"Why," she said, stroking her pursed serious mouth with a slightly
puzzled movement, "he says he's goin' to Harvard.  I reckon," she
said, in the same puzzled tone, "it's all right--I guess he knows
what he's about.  Says he's made up his mind to go--I told him,"
she said, and shook her head again, "that I'd send him for a year
if he wanted to try it--an' then he'll have to get out an' shift
for himself.  We'll see," she said.  "I reckon it's all right."

"Harvard, eh?" said George Pentland.  "Boy, you ARE flyin'
high! . . .  What you goin' to do up there?"

The boy, furiously red of face, squirmed, and finally stammered:

"Why . . . I . . . guess . . . I guess I'll do some studying!"

"You GUESS you will!" roared George.  "You'd damn well BETTER do
some studying--I bet your mother'll take it out of your hide if she
finds you loafin' on her money."

"Why, yes," the mother said, nodding seriously, "I told him it was
up to him to make the most of this--"

"Harvard, eh!" George Pentland said again, slowly looking his cousin
over from head to foot.  "Son, you're flyin' high, you are! . . .
Now don't fly so high you never get back to earth again! . . .  You
know the rest of us who didn't go to Harvard still have to walk
around upon the ground down here," he said.  "So don't fly too high
or we may not even be able to see you!"

"George!  George!" said the young woman in a low tone, holding one
hand to her mouth, and bending over to whisper loudly as she looked
at her young brother.  "Do you think anyone could fly very high
with a pair of feet like that?"

George Pentland looked at the boy's big feet for a moment, shaking
his head slowly in much wonderment.

"Hell, no!" he said at length.  "He'd never get off the ground! . . .
But if you cut 'em off," he said, "he'd go right up like a
balloon, wouldn't he?  Haw!  Haw!  Haw!  Haw!"  The great guffaw
burst from him, and grinning with his solid teeth, he dug blindly
at his thigh.

"Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi," the sister jeered, seeing the boy's flushed
and angry face and prodding him derisively in the ribs--"This is
our Harvard boy! k, k, k, k!"

"Don't let 'em kid you, son," said George now in an amiable and
friendly manner.  "Good luck to you!  Give 'em hell when you get up
there! . . .  You're the only one of us who ever had guts enough to
go through college, and we're proud of you! . . .  Tell Uncle
Bascom and Aunt Louise and all the rest of 'em hello for me when
you get to Boston. . . .  And remember me to your father and Luke
when you get to Baltimore. . . .  Good-bye, Gene--I've got to leave
you now.  Good luck, son," and with a friendly grip of his powerful
hand he turned to go.  "You folks come over sometime--all of you,"
he said in parting.  "We'd like to see you."  And he went away.

At this moment, all up and down the platform, people had turned to
listen to the deep excited voice of a young man who was saying in a
staccato tone of astounded discovery:

"You DON'T mean it! . . .  You SWEAR she did! . . .  And YOU were
there and saw it with your OWN eyes! . . .  Well, if that don't
beat all I ever heard of! . . .  I'll be DAMNED!" after which
ejaculation, with an astounded falsetto laugh, he looked about him
in an abstracted and unseeing manner, thrust one hand quickly and
nervously into his trousers pocket in such a way that his fine
brown coat came back, and the large diamond-shaped pin of the Delta
Kappa Epsilon fraternity was revealed, and at the same time passing
one thin nervous hand repeatedly over the lank brown hair that
covered his small and well-shaped head, and still muttering in
tones of stupefied disbelief--"Lord!  Lord! . . .  What do you know
about that?" suddenly espied the woman and her two children at the
other end of the platform, and without a moment's pause, turned on
his heel, and walked towards them, at the same time muttering to
his astonished friends:

"Wait a minute! . . .  Some one over here I've got to speak to! . . .
Back in a minute!"

He approached the mother and her children rapidly, at his stiff,
prim and somewhat lunging stride, his thin face fixed eagerly upon
them, bearing towards them with a driving intensity of purpose as
if the whole interest and energy of his life were focussed on them,
as if some matter of the most vital consequence depended on his
reaching them as soon as possible.  Arrived, he immediately began
to address the other youth without a word of greeting or
explanation, bursting out with the sudden fragmentary explosiveness
that was part of him:

"Are you taking this train, too? . . .  Are you going today? . . .
Well, what did you decide to do?" he demanded mysteriously in an
accusing and challenging fashion.  "Have you made up your mind
yet? . . .  Pett Barnes says you've decided on Harvard.  Is that
it?"

"Yes, it is."

"Lord, Lord!" said the youth, laughing his falsetto laugh again.
"I don't see how you can! . . .  You'd better come on with me. . . .
What ever got into your head to do a thing like that?" he said
in a challenging tone.  "Why do you want to go to a place like
that?"

"Hah?  What say?"  The mother who had been looking from one to the
other of the two boys with the quick and startled attentiveness of
an animal, now broke in:

"You know each other. . . .  Hah? . . .  You're taking this train,
too, you say?" she said sharply.

"Ah-hah-hah!" the young man laughed abruptly, nervously; grinned,
made a quick stiff little bow, and said with nervous engaging
respectfulness:  "Yes, Ma'am! . . .  Ah-hah-hah! . . .  How d'ye
do? . . .  How d'ye do, Mrs. Gant?"  He shook hands with her
quickly, still laughing his broken and nervous "ah-hah-hah"--"How
d'ye do?" he said, grinning nervously at the younger woman and at
Barton.  "Ah-hah-hah.  How d'ye do?"

The older woman still holding his hand in her rough worn clasp
looked up at him a moment calmly, her lips puckered in tranquil
meditation:

"Now," she said quietly, in the tone of a person who refuses to
admit failure, "I know you.  I know your face.  Just give me a
moment and I'll call you by your name."

The young man grinned quickly, nervously, and then said
respectfully in his staccato speech:

"Yes, Ma'am. . . .  Ah-hah-hah. . . .  Robert Weaver."

"AH-H, that's SO!" she cried, and shook his hands with sudden
warmth.  "You're Robert Weaver's boy, of course."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert, with his quick nervous laugh.  "Yes,
Ma'am. . . .  That's right. . . .  Ah-hah-hah. . . .  Gene and I
went to school together.  We were in the same class at the
University."

"Why, of course!" she cried in a tone of complete enlightenment,
and then went on in a rather vexed manner, "I'll VOW!  I knew you
all along!  I knew that I'd seen you just as soon as I saw your
face!  Your name just slipped my mind a moment--and then, of
course, it all flashed over me. . . .  You're Robert Weaver's
boy! . . .  And you ARE," she still held his hand in her strong,
motherly and friendly clasp, and looking at him with a little sly
smile hovering about the corners of her mouth, she was silent a
moment, regarding him quizzically--"now, boy," she said quietly,
"you may think I've got a pretty poor memory for names and faces--
but I want to tell you something that may surprise you. . . .  I
know more about you than you think I do.  Now," she said, "I'm
going to tell you something and you can tell me if I'm right."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert respectfully.  "Yes, Ma'am."

"You were born," she went on slowly and deliberately, "on September
2nd, 1898, and you are just two years and one month and one day
older than this boy here--" she nodded to her own son.  "Now you
can tell me if I'm right or wrong."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert.  "Yes, Ma'am. . . .  That's right. . . .
You're absolutely right," he cried, and then in an astounded and
admiring tone, he said:  "Well, I'll declare. . . .  If that don't
beat all! . . .  How on earth did you ever remember it!" he cried
in an astonished tone that obviously was very gratifying to her
vanity.

"Well, now, I'll tell you," she said with a little complacent
smile--"I'll tell you how I KNOW. . . .  I remember the day you
were born, boy--because it was on that very day that one of my own
children--my son, Luke--was allowed to get up out of bed after
havin' typhoid fever. . . .  That very day, sir, when Mr. Gant came
home to dinner, he said--'Well, I was just talking to Robert Weaver
on the street and everything's all right.  His wife gave birth to a
baby boy this morning and he says she's out of danger.'  And I know
I said to him, 'Well, then, it's been a lucky day for both of us.
McGuire was here this morning and he said Luke is now well enough
to be up and about.  He's out of danger.'--And I reckon," she went
on quietly, "that's why the date made such an impression on me--of
course, Luke had been awfully sick," she said gravely, and shook
her head, "we thought he was goin' to die more than once--so when
the doctor came and told me he was out of danger--well, it was a
day of rejoicin' for me, sure enough.  But that's how I know--
September 2nd, 1898--that's when it was, all right, the very day
when you were born."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert.  "That is certainly right. . . .  Well,
if that don't beat all!" he cried with his astounded and engaging
air of surprise.  "The most remarkable thing I ever heard of!" he
said solemnly.

"So the next time you see your father," the woman said, with the
tranquil satisfaction of omniscience, "you tell him that you met
Eliza Pentland--he'll know who _I_ am, boy--I can assure you--for
we were born and brought up within five miles from each other and
you can tell him that she knew you right away, and even told you to
the hour and minute the day when you were born! . . .  You tell him
that," she said.

"Yes, Ma'am!" said Robert respectfully, "I certainly will! . . .
I'll tell him! . . .  That is certainly a remarkable thing. . . .
Ah-hah-hah! . . .  Beats all I ever heard of! . . .  Ah-hah-hah,"
he kept bowing and smiling to the young woman and her husband, and
muttering "ah-hah-hah! . . .  Pleased to have met you. . . .  Got
to go now: some one over here I've got to see . . . but I'll
certainly tell him . . . ah-hah-hah. . . .  Gene, I'll see you on
the train. . . .  Good-bye. . . .  Good-bye. . . .  Glad to have
met you all. . . .  Ah-hah-hah. . . .  Certainly a remarkable
thing. . . .  Good-bye!" and turning abruptly, he left them,
walking rapidly along at his stiff, prim, curiously lunging stride.

The younger woman looked after the boy's tall form as he departed,
stroking her chin in a reflective and abstracted manner:

"So that's Judge Robert Weaver's son, is it? . . .  Well," she went
on, nodding her head vigorously in a movement of affirmation.
"He's all right. . . .  He's got good manners. . . .  He looks and
acts like a gentleman. . . .  You can see he's had a good bringing
up. . . .  I like him!" she declared positively again.

"Why, yes," said the mother, who had been following the tall
retreating form with a reflective look, her hands loose-folded at
her waist--"Why, yes," she continued, nodding her head in a
thoughtful and conceding manner that was a little comical in its
implications--"He's a good-looking all-right sort of a boy. . . .
And he certainly seems to be intelligent enough."  She was silent
for a moment, pursing her lips thoughtfully and then concluded with
a little nod--"Well, now, the boy may be all right. . . .  I'm not
saying that he isn't. . . .  He may turn out all right, after all."

"All right?" her daughter said, frowning a little and showing a
little annoyance, but with a faint lewd grin around the corners of
her mouth--"what do you mean by all right, Mama?  Why, of course
he's all right. . . .  What makes you think he's not?"

The other woman was silent for another moment: when she spoke
again, her manner was tinged with portent, and she turned and
looked at her daughter a moment in a sudden, straight and deadly
fashion before she spoke:

"Now, child," she said, "I'm going to tell you: perhaps everything
will turn out all right for that boy--I hope it does--but--"

"Oh, my God!" the younger woman laughed hoarsely but with a shade
of anger, and turning, prodded her brother stiffly in the ribs.
"Now we'll get it!" she sniggered, prodding him, "k-k-k-k-k!  What
do you call it?" she said with a lewd frowning grin that was
indescribably comic in its evocations of coarse humour--"the low
down?--the dirt?--Did you ever know it to fail?--The moment that
you meet any one, and up comes the family corpse."

"--Well, now, child, I'm not saying anything against the boy--
perhaps it won't touch him--maybe he'll be the one to escape--to
turn out all right--but--"

"Oh, my God!" the younger woman groaned, rolling her eyes around in
a comical and imploring fashion.  "Here it comes."

"You are too young to know about it yourself," the other went on
gravely--"you belong to another generation--you don't know about
it--but I DO."  She paused again, shook her pursed lips with a
convulsive pucker of distaste, and then, looking at her daughter
again in her straight and deadly fashion, said slowly, with a
powerful movement of the hand:

"There's been insanity in that boy's family for generations back!"

"Oh, my God!  I knew it!" the other groaned.

"Yes, sir!" the mother said implacably--"and two of his aunts--
Robert Weaver's own sisters died raving maniacs--and Robert
Weaver's mother herself was insane for the last twenty years of her
life up to the hour of her death--and I've heard tell that it went
back--"

"Well, deliver me," the younger woman checked her, frowning,
speaking almost sullenly.  "I don't want to hear any more about
it. . . .  It's a mighty funny thing that they all seem to get along
now--better than we do . . . so let's let bygones be bygones . . .
don't dig up the past."

Turning to her brother with a little frowning smile, she said
wearily:  "Did you ever know it to fail? . . .  They know it all,
don't they?" she said mysteriously.  "The minute you meet any one
you like, they spill the dirt. . . .  Well, I don't care," she
muttered.  "You stick to people like that. . . .  He looks like a
nice boy and--" with an impressed look over towards Robert's
friends, she concluded, "he goes with a nice crowd. . . .  You
stick to that kind of people.  I'm all for him."

Now the mother was talking again: the boy could see her powerful
and delicate mouth convolving with astonishing rapidity in a series
of pursed thoughtful lips, tremulous smiles, bantering and
quizzical jocosities, old sorrow and memory, quiet gravity, the
swift easy fluency of tears that the coming of a train always
induced in her, thoughtful seriousness, and sudden hopeful
speculation.

"Well, boy," she was now saying gravely, "you are going--as the
sayin' goes--" here she shook her head slightly, strongly, rapidly
with powerful puckered lips, and instantly her weak worn eyes of
brown were wet with tears--"as the sayin' goes--to a strange land--
a stranger among strange people.--It may be a long, long time," she
whispered in an old husky tone, her eyes tear-wet as she shook her
head mysteriously with a brave pathetic smile that suddenly filled
the boy with rending pity, anguish of the soul, and a choking sense
of exasperation and of woman's unfairness--"I hope we are all
here when you come back again. . . .  I hope you find us all
alive. . . ."  She smiled bravely, mysteriously, tearfully.  "You
never know," she whispered, "you never know."

"Mama," he could hear his voice sound hoarsely and remotely in his
throat, choked with anguish and exasperation at her easy fluency of
sorrow, "--Mama--in Christ's name!  Why do you have to act like
this every time someone goes away! . . .  I beg of you, for God's
sake, not to do it!"

"Oh, stop it!  Stop it!" his sister said in a rough, peremptory and
yet kindly tone to the mother, her eyes grave and troubled, but
with a faint rough smile about the edges of her generous mouth.
"He's not going away for ever!  Why, good heavens, you act as if
someone is dead!  Boston's not so far away you'll never see him
again!  The trains are running every day, you know. . . .
Besides," she said abruptly and with an assurance that infuriated
the boy, "he's not going today, anyway.  Why, you haven't any
intention of going today, you know you haven't," she said to him.
"He's been fooling you all along," she now said, turning to the
mother with an air of maddening assurance.  "He has no idea of
taking that train.  He's going to wait over until tomorrow.  I've
known it all along."

The boy went stamping away from them up the platform, and then came
stamping back at them while the other people on the platform
grinned and stared.

"Helen, in God's name!" he croaked frantically.  "Why do you start
that when I'm all packed up and waiting here at the God-damned
station for the train?  You KNOW I'm going away today!" he yelled,
with a sudden sick desperate terror in his heart as he thought that
something might now come in the way of going.  "You KNOW I am!  Why
did we come here?  What in Christ's name are we waiting for if you
don't think I'm going?"

The young woman laughed her high, husky laugh which was almost
deliberately irritating and derisive--"Hi!  Hi!  Hi!  Hi!  Hi!"--
and plodded him in the ribs with her large stiff fingers.  Then,
almost wearily, she turned away, plucking at her large chin
absently, and said:  "Well, have it your own way!  It's your own
funeral!  If you're determined to go today, no one can stop you.
But I don't see why you can't just as well wait over till
tomorrow."

"Why, yes!" the mother now said briskly and confidently.  "That's
exactly what I'd do if I were you! . . .  Now, it's not going to do
a bit of harm to anyone if you're a day or so late in gettin'
there. . . .  Now I've never been there myself," she went on in her
tone of tranquil sarcasm, "but I've always heard that Harvard
University was a good big sort of place--and I'll bet you'll find,"
the mother now said gravely, with a strong slow nod of conviction--
"I'll bet you'll find that it's right there where it always was
when you get there.  I'll bet you find they haven't moved a foot,"
she said, "and let me tell you something, boy," she now continued,
looking at him almost sternly, but with a ghost of a smile about
her powerful and delicate mouth--"now I haven't had your education
and I reckon I don't know as much about universities as you do--but
I've never heard of one yet that would run a feller away for bein'
a day late as long as he's got money enough to pay his tuition. . . .
Now you'll find 'em waitin' for you when you get there--and
YOU'LL GET IN," she said slowly and powerfully.  "You don't have to
worry about that--they'll be glad to see you, and they'll take you
in a hurry when they see you've got the price."

"Now, Mama," he said in a quiet frenzied tone, "I beg of you, for
God's sake, please, not to--"

"All right, all right," the mother answered hastily in a placating
tone, "I was only sayin'--"

"If you will kindly, please, for God's sake--"

"K-k-k-k-k-k!" his sister snickered, poking him in the ribs.

But now the train was coming.  Down the powerful shining tracks a
half-mile away, the huge black snout of the locomotive swung slowly
round the magnificent bend and flare of the rails that went into
the railway yards of Altamont two miles away, and with short
explosive thunders of its squat funnel came barging slowly forward.
Across the golden pollenated haze of the warm autumnal afternoon
they watched it with numb lips and an empty hollowness of fear,
delight, and sorrow in their hearts.

And from the sensual terror, the ecstatic tension of that train's
approach, all things before, around, about the boy came to instant
life, to such sensuous and intolerable poignancy of life as a
doomed man might feel who looks upon the world for the last time
from the platform of the scaffold where he is to die.  He could
feel, taste, smell, and see everything with an instant still
intensity, the animate fixation of a vision seen instantly, fixed
for ever in the mind of him who sees it, and sense the clumped
dusty autumn masses of the trees that bordered the tracks upon the
left, and smell the thick exciting hot tarred caulking of the
tracks, the dry warmth and good worn wooden smell of the powerful
railway ties, and see the dull rusty red, the gaping emptiness and
joy of a freight car, its rough floor whitened with soft siltings
of thick flour, drawn in upon a spur of rusty track behind a
warehouse of raw concrete blocks, and see with sudden desolation,
the warehouse flung down rawly, newly, there among the hot, humid,
spermy, nameless, thick-leaved field-growth of the South.

Then the locomotive drew in upon them, loomed enormously above
them, and slowly swept by them with a terrific drive of eight-
locked pistoned wheels, all higher than their heads, a savage
furnace-flare of heat, a hard hose-thick hiss of steam, a moment's
vision of a lean old head, an old gloved hand of cunning on the
throttle, a glint of demon hawk-eyes fixed for ever on the rails, a
huge tangle of gauges, levers, valves, and throttles, and the
goggled blackened face of the fireman, lit by an intermittent hell
of flame, as he bent and swayed with rhythmic swing of laden shovel
at his furnace doors.

The locomotive passed above them, darkening the sunlight from their
faces, engulfing them at once and filling them with terror, drawing
the souls out through their mouths with the God-head of its instant
absoluteness, and leaving them there, emptied, frightened, fixed
for ever, a cluster of huddled figures, a bough of small white
staring faces, upturned, silent, and submissive, small, lonely, and
afraid.

Then as the heavy rust-black coaches rumbled past, and the wheels
ground slowly to a halt, the boy could see his mother's white
stunned face beside him, the naked startled innocence of her eyes,
and feel her rough worn clasp upon his arm, and hear her startled
voice, full of apprehension, terror, and surprise, as she said
sharply:

"Hah?  What say?  Is this his train?  I thought--"

It was his train and it had come to take him to the strange and
secret heart of the great North that he had never known, but whose
austere and lonely image, whose frozen heat and glacial fire, and
dark stern beauty had blazed in his vision since he was a child.
For he had dreamed and hungered for the proud unknown North with
that wild ecstasy, that intolerable and wordless joy of longing and
desire, which only a Southerner can feel.  With a heart of fire, a
brain possessed, a spirit haunted by the strange, secret and
unvisited magic of the proud North, he had always known that some
day he should find it--his heart's hope and his father's country,
the lost but unforgotten half of his own soul,--and take it for his
own.

And now that day had come, and these two images--call them rather
lights and weathers of man's soul--of the world-far, lost and
lonely South, and the fierce, the splendid, strange and secret
North were swarming like a madness through his blood.  And just as
he had seen a thousand images of the buried and silent South which
he had known all his life, so now he had a vision of the proud
fierce North with all its shining cities, and its tides of life.
He saw the rocky sweetness of its soil and its green loveliness,
and he knew its numb soft prescience, its entrail-stirring ecstasy
of coming snow, its smell of harbours and its traffic of proud
ships.

He could not utter what he wished to say and yet the wild and
powerful music of those two images kept swelling in him and it
seemed that the passion of their song must burst his heart, explode
the tenement of bright blood and agony in which they surged, and
tear the sinews of his life asunder unless he found some means to
utter them.

But no words came.  He only knew the image of man's loneliness, a
feeling of sorrow, desolation, and wild mournful secret joy,
longing and desire, as sultry, moveless and mysterious in its slow
lust as the great rivers of the South themselves.  And at the same
moment that he felt this wild and mournful sorrow, the slow, hot,
secret pulsings of desire, and breathed the heavy and mysterious
fragrance of the lost South again, he felt, suddenly and terribly,
its wild strange pull, the fatal absoluteness of its world-lost
resignation.

Then, with a sudden feeling of release, a realization of the
incredible escape that now impended for him, he knew that he was
waiting for the train, and that the great life of the North, the
road to freedom, solitude and the enchanted promise of the golden
cities was now before him.  Like a dream made real, a magic come to
life, he knew that in another hour he would be speeding worldward,
lifeward, Northward out of the enchanted, time-far hills, out of
the dark heart and mournful mystery of the South for ever.

And as that overwhelming knowledge came to him, a song of triumph,
joy, and victory so savage and unutterable, that he could no longer
hold it in his heart was torn from his lips in a bestial cry of
fury, pain, and ecstasy.  He struck his arms out in the shining air
for loss, for agony, for joy.  The whole earth reeled about him in
a kaleidoscopic blur of shining rail, massed heavy greens, and
white empetalled faces of the staring people.

And suddenly he was standing there among his people on the platform
of the little station.  All things and shapes on earth swam back
into their proper shape again, and he could hear his mother's
voice, the broken clatter of the telegraph, and see, there on the
tracks, the blunt black snout, the short hard blasts of steam from
its squat funnel, the imminent presence, the enormous bigness of
the train.



II


The journey from the mountain town of Altamont to the tower-masted
island of Manhattan is not, as journeys are conceived in America, a
long one.  The distance is somewhat more than 700 miles, the time
required to make the journey a little more than twenty hours.  But
so relative are the qualities of space and time, and so complex and
multiple their shifting images, that in the brief passage of this
journey one may live a life, share instantly in 10,000,000 other
ones, and see pass before his eyes the infinite panorama of
shifting images that make a nation's history.

First of all, the physical changes and transitions of the journey
are strange and wonderful enough.  In the afternoon one gets on the
train and with a sense of disbelief and wonder sees the familiar
faces, shapes, and structures of his native town recede out of the
last fierce clasp of life and vision.  Then, all through the waning
afternoon, the train is toiling down around the mountain curves and
passes.  The great shapes of the hills, embrowned and glowing with
the molten hues of autumn, are all about him: the towering summits,
wild and lonely, full of joy and strangeness and their haunting
premonitions of oncoming winter soar above him, the gulches,
gorges, gaps, and wild ravines, fall sheer and suddenly away with a
dizzy terrifying steepness, and all the time the great train toils
slowly down from the mountain summits with the sinuous turnings of
an enormous snake.  And from the very toiling slowness of the
train, together with the terrific stillness and nearness of the
marvellous hills, a relation is established, an emotion evoked,
which it is impossible to define, but which, in all its strange and
poignant mingling of wild sorrow and joy, grief for the world that
one is losing, swelling triumph at the thought of the strange new
world that one will find, is instantly familiar, and has been felt
by every one.

The train toils slowly round the mountain grades, the short and
powerful blasts of its squat funnel sound harsh and metallic
against the sides of rocky cuts.  One looks out the window and sees
cut, bank, and gorge slide slowly past, the old rock wet and
gleaming with the water of some buried mountain spring.  The train
goes slowly over the perilous and dizzy height of a wooden trestle;
far below, the traveller can see and hear the clean foaming
clamours of rock-bright mountain water; beside the track, before
his little hut, a switchman stands looking at the train with the
slow wondering gaze of the mountaineer.  The little shack in which
he lives is stuck to the very edge of the track above the steep and
perilous ravine.  His wife, a slattern with a hank of tight-drawn
hair, a snuff-stick in her mouth, and the same gaunt, slow
wondering stare her husband has, stands in the doorway of the
shack, holding a dirty little baby in her arms.

It is all so strange, so near, so far, so terrible, beautiful, and
instantly familiar, that it seems to the traveller that he must
have known these people for ever, that he must now stretch forth
his hand to them from the windows and the rich and sumptuous luxury
of the Pullman car, that he must speak to them.  And it seems to
him that all the strange and bitter miracle of life--how, why, or
in what way, he does not know--is in that instant greeting and
farewell; for once seen, and lost the moment that he sees it, it is
his for ever and he can never forget it.  And then the slow toiling
train has passed these lives and faces and is gone, and there is
something in his heart he cannot say.

At length the train has breached the last great wall of the soaring
ranges, has made its slow and sinuous descent around the powerful
bends and cork-screws of the shining rails (which now he sees above
him seven times) and towards dark, the lowland country has been
reached.  The sun goes down behind the train a tremendous globe of
orange and pollen, the soaring ranges melt swiftly into shapes of
smoky and enchanted purple, night comes--great-starred and velvet-
breasted night--and now the train takes up its level pounding
rhythm across the piedmont swell and convolution of the mighty
State.

Towards nine o'clock at night there is a pause to switch cars and
change engines at a junction town.  The traveller, with the same
feeling of wild unrest, wonder, nameless excitement and wordless
expectancy, leaves the train, walks back and forth upon the
platform, rushes into the little station luncheon room or out into
the streets to buy cigarettes, a sandwich--really just to feel this
moment's contact with another town.  He sees vast flares and
steamings of gigantic locomotives on the rails, the seamed,
blackened, lonely faces of the engineers in the cabs of their great
engines, and a little later he is rushing again across the rude,
mysterious visage of the powerful, dark, and lonely earth of old
Catawba.

Toward midnight there is another pause at a larger town--the last
stop in Catawba--again the feeling of wild unrest and nameless joy
and sorrow.  The traveller gets out, walks up and down the
platform, sees the vast slow flare and steaming of the mighty
engine, rushes into the station, and looks into the faces of all
the people passing with the same sense of instant familiarity,
greeting, and farewell,--that lonely, strange, and poignantly
wordless feeling that Americans know so well.  Then he is in the
Pullman again, the last outposts of the town have slipped away from
him and the great train which all through the afternoon has
travelled eastward from the mountains half across the mighty State,
is now for the first time pointed northward, worldward, towards the
secret borders of Virginia, towards the great world cities of his
hope, the fable of his childhood legendry, and the wild and secret
hunger of his heart, his spirit and his life.

Already the little town from which he came in the great hills, the
faces of his kinsmen and his friends, their most familiar voices,
the shapes of things he knew seem far and strange as dreams, lost
at the bottom of the million-visaged sea-depth of dark time, the
strange and bitter miracle of life.  He cannot think that he has
ever lived there in the far lost hills, or ever left them, and all
his life seems stranger than the dream of time, and the great train
moves on across the immense and lonely visage of America, making
its great monotone that is the sound of silence and for ever.  And
in the train, and in ten thousand little towns, the sleepers sleep
upon the earth.

Then bitter sorrow, loneliness and joy come swelling to his throat--
quenchless hunger rises from the adyts of his life and conquers
him, and with wild wordless fury horsed upon his life, he comes at
length, in dark mid-watches of the night, up to the borders of the
old earth of Virginia.



Who has seen fury riding in the mountains?  Who has known fury
striding in the storm?  Who has been mad with fury in his youth,
given no rest or peace or certitude by fury, driven on across the
earth by fury, until the great vine of the heart was broke, the
sinews wrenched, the little tenement of bone, blood, marrow, brain,
and feeling in which great fury raged, was twisted, wrung,
depleted, worn out, and exhausted by the fury which it could not
lose or put away?  Who has known fury, how it came?

How have we breathed him, drunk him, eaten fury to the core, until
we have him in us now and cannot lose him anywhere we go?  It is a
strange and subtle worm that will be for ever feeding at our heart.
It is a madness working in our brain, a hunger growing from the
food it feeds upon, a devil moving in the conduits of our blood, it
is a spirit wild and dark and uncontrollable forever swelling in
our soul, and it is in the saddle now, horsed upon our lives,
rowelling the spurs of its insatiate desire into our naked and
defenceless sides, our owner, master, and the mad and cruel tyrant
who goads us on for ever down the blind and brutal tunnel of
kaleidoscopic days at the end of which is nothing but the blind
mouth of the pit and darkness and no more.

Then, then, will fury leave us, he will cease from those red
channels of our life he has so often run, another sort of worm will
work at that great vine, whereat he fed.  Then, then, indeed, he
must give over, fold his camp, retreat; there is no place for
madness in a dead man's brain, no place for hunger in a dead man's
flesh, and in a dead man's heart there is a place for no desire.

At what place of velvet-breasted night long, long ago, and in what
leafy darkened street of mountain summer, hearing the footsteps of
approaching lovers in the night, the man's voice, low, hushed,
casual, confiding, suddenly the low rich welling of a woman's
laughter, tender and sensual in the dark, going, receding, fading,
and then the million-noted silence of the night again?  In what
ancient light of fading day in a late summer; what wordless passion
then of sorrow, joy, and ecstasy--was he betrayed to fury when it
came?

Or in the black dark of some forgotten winter's morning, child of
the storm and brother to the dark, alone and wild and secret in the
night as he leaned down against the wind's strong wall towards
Niggertown, blocking his folded papers as he went, and shooting
them terrifically in the wind's wild blast against the shack-walls
of the jungle-sleeping blacks, himself alone awake, wild, secret,
free and stormy as the wild wind's blast, giving it howl for howl
and yell for yell, with madness, and a demon's savage and exultant
joy, up-welling in his throat!  Oh, was he then, on such a night,
betrayed to fury--was it then, on such a night, that fury came?



He never knew; it may have been a rock, a stone, a leaf, the moths
of golden light as warm and moving in a place of magic green, it
may have been the storm-wind howling in the barren trees, the
ancient fading light of day in some forgotten summer, the huge
unfolding mystery of undulant, oncoming night.

Oh, it might have been all this in the April and moist lilac
darkness of some forgotten morning as he saw the clean line of the
East cleave into morning at the mountain's ridge.  It may have been
the first light, bird-song, an end to labour and the sweet ache and
pure fatigue of the lightened shoulder as he came home at morning
hearing the single lonely hoof, the jinking bottles, and the wheel
upon the street again, and smelled the early morning breakfast
smells, the smoking wheat cakes, and the pungent sausages, the
steaks, biscuits, grits, and fried green apples, and the brains and
eggs.  It may have been the coil of pungent smoke upcurling from
his father's chimney, the clean sweet gardens and the peach-bloom,
apples, crinkled lettuce wet with dew, bloom and cherry bloom down-
drifting in their magic snow within his father's orchard, and his
father's giant figure awake now and astir, and moving in his house!

Oh, ever to wake at morning knowing he was there!  To feel the
fire-full chimney-throat roar up a-tremble with the blast of his
terrific fires, to hear the first fire crackling in the kitchen
range, to hear the sounds of morning in the house, the smells of
breakfast and the feeling of security never to be changed!  Oh, to
hear him prowling like a wakened lion below, the stertorous hoarse
frenzy of his furious breath; to hear the ominous muttering
mounting to faint howls as with infuriated relish he prepared the
roaring invective of the morning's tirade, to hear him muttering as
the coal went rattling out upon the fire, to hear him growling as
savagely the flame shot up the trembling chimney-throat, to hear
him muttering back and forth now like a raging beast, finally to
hear his giant stride racing through the house prepared now,
storming to the charge, and the well-remembered howl of his
awakened fury as springing to the door-way of the back-room stairs
he flung it open, yelling at them to awake.

Was it in such a way, one time as he awoke, and heard below his
father's lion-ramp of morning that fury came?  He never knew, no
more than one could weave the great web of his life back through
the brutal chaos of ten thousand furious days, unwind the great
vexed pattern of his life to silence, peace, and certitude in the
magic land of new beginnings, no return.

He never knew if fury had lain dormant all those years, had worked
secret, silent, like a madness in the blood.  But later it would
seem to him that fury had first filled his life, exploded,
conquered, and possessed him, that he first felt it, saw it, knew
the dark illimitable madness of its power, one night years later on
a train across Virginia.



III


It was a little before midnight when the youth entered the smoking
room of the Pullman where, despite the lateness of the hour,
several men still sat.  At just this moment the train had entered
the State of Virginia, although, of course, none of the men who sat
there talking knew this.

It is true that some of them might have known, had their interest
and attention been directed toward this geographic fact, had they
been looking for it.  Just at this moment, indeed, as the train,
scarcely slackening its speed, was running through the last of the
Catawba towns, one of the men glanced up suddenly from the
conversation in which he and the others were earnestly engaged,
which was exclusively concerned with the fascinating, ever-mounting
prices of their property and the tempting profits undoubtedly to be
derived from real-estate speculation in their native town.  He had
looked up quickly, casually, and absently, with that staggering
indifference of prosperous men who have been so far, so often, on
such splendid trains, that a trip across the continent at night
toward the terrific city is no longer a grand adventure of their
lives, but just a thing of custom, need, and even weariness, and
who, therefore, rarely look out of windows any more:

"What is this?" he said quickly.  "Oh, Maysville, probably.  Yes, I
guess this must be Maysville," and had then returned vigorously
from his brief inspection of the continent of night, a few lights,
and a little town, to the enticing topic which had for several
hours absorbed the interests of the group.

Nor was there any good reason why this traveller who had glanced so
swiftly and indifferently from the window of the train should feel
any greater interest than he showed.  Certainly the briefest and
most casual inspection would have convinced the observer that, in
Baedeker's celebrated phrase, there was "little here that need
detain the tourist."  What the man saw in the few seconds of his
observation was the quiet, dusty and sparsely lighted street of a
little town in the upper South.  The street was shaded by large
trees and there were some level lawns, more trees, and some white
frame-houses with spacious porches, gables, occasionally the wooden
magnificence of Georgian columns.

On everything--trees, houses, foliage, yards, and street--there was
a curious loneliness of departure and October, an attentive almost
mournful waiting.  And yet this dark and dusty street of the tall
trees left a haunting, curiously pleasant feeling of strangeness
and familiarity.  One viewed it with a queer sudden ache in the
heart, a feeling of friendship and farewell, and this feeling was
probably intensified by the swift and powerful movement of the
train which seemed to slide past the town almost noiselessly, its
wheels turning without friction, sound, or vibrancy on the pressed
steel ribbons of the rails, giving to a traveller, and particularly
to a youth who was going into the secret North for the first time,
a feeling of illimitable and exultant power, evoking for him the
huge mystery of the night and darkness, and the image of ten
thousand lonely little towns like this across the continent.

Then the train slides by the darkened vacant-looking little station
and for a moment one has a glimpse of the town's chief square and
business centre.  And as he sees it he is filled again with the
same feeling of loneliness, instant familiarity, and departure.
The square is one of those anomalous, shabby-ornate, inept, and
pitifully pretentious places that one finds in little towns like
these.  But once seen, if only for this fraction of a moment, from
the windows of a train, the memory of it will haunt one for ever
after.

And this haunting and lonely memory is due probably to the
combination of two things: the ghastly imitation of swarming life
and metropolitan gaiety in the scene, and the almost total absence
of life itself.  The impression one gets, in fact, from that brief
vision is one of frozen cataleptic silence in a world from which
all life has recently been extinguished by some appalling
catastrophe.  The lights burn, the electric signs wink and flash,
the place is still horribly intact in all its bleak prognathous
newness, but all the people are dead, gone, vanished.  The place is
a tomb of frozen silence, as terrifying in its empty bleakness as
those advertising backdrops one saw formerly in theatres, where the
splendid buildings, stores, and shops of a great street are painted
in the richest and most flattering colours, and where there is no
sign of life whatever.

So was it here, save that here the illusion of the dead world
gained a hideous physical reality by its stark, staring, nakedly
concrete dimensions.

All this the boy had seen, or rather sensed, in the wink of an eye,
a moment's vision of a dusty little street, a fleeting glimpse of a
silent little square, a few hard lights, and then the darkness of
the earth again--these half-splintered glimpses were all the boy
could really see in the eye-wink that it took the train to pass the
town.  And yet, all these fragmentary things belonged so completely
to all the life of little towns which he had known, that it was not
as if he had seen only a few splintered images, but rather as if
the whole nocturnal picture of the town was instantly whole and
living in his mind.

Beyond the station, parked in a line against the curb, is a row of
empty motor cars, and he knows instantly that they have been left
there by the patrons of the little moving-picture theatre which
explodes out of the cataleptic silence of the left-hand side of the
square into a blaze of hard white and flaming posters which seem to
cover the entire façade.  Even here, no movement of life is
visible, but one who has lived and known towns like these feels for
the first time an emotion of warmth and life as he looks at the
gaudy, blazing bill-beplastered silence of that front.

For suddenly he seems to see the bluish blaze of carbon light that
comes from the small slit-like vent-hole cut into the wall and can
hear again--one of the loneliest and most haunting of all sounds--
the rapid shuttering sound of the projection camera late at night,
a sound lonely, hurried, unforgettable, coming out into those
cataleptic squares of silence in the little towns--as if the
operator is fairly racing through the last performance of the night
like a weary and exhausted creature whose stale, over-driven life
can find no joy in what is giving so much joy to others, and who is
pressing desperately ahead toward the merciful rewards of food,
sleep, and oblivion which are already almost in his grasp.

And as he remembers this, he also suddenly sees and knows the
people in the theatre, and in that instant greets them, feels his
lonely kinship with them, with the whole family of the earth, and
says farewell.  Small, dark, lonely, silent, thirsty, and
insatiate, the people of the little town are gathered there in that
one small cell of radiance, warmth, and joy.  There for a little
space they are united by the magic spell the theatre casts upon
them.  They are all dark and silent leaning forward like a single
mind and congeries of life, and yet they are all separate too.

Yes, lonely, silent, for a moment beautiful, he knows the people of
the town are there, lifting the small white petals of their faces,
thirsty and insatiate, to that magic screen: now they laugh
exultantly as their hero triumphs, weep quietly as the mother dies,
the little boys cheer wildly as the rascal gets his due--they are
all there in darkness, under immense immortal skies of time, small
nameless creatures in a lost town on the mighty continent, and for
an instant we have seen them, known them, said farewell.

Around the four sides of the square at even intervals, the new
standards of the five-bulbed lamps cast down implacably upon those
cataleptic pavements the cataleptic silence of their hard white
light.  And this, he knows, is called "the Great White Way," of
which the town is proud.  Somehow the ghastly, lifeless silence of
that little square is imaged nowhere else so cruelly as in the
harsh, white silence of these lights.  For they evoke terribly, as
nothing else can do, the ghastly vacancy of light without life.
And poignantly, pitifully, and unutterably their harsh, white
silence evokes the moth-like hunger of the American for hard,
brilliant, blazing incandescence.

It is as if there may be in his soul the horror of the ancient
darkness, the terror of the old immortal silences, which will not
down and must be heard.  It is as if he feels again the ancient
fear of--what?  Of the wilderness, the wet and lidless eye of shame
and desolation feeding always on unhoused and naked sides.  It is
as if he fears the brutal revelation of his loss and loneliness,
the furious, irremediable confusion of his huge unrest, his
desperate and unceasing flight from the immense and timeless skies
that bend above him, the huge, doorless and unmeasured vacancies of
distance, on which he lives, on which, as helpless as a leaf upon a
hurricane, he is driven on for ever, and on which he cannot pause,
which he cannot fence, wall, conquer, make his own.

Then the train, running always with its smooth, powerful, almost
noiseless movement, has left the station and the square behind it.
The last outposts of the town appear and vanish in patterns of
small, lonely light, and there is nothing but huge and secret night
before us, the lonely, everlasting earth, and presently Virginia.

And surely, now, there is little more to be seen.  Surely, now,
there is almost nothing that by day would be worthy of more than a
glance from those great travellers who have ranged the earth, and
known all its wild and stormy seas, and seen its rarest glories.
And by night, now, there is nothing, nothing by night but darkness
and a space we call Virginia through which the huge projectile of
the train is hurtling onward in the dark.

Field and fold and gulch and hill and hollow, forest and stream and
bridge and bank and cut, the huge earth, the rude earth, the wild,
formless, infinitely various, most familiar, ever-haunting earth,
the grand and casual earth that is so brown, so harsh, so dusty, so
familiar, the strange and homely earth wrought in our blood, our
brain, our heart, the earth that can never be forgotten or
described, is flowing by us, by us, by us in the night.

What is it that we know so well and cannot speak?  What is it that
we want to say and cannot tell?  What is it that keeps swelling in
our hearts its grand and solemn music, that is aching in our
throats, that is pulsing like a strange wild grape through all the
conduits of our blood, that maddens us with its exultant and
intolerable joy and that leaves us tongueless, wordless, maddened
by our fury to the end?

We do not know.  All that we know is that we lack a tongue that
could reveal, a language that could perfectly express the wild joy
swelling to a music in our heart, the wild pain welling to a strong
ache in our throat, the wild cry mounting to a madness in our
brain, the thing, the word, the joy we know so well, and cannot
speak!  All that we know is that the little stations whip by in the
night, the straggling little towns whip by with all that is casual,
rude, familiar, ugly, and unutterable.  All that we know is that
the earth is flowing by us in the darkness, and that this is the
way the world goes--with a field and a wood and a field!  And of
the huge and secret earth all we know is that we feel with all our
life its texture with our foot upon it.

All that we know is that having everything we yet hold nothing,
that feeling the wild song of this great earth upwelling in us we
have no words to give it utterance.  All that we know is that here
the passionate enigma of our lives is so bitterly expressed, the
furious hunger that so haunts and hurts Americans so desperately
felt--that being rich, we all are yet so poor, that having an
incalculable wealth we have no way of spending it, that feeling an
illimitable power we yet have found no way of using it.

Therefore we hurtle onward in the dark across Virginia, we hurtle
onward in the darkness down a million roads, we hurtle onward
driven by our hunger down the blind and brutal tunnel of ten
thousand furious and kaleidoscopic days, the victims of the cruel
impulse of a million chance and fleeting moments, without a wall at
which to thrust the shoulder of our strength, a roof to hide us in
our nakedness, a place to build in, or a door.



IV


As the boy entered the smoking compartment, the men who were
talking together paused, and looked up at him briefly with the
intent, curious, momentary stare of men interrupted in a
conversation.  The boy, a leggy creature racing into unfledged
lengths of shank and arm and shoulder, fumbled nervously in his
coat pocket for a package of cigarettes and then sat down abruptly
on the upholstered leather seat beside one of the men.

The boy's manner betrayed that mixture of defiance and diffidence
which a young man going out into the world for the first time feels
in the presence of older and more experienced men.  And this was
the way he felt.  And for this reason in the sharp and casual stare
which the men fixed briefly on him there may have been unconsciously
something affectionate and tender as each one recalled a moment of
his own lost youth.

The boy felt the powerful movement of the train beneath him and the
lonely austerity and mystery of the dark earth outside that swept
past for ever with a fanlike stroke, an immortal and imperturbable
stillness.  It seemed to him that these two terrific negatives of
speed and stillness, the hurtling and projectile movement of the
train and the calm silence of the everlasting earth, were poles of
a single unity--a unity coherent with his destiny, whose source was
somehow in himself.

It seemed to him that this incredible and fortunate miracle of his
own life and fate had ordered all these accidental facts into
coherent and related meanings.  He felt that everything--the
powerful movement of the train, the infinite mystery and lonely
wildness of the earth, the feeling of luxury, abundance, and
unlimited wealth that was stimulated by the rich furnishings of the
Pullman, and the general air of affluence of these prosperous men--
belonged to him, had come out of his own life, and were ready to
serve him at his own behest and control.

It seemed to him that the glorious moment for which his whole life
had been shaped, and toward which every energy and desire in his
spirit had been turned, was now here.

As that incredible knowledge came to him, a fury, wild, savage,
wordless, pulsed through his blood and filled him with such a
swelling and exultant joy as he has never known before.  He felt
the savage tongueless cry of pain and joy swell up and thicken in
his throat, he felt a rending and illimitable power in him as if he
could twist steel between his fingers, and he felt an almost
uncontrollable impulse to yell into the faces of the men with a
demonic glee.

Instead he just sat down quickly with an abrupt, half-defiant
movement, lit his cigarette, and spoke to one of the men quickly
and diffidently, saying:

"Hello, Mr. Flood."

For a moment, the man thus addressed said nothing, but sat staring
at the boy stupidly with an expression of heavy surprise.  He was a
well-dressed but bloated-looking man in his fifties whose gross
figure even in repose betrayed a gouty tendency.  His face, which
had the satiny rosy texture, veinous and tender, that alcoholism
and a daily massage can give, was brutally coarse and sensual, but
was given a disturbing and decisive character by his bulging yellow
eyeballs and the gross lewd mouth which, because of several large
buck teeth whose discoloured surfaces protruded under the upper
lip, seemed always to be half opened and half smiling.  And it was
not a pleasant smile.  It was a smile, faint, unmistakably sensual,
and rather sly.  It seemed to come from some huge choking secret
glee and there was in it a quality that was jubilantly obscene.

For a moment more Mr. Flood stared through his bulging eyes at the
boy who had just spoken to him, with an air of comical and stupid
surprise.  Then amiably, but with a puzzled undertone, he said
gruffly:

"Hello.  Oh, hello, son!  How are you?"

And after looking at the boy a moment longer, he turned his
attention to the other men again.

It was at just that season of the year when two events which are
dear to the speculations of the American had absorbed the public
interest.  These events were baseball and politics, and at that
moment both were thrillingly imminent.  The annual baseball
contests for "the championship of the world" were to begin within
another day or two, and the national campaign for the election of
the American president, which would be held in another month, was
moving daily to its furious apogee of speeches, accusations, dire
predictions, and impassioned promises.  Both events gave the
average American a thrill of pleasurable anticipation: his approach
to both was essentially the same.  It was the desire of a man to
see a good show, to "take sides" vigorously in an exciting contest--
to be amused, involved as an interested spectator is involved, but
not to be too deeply troubled or concerned by the result.

It was just natural, therefore, that at the moment when the boy
entered the smoking compartment of the train, the conversation of
the men assembled there should be chiefly concerned with these twin
sports.  As he came in, there was a hum of voices, a sound of
argument, and then he could see the hearty red-faced man--the
politician--shaking his head dubiously and heard him say, with a
protesting laugh:

"Ah-h, I don't know about that.  From what I hear it's just the
other way.  I was talking to a man from Tennessee the other day,
and from what he says, Cox is gaining everywhere.  He said that a
month ago he wouldn't have given two cents for his chances, but now
he thinks he's going to carry the State."

"It's going to be close," another conceded.  "He may win yet--but
it looks to me as if he's got a hard uphill fight on his hands.
Tennessee always polls a big Republican vote--in some of those
mountain districts they vote two to one Republican--and this year
it looks as if they're all set for a change. . . .  What do you
think about it, Emmet?" he said, appealing to the small, swarthy
and important-looking little man, who sat there, swinging his short
little legs and chewing on a fat cigar with an air of wise
reflection.

"Well," that person answered slowly after a thoughtful moment,
taking his cigar in his pudgy fingers and looking at it studiously--
"it may be--it may be--that the country's ready for a change--now
don't misunderstand me," he went on hastily, as if eager to set
their perturbed minds at rest--"I'm not saying that I want to see
Harding elected--that I'm going to cast my vote for him--as you
know, I'm a party man and have voted the Democratic ticket ever
since I came of age--but," again he paused, frowned importantly at
his cigar, and spoke with careful deliberation--"it may just be
that we are due for a change this year--that the country is ready
for it--that we need it. . . .  Now, I supported Wilson twice, in
1912, when he got elected to his first term of office, and again in
1916--"

"The time he kept us out of war," some one said ironically.

"And," the little man said deliberately--"if he was running again--
if he was well enough to run--if he wanted a third term--(although
I'm against the third term in principle)," he amended hastily
again--"why, I believe I'd go ahead and vote for him.  That's how
much I think of him.  But," again he paused, and meditated his
chewed cigar profoundly--"it may be we're due now for a change.
Wilson was a great president--in my opinion, the greatest man we've
had since Lincoln--I don't believe any other man could have done
the job he did as well as he--BUT," the word came out impressively,
"the job is done!  The war is over--"

"Yes, thank God!" some one murmured softly but fervently.

"The people want to forget about the war--they want to forget all
their sacrifices and suffering--" said this little man who had
sacrificed and suffered nothing--"they are looking forward to
better times. . . .  And in my opinion," he spoke again with his
air of slow deliberation, important carefulness--"in my opinion,
better times are before us.  I think that after this election we
are going to witness one of the greatest periods of national
development and expansion that the world has ever known. . . .
Why, we haven't begun yet!  We haven't even started!" he cried
suddenly, with a note of passionate conviction in his voice--"Do
you realize that this country is only a little more than a hundred
years old?  Why, we haven't even begun to show what we can do yet!
We've spent all that time in getting started--in building cities--
settling the country--building railroads and factories--developing
the means of production--making the tools with which to work. . . .
The resources of this country are scarcely tapped as yet.  And in
my opinion we are on the eve of the greatest period of prosperity
and growth the world has ever known. . . .  Look at Altamont, for
example," he went on cogently.  "Ten years ago, in 1910, the census
gave us a population of 18,000. . . .  Now, we have thirty,
according to government figures, and that doesn't begin to take the
whole thing in: it doesn't take in Biltburn, Lunn's Cove, Beaver
Hills, Sunset Parkway--a dozen other places I can mention, all
really part of the town but not included in the census figures. . . .
If all the suburbs were included we'd have a population of at
least 40,000 inhabitants--"

"I'd call it nearer fifty," said another patriot.

"And within another ten years we'll go to seventy-five, perhaps a
hundred. . . .  Why, that town hasn't begun to grow yet!" he said,
bending his short body forward in his enthusiasm and tapping his
fat knee--"It has been less than eight years since we established
the Citizen's Bank and Trust Company with a capital of $25,000 and
capital stock at $100 a share. . . .  Now," he paused a moment, and
looked around him, his swarthy face packed with strong conviction--
"NOW, we have a capital of $2,000,000--deposits totalling more than
$18,000,000--and as for the stock--" for a moment the little man's
swarthy face was touched with a faint complacent smile, he said
smugly, "I don't know exactly how much stock you gentlemen may hold
among you, but if any of you wants to sell what he has, I will pay
you $1000 a share--here and now," he slapped a fat small hand down
upon a fat small knee--"here and now! for every share you own."

And he looked at them steadily for a moment with an air of
challenge.

"Not for mine!" the florid heavy man cried heartily.  "No, sir!
I've only got ten shares, Emmet, but you can't buy it from me at
any price!  I won't sell!"

And the swarthy little man, pleased by the answer, smiled
complacently about him before he spoke again.

"Yes, sir!" he said.  "That's the way it is.  And the thing that's
begun to happen at home already is going to happen everywhere--all
over the country.  From now on you're going to see a period of
rising prices and high wages--increased production, a boom in real
estate, stocks, investments, business of all kinds--rising values
everywhere such as you never saw before and never hoped to see."

"And where is it going to stop?"

"Stop!" the swarthy little man spoke almost curtly, and then
barked, "It's not going to stop!  Not during OUR lifetime, anyway!
I tell you, man, we're just beginning!  How can there be any talk
of stopping when we haven't STARTED yet? . . .  There's been
nothing like it before," he cried with passionate earnestness--
"nothing to match it in the history of the world.  We've had wars,
booms, good times, hard times, slumps, periods of prosperity--but,
I tell you, gentlemen!" and here he smote himself sharply on the
knee and his voice rose with the strength of an unshakable
conviction--"this thing is different!  We have reached a stage in
our development that no other country in the world has ever known--
that was never dreamed of before--a stage that is beyond booms,
depressions, good times, hard times--anything--"

"You mean that after this we shall never be affected by those
things?"

"Yes, sir!" he cried emphatically.  "I mean just that!  I mean that
we have learned the causes for each of those conditions.  I mean
that we have learned how to check them, how to control them.  I
mean that so far as we are concerned they don't EXIST any more!"
His voice had become almost shrill with the force of his persuasive
argument, and suddenly whipping a sheaf of envelopes, tied with a
rubber band, out of his inner pocket, and gripping a stub of pencil
in his stubby hand, he crossed his short fat legs with an energetic
movement, bent forward poised above the envelopes, and said quietly
but urgently:

"See here, now!--I'd like to show you a few figures!  My business,
as you know, is to look after other people's money--your money, the
town's money, everybody's money--I've got to keep my fingers on the
pulse of business at every moment of the day--my business is to
KNOW--to KNOW--and let me tell you something," he said quietly,
looking directly in their eyes, "I DO know,--so pay attention just
a moment while I show these figures to you."

And for some moments he spoke quietly, persuasively, his dark
features packed with an energy of powerful conviction, while he
rapidly jotted figures down upon the backs of the soiled envelopes,
and they bent around him--their medicine-man of magic numerals--in
an attitude of awed and rapt attentiveness.  And when he had
finished, there was silence for a moment, save for the rhythmic
clack of wheels, the rocketing sound of the great train.  Then one
of the men, stroking his chin thoughtfully, and with an impressed
air, said:

"I see. . . .  And you think, then, that in view of these
conditions it would be better for the country if Harding is
elected."

The little man's manner became instantly cautious, non-committal,
"conservative":

"I don't say that," he said, shaking his head in a movement of
denial--"I only say that whoever gets elected we're in for a period
of unparalleled development. . . .  Now both of them are good men--
as I say, I shall probably vote for Cox--but you can rest assured,"
he spoke deliberately and looked around him in his compelling way--
"you can rest assured that no matter which one gets elected the
country will be in good hands.  There's no question about that."

"Yes, sir," said the florid-faced politician in his amiable and
hearty way.  "I agree with you. . . .  I'm a Democrat myself, both
in practice and in principle.  I'm going to vote for Cox, but if
Harding gets elected I won't shed any tears over his election.
We'll have to give the Republicans credit for a good deed this
time--they couldn't have made a wiser or a better decision.  He has
a long and honourable career in the service of his country,"--as he
spoke his voice unconsciously took on the sententious ring and lilt
of the professional politician--"no breath of scandal has ever
touched his name: in public and in private life he has remained as
he began--a statesman loyal to the institutions of his country, a
husband devoted to his family life, a plain American of simple
tastes who loves his neighbours as himself, and prefers the quiet
life of a little town, the democracy of the front porch, to the
marble arches of the Capitol--so, whatever the result may be," the
orator concluded, "this nation need fear nothing: it has chosen
well and wisely in both cases, its future is secure."

Mr. Flood, during the course of this impassioned flight, had
remained ponderously unmoved.  In the pause that followed, he sat
impassively, his coarse-jowled face and bulging yellowed eyes fixed
on the orator in their customary expression of comic stupefaction.
Now, breathing hoarsely and stertorously, he coughed chokingly and
with an alarming rattling noise into his handkerchief, peered
intently at his wadded handkerchief for a moment, and then said
coarsely:

"Hell!  What all of you are saying is that you are goin' to vote
for Cox but that you hope that Harding wins."

"No, now, Jim--" the politician, Mr. Candler, said in a protesting
tone--"I never said--"

"Yes, you did!" Mr. Flood wheezed bluntly.  "You meant it, anyhow,
every one of you is sayin' how he always was a Democrat and what
a great man Wilson is, and how he's goin' to vote for Cox--and
every God-damn one of you is praying that the other feller gets
elected. . . .  Why?  I'll tell you why," he wheezed coarsely,
"--it's because we're sick an' tired of Woodrow, all of us--we want
to put the rollers under him an' see the last of him!  Oh, yes, we
are," he went on brutally as some one started to protest--"we're
tired of Woodrow's flowery speeches, an' we're tired of hearin' about
wars an' ideals an' democracy an' how fine an' noble we all are an'
'Mister won't you please subscribe?'  We're tired of hearin' bunk
that doesn't pay an' we want to hear some bunk that does--an' we're
goin' to vote for the crook that gives it to us. . . .  Do you know
what we all want--what we're lookin' for?" he demanded, glowering
brutally around at them.  "We want a piece of the breast with lots
of gravy--an' the boy that promises us the most is the one we're
for! . . .  Cox!  Hell!  All of you know Cox has no more chance of
getting in than a snowball has in hell.  When they get through with
him he won't know whether he was run over by a five-ton truck or
chewed up in a sausage mill. . . .  Nothing has changed, the
world's no different, we're just the same as we always were--and
I've watched 'em come an' go for forty years--Blaine, Cleveland,
Taft, McKinley, Roosevelt--the whole damned lot of 'em--an' what we
want from them is just the same: all we can get for ourselves, a
free grab with no holts barred, and to hell with the other fellow."

"So whom are you going to vote for, Jim?" said Mr. Candler smiling.

"Who?  Me?" said Mr. Flood with a coarse grin.  "Why, hell, you
ought to know that without asking.  Me--I'm a Democrat, ain't I?--
don't I publish a Democratic newspaper?  I'm going to vote for Cox,
of course."

And, in the burst of laughter that followed, some one could be
heard saying jestingly:

"And who's going to win the Series, Jim?  Some one told me you're
for Brooklyn!"

"Brooklyn!" Mr. Flood jeered wheezingly.  "Brooklyn has just the
same kind of chance Cox has--the chance a snowball has in hell!
Brooklyn!  They're in just the same fix the Democrats are in--
they've got nothing on the ball.  When Speaker and that Cleveland
gang get through with them, Brooklyn is going to look just like Cox
the day after the election.  Brooklyn," he concluded with brutal
conviction, "hasn't got a chance."

And again the debate between the men grew eager, animated and
vociferous: they shouted, laughed, denied, debated, jeered good-
naturedly, and the great train hurtled onward in the darkness, and
the everlasting earth was still.

And other men, and other voices, words, and moments such as these
would come, would pass, would vanish and would be forgotten in the
huge record and abyss of time.  And the great trains of America
would hurtle on through darkness over the lonely, everlasting
earth--the earth which only was eternal--and on which our fathers
and our brothers had wandered, their lives so brief, so lonely, and
so strange--into whose substance at length they all would be
compacted.  And the great trains would hurtle on for ever over the
silent and eternal earth--fixed in that design of everlasting
stillness and unceasing change.  The trains would hurtle onward
bearing other lives like these, all brought together for an instant
between two points of time--and then all lost, all vanished, broken
and forgotten.  The trains would bear them onward to their million
destinations--each to the fortune, fame, or happiness he wished,
whatever it was that he was looking for--but whether any to a sure
success, a certain purpose, or the thing he sought--what man could
say?  All that he knew was that these men, these words, this moment
would vanish, be forgotten--and that great wheels would hurtle on
for ever.  And the earth be still.



Mr. Flood shifted his gouty weight carefully with a movement of his
fat arm, grunting painfully as he did so.  This delicate operation
completed, he stared sharply and intently at the boy again and at
length said bluntly:

"You're one of those Gant boys, ain't you?  Ain't you Ben's
brother?"

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.  "That's right."

"Which one are you?" Mr. Flood said with this same brutal
directness.  "You ain't the one that stutters, are you?"

"No," one of the other men interrupted with a laugh, but in a
decided tone.  "He's not the one.  You're thinking of Luke."

"Oh," said Mr. Flood stupidly.  "Is Luke the one that stutters?"

"Yes," the boy said, "that's Luke.  I'm Eugene."

"Oh," Mr. Flood said heavily.  "I reckon you're the youngest one."

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.

"Well," said Mr. Flood with an air of finality, "I didn't know
which one you were, but I knew you were one of them.  I knew I'd
seen you somewhere."

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.  He was about to go on, hesitated for
a moment, and suddenly blurted out:  "I used to carry a route on
The Courier when you owned it.  I guess that's how you remembered
me."

"Oh," said Mr. Flood stupidly, "you did?  Yes, that's it, all
right.  I remember now."  And he continued to look at the boy with
his bulging stare of comic stupefaction and for a moment there was
silence save for the pounding of the wheels upon the rail.

"How many of you boys are there?"  The swarthy and important-
looking man who had previously been addressed as Emmet now spoke
curiously:  "There must be five or six in all."

"No," the boy said, "there's only three now.  There's Luke and
Steve and me."

"Oh, Steve, Steve," the little man said with an air of crisp
finality, as if this was the name that had been at the tip of his
tongue all the time.  "Steve was the oldest, wasn't he?"

"Yes, sir," said the boy.

"Whatever became of Steve, anyway?" the man said.  "I don't believe
I've seen him in ten or fifteen years.  He doesn't live at home any
more, does he?"

"No, sir," the boy said.  "He lives in Indiana."

"Does he for a fact?" said the little man, as if this was a rare
and curious bit of information.  "What's Steve doing out there?  Is
he in business?"

For a moment the boy was going to say, "No, he runs a pool room and
lives up over it with his wife and children," but feeling ashamed
to say this, he said:

"I think he runs some kind of cigar store out there."

"Is that so?" the man answered with an air of great interest.
"Well," he went on in a moment in a conciliatory tone, "Steve was
always smart enough.  He had brains enough to do almost anything if
he tried."

Emmet Wade, the man who had asked the boy all these questions, was
a quick, pompous little figure, corpulently built, but so short in
stature as to be almost dwarfish-looking.  His skin was curiously
and unpleasantly swarthy, and save for a fringe of thin black hair
at either side, his head was completely bald.  In that squat
figure, the suggestion of pompous authority and mountainous conceit
was so pronounced that even in repose, as now, the whole man seemed
to strut.  He was, by virtue of that fortuitous chance and
opportunity which has put so many small men in great positions, the
president of the leading bank of the community.  Even as he sat
there in the smoking compartment, with his short fat legs crossed,
the boy could see him sitting at his desk in the bank, swinging
back and forth in his swivel chair thoughtfully, his pudgy hands
folded behind his head as he dictated a letter to his obsequious
secretary.

"Where's old Luke?  What's he doing, anyway?" another of the men
demanded suddenly, beginning to chuckle even as he spoke.  The
speaker was the florid-faced, somewhat countrified-looking man
already noted, who wore the string neck-tie and spoke with the
rhetorical severity of the small-town politician.  He was one of
the town commissioners and in his hearty voice and easy manner
there was a more genial quality than any of the others had.  "I
haven't seen that boy in years," he continued.  "Some one was
asking me just the other day what had become of him."

"He's got a job selling farm machinery and lighting equipment," the
boy answered.

"Is that so?" the man replied with this same air of friendly
interest.  "Where is he located?  He doesn't get home very often,
does he?"

"No, sir," the boy said, "not very often.  He comes in every two or
three weeks, but he doesn't stay home long at a time.  His
territory is down through South Carolina and Georgia--all through
there."

"What did you say he was selling?" said Mr. Flood, who had been
staring at the boy fixedly during all this conversation with his
heavy expression of a slow, intent and brutal stupefaction.

"He sells lighting systems and pumps and farm equipment and
machinery--for farms," the boy said awkwardly.

"That's Luke--who does that?" said Mr. Flood after a moment, when
this information had had time to penetrate.

"Yes, sir.  That's Luke."

"And he's the one that stutters?"

"Yes, sir."

"The one that used to have the agency for The Saturday Evening Post
and did all that talking when he sold 'em to you?"

"Yes, sir.  That's Luke."

"And what d'you say he's doing now?" said Mr. Flood heavily.
"Selling farm machinery?"

"Yes, sir.  That's what he's doing."

"Then, by God," said Mr. Flood, with a sudden and explosive
emphasis which, after his former attitude of heavy, brutal
stupefaction, was startling, "he'll do it!"  The other men laughed
and Mr. Flood shook his ponderous, crimson head slowly from side to
side to emphasize his conviction in the matter.

"If any one can sell 'em, he'll do it," he said positively.  "That
boy could sell Palm Beach suits to the Esquimaux.  They'd have to
buy 'em just to keep him from talking them to death."

"I'll tell you what I saw him do one time," said the politician,
shifting his weight a little in order to accommodate himself more
comfortably to the motion of the train.  "I was standing in front
of the post office one day talking to Dave Redmond about some
property he owned out on the Haw Creek Road--oh, it must have been
almost fifteen years ago--when here he comes hustling along, you
know, with a big bundle of his papers under his arm.  Well, he
sails right into us, talking about a mile a minute and going so
fast neither of us had a chance to get a word in edgeways.  'Here
you are, gentlemen,' he says, 'hot off the press, just the thing
you've been waiting for, this week's edition of The Saturday
Evening Post, five cents, only a nickel, the twentieth part of a
dollar.'  By that time," said Mr. Candler, "he had the thing all
opened up and shoved up right under Dave Redmond's nose, and he was
turning the pages and telling him all about the different pieces it
had in it and who wrote them and what was in them, and what a
bargain it was for five cents.  'W-w-w-why,' he says, 'if you b-b-
b-bought it in a book, why it'd cost you a d-d-d-dollar and a half
and then,' he says, 'it wouldn't be half as good.'  Well, Dave was
getting sort of red in the face by that time," Mr. Candler said,
"and I could see he was sort of annoyed at being interrupted, but
the boy kept right on with his spiel and wouldn't give up.  'I
don't want it,' says Dave, 'I'm busy,' and he tries to turn away
from him, but Luke moves right around to the other side and goes
after him about twice as hard as before.  'Go on, go on,' says
Dave.  'We're busy!  I don't want it!  I can't read!' he says.
'All right,' says Luke, 'then you can look at the p-p-p-pictures.
Why, the pictures alone,' he says, 'are w-w-w-worth a half a
dollar.  It's the b-b-b-bargain of a lifetime,' he says.  Well, the
boy was pressing him pretty hard and I guess Dave lost his temper.
He sort of knocked the magazine away from him and shouted, 'Damn
it, I told you that I didn't want it, and I mean it!  Now go on!
We're busy.'  Well," said Mr. Candler, "Luke didn't say a word for
a moment.  He took his magazine and put it under his arm again, and
he just stood there looking at Dave Redmond for a moment, and then
he said, just as quiet as you please, 'All right, sir.  You're the
doctor.  But I think you're going to regret it!'  And then he
turned and walked away from us.  Well, sir," said Mr. Candler,
laughing, "Dave Redmond's face was a study.  You could see he felt
pretty small to think he had shouted at the boy like that, and
acted as he did.  And Luke hadn't gone twenty feet before Dave
Redmond called him back.  'Here, son,' he says, diving his hand
down into his pocket, 'give me one of those things!  I may never
read it but it's worth a dollar just to hear you talk.'  And he
gave him a dollar, too, and made him take it," Mr. Candler said,
"and from that day on Dave Redmond was one of the biggest boosters
that Luke had. . . .  'I think you're going to regret it,'" said
Mr. Candler again, laughing at the memory.  "That's the thing that
did it--that's what got him--the way the boy just looked at him and
said, 'All right, sir, but I think you're going to regret it.'
That did the trick, all right."  And pleased with his story and the
memory it evoked, Mr. Candler looked mildly out of the window for a
moment, smiling.

"That was Luke that done that?" Mr. Flood demanded hoarsely after a
moment, with his air of brutal and rather stunned surprise.  "The
one that stutters?"

"Yes, that's the one all right," said Mr. Candler.  "That's who it
was."

Mr. Flood pondered this information for a moment with his bulging
eyes still fastened on Mr. Candler in their look of stupefied
curiosity.  Then, as the full import of what he had heard at length
soaked into his intelligence, he shook his great coarse head once,
slowly, in a movement of ponderous but emphatic satisfaction, and
said with hoarse conviction:

"Well, he's a good 'un!  If any one can sell 'em, he's the one."

This judgment was followed by a brief but heavy pause, which was
broken in a moment by the voice of the pompous, swarthy little man
who, in a tone of detached curiosity, said:

"Whatever became of that other boy--the one who used to work there
in The Courier office when you owned it?  What was his name,
anyway?"

"Ben," said Mr. Flood heavily, but without hesitation.  "That was
Ben."  Here he coughed in an alarming, phlegmy sort of way, cleared
his throat and spat chokingly into the spittoon at his feet, wiped
his mouth with his wadded handkerchief and in a moment, panting for
breath, wheezed:

"Ben was the one that worked for me."

"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" the swarthy little man said rapidly, as if now
it all came back to him.  "Ben!  That was the one!  Whatever became
of him?  I haven't seen him recently."

"He's dead," said Mr. Flood, still wheezing rapidly for breath and
gazing at the spittoon.  "That's the reason you haven't seen him,"
he said seriously.  And suddenly, as if the long-awaited moment had
come, he bent over, torn by a fit of choking and phlegmy sounds of
really astounding proportions.  When it was over, he raised
himself, settled back slowly and painfully in his seat, and for a
moment, with closed eyes, did nothing but wheeze rapidly.  In a
moment, still with closed eyes, he gasped almost inaudibly:

"Ben was the one that died."

"Oh, yes!  I do remember now," the pompous little man declared,
nodding his head sharply with an air of conviction.  "That's been
some time ago, hasn't it?" he said to the boy.

"He died two years ago," the boy replied, "during the war."

"Oh, that's so, he did!  I remember now!" the man cried instantly,
with an air of recollection that somehow said that he remembered
nothing.  "He was overseas at the time, wasn't he?" he asked
smoothly.

"No, sir," the boy answered.  "He was at home.  He died of
pneumonia--during that big epidemic."

"I know," the man said regretfully.  "That got a lot of the boys.
Ben was in service at the time, wasn't he?"

"No," the boy answered.  "He never got in.  Luke was the one who
was in service.  Ben tried to get in twice but he couldn't pass the
examinations."

"Is that so?" the man said vaguely.  "Well, I was mighty sorry to
hear about his death.  Old Ben was one fine boy!"

Nothing was said for a moment.

"I'll tell you how fine he was," Mr. Flood, who had been wheezing
with closed eyes, now grunted suddenly, glaring solemnly about him
with an air of brutal earnestness.  "Now I think I knew that boy
about as well as any man alive--he worked for me for almost fifteen
years--started out when he was ten years old as a route-boy on The
Courier and kept right on working for my paper until just a year or
two before he died!  And I'm here to tell you," he wheezed
solemnly, "that they don't come any better than Ben!"  Here he
glowered around him pugnaciously as if the character of a dead
saint had been called in question.  "Now he wasn't one of your big
talkers who'd promise everything and know nothing.  Ben was a do-
er, not a talker.  You could depend on him," said Mr. Flood,
hoarsely and impressively.  "When he told you he'd do a thing,
you'd know it was going to get done!  As regular as a clock and as
steady as the day is long!  And as quiet a fellow as you ever saw,"
said Mr. Flood.  "That was Ben for you!  Am I right?" he demanded,
suddenly turning to the boy.  "Was that Ben?"

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.  "That was Ben."

"And until you asked him something he'd go for days at a time
without speaking to you, but I knew he didn't mean anything by it,
it was just his way.  He believed in tending to his own business
and he expected every one else to do the same."  And for a moment,
exhausted by these eulogies, he wheezed rapidly.

"Well, the world would be a lot better off if there were more like
him," the pompous, swarthy little man now said virtuously, as if
this sentiment expressed his own pious belief and practice.  "There
are too many people sticking their noses in other people's
business, as it is."

"Well, they didn't stick their noses in Ben's business," said Mr.
Flood with grim emphasis, "not after the first time, anyway.  But
they didn't come any better than that boy.  I couldn't have thought
more of him if he'd been my own son," he concluded piously and then
gasped stertorously, lifted his cigar slowly to his lips with the
thick, gouty tenderness that characterized all his movements and
for a moment puffed slowly, wheezing reflectively over it.

"Not that he was ever much like a boy," he grunted suddenly, with a
surprising flash of insight.  "He was always more like an old man--
didn't ever seem to be a kid like the others.  Why," suddenly he
chuckled with a phlegmy hoarseness, "I remember when he first began
to come down there in the morning as a carrier, the other kids all
called him 'Pop.'  That was Ben for you.  Always had that scowl on
his face, even when he was laughing--as serious and earnest as an
old man.  But he was one of the best--as good as they come."  Again
he coughed chokingly, bent over with a painful grunt, and cleared
his throat phlegmily into the polished brass spittoon beside him.
Then, wheezing a little, he drew the wadded silk handkerchief from
a side-pocket, wiped his mouth with it, raised himself up in his
seat a little, and settled back slowly, tenderly, wheezing, with a
sigh!  Then for a moment he laboured painfully, eyes closed, with
his rapid wheezing breath and finally, when it seemed he must be
exhausted by his efforts and done with conversation for the
evening, he wheezed faintly and unexpectedly.

"That was Ben."

"Oh, I remember that boy now," the swarthy pompous-looking man
suddenly broke in with a flash of recollective inspiration--"Wasn't
Ben the boy who used to stand in the windows of The Courier offices
when the World Series was being played, and post the score up on
the score-board as they phoned it in to him?"

"Yes," wheezed Mr. Flood, nodding heavily.  "You got him now, all
right.  That was Ben."

"I remember now," the swarthy little man said thoughtfully, with a
far-away look in his eye.  "I was thinking about him the other day
when I went by The Courier office.  They were playing the Series
then.  They had another fellow in the window and I wondered what
had become of him.  So that was Ben?"

"Yes," Mr. Flood wheezed hoarsely again.  "That was Ben."



For a moment as the gouty old rake had spoken of the boy's dead
brother, the boy had felt within him a sense of warmth: a wakening
of dead time, a stir of grateful affection for the gross old man as
if there might have been in this bloated carcass some trace of
understanding for the dead boy of whom he spoke--an understanding
faint and groping as a dog who bays the moon might have of the
sidereal universe, and yet genuine and recognizable.

And for a moment present time fades out and the boy sits there
staring blindly out at the dark earth that strokes for ever past
the train, and now he has the watch out and feels it in his
hands. . . .  And suddenly Ben is standing there before his vision,
smoking, and scowls down through the window of the office at the
boy.

He jerks his head in a peremptory gesture: the boy, obedient to his
brother's command, enters the office and stands there waiting at
the counter.  Ben steps down from the platform in the window, puts
the earphones on a table and walks over to the place where the boy
is standing.  For a moment, scowling fiercely, he stands there
looking at the boy across the counter.  The scowl deepens, he makes
a sudden threatening gesture of his hard white hand as if to strike
the boy, but instead he reaches across the counter quickly, seizes
the boy by the shoulders, pulls him closer, and with rough but
skilful fingers tugs, pulls and jerks the frayed string of neck-tie
which the boy is wearing into a more orderly and presentable shape.

The boy starts to go.

"Wait!" says Ben, quietly, in a deliberately off-hand kind of tone.
He opens a drawer below the counter, takes out a small square
package, and scowling irritably, and without looking at the boy, he
thrusts it at him.  "Here's something for you," he says, and walks
away.

"What is it?"  The boy takes the package and examines it with a
queer numb sense of expectancy and growing joy.

"Why don't you open it and see?" Ben says, his back still turned,
and scowling down into a paper on the desk.

"Open it?" the boy says, staring at him stupidly.

"Yes, open it, fool!" Ben snarls.  "It's not going to bite you!"

While the boy fumbles with the cords that tie the package, Ben
prowls over toward the counter with his curious, loping, pigeon-
toed stride, leans on it with his elbows and, scowling, begins to
look up and down the 'want-ad.' columns, while blue, pungent smoke
coils slowly from his nostrils.  By this time, the boy has taken
off the outer wrapping of the package, and is holding a small case,
beautifully heavy, of sumptuous blue velvet, in his hands.

"Well, did you look at it?" Ben says, still scowling up and down
the 'want-ads.' of the paper, without looking at the boy.

The boy finds the spring and presses it, the top opens, inside upon
its rich cushion of white satin is a gold watch, and a fine gold
chain.  It is a miracle of design, almost as thin and delicate as a
wafer.  The boy stares at it with bulging eyes and in a moment
stammers:

"It's--it's a watch!"

"Does it look like an alarm clock?" Ben jeers quietly, as he turns
a page and begins to scowl up and down the advertisements of
another column.

"It's--for me?" the boy says thickly, slowly, as he stares at it.

"No," Ben says, "it's for Napoleon Bonaparte, of course! . . .  You
little idiot!  Don't you know what day this is?  Have I got to do
all the thinking for you?  Don't you ever use your head for
anything except a hat-rack? . . .  Well," he goes on quietly in a
moment, still looking at his paper, "what do you think of it? . . .
There's a spring in the back that opens up," he goes on casually,
"Why don't you look at it?"

The boy turns the watch over, feels the smooth golden surface of
that shining wafer, finds the spring, and opens it.  The back of
the watch springs out, upon the inner surface is engraved, in
delicate small words, this inscription:


                      "To Eugene Gant
          Presented To Him On His Twelfth Birthday
                       By His Brother
                         B. H. Gant
                       October 3, 1912"


"Well," Ben says quietly in a moment.  "Did you read what it says?"

"I'd just like to say--" the boy begins in a thick, strange voice,
staring blindly down at the still open watch.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Ben says, lifting his scowling head in the
direction of his unknown demon, and jerking his head derisively
towards the boy.  "Listen to this, won't you? . . .  Now, for God's
sake, try to take good care of it and don't abuse it!" he says
quickly and irritably.  "You've got to look after a watch the same
as anything else.  Old man Enderby"--this is the name of the
jeweller from whom he has bought the watch--"told me that a watch
like that was good for fifty years, if you take care of it. . . .
You know," he goes on quietly, insultingly, "you're not supposed to
drive nails with it or use it for a hammer.  You know that, don't
you?" he says, and for the first time turns and looks quietly at
the boy.  "Do you know what a watch is for?"

"Yes."

"What is it for?"

"To keep time with," says the boy.

Ben says nothing for a moment, but looks at him.

"Yes," he says quietly at length, with all the bitter weariness of
a fathomless resignation and despair, the infinite revulsion,
scorn, disgust which life has caused in him.  "That's it.  That's
what it's for.  To keep time with."  The weary irony in his voice
had deepened to a note of passionate despair.  "And I hope to God
you keep it better than the rest of us!  Better than Mama or the
old man--better than me!  God help you if you don't! . . .  Now go
on home," he says quietly in a moment, "before I kill you."



"To keep time with!"

What is this dream of time, this strange and bitter miracle of
living?  Is it the wind that drives the leaves down bare paths
fleeing?  Is it the storm-wild flight of furious days, the storm-
swift passing of the million faces, all lost, forgotten, vanished
as a dream?  Is it the wind that howls above the earth, is it the
wind that drives all things before its lash, is it the wind that
drives all men like dead ghosts fleeing?  Is it the one red leaf
that strains there on the bough and that for ever will be fleeing?
All things are lost and broken in the wind; the dry leaves scamper
down the path before us, in their swift-winged dance of death the
dead souls flee along before us driven with rusty scuffle before
the fury of the demented wind.  And October has come again, has
come again.

What is this strange and bitter miracle of life?  Is it to feel,
when furious day is done, the evening hush, the sorrow of lost,
fading light, far sounds and broken cries, and footsteps, voices,
music, and all lost--and something murmurous, immense and mighty in
the air?

And we have walked the pavements of a little town and known the
passages of barren night, and heard the wheel, the whistle and the
tolling bell, and lain in the darkness waiting, giving to silence
the huge prayer of our intolerable desire.  And we have heard the
sorrowful silence of the river in October--and what is there to
say?  October has come again, has come again, and this world, this
life, this time are stranger than a dream.

May it not be that some day from this dream of time, this chronicle
of smoke, this strange and bitter miracle of life in which we are
the moving and phantasmal figures, we shall wake?  Knowing our
father's voice upon the porch again, the flowers, the grape-vines,
the low rich moons of waning August, and the tolling bell--and
instantly to know we live, that we have dreamed and have awakened,
and find then in our hands some object, like this real and
palpable, some gift out of the lost land and the unknown world as
token that it was no dream--that we have really been there?  And
there is no more to say.

For now October has come back again, the strange and lonely month
comes back again, and you will not return.

Up on the mountain, down in the valley, deep, deep, in the hill,
Ben--cold, cold, cold.

"To keep time with!"

And suddenly the scene, the shapes, the voices of the men about him
swam back into their focus, and he could hear the rhythmed pounding
of the wheels below him, and in his palm the frail-numbered visage
of the watch stared blank and plain at him its legend.  It was one
minute after twelve o'clock, Sunday morning, October the third,
1920, and he was hurtling across Virginia, and this world, this
life, this time were stranger than a dream.



The train had halted for a moment at one of the Virginia towns, and
for a moment the people were conscious of the strange yet casual
familiarity of all those sounds which suddenly will intercept the
rhythmic spell of time and memory which a journey in a train can
cast upon its passengers.  Suddenly this spell was broken by the
intrusion of peculiar things--of sounds and voices--the sense of
instant recognition, union to a town, a life which they had never
known, but with which they now felt immediately familiar.  A
railwayman was coming swiftly down the station platform beneath the
windows of the train, pausing from time to time to hammer on the
car-wheels of each truck.  A negro toiled past below them with a
heavy rattling truck in tow, piled high with baggage.

And elsewhere there were the casual voices of the railwaymen--
conductors, porters, baggage masters, station men--greeting each
other with friendly words, without surprise, speaking of weather,
work, plans for the future, saying farewell in the same way.  Then
the bell tolled, the whistle blew, the slow panting of the engine
came back to them, the train was again in motion; the station, and
the station lights, a glimpse of streets, the thrilling, haunting,
white-glazed incandescence of a cotton mill at night, the hard last
lights of town, slid past the windows of the train.  The train was
in full speed now, and they were rushing on across the dark and
lonely earth again.

Then one of the men in the compartment, the politician, who had
been looking curiously out of the window at this town and station
scene, turned and spoke with a casual interest to the boy:

"Your father's in Baltimore now, isn't he, son?" he said.

"Yes, sir.  He's at Hopkins.  Luke's up there with him."

"Well, I thought I read something in the paper a week or two back
about his being there," said the man with the florid face.

"What's wrong with him?" Mr. Flood demanded coarsely in a moment,
after he had absorbed this information.  "Ain't he feeling good?"

The boy shifted nervously in his seat before he answered.  His
father was dying of cancer, but for some reason it did not seem
possible or proper for him to say this to these men.  He said:

"He's got some kind of kidney trouble, I think.  He goes up there
for radium treatments."

"It's the same thing John Rankin had," the florid-faced man glibly
interposed at this moment.  "Some sort of prostate trouble, isn't
it?" he said.

"Yes, sir, that's it," the boy said.  For some reason he felt a
sense of relief and gratefulness towards the man with the florid
face.  The easy, glib and false assurance that his father's
"trouble" was "the same thing John Rankin had" seemed to give the
disease a respectable standing and to divest the cancer of its
fatal, shameful and putrescent horror.

"I know what it is," the florid-faced man was saying, nodding his
head in a confident manner.  "It's the same thing John Rankin had.
A lot of men get it after they're fifty.  John told me he went
through agony with it for ten years.  Said he used to be up with it
a dozen times a night.  It got so he couldn't sleep, he couldn't
rest, he couldn't do anything but walk the floor with it.  It got
him down so that he was nothing but skin and bones, he was walking
around like a dead man.  Then he went up there and had that
operation and he's been a new man ever since.  He looks better than
he's looked in twenty years.  I was talking to him the other day
and he told me he didn't have an ache or a pain in the world.  He
said he was going to live to be a hundred and he looked it--the
picture of health.

"Well," he said in a friendly tone, now turning to the boy,
"remember me to your father when you see him.  Tell him Frank
Candler asked to be remembered to him."

"Are you and him good friends?" Mr. Flood demanded heavily, after
another staring pause, with the brutal, patient, and somehow
formidable curiosity which belonged to him.  "You know him well?"

"Who?  Mr. Gant?" Mr. Candler cried with the hearty geniality of
the politician, which seemed to suggest he knew the man so well
that the very question was amusing to him.  "Why, I've known him
all my life--I've known him ever since he first came to Altamont--
let's see, that's all of forty years ago when he first came here?"
Mr. Candler went on reflectively, "or no, maybe a little less than
that.  Wait a minute."  He considered seriously for a moment.  "The
first time I ever saw your father," said Mr. Candler very slowly
and impressively, with a frown on his face and not looking at any
one, but staring straight before him, "was in October, 1882--and I
believe--I believe," he said strongly, "that was the very year he
came to town--yes, sir!  I'm positive of it!" he cried.  "For
Altamont was nothing but a cross-roads village in those days--I
don't believe we had 2,000 people there--why, that's all in the
world it was."  Mr. Candler now interrupted himself heartily.  "The
courthouse up there on the square and a few stores around it--when
you got two blocks away you were right out in the country.  Didn't
Captain Bob Porter offer me three lots he owned down there on
Pisgah Avenue, not a block from the square, for a thousand dollars,
and didn't I laugh at him to think he was fool enough to ask such a
price as that and expect to get it!  Why!" Mr. Candler declared,
with a full countrified laugh, "it was nothing but a mud-hole down
in the holler.  I've seen old Captain Porter's hawgs wallerin'
around in it many's the time.  'And you,' I said to him, 'you--do
you think I'd pay you a price like that for a mud-hole?  Why, you
must think I'm crazy, sure enough.'  'All right,' he says, 'have it
your own way, but you'll live to see the day you'll regret not
buying it.  You'll live to see the day when you can't buy ONE of
those lots for a thousand dollars!'  ONE of them!" Mr. Candler now
cried in hearty self-derision.  "Why, if I owned one of those lots
to-day, I'd be a rich man!  I don't believe you could buy a foot of
that land to-day for less than a thousand dollars, could you,
Bruce?" he said, addressing himself to the swarthy, pompous-looking
man who sat beside the boy.

"Five thousand a front foot would come closer to it, I should
think," the pompous little man replied, with the crisp, brisk and
almost strutting assurance that characterized all his words and
gestures.  He crossed and uncrossed his fat little legs briskly as
he uttered these words and then sat there "all reared back" as the
saying goes, unable even to reach the floor with his fat little
legs, but smiling a complacent smile and simply exuding conceit and
strutting self-satisfaction from every pore.  "Yes, sir!" the
swarthy little man continued, pompously, "I should doubt very much
if you could buy a foot of that property for less than $5,000
today!"

"Well," said Mr. Candler with a satisfied air.  "That's what I
thought!  I knew it would be way up there somewheres.  But I could
have had the whole thing once for a thousand dollars.  I've kicked
myself in the seat of the pants a thousand times since to think
what a fool I was for not taking it when I had the chance!  I'd be
a rich man to-day if I had!  It just goes to show you, doesn't it?"
he concluded indefinitely.

"Yes, sir," the pompous, swarthy little man replied, in his dry,
briskly assured tones, "it goes to show that our hindsight is
usually a great deal better than our foresight!"  And he glanced
about him complacently, obviously pleased with his wit and
convinced that he had said something remarkably pungent and
original.

"It was about that time when I first met your father," said Mr.
Candler, turning to the boy again.  "Along there in the fall of
'82--that's when it was all right--and I don't think he'd been in
town then more than a month, for in a town that size, I'd have
known if he'd been there longer.  And yes, of course!" he cried
sharply, struck by sudden recollection, "that very first day I saw
him he was standing there in front of his shop with two nigger men,
unloading some blocks of marble and granite and tombstones, I
reckon, and moving them back into his shop.  I guess he was just
moving in at the time.  He'd rented an old shack over there at the
north-east corner of the square where the Sluder building is now.
That's where it was, all right.  I was working for old man Weaver
at the time--he had a grocery and general-goods store there
opposite the old courthouse about where the Blue Ridge Coal and Ice
Company is now.  I was going back to work after dinner and had just
turned the corner at the Square there from Academy Street when I
saw your father.  I remember stopping to watch him for a moment
because there was something about his appearance--I don't know what
it was, but if you saw him once you'd never forget him--there was
something about the way he looked and talked and worked that was
different from any one I'd ever seen.  Of course, he was an awful
tall, big-boned, powerful-looking sort of man--how tall is your
father, son?"

"He was about six feet five," the boy answered, "but I guess he's
not that much now--he's stooped over some since he got old."

"Well, he didn't stoop in those days," said Mr. Candler.  "He
always carried himself as straight as an arrow.  I noticed that.
He was an awful big man--not that he had much weight on him--he was
always lean and SKINNY like--but he LOOKED big--he had big bones--
his FRAME was big!" cried Mr. Candler.  "You'll make a big man too
when you fill out," he continued, giving the boy an appraising
look.  "Of course, you look like your mother's people, you're a
Pentland and they're fleshy people, but you've got the old man's
frame.  You may make a bigger man than he is when you put on weight
and widen out--but it wasn't that your father was so big--I think
he looked bigger than he really was--it was something else about
him--about the way he gave orders to the niggers and went about his
work," said Mr. Candler, in a rather puzzled tone.  "I don't know
what it was, but I'd never seen any one like him before.  For one
thing he was dressed so good!" he said suddenly.  "He always wore
his good clothes when he worked--I'd never seen a man who did hard
labour with his hands who dressed that way.  Here he was, you know,
sweating over those big blocks of stone with those two niggers and
wearing better clothes than you and me would go to church in.  Of
course, he had his coat off, and his cuffs rolled back, and he was
wearing one of those big striped aprons that go the whole way up
across the shoulders--but you could see his clothes were GOOD,"
said Mr. Candler.  "Looked like black broadcloth that had been made
by a tailor and wearing a BOILED shirt, mind you, and one of those
wing collars with a black silk neck-tie--and not afraid to work,
either!  Why, the first thing I saw him do," said Mr. Candler,
laughing, "he let out a string of words at those niggers you could
have heard from here to yonder because they were sweating and
straining to get a big hunk of marble up on the rollers, that they
hadn't been able to budge an inch.  'Merciful God,' he says, that's
just the way he talked, you know--'Merciful God!  Has it come to
this that I must do everything for myself while you stand there
gloating at my agony?  I could as soon look for help from a couple
of God-damned wooden Indians!  In the name of God, stand back.
I'll do it myself, sick and feeble as I am!'  Well," said Mr.
Candler, chuckling with the recollection, "with that he reaches
down and gets a grip on that big hunk of stone and gives a heave
and up she comes on to the rolling pins as nice and easy as
anything you ever saw.  Well, sir, you should have seen the look
upon those niggers' faces--I thought their eyes were going to pop
out of their heads.  And that's the first time I ever spoke to him,
you know.  I can remember the very words I said.  I said to him,
'Well, if you call that being sick and feeble, most of the folks up
in this part of the country are already dead and in their graves.'"

The man's story had stirred in the boy's mind a thousand living
memories of his father.  For a moment it seems to him that the lost
world which these words evoked has never died, lives yet in all the
radiant and enchanted colour of his childhood, in all its proud,
dense, and single fabric of passion, fury, certitude and joy.
Every memory that the story brought to life is part of him.  There
are a thousand buried, nameless and forgotten lives, ten thousand
strange and secret tongues alive now, urgent, swarming in his
blood, and thronging at the gateways of his memory.  They are the
lives of the lost wilderness, his mother's people; they are the
tongues, the faces of the secret land, the dark half of his heart's
desire, the fertile golden earth from which his father came.

He knows the farmer boy who stood beside the road and watched the
dusty rebels marching past towards Gettysburg.  He smells the sweet
fragrance of that lavish countryside, he hears the oaths, the
jests, the laughter of the marching soldiers, he hears the
cricketing stitch of noon in drowsy fields, the myriad woodnotes,
secret, green, and cool, the thrumming noises.  He feels the
brooding wait and murmur of hot afternoon, the trembling of the
distant guns in the hot air, and the vast, oncoming hush and peace
and silence of the dusk.

And then he is lying beside his father in the little gabled room
upstairs.  He is there beside his father and his father's brothers
in the darkness--waiting, silent, waiting--with an unspoken single
question in their hearts.  They are thinking of an older brother
who that night is lying twelve miles away, shot through the lungs.
He sees his father's gaunt, long form in darkness, the big-boned
hands, the gaunt, long face, the cold, green-grey, restless and
weary eyes, so deep and untelling, so strangely lonely, and the
slanting, almost reptilian large formation of the skull that has,
somehow, its own strange dignity--as of some one lost.  And the
great stars of America blaze over them, the vast and lonely earth
broods round them, then as now, with its secret and mysterious
presences, and then as now the million-noted ululation of the night
throngs up from silence the song of all its savage, dark and
measureless fecundity.  And he lies there in the darkness with his
father and the brothers--silent, waiting--their cold, grey eyes
turned upward to the loneliness of night, the blazing stars, having
no words to say the thing they feel, the dream of time and the dark
wonder of man's destiny which has drenched with blood the old
earth, the familiar wheat, and fused that day the image of immortal
history in a sleepy country town twelve miles away.

He sees the gaunt figure of the stone-cutter coming across the
square at his earth-devouring stride.  He hears him muttering
underneath his breath the mounting preludes of his huge invective.
He sees him striding on for ever, bent forward in his haste,
wetting his thumb and clearing his throat with an infuriated and
anticipatory relish as he comes.  He sees him striding round the
corner, racing up-hill towards the house, bearing huge packages of
meat beneath his arm.  He sees him take the high front steps four
at a time, hasten like a hurricane into the house, lay down the
meat upon the kitchen table, and then without a pause or
introduction, comes the storm--fire, frenzy, curses, woes and
lamentations, and then news out of the streets, the morning's joy,
the smoking and abundant dinner.

A thousand memories of that life of constant and unresting fury
brim in the boy's mind in an instant.  At this moment, with
telescopic force, all of these memories of his father's life become
fused and blurred to one terrific image, in which it seems that the
whole packed chronicle, from first to last, is perfectly comprised.



At the same moment the boy became conscious that the men were
getting up around him, preparatory to departure, and that the
florid-faced man, who had been speaking of his father, had laid his
hand upon his shoulder in a friendly gesture, and was speaking to
him.

"Good night, son," the man was saying.  "I'm getting off at
Washington.  If I don't see you again, good luck to you.  I suppose
you'll be getting off at Baltimore to see your father before you go
on, won't you?"

"Yes.  Yes, sir," the boy stammered confusedly, getting to his
feet.

"Remember me to him, won't you?  Tell him you saw Frank Candler on
the train and he sent his best regards."

"Yes, sir--thank you--I will," the boy said.

"All right.  And good luck to you, boy," the politician said,
giving him his broad, fleshy and rather tender hand.  "Give 'em
hell when you get up there," he said quietly, with a firm, friendly
clasp and a good-natured wink.

"Yes--I certainly will--thank you--" the boy stammered, flaming in
the face, with a feeling of proud hope, and with affection for the
man who had spoken to him.

Then the man had gone, but his words had brought back to the boy
suddenly the knowledge that in the morning he was to see his
father.  And that knowledge instantly destroyed all the exultancy
of flight and darkness, the incredible realization of his escape,
the image of new lands, the new life, and the shining city that had
been swelling in his spirit all night long.  It had interposed its
leaden face between him and this image of wild joy towards which he
was rushing onward in the darkness, and its grey oppressive cloud
weighed down upon him suddenly a measureless weight of dull
weariness, horror and disgust.

He knew that next day he must meet his brother and his father, he
knew that the dreaded pause and interruption of his flight would
last but two short days, and that in this brief time he might see
and know for the last time all that was living of his father, and
yet the knowledge of this hated meeting filled him with loathing, a
terrible desire to get away from it as quickly as possible, to
forget it, to escape from it for ever.

He knew in his heart that for the wretched, feeble, whining old man
whom he must meet next day, he felt no love whatever.  He knew,
indeed, that he felt instead a kind of hate--the wretched kind of
hatred that comes from intolerable pity without love, from
suffering and disgust, from the agony of heart and brain and
nerves, the poisonous and morbid infection of our own lives, which
a man dying of a loathsome disease awakes in us, and from the self-
hate, the self-loathing that it makes us feel because of our
terrible desire to escape him, to desert him, to blot out the
horrible memory we have for him, utterly to forget him.

Now the three men remaining in the compartment were rising to
depart.  Old Flood got up with a painful grunt, carefully dropped
the chewed butt of his cigar into the brass spittoon, and walked
tenderly with a gouty and flat-footed shuffle across the little
room to the mirrored door of the latrine.  He opened it, entered,
and closed it behind him.  The pompous swarthy little man got up,
stretched his short fat arms out stiffly, and said, "Well, I'll be
turning in.  I'll see you in the morning, won't I, Jim?"

The man with the thin, tight, palely freckled face, to whom these
words had been addressed, looked up quickly from the magazine he
was reading, and said sharply, in a rather cold, surprised and
distant tone:

"What? . . .  Oh!  Yes.  Good night, Wade."

He got up then, carefully detached the horn-rimmed spectacles from
his long, pointed nose, folded them carefully and put them in the
breast pocket of his coat, and then took up the brief-case at his
side.  At this moment, a man, accompanied by Robert Weaver and by
another youth who was about the same age as the boy, entered the
smoking-room.

The man, who was in his middle thirties, was a tall lean
Englishman, already bald, with bitten and incisive features, a
cropped moustache, and the high hard flush of the steady drinker.

His name was John Hugh William Macpherson Marriott.  He was the
youngest son of an ancient family of the English nobility and just
a year or two before he had married the great heiress, Virginia
Willets.  To the boy, and to all the other men in the train, except
the man with the cold thin face and pointed nose, the Englishman
was known only by sight and rumour, and his sudden entrance into
the smoking-room had much the same effect as would the appearance
of a figure from some legendary world of which they had often
heard, but which they had never seen.

The reason for this feeling was that the Englishman and his wife
lived on the great estate near town which her father had built and
left to her.  All the people in the town had seen this immense
estate, had driven over some of its 90,000 acres, had seen its
farms, its fields, its pastures, and its forests, its dairies,
buildings, and its ranges of wild, smoke-blue mountains.  And
finally they had all seen from a distance its great mansion house,
the gables, roof, and spires of a huge stone structure modelled on
one of the great châteaux of France.  But few of them had ever been
inside the place or known the wonderful people who lived there.

All the lives of these fortunate people had become, therefore, as
strange and wonderful to the people of the town as the lives of
legendary heroes.  And in a curious way that great estate had
shaped the whole life of the town.  To be a part of that life, to
be admitted there, to know the people who belonged to it would have
been the highest success, the greatest triumph that most of the
people in the town could imagine.  They could not admit it, but it
was the truth.  At the heart of the town's desire was the life of
that great house.

The Englishman had entered the smoking compartment with the driving
movement of a man who has been drinking hard, but is used to it.
The moment that he entered, however, and saw the other people there
he stopped short, with a kind of stunned abruptness.  In a moment,
after an astounded silence, he spoke to them, greeting them with
the rough, brief, blurted-out friendliness of a shy and reticent
man:

"Hello! . . .  Oh, hello! . . .  How do?"  He grinned formally and
suddenly began to stare with an astounded expression at the gouty
figure of old Flood who at just this moment had opened the door of
the latrine and was shuffling painfully out into the compartment.
Mr. Flood stopped and returned his look in kind, with his bulging
and bejowled stare of comic stupefaction.

In a moment more the Englishman recovered himself, grimaced with
his shy, quick, toothy grin, and blurted out at Flood, as to the
other men:

"Oh, hello!  Hello!  How d'ye do?"

"I'm pretty good, thank you!" old Flood said hoarsely and slowly,
after a heavy pause.  "How are you?" and continued to stare heavily
and stupidly at him.

But already the Englishman had turned abruptly from him, his face
and lean neck reddening instantly and fiercely with the angry
embarrassment of a shy man.  And with the same air of astonished
discovery he now addressed himself to the man with the long thin
nose and palely freckled face, blurting his words out rapidly and
by rushes as before, but somehow conveying to the others the sense
of his intimacy and friendship with this man and of their own
exclusion.

"Oh! . . .  There you are, Jim!" he was saying in his astounded and
explosive fashion.  "Where the devil have you been all night? . . .
I say!" he went on rapidly without waiting for an answer, "won't
you come in and have a spot with me before you turn in?"

Every suggestion of the disdain and cold aloofness which had
characterized the other man's manner towards his fellow-passengers
had now vanished at the Englishman's words.  Indeed, in the way he
now came forward, smiling, and put his hand in a friendly manner on
the Englishman's arm, there was something almost scrambling in its
effusive eagerness.  "Why yes, Hugh," he said hastily.  "I'd be
delighted, of course! . . .  Just a minute," he said in an almost
confused tone of voice, "till I get my brief-case. . . .  Where did
I leave it?  Oh, here it is!" he cried, picking it up, and making
for the door with his companion, "I'm all ready now!  Let's go!"

"Hugh!  Hugh!" cried Robert who had accompanied the Englishman when
he entered the compartment, and whom the Englishman now seemed to
have forgotten entirely, "will I see you to-morrow before you get
off?"  The words were spoken in a deep, rapid, eager tone of voice,
and in the tone and manner of the youth who spoke them there was
the same suggestion of almost fawning eagerness that had
characterized the older man.

"Eh!  What's that?" the Englishman cried in a startled tone,
turning abruptly and staring at the young man who had addressed
him.  "Oh!  Yes, Robert!  I'm stopping at Washington!  Look in for
a moment, won't you, if you're up!"

Something in his tone and manner plainly and definitely said that
the young man's company was no longer wanted for the evening, but
the youth immediately nodded his head energetically and decisively,
saying in a satisfied manner:

"Good!  Good!  I'll do that!  I'll be in to say good-bye to-morrow
morning."

"Right!" the Englishman said curtly.  "Good night! . . .  Good
night! . . .  Good night!" he blurted out, turning round and
addressing every one, yet seeing no one, in a series of toothy
grimaces.  "Oh--good night!" he said suddenly, before going out,
grinning and shaking hands briefly, in a gesture of permanent
dismissal, with the other young man, who was a blond insignificant-
looking youth, obviously a "hanger-on," with whom the Englishman
evidently cared to have no further acquaintance.  Then, pushing his
companion before him through the green curtain, he went out
suddenly with the same desperate shy abruptness, and in a moment
the other men, saying good night all around, had followed him, and
the three young men were left alone in the compartment.  It was now
after one o'clock.  Outside, the moon was up, flooding the dark
earth of Virginia with a haunting light.  That grand, moon-haunted
earth stroked calmly past and, through the media of its changeless
and unceasing change, the recession and recurrent movement of the
enchanted scene, the train made on for ever its tremendous monotone
that was itself the rhythm of suspended time, the sound of silence
and for ever.



For a moment, after the men had gone, Robert stared down sternly
and quizzically at the boy, with an expression of mock gravity, and
then, in his rapid, eager, deep-toned and rather engaging voice,
said:

"Well, Colonel? . . .  What have you to say for yourself? . . .
Was there grass on the back of her back, or was the foul deed
perpetrated in your Hudson Super Six? . . .  Come, sir!  Explain
yourself!  Were you drunk or sober?"  And suddenly lifting his
thin, young, yet almost tortured-looking face and his restless
eyes, which were inflamed with drink, and in whose haggard depths
the incipient flashes of the madness which later would destroy him
were already visible, he laughed suddenly, a strange, small,
hoarsely falsetto kind of laugh, jerking his head towards the boy,
and saying in an annoying and indefinite way:

"Crazy!  Crazy!  Crazy! . . .  The craziest man I ever saw!"  He
stopped suddenly and, looking down at the boy for a moment with
this same expression of haggard, over-driven restlessness, demanded
impatiently:

"What have you been doing by yourself all night?  Just sitting
there all alone and doing nothing? . . .  I'll swear, I don't see
how you do it! . . .  I'd go crazy sitting in one place like that
without any one to talk to!" he said in an accusing and impatient
tone of voice, as if the other youth had really done some
extraordinary and unreasonable thing.  He thrust one hand quickly
and impatiently into the trousers pocket of his well-cut clothes in
such a way that his Delta Kappa Epsilon pin was for a moment
visible.  Then he stood there, jingling some coins about in his
pocket and looking at the boy with his inflamed, restless,
furiously desperate eyes.  Turning away suddenly, with a movement
of impatience, he shook his head in a gesture of astounded
disbelief, laughed his little hoarse falsetto laugh again, and
said:

"It beats me! . . .  Don't see how he does it! . . .  Damnedest man
I ever saw! . . .  It'd drive me crazy to be alone like that!"

He turned abruptly again, thrust both hands into his pockets, and
for a moment stood looking at the boy with the old expression of
mock gravity, and with a faintly malicious smile hovering about the
edges of his thin, nervous, strongly modelled mouth.

"Do you know what they're saying about you at home? . . .  Do you
know what those people think of you? . . .  Do you know what all
those old women up there are doing now?" he said hoarsely and
accusingly, in his deep, sonorous, and rapid tone.

"Now, Robert!" the boy suddenly shouted, in a choking and furious
tone, getting to his feet.  "Don't you start that stuff!  I'm not
going to listen to it!  You can't fool me!  They're not saying
anything!"

Robert lifted his thin, finely drawn face and laughed again, his
little annoying hoarse falsetto laugh, in which a note of malice
and triumph was audible.

"Why, they ARE!" he said solemnly.  "It's the truth! . . .  I think
you ought to know about it! . . .  I heard it everywhere, all over
town!"

"Oh, Robert, you're a liar!" the boy cried furiously.  "WHAT did
you hear all over town?  You heard nothing!"

"Why, I DID!" said Robert solemnly, as before.  "I'll swear it to
you. . . .  Do you know what I heard the other day?" he went on in
a blunt, accusing tone.  "I heard that one of those women up there--
some old sister in the Baptist Church--said she grew up with your
mother and has known her all her life--well, she's praying for
you!" said Robert solemnly.  "I'll swear she is!"

"Praying for me!" the boy cried in an exasperated tone, but at the
same time, feeling the numb white nauseous sickness of the heart
which the intolerable thought that people are talking in a
disparaging manner about him, his talents, or the success or
failure of his life, can always bring to a young man.  "Praying for
me!" he fiercely shouted.  "Why the hell should any one pray for
me?"

"I know!  I know!" said Robert, nodding his head vigorously, and
speaking with grave agreement.  "That's what I told them.  That's
just the way I felt about it! . . .  But some of those people down
there think you've gone to hell for good. . . .  Do you know what I
heard a woman say the other day?  She said that Eugene Gant had
gone straight to the devil since he went away to the State
University--"

"Robert, I don't believe you!" the boy shouted.  "You're making all
this up!"

"Why, she did!  So help me, God!  I heard her say it, as sure as
I'm standing here," swore Robert solemnly.  "She said you'd gone
down there and taken Vergil Weldon's courses in philosophy and that
you were ruined for life!  She said you had turned into a regular
infidel--didn't believe in God or anything any more. . . .  Said
she certainly did feel sorry for your mother," said Robert
maliciously.

"Feel sorry for my mother!" the boy fairly howled, dancing around
now like a maniac.  "Why the hell should the old bitch feel sorry
for my mother!  My mother can take care of herself; she doesn't
need any one to feel sorry for her! . . .  All right, then!" he
cried bitterly, with sudden acceptation of the other's story.  "Let
'em pray!  If that's the way they feel, let 'em pray till they wear
corns on their God-damned knees!  The dirty hypocrites!" he cried
bitterly.  "I'll show them!  Sneaking around behind your back to
tell their rotten lies about you--and their talk of praying for
your soul!  I'm glad I'm out of that damned town!  The two-faced
bastards!  I wouldn't trust any of them as far as I could throw an
elephant by his tail!"

"I know!  I know!" said Robert, wagging his head in solemn
agreement.  "I agree with you absolutely.  It's awful--that's what
it is."

It was extraordinary that this absurd story, whether true or not,
should have had such a violent effect on the emotions of the boy.
Yet now that he had been told of some unknown woman's concern for
the salvation of his soul, and that certain people of the praying
sort already thought that he was "lost," the words were fastened in
his flesh like rankling and envenomed barbs.  And instantly, the
moment that he heard this story and had cursed it, he thought that
it was true.  Now, his mind could no longer remember the time just
a moment before when Robert's words had seemed only an idle and
malicious fabrication, probably designed to goad him, or, even if
true, of no great importance.

But now, as if the idle gossip of the other youth had really
pronounced some fatal and inexorable judgment against his whole
life, the boy's spirit was set against "them" blindly, as against a
nameless and hostile antagonist.  Plunged suddenly into a dark
weather of fatality and grim resolution, something in him was
saying grimly and desperately:

"All right, then.  If that's the way they feel about me, I'll show
them."  And seeing the lonely earth outside that went stroking past
the windows of the train, he suddenly felt the dark and brooding
joy of desperation and escape, and thought again:  "Thank God, I've
got away at last.  Now there's a new land, a new life, new people
like myself who will see and know me as I am and value me--and, by
God, I'll show them!  I'll show THEM, all right."

And at just this moment of his gloomy thoughts, he muttered
sombrely, aloud, with sullen face:

"All right!  To hell with them!  I'll show them!"

--And was instantly aware that Robert was looking at him, laughing
his little, malicious, hoarse, falsetto laugh, and that the other
youth, who was a fair-haired, red-cheeked and pleasant-featured boy
named Creasman, obviously somewhat inflamed by drink and by his
social triumphs of the evening, was now, with an eager excessiveness
of good-fellowship, slapping him on the back and saying boisterously:

"Don't let him kid you, Gene!  To hell with them!  What do you care
what they say, anyway?"

With these words, he produced from his pocket a flask of the raw,
colourless, savagely instant corn whisky, of which both of them
apparently had been partaking pretty freely, and tendering it to
the boy, said:

"Here, take a drink!"

The boy took the flask, pulled out the cork, and putting the bottle
to his lips, instantly gulped down two or three powerful swallows
of the fiery stuff.  For a moment, he stood there blind and
choking, instantly robbed of breath, his throat muscles swelling,
working, swallowing convulsively in an aching struggle to keep down
the revolting and nauseous tasting stuff, and on no account to show
the effort it was costing him.

"Is that the kick of the mule, or not?" said the Creasman boy,
grinning and taking back his flask.  "How is it?"

"Good!" the boy said hoarsely, gasping.  "Fine!  Best I ever
tasted!"  And he blinked his eyes rapidly to keep the tears from
coming.

"Well, there's lots more where that came from, boy," said Creasman.
"I've got two pint jars of it in my berth.  Let me know when you
want some more."  And putting the bottle to his lips with a smile,
he tilted his head, and drank in long easy swallows which showed he
was no novice to the act.

"Damn!" cried Robert, staring at him, in his familiar tone of
astounded disbelief.  "Do you mean to tell me you can stand there
drinking that stuff straight!  Phew!" he said, shuddering, and
making a face.  "That old pukey stuff!  Why, it'd rot the guts of a
brass monkey! . . .  I don't see how you people do it!" he cried
protestingly, as he took the bottle.  In three gulps he had drained
it to the last drop, and even as he was looking around for a place
to throw the empty flask, he shuddered convulsively again, made a
contracted grimace of disgust, and said to the others accusingly,
with his small falsetto laugh of astounded protest:

"Why, you'll kill yourself drinking that stuff raw!  Don't you know
that?  You must be crazy! . . .  Wait a minute," he muttered
suddenly, comically, dropping the bottle deftly into his pocket, as
the swarthy, pompous little man named Wade entered, attired in blue
pyjamas and a dressing-gown, and holding a tooth-brush and a tube
of tooth-paste in his hand:

"Good evening, sir! . . .  Ah-hah! . . .  How d'ye do?" said
Robert, bowing slightly and stiffly, and speaking in his grave,
staccato, curiously engaging tone.

"Still up, are you, boys?" the pompous little man remarked, with
his usual telling aptness.

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert appreciatively.  "Yes, sir! . . .  Just
fixin' to go! . . .  Come on," he muttered to the others, jerking
his head towards the little man warningly.  "Not here! . . .  Well,
good night, sir! . . .  Goin' now."

"Good night, boys," said the little man, who now had his back
turned to them, and was standing at the silvery basin with his
tooth-brush held in readiness.  "See you in the morning."

"Ah-hah-hah!" said Robert.  "Yes, sir.  That's right.  Goodnight."

And frowning in a meaningful way at his companions, he jerked his
head toward the corridor, and, with an air of great severity, led
them out.

"Didn't want him to see us with that bottle," he muttered when they
were outside in the corridor.  "Hell!  He's got the biggest bank in
town!  Where'd you be if Emmet Wade ever got the idea you're a
liquor-head! . . .  Wait a minute!" he said, with the dissonant
abruptness that characterized so much of his speech and action.
"Come outside here--on the platform: nobody to see you there!"

"I'll meet you out there.  I'll go and get another bottle,"
whispered Creasman, and disappeared along the darkened corridor in
the direction of his berth.  In a moment he returned, and the three
of them went out upon the platform at the car-end, closed the door
behind them and there, among the rocking and galloping noises of
the pounding wheels, they took another long drink of the savage
liquor.  By this time the fiery stuff was leaping, pulsing,
pounding the mounting and exuberant illusions of its power and
strength through every tissue of their blood and life.

And outside, floating past their vision the huge pageant of its
enchanted and immortal stillness, the old earth of Virginia now lay
dreaming in the moon's white light.



So here they are now, three atoms on the huge breast of the
indifferent earth, three youths out of a little town walled far
away within the great rim of the silent mountains, already a
distant, lonely dot upon the immense and sleeping visage of the
continent.  Here they are--three youths bound for the first time
towards their image of the distant and enchanted city, sure that
even though so many of their comrades had found there only dust and
bitterness, the shining victory will be theirs.  Here they are
hurled onward in the great projectile of the train across the
lonely visage of the everlasting earth.  Here they are--three
nameless grains of life among the man-swarm ciphers of the earth,
three faces of the million faces, three drops in the unceasing
flood--and each of them a flame, a light, a glory, sure that his
destiny is written in the blazing stars, his life shone over by the
fortunate watches of the moon, his fame nourished and sustained by
the huge earth, whose single darling charge he is, on whose
immortal stillness he is flung onward in the night, his glorious
fate set in the very brain and forehead of the fabulous, the
unceasing city, of whose million-footed life he will to-morrow be a
part.

Therefore they stand upon the rocking platform of the train, wild
and dark and jubilant from the fierce liquor they have drunk, but
more wild and dark and jubilant from the fury swelling in their
hearts, the mad fury pounding in their veins, the savage, exultant
and unutterable fury working like a madness in the adyts of their
soul.  And the great wheels smash and pound beneath their feet, the
great wheels pound and smash and give a rhyme to madness, a tongue
to hunger and desire, a certitude to all the savage, drunken, and
exultant fury that keeps mounting, rising, swelling in them all the
time!



Click, clack, clackety-clack; click, clack, clackety-clack; click,
clack, clackety-clack; clackety-clackety-clack!

Hip, hop, hackety-hack; stip, step, rackety-rack; come and fetch
it, come and fetch it, hickety-hickety-hack!

Rock, reel, smash, and swerve; hit it, hit it, on the curve;
steady, steady, does the trick, keep her steady as a stick; eat the
earth, eat the earth, slam and slug and beat the earth, and let her
whir-r, and let her pur-r, at eighty per-r!

--Whew-w!

--Wow!

--God-dam!

--Put 'er there, boy!

--Put 'er there--whah!--WHAH-H! you ole long-legged frowsle-headed
son-of-a-bitch!

--Whoop-ee!  Whah--WHAH-H!  Why, Go-d-d-dam!

--Whee!  Vealer rog?

--Wadja say?  Gant hearya!

--I say 'ja vealer rog?  Wow!  Pour it to her, son!  Give 'er the
gas!  We're out to see the world!  Run her off the god-damn track,
boy!  We don't need no rail, do we?

--Hell no!  Which way does this damn train go, anyway, after it
leaves Virginia?

--Maryland.

--Maryland my--!  I don't want to go to Maryland!  To hell with
Mary's land!  Also to hell with Mary's lamb and Mary's calf and
Mary's blue silk underdrawers!  Good old Lucy's the girl for me--
the loosier the better!  Give me Lucy any day!  Good old Lucy
Bowles, God bless her--she's the pick of the crowd, boys!  Here's
to Lucy!

--Robert!  Art there, boy?

--Aye, aye, sir!  Present!

--Hast seen the damsel down in Lower Seven?

--I' sooth, sir, that I have!  A comely wench, I trow!

--Peace, fool!  Don't think, proud Princocke, thou canst snare this
dove of innocence into the nets of infamous desire with stale
reversions of thy wit!  Out, out, vile lendings!  An but thou
carried'st at thy shrunken waist that monstrous tun of guts thou
takest for a brain 'twould so beslubber this receiving earth with
lard as was not seen twixt here and Nottingham since butter shrove!
Out, out upon you, scrapings of the pot!  A dove, a doe, it is a
faultless swan, I say, a pretty thing!



Now Virginia lay dreaming in the moonlight.  In Louisiana bayous
the broken moonlight shivers the broken moonlight quivers the light
of many rivers lay dreaming in the moonlight beaming in the
moonlight dreaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight seeming in
the moonlight moonlight moonlight to be gleaming to be streaming in
the moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight
moonlight moonlight

--Mo-hoo-oonlight-oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight
oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight

--To be seeming to be dreaming in the moonlight!



WHAM!

SMASH!

--Now!  God-dam, let her have it!  Wow-w!

With slamming roar, hoarse waugh, and thunderbolted light, the
southbound train is gone in one projectile smash of wind-like fury,
and the open empty silence of its passing fills us, thrills us,
stills us with the vision of Virginia in the moonlight, with the
dream-still magic of Virginia in the moon.

And now, as if with recollected force, the train gains power from
the train it passed, leaps, gathers, springs beneath them, smashes
on with recollected demon's fury in the dark . . .

With slam-bang of devil's racket and God-dam of curse--give us the
bottle, drink, boys, drink!--the power of Virginia lies compacted
in the moon.  To you, God-dam of devil's magic and slam-bang of
drive, fire-flame of the terrific furnace, slam of rod, storm-
stroke of pistoned wheel and thunderbolt of speed, great earth-
devourer, city-bringer--hail!

To you, also, old glint of demon hawk-eyes on the rail and the dark
gloved hand of cunning--you, there, old bristle-crops!--Tom Wilson,
H. F. Cline, or T. J. Johnson--whatever the hell your name is--

CASEY JONES!  Open the throttle, boy, and let her rip!  Boys, I'm a
belly-busting bastard from the State of old Catawba--a rootin'
tootin' shootin' son-of-a-bitch from Saw Tooth Gap in Buncombe--
why, God help this lovely bastard of a train--it is the best damned
train that ever turned a wheel since Casey Jones's father was a
pup--why, you sweet bastard, run!  Eat up Virginia!--Give her the
throttle, you old goggle-eyed son-of-a-bitch up there!--Pour it to
her!  Let 'er have it, you nigger-Baptist bastard of a shovelling
fireman--let 'er rip!--Wow!  By God, we'll be in Washington for
breakfast!

--Why, God bless this lovely bastard of a train!  It is the best
damned train that ever pulled a car since Grant took Richmond!--
Which way does the damn thing go?--Pennsylvania?--Well, that's all
right!  Don't you say a word against Pennsylvania!  My father came
from Pennsylvania, boys, he was the best damned man that ever
lived--He was a stone-cutter and he's better than any son-of-a-
bitch of a plumber you ever saw--He's got a cancer and six doctors
and they can't kill him!--But to hell with going where we go!--
We're out to see the world, boy!--To hell with Baltimore, New York,
Boston!  Run her off the God-damn rails!  We're going West!  Run
her through the woods--cross fields--rivers, through the hills!
Hell's pecker!  But I'll shove her up the grade and through the
gap, no double-header needed!--Let's see the world now!  Through
Nebraska, boy!  Let's shove her through, now, you can do it!--Let's
run her through Ohio, Kansas, and the unknown plains!  Come on, you
hogger, let's see the great plains and the fields of wheat--Stop
off in Dakota, Minnesota, and the fertile places--Give us a minute
while you breathe to put our foot upon it, to feel it spring back
with the deep elastic feeling, 8,000 miles below, unrolled and
lavish, depthless, different from the East.



Now Virginia lay dreaming in the moonlight!  And on Florida's
bright waters the fair and lovely daughters of the Wilsons and the
Potters; the Cabots and the Lowells; the Weisbergs and O'Hares; the
Astors and the Goulds; the Ransoms and the Rands; the Westalls and
the Pattons and the Webbs; the Reynolds and McRaes; the Spanglers
and the Beams; the Gudgers and the Blakes; the Pedersons and
Craigs--all the lovely daughters, the Robinsons and Waters, the
millionaires' sweet daughters, the Boston maids, the Beacon Slades,
the Back Bay Wades, all of the merchant, lawyer, railroad and well-
moneyed grades of Hudson River daughters in the moon's bright
living waters--lay dreaming in the moonlight, beaming in the
moonlight, seeming in the moonlight, to be dreaming to be gleaming
in the moon.

--Give 'em hell, son!

--Here, give him another drink!--Attaboy!  Drink her down!

--Drink her down--drink her down--drink her down--damn your soul--
drink her down!

--By God, I'll drink her down and flood the whole end of Virginia,
I'll drown out Maryland, make a flood in Pennsylvania--I tell you
boys I'll float 'em, I'll raise 'em up, I'll bring 'em down stream,
now--I mean the Potters and the Waters, the rich men's lovely
daughters, the city's tender daughters, the Hudson river daughters--

Lay dreaming in the moonlight, beaming in the moonlight, to be
seeming to be beaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight oonlight
oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight.

And Virginia lay dreaming in the moon.



Then the moon blazed down upon the vast desolation of the American
coasts, and on all the glut and hiss of tides, on all the surge and
foaming slide of waters on lone beaches.  The moon blazed down on
18,000 miles of coast, on the million sucks and scoops and hollows
of the shore, and on the great wink of the sea, that ate the earth
minutely and eternally.  The moon blazed down upon the wilderness,
it fell on sleeping woods, it dripped through moving leaves, it
swarmed in weaving patterns on the earth, and it filled the cat's
still eye with blazing yellow.  The moon slept over mountains and
lay like silence in the desert, and it carved the shadows of great
rocks like time.  The moon was mixed with flowing rivers, and it
was buried in the heart of lakes, and it trembled on the water like
bright fish.  The moon steeped all the earth in its living and
unearthly substance, it had a thousand visages, it painted
continental space with ghostly light; and its light was proper to
the nature of all the things it touched: it came in with the sea,
it flowed with the rivers, and it was still and living on clear
spaces in the forest where no men watched.

And in woodland darkness great birds fluttered to their sleep--in
sleeping woodlands strange and secret birds, the teal, the
nightjar, and the flying rail went to their sleep with flutterings
dark as hearts of sleeping men.  In fronded beds and on the leaves
of unfamiliar plants where the tarantula, the adder, and the asp
had fed themselves asleep on their own poisons, and on lush jungle
depths where green-golden, bitter red and glossy blue proud tufted
birds cried out with brainless scream, the moonlight slept.

The moonlight slept above dark herds moving with slow grazings in
the night, it covered lonely little villages; but most of all it
fell upon the unbroken undulation of the wilderness, and it blazed
on windows and moved across the face of sleeping men.

Sleep lay upon the wilderness, it lay across the faces of the
nations, it lay like silence on the hearts of sleeping men; and low
upon lowlands, and high upon hills, flowed gently sleep, smooth-
sliding sleep--sleep--sleep.



--Robert--

--Go on to bed, Gene, go to bed now, go to bed.

--There's shump'n I mush shay t'you--

--Damn fool!  Go to bed!

--Go to bed!  I'll go to bed when I'm God-damn good and ready!
I'll not go to bed when there's shump'n I mush shay t'you--

--Go on to bed now, Gene.  You've had enough.

--Creasman, you're a good fellow maybe but I don't know you. . . .
You keep out of this. . . .  Robert. . . .  I'm gonna tell y'
shump'n. . . .  You made a remark t'night I didn' like--Prayin' for
me, are they, Robert?

--You damn fool!--You don't know what you're talkin' 'bout!  Go on
to bed!--

--I'll go to bed, you bastard--I got shump'n to shay t'you!--
Prayin.' for me, are yuh?--Pray for yourself, y' bloody little
Deke!

--Damn fool's crazy!  Go on to bed now--

--I'll bed yuh, you son-of-a-bitch!  What was it that y' said that
day?--

--What day?  You damned fool, you don't know what you're saying!

--I'll tell yuh what day!--Coming along Chestnut Street that day
after school with you and me and Sunny Jim Curtis and Ed Petrie and
Bob Pegram and Carl Hartshorn and Monk Paul--and the rest of those
boys--

--You damn fool!  Chestnut Street!  I don't know what you're
talking about!

--Yes, you do!--You and me and Bob and Carl and Irwin and Jim Homes
and some other boys--'Member what y' said, yuh son-of-a-bitch?  Old
man English was in his yard there burning up some leaves and it was
October and we were comin' along there after school and you could
smell the leaves and it was after school and you said, "Here's Mr.
Gant, the tombstone-cutter's son."

--You damn fool!  I don't know what you're talking about!--

--Yes, you do, you cheap Deke son-of-a-bitch--Too good to talk to
us on the street when you were sucking around after Bruce Martin or
Steve Patton or Jack Marriott--but a lifelong brother--oh! couldn't
see enough of us, could you, when you were alone?

--The damn fool's crazy!

--Crazy, am I?--Well, we never had any old gummy grannies tied down
and hidden in the attic--which is more than some people that I know
can say!--you son-of-a-bitch--who do you think you are with your
big airs and big Deke pin!--My people were better people than your
crowd ever hoped to be--we've been here longer and we're better
people--and as for the tombstone-cutter's son, my father was the
best damned stone-cutter that ever lived--he's dying of cancer and
all the doctors in the world can't kill him--he's a better man than
any little ex-police court magistrate who calls himself a judge
will ever be--and that goes for you too--you--

Why, you crazy fool!  I never said anything about your father--

To hell with you, you damn little bootlicking--

Come on Gene come on you've had enough you're drunk now come on.

Why God-damn you to hell, I hate your guts you--

All right, all right--He's drunk!  He's crazy--Come on, Bill!
Leave him alone!--He don't know what he's doing--

All right.  Good night, Gene. . . .  Be careful now--See you in the
morning, boy.

All right, Robert, I mean nothing against you--you--

All right!--All right!--Come on, Bill.  Let him alone!  Good night,
Gene--Come on--let's go to bed!--

To bed to bed to bed to bed to bed!  So, so, so, so, so!  Make no
noise, make no noise, draw the curtains; so, so, so.  We'll go to
supper i' the morning: so, so, so.

And Ile goe to bedde at noone.



Alone, alone now, down the dark, the green, the jungle aisle
between the dark drugged snorings of the sleepers.  The pause, the
stir, the sigh, the sudden shift, the train that now rumbles on
through the dark forests of the dream-charged moon-enchanted mind
its monotone of silence and for ever:  Out of these prison bands of
clothes, now, rip, tear, toss, and haul while the green-curtained
sleepers move from jungle depths and the even-pounding silence of
eternity--into the stiff white sheets, the close, hot air, his long
body crookedly athwart, lights out, to see it shining faintly in
the coffined under-surface of the berth above--and sleepless,
Virginia floating, dreamlike, in the still white haunting of the
moon--

--At night, great trains will pass us in the timeless spell of an
unsleeping hypnosis, an endless and unfathomable stupefaction.
Then suddenly in the unwaking never-sleeping century of the night,
the sensual limbs of carnal whited nakedness that stir with drowsy
silken warmth in the green secrecies of Lower Seven, the slow-
swelling and lonely and swarm-haunted land--and suddenly, suddenly,
silence and thick hardening lust of dark exultant joy, the
dreamlike passage of Virginia!--Then in the watches of the night a
pause, the sudden silence of up-welling night, and unseen faces,
voices, laughter, and farewells upon a lonely little night-time
station--the lost and lonely voices of Americans:--"Good-bye!
Good-bye, now!  Write us when you get there, Helen!  Tell Bob he's
got to write!--Give my love to Emily!--Good-bye, good-bye now--
write us, soon!"--And then the secret, silken and subdued rustling
past the thick green curtains and the sleepers, the low respectful
negroid tones of the black porter--and then the whistle cry, the
tolling bell, the great train mounting to its classic monotone
again, and presently the last lights of a little town, the floating
void and loneliness of moon-haunted earth--Virginia!

Also, in the dream--thickets of eternal night--there will be huge
steamings on the rail, the sudden smash, the wall of light, the
sudden flarings of wild, roaring light upon the moon-haunted and
dream-tortured faces of the sleepers!

--And finally, in that dark jungle of the night, through all the
visions, memories, and enchanted weavings of the timeless and
eternal spell of time, the moment of for ever--there are two
horsemen, riding, riding, riding in the night.

Who are they?  Oh, we know them with our life and they will ride
across the land, the moon-haunted passage of our lives for ever.
Their names are Death and Pity, and we know their face: our brother
and our father ride ever beside us in the dream-enchanted spell and
vista of the night; the hooves keep level time beside the rhythms
of the train.

Horsed on the black and moon-maned steeds of fury, cloaked in the
dark of night, the spell of time, dream-pale, eternal, they are
rushing on across the haunted land, the moon-enchanted wilderness,
and their hooves make level thunder with the train.

Pale Pity and Lean Death their names are, and they will ride for
evermore the moon-plantations of Virginia keeping time time time to
the level thunder of the train pounding time time time as with
four-hooved thunder of phantasmal hooves they pound for ever level
with the train across the moon-plantations of Virginia.

Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum as with storm-
phantasmal hooves Lean Death and Pale Pity with quadrupedante
putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum . . . campum . . . quadrupedante
. . . putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem putrem putrem as with sonitu
quatit ungula campum quadrupedante putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem
putrem putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem putrem putrem
quadrupedante quadrupedante quadrupedante putrem putrem as with
sonitu quatit ungula campum quadrupedante putrem . . . putrem . . .
putrem putrem putrem . . . as with sonitu quatit ungula campum
quadrupedante putrem . . . ungula campum . . . campum . . . ungula
. . . ungula campum . . .



V


At day-break suddenly, he awoke.  The first light of the day,
faint, grey-white, shone through the windows of his berth.  The
faint grey light fell on the stiff white linen, feverishly scuffed
and rumpled in the distressful visions of the night, on the hot
pillows and on the long cramped figure of the boy, where dim
reflection already could be seen on the polished surface of the
berth above his head.  Outside, that smoke-grey light had stolen
almost imperceptibly through the darkness.  The air now shone grey-
blue and faintly luminous with day, and the old brown earth was
just beginning to emerge in that faint light.  Slowly, the old
brown earth was coming from the darkness with that strange and
awful stillness which the first light of the day has always
brought.

The earth emerged with all its ancient and eternal quality: stately
and solemn and lonely-looking in that first light, it filled men's
hearts with all its ancient wonder.  It seemed to have been there
for ever, and, though they had never seen it before, to be more
familiar to them than their mother's face.  And at the same time it
seemed they had discovered it once more, and if they had been the
first men who ever saw the earth, the solemn joy of this discovery
could not have seemed more strange or more familiar.  Seeing it,
they felt nothing but silence and wonder in their hearts, and were
naked and alone and stripped down to their bare selves, as near to
truth as men can ever come.  They knew that they would die and that
the earth would last for ever.  And with that feeling of joy,
wonder, and sorrow in their hearts, they knew that another day had
gone, another day had come, and they knew how brief and lonely are
man's days.

The old earth went floating past them in that first gaunt light of
the morning, and it seemed to be the face of time itself, and the
noise the train made was the noise of silence.  They were fixed
there in that classic design of time and silence.  The engine smoke
went striding out upon the air, the old earth--field and wood and
hill and stream and wood and field and hill--went stroking,
floating past with a kind of everlasting repetitiveness, and the
train kept making on its steady noise that was like silence and for
ever--until it almost seemed that they were poised there in that
image of eternity for ever--in moveless movement, unsilent silence,
spaceless flight.

All of the noises, rhythms, sounds and variations of the train
seemed to belong to all the visions, images, wild cries and oaths
and songs and haunting memories of the night before, and now the
train itself seemed united to this infinite monotone of silence,
and the boy felt that this land now possessed his life, that he had
known it for ever, and could now think only with a feeling of
unbelief and wonder that yesterday--just yesterday--he had left his
home in the far mountains and now was stroking eastward, northward
towards the sea.

And against the borders of the East, pure, radiant, for the first
time seen in the unbelievable wonder of its new discovery, bringing
to all of us, as it had always done, the first life that was ever
known on this earth, the golden banner of the day appeared.



VI


In morning sunlight on a hospital porch, five flights above the
ground, an old dying spectre of a man was sitting, looking
mournfully out across the sun-hazed sweep of the city he had known
in his youth.  He sat there, a rusty, creaking hinge, an almost
severed thread of life, a shockingly wasted integument of skin and
bone, of which every fibre and sinew was almost utterly rotted out,
consumed and honeycombed by the great plant of the cancer which
flowered from his entrails and had now spread its fibrous roots to
every tissue of his life.  Everything was gone: everything was
wasted from him: the face was drawn tight and bony as a beak, the
skin was clean, tinged with a fatal cancerous yellow, and almost
delicately transparent.  The great thin blade of nose cut down
across the face with knife-like sharpness and in the bony,
slanting, almost reptilian cage-formation of the skull, the
smallish cold-grey-green eyes were set wearily, with a wretched and
enfeebled dullness, out across the great space of the city which
swept away and melted at length into the sun-hazed vistas of
October.

Nothing was left but his hands.  The rest of the man was dead.  But
the great hands of the stone-cutter, on whose sinewy and bony
substance there was so little that disease or death could waste,
looked as powerful and living as ever.  Although one of his hands--
the right one--had been stiffened years before by an attack of
rheumatism, they had lost none of their character of power and
massive shapeliness.

In the huge shapely knuckles, in the length and sinewy thickness of
the great fingers--which were twice the size of an ordinary man's--
and in the whole length and sinewy contour of the hand, there was a
quality of sculptural design which was as solid and proportionate
as any of the marble hands of love and grace which the stone-cutter
had so often carved upon the surface of a graveyard monument.

Thus, as he sat there now, staring dully out across the city, an
emaciated and phantasmal shadow of a man, there was, in the
appearance of these great living hands of power (one of which lay
with an enormous passive grace and dignity across the arm of his
chair and the other extended and clasped down upon the handle of a
walking-stick), something weirdly incongruous, as if the great
strong hands had been unnaturally attached to the puny lifeless
figure of a scarecrow.

Now, wearily, desperately, the old enfeebled mind was trying to
grope with the strange and bitter miracle of life, to get some
meaning out of that black, senseless fusion of pain and joy and
agony, that web that had known all the hope and joy and wonder of a
boy, the fury, passion, drunkenness, and wild desire of youth, the
rich adventure and fulfilment of a man, and that had led him to
this fatal and abominable end.

But that fading, pain-sick mind, that darkened memory could draw no
meaning and no comfort from its tragic meditation.

The old man's land of youth was far away in time, yet now only the
magic lonely hills of his life's journey, his wife's people, seemed
sorrowful, lonely, lost, and strange to him.  Now he remembered all
places, things, and people in his land of youth as if he had known
them instantly and for ever!

Oh, what a land, a life, a time was that--that world of youth and
no return.  What colours of green-gold, magic, rich plantations,
and shining cities were in it!  For now when this dying man thought
about this vanished life that tragic quality of sorrow and
loneliness had vanished instantly.  All that he had read in books
about old wars seemed far and lost and in another time, but when he
thought about these things that he had known as a boy, he saw them
instantly, knew them, breathed them, heard them, felt them, was
there beside them, living them with his own life.  He remembered
now his wife's people!--tramping in along the Carlisle Pike on that
hot first morning in July, as they marched in towards Gettysburg.
He had been standing there with his next older brother Gil, beside
the dusty road, as they came by.

And he could see them now, not as shadowy, lost, phantasmal figures
of dark time, the way they were in books; he saw them, heard them,
knew them again as they had been in their shapeless rags of
uniforms, their bare feet wound in rags, their lank disordered
hair, sometimes topped by stove-pipe hats which they had looted out
of stores.

"God!" the old man thought, wetting his great thumb briefly,
grinning thinly, as he shook his head, "What a scarecrow crew that
was!  In all my days I never saw the like of it!  A bum-looking
lot, if ever there was one!--And the bravest of the brave, the
finest troops that ever lived!"--his mind swung upward to its tide
of rhetoric--"Veterans all of them, who had been through the
bloodiest battles of the war, they did not know the meaning of the
word 'fear,' and they would have gone into the valley of death, the
jaws of hell, at a word from their Commander!"  His mind was alive
again, in full swing now, the old voice rose and muttered on the
tides of rhetoric, the great hand gestured, the cold-grey, restless
eyes glared feverishly about--and all of it began to live for him
again.

He remembered how he and Gil had been standing there beside the
road, two barefoot farmer boys, aged thirteen and fifteen, and he
remembered how the rebels would halt upon their march, and shout
jesting remarks at the two boys standing at the road.  One shouted
out to Gil:

"Hi, there, Yank!  You'd better hide!  Jeb Stuart's on the way an'
he's been lookin' fer you!"

And Gil, older, bolder, more assured than he, quick-tempered,
stubborn, fiercely partisan, had come back like a flash:

"He'll be lookin' fer YOU when we get through with you!" said Gil
and the rebels had slapped their ragged thighs and howled with
laughter, shouting at their crestfallen, grinning comrade:

"'Y, God!  I reckon you'll be quiet now!  He shore God put it on ye
that time!"

And he was there beside his brother, seeing, hearing, living it
again, as he remembered his strange first meeting with the Pentland
tribe, the haunting miracle of that chance meeting.  For among that
ragged crew he had first seen his wife's uncle, the prophet,
Bacchus Pentland, and he had seen him, heard him that hot morning,
and had never been able to forget him, although it would be twenty
years, after many strange turnings of the roads of destiny and
wandering, before he was to see the man again, and know his name,
and join together the two halves of fated meeting.

Yes, there had been one among the drawling and terrible mountaineers
that day who passed there on that dusty road, and paused, and
talked, and waited in the heat, one whose face he had never been
able to forget--one whose full, ruddy face and tranquil eyes were
lighted always by a smile of idiot and beatific saintliness, whose
powerful fleshy body gave off a stench that would have put a goat to
shame, and who on this account was called by his jesting comrades,
"Stinking Jesus."  Yes, he had been there that morning, Bacchus
Pentland, the fated and chosen of God, the supernatural appearer on
roads at nightfall, the harbinger of death, the prophet, chanting
even then his promises of Armageddon and the Coming of the Lord,
speaking for the first time to the fascinated ears of those two
boys, the full, drawling, unctuous accents of the fated, time-
triumphant Pentlands.

They came, they halted in the dust before the two young brothers,
the lewd tongues mocked and jested, but that man of God, the
prophet Bacchus Pentland, was beautifully unmoved by their unfaith,
and chanted, with a smile of idiot beatitude, his glorious
assurances of an end of death and battle, everlasting peace:

"Hit's a-comin'!" cried the prophet with the sweet purity of his
saintly smile.  "Hit's a-comin'!  Accordin' to my figgers the Great
Day is almost here!  Oh, hit's a-comin', boys!" he sweetly,
cheerfully intoned, "Christ's kingdom on this airth's at hand!
We're marchin' in to Armageddon now!"

"Hell, Back!" drawled one, with a slow grin of disbelief.  "You
said the same thing afore Chancellorsville, an' all I got from it
was a slug of canister in my tail!"--and the others slapped their
ragged thighs and shouted.

"Hit's a-comin'!" Bacchus cried, with a brisk wink, and his
seraphic smile, unmoved, untouched, by their derision.  "He'll be
here a-judgin' an' decreein' afore the week is over, settin' up His
Kingdom, an' sortin' us all out the way it was foretold--the sheep
upon His right hand an' the goats upon His left."

"An' which side are you goin' to be on, Back, when all this sortin'
starts?" one drawled with evil innocence.  "Are you goin' to be
upon the sheep-side or the goat-side?" he demanded.

"Oh," cried Bacchus cheerfully, with his seraphic smile, "I'll be
upon the sheep-side, brother, with the Chosen of the Lord."

"Then, Back," the other slowly answered, "you'd shore God better
begin to smell a whole lot better than you do right now, for if the
Lord starts sortin' in the dark, Back, He's goin' to put you where
you don't belong--He'll have you over thar among the goats!"--and
the hot brooding air had rung then with their roars of laughter.
Then a word was spoken, an order given, the ragged files trudged on
again, and they were gone.

Now this was lost, a fume of smoke, the moment's image of a fading
memory, and he could not say it, speak it, find a word for it--but
he could see that boy of his lost youth as he sat round the kitchen
table with the rest of them.  He could see his cold-grey, restless,
unhappy eyes, the strange, gaunt, almost reptilian conformation of
his staring face, his incredibly thin, blade-like nose, as he
waited there in silence, looking uneasily at the others with his
cold-grey, shallow, most unhappy eyes.  And the old man seemed to
be the spy of destiny, to look at once below the roofs of a million
little houses everywhere and on the star-shone, death-flung mystery
of the silent battlefield.

He seemed to be a witness of the secret weavings of dark chance
that threads our million lives into strange purposes that we do not
know.  He thought of those dead and wounded men upon the
battlefield whose lives would touch his own so nearly, the wounded
brother that he knew, the wounded stranger he had seen that day by
magic chance, whom he could not forget, and whose life, whose
tribe, in the huge abyss and secret purpose of dark time would one
day interweave into his own.

Oh, he could not find a word, a phrase to utter it, but he seemed
to have the lives not only of those people in him, but the lives of
millions of others whose dark fate is thus determined, interwove,
and beyond their vision or their knowledge, foredone and made
inevitable in the dark destiny of unfathomed time.  And suddenly it
seemed to him that all of it was his, even as his father's blood
and earth were his, the lives and deaths and destinies of all his
people.  He had been a nameless atom in the great family of earth,
a single, unknown thread in the huge warp of fate and chance that
weaves our lives together and because of this he had been the
richest man that ever lived; the power, grandeur, glory of this
earth and all its lives of men were his.

And for a moment he forgot that he was old and dying, and pride,
joy, pain, triumphant ecstasy that had no tongue to utter it rose
like a wordless swelling pæan in his throat because it seemed to
him that this great familiar earth on which his people lived and
wrought was his, that all the mystery, grandeur and beauty in the
lives of men were his, and that he must find a word, a tongue, a
door to utter what was his, or die!

How could he say it!  How could he ever find a word to speak the
joy, the pain, the grandeur bursting in the great vine of his
heart, swelling like a huge grape in his throat--mad, sweet, wild,
intolerable with all the mystery, loneliness, wild secret joy, and
death, the ever-returning and renewing fruitfulness of the earth!

A cloud-shadow passed and left no light but loneliness on the
massed green of the wilderness!  A bird was calling in a secret
wood!  And there was something going, coming, fading there across
the sun--oh, there was something lonely and most sorrowful, his
mother's voice, the voices of lost men long, long ago, the flowing
of a little river in the month of April--and all, all of it was
his!

A man had passed at sunset on a lonely road and vanished unknown
years ago!  A soldier had toiled up a hill at evening and was gone!
A man was lying dead that day upon a bloody field!--and all, all,
all of it was his!

He had stood beside a dusty road, feet bare, his gaunt boy's face
cold-eyed, staring, restless, and afraid.  The ragged jesting
rebels passed before him in the dusty heat, the huge drowse and
cricketing stitch of noon was rising from the sweet woods and nobly
swelling, fertile fields of Pennsylvania and all, all, all of it
was his!

A prophet passed before him in the road that day with the familiar
haunting unction of an unmet, unheard tribe; a wounded prophet lay
that night below the stars and chanted glory, peace, and
Armageddon; the boy's brother lay beside the prophet bleeding from
the lungs; the boy's people grimly waited all night long in a
little house not fourteen miles away; and all, all, all of it was
his!

Over the wild and secret earth, the lonely, everlasting, and
unchanging earth, under the huge tent of the all-engulfing night,
amid the fury, chaos, blind confusions of a hundred million lives,
something wild and secret had been weaving through the generations,
a dark terrific weaving of the threads of time and destiny.

But it had come to this: an old man dying on a porch, staring
through the sun-hazed vistas of October towards the lost country of
his youth.

This was the end of man, then, end of life, of fury, hope, and
passion, glory, all the strange and bitter miracle of chance, of
history, fate, and destiny, which even a stone-cutter's life could
include.  This was the end, then:--an old man, feeble, foul,
complaining and disease-consumed who sat looking from the high
porch of a hospital at the city of his youth.  This was the
sickening and abominable end of flesh, which infected time and all
man's living memory of morning, youth, and magic with the death-
putrescence of its cancerous taint, and made us doubt that we had
ever lived, or had a father, known joy: this was the end, and the
end was horrible in ugliness.  At the end it was not well.



On the last morning when his sons came, Gant was there on the high
porch of the hospital, among the other old men who were sitting
there.  All of the old men looked very feeble, shrunk, and wasted,
their skins had the clear and frail transparency that men get in
hospitals, and in the bright tremendous light of morning and
October, the old men looked forlorn.

Some looked out wearily and vacantly across the sun-hazed vistas of
the city, with the dull and apathetic expression of men who are
tired of pain and suffering and disease, and who wish to die.
Others, who were in a state of convalescence after operations,
looked out upon the sun-lit city with pleased, feeble smiles,
awkwardly holding cigars in their frail fingers, putting them in
their mouths with the uncertain and unaccustomed manner which a
convalescent has, and looking up slowly, questioningly, with a
feeble and uncertain smile into the faces of their relatives,
wives, or children, as if to ask if it could really be true that
they were going to live instead of die.

Their smiles and looks were pitiful in their sense of childish
trust, of growing hopefulness, of wondering disbelief, but there
was something shameful in them, too.  In these feeble smiles of the
old men there was something pleased and impotent, as if they had
been adroitly castrated in the hospital and shorn of their manhood.
And for some reason, one felt suddenly a choking anger and
resentment against some force in life which had betrayed these old
men and made them impotent--something unspeakably ruthless, cruel,
and savage in the world which had made these old and useless
capons.  And this anger against this unknown force suddenly took
personal form in a blind resentment against doctors, nurses,
internes, and the whole sinister and suave perfection of the
hospital which under glozing words and cynical assurances, could
painlessly and deftly mutilate a living man.

The great engine of the hospital, with all its secret, sinister,
and inhuman perfections, together with its clean and sterile smells
which seemed to blot out the smell of rotting death around one,
became a hateful presage of man's destined end.  Suddenly, one got
an image of his own death in such a place as this--of all that
death had come to be--and the image of that death was somehow
shameful.  It was an image of a death without man's ancient pains
and old gaunt ageing--an image of death drugged and stupefied out
of its ancient terror and stern dignities--of a shameful death that
went out softly, dully in anæsthetized oblivion, with the fading
smell of chemicals on man's final breath.  And the image of that
death was hateful.



Thus, as Gant sat there, his great figure wasted to the bone, his
skin yellow and transparent, his eyes old and dead, his chin
hanging loose and petulant, as he stared dully and unseeingly out
across the great city of his youth, his life seemed already to have
been consumed and wasted, emptied out into the void of this cruel
and inhuman space.  Nothing was left, now, to suggest his life of
fury, strength and passion except his hands.  And the hands were
still the great hands of the stone-cutter, powerful, sinewy, and
hairy as they had always been, attached now with a shocking
incongruity to the wasted figure of a scarecrow.

Then, as he sat there staring dully and feebly out upon the city,
his great hairy hands quietly at rest upon the sides of his chair,
the door opened and his two sons came out upon the porch.

"W-w-w-well, Papa," Luke sang out in his rich stammering tones.
"Wy-wy wy, wy, I fought we'd just c-c-c-come by for a m-m-m-moment
to let Gene say g-g-good-bye to you."  In a low tone to his younger
brother he added nervously, "Wy, I fink, I fink I'd m-m-make it
short and snappy if I were you.  D-d-don't say anyf'ing to excite
him, wy, wy, wy, I'd just say good-bye."

"Hello, son," said Gant quietly and dully, looking up at him.  For
a moment his great hand closed over the boy's, and he said quietly:

"Where are you going?"

"Wy, wy, wy, he's on his way up Norf . . . wy . . . he's g-g-going
to Harvard, Papa."

"Be a good boy, son," Gant said gently.  "Do the best you can.  If
you need anything let your mother know," he said wearily and
indifferently, and turned his dead eyes away across the city.

"Wy . . . wy . . . wy he'd like to tell you--"

"Oh, Jesus. . . .  I don't want to hear about it," Gant began to
sniffle in a whining tone. . . .  "Why must it all be put on me . . .
sick and old as I am? . . .  If he wants anything let him ask his
mother for it . . . it's fearful, it's awful, and it's cruel that
you should afflict a sick man in this way."  He was sniffling
petulantly and his chin, on which a wiry stubble of beard was
growing, trembled and shook like that of a whining child.

"I . . . I . . . I fink I'd just say g-g-good-bye now, Gene . . .
m-m-make it, wy make it quick if you can: he's not f-f-feeling good
today."

"Good-bye, Papa," the boy said, and, bending, took his father's
great right hand.

"Good-bye, son," Gant now said quietly as before, looking up at
him.  He presented his grizzled moustache, and the boy kissed him
briefly, feeling the wiry bristles of the moustache brush his cheek
as they had always done.

"Take care of yourself, son," said Gant kindly.  "Do the best you
can."  And for a moment he covered the boy's hand with one great
palm, and gestured briefly across the city:  "I was a boy here,"
Gant said quietly, "over fifty years ago . . . old Jeff Streeter's
hotel where I lived was there," he pointed briefly with his great
forefinger.  ". . . . I was alone in this great city like the city
you are going to--a poor friendless country boy who had come here
to learn his trade as apprentice to a stone-cutter . . . and I had
come from . . . THERE!" as he spoke these words, a flash of the old
power and life had come into Gant's voice, and now he was pointing
his great finger strongly towards the sun-hazed vistas of the North
and West.

"There!" cried Gant, strongly now, his eye bright and shining as he
followed the direction of his pointing finger.  "Do you see,
son? . . .  Pennsylvania . . . Gettysburg . . . Brant's Mill . . .
the country that I came from is THERE! . . .  Now I shall never see
it any more," he said.  "I'm an old man and I'm dying. . . .  The
big farms . . . the orchards . . . the great barns bigger than
houses. . . .  You must go back, son, someday to see the country
that your father came from. . . .  I was a boy there," the old man
muttered.  "Now I'm an old man. . . .  I'll come back no more. . . .
No more . . . it's pretty strange when you come to think of it," he
muttered, "by God it is!"

"Wy, wy, P-p-p-papa," Luke said nervously, "I . . . I fink if he's
g-g-going to get his train wy we'd better--"

"Good-bye, son," Gant said quietly again, giving the boy the
pressure of his great right hand.  "Be a good boy, now."

But already all the fires of life, so briefly kindled by this
memory of the past, had died away: he was an old sick man again,
and he had turned his dead eyes away from his son and was staring
dully out across the city.

"Good-bye, Papa," the boy said, and then paused uncertainly, not
knowing further what to say.  From the old man there had come
suddenly the loathsome stench of rotting death, corrupt mortality,
and he turned swiftly away with a feeling of horror in his heart,
remembering the good male smell of childhood and his father's
prime--the smell of the old worn sofa, the chairs, the sitting-
room, the roaring fires, the plug tobacco on the mantelpiece.

At the screen door he paused again and looked back down the porch.
His father was sitting there as he had left him, among the other
old dying men, his long chin loose, mouth half open, his dead dull
eye fixed vacantly across the sun-hazed city of his youth, his
great hand of power quietly dropped upon his cane.

Down in the city's central web, the boy could distinguish faintly
the line of the rails, and see the engine smoke above the railroad
yards, and as he looked, he heard far off that haunting sound and
prophecy of youth and of his life--the bell, the wheel, the wailing
whistle--and the train.

Then he turned swiftly and went to meet it--and all the new lands,
morning, and the shining city.  Upon the porch his father had not
moved or stirred.  He knew that he should never see him again.




BOOK II



YOUNG FAUSTUS



VII


The train rushed on across the brown autumnal land, by wink of
water and the rocky coasts, the small white towns and flaming
colours and the lonely, tragic and eternal beauty of New England.
It was the country of his heart's desire, the dark Helen in his
blood forever burning--and now the fast approach across October
land, the engine smoke that streaked back on the sharp grey air
that day!

The coming on of the great earth, the new lands, the enchanted
city, the approach, so smoky, blind and stifled, to the ancient
web, the old grimed thrilling barricades of Boston.  The streets
and buildings that slid past that day with such a haunting strange
familiarity, the mighty engine steaming to its halt, and the great
train-shed dense with smoke and acrid with its smell and full of
the slow pantings of a dozen engines, now passive as great cats,
the mighty station with the ceaseless throngings of its illimitable
life, and all of the murmurous, remote and mighty sounds of time
for ever held there in the station, together with a tart and nasal
voice, a hand's-breadth off that said:  "There's hahdly time, but
try it if you want."

He saw the narrow, twisted, age-browned streets of Boston, then,
with their sultry fragrance of fresh-roasted coffee, the sight of
the man-swarm passing in its million-footed weft, the distant drone
and murmur of the great mysterious city all about him, the shining
water of the Basin, and the murmur of the harbour and its ships,
the promise of glory and of a thousand secret, lovely and
mysterious women that were waiting somewhere in the city's web.

He saw the furious streets of life with their unending flood-tide
of a million faces, the enormous library with its million books; or
was it just one moment in the flood-tide of the city, at five
o'clock, a voice, a face, a brawny lusty girl with smiling mouth
who passed him in an instant at the Park Street station, stood
printed in the strong October wind a moment--breast, belly, arm,
and thigh, and all her brawny lustihood--and then had gone into the
man-swarm, lost for ever, never found?

Was it at such a moment--engine-smoke, a station, a street, the
sound of time, a face that came and passed and vanished, could not
be forgot--HERE or HERE or HERE, at such a moment of man's
unrecorded memory, that he breathed fury from the air, that fury
came?

He never knew; but now mad fury gripped his life, and he was
haunted by the dream of time.  Ten years must come and go without a
moment's rest from fury, ten years of fury, hunger, all of the
wandering in a young man's life.  And for what?  For what?

What is the fury which this youth will feel, which will lash him on
against the great earth for ever?  It is the brain that maddens
with its own excess, the heart that breaks from the anguish of its
own frustration.  It is the hunger that grows from everything it
feeds upon, the thirst that gulps down rivers and remains
insatiate.  It is to see a million men, a million faces and to be a
stranger and an alien to them always.  It is to prowl the stacks of
an enormous library at night, to tear the books out of a thousand
shelves, to read in them with the mad hunger of the youth of man.

It is to have the old unquiet mind, the famished heart, the
restless soul; it is to lose hope, heart, and all joy utterly, and
then to have them wake again, to have the old feeling return with
overwhelming force that he is about to find the thing for which his
life obscurely and desperately is groping--for which all men on
this earth have sought--one face out of the million faces, a wall,
a door, a place of certitude and peace and wandering no more.  For
what is it that we Americans are seeking always on this earth?  Why
is it we have crossed the stormy seas so many times alone, lain in
a thousand alien rooms at night hearing the sounds of time, dark
time, and thought until heart, brain, flesh and spirit were sick
and weary with the thought of it:  "Where shall I go now?  What
shall I do?"

He did not know the moment that it came, but it came instantly, at
once.  And from that moment on mad fury seized him, from that
moment on, his life, more than the life of any one that he would
ever know, was to be spent in solitude and wandering.  Why this was
true, or how it happened, he would never know; yet it was so.  From
this time on--save for two intervals in his life--he was to live
about as solitary a life as a modern man can have.  And it is meant
by this that the number of hours, days, months, and years--the
actual time he spent alone--would be immense and extraordinary.

And this fact was all the more astonishing because he never seemed
to seek out solitude, nor did he shrink from life, or seek to build
himself into a wall away from all the fury and the turmoil of the
earth.  Rather, he loved life so dearly that he was driven mad by
the thirst and hunger which he felt for it.  Of this fury, which
was to lash and drive him on for fifteen years, the thousandth part
could not be told, and what is told may seem unbelievable, but it
is true.  He was driven by a hunger so literal, cruel and physical
that it wanted to devour the earth and all the things and people in
it, and when it failed in this attempt, his spirit would drown in
an ocean of horror and desolation, smothered below the overwhelming
tides of this great earth, sickened and made sterile, hopeless,
dead by the stupefying weight of men and objects in the world, the
everlasting flock and flooding of the crowd.

Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling
books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman.
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the
more he read, the less he seemed to know--the greater the number of
the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of
those which he could never read would seem to be.  Within a period
of ten years he read at least 20,000 volumes--deliberately the
number is set low--and opened the pages and looked through many
times that number.  This may seem unbelievable, but it happened.
Dryden said this about Ben Jonson:  "Other men read books, but he
read libraries"--and so now was it with this boy.  Yet this
terrific orgy of the books brought him no comfort, peace, or wisdom
of the mind and heart.  Instead, his fury and despair increased
from what they fed upon, his hunger mounted with the food it ate.

He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten
thousands, yet he had no desire to be bookish; no one could
describe this mad assault upon print as scholarly: a ravening
appetite to him demanded that he read everything that had ever been
written about human experience.  He read no more from pleasure--the
thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart for
ever.  He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as
from a fowl.  At first, hovering over bookstalls, or walking at
night among the vast piled shelves of the library, he would read,
watch in hand, muttering to himself in triumph or anger at the
timing of each page:  "Fifty seconds to do that one.  Damn you,
we'll see!  You will, will you?"--and he would tear through the
next page in twenty seconds.

This fury which drove him on to read so many books had nothing to
do with scholarship, nothing to do with academic honours, nothing
to do with formal learning.  He was not in any way a scholar and
did not want to be one.  He simply wanted to know about everything
on earth; he wanted to devour the earth, and it drove him mad when
he saw he could not do this.  And it was the same with everything
he did.  In the midst of a furious burst of reading in the enormous
library, the thought of the streets outside and the great city all
around him would drive through his body like a sword.  It would now
seem to him that every second that he passed among the books was
being wasted--that at this moment something priceless, irrecoverable
was happening in the streets, and that if he could only get to it in
time and see it, he would somehow get the knowledge of the whole
thing in him--the source, the well, the spring from which all men
and words and actions, and every design upon this earth proceeds.

And he would rush out in the streets to find it, be hurled through
the tunnel into Boston and then spend hours in driving himself
savagely through a hundred streets, looking into the faces of a
million people, trying to get an instant and conclusive picture of
all they did and said and were, of all their million destinies, and
of the great city and the everlasting earth, and the immense and
lonely skies that bent above them.  And he would search the furious
streets until bone and brain and blood could stand no more--until
every sinew of his life and spirit was wrung, trembling, and
exhausted, and his heart sank down beneath its weight of desolation
and despair.

Yet a furious hope, a wild extravagant belief, was burning in him
all the time.  He would write down enormous charts and plans and
projects of all that he proposed to do in life--a programme of work
and living which would have exhausted the energies of 10,000 men.
He would get up in the middle of the night to scrawl down insane
catalogues of all that he had seen and done:--the number of books
he had read, the number of miles he had travelled, the number of
people he had known, the number of women he had slept with, the
number of meals he had eaten, the number of towns he had visited,
the number of states he had been in.

And at one moment he would gloat and chuckle over these stupendous
lists like a miser gloating over his hoard, only to groan bitterly
with despair the next moment, and to beat his head against the
wall, as he remembered the overwhelming amount of all he had not
seen or done, or known.  Then he would begin another list filled
with enormous catalogues of all the books he had not read, all the
food he had not eaten, all the women that he had not slept with,
all the states he had not been in, all the towns he had not
visited.  Then he would write down plans and programmes whereby all
these things must be accomplished, how many years it would take to
do it all, and how old he would be when he had finished.  An
enormous wave of hope and joy would surge up in him, because it now
looked easy, and he had no doubt at all that he could do it.

He never asked himself in any practical way how he was going to
live while this was going on, where he was going to get the money
for this gigantic adventure, and what he was going to do to make it
possible.  If he thought about it, it seemed to have no importance
or reality whatever--he just dismissed it impatiently, or with a
conviction that some old man would die and leave him a fortune,
that he was going to pick up a purse containing hundreds of
thousands of dollars while walking in the Fenway, and that the
reward would be enough to keep him going, or that a beautiful and
rich young widow, true-hearted, tender, loving, and voluptuous, who
had carrot-coloured hair, little freckles on her face, a snub nose
and luminous grey-green eyes with something wicked, yet loving and
faithful in them, and one gold filling in her solid little teeth,
was going to fall in love with him, marry him, and be for ever true
and faithful to him while he went reading, eating, drinking,
whoring, and devouring his way around the world; or finally that he
would write a book or play every year or so, which would be a great
success, and yield him fifteen or twenty thousand dollars at a
crack.  Thus, he went storming away at the whole earth about him,
sometimes mad with despair, weariness, and bewilderment; and
sometimes wild with a jubilant and exultant joy and certitude as
the conviction came to him that everything would happen as he
wished.  Then at night he would hear the vast sounds and silence of
the earth and of the city, he would begin to think of the dark
sleeping earth and of the continent of night, until it seemed to
him it all was spread before him like a map--rivers, plains, and
mountains and 10,000 sleeping towns; it seemed to him that he saw
everything at once.



VIII


One morning, a few days after his arrival in Cambridge, he had
received a letter, written on plain but costly paper in a fine but
almost feminine hand.  The letter read as follows:


"Dear Sir:  I should be pleased to have your company for dinner
Wednesday evening at eight-thirty at the 'Cock House Tavern' on
Brattle Street.  In case of your acceptance will you kindly call at
my rooms in Holyoke House, opposite the Widener Library, at seven-
fifteen?

"Sincerely yours,

"FRANCIS STARWICK."


He read that curt and cryptic note over and over with feelings
mixed of astonishment and excitement.  Who was Francis Starwick?
Why should Francis Starwick, a stranger of whom he had never heard,
invite him to dinner?  And why was that laconic note not
accompanied by a word of explanation?

It is likely he would have gone anyway, from sheer curiosity, and
because of the desperate eagerness with which a young man, alone
in a strange world for the first time, welcomes any hope of
friendship.  But before the day was over, he had learned from
another student in Professor Hatcher's celebrated course for
dramatists, of which he himself was now a member, that Francis
Starwick was Professor Hatcher's assistant; and correctly inferring
that the invitation had some connection with this circumstance, he
resolved to go.

In this way, his acquaintance began with that rare and tragically
gifted creature who was one of the most extraordinary figures of
his generation and who, possessing almost every talent that an
artist needs, was lacking in that one small grain of common earth
that could have saved him, and brought his work to life.

No fatality rested on that casual meeting.  He could not have
foreseen in what strange and sorrowful ways his life would weave
and interweave with this other one, nor could he have known from
any circumstance of that first meeting that this other youth was
destined to be that triune figure in his life, of which each man
knows one and only one, in youth, and which belongs to the weather
of man's life, and to the fabric of his destiny: his friend, his
brother--and his mortal enemy.  Nor was there, in the boy he met
that night, any prefigurement of the tragic fatality with which
that brilliant life was starred, the horrible end toward which,
perhaps, it even then was directed.

They were both young men, and both filled with all the vanity,
anguish and hot pride of youth, and with its devotion and humility;
they were both strong in their proud hope and faith and untried
confidence; they both had shining gifts and powers and they were
sure the world was theirs; they were splendid and fierce and weak
and strong and foolish; the prescience of wild swelling joy was in
them; and the goat cry was still torn from their wild young
throats.  They knew that the most fortunate, good and happy life
that any man had ever known was theirs, if they would only take it;
they knew that it impended instantly--the fortune, fame, and love
for which their souls were panting; neither had yet turned the dark
column, they knew that they were twenty, and that they could never
die.

Francis Starwick, on first sight, was a youth of medium height and
average weight, verging perhaps toward slenderness, with a pleasant
ruddy face, brown eyes, a mass of curly auburn-reddish hair, and a
cleft chin.  The face in its pleasant cast and healthy tone, and
spacious, quiet intelligence was strikingly like those faces of
young Englishmen which were painted by Hoppner and Sir Henry
Raeburn towards the beginning of the nineteenth century.  It was an
attractive, pleasant immensely sensitive and intelligent face, but
when Starwick spoke this impression of warmth and friendliness was
instantly destroyed.

He spoke in a strange and rather disturbing tone, the pitch and
timbre of which it would be almost impossible to define, but which
would haunt one who had heard it for ever after.  His voice was
neither very high nor low, it was a man's voice and yet one felt it
might almost have been a woman's; but there was nothing at all
effeminate about it.  It was simply a strange voice compared to
most American voices, which are rasping, nasal, brutally coarse or
metallic.  Starwick's voice had a disturbing lurking resonance, an
exotic, sensuous, and almost voluptuous quality.  Moreover, the
peculiar mannered affectation of his speech was so studied that it
hardly escaped extravagance.  If it had not been for the dignity,
grace, and intelligence of his person, the affectation of his
speech might have been ridiculous.  As it was, the other youth felt
the moment's swift resentment and hostility that is instinctive
with the American when he thinks some one is speaking in an
affected manner.

As Starwick welcomed his guest his ruddy face flushed brick-red
with the agonizing embarrassment of a shy and sensitive person to
whom every new meeting is an ordeal; his greeting was almost
repellently cold and formal, but this, too, with the studied
affectation of his speech, was protective armour for his shyness.

"A-d'ye-do?" he said, shaking hands, the greeting coming from his
throat through lips that scarcely seemed to move.  "It was good of
you to come."

"It was good of you to ask me," the other boy said awkwardly,
fumbled desperately for a moment, and then blurted out--"I didn't
know who you were at first--when I got your note--but then somebody
told me:--you're Professor Hatcher's assistant, aren't you?"

"Ace," said Starwick, this strange sound which was intended for
"yes" coming through his lips in the same curious and almost
motionless fashion.  The brick-red hue of his ruddy face deepened
painfully, and for a moment he was silent--"Look!" he said
suddenly, yet with a casualness that was very warm and welcome
after the stilted formality of his greeting, "would you like a
drink?  I have some whisky."

"Why, yes--sure--certainly," the other stammered, almost feverishly
grateful for the diversion--"I'd like it."

Starwick opened the doors of a small cupboard, took out a bottle, a
siphon, and some glasses on a tray, and placed them on a table.

"Help yourself," he said.  "Do you like it with soda--or plain
water--or how?"

"Why--any way you do," the other youth stammered.  "Aren't you
going to drink?  I don't want to unless you do."

"Ace," said Starwick again, "I'll drink with you.  I like the
soda," he added, and poured a drink for himself and filled it with
the siphon.  "Go on.  Pour your own. . . .  Look," he said abruptly
again, as the other youth was awkwardly manipulating the
unaccustomed siphon.  "Do you mind if I drink mine while I'm
shaving?  I just came in.  I'd like to shave and change my shirt
before we go out.  Do you mind?"

"No, of course not," the other said, grateful for the respite thus
afforded.  "Go ahead.  Take all the time you like.  I'll drink my
drink and have a look at your books, if you don't mind."

"Please do," said Starwick, "if you find anything you like.  I
think this is the best chair."  He pushed a big chair up beneath a
reading lamp and switched the light on.  "There are cigarettes on
the table," he said in his strange mannered tone, and went into the
bathroom, where, after a moment's inspection of his ruddy face, he
immediately began to lather himself and to prepare for shaving.

"This is a nice place you have here," the visitor said presently,
after another awkward pause, during which the only sound was the
minute scrape of the razor blade on Starwick's face.

"Quite," he answered concisely, in his mannered tone, and with that
blurred sound of people who try to talk while they are shaving.
For a few moments the razor scraped on.  "I'm glad you like it,"
Starwick said presently, as he put the razor down and began to
inspect his work in the mirror.  "And what kind of place did you
find for yourself?  Do you like it?"

"Well, it will do, I guess," the other boy said dubiously.  "Of
course, it's nothing like this--it's not an apartment; it's just a
room I rented."

"Ace," said Starwick from the bathroom.  "And where is that?"

"It's on a street called Buckingham Road.  Do you know where that
is?"

"Oh," said Starwick coldly, and he craned carefully with his neck,
and was silent a moment as he did a little delicate razor-work
around the Adam's apple.  "Ace," he said at length as he put the
razor down again.  "I think I do. . . .  And how did you happen to
go out there?" he inquired coldly as he began to dry his face on a
towel.  "Did some one tell you about the place?"

"Well--yes.  I knew about it before I came.  It's a room in a house
that some people I know have rented."

"Oh," said Starwick coldly, formally again, as he thrust his arms
into a fresh shirt.  "Then you do know people here in Cambridge?"

"Well, no: they are really people from home."

"Home?"

"Yes--from my own state, the place I came from, where I went to
school before I came here."

"Oh," said Starwick, buttoning his shirt, "I see.  And where was
that?  What state are you from?"

"Catawba."

"Oh. . . .  And you went to school down there?"

"Yes.  To the State University."

"I see. . . .  And these people who have the house where you are
living now--what are they doing here?"

"Well, the man--he's a professor at the State University down
there--he's up here getting some sort of degree in education."

"In what?"

"In education."

"Oh.  I see. . . .  And what does his wife do; has he got a wife?"

"Yes; and three children. . . .  Well," the other youth said
uncertainly, and then laughed suddenly, "I haven't seen her do
anything yet but sit on her tail and talk."

"Ace?" said Starwick, knotting his tie very carefully.  "And what
does she talk about?"

"Of people back home, mostly--the professors at the University, and
their wives and families."

"Oh," said Starwick gravely, but there was now lurking in his voice
an indefinable drollery of humour.  "And does she say nice things
about them?"  He looked out towards his guest with a grave face,
but a sly burble in his voice now escaped him and broke out in an
infectious chuckling laugh.  "Or is she--" for a moment he was
silent, trembling a little with secret merriment, and his pleasant
face reddened with laughter--"or is she," he said with sly
insinuation--"bitter?"

The other, somehow conquered by the sly yet broad and vulgar humour
in Starwick's tone, broke out into a loud guffaw, and said:

"God! she's bitter--and nothing but!  That's just the word for it."

"Has anyone escaped yet?" said Starwick slyly.

"Not a damned one of them," the other roared.  "She's worked her
way from the President and his family all the way down to the
instructors.  Now she's started on the people of the town.  I've
heard about every miscarriage and every dirty pair of drawers that
ever happened there.  We've got a bet on, a friend of mine from
home who's also staying there--he's in the Law School--whether
she's going to say anything good about anyone before the year is
over."

"And which side have you?" said Starwick.

"I say she won't--but Billy Ingram says she will.  He says that the
last time she said anything good about anyone was when someone died
during the influenza epidemic in 1917; and he claims she's due
again."

"And what is the lady's name?" said Starwick.  He had now come out
into the living room and was putting on his coat.

"Trotter," the other said, feeling a strange convulsive humour
swelling in him.  "Mrs. Trotter."

"What?" said Starwick, his face reddening and the sly burble
appearing in his voice again.  "Mrs.--who?"

"Mrs. Trotter!" the other choked, and the room rang suddenly with
their wild laughter.  When it had subsided, Starwick blew his nose
vigorously, and his pleasant face still reddened with laughter, he
asked smoothly:

"And what does Professor Trotter say while this is going on?"

"He doesn't say anything," the other laughed.  "He can't say
anything.  He just sits there and listens. . . .  The man's all
right.  Billy and I feel sorry for him.  He's got this damned old
shrew of a wife who sits there talking ninety to the minute, and
three of the meanest, dirtiest, noisiest little devils you ever saw
falling over his feet and raising hell from morning to night, and
this sloppy nigger wench they brought up with them from the South--
the place looks like an earthquake hit it, and the poor devil is up
here trying to study for a degree--it's pretty hard on him.  He's a
nice fellow, and he doesn't deserve it."

"God!" said Starwick frankly and gravely, "but it sounds dreary!
Why did you ever go to such a place?"

"Well, you see, I didn't know anyone in Cambridge--and I had known
these people back home."

"I should think that would have made you anxious to avoid them,"
Starwick answered.  "And it's most important that you have a
pleasant place to work in.  It really is, you know," he said
earnestly and with a note of reproof in his mannered tone.  "You
really should be more careful about that," he said.

"Yes, I suppose it is.  You certainly have a good place here."

"Ace," said Starwick.  "It is very pleasant.  I'm glad you like
it."

He came out, with his drink in his hand, put the drink down on a
table and sat down beside it, crossing his legs and reaching for
one of the straw-tipped cigarettes in a small and curiously carved
wooden box.  The impression he made on the other youth was one of
magnificence and luxury.  The boy's rooms seemed to fit his
sensuous and elegant personality like a glove: he was only twenty-
two years old, but his distinctive and incomparable quality was
everywhere about him in these two rooms.

To the unaccustomed eyes of the younger boy, these modest rooms
seemed to be the most magnificent apartment he had seen.  For a
moment he thought that Starwick must be an immensely wealthy person
to live in such a way.  The fact that a man so young should live in
such splendid and luxurious independence--that he should "have his
own place," an apartment of his own, instead of a rented room, the
thrilling solitudes of midnight privacy to himself, the freedom to
come and go as he pleased, to do as he wished, to invite to his
place whoever he chose, "to bring a girl there" whenever he wanted,
without fear or the need for stealth--all these simple things which
are just part of the grand and hopeful joy of youth, which the
younger boy had never known, but to which he had aspired, as every
youth aspires, in many a thrilling fantasy--now made Starwick's
life seem almost impossibly fortunate, happy and exciting.

And yet it was not merely his own inexperience that made Starwick
seem so wealthy.  Starwick, although he had no regular income save
a thousand dollars a year which he received for his work as
Professor Hatcher's assistant, and small sums he got from time to
time from his family--he was, incredibly enough, the youngest of a
middle-western family of nine children, small business and farming
people in modest circumstances--gave the impression of wealth
because he really was a wealthy person: he had been born wealthy,
endowed with wealth by nature.  In everything he did and said and
was, in all he touched, in the whole quality of his rare and
sensuous personality there was an opulence of wealth and luxury
such as could not be found in a hundred millionaires.  He had that
rare and priceless quality that is seldom found in anyone, and
almost never in Americans, of being able to give to any simple act
or incident a glamour of luxury, pleasure, excitement.  Thus, when
he smoked a cigarette, or drank a drink, or invited someone to go
with him to the theatre, or ordered a meal in a shabby Italian
restaurant, or made coffee in his rooms, or talked of something he
had read in a book, or tied his neck-tie--all these things had a
rare, wonderful and thrilling quality in them that the richest
millionaire in the world could not have bought for money.  And for
this reason, people were instantly captivated by the infinite grace
and persuasiveness of Starwick's personality: he had the power, as
few people in the world have ever had the power, instantly to
conquer and command the devotion of people because, while they were
with him, everything in the world took on a freshness, wonder, joy
and opulence it had never had before, and for this reason people
wanted to be near him, to live in this thrilling enchantment that
he gave to everything.

Even as he sat there smoking, drinking and talking with his guest,
he did a simple and characteristic thing that yet seemed wonderful
and thrilling to the other boy.

"Look," said Starwick suddenly, getting up, going over to one of
his bookshelves and switching on a light.  "Look," he said again,
in his strangely fibred voice, "did you ever read this?"

As he uttered these words he took a book from one of the shelves
and put on his spectacles.  There was something strange and
wonderful about the spectacles, and in the way he put them on,
quietly, severely, plainly; the spectacles had thick old-fashioned
silver rims, and silver handles.  Their plain, honest and old-
fashioned sobriety was somehow remarkable, and as he put them on,
with a patient and quiet movement, and turned his attention to the
pages of the book, the gravity and maturity of quiet and lonely
thought in the boy's face and head were, remarkably evident.

"Did you ever read this?" he said quietly, turning to the other
youth, and handing him the book.  It was a copy of George Moore's
Confessions of a Young Man: the other replied he had not read it.

"Then," said Starwick, "why don't you take it along with you?  It's
really quite amusing."  He switched off the light above the
bookshelves, took off his glasses with a quiet tired movement, and
folding them and putting them in his breast pocket, came back to
the table and sat down.

"I think it may interest you," he said.

Although the other boy had always felt an instinctive repulsion
towards books which someone else urged him to read, something in
Starwick's simple act had suddenly given the book a strange rare
value: he felt a strange and pleasurable excitement when he thought
about it, and was instantly eager and curious to read it.
Moreover, in an indefinable way, he had understood, the moment that
Starwick turned to him, that he was GIVING, and not LENDING him the
book; and this act, too, instantly was invested with a princely and
generous opulence.  It was this way with everything that Starwick
did: everything he touched would come instantly to life with grace
and joy; his was an incomparable, an enslaving power--a Midas-gift
of life and joy almost too fortunate and effortless for one man to
possess and in the end, like all his other gifts of life and joy, a
power that would serve death, not life, that would spread
corruption instead of health, and that finally would turn upon its
owner and destroy him.

Later, when they left his rooms and went out on the street, the
sensuous quickening of life, the vital excitement and anticipation
which Starwick was somehow able to convey to everything he did and
give to everyone he knew and liked, was constantly apparent.  It
was a fine clear night in early October, crispness and an
indefinable smell of smoke were in the air, students were coming
briskly along the street, singly or in groups of two or three,
light glowed warmly in the windows of the book-shops, pharmacies,
and tobacco stores near Harvard Square, and from the enormous
library and the old buildings in the Harvard Yard there came a glow
of lights, soft, rich, densely golden, embedded in old red brick.

All of these things, vital, exciting, strangely, pleasurably
stirring as they were, gained a curious enhancement from Starwick's
presence until they gave to the younger boy not only a feeling of
sharp, mounting, strangely indefinable excitement, but a feeling of
power and wealth--a sense of being triumphant and having before him
the whole golden and unvisited plantation of the world to explore,
possess and do with as he would--the most fortunate and happy life
that any man had ever known.

Starwick went into a tobacco shop to cash a cheque and the whole
place, with its pungent smells of good tobacco, its idling
students, its atmosphere of leisure and enjoyment, became
incomparably wealthy, rich, exciting as it had never been before.

And later, when the two young men had gone into the "Cock House
Tavern" on Brattle Street, the prim and clean little rooms of the
old house, the clean starched waitresses and snowy tablecloth, the
good food, and several healthy and attractive-looking girls of the
New England type all gained an increased value.  He felt a thrill
of pleasurable anticipation and a feeling of unlimited wealth,
simply because Starwick was there ordering the meal, conferring on
everything around him the sense of wealth and ease and nameless joy
which his wonderful personality, with its magic touch, instantly
gave to anything on earth.

Yet during the meal the feeling of hostile constraint between the
two young men was not diminished, but grew constantly.  Starwick's
impeccable cold courtesy--really the armour of a desperately shy
person--his mannered tone, with its strange and disturbing accent,
the surgical precision of his cross-examination into the origin,
experience, and training of the other youth sharpened a growing
antagonism in the other's spirit, and put him on his guard.
Moreover, failure to give any information about himself--above all
his complete reticence concerning his association with Professor
Hatcher and the reason for his curt and brusquely-worded invitation
to dinner--all this began to bear now with oppressive weight upon
the other's spirit.  It seemed to him there was a deliberate
arrogance in this cold reticence.  He began to feel a sullen
resentment because of this secretive and mysterious conduct.  And
later that evening when the two young men parted, the manner of
each of them was cold and formal.  They bowed stiffly, shook hands
with each other coldly, and marched away.  It was several months
before the younger would again talk to Starwick, and during that
period he thought of him with a feeling of resentment, almost of
dislike.



IX


That first impact of the city had stunned him with its huge and
instant shock, and now, like a swimmer whelmed in a raging storm,
he sought desperately among that unceasing flood of faces for one
that he knew, one that he could call his own, and suddenly he
thought of Uncle Bascom.  When his mother had told him he should go
to see his uncle and his family as soon as he could he had nodded
his head mechanically and muttered a few words of perfunctory
assent, but so busy were his mind and heart with his shining vision
of the city and all the magic he was sure to find there that it had
never seriously occurred to him that he would turn eagerly to the
old man for companionship and help.

But now, the day after his arrival in the city, he found himself
pawing eagerly through the pages of the phone book for his uncle's
business address: he found it--the familiar words, "Bascom
Pentland" stared up out of the crowded page with a kind of unreal
shocking incandescence, and in another moment he heard himself
speaking across the wire to a puzzled voice that came to him with
its curious and unearthly remoteness as if from some planetary
distance--and suddenly the howling recognition of the words--words
whose unearthly quality now came back to him in a searing flash of
memory, although he had not heard his uncle's voice for eight
years, when he was twelve years old:

"Oh, hello! hello! hello!" that unearthly voice howled faintly at
him.  "How are you, my boy, how are you, how are you, how are
you? . . .  And say!" the voice yelled with a sudden comical
transition to matter of factness--"I had a letter from your mother
just this morning.  She told me you were on your way. . . .  I've
been expecting you."

"Can I come over to see you now, Uncle Bascom?"

"Oh, by all means, by all means, by all means!" that unearthly and
passionate voice howled back at once enthusiastically.  "Come over
at once, my boy, at once!  Oh, by all means, by all means, by all
means! . . .  And now, my boy!" the voice became faintly and
comically precise, and he could hear his uncle smacking his large
rubbery lips with pedantic relish as he pronounced the words:
"Know-ing you are a young man alone in this great city for the
first time, I shall give you a few brief--and, I trust, reasonably
clear, di-rections," again Bascom smacked his lips with audible
relish as he pronounced this lovely word--"concerning your i-tin-
er-ary"--his joy as he smacked his lips over this last word was
almost indecently evident, and he went on with meticulous
elaboration through a bewildering labyrinth of instructions until
even he was satisfied at the confusion he had caused.  Then he said
good-bye, upon the assurance of his nephew that he would come at
once.  And it was in this way, after eight years of absence, that
the boy again met his uncle.

He found the old man hardly changed at all.  He was, indeed, a
member of that race of men who scarcely vary by a jot from one
decade to another; he was a trifle greyer, the stringy gauntness of
his tall stooped frame was perhaps a little more pronounced, his
eccentric tricks of speech and manner a little more emphatic--but
this was all.  In dress, speech, manner and appearance he was to an
amazing degree the same as he had been the last time that his
nephew saw him.

It is doubtful, in fact, if he had changed appreciably in thirty
years.  And certainly during the first twenty-five years of this
century, business people who had their offices in or near State
Street, Boston, and who had grown very familiar with that
cadaverous and extraordinary figure, could have testified that he
had not changed at all.  His daily appearances, indeed, had become
so much a part of the established process of events in that crowded
street, that they had attained a kind of ritualistic dignity, and
any serious alteration in their pattern would have seemed to
hundreds of people to whom his gaunt bowed figure had become
familiar, almost to constitute a serious disruption of the natural
order.

Shortly before nine o'clock of every working day he would emerge
from a subway exit near the head of the street and pause vaguely
for a moment, making a craggy eddy in the tide of issuing workers
that foamed swiftly about him while he stood with his enormous bony
hands clutched comically before him at the waist, as if holding
himself in, at the same time making the most horrible grimaces with
his lean and amazingly flexible features.  These grimaces were made
by squinting his small sharp eyes together, widening his mouth in a
ghastly travesty of a grin, and convolving his chin and cheek in a
rapid series of pursed lips and horrible squints as he swiftly
pressed his rubbery underlip against a few enormous horse-teeth
that decorated his upper jaw.  Having completed these facial
evolutions, he glanced quickly and, it must be supposed, blindly,
in every direction; for he then plunged heedlessly across the
street, sometimes choosing the moment when traffic had been halted,
and pedestrians were hurrying across, sometimes diving into the
midst of a roaring chaos of motor cars, trucks, and wagons, through
which he sometimes made his way in safety, accompanied only by a
scream of brake-bands, a startled barking of horns, and the hearty
curses of frightened drivers, or from which, howling with terror in
the centre of a web of traffic which he had snarled hopelessly and
brought to a complete standstill, he was sometimes rescued by a
red-faced and cursing young Irishman who was on point-duty at that
corner.

But Bascom was a fated man and he escaped.  Once, it is true, a
bright mindless beetle of machinery, which had no thought for fated
men, had knocked him down and skinned and bruised him; again, an
uninstructed wheel had passed across the soft toe-end of his shoe
and held him prisoner, as if he were merely some average son of
destiny--but he escaped.  He escaped because he was a fated man and
because the providence which guides the steps of children and the
blind was kind to him; and because this same policeman whose simian
upper lip had once been thick and twisted with its curses had long
since run the scale from anger to wild fury, and thence to madness
and despair and resignation, and had now come to have a motherly
affection for this stray sheep, kept his eye peeled for its
appearance every morning, or, failing this, at once shrilled hard
upon his whistle when he heard the well-known howl of terror and
surprise, plunged to the centre of the stalled traffic snarl,
plucked Bascom out to safety under curse and shout and scream of
brake, and marched him tenderly to the curb, gripping his brawny
hand around the old man's arm, feeling his joints, testing his
bones, massaging anxiously his sinewy carcass, and calling him
"bud"--although Bascom was old enough to be his grandfather.  "Are
you all right, bud?  You're not hurt, are you, bud?  Are you
O.K.?"--to which Bascom, if his shock and terror had been great,
could make no answer for a moment save to pant hoarsely and to howl
loudly and huskily from time to time, "Ow!  Ow!  Ow!  Ow!"

At length, becoming more coherent, if not more calm, he would
launch into an ecclesiastical indictment of motor cars and their
drivers delivered in a high, howling, and husky voice that
suggested the pronouncements of a prophet from a mountain.  This
voice had a quality of strange remoteness and, once heard, would
never be forgotten.  It actually had a howling note in it, and
carried to great distances, and yet it was not loud: it was very
much as if Mr. Bascom Pentland were standing on a mountain and
shouting to someone in a quiet valley below--the sounds came to one
plainly but as if from a great distance, and it was full of a
husky, unearthly passion.  It was really an ecclesiastical voice,
the voice of a great preacher; one felt that it should be heard in
churches, which was exactly where it once was heard, for Bascom had
at various times and with great conviction, in the course of his
long and remarkable life, professed and preached the faith of the
Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists, and
the Unitarians.

Quite often, in fact, as now, when he had narrowly escaped disaster
in the streets, Bascom still preached from the corner: as soon as
he recovered somewhat from his shock, he would launch forth into a
sermon of eloquent invective against any driver of motor cars
within hearing, and if any of them entered the fray, as sometimes
happened, a very interesting performance occurred.

"What happened to YOU?" the motorist might bitterly remark.  "Do
the keepers know you're out?"

Mr. Pentland would thereupon retort with an eloquent harangue,
beginning with a few well-chosen quotations from the more violent
prophets of the Old Testament, a few predictions of death,
destruction and damnation for the owners of motor cars, and a few
apt references to Days of Judgment and Reckoning, Chariots of
Moloch, and Beasts of the Apocalypse.

"Oh, for God's sake!" the exasperated motorist might reply.  "Are
you BLIND?  Where do you think you are?  In a cow-pasture?  Can't
you read the signals?  Didn't you see the cop put his hand up?
Don't you know when it says to 'Stop' or 'Go'?  Did you ever hear
of the traffic law?"

"The TRAFFIC law!" Bascom sneeringly exclaimed, as if the mere use
of the word by the motorist evoked his profoundest contempt.  His
voice now had a precise and meticulous way of speech, there was
something sneering and pedantic in the way he pronounced each word,
biting it off with a prim, nasal and heavily accented enunciation
in the manner of certain pedants and purists who suggest by their
pronunciation that language in the mouths of most people is vilely
and carelessly treated, that each word has a precise, subtle, and
careful meaning of its own, and that they--THEY alone--understand
these matters.  "The TRAFFIC law!" he repeated again: then he
squinted his eyes together, pursed his rubbery lip against the big
horsy upper teeth, and laughed down his nose in a forced, sneering
manner.  "The TRAFFIC law!" he said.  "Why, you pit-i-ful ig-no-
RAM-us!  You il-LIT-ter-ate ruffian!  You dare to speak to me--to
ME!" he howled suddenly with an ecclesiastical lift of his voice,
striking himself on his bony breast and glaring with a majestical
fury as if the word of a mighty prophet had been contradicted by an
upstart--"of the traffic law, when it is doubtful if you could READ
the law if you saw it,"--he sneered--"and it is obvious to anyone
with the perception of a schoolboy that you would not have
intelligence enough to understand it, and"--here his voice rose to
a howling emphasis and he held one huge bony finger up to command
attention--"AND to interpret it, if you could read."

"Is THAT so?" the motorist heavily remarked.  "A WISE guy, eh?  One
of these guys who knows it all, eh?  You're a PRETTY wise guy,
aren't you?" the motorist continued bitterly, as if caught up in
the circle of his refrain and unable to change it.  "Well, let me
tell YOU something.  You think you're pretty smaht, don't you?
Well, you're not.  See?  It's wise guys like you who go around
looking for a good bust on the nose.  See?  That's how smaht you
are.  If you wasn't an old guy I'd give you one, too," he said,
getting a moody satisfaction from the thought.

"Ow-w!  Ow-w!  Ow-w!" Bascom howled in sudden terror.

"If you know so much, if you're so smaht as you think you are, what
IS the traffic law?"

Then, assuredly, if there was a traffic law, the unfortunate
motorist was lost, for Uncle Bascom would deliver it to him
verbatim, licking his lips with joy over all the technicalities of
legal phrasing and pronouncing each phrase with a meticulous and
pedantic enunciation.

"And furthermore!" he howled, holding up his big bony finger, "the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decreed, by a statute that has
been on the books since 1856, by a statute that is irrevocably,
inexorably, ineluctably plain that any driver, director, governor,
commander, manager, agent or conductor, or any other person who
shall conduct or cause to be conducted any vehicular instrument,
whether it be of two, four, six, eight or any number of wheels
whatsoever, whether it be in the public service, or in the
possession of a private individual, whether it be--" but by this
time the motorist, if he was wise, had had enough and had escaped.

If, however, it had been one of his more fortunate mornings, if he
had blindly but successfully threaded the peril of roaring traffic,
Uncle Bascom proceeded rapidly down State Street, still clutching
his raw bony hands across his meagre waist, still contorting his
remarkable face in its endless series of pursed grimaces, and
presently turned in to the entrance of a large somewhat dingy-
looking building of blackened stone, one of those solid,
unpretentious, but very valuable properties which smell and look
like the early 1900's, and which belong to that ancient and
enormously wealthy corporation across the river known as Harvard
University.

Here, Uncle Bascom, still clutching himself together across the
waist, mounted a flight of indented marble entry steps, lunged
through revolving doors into a large marble corridor that was
redolent with vibrating waves of hot steamy air, wet rubbers and
galoshes, sanitary disinfectant and serviceable but somewhat old-
fashioned elevators and, entering one of the cars which had just
plunged down abruptly, banged open its door, belched out two or
three people and swallowed a dozen more, he was finally deposited
with the same abruptness on the seventh floor, where he stepped out
into a wide dark corridor, squinted and grimaced uncertainly to
right and left as he had done for twenty-five years, and then went
left along the corridor, past rows of lighted offices in which one
could hear the preliminary clicking of typewriters, the rattling of
crisp papers, and the sounds of people beginning their day's work.
At the end of the corridor Bascom Pentland turned right along
another corridor and at length paused before a door which bore this
inscription across the familiar glazed glass of American business
offices:  "The John T. Brill Realty Co.--Houses For Rent or Sale."
Below this bold legend in much smaller letters was printed:
"Bascom Pentland--Att'y at Law--Conveyancer and Title Expert."

The appearance of this strange figure in State Street, or anywhere
else, had always been sufficient to attract attention and to draw
comment.  Bascom Pentland, if he had straightened to his full
height, would have been six feet and three or four inches tall, but
he had always walked with a stoop and as he grew older the stoop
had become confirmed: he presented a tall, gnarled, bony figure,
cadaverous and stringy, but tough as hickory.  He was of that race
of men who seem never to wear out, or to grow old, or to die: they
live with almost undiminished vitality to great ages, and when they
die they die suddenly.  There is no slow wastage and decay because
there is so little to waste or decay: their mummied and stringy
flesh has the durability of granite.

Bascom Pentland clothed his angular figure with an assortment of
odd garments which seemed to have the same durability: they were
immensely old and worn, but they also gave no signs of ever wearing
out, for by their cut and general appearance of age, it seemed that
his frugal soul had selected in the 'nineties materials which it
hoped would last for ever.  His coat, which was originally of a
dark dull pepper-and-salt grey, had gone green at the seams and
pockets, and moreover it was a ridiculously short skimpy coat for a
gaunt big-boned man like this: it was hardly more than a jacket,
his great wristy hands burst out of it like lengths of cordwood,
and the mark of his high-humped narrow shoulders cut into it with a
knife-like sharpness.  His trousers were also tight and skimpy, of
a lighter grey and of a rough woolly texture from which all fuzz
and fluff had long ago been rubbed; he wore rough country brogans
with raw-hide laces, and a funny little flat hat of ancient black
felt, which had also gone green along the band.  One understands
now why the policeman called him "Bud": this great bony figure
seemed ruthlessly to have been crammed into garments in which a
country fledgling of the 'eighties might have gone to see his girl,
clutching a bag of gumdrops in his large red hand.  A stringy
little neck-tie, a clean but dilapidated collar which by its bluish
and softly mottled look Bascom Pentland must have laundered himself
(a presumption which is quite correct since the old man did all his
own laundry work, as well as his mending, repairing, and cobbling)--
this was his costume, winter and summer, and it never changed,
save that in winter he supplemented it with an ancient blue sweater
which he wore buttoned to the chin and whose frayed ends and cuffs
projected inches below the scanty little jacket.  He had never been
known to wear an overcoat, not even on the coldest days of those
long, raw, and formidable winters from which Boston suffers.

The mark of his madness was plain upon him: intuitively men knew he
was not a poor man, and the people who had seen him so many times
in State Street would nudge one another, saying:  "You see that old
guy?  You'd think he was waitin' for a hand-out from the Salvation
Army, wouldn't you?  Well, he's not.  He's GOT it, brother.
Believe me, he's GOT it good and plenty: he's GOT it salted away
where no one ain't goin' to touch it.  That guy's got a sock full
of dough!"

"Jesus!" another remarks.  "What good's it goin' to do an old guy
like that?  He can't take any of it with him, can he?"

"You said it, brother," and the conversation would become
philosophical.

Bascom Pentland was himself conscious of his parsimony, and
although he sometimes asserted that he was "only a poor man," he
realized that his exaggerated economies could not be justified to
his business associates on account of poverty: they taunted him
slyly, saying, "Come on, Pentland, let's go to lunch.  You can get
a good meal at the Pahkeh House for a couple of bucks."  Or:  "Say,
Pentland, I know a place where they're havin' a sale of winter
overcoats: I saw one there that would just suit you--you can get it
for sixty dollars."  Or:  "Do you need a good laundry, Reverend?  I
know a couple of Chinks who do good work."

To which Bascom, with the characteristic evasiveness of parsimony,
would reply, snuffling derisively down his nose:  "No, sir!  You
won't catch me in any of their stinking restaurants.  You never
know what you're getting: if you could see the dirty, nasty, filthy
kitchens where your food is prepared you'd lose your appetite quick
enough."  His parsimony had resulted in a compensating food mania:
he declared that "in his young days" he "ruined his digestion by
eating in restaurants," he painted the most revolting pictures of
the filth of these establishments, laughing scornfully down his
nose as he declared:  "I suppose you think it tastes better after
some dirty, nasty, stinking NIGGER has wiped his old hands all over
it" (phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh!)--here he would contort his face and
snuffle scornfully down his nose; and he was bitter in his
denunciation of "rich foods," declaring they had "destroyed more
lives than all the wars and all the armies since the beginning of
time."

As he had grown older he had become more and more convinced of the
healthy purity of "raw foods," and he prepared for himself at home
raw revolting messes of chopped-up carrots, onions, turnips, even
raw potatoes, which he devoured at table, smacking his lips with an
air of keen relish, and declaring to his wife: "You may poison
YOURSELF on your old roasts and oysters and turkeys if you please:
you wouldn't catch ME eating that stuff.  No, sir!  Not on your
life!  I think too much of my stomach!"  But his use of the pronoun
"you" was here universal rather than particular, because if that
lady's longevity had depended on her abstinence from "roasts and
oysters and turkeys" there was no reason why she should not have
lived for ever.

Or again, if it were a matter of clothing, a matter of fencing in
his bones and tallows against the frozen nail of Boston winter, he
would howl derisively:  "An overcoat!  Not on your life!  I
wouldn't give two cents for all the old overcoats in the world!
The only thing they're good for is to gather up germs and give you
colds and pneumonia.  I haven't worn an overcoat in thirty years,
and I've never had the VESTIGE--no! not the SEMBLANCE--of a cold
during all that time!"--an assertion that was not strictly
accurate, since he always complained bitterly of at least two or
three during the course of a single winter, declaring at those
times that no more hateful, treacherous, damnable climate than that
of Boston had ever been known.

Similarly, if it were a question of laundries he would scornfully
declare that he would not send "HIS shirts and collars to let some
dirty old Chinaman spit and HOCK upon them--YES!" he would
gleefully howl, as some new abomination of nastiness suggested
itself to his teeming brain--"YES! and iron it IN, too, so you can
walk around done up in old Chinaman's spit!"--(Phuh-phuh-phuh-phuh-
phuh!)--here he would grimace, contort his rubbery lip, and laugh
down his nose in forced snarls of gratification and triumph.

This was the old man who, even now, as his nephew sped to meet him,
stood in his dusty little office clutching his raw and bony hands
across his waist.

In spite of the bewildering elaboration of his uncle's direction,
the boy found his offices without much trouble.  He went in and a
moment later, his hand was being vigorously pumped by his uncle's
great stiff paw, and he heard that instant howling voice of
welcome--the voice of a prophet calling from the mountain-tops--
coming to him without preliminary or introduction, as he had heard
it last eight years before.

"Oh, hello, hello, hello. . . .  How are you, how are you, how are
you? . . .  Say!" his uncle turned abruptly and in a high howling
tone addressed several people who were staring at the young man
curiously, "I want you all to meet my sister's youngest son--my
nephew, Mr. Eugene Gant . . . and say!" he bawled again, but in
remoter tone, in a strangely confiding and insinuating tone--"would
you know he was a Pentland by the look of him? . . .  Can you see
the family resemblance?"  He smacked his rubbery lips together with
an air of relish, and suddenly threw his great gaunt arms up and
let them fall with an air of ecstatic jubilation, squinted his
small sharp eyes together, contorted his rubbery lips in their
amazing and grotesque grimace, and stamping ecstatically at the
floor with one long stringy leg, taking random ecstatic kicks at
any object that was within reach, he began to snuffle with his
strange forced laughter, and howled deliriously, "Oh, MY, yes! . . .
The thing is evident. . . .  He is a Pentland beyond the shadow
of a vestige of a doubt! . . .  Oh, by all means, by all means, by
all means!" and he went on snuffling, stamping, howling, and
kicking at random objects in this way until the strange seizure of
his mirth had somewhat subsided.  Then, more quietly, he introduced
his nephew to his associates in the curious business of which he
was a partner.

And it was in this way that the boy first met the people in his
uncle's office--an office and people who were, during the years
that followed, and in the course of hundreds of visits, to become a
part of the fabric of his life--so hauntingly real, so strangely
familiar that in the years that followed he could forget none of
them, remember everything just as it was.

These offices, which he saw for the first time that day, were
composed of two rooms, one in front and one behind, L-shaped, and
set in the elbow of the building, so that one might look out at the
two projecting wings of the building and see lighted layers of
offices, in which the actors of a dozen enterprises "took"
dictation, clattered at typewriters, walked back and forth
importantly, talked into telephones or, what they did with amazing
frequency, folded their palms behind their skulls, placed their
feet restfully on the nearest solid object, and gazed for long
periods dreamily and tenderly at the ceilings.

Through the broad and usually very dirty panes of the window in the
front office one could catch a glimpse of Faneuil Hall and the
magnificent and exultant activity of the markets.

These dingy offices, however, from which a corner of this rich
movement might be seen and felt, were merely the unlovely
counterpart of millions of others throughout the country and, in
the telling phrase of Baedeker, offered "little that need detain
the tourist": a few chairs, two scarred roll-top desks, a typist's
table, a battered safe with a pile of thumb-worn ledgers on top of
it, a set of green filing cases, an enormous green, greasy water-
jar always half filled with a rusty liquid that no one drank, and
two spittoons, put there because Brill was a man who chewed and
spat widely in all directions--this, save for placards, each
bearing several photographs of houses with their prices written
below them--8 rooms, Dorchester, $6500; 5 rooms and garage,
Melrose, $4500, etc.--completed the furniture of the room, and the
second room, save for the disposition of objects, was similarly
adorned.

Such, then, was the scene in which the old man and his nephew met
again after a separation of eight years.



X


The youth was drowned in the deepest sea--an atom bombarded,
ignorant of all defence in a tumultuous world.  The shell of
custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from
the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud.
He was nothing, nobody--there was no heart or bravery left in him;
he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance--the beginning, as
Socrates suggested, of wisdom--he was lost.

He had wanted to cut a figure in the world--he had simply never
imagined the number of people that were in it.  And like most
people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of
occasional companionship, for ever tender and for ever true, which
might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a
sword.

There was, of course, among the members of the play-writing class
an energetic and calculated sociability.  The supposed advantages
of discussion with one another, the interplay of wit, and so on,
above all what was called "the exchange of ideas," but what most
often was merely the exchange of other people's ideas,--all these
were mentioned often; they were held in the highest esteem as one
of the chief benefits to be derived from the course.

Manifestly, one could write anywhere.  But where else could one
write with around one the constant stimulus of other people who
also wrote?  Where could one learn one's faults so well as before a
critical and serious congress of artists?  They were content with
it--they got what they wanted.  But the lack of warmth, the absence
of inner radial heat which, not being fundamental in the structure
of their lives, had never been wanted, filled him with horror and
impotent fury.

The critical sense had stirred in him hardly at all, the idea of
questioning authority and position had not occurred to him.

He was facing one of the oldest--what, for the creative mind, must
be one of the most painful--problems of the spirit--the search for
a standard of taste.  He had, at seventeen, as a sophomore,
triumphantly denied God, but he was unable now to deny Robert
Browning.  It had never occurred to him that there was a single
authoritatively beautiful thing in the world that might not be
agreed on, by a community of all the enlightened spirits of the
universe, as beautiful.  EVERYONE, of course, KNEW that King Lear
was one of the greatest plays that had ever been written.  Only, he
was beginning to find everyone didn't.

And now for the first time he began to worry about being "modern."
He had the great fear young people have that they will not be a
part of the most advanced literary and artistic movements of the
time.  Several of the young men he knew had contributed stories,
poems, and criticisms to little reviews, published by and for
small groups of literary adepts.  They disposed of most of the
established figures with a few well-chosen words of contempt, and
they replaced these figures with obscure names of their own who,
they assured him, were the important people of the future.

For the first time, he heard the word "Mid-Victorian" applied as a
term of opprobrium.  What its implications were he had no idea.
Stevenson, too, to him hardly more than a writer of books for boys,
books that he had read as a child with interest and delight, was a
symbol of some vague but monstrously pernicious influence.

But he discovered at once that to voice any of these questionings
was to brand oneself in the esteem of the group; intuitively he saw
that their jargon formed a pattern by which they might be placed
and recognized; that, to young men most of all, to be placed in
a previous discarded pattern was unendurable disgrace.  It
represented to them the mark of intellectual development, just as
in a sophomore's philosophy the belief that God is an old man with
a long beard brings ridicule and odium upon the believer but the
belief that God is an ocean without limit, or an all-pervasive and
inclusive substance, or some other equally naïve and extraordinary
idea, is regarded as a certain sign of bold enlightenment.  Thus it
often happens, when one thinks he has extended the limits of his
life, broken the bonds, and liberated himself in the wider ether,
he has done no more than to exchange a new superstition for an old
one, to forsake a beautiful myth for an ugly one.

The young men in Professor Hatcher's class were sorry for many
things and many people.

"Barrie?" began Mr. Scoville, an elegant and wealthy young dawdler
from Philadelphia, who, by his own confession, had spent most of
his life in France, "Barrie?" he continued regretfully, in answer
to a question.  For a moment, he drew deeply on his cigarette, then
raised sad, languid eyes.  "I'm sorry," he said gently, with a
slight regretful movement of his head--"I can't read him.  I've
tried it--but it simply can't be done."  They laughed, greatly
pleased.

"But it is a pity, you know, a GREAT pity," Francis Starwick
remarked languidly, using effectively his trick of giving a tired
emphasis to certain words which conveyed a kind of sad finality, a
weary earnestness to what he said.  He turned to go.

"But--but--but--how--how--how very interesting!  Why IS it, Frank?"
Hugh Dodd demanded with his earnest stammering eagerness.  He was
profoundly respectful of Starwick's critical ability.

"Why is what?" said Starwick in his curiously mannered voice, his
air of languid weariness.

"Why is it a great pity about Barrie?" knitting his bushy brows
together, and scowling with an air of intense concentration over
his words as he spoke.  "Because," said the appraiser of Values, as
he prepared to depart, arranging with feminine luxuriousness the
voluptuous folds of his blue silk scarf, "the man really had
something one time.  He really did.  Something strange and
haunting--the genius of the Celt."  Swinging his cane slowly,
acutely and painfully conscious that he was being watched, with the
agonizing stiffness that was at the bottom of his character, he
strolled off across the Yard, stark and lovely with the harsh white
snow and wintry branches of bleak winter.

"You know--you know--you know--that's very interesting," said Dodd,
intent upon his words.  "I'd--I'd--I'd never thought of it in JUST
that way."

"Barrie," drawled Wood, the maker of epigrams, "is a stick of
taffy, floating upon a sea of molasses."

There was laughter.

He was for ever making these epigrams; his face had a somewhat
saturnine cast, his lips twisted ironically, his eyes shot
splintered promises of satiric wisdom.  He looked like a very
caustically humorous person; but unhappily he had no humour.  But
they thought he had.  No one with a face like that could be less
than keen.

So he had something to say for every occasion.  He had discovered
that the manner counted for wit.  If the talk was of Shaw's
deficiencies as a dramatist, he might say:

"But, after all, if one is going in for all that sort of thing, why
not have lantern slides and a course of lectures?"

Thus he was known, not merely as a subtle-souled and elusive
psychologist but also as a biting wit.

"Galsworthy wrote something that looked like a play once," someone
remarked.  "There were parts of Justice that weren't bad."

"Yes.  Yes," said Dodd, peering intently at his language.
"Justice--there were some interesting things in that.  It's--it's--
it's rather a PITY about him, isn't it?"  And as he said these
words he frowned earnestly and intently.  There was genuine pity in
his voice, for the man's spirit had great charity and sweetness in
it.

As they dispersed, someone remarked that Shaw might have made a
dramatist if he had ever known anything about writing a play.

"But he DATES so--how he DATES!" Scoville remarked.

"Those earlier plays--"

"Yes, I agree"--thus Wood again.  "Almost Mid-Victorian.  Shaw:--a
prophet with his face turned backwards."  Then they went away in
small groups.



XI


To reach his own "office," as Bascom Pentland called the tiny
cubicle in which he worked and received his clients, the old man
had to traverse the inner room and open a door in a flimsy
partition of varnished wood and glazed glass at the other end.
This was his office: it was really a very narrow slice cut off from
the larger room, and in it there was barely space for one large
dirty window, an ancient dilapidated desk and swivel chair, a very
small battered safe buried under stacks of yellowed newspapers, and
a small bookcase with glass doors and two small shelves on which
there were a few worn volumes.  An inspection of these books would
have revealed four or five tattered and musty law books in their
ponderous calf-skin bindings--one on Contracts, one on Real
Property, one on Titles--a two-volume edition of the poems of
Matthew Arnold, very dog-eared and thumbed over; a copy of Sartor
Resartus, also much used; a volume of the essays of Ralph Waldo
Emerson; the Iliad in Greek with minute yellowed notations in the
margins; a volume of the World Almanac several years old; and a
very worn volume of the Holy Bible, greatly used and annotated in
Bascom's small, stiffly laborious, and meticulous hand.

If the old man was a little late, as sometimes happened, he might
find his colleagues there before him.  Miss Muriel Brill, the
typist, and the eldest daughter of Mr. John T. Brill, would be
seated in her typist's chair, her heavy legs crossed as she bent
over to undo the metal latches of the thick galoshes she wore
during the winter season.  It is true there were also other seasons
when Miss Brill did not wear galoshes, but so sharply and strongly
do our memories connect people with certain gestures which, often
for an inscrutable reason, seem characteristic of them, that any
frequent visitor to these offices at this time of day would
doubtless have remembered Miss Brill as always unfastening her
galoshes.  But the probable reason is that some people inevitably
belong to seasons, and this girl's season was winter--not blizzards
or howling winds, or the blind skirl and sweep of snow, but grey,
grim, raw, thick, implacable winter: the endless successions of
grey days and grey monotony.  There was no spark of colour in her,
her body was somewhat thick and heavy, her face was white, dull,
and thick-featured and instead of tapering downwards, it tapered
up: it was small above, and thick and heavy below, and even in her
speech, the words she uttered seemed to have been chosen by an
automaton, and could only be remembered later by their desolate
banality.  One always remembered her as saying as one entered:
". . . Hello! . . .  You're becoming quite a strangeh! . . .
It's been some time since you was around, hasn't it? . . .  I
was thinkin' the otheh day it had been some time since you was
around. . . .  I'd begun to think you had forgotten us. . . .  Well,
how've you been?  Lookin' the same as usual, I see. . . .  Me? . . .
Oh, can't complain. . . .  Keepin' busy?  I'LL say!  I manage
to keep goin'. . . .  Who you lookin' for?  Father?  He's in
THERE. . . . Why, yeah!  Go right on in."

This was Miss Brill, and at the moment that she bent to unfasten
her galoshes, it is likely that Mr. Samuel Friedman would also be
there in the act of rubbing his small dry hands briskly together,
or of rubbing the back of one hand with the palm of the other in
order to induce circulation.  He was a small youngish man, a pale
somewhat meagre-looking little Jew with a sharp ferret face: he,
too, was a person who goes to "fill in" those vast swarming masses
of people along the pavements and in the subway--the mind cannot
remember them or absorb the details of their individual appearance,
but they people the earth, they make up life.  Mr. Friedman had
none of the richness, colour, and humour that some members of his
race so abundantly possess; the succession of grey days, the grim
weather seemed to have entered his soul as it enters the souls of
many different races there--the Irish, the older New England stock,
even the Jews--and it gives them a common touch that is prim, drab,
careful, tight and sour.  Mr. Friedman also wore galoshes, his
clothes were neat, drab, a little worn and shiny, there was an
odour of thawing dampness and warm rubber about him as he rubbed
his dry little hands saying:  "Chee!  How I hated to leave that
good wahm bed this morning!  When I got up I said, 'HOLY Chee!'  My
wife says, 'Whatsa mattah?'  I says, 'Holy Chee!  You step out heah
a moment where I am an' you'll see whatsa mattah.'  'Is it cold?'
she says.  'Is it cold!  I'll tell the cock-eyed wuhld!' I says.
Chee!  You could have cut the frost with an axe: the wateh in the
pitchehs was frozen hahd; an' she has the nuhve to ask me if it's
cold!  Is it cold!' I says.  'Do you know any more funny stories?'
I says.  Oh, how I do love my bed!  Chee!  I kept thinkin' of that
guy in Braintree I got to go see today an' the more I thought about
him, the less I liked him!  I thought my feet would tu'n into two
blocks of ice before I got the funniss stahted!  'Chee!  I hope the
ole bus is still workin',' I says.  If I've got to go thaw that
damned thing out,' I says, 'I'm ready to quit.'  Chee!  Well, suh,
I neveh had a bit of trouble: she stahted right up an' the way that
ole moteh was workin' is nobody's business."

During the course of this monologue Miss Brill would give ear and
assent from time to time by the simple interjection:  "Uh!"  It was
a sound she uttered frequently, it had somewhat the same meaning as
"Yes," but it was more non-committal than "Yes."  It seemed to
render assent to the speaker, to let him know that he was being
heard and understood, but it did not commit the auditor to any
opinion, or to any real agreement.

The third member of this office staff, who was likely to be present
at this time, was a gentleman named Stanley P. Ward.  Mr. Stanley
P. Ward was a neat middling figure of a man, aged fifty or
thereabouts; he was plump and had a pink tender skin, a trim
Vandyke, and a nice comfortable little pot of a belly which slipped
snugly into the well-pressed and well-brushed garments that always
fitted him so tidily.  He was a bit of a fop, and it was at once
evident that he was quietly but enormously pleased with himself.
He carried himself very sprucely, he took short rapid steps and his
neat little paunch gave his figure a movement not unlike that of a
pouter pigeon.  He was usually in quiet but excellent spirits, he
laughed frequently and a smile--rather a subtly amused look--was
generally playing about the edges of his mouth.  That smile and his
laugh made some people vaguely uncomfortable: there was a kind of
deliberate falseness in them, as if what he really thought and felt
was not to be shared with other men.  He seemed, in fact, to have
discovered some vital and secret power, some superior knowledge and
wisdom, from which the rest of mankind was excluded, a sense that
he was "chosen" above other men, and this impression of Mr. Stanley
Ward would have been correct, for he was a Christian Scientist, he
was a pillar of the Church, and a very big Church at that--for Mr.
Ward, dressed in fashionable striped trousers, rubber soles, and a
cut-away coat, might be found somewhere under the mighty dome of
the Mother Church on Huntingdon Avenue every Sunday suavely,
noiselessly, and expertly ushering the faithful to their pews.

This completes the personnel of the first office of the John T.
Brill Realty Company, and if Bascom Pentland arrived late, if these
three people were already present, if Mr. Bascom Pentland had not
been defrauded of any part of his worldly goods by some contriving
rascal of whom the world has many, if his life had not been
imperilled by some speed maniac, if the damnable New England
weather was not too damnable, if, in short, Bascom Pentland was in
fairly good spirits he would on entering immediately howl in a
high, rapid, remote and perfectly monotonous tone:  "Hello, Hello,
Hello!  Good morning, Good morning, Good-morning!"--after which he
would close his eyes, grimace horribly, press his rubbery lip
against his big horse-teeth, and snuffle with laughter through his
nose, as if pleased by a tremendous stroke of wit.  At this
demonstration the other members of the group would glance at one
another with those knowing, subtly supercilious nods and winks,
that look of common self-congratulation and humour with which the
more "normal" members of society greet the conduct of an eccentric,
and Mr. Samuel Friedman would say:  "What's the mattah with you,
Pop?  You look happy.  Some one musta give you a shot in the ahm."

At which, a course powerful voice, deliberate and rich with its
intimation of immense and earthy vulgarity, might roar out of the
depth of the inner office:  "No, I'll tell you what it is."  Here
the great figure of Mr. John T. Brill, the head of the business,
would darken the doorway.  "Don't you know what's wrong with the
Reverend?  It's that widder he's been takin' around."  Here, the
phlegmy burble that prefaced all of Mr. Brill's obscenities would
appear in his voice, the shadow of a lewd smile would play around
the corner of his mouth:  "It's the widder.  She's let him have a
little of it."

At this delicate stroke of humour, the burble would burst open in
Mr. Brill's great red throat, and he would roar with that high,
choking, phlegmy laughter that is frequent among big red-faced men.
Mr. Friedman would laugh drily ("Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!"), Mr.
Stanley Ward would laugh more heartily, but complacently, and Miss
Brill would snicker in a coy and subdued manner as became a modest
young girl.  As for Bascom Pentland, if he was really in a good
humour, he might snuffle with nosy laughter, bend double at his
meagre waist, clutching his big hands together, and stamp at the
floor violently several times with one stringy leg; he might even
go so far as to take a random ecstatic kick at objects, still
stamping and snuffling with laughter, and prod Miss Brill stiffly
with two enormous bony fingers, as if he did not wish the full
point and flavour of the jest to be lost on her.

Bascom Pentland, however, was a very complicated person with many
moods, and if Mr. Brill's fooling did not catch him in a receptive
one, he might contort his face in a pucker of refined disgust, and
mutter his disapproval, as he shook his head rapidly from side to
side.  Or he might rise to great heights of moral denunciation,
beginning at first in a grave low voice that showed the seriousness
of the words he had to utter:  "The lady to whom you refer," he
would begin, "the very charming and cultivated lady whose name,
sir"--here his voice would rise on its howling note and he would
wag his great bony forefinger--"whose name, sir, you have so foully
traduced and blackened--"

"No, I wasn't, Reverend.  I was only tryin' to whiten it," said Mr.
Brill, beginning to burble with laughter.

"--Whose name, sir, you have so foully traduced and blackened with
your smutty suggestions," Bascom continued implacably, "--that lady
is known to me, as you very well know, sir," he howled, wagging his
great finger again, "solely and simply in a professional capacity."

"Why, hell, Reverend," said Mr. Brill innocently, "I never knew she
was a perfessional.  I thought she was an amatoor."

At this conclusive stroke, Mr. Brill would make the whole place
tremble with his laughter, Mr. Friedman would laugh almost
noiselessly, holding himself weakly at the stomach and bending
across a desk, Mr. Ward would have short bursts and fits of
laughter, as he gazed out the window, shaking his head deprecatingly
from time to time, as if his more serious nature disapproved, and
Miss Brill would snicker, and turn to her machine, remarking:
"This conversation is getting too rough for me!"

And Bascom, if this jesting touched his complex soul at one of
those moments when such profanity shocked him, would walk away,
confiding into vacancy, it seemed, with his powerful and mobile
features contorted in the most eloquent expression of disgust and
loathing ever seen on any face, the while he muttered, in a
resonant whisper that shuddered with passionate revulsion:  "Oh,
BAD!  Oh, BAD!  Oh, BAD! BAD! BAD!"--shaking his head slightly from
side to side with each word.

Yet there were other times, when Brill's swingeing vulgarity, the
vast coarse sweep of his profanity not only found Uncle Bascom in a
completely receptive mood, but evoked from him gleeful responses,
counter-essays in swearing which he made slyly, craftily,
snickering with pleasure and squinting around at his listeners at
the sound of the words, and getting such stimulus from them as
might a renegade clergyman exulting in a feeling of depravity and
abandonment for the first time.

To the other people in this office--that is, to Friedman, Ward, and
Muriel, the stenographer--the old man was always an enigma; at
first they had observed his peculiarities of speech and dress, his
eccentricity of manner, and the sudden, violent, and complicated
fluctuation of his temperament, with astonishment and wonder, then
with laughter and ridicule, and now, with dull, uncomprehending
acceptance.  Nothing he did or said surprised them any more, they
had no understanding and little curiosity, they accepted him as a
fact in the grey schedule of their lives.  Their relation to him
was habitually touched by a kind of patronizing banter--"kidding
the old boy along," they would have called it--by the communication
of smug superior winks and the conspiracy of feeble jests.  And in
this there was something base and ignoble, for Bascom was a better
man than any of them.

He did not notice any of this, it is not likely he would have cared
if he had, for, like most eccentrics, his thoughts were usually
buried in a world of his own creating to whose every fact and
feeling and motion he was the central actor.  Again, as much as any
of his extraordinary family, he had carried with him throughout his
life the sense that he was "fated"--a sense that was strong in all
of them--that his life was pivotal to all the actions of
providence, that, in short, the time might be out of joint, but not
himself.  Nothing but death could shake his powerful egotism, and
his occasional storms of fury, his railing at the world, his
tirades of invective at some motorist, pedestrian, or labourer
occurred only when he discovered that these people were moving in a
world at cross-purposes to his own and that some action of theirs
had disturbed or shaken the logic of his universe.

It was curious that, of all the people in the office, the person
who had the deepest understanding and respect for him was John T.
Brill.  Mr. Brill was a huge creature of elemental desires and
passions: a river of profanity rushed from his mouth with the
relentless sweep and surge of the Mississippi, he could no more
have spoken without swearing than a whale could swim in a frog-
pond--he swore at everything, at everyone, and with every breath,
casually and unconsciously, and yet when he addressed Bascom his
oath was always impersonal and tinged subtly by a feeling of
respect.

Thus, he would speak to Uncle Bascom somewhat in this fashion:
"God-damn it, Pentland, did you ever look up the title for that
stuff in Maiden?  That feller's been callin' up every day to find
out about it."

"Which fellow?" Bascom asked precisely.  "The man from Cambridge?'"

"No," said Mr. Brill, "not him, the other son of a bitch, the
Dorchester feller.  How the hell am I goin' to tell him anything if
there's no goddamn title for the stuff?"

Profane and typical as this speech was, it was always shaded nicely
with impersonality toward Bascom--conscious to the full of the
distinction between "damn IT" and "damn YOU."  Toward his other
colleagues, however, Mr. Brill was neither nice nor delicate.

Brill was an enormous man physically: he was six feet two or three
inches tall, and his weight was close to three hundred pounds.  He
was totally bald, his skull was a gleaming satiny pink; above his
great red moon of face, with its ponderous and pendulous jowls, it
looked almost egg-shaped.  And in the heavy, deliberate, and
powerful timbre of his voice there was always lurking this burble
of exultant, gargantuan obscenity: it was so obviously part of the
structure of his life, so obviously his only and natural means of
expression, that it was impossible to condemn him.  His epithet was
limited and repetitive--but so, too, was Homer's, and, like Homer,
he saw no reason for changing what had already been used and found
good.

He was a lewd and innocent man.  Like Bascom, by comparison with
these other people, he seemed to belong to some earlier, richer and
grander period of the earth, and perhaps this was why there was
more actual kinship and understanding between them than between any
of the other members of the office.  These other people--Friedman,
Brill's daughter Muriel, and Ward--belonged to the myriads of the
earth, to those numberless swarms that with ceaseless pullulation
fill the streets of life with their grey immemorable tides.  But
Brill and Bascom were men in a thousand, a million: if one had seen
them in a crowd he would have looked after them, if one had talked
with them, he could never have forgotten them.

It is rare in modern life that one sees a man who can express
himself with such complete and abundant certainty as Brill did--
completely and without doubt or confusion.  It is true that his
life expressed itself chiefly by three gestures--by profanity, by
his great roar of full-throated, earth-shaking laughter, and by
flatulence, an explosive comment on existence which usually
concluded and summarized his other means of expression.

Although the other people in the office laughed heartily at this
soaring rhetoric of obscenity, it sometimes proved too much for
Uncle Bascom.  When this happened he would either leave the office
immediately or stump furiously into his own little cupboard that
seemed silted over with the dust of twenty years, slamming the door
behind him so violently that the thin partition rattled, and then
stand for a moment pursing his lips, and convolving his features
with incredible speed, and shaking his gaunt head slightly from
side to side, until at length he whispered in a tone of passionate
disgust and revulsion:  "Oh, BAD!  BAD!  BAD!  By every GESTURE!
by every ACT! he betrays the BOOR, the VULGARIAN!  Can you
imagine"--here his voice sank even lower in its scale of passionate
whispering repugnance--"can you for one MOMENT imagine a man of
BREEDING and the social graces breaking wind publicly?--And before
his own daughter.  Oh, BAD!  BAD!  BAD!  BAD!"

And in the silence, while Uncle Bascom stood shaking his head in
its movement of downcast and convulsive distaste, they could hear,
suddenly, the ripping noise Brill would make as his pungent answer
to all the world--and his great bellow of throaty laughter.  Later
on, if Bascom had to consult him on any business, he would open his
door abruptly, walk out into Brill's office clutching his hands
together at his waist, and with disgust still carved upon his face,
say:  "Well, sir. . . .  If you have concluded your morning
devotions," here his voice sank to a bitter snarl, "we might get
down to the transaction of some of the day's business."

"Why, Reverend!" Brill roared.  "You ain't heard nothin' yet!"

And the great choking bellow of laughter would burst from him
again, rattling the windows with its power as he hurled his great
weight backward, with complete abandon, in his creaking swivel-
chair.



It was obvious that he liked to tease the old man, and never lost
an opportunity of doing so: for example, if anyone gave Uncle
Bascom a cigar, Brill would exclaim with an air of innocent
surprise:  "Why, REVEREND, you're not going to smoke that, are
you?"

"Why, certainly," Bascom said tartly.  "That is the purpose for
which it was intended, isn't it?"

"Why, yes," said Brill, "but you know how they make 'em, don't you?
I didn't think you'd touch it after some dirty old Spaniard has
wiped his old hands all over it--yes! an' SPIT upon it, too,
because that's what they do!"

"Ah!" Bascom snarled contemptuously.  "You don't know what you're
talking about!  There is nothing cleaner than good tobacco!  Finest
and healthiest plant on earth!  No question about it!"

"Well," said Brill, "I've learned something.  We live and learn,
Reverend.  You've taught me somethin' worth knowing: when it's free
it's clean; when you have to pay for it it stinks like hell!"  He
pondered heavily for a moment, and the burble began to play about
in his great throat:  "And by God!" he concluded, "tobacco's not
the only thing that applies to, either.  Not by a damned sight!"

Again, one morning when his nephew was there, Bascom cleared his
throat portentously, coughed, and suddenly said to him:  "Now,
Eugene, my boy, you are going to have lunch with me today.  There's
no question about it whatever!"  This was astonishing news, for he
had never before invited the youth to eat with him when he came to
his office, although the boy had been to his house for dinner many
times.  "Yes, sir!" said Bascom, with an air of conviction and
satisfaction.  "I have thought it all over.  There is a splendid
establishment in the basement of this building--small, of course,
but everything clean and of the highest order!  It is conducted by
an Irish gentleman whom I have known for many years.  Finest people
on earth: no question about it!"

It was an astonishing and momentous occasion; the boy knew how
infrequently he went to a restaurant.  Having made his decision,
Uncle Bascom immediately stepped into the outer offices and began
to discuss and publish his intentions with the greatest
satisfaction.

"Yes, sir!" he said in a precise tone, smacking his lips in a
ruminant fashion, and addressing himself to everyone rather than to
a particular person.  "We shall go in and take our seats in the
regular way, and I shall then give appropriate instructions to one
of the attendants--" again he smacked his lips as he pronounced
this word with such an indescribable air of relish that immediately
the boy's mouth began to water, and the delicious pangs of appetite
and hunger began to gnaw his vitals--"I shall say:  'This is my
nephew, a young man now enrolled at Harvard Un-i-ver-sit-tee!'"--
here Bascom smacked his lips together again with that same
maddening air of relish--"'Yes, sir' (I shall say!)--'You are to
fulfil his order without STINT, without DELAY, and without
QUESTION, and to the UTMOST of your ability'"--he howled, wagging
his great bony forefinger through the air--"As for myself," he
declared abruptly, "I shall take nothing.  Good Lord, no!" he said
with a scornful laugh.  "I wouldn't touch a thing they had to
offer.  You couldn't pay me to: I shouldn't sleep for a month if I
did.  But you, my boy!" he howled, turning suddenly upon his
nephew, "--are to have everything your heart desires!  Everything,
everything, everything!"  He made an inclusive gesture with his
long arms; then closed his eyes, stamped at the floor, and began to
snuffle with laughter.

Mr. Brill had listened to all this with his great-jowled face
slack-jawed and agape with astonishment.  Now, he said heavily:
"He's goin' to have everything, is he?  Where are you goin' to take
him to git it?"

"Why, sir!" Bascom said in an annoyed tone, "I have told you all
along--we are going to the modest but excellent establishment in
the basement of this very building."

"Why, Reverend," Brill said in a protesting tone, "you ain't goin'
to take your nephew THERE, are you?  I thought you said you was
goin' to git somethin' to EAT."

"I had supposed," Bascom said with bitter sarcasm, "that one went
there for that purpose.  I had not supposed that one went there to
get shaved."

"Well," said Brill, "if you go there you'll git shaved, all right.
You'll not only git SHAVED, you'll git SKINNED alive.  But you
won't git anything to eat."  And he hurled himself back again,
roaring with laughter.

"Pay no attention to him!" Bascom said to the boy in a tone of
bitter repugnance.  "I have long known that his low and vulgar mind
attempts to make a joke of everything, even the most sacred
matters.  I assure you, my boy, the place is excellent in every
way:--do you suppose," he said now, addressing Brill and all the
others, with a howl of fury--"do you suppose, if it were not, that
I should for a single moment DREAM of taking him there?  Do you
suppose that I would for an instant CONTEMPLATE taking my own
nephew, my sister's son, to any place in which I did not repose the
fullest confidence?  Not on your life!" he howled.  "Not on your
life!"

And they departed, followed by Brill's great bellow, and a farewell
invitation which he shouted after the young man.  "Don't worry,
son!  When you git through with that cockroach stew, come back an'
I'll take you out to lunch with ME!"



Although Brill delighted in teasing and baiting his partner in this
fashion, there was, at the bottom of his heart, a feeling of deep
humility, of genuine respect and admiration for him: he respected
Uncle Bascom's intelligence, he was secretly and profoundly
impressed by the fact that the old man had been a minister of the
gospel and had preached in many churches.

Moreover, in the respect and awe with which Brill greeted these
evidences of Bascom's superior education, in the eagerness he
showed when he boasted to visitors, as he often did, of his
partner's learning, there was a quality of pride that was
profoundly touching and paternal: it was as if Bascom had been his
son and as if he wanted at every opportunity to display his talents
to the world.  And this, in fact, was exactly what he did want to
do.  Much to Bascom's annoyance, Brill was constantly speaking of
his erudition to strangers who had come into the office for the
first time, and constantly urging him to perform for them, to "say
some of them big words, Reverend."  And even when the old man
answered him, as he frequently did, in terms of scorn, anger, and
contempt, Brill was completely satisfied if Uncle Bascom would only
use a few of the "big words" in doing it.  Thus, one day, when one
of his boyhood friends, a New Hampshire man whom he had not seen in
thirty-five years, had come in to renew their acquaintance Brill,
in describing the accomplishments of his partner, said with an air
of solemn affirmation:  "Why, hell yes, Jim!  It'd take a college
perfesser to know what the Reverend is talkin' about half the time!
No ordinary son of a bitch is able to understand him!  So help me
God, it's true!" he swore solemnly, as Jim looked incredulous.
"The Reverend knows words the average man ain't never heard.  He
knows words that ain't even in the dictionary.  Yes, sir!--an' uses
'em, too--all the time!" he concluded triumphantly.

"Why, my dear sir!" Bascom answered in a tone of exacerbated
contempt, "What on earth are you talking about?  Such a man as you
describe would be a monstrosity, a heinous perversion of natural
law!  A man so wise that no one could understand him:--so literate
that he could not communicate with his fellow-creatures:--so
erudite that he led the inarticulate and incoherent life of a beast
or a savage!"--here Uncle Bascom squinted his eyes tightly shut,
and laughed sneeringly down his nose:  "Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!
phuh!--Why, you con-sum-mate fool!" he sneered, "I have long known
that your ignorance was bottomless--but I had never hoped to see it
equalled--Nay, surpassed!" he howled, "by your asininity."

"There you are!" said Brill exultantly to his visitor, "What did I
tell you?  There's one of them words, Jim: 'asserninity,' why, damn
it, the Reverend's the only one who knows what that word means--you
won't even find it in the dictionary!"

"Not find it in the dictionary!" Bascom yelled.  "Almighty God,
come down and give this ass a tongue as Thou didst once before in
Balaam's time!"

Again, Brill was seated at his desk one day engaged with a client
in those intimate, cautious, and confidential preliminaries that
mark the consummation of a "deal" in real estate.  On this occasion
the prospective buyer was an Italian: the man sat awkwardly and
nervously in a chair beside Brill's desk while the great man bent
his huge weight ponderously and persuasively toward him.  From time
to time the Italian's voice, sullen, cautious, disparaging,
interrupted Brill's ponderous and coaxing drone.  The Italian sat
stiffly, his thick, clumsy body awkwardly clad in his "good"
clothes of heavy black, his thick, hairy, blunt-nailed hands cupped
nervously upon his knees, his black eyes glittering with suspicion
under his knitted inch of brow.  At length, he shifted nervously,
rubbed his paws tentatively across his knees and then, with a smile
mixed of ingratiation and mistrust, said:  "How mucha you want,
eh?"

"How mucha we want?" Brill repeated vulgarly as the burble began to
play about within his throat.  "Why, how mucha you got? . . .  You
know we'll take every damn thing you got!  It's not how mucha we
want, it's how mucha you got!"  And he hurled himself backward,
bellowing with laughter.  "By God, Reverend," he yelled as Uncle
Bascom entered, "ain't that right?  It's not how mucha we want,
it's how mucha you got! 'od damn!  We ought to take that as our
motter.  I've got a good mind to git it printed on our letterheads.
What do you think, Reverend?"

"Hey?" howled Uncle Bascom absently, as he prepared to enter his
own office.

"I say we ought to use it for our motter."

"Your what?" said Uncle Bascom scornfully, pausing as if he did not
understand.

"Our motter," Brill said.

"Not your MOTTER," Bascom howled derisively.  "The word is NOT
motter," he said contemptuously.  "Nobody of any refinement would
say MOTTER.  MOTTER is NOT correct!" he howled finally.  "Only an
ig-no-RAM-us would say MOTTER.  No!" he yelled with final
conclusiveness.  "That is NOT the way to pronounce it!  That is ab-
so-lute-ly and em-phat-ic-ally NOT the way to pronounce it!"

"All right, then, Reverend," said Brill, submissively.  "You're the
doctor.  What is the word?"

"The word is MOTTO," Uncle Bascom snarled.  "Of course!  Any fool
knows that!"

"Why, hell," Mr. Brill protested in a hurt tone.  "That's what I
said, ain't it?"

"No-o!" Uncle Bascom howled derisively.  "No-o!  By no means, by no
means, by no means!  You said MOTTER.  The word is NOT motter.  The
word is motto: m-o-t-t-o!  M-O-T-T-O does NOT spell motter," he
remarked with vicious decision.

"What does it spell?" said Mr. Brill.

"It spells MOTTO," Uncle Bascom howled.  "It HAS always spelled
motto!  It WILL always spell motto!  As it was in the beginning, is
now, and ever shall be: A-a-men!" he howled huskily in his most
evangelical fashion.  Then, immensely pleased at his wit, he closed
his eyes, stamped at the floor, and snarled and snuffled down his
nose with laughter.

"Well, anyway," said Brill, "no matter how you spell it, it's not
how mucha we want, it's how mucha you got!  That's the way we feel
about it!"

And this, in fact, without concealment, without pretence, without
evasion, was just how Brill DID feel about it.  He wanted
everything that was his and, in addition, he wanted as much as he
could get.  And this rapacity, this brutal and unadorned gluttony,
so far from making men wary of him, attracted them to him, inspired
them with unshakable confidence in his integrity, his business
honesty.  Perhaps the reason for this was that concealment did not
abide in the man: he published his intentions to the world with an
oath and a roar of laughter--and the world, having seen and judged,
went away with the confidence of this Italian--that Brill was "one
fine-a man!"  Even Bascom, who had so often turned upon his
colleague the weapons of scorn, contempt, and mockery, had a
curious respect for him, an acrid sunken affection: often, when the
old man and his nephew were alone, he would recall something Brill
had said and his powerful and fluent features would suddenly be
contorted in that familiar grimace, as he laughed his curious laugh
which was forced out, with a deliberate and painful effort, through
his powerful nose and his lips, barred with a few large teeth.
"Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! . . .  Of course!" he said, with a
nasal rumination, as he stared over the apex of his great bony
hands, clasped in meditation--"of course, he is just a poor
ignorant fellow!  I don't suppose--no, sir, I really do not suppose
that Brill ever went to school over six months in his life!--Say!"
Bascom paused suddenly, turned abruptly with his strange fixed
grin, and fastened his sharp old eyes keenly on the boy: in this
sudden and abrupt change, this transference of his vision from his
own secret and personal world, in which his thought and feeling
were sunken, and which seemed to be so far away from the actual
world about him, there was something impressive and disconcerting.
His eyes were grey, sharp, and old, and one eyelid had a heavy
droop or ptosis which, although it did not obscure his vision, gave
his expression at times a sinister glint, a malevolent humour.
"--Say!" here his voice sank to a deliberate and confiding whisper,
"(Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!)  Say--a man who would--he told me--
Oh, vile! vile! vile! my boy!" his uncle whispered, shutting his
eyes in a kind of shuddering ecstasy as if at the memory of things
too gloriously obscene to be repeated.  "Can you IMAGINE, can you
even DREAM of such a state of affairs if he had possessed an atom,
a SCINTILLA of delicacy and good breeding!  Yes, sir!" he said with
decision.  "I suppose there's no doubt about it!  His beginnings
were very lowly, very poor and humble indeed! . . .  Not that that
is in any sense to his discredit!" Uncle Bascom said hastily, as if
it had occurred to him that his words might bear some taint of
snobbishness.  "Oh, by no means, by no means, by no means!" he sang
out, with a sweeping upward gesture of his long arm, as if he were
clearing the air of wisps of smoke.  "Some of our finest men--some
of the nation's LEADERS, have come from just such surroundings as
those.  Beyond a doubt!  Beyond a doubt!  There's no question about
it whatever!  Say!"--here he turned suddenly upon the boy again
with the ptotic and sinister intelligence of his eye.  "Was LINCOLN
an aristocrat?  Was he the issue of wealthy parents?  Was he
brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth?  Was our OWN former
governor, the Vice-President of the United States today, reared in
the lap of luxury!  Not on your life!" howled Uncle Bascom.  "He
came from frugal and thrifty Vermont farming stock, he has never
deviated a JOT from his early training, he remains today what he
has always been--one of the simplest of men!  Finest people on
earth, no question about it whatever!"

Again, he meditated gravely with lost stare across the apex of his
great joined hands, and the boy noticed again, as he had noticed so
often, the great dignity of his head in thought--a head that was
high-browed, lean and lonely, a head that not only in its cast of
thought but even in its physical contour, and in its profound and
lonely earnestness, bore an astonishing resemblance to that of
Emerson--it was, at times like these, as grand a head as the young
man had ever seen, and on it was legible the history of man's
loneliness, his dignity, his grandeur and despair.

"Yes, sir!" said Bascom, in a moment.  "He is, of course, a vulgar
fellow and some of the things he says at times are Oh, vile! vile!
vile!" cried Bascom, closing his eyes and laughing, "Oh, vile! MOST
vile! . . . but (phuh! phuh! phuh!) you can't help laughing at the
fellow at times because he is so. . . .  Oh, I could tell you
things, my boy! . . .  Oh, VILE! VILE!" he cried, shaking his head
downwards.  "What coarseness! . . .  What in-VECT-ive!" he
whispered, in a kind of ecstasy.



XII


Eugene was now a member of Professor Hatcher's celebrated course
for dramatists, and although he had come into this work by chance,
and would in the end discover that his heart and interest were not
in it, it had now become for him the rock to which his life was
anchored, the rudder of his destiny, the sole and all-sufficient
reason for his being here.  It now seemed to him that there was
only one work in life which he could possibly do, and that this
work was writing plays, and that if he could not succeed in this
work he had better die, since any other life than the life of the
playwright and the theatre was not to be endured.

Accordingly every interest and energy of his life was now fastened
on this work with a madman's passion; he thought, felt, breathed,
ate, drank, slept, and lived completely in terms of plays.  He
learned all the jargon of the art-playwriting cult, read all the
books, saw all the shows, talked all the talk, and even became a
kind of gigantic eavesdropper upon life, prowling about the streets
with his ears constantly straining to hear all the words and
phrases of the passing crowd, as if he might hear something that
would be rare and priceless in a play for Professor Hatcher's
celebrated course.

Professor James Graves Hatcher was a man whose professional career
had been made difficult by two circumstances: all the professors
thought he looked like an actor and all the actors thought he
looked like a professor.  In reality, he was wholly neither one,
but in character and temper, as well as in appearance, he possessed
some of the attributes of both.

His appearance was imposing: a well-set-up figure of a man of
fifty-five, somewhat above the middle height, strongly built and
verging toward stockiness, with an air of vital driving energy that
was always filled with authority and a sense of sure purpose,
and that never degenerated into the cheap exuberance of the
professional hustler.  His voice, like his manner, was quiet,
distinguished, and controlled, but always touched with the
suggestions of great latent power, with reserves of passion,
eloquence, and resonant sonority.

His head was really splendid; he had a strong but kindly-looking
face touched keenly, quietly by humour; his eyes, beneath his
glasses, were also keen, observant, sharply humorous; his mouth was
wide and humorous but somewhat too tight, thin and spinsterly for a
man's; his nose was large and strong; his forehead shapely and
able-looking, and he had neat wings of hair cut short and sparse
and lying flat against the skull.

He wore eye-glasses of the pince-nez variety, and they dangled in a
fashionable manner from a black silk cord: it was better than going
to a show to see him put them on, his manner was so urbane, casual,
and distinguished when he did so.  His humour, although suave, was
also quick and rich and gave an engaging warmth and humanity to a
personality that sometimes needed them.  Even in his display of
humour, however, he never lost his urbane distinguished manner--for
example, when someone told him that one of his women students had
referred to another woman in the course, an immensely tall angular
creature who dressed in rusty brown right up to the ears, as "the
queen of the angleworms," Professor Hatcher shook all over with
sudden laughter, removed his glasses with a distinguished movement,
and then in a rich but controlled voice remarked:

"Ah, she has a very pretty wit.  A very pretty wit indeed!"

Thus, even in his agreeable uses of the rich, subtle and immensely
pleasant humour with which he had been gifted, Professor Hatcher
was something of an actor.  He was one of those rare people who
really "chuckle," and although there was no doubting the
spontaneity and naturalness of his chuckle, it is also probably
true that Professor Hatcher somewhat fancied himself as a chuckler.

The Hatcherian chuckle was just exactly what the word connotes: a
movement of spontaneous mirth that shook his stocky shoulders and
strong well-set torso with a sudden hearty tremor.  And although he
could utter rich and sonorous throat-sounds indicative of hearty
mirth while this chuckling process was going on, an even more
characteristic form was completely soundless, the tight lips firmly
compressed, the edges turned up with the convulsive inclination to
strong laughter, the fine distinguished head thrown back, while all
the rest of him, throat, shoulders, torso, belly, arms--the whole
man--shook in the silent tremors of the chuckle.

It could also be said with equal truth that Professor Hatcher was
one of the few men whose eyes could really "twinkle," and it is
likewise true that he probably fancied himself as somewhat of a
twinkler.

Perhaps one fact that made him suspect to professors was his air of
a distinguished and mature, but also a very worldly, urbanity.  His
manner, even in the class-room, was never that of the scholar or
the academician, but always that of the cultured man of the world,
secure in his authority, touched by fine humour and fine
understanding, able, knowing and assured.  And one reason that he
so impressed his students may have been that he made some of the
most painful and difficult labours in the world seem delightfully
easy.

For example, if there were to be a performance by a French club at
the university of a French play, produced in the language of its
birth, Professor Hatcher might speak to his class in his assured,
yet casual and urbanely certain tones, as follows:

"I understand Le Cercle Français is putting on De Musset's Il faut
qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée on Thursday night.  If you are
doing nothing else, I think it might be very well worth your while
to brush up on your French a bit and look in on it.  It is, of
course, a trifle and perhaps without great significance in the
development of the modern theatre, but it is De Musset in rather
good form and De Musset in good form is charming.  So it might
repay you to have a look at it."

What was there in these simple words that could so impress and
captivate these young people?  The tone was quiet, pleasant and
urbanely casual, the manner easy yet authoritative; what he said
about the play was really true.  But what was so seductive about it
was the flattering unction which he laid so casually to their young
souls--the easy off-hand suggestion that people "brush up on their
French a bit" when most of them had no French at all to brush up
on, that if they had "nothing else to do," they might "look in"
upon De Musset's "charming trifle," the easy familiarity with De
Musset's name and the casual assurance of the statement that it was
"De Musset in rather good form."

It was impossible for a group of young men, eager for sophistication
and emulous of these airs of urbane worldliness, not to be impressed
by them.  As Professor Hatcher talked they too became easy,
casual and urbane in their manners, they had a feeling of being
delightfully at ease in the world and sure of themselves, the words
"brush up on your French a bit" gave them a beautifully comfortable
feeling that they would really be able to perform this remarkable
accomplishment in an hour or two of elegant light labour.  And when
he spoke of the play as being "De Musset in rather good form" they
nodded slightly with little understanding smiles as if De Musset
and his various states of form were matters of the most familiar
knowledge to them.

What was the effect, then, of this and other such-like talk upon
these young men eager for fame and athirst for glory in the great
art-world of the city and the theatre?  It gave them, first of all,
a delightful sense of being in the know about rare and precious
things, of rubbing shoulders with great actors and actresses and
other celebrated people, of being expert in all the subtlest
processes of the theatre, of being travelled, urbane, sophisticated
and assured.

When Professor Hatcher casually suggested that they might "brush up
on their French a bit" before going to a performance of a French
play, they felt like cosmopolites who were at home in all the great
cities of the world.  True, "their French had grown a little
rusty"--it had been some time since they were last in Paris--a
member of the French Academy, no doubt, might detect a few slight
flaws in their pronunciation--but all that would arrange itself by
a little light and easy "polishing"--"tout s'arrange, hein?" as we
say upon the boulevards.

Again, Professor Hatcher's pleasant and often delightfully gay
anecdotes about the famous persons he had known and with whom he
was on such familiar terms--told always casually, apropos of some
topic of discussion, and never dragged in or laboured by pretence--
"The last time I was in London, Pinero and I were having lunch
together one day at the Savoy"--or "I was spending the week-end
with Henry Arthur Jones"--or "It's very curious you should mention
that.  You know, Barrie was saying the same thing to me the last
time I saw him"--or--"Apropos of this discussion, I have a letter
here from 'Gene O'Neill which bears on that very point.  Perhaps
you would be interested in knowing what he has to say about it."--
All this, of course, was cakes and ale to these young people--it
made them feel wonderfully near and intimate with all these
celebrated people, and with the enchanted world of art and of the
theatre in which they wished to cut a figure.

It gave them also a feeling of amused superiority at the posturings
and antics of what, with a slight intonation of disdain, they
called "the commercial producers"--the Shuberts, Belascos, and
others of this kind.  Thus, when Professor Hatcher told them how he
had done some pioneer service in Boston for the Russian Players and
had received a telegram from the Jewish producer in New York who
was managing them, to this effect:  "You are the real wonder boy"--
they were instantly able to respond to the sudden Hatcherian
chuckle with quiet laughter of their own.

Again, he once came back from New York with an amusing story of a
visit he had paid to the famous producer, David Belasco.  And he
described drolly how he had followed a barefoot, snaky-looking
female, clad in a long batik gown, through seven Gothic chambers
mystical with chimes and incense.  And finally he told how he had
been ushered into the presence of the great ecclesiastic who sat at
the end of a cathedral-like room beneath windows of church glass,
and how he was preceded all the time by Snaky Susie who swept low
in obeisance as she approached, and said in a silky voice--"One is
here to see you, Mahster," and how she had been dismissed with
Christ-like tone and movement of the hand--"Rise, Rose, and leave
us now."  Professor Hatcher told this story with a quiet drollery
that was irresistible, and was rewarded all along by their shouts
of astounded laughter, and finally by their smiling and astonished
faces, lifting disbelieving eyebrows at each other, saying, "Simply
incredible!  It doesn't seem possible! . . .  MARVELLOUS!"

Finally, when Professor Hatcher talked to them of how a Russian
actress used her hands, of rhythm, tempo, pause, and timing, of
lighting, setting, and design, he gave them a language they could
use with a feeling of authority and knowledge, even when authority
and knowledge were lacking to them.  It was a dangerous and often
very trivial language--a kind of jargonese of art that was coming
into use in the world of those days, and that seemed to be
coincident with another jargonese--that of science--"psychology,"
as they called it--which was also coming into its brief hour of
idolatry at about the same period, and which bandied about its talk
of "complexes," "fixations," "repressions," "inhibitions," and the
like, upon the lips of any empty-headed little fool that came
along.

But although this jargon was perhaps innocuous enough when rattled
off the rattling tongue of some ignorant boy or rattle-pated girl,
it could be a very dangerous thing when uttered seriously by men
who were trying to achieve the best, the rarest, and the highest
life on earth--the life which may be won only by bitter toil and
knowledge and stern living--the life of the artist.

And the great danger of this glib and easy jargon of the arts was
this: that instead of knowledge, the experience of hard work and
patient living, they were given a formula for knowledge; a language
that sounded very knowing, expert and assured, and yet that knew
nothing, was experienced in nothing, was sure of nothing.  It gave
to people without talent and without sincerity of soul or integrity
of purpose, with nothing, in fact, except a feeble incapacity for
the shock and agony of life, and a desire to escape into a
glamorous and unreal world of make-believe--a justification for
their pitiable and base existence.  It gave to people who had no
power in themselves to create anything of merit or of beauty--
people who were the true Philistines and enemies of art and of the
artist's living spirit--the language to talk with glib knowingness
of things they knew nothing of--to prate of "settings," "tempo,"
"pace," and "rhythm," of "boldly stylized conventions," and the
wonderful way some actress "used her hands."  And in the end, it
led to nothing but falseness and triviality, to the ghosts of
passion, and the spectres of sincerity, to the shoddy appearances
of conviction and belief in people who had no passion and
sincerity, and who were convinced of nothing, believed in nothing,
were just the disloyal apes of fashion and the arts.

"I think you ought to go," says one.  "I really do.  I really think
you might be interested."

"Yes," says number two, in a tone of fine, puzzled, eyebrow-lifting
protest, "but I hear the play is pretty bad.  The reviews were
rather awful--they really were, you know."

"Oh, the play!" the other says, with a slight start of surprise, as
if it never occurred to him that anyone might be interested in the
play--"the play, the play IS rather terrible.  But, my dear fellow,
no one goes to see the PLAY . . . the play is nothing," he
dismisses it with a contemptuous gesture--"It's the SETS!" he
cries--"the SETS are really quite remarkable.  You ought to go, old
boy, just to see the SETS!  They're very good--they really are."

"H'm!" the other says, stroking his chin in an impressed manner.
"Interesting!  In that case, I shall go!"

The SETS!  The SETS!  One should not go to see the play; the only
thing that matters is the sets.  And this is the theatre--the
magic-maker and the world of dreams; and these the men that are to
fashion for it--with their trivial ape's talk about "sets."  Did
anyone ever hear such damned stuff as this since time began?

False, trivial, glib, dishonest, empty, without substance, lacking
faith--is it any wonder that among Professor Hatcher's young men
few birds sang?



XIII


That year the youth was twenty, it had been his first year in New
England, and the winter had seemed very long.  In the man-swarm he
felt alone and lost, a desolate atom in the streets of life.  That
year he went to see his uncle many times.

Sometimes he would find him in his dusty little cubicle, bent over
the intricacy of a legal form, painfully and carefully, with
compressed lips, filling in the blank spaces with his stiff,
angular and laborious hand.  Bascom would speak quietly, without
looking up, as he came in:  "Hello, my boy.  Sit down, won't you?
I'll be with you in a moment."  And for a time the silence would be
broken only by the heavy rumble of Brill's voice outside, by the
minute scratching of his uncle's pen, and by the immense and
murmurous sound of time, which rose above the city, which caught up
in the upper air all of the city's million noises, and yet seemed
remote, essential, imperturbable and everlasting--fixed and
unchanging, no matter what men lived or died.

Again, the boy would find his uncle staring straight before him,
with his great hands folded in a bony arch, his powerful gaunt face
composed in a rapt tranquillity of thought.  At these times he
seemed to have escaped from every particular and degrading thing in
life--from the excess of absurd and eccentric speech and gesture,
from all demeaning parsimonies, from niggling irascibilities, from
everything that contorted his face and spirit away from its
calmness and unity of thought.  His face at such a time might well
have been the mask of thought, the visage of contemplation.
Sometimes he would not speak for several minutes, his mind seemed
to brood upon the lip and edge of time, to be remote from every
dusty moment of the earth.

One day the boy went there and found him thus: after a few moments
he lowered his great hands and, without turning toward his nephew,
sat for some time in an attitude of quiet relaxation.  At length he
said:

"What is man that thou art mindful of him?"

It was one of the first days of spring: the spring had come late,
with a magical northern suddenness.  It seemed to have burst out of
the earth overnight, the air was lyrical and sang with it.

Spring came that year like a triumph and like a prophecy--it sang
and shifted like a moth of light before the youth, but he was sure
that it would bring him a glory and fulfilment he had never known.

His hunger and thirst had been immense: he was caught up for the
first time in the midst of the Faustian web--there was no food that
could feed him, no drink that could quench his thirst.  Like an
insatiate and maddened animal he roamed the streets, trying to draw
up mercy from the cobble-stones, solace and wisdom from a million
sights and faces, or he prowled through endless shelves of high-
piled books, tortured by everything he could not see and could not
know, and growing blind, weary, and desperate from what he read and
saw.  He wanted to know all, have all, be all--to be one and many,
to have the whole riddle of this vast and swarming earth as
legible, as tangible in his hand as a coin of minted gold.

Suddenly spring came, and he fell at once exultant certainty and
joy.  Outside his uncle's dirty window he could see the edge of
Faneuil Hall, and hear the swarming and abundant activity of the
markets.  The deep roar of the markets reached them across the
singing and lyrical air, and he drank into his lungs a thousand
proud, potent, and mysterious odours which came to him like the
breath of certainty, like the proof of magic, and like the
revelation that all confusion had been banished--the world that he
longed for won, the word that he sought for spoken, the hunger that
devoured him fed and ended.  And the markets, swarming with
richness, joy, and abundance, thronged below him like a living
evidence of fulfilment.  For it seemed to him that nowhere more
than here was the passionate enigma of New England felt: New
England, with its harsh and stony soil, and its tragic and lonely
beauty; its desolate rocky coasts and its swarming fisheries, the
white, piled, frozen bleakness of its winters with the magnificent
jewellery of stars, the dark firwoods, and the warm little white
houses at which it is impossible to look without thinking of
groaning bins, hung bacon, hard cider, succulent bastings and
love's warm, white and opulent flesh.

There was the rustle of gingham by day and sober glances; then,
under low eaves and starlight, the stir of the satiny thighs in
feather beds, the white small bite and tigerish clasp of secret
women--always the buried heart, the sunken passion, the frozen
heat.  And then, after the long, unendurably hard-locked harshness
of the frozen winter, the coming of spring as now, like a lyrical
cry, like a flicker of rain across a window glass, like the sudden
and delicate noises of a spinet--the coming of spring and ecstasy,
and overnight the thrum of wings, the burst of the tender buds, the
ripple and dance of the roughened water, the light of flowers, the
sudden, fleeting, almost captured, and exultant spring.

And here, within eighty yards of the dusty little room where his
uncle Bascom had his desk, there was living evidence that this
intuition was not false: the secret people, it was evident, did not
subsist alone on codfish and a jugful of baked beans--they ate
meat, and large chunks of it, for all day long, within the market
district, the drivers of big wagons were standing to their chins in
meat, boys dragged great baskets of raw meat along the pavements,
red-faced butchers, aproned with gouts of blood, and wearing the
battered straw hats that butchers wear, toiled through the streets
below with great loads of loin or haunch or rib, and in "chill"
shops with sawdust floors the beeves were hung in frozen regimental
rows.

Right and left, around the central market, the old buildings
stretched down to the harbour and the smell of ships: this was
built-on land; in old days ships were anchored where these cobbles
were, but the warehouses were also old--they had the musty, mellow,
blackened air and smell of the 'seventies, they looked like
Victorian prints, they reeked of ancient ledgers, of "counting-
houses," of proud, moneyed merchants, and the soft-spoked rumble of
victorias.

By day, this district was one snarled web of chaos: a gewirr of
deep-bodied trucks, powerful dappled horses, cursing drivers, of
loading, unloading, and shipping, of dispatch and order, of the
million complicated weavings of life and business.

But if one came here at evening, after the work of the day was
done, if one came here at evening on one of those delicate and
sudden days of spring that New England knows, if one came here as
many a lonely youth had come here in the past, some boy from the
inland immensity of America, some homesick lad from the South, from
the marvellous hills of Old Catawba, he might be pierced again by
the bitter ecstasy of youth, the ecstasy that tears him apart with
a cry that has no tongue, the ecstasy that is proud, lonely, and
exultant, that is fierce with joy and a moment, that the intangible
cannot be touched, the ungraspable cannot be grasped--the imperial
and magnificent minute is gone for ever which, with all its
promises, its million intuitions, he wishes to clothe with the
living substance of beauty.  He wishes to flesh the moment with the
thighs and breast and belly of a wonderful mistress, he wishes to
be great and glorious and triumphant, to distil the ether of this
ecstasy in a liquor, and to drink strong joy for ever; and at the
heart of all this is the bitter knowledge of death--death of the
moment, death of the day, death of one more infrequent spring.

Perhaps the thing that really makes New England wonderful is this
sense of joy, this intuition of brooding and magic fulfilment that
hovers like a delicate presence in the air of one of these days.
Perhaps the answer is simple: perhaps it is only that this soft and
sudden spring, with its darts and flicks of evanescent joy, its
sprite-like presence that is only half believed, its sound that is
the sound of something lost and elfin and half dreamed, half heard,
seems wonderful after the grim frozen tenacity of the winter, the
beautiful and terrible desolation, the assault of the frost and ice
on living flesh which resists it finally as it would resist the
cruel battering of a brute antagonist, so that the tart, stingy
speech, the tight gestures, the withdrawn and suspicious air, the
thin lips, red pointed noses and hard prying eyes of these people
are really the actions of those who, having to defend themselves
harshly against nature, harshly defend themselves against all the
world.



At any rate, the thing the boy feels who comes here at the day's
end is not completion, weariness, and sterility, but a sense of
swelling ecstasy, a note of brooding fulfilment.  The air will have
in it the wonderful odours of the market and the smell of the sea;
as he walks over the bare cobbled pavement under the corrugated tin
awnings of the warehouses and produce stores a hundred smells of
the rich fecundity of the earth will assail him: the clean sharp
pungency of thin crated wood and the citric nostalgia of oranges,
lemons, and grape-fruit, the stench of a decayed cabbage and the
mashed pulp of a rotten orange.  There will be also the warm coarse
limy smell of chickens, the strong coddy smell of cold fish and
oysters; and the crisp moist cleanliness of the garden smells--of
great lettuces, cabbages, new potatoes, with their delicate skins
loamy with sweet earth, the wonderful sweet crispness of crated
celery; and then the melons--the ripe golden melons bedded in
fragrant straw--and all the warm infusions of the tropics: the
bananas, the pineapples and the alligator pears.

The delicate and subtle air of spring touches all these odours with
a new and delicious vitality; it draws the tar out of the pavements
also, and it draws slowly, subtly, from ancient warehouses the
compacted perfumes of eighty years: the sweet thin piny scents of
packing-boxes, the glutinous composts of half a century, that have
thickly stained old warehouse plankings, the smells of twine, tar,
turpentine and hemp, and of thick molasses, ginseng, pungent vines
and roots and old piled sacking; the clean, ground strength of
fresh coffee, brown, sultry, pungent, and exultantly fresh and
clean; the smell of oats, baled hay and bran, of crated eggs and
cheese and butter; and particularly the smell of meat, of frozen
beeves, slick porks, and veals, of brains and livers and kidneys,
of haunch, paunch, and jowl; of meat that is raw and of meat that
is cooked, for upstairs in that richly dingy block of buildings
there is a room where the butchers, side by side with the bakers,
the bankers, the brokers and the Harvard boys, devour thick steaks
of the best and tenderest meat, smoking-hot breads, and big,
jacketed potatoes.

And then there is always the sea.  In dingy blocks, memoried with
time and money, the buildings stretch down to the docks, and there
is always the feeling that the sea was here, that this is built-on
earth.  A single truck will rattle over the deserted stones, and
then there is the street that runs along the harbour, the dingy
little clothing shops and eating places, the powerful strings of
freight cars, agape and empty, odorous with their warm fatigued
planking and the smells of flanges and axles that have rolled great
distances.

And finally, by the edges of the water, there are great piers and
storehouses, calm and potent with their finished work: they lie
there, immense, starkly ugly, yet touched with the powerful beauty
of enormous works and movements; they are what they are, they have
been built without a flourish for the work they do, their great
sides rise in level cliffs of brick, they are pierced with tracks
and can engulf great trains; and now that the day is done they
breathe with the vitality of a tired but living creature.  A single
footfall will make remote and lonely echoes in their brooding
depths, there will be the expiring clatter of a single truck, the
sound of a worker's voice as he says "Good night," and then the
potent and magical silence.

And then there is the sea--the sea, beautiful and mysterious as it
is only when it meets the earth in harbours, the sea that bears in
swell and glut of tides the odorous savour of the earth, the sea
that swings and slaps against encrusted piles, the sea that is
braided with long ropes of scummy weed, the sea that brings the
mast and marly scent of shelled decay.  There is the sea, and there
are the great ships--the freighters, the fishing schooners, the
clean white one-night boats that make the New York run, now also
potent and silent, a glitter of bright lights, of gleaming brasses,
of opulent saloons--a token of joy and splendour in dark waters, a
hint of love and the velvet belly upon dark tides--and the sight of
all these things, the fusion of all these odours by the sprite of
May is freighted with unspeakable memories, with unutterable
intuitions for the youth: he does not know what he would utter, but
glory, love, power, wealth, flight, and movement and the sight of
new earth in the morning, and the living corporeal fulfilment of
all his ecstasy is in his wish and his conviction.

Certainly, these things can be found in New England, but perhaps
the person who finds this buried joy the most is this lonely
visitor--and particularly the boy from the South, for in the heart
of the Southerner alone, perhaps, is this true and secret knowledge
of the North: it is there in his dreams and his childhood
premonition, it is there like the dark Helen, and no matter what he
sees to cheat it, he will always believe in it, he will always
return to it.  Certainly, this was true of the gnarled and miserly
old man who now sat not far from all this glory in his dingy State
Street office, for Bascom Pentland, although the stranger on seeing
him might have said, "There goes the very image of a hard-bitten
old Down-Easter," had come, as lonely and wretched a youth as ever
lived, from the earth of Old Catawba, he had known and felt these
things and, in spite of his frequent bitter attacks on the people,
the climate, the life, New England was the place to which he had
returned to live, and for which he felt the most affection.



Now, ruminant and lost, he stared across the archway of his hands.
In a moment, with what was only an apparent irrelevance, with what
was really a part of the coherent past, a light plucked from dark
adyts of the brain, he said:  "Who knoweth the spirit of man that
goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to
the earth?"

He was silent and thoughtful for a moment; then he added sadly:
"I am an old man.  I have lived a long time.  I have seen so many
things.  Sometimes everything seems so long ago."

Then his eye went back into the wilderness, the lost earth, the
buried men.

Presently he said:  "I hope you will come out on Sunday.  O, by all
means!  By all means!  I believe your aunt is expecting you.  Yes,
sir, I believe she said something to that effect.  Or perhaps she
intends to pay a visit to one of her children.  I do not know, I
have not the REMOTEST--not the FAINTEST idea, of what she proposes
to do," he howled.  "Of course," he said impatiently and
scornfully, "I never have any notion what she has in mind.  No,
sir, I really could not tell you.  I no longer pay any attention to
what she says--O!  not the slightest!" he waved his great hand
through the air--"SAY!" stiffly and harshly he tapped the boy's
knee, grinning at him with the combative glitter of his ptotic eye--
"SAY! did you ever find ONE of them with whom it was possible to
carry on a coherent conversation?  Did you ever find one of them
who would respond to the processes of reason and ordered thought?
My dear boy!" he cried, "you cannot talk to them.  I assure you,
you cannot talk to them.  You might as well whistle into the wind
or spit into the waters of the Nile, for all the good it will do
you.  In his youth man will bare the riches of his spirit to them,
will exhaust the rich accumulations of his genius--his wisdom, his
learning, his philosophy--in an effort to make them worthy of his
companionship--and in the end, what does he ALWAYS find?  Why,"
said Uncle Bascom bitterly, "that he has spent his powers in
talking to an imbecile"--and he snarled vengefully through his
nose.  In a moment more, he contorted his face, and nasally whined
in a grotesque and mincing parody of a woman's voice, "O, I feel SO
sick!  O, deary ME, now!  I think my TIME is coming on again!  O,
you don't LOVE me any mo-o-ore!  O, I WISH I was dead!  O, I can't
get UP today!  O, I wish you'd bring me something NICE from TA-OWN!
O, if you loved me you'd buy me a NEW hat!  O, I've got nothing to
WE-E-AR!" here his voice had an added snarl of bitterness--"I'm
ashamed to go out on the street with all the other wim-men!"

Then he paused broodingly for a moment more, wheeled abruptly and
tapped the boy on the knee again:  "The proper study of mankind is--
say!" he said with a horrible fixed grimace and in a kind of
cunning whisper--"does the poet say--WOMAN?  I want to ask you:
DOES he, now?  Not on your life!" yelled Uncle Bascom.  "The word
is MAN! MAN! MAN!  Nothing else but MAN!"

Again he was silent: then, with an accent of heavy sarcasm, he went
on:  "Your aunt likes music.  You may have observed your aunt is
fond of music--"

It was, in fact, the solace of her life: on a tiny gramophone which
one of her daughters had given her, she played constantly the
records of the great composers.

"--Your aunt is fond of music," Bascom said deliberately.  "Perhaps
you may have thought--perhaps it seemed to you that she discovered
it--perhaps you thought it was your aunt's own patent and
invention--but there you would be wrong!  O yes! my boy!" he howled
remotely.

"You may have thought so, but you would be wrong--Say!" he turned
slowly with a malevolent glint of interrogation, a controlled
ironic power--"was the Fifth Symphony written by a woman?  Was the
object of your aunt's worship, Richard Wagner, a FEMALE?" he
snarled.  "By no means!  Where are their great works--their mighty
symphonies, their great paintings, their epic poetry?  Was it in a
woman's skull that the Critique of Pure Reason was conceived?  Is
the gigantic work upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel the
product of a woman's genius?--Say! did you ever hear of a lady by
the name of William Shakespeare?  Was it a female of that name who
wrote King Lear?  Are you familiar with the works of a nice young
lady named John Milton?  Or Fräulein Goethe, a sweet German girl?"
he sneered.  "Perhaps you have been edified by the writ-ings of
Mademoiselle Voltaire or Miss Jonathan Swift?  Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!
Phuh!  Phuh!"

He paused, stared deliberately across his hands, and in a moment
repeated, slowly and distinctly:  "The woman gave me of the tree
and I did eat.  Ah! that's it!  There, my boy, you have it!  There,
in a nutshell, you have the work for which they are best fitted."
And he turned upon his nephew suddenly with a blaze of passion, his
voice husky and tremulous from the stress of emotion.  "The
tempter!  The Bringer of Forbidden Fruit!  The devil's ambassador!
Since the beginning of time that has been their office--to madden
the brain, to turn man's spirit from its highest purposes, to
corrupt, to seduce, and to destroy!  To creep and crawl, to intrude
into the lonely places of man's heart and brain, to wind herself
into the core of his most secret life as a worm eats its way into a
healthy fruit--to do all this with the guile of a serpent, the
cunning of a fox--that, my boy, is what she's here for!--and she'll
never change!"  And, lowering his voice to an ominous and
foreboding whisper, he said mysteriously, "Beware!  Beware!  Do not
be deceived!"

In a moment more he had resumed his tone and manner of calm
deliberation and, with an air of irrelevance, somewhat grudgingly,
as if throwing a bone to a dog, he said:  "Your aunt, of course,
was a woman of considerable mentality--considerable, that is, for a
female.  Of course, her mind is no longer what it used to be.  I
never talk to her any more," he said indifferently.  "I do not
listen to her.  I think she said something to me about your coming
out on Sunday!  But I do not know.  No, sir, I could not tell you
what her plans are.  I have my own interests, and I suppose she has
hers.  Of course, she has her music. . . .  Yes, sir, she always
has her music," he said indifferently and contemptuously, and,
staring across the apex of his hands, he forgot her.



Yet, he had been young, and full of pain and madness.  For a space
he had known all the torments any lover ever knew.  So much Louise
had told her nephew, and so much Bascom had not troubled to deny.
For bending toward the boy swiftly, fiercely, and abruptly, as if
Bascom was not there, she whispered:  "Oh, yes! he's indifferent
enough to me now--but there was a time, there was a time, I tell
you!--when he was mad about me!  The old fool!" she cackled
suddenly and bitterly with a seeming irrelevance.  Then bending
forward suddenly with a resumption of her former brooding
intensity, she whispered:  "Yes! he was mad, mad, mad!  Oh, he
can't deny it!" she cried.  "He couldn't keep his eyes off me for a
minute!  He went cwazy if any other man so much as looked at me!"

"Quite true, my dear!  Quite true!" said Uncle Bascom without a
trace of anger or denial in his voice, with one of his sudden and
astonishing changes to a mood of tender and tranquil agreement.
"Oh, yes," he said again, staring reminiscently across the apex of
his great folded hands, "it is all quite true--every word as she
has spoken it--quite true, quite true, I had forgotten, but it's
all quite true."  And he shook his gaunt head gently from side to
side, turning his closed eyes downward, and snuffling gently,
blindly, tenderly, with laughter, with a passive and indifferent
memory.

For a year or two after his marriage, she had said, he had been
maddened by a black insanity of jealousy.  It descended on his
spirit like a choking and pestilence-laden cloud, it entered his
veins with blackened tongues of poison, it crept along the conduits
of his blood, sweltered venomously in his heart, it soaked into the
convolutions of his brain until his brain was fanged with hatred,
soaked in poison, stricken, maddened, and unhinged.  His gaunt
figure wasted until he became the picture of skeletonized
emaciation; jealousy and fear ate like a vulture at his entrails,
all of the vital energy, the power and intensity of his life, was
fed into this poisonous and consuming fire and then, when it had
almost wrecked his health, ruined his career, and destroyed his
reason, it left him as suddenly as it came: his life reverted to
its ancient and embedded core of egotism, he grew weary of his
wife, he thought of her indifferently, he forgot her.

And she, poor soul, was like a rabbit trapped before the fierce
yellow eye, the hypnotic stare of a crouching tiger.  She did not
know whether he would spring, strike forth his paw to maul her, or
walk off indifferently.  She was dazed and stricken before the
violence of his first passion, the unreasoning madness of his
jealousy, and in the years that followed she was bewildered,
resentful, and finally embittered by the abrupt indifference which
succeeded it--an indifference so great that often he seemed to
forget her very existence for days at a time, to live with her in a
little house as if he were scarcely conscious of her presence,
stumping about the place in an intensity of self-absorption while
he cursed and muttered to himself, banged open furnace doors,
chopped up whatever combinations of raw foods his fantastic
imagination might contrive, and answering her impatiently and
contemptuously when she spoke to him:  "What did you SAY-Y!  Oh,
what are you talk-ing about?"--and he would stump away again,
absorbed mysteriously with his own affairs.  And sometimes, if he
was the victim of conspiracy in the universe--if God had forsaken
him and man had tricked and cheated him, he would roll upon the
floor, hammer his heels against the wall, and howl his curses at
oblivious heaven.

Louise, meanwhile, her children having left her, played Wagner on
the gramophone, kept her small house tidy, and learned to carry on
involved and animated conversations with herself, or even with her
pots and pans, for when she scrubbed and cleaned them, she would
talk to them: if she dropped one, she would scold it, pick it from
the floor, spank it across the bottom, saying:  "No, you don't!
Naughty, you bad thing, you!"  And often, while he stumped through
the house, these solitary conversations were interspersed by fits
of laughter: she would bend double over her pots snuffling with
soft laughter which was faintly broken at its climax, a long high
"Who-o-op!"  Then she would shake her head pityingly, and be off
again, but at what she was laughing she could not have said.

One night, however, she interrupted one of Bascom's stamping and
howling tirades by putting on her tiny gramophone The Ride of the
Valkyries, as recorded by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.
Bascom, after the first paralysis of his surprise had passed,
rushed furiously toward the offending instrument that was providing
such melodious but mighty competition.  Then Bascom halted; for
suddenly he noticed that Louise was standing beside the instrument,
that she was snuffling through her nose with laughter, and that
from time to time she looked craftily toward him, and broke into a
high piercing cackle.  Bascom also noticed that she held a large
carving-knife in her hand.  With a loud yell he turned and fled
toward his room, where he locked the door, crying out strongly in
an agony of terror:  "O Momma!  Momma!  Save me!"

All this had amused Louise enormously.  She played the record over
time after time, for ever snuffling with laughter and the high
cackle:  "Who-oo-oo!"  She bent double with it.



And now, as the boy looked at the old man, he had a sense of union
with the past.  It seemed to him if he would only speak, the living
past, the voices of lost men, the pain, the pride, the madness and
despair, the million scenes and faces of the buried life--all that
an old man ever knew--would be revealed to him, would be delivered
to him like a priceless treasure, as an inheritance which old men
owed to young, and which should be the end and effort of all
living.  His savage hunger was a kind of memory: he thought if he
could speak, it would be fed.

And for a moment, it seemed, he saw the visages of time, dark time,
the million lock-bolts shot back in man's memory, the faces of the
lost Americans, and all the million casual moments of their lives,
with Bascom blazing at them from a dozen pulpits, Bascom, tortured
by love and madness, walking the streets of the nation, stumping
the rutted roads, muttering through darkness with clasped bony
hands, a gaunt and twisted figure reeling across the continent
below immense and cruel skies.  Light fell upon his face and
darkness crossed it:--he came up from the wilderness, from derbied
men and bustled women, from all of the memories of lavish brown,
and from time, dark time--from a time that was further off than
Saxon thanes, all of the knights, the spearheads, and the horses.

Was all this lost?

"It was so long ago," the old man said.



Bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more: the flying leaf, the
broken cloud.  Was no love crying in the wilderness?

"--So long ago.  I have lived so long.  I have seen so much.  I
could tell you so many things," his uncle said huskily, with
weariness and indifference.  His eye was lustreless and dead, he
looked for a moment tired and old.

All at once, a strange and perplexing vision, which was to return
many times in the years that followed, came to the boy.  It was
this: there was a company of old men and women at dinner, seated
together around a table.  All of them were very old, older than his
uncle; the faces of the old men and women were fragile and delicate
like old yellowed china, their faces were frail and sexless, they
had begun to look alike.  In their youth all these people had known
one another.  The men had drunk, fought, whored, hated one another,
and loved the women.  Some had been devoured by the sterile and
corrupt fear and envy that young men know.  In secret their lips
were twisted, their faces livid, and their hearts bitter; their
eyes glittered with a reptilian hatred of another man--they dreaded
his success, and they exulted in his failure, laughing with a
delirious joy when they heard or read of his hurt, defeat, or
humiliation.  They had been afraid to speak or confess what was in
their hearts, they feared the mockery of their fellows; with one
another their words were careful, picked, and disparaging.  They
gave the lie to passion and belief and they said what they knew was
false.  And yet along dark roads at night they had shouted out into
the howling winds their great goat-cries of joy, exultancy and
power; they had smelled snow in thick brooding air at night, and
they had watched it come, softly spitting at the window glass,
numbing the footfalls of the earth with its soft silent fall,
filling their hearts with a dark proud ecstasy, touching their
entrails with impending prophecy.  Each had a thousand dark desires
and fantasies; each wanted wealth, power, fame and love; each saw
himself as great, good and talented; each feared and hated rivals
in business or in love--and in crowds they glared at one another
with hard hostile eyes, they bristled up like crested cocks, they
watched their women jealously, felt looks and glances through their
shoulder-blades, and hated men with white spermatic necks, amorous
hair, and faces proud and insolent with female conquest.

They had been young and full of pain and combat, and now all this
was dead in them: they smiled mildly, feebly, gently, they spoke in
thin voices, and they looked at one another with eyes dead to
desire, hostility, and passion.

As for the old women, they sat there on their yellowed and bony
haunches.  They were all beyond the bitter pain and ecstasy of
youth--its frenzy, its hope, its sinew of bright blood and agony:
they were beyond the pain and fear of anything save age and death.
Here was a faithful wife, a fruitful mother; here was an adulterous
and voluptuous woman, the potent mistress of a dozen men; here was
her cuckold husband, who had screamed like a tortured animal when
he had first found her in bed with another man, and here was the
man he found her with; here was another man in whom the knowledge
of his wife's infidelity had aroused only a corrupt inverted joy;
he exulted in it, he urged her on into new love affairs, he
besought her greedily to taunt him with it, he fed upon his pain--
and now they were all old and meagre and had the look of yellowed
china.  They turned their mild sunken faces toward one another with
looks in which there was neither hate nor love nor desire nor
passion; they laughed thinly, and their memory was all of little
things.

They no longer wanted to excel or to be first; they were no longer
mad and jealous; they no longer hated rivals; they no longer wanted
fame; they no longer cared for work or grew drunk on hope; they no
longer turned into the dark and struck their bloody knuckles at the
wall; they no longer writhed with shame upon their beds, cursed at
the memory of defeat and desolation, or ripped the sheets between
convulsive fingers.  Could they not speak?  Had they forgotten?

Why could not the old men speak?  They had known pain, death and
madness, yet all their words were stale and rusty.  They had known
the wilderness, the savage land, the blood of the murdered men ran
down into the earth that gave no answer; and they had seen it, they
had shed it.  Where were the passion, pain and pride, the million
living moments of their lives?  Was all this lost?  Were they all
tongueless?  It seemed to the boy that there was something sly and
evil in their glances as they sat together, as if they hoarded some
cunning and malevolent wisdom in their brains, as if the medicine
to all our grief and error was in them, but as if through the evil
and conspirate communication of their glance, they had resolved to
keep it from us.  Or were they simply devoured with satiety, with
weariness and indifference?  Did they refuse to speak because they
could not speak, because even memory had gone lifeless in them?

Yes.  Words echoed in their throat but they were tongueless.  For
them the past was dead: they poured into our hands a handful of dry
dust and ashes.



The dry bones, the bitter dust?  The living wilderness, the silent
waste?  The barren land?

Have no lips trembled in the wilderness?  No eyes sought seaward
from the rock's sharp edge for men returning home?  Has no pulse
beat more hot with love or hate upon the river's edge?  Or where
the old wheel and the rusted stock lie stogged in desert sand: by
the horsehead a woman's skull.  No love?

No lonely footfalls in a million streets, no heart that beat its
best and bloodiest cry out against the steel and stone, no aching
brain, caught in its iron ring, groping among the labyrinthine
canyons?  Naught in that immense and lonely land but incessant
growth and ripeness and pollution, the emptiness of forests and
deserts, the unhearted, harsh and metal jangle of a million
tongues, crying the belly-cry for bread, or the great cat's snarl
for meat and honey?  All then, all?  Birth and the twenty thousand
days of snarl and jangle--and no love, no love?  Was no love crying
in the wilderness?

It was not true.  The lovers lay below the lilac bush; the laurel
leaves were trembling in the wood.



Suddenly it seemed to the boy that if he could put his hand upon
his uncle, if he could grip his fingers in his stringy arm, his own
strength and youth would go into him, and he could rekindle memory
like a living flame in him, he could animate for an hour that
ancient heart with the exultancy, the power, the joy that pulsed in
himself; he could make the old man speak.

He wanted to speak to him as people never speak to one another, he
wanted to say and hear the things one never says and hears.  He
wanted to know what the old man's youth beyond its grim weather of
poverty, loneliness, and desperation had been like.  His uncle had
been over ten years old when the war had ended, and he had seen the
men plod home in wreaths of dust and heard their casual voices in a
room; he had breathed the air of vanished summers, he had seen
cloud shadows floating on the massed green of the wilderness, the
twisting of a last lone leaf upon a bough; and he had heard the
desolate and stricken voices in the South long, long ago, the quiet
and casual voices of lost men, a million vanished footsteps in the
streets of life.  And he had known the years of brown, dark lavish
brown, the lost and hypocritical years, the thunder of the wheels
and hooves upon the cobbles, the colour of bright blood--the
savagery, the hunger and the fear.

Was the memory of all this lost?

The boy touched him--he put his hand upon his uncle's shoulder; the
old man did not move.  Sunken in what lost world, buried in what
incommunicable and tongueless past, he said--"So long ago."

Then the boy got up and left him and went out into the streets
where the singing and lyrical air, the man-swarm passing in its
million-footed weft, the glorious women and the girls compacted in
a single music of belly and breasts and thighs, the sea, the earth,
the proud, potent, clamorous city, all of the voices of time, fused
to a unity that was like a song, a token and a cry.  Victoriously,
he trod the neck of doubt as if it were a serpent: he was joined to
the earth, a part of it, and he possessed it; he would be wasted
and consumed, filled and renewed eternally; he would feel
unceasingly alternate tides of life and dark oblivion; he would be
emptied without weariness, replenished for ever with strong joy.
He had a tongue for agony, a food for hunger, a door for exile and
a surfeit for insatiate desire: exultant certainty welled up in
him, he thought he could possess it all, and he cried:  "Yes!  It
will be mine!"



XIV


He had spells and rhymes of magic numbers which would enable him,
he thought, to read all of the million books in the great library.
This was a furious obsession with him all the time.  And there were
other spells and rhymes which would enable him to know the lives of
50,000,000 people, to visit every country in the world, to know a
hundred languages, possess 10,000 lovely women, and yet have one he
loved and honoured above all, who would be true and beautiful and
faithful to him.

And by the all-resuming magic of these spells he would go
everywhere on earth, while keeping one place to return to; and
while driven mad with thirst and hunger to have everything, he
would be peacefully content with almost nothing; and while wanting
to be a famous, honoured, celebrated man, he would live obscurely,
decently, and well, with one true love for ever.  In short, he
would have the whole cake of the world, and eat it, too--have
adventures, labours, joys, and triumphs that would exhaust the
energies of ten thousand men, and yet have spells and charms for
all of it, and was sure that with these charms and spells and
sorceries, all of it was his.

He would rush out of the great library into the street and take the
subway into Boston.  And as the train smashed and rocked along, he
would sit there solemnly with his lungs expanded to the bursting
point and his chest swollen and stuck out like the breast of a
pouter pigeon, while his eyes bulged, the veins on his forehead
stuck out, and his face slowly turned an apoplectic purple as he
sat there rocking with the agony of his effort.

Then the train would roar into the Central Station, and the breath
would come sobbing and soughing out of his tortured lungs like wind
out of an organ bellows.  And for several seconds, while the train
was stopped there at the station (for in these magic formulas these
stops at stations "did not count") he would pant and gasp for
breath like a fish out of water, gulping a new supply ravenously
down into his lungs again, as if he thought he was being shot in a
projectile through the terrific vacuum of unmeasured space.

Then, as the train roared out into the tunnel's dark again, he
would repeat the effort, sitting as solemn as an owl with his
bulging eyes, stuck-out chest, the stolid apoplectic purple of his
swollen face, while little children looked at him with frightened
eyes, their mothers with a glance of nervous apprehension, and the
men in all the various attitudes of gape-jawed astonishment and
stupefaction.  Yet, at that time, he saw nothing strange or curious
in this mad behaviour.  Rather, to hold his breath there in the
tunnel's dark, to make that mystery of rite and number, and to
follow it with a maniacal devotion seemed as inevitable and natural
to him as the very act of life, of breath itself, and he was
sometimes bitterly incensed when people stared at him because of
it.

Those faces--the secret, dark, unknown, nameless faces, the faces
of the million instant casual meetings of these years, in the cars
of subway trains or on the swarming streets--returned in later
years to haunt him with a blazing, unforgettable intensity of
vision, with an overwhelming sense of strangeness, loss and sorrow,
a poignancy of familiarity, affection and regret, which was
somehow, unbelievably, as wordless, grievous, full of an instant
rending and unfathomable pity, as those things a man has known best
and loved with all the life and passion in him, and has lost for
ever--a child's quick laugh of innocence and exultant mirth, a
woman's smile, an intonation in her voice, the naked, child-like
look remembered in the eyes of simple, faithful people who have
gone, or the snatches of the song one's brother sang when he lay
drowned in darkness and delirium, as he died.

Why did the unknown faces of these years come back to him?  For he
could not forget the million obscure faces of those first years of
his wandering when for the first time he walked alone the streets
of a great city, a madman, a beggar, and a king, feeling the huge
joy of the secret world impending over him with all the glory of
its magic imminence, and when each furious prowl and quest into the
swarming streets of life, each furious journey through the tunnel's
depth was living with the intolerable prescience of triumph and
discovery--a life more happy, fortunate, golden and complete than
any life before had ever been.

He did not know.  He never knew why all those obscure, nameless and
unknown faces of a million strangers who passed and vanished in an
instant from his sight, or whom he passed a hundred times upon the
streets without a word or sign of recognition, should return to
haunt him later with a sense of loss, affection, and the
familiarity of utter knowledge.  But he knew that they came back to
him in images of unfading brightness, and that the light of time,
dark time, was on them all, and that there was revealed to him, in
later years, something strange and mad and lonely in the lives of
all of them, which he had accepted instantly, and felt no wonder or
surprise at, when he had seen them.

But these images of the past would come back in later years, and
with a feeling of bitter loss and longing he would want to find, to
see, to know them all again, to ask them what their lives had been,
and what had happened to them.  It was a weird, strange, assorted
crew--that company of memory--on whom the light of time would fall
with such a lonely hue, and how they were all got together in that
magic consonance he could never tell, but he could not forget them.

One was an old man, an old man with fierce restless eyes, and
bedraggled moustaches of a stained tobacco yellow who kept a
lodging-house where a student that he knew had rooms, and whose
house, from the basement to the attic, was a museum to the old
man's single mania.  For that house was crowded with old tottering
stacks of books, a mountain of junk, uncounted and uncountable, a
weariness and desolation of old print, dusty, yellowed, and
unreadable--and all were memoirs of a single man, Napoleon.

Another was a woman with a mass of henna hair, piled up in a great
crown upon her head, who sat smugly, day after day, like something
ageless and embalmed, a presence deathless and hermetic to all the
things that change and pass, in a glass cage before a moving-
picture house on Washington Street, where people thronged in the
dense and narrow line before her all the time, and glass steps and
a rotating stairway went steeply up beside her cage, and flashing
cascades of bright water foamed and tumbled underneath the glassy
stairs, as the woman with piled henna hair sat always in her cage,
deathless, smug, hermetic, and embalmed.

Another was an old man with a mad, fierce, handsome face and wild
strewn hair of silvery white, who never wore a hat or overcoat, and
who muttered through the streets of Cambridge, over the board walks
of the Harvard Yard, in every kind of weather; winter was around
him always, the rugged skies of wintry sunsets, red and harsh, the
frozen desolation of old snow in street and Yard and gutter, the
harsh, interminable, weary savagery of grey winter.

One was a waitress in a restaurant on Tremont Street, a woman
quiet, decent, and demure in manner, who wore faintly on her lips
continually the most sensual, tender, and seductive mystery of a
smile that he had ever seen on any woman's face, who drew him back
into that place to eat a thousand times, who made him think of her
at night, and prowl the streets and think of her, and go back to
that restaurant night after night, with a feeling of wild joy and
imminent possession when he thought of her, and yet who said, did,
promised nothing that was not sedate, decent, and correct, or that
could give him comfort, hope, or knowledge of her life.

He never got to know her, he never even knew her name, some secrecy
and pride in him prevented him from speaking to her with familiar
warmth or curiosity, but he spent thousands of good hours in
thinking of her--hours filled with all the passion, dreams, and
longing youth can know.  The woman was no longer young; the other
waitresses were younger, fresher, better-looking, had better legs
and finer figures; he had no way at all of knowing the quality of
her life, mind, spirit, speech--save that when he heard her speak
her voice was a little husky and coarse-fibred--but that woman
became the central figure of one of those glittering and impossible
fantasies young men have.

It was a great legend of wealth and fame and love and glory in
which this woman lived as a creature of queenly beauty, delicacy,
intelligence, and grandeur of the soul--and every obstacle of cold
and acid fact that interposed itself between him and his vision he
would instantly destroy by the wild fantastic logic of desire.

And because of her he prowled a hundred streets, and walked three
thousand miles, and ate one thousand sirloin steaks in that one
restaurant.  He would wait for night to come with furious
impatience, and would feel his hands grow weak, his entrails numb,
his heart begin to pound, and his throat to swell with this
intolerable exultancy of joy as he approached the restaurant.  Then
when he got inside, and had gone upstairs to where the restaurant
was, his whole body would be stirred with such a shifting
iridescence of passion, happiness, hunger, triumph, music, and wild
exuberant humour that he felt he could no longer hold the swelling
power of ecstasy that he felt in him.

Everything in the restaurant would become impossibly good,
wonderful, and happy.  The beautifully clean, crisply-waisted, and
voluptuous-looking waitresses would be passing all around him
bearing trays of food, the empress of his desire would pass by
clean and neat and dainty, sedate and decent and demure, smiling
that proud, smoke-like, faint, ghost-phantom smile of maddening
tenderness and seduction, the three-piece orchestra would be
playing briskly, softly, languorously, strains of popular music,
filling his heart with the swelling pæans of another, prouder,
grander, more triumphant music; while he listened, some robust,
handsome, clear-eyed and lusty-figured New England girls would be
sitting at a table, smartly, roughly dressed, their fine legs
clothed with woollen stockings, their feet shod with wide-open
galoshes, looking almost ripe for love and tenderness if something
could be done to them--and all of this spurred his hunger with a
kind of maddening relish, and made the food taste better than any
he had ever had before.

Everything he saw would fill him with haunting sorrow, hunger, joy,
the sense of triumph, glory, and delight, or with a limitless
exuberance of wild humour.  The motto of the restaurant, fixed on
the wall in shields embossed with a flamboyant coat of arms, was
written in a scroll beneath the coat of arms, as follows:  "Luxuria
cum Economia."  The effect these words wrought on his spirit was
unbelievable: he could never say what he wished to say, or what he
felt about them, and to say that they were "the funniest words he
ever saw" would not begin to convey their real effect on him.

For what they did to him was so far beyond mere funniness that he
had no name to give to the emotion they evoked.  But instantly,
when he saw them, the wild wordless surge of a powerful and idiotic
exuberance of humour would swell up in him and split his features
with an exultant grin.

He would want to roar with laughter, to shout out and pound upon
the table in his joy, but instead the wild voices of a goat-like
exuberance would swell up in his throat until the people at the
other tables would begin to stare at him as if he had gone mad.
And later, on the streets, or in his room at night, he would
suddenly remember them again, and then that idiotic, wordless, and
exultant glee would burst out of him in one roar of joy.

Yet the words gave him a strange happiness and content as well.  He
felt a feeling of tenderness for the people who had written them,
for the owners of the restaurant who had solemnly and triumphantly
thought them out, for all the doctrines of "taste," "class," and
"refinement" they evoked, for something mistaken and most pitiful
that had got into our lives, and that was everywhere, something
grotesquely wrong, ridiculous and confused that made one somehow
feel a warm, a wordless affection for its victims.



But this was the reason why these things could never be forgotten--
because we are so lost, so naked and so lonely in America.  Immense
and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on for ever
and we have no home.  Therefore, it is not the slow, the punctual
sanded drip of the unnumbered days that we remember best, the ash
of time; nor is it the huge monotone of the lost years, the
unswerving schedules of the lost life and the well-known faces,
that we remember best.  It is a face seen once and lost for ever in
a crowd, an eye that looked, a face that smiled and vanished on a
passing train, it is a prescience of snow upon a certain night, the
laughter of a woman in a summer street long years ago, it is the
memory of a single moon seen at the pine's dark edge in old
October--and all of our lives is written in the twisting of a leaf
upon a bough, a door that opened, and a stone.

For America has a thousand lights and weathers and we walk the
streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the streets of life
alone.

It is the place of the howling winds, the hurrying of the leaves in
old October, the hard clean falling to the earth of acorns.  The
place of the storm-tossed moaning of the wintry mountain-side,
where the young men cry out in their throats and feel the savage
vigour, the rude strong energies; the place also where the trains
cross rivers.

It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the one
place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the
time.

It is the place of exultancy and strong joy, the place of the
darkened brooding air, the smell of snow; it is the place of all
the fierce, the bitten colours in October, when all of the wild,
sweet woods flame up; it is also the place of the cider press and
the last brown oozings of the York Imperials.  It is the place of
the lovely girls with good jobs and the husky voices, who will buy
a round of drinks; it is the place where the women with fine legs
and silken underwear lie in the Pullman berth below you; it is the
place of the dark-green snore of the Pullman cars and the voices in
the night-time in Virginia.

It is the place where great boats are baying at the harbour's
mouth, where great ships are putting out to sea; it is the place
where great boats are blowing in the gulf of night, and where the
river, the dark and secret river, full of strange time, is for ever
flowing by us to the sea.

The tugs keep baying in the river; at twelve o'clock the Berengaria
moans, her lights slide gently past the piers beyond Eleventh
Street; and in the night a tall tree falls in Old Catawba, there in
the hills of home.

It is the place of autumnal moons hung low and orange at the frosty
edges of the pines; it is the place of frost and silence, of the
clean dry shocks and the opulence of enormous pumpkins that yellow
on hard dotted earth; it is the place of the stir and feathery
stumble of the hens upon their roost, the frosty, broken barking of
the dogs, the great barn-shapes and solid shadows in the running
sweep of the moon-whited countryside, the wailing whistle of the
fast express.  It is the place of flares and steamings on the
tracks, and the swing and bob and tottering dance of lanterns in
the yards; it is the place of dings and knellings and the sudden
glare of mighty engines over sleeping faces in the night; it is the
place of the terrific web and spread and smouldering, the distant
glare of Philadelphia and the solid rumble of the sleepers; it is
also the place where the Transcontinental Limited is stroking
eighty miles an hour across the continent and the small dark towns
whip by like bullets, and there is only the fanlike stroke of the
secret, immense and lonely earth again.

I have foreseen this picture many times: I will buy passage on the
Fast Express.

It is the place of the wild and exultant winter's morning and the
wind, with the powdery snow, that has been howling all night long;
it is the place of solitude and the branches of the spruce and
hemlock piled with snow; it is the place where the Fall River boats
are tethered to the wharf, and the wild grey snow of furious,
secret, and storm-whited morning whips across them.  It is the
place of the lodge by the frozen lake and the sweet breath and
amorous flesh of sinful woman; it is the place of the tragic and
lonely beauty of New England; it is the place of the red barn and
the sound of the stabled hooves and of bright tatters of old circus
posters; it is the place of the immense and pungent smell of
breakfast, the country sausages and the ham and eggs, the smoking
wheat cakes and the fragrant coffee, and of lone hunters in the
frosty thickets who whistle to their lop-eared hounds.

Where is old Doctor Ballard now with all his dogs?  He held that
they were sacred, that the souls of all the dear lost dead went
into them.  His youngest sister's soul sat on the seat beside him;
she had long ears and her eyes were sad.  Two dozen of his other
cherished dead trotted around the buggy as he went up the hill past
home.  And that was eleven years ago, and I was nine years old; and
I stared gravely out of the window of my father's house at old
Doctor Ballard.

It is the place of the straight stare, the cold white bellies and
the buried lust of the lovely Boston girls; it is the place of ripe
brainless blondes with tender lips and a flowery smell, and of the
girls with shapely arms who stand on ladders picking oranges; it is
also the place where large slow-bodied girls from Kansas City, with
big legs and milky flesh, are sent East to school by their rich
fathers, and there are also immense and lovely girls, with the grip
of a passionate bear, who have such names as Neilson, Lundquist,
Jorgenson, and Brandt.

I will go up and down the country, and back and forth across the
country on the great trains that thunder over America.  I will go
out West where States are square; Oh, I will go to Boise, and
Helena and Albuquerque.  I will go to Montana and the two Dakotas
and the unknown places.

It is the place of violence and sudden death; of the fast shots in
the night, the club of the Irish cop, and the smell of brains and
blood upon the pavement; it is the place of the small-town
killings, and the men who shoot the lovers of their wives; it is
the place where the negroes slash with razors and the hillmen kill
in the mountain meadows; it is the place of the ugly drunks and the
snarling voices and of foul-mouthed men who want to fight; it is
the place of the loud word and the foolish boast and the violent
threat; it is also the place of the deadly little men with white
faces and the eyes of reptiles, who kill quickly and casually in
the dark; it is the lawless land that feeds on murder.

"Did you know the two Lipe girls?" he asked.  "Yes," I said.  "They
lived in Biltburn by the river, and one of them was drowned in the
flood.  She was a cripple, and she wheeled herself along in a
chair.  She was strong as a bull."  "That's the girl," he said.

It is the place of the crack athletes and of the runners who limber
up in March; it is the place of the ten-second men and the great
jumpers and vaulters; it is the place where spring comes, and the
young birch trees have white and tender barks, of the thaw of the
earth, and the feathery smoke of the trees; it is the place of the
burst of grass and bud, the wild and sudden tenderness of the
wilderness, and of the crews out on the river and the coaches
coming down behind them in the motor-boats, the surges rolling out
behind when they are gone with heavy sudden wash.  It is the place
of the baseball players, and the easy lob, the soft spring
smackings of the glove and mit, the crack of the bat; it is the
place of the great batters, fielders, and pitchers, of the nigger
boys and the white, drawling, shirt-sleeved men, the bleachers and
the resinous smell of old worn wood; it is the place of Rube
Waddell, the mighty untamed and ill-fated pitcher when his left arm
is swinging like a lash.  It is the place of the fighters, the
crafty Jewish lightweights and the mauling Italians, Leonard,
Tendler, Rocky Kansas, and Dundee; it is the place where the
champion looks over his rival's shoulder with a bored expression.

I shall wake at morning in a foreign land thinking I heard a horse
in one of the streets of home.

It is the place where they like to win always, and boast about
their victories; it is the place of quick money and sudden loss; it
is the place of the mile-long freights with their strong, solid,
clanking, heavy loneliness at night, and of the silent freight of
cars that curve away among raw piny desolations with their promise
of new lands and unknown distances--the huge attentive gape of
emptiness.  It is the place where the bums come singly from the
woods at sunset, the huge stillness of the water-tower, the fading
light, the rails, secret and alive, trembling with the oncoming
train; it is the place of the great tramps, Oklahoma Red, Fargo
Pete, and the Jersey Dutchman, who grab fast rattlers for the
Western shore; it is the place of old blown bums who come up in
October skirls of dust and wind and crumpled newspapers and beg,
with canned heat on their breaths:  "Help Old McGuire: McGuire's a
good guy, kid.  You're not so tough, kid: McGuire's your pal, kid:
How about McGuire, McGuire--?"

It is the place of the pool-room players and the drug-store boys;
of the town whore and her paramour, the tough town driver; it is
the place where they go to the woods on Sunday and get up among the
laurel and dogwood bushes and the rhododendron blossoms; it is the
place of the cheap hotels and the kids who wait with chattering
lips while the nigger goes to get them their first woman; it is the
place of the drunken college boys who spend the old man's money and
wear fur coats to the football games; it is the place of the lovely
girls up North who have rich fathers, of the beautiful wives of
business men.

The train broke down somewhere beyond Manassas, and I went forward
along the tracks with all the other passengers.  "What's the
matter?" I said to the engineer.  "The eccentric strap is broken,
son," he said.  It was a very cold day, windy and full of sparkling
sun.  This was the farthest north I'd ever been, and I was twelve
years old and on my way to Washington to see Woodrow Wilson
inaugurated.  Later I could not forget the face of the engineer and
the words "eccentric strap."

It is the place of the immense and lonely earth, the place of fat
ears and abundance where they grow cotton, corn, and wheat, the
wine-red apples of October, and the good tobacco.

It is the place that is savage and cruel, but it is also the
innocent place; it is the wild lawless place, the vital earth that
is soaked with the blood of the murdered men, with the blood of the
countless murdered men, with the blood of the unavenged and
unremembered murdered men; but it is also the place of the child
and laughter, where the young men are torn apart with ecstasy, and
cry out in their throats with joy, where they hear the howl of the
wind and the rain and smell the thunder and the soft numb spitting
of the snow, where they are drunk with the bite and sparkle of the
air and mad with the solar energy, where they believe in love and
victory and think that they can never die.

It is the place where you come up through Virginia on the great
trains in the night-time, and rumble slowly across the wide Potomac
and see the morning sunlight on the nation's dome at Washington,
and where the fat man shaving in the Pullman washroom grunts,
"What's this?  What's this we're coming to--Washington?"--And the
thin man glancing out of the window says, "Yep, this is Washington.
That's what it is, all right.  You gettin' off here?"--And where
the fat man grunts, "Who--me?  Naw--I'm goin' on to Baltimore."  It
is the place where you get off at Baltimore and find your brother
waiting.

Where is my father sleeping on the land?  Buried?  Dead these seven
years?  Forgotten, rotten in the ground?  Held by his own great
stone?  No, no!  Will I say "Father" when I come to him?  And will
he call me "Son"?  Oh, no, he'll never see my face; we'll never
speak except to say--

It is the place of the fast approach, the hot blind smoky passage,
the tragic lonely beauty of New England, and the web of Boston; the
place of the mighty station there, and engines passive as great
cats, the straight dense plumes of engine smoke, the acrid and
exciting smell of trains and stations, and of the man-swarm passing
ever in its million-footed weft, the smell of the sea in harbours
and the thought of voyages--and the place of the goat-cry, the
strong joy of our youth, the magic city, when we knew the most
fortunate life on earth would certainly be ours, that we were
twenty and could never die.

And always America is the place of the deathless and enraptured
moments, the eye that looked, the mouth that smiled and vanished,
and the word; the stone, the leaf, the door we never found and
never have forgotten.  And these are the things that we remember of
America, for we have known all her thousand lights and weathers,
and we walk the streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the
streets of life alone.



XV


Now at Cambridge, in the house of the Murphys on Trowbridge Street,
he found himself living with the Irish for the first time, and he
discovered that the Murphys were utterly different from all the
Irish he had known before, and all that he had felt and believed
about them.  He soon discovered that the Murphys were a typical
family of the Boston Irish.  It was a family of five: there were
Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, two sons and a daughter.  Mrs. Murphy ran the
house on Trowbridge Street, which they owned, and rented the rooms
to lodgers, Mr. Murphy was night watchman in a warehouse on the
Boston water-front, the girl was a typist in an Irish business
house in Boston, the older boy, Jimmy, had a clerical position in
the Boston City Hall, and the youngest boy, Eddy, whom the youth
knew best, was a student at Boston College.  In addition there were
two Irish lodgers who had lived with them for years: Mr. Feeney, a
young man who worked at Raymond's, a department store in Washington
Street, Boston, and Mr. O'Doul, a middle-aged man, unmarried, who
occupied the front room upstairs just over the boy's own room.  Mr.
O'Doul was a civil engineer, he drank very heavily, and he would
sometimes be confined to his bed for days at a time with terrible
attacks of rheumatism which would bend, gnarl, and twist him, and
render him incapable of movement.

But in the Murphys the boy discovered none of the richness,
wildness, extravagance, and humour of such people as Mike Fogarty,
Tim Donovan, or the MacReadys--the Irish he had known at home.  The
Murphys were hard, sterile, arid, meagre, and cruel: they were
disfigured by a warped and infuriated puritanism, and yet they were
terribly corrupt.  There was nothing warm, rich, or generous about
them or their lives: it seemed as if the living roots of nature had
grown gnarled and barren among the walls and pavements of the city;
it seemed that everything that is wild, sudden, capricious,
whimsical, passionate, and mysterious in the spirit of the race had
been dried and hardened out of them by their divorce from the
magical earth their fathers came from, as if the snarl and jangle
of the city streets, the barren and earthless angularity of steel
and stone and brick had entered their souls.  Even their speech
had become hard, grey, and sterile: the people were almost
inarticulate; it is doubtful if one of them had three hundred words
in his vocabulary: the boy noticed that the men especially--Murphy,
his two sons, Feeney, and O'Doul--made constant use of a few arid
words and phrases, which, with the intonation of the voice and a
slight convulsive movement of the arms and hands, filled in
enormous vacancies in thought and feeling, and said all that they
could say or wished to say.  Chief among these words or phrases was
"YOU know?". . . or "YOU know what I mean?"--words which were
uttered with a slight protesting emphasis on "You," a slight and
painful movement of the hands or shoulders, and an air that the
listener must fill in for himself all that they wanted to imply.
For epithets of rich resounding rage, for curses thick and opulent
with fury, in which he had believed their tongues were apt and
their spirits prodigal, he discovered that they had no more to
offer than "Chee!" or "Jeez!" or "Ho-ly Jeez!" or "Christ!" or "HO-
ly Christ!" or occasionally "HO-ly Mary!"  Finally, they made a
constant and stupefying use of that terrible grey abortion of a
word "guy": it studded their speech with the numberless monotony of
paving brick; without it they would have been completely speechless
and would have had to communicate by convulsions of their arms and
hands and painful croakings from their tongueless throats--the word
fell upon the spirit of the listener with the grey weariness of a
cold incessant drizzle; it flowed across the spirit like a river of
concrete; hope, joy; the power to feel and think were drowned out
under the relentless and pitiless aridity of its flood.

At first, he thought these words and phrases were part of a meagre
but sufficient pattern which they had learned in order to meet the
contingencies of life and business with alien and Protestant
spirits, as waiters in European café's, restaurants, and dining-
cars will learn a few words of English in order to serve the needs
of British and American tourists--he thought this because he saw
something sly, closed, conspiratorial, mocking and full of hatred
and mistrust, in their relations with people who were not members
of their race and their religion; he thought they had a warm,
secret and passionate life of their own which never could be known
by a stranger.  But he soon found that this belief was untrue: even
in their conversations with one another, they were almost
inarticulate--a race which thought, felt, and spoke with the wooden
insensitivity of automatons or dummies on whose waxen souls a few
banal formulas for speech and feeling had been recorded.  He heard
some amazing performances: every evening toward six o'clock the
family would gather in their dingy living-room at the end of the
hall, Mr. Feeney and Mr. O'Doul would join them, and then he could
hear the voices of the men raised in argument, protest, agreement,
denial, affirmation and belief, or scepticism, evoking a ghastly
travesty of all of man's living moments of faith, doubt, and
passion, and yet speaking for hours at a time, with the idiotic
repetitions of a gramophone held by its needle to a single groove,
a blunted jargon of fifty meaningless words:

"What guy?"

"DAT guy!"

"Nah, nah, nah, not him--duh otheh guy!"

"Wich guy do yuh mean--duh big guy?"

"Nah, nah, nah--yuh got it all wrong!--Not HIM--duh little guy!"

"Guh-WAN!"--a derisive laugh--"Guh-wan!"

"Watcha tryin' t' do--KID me?  Dat guy neveh saw de day he could
take Grogan.  Grogan 'ud bat his brains out."

"Guh-WAN!  Yer full of prunes! . . .  Watcha tryin' t' give me?
Dat guy 'ud neveh take Tommy Grogan in a million yeahs!  He
couldn't take Tommy duh best day he eveh saw!  Grogan 'ud have him
on de floeh in thirty seconds!"

"HO-ly Ghee!"

"Sure he would!"

"Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN!  Yer CRAZY!  GROGAN!  HO-ly Ghee!"

And this, with laughter, denial, agreement--all the appurtenances
of conversation among living men--could go on unweariedly for hours
at a time.

Sometimes he would interrupt these conversations for a moment: he
would go back to leave a message, to pay the rent, to ask if anyone
had called.

As soon as he knocked, the voices would stop abruptly, the room
would grow suddenly hushed, there would be whispers and a dry
snickering laughter: in a moment someone would say "Come in," and
he would enter a room full of hushed and suddenly straightened
faces.  The men would sit quietly or say a word or two of greeting,
friendly enough in appearance, but swift sly looks would pass
between them, and around the corners of their thin, hard mouths
there would be something loose, corrupt and mocking.  Mrs. Murphy
would rise and come to greet him, her voice filled with a false
heartiness, an unclean courtesy, a horrible and insolent travesty
of friendliness, and her face would also have the look of having
been suddenly straightened out and solemnly compressed; she would
listen with a kind of evil attention, but she would have the same
loose, mocking look, and the quiet sly look would pass between her
and the others.  Then, when he had left them and the door had
closed behind him, there would be the same sly silence for a
moment, then a low muttering of words, a sudden violence of hard
derisive laughter, and someone saying, "HO-ly Jeez!"

He despised them: he loathed them because they were dull, dirty,
and dishonest, because their lives were stupid, barren, and ugly,
for their deliberate and insolent unfriendliness and for the
conspiratorial secrecy and closure of their petty and vicious
lives, entrenched solidly behind a wall of violent and corrupt
politics and religious fanaticism, and regarding the alien, the
stranger, with the hostile and ignorant eyes of the peasant.

All of the men had a dry, meagre, and brutal quality: Mr. Murphy
was a little man with a dry, corky figure; he had a grey face, a
thin sunken mouth, around which the line of loose mockery was
always playing, and a closely cropped grey moustache.  The boy
always found him in his shirt-sleeves, with his shoes off and his
stockinged feet thrust out upon a chair.  Feeney, O'Doul, Jimmy and
Eddy Murphy, although of various sizes, shapes, and ages, all had
thick tallowy-looking skins, hard dull eyes and a way of speaking
meagrely out of the corners of their loose thin mouths.  Mrs.
Murphy was physically the biggest of the lot, with a certain
quality of ripeness and fertility, however blighted, that none of
the others had: she was a large slatternly woman, with silvery
white hair which gave her somehow a look of sly and sinister
haggishness; she had a high, flaming colour marked with patches of
eczematous red, her voice was hearty and she had a big laugh, but
her face also had the false, hostile and conspiratorial secrecy of
the others.

Eddy Murphy, the youngest boy, was also the best of the crowd.  All
decent and generous impulse had not yet been killed or deadened in
him; he still possessed a warped and blunted friendliness, the
rudiments of some youthful feeling for a better, warmer, bolder,
and more liberal kind of life.  As time went on, he made a few
awkward, shamed, and inarticulate advances toward friendship; he
began to come into the young man's room from time to time, and
presently to tell him a little of his life at college and his hopes
for the future.  He was a little fellow, with the same dry,
febrile, alert, and corky figure that his father had: he was one of
the dark Irish; he had black hair and black eyes, and one of his
legs was badly bowed and bent outward, the result, he said, of
having broken it in a high-school football game.  The first time
he came into the room he stood around shyly, awkwardly, and
mistrustfully for a spell, blurting out a few words from time to
time, and looking at the books and papers with a kind of dazed and
stricken stupefaction.

"Watcha do wit all dese books?  Huh?"

"I read them."

"Guh-WAN!  Watcha tryin' t' hand me?  Y' ain't read all dem books!
Dey ain't no guy dat's read dat much."

As a matter of fact, there were only two or three hundred books in
the place, but he could not have been more impressed if the entire
contents of the Widener Library had been stored there.

"Well, I have read them all," the other said.  "Most of them,
anyway, and a lot more besides."

"Guh-WAN!  No kiddin'!" he said, in a dazed tone and with an air of
astounded disbelief.  "Watcha want to read so much for?"

"I like to read.  Don't you?"

"Oh, I don't know.  YOU know," he said painfully, with the
slightest convulsive movement of his hands and shoulders.
". . . 'S'all right."

"You have to read for your classes at Boston College, don't you?"

"DO I?" he cried, with a sudden waking to life.  "I'll say I
do! . . .  HO-ly Chee!  Duh way dose guys pile it on to you is a
CRIME!"

There was another awkward silence; he continued to stare at the
books and to fumble about in an embarrassed and tongue-tied manner,
and suddenly he burst out explosively and triumphantly:
"Shakespeare was de greatest poet dat evah lived.  He wrote plays
an' sonnets.  A sonnet is a pome of foihteen lines: it is composed
of two pahts, de sextet an' de octrave."

"That's pretty good.  They must make you work out there?"

"DO they?" he cried.  "I'll tell duh cock-eyed world dey do! . . .
Do you know who de greatest prose-writeh was?" he burst out with
the same convulsive suddenness.

"No . . . who was it?  Jonathan Swift?"

"Guh-WAN!"

"Addison? . . .  Dryden? . . .  Matthew Arnold?" the youth asked
hopefully.

"Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN!" he shouted derisively.  "Yuh're way off!"

"Am I? . . .  Who was it then?"

"James Henry Cardinal Nooman," he crowed triumphantly.  "Dat's who
it was! . . .  Father Dolan said so. . . .  Chee! . . .  Dey ain't
nuttin' dat guy don't know!  He's duh greatest English scholeh
livin'! . . .  Nooman wrote de Apologia pro Vita Suo," he said
triumphantly.  "Dat's Latin."

"Well, yes, he IS a good writer," said the other boy.  "But Thomas
Carlyle is a good writer, too?" he proposed argumentatively.

"Guh-WAN!" shouted Eddy derisively.  "Watcha givin' me?"  He was
silent a moment; then he added with a grin, "Yuh know de reason why
you say dat?"

"No, why?"

"It's because yuh're a Sout'paw," and suddenly he laughed,
naturally and good-naturedly.

"A Southpaw?  How do you mean?"

"Oh, dat's duh name de fellows call 'em out at school," he said.

"Call who?"

"Why, guys like you," he said.  "Dat's de name we call duh
Protestants," he said, laughing.  "We call 'em Sout'paws."

The word in its connotation of a life that was hostile, hard,
fanatic, and suspicious of everything alien to itself was
disgraceful and shameful, but there was something irresistibly
funny about it too, and suddenly they both laughed loudly.

After that, they got along together much better: Eddy came in to
see the other youth quite often, he talked more freely and
naturally, and sometimes he would bring his English themes and ask
for help with them.

Such were the Boston Irish as he first saw them; and often as he
thought of the wild, extravagant and liberal creatures of his
childhood--of Mr. Fogarty, Tim Donovan, and the MacReadys--it
seemed to him that they belonged to a grander and completely
different race; or perhaps, he thought, the glory of earth and air
and sky there had kept them ripe and sweet as they always were,
while their brothers here had withered upon the rootless pavements,
soured and sickened in the savage tumult of the streets, grown hard
and dead and ugly in the barren land.



The only person near him in the house, and the only person there
the boy saw with any regularity was a Chinese student named Wang:
he had the room next to him--in fact, he had the two next rooms,
for he was immensely rich, the son of a man in the mandarin class
who governed one of the Chinese provinces.

But his habits and conduct were in marked contrast to those of the
average Oriental who attends an American university.  These others,
studious seekers after knowledge, had come to work.  Mr. Wang, a
lazy and good-humoured wastrel with more money than he could spend,
had come to play.  And play he did, with a whole-hearted devotion
to pleasure that was worthy of a better purpose.  His pleasures
were for the most part simple, but they were also costly, running
to flowered-silk dressing gowns, expensively tailored clothes cut
in a rakish Broadway style, silk shirts, five-pound boxes of
chocolate creams, of which he was inordinately fond, week-end trips
to New York, stupendous banquets at an expensive Chinese restaurant
in Boston, phonograph records, of which he had a great many, and
the companionship of "nice flat girls"--by this he meant to say his
women should be "fat," which apparently was the primary requisite
for voluptuous pulchritude.

Mr. Wang himself was just a fat, stupid, indolent, and good-hearted
child: his two big rooms in the rear of the Murphy establishment
were lavishly furnished with carved teak-wood, magnificent screens,
fat divans, couches, and chests.  The rooms were always lighted
with the glow of dim and sensual lamps, there was always an odour
of sandalwood and incense, and from time to time one heard Mr.
Wang's shrill sudden scream of childish laughter.  He had two
cronies, young Chinese who seemed as idle, wealthy, and pleasure-
loving as himself; they came to his rooms every night, and then one
could hear them jabbering and chattering away in their strange
speech, and sometimes silence, low eager whisperings, and then
screams of laughter.

The boy had grown to know the Chinese very well; Mr. Wang had come
to him to seek help on his English composition themes--he was not
only stupid but thoroughly idle, and would not work at anything--
and the boy had written several for him.  And Mr. Wang, in grateful
recompense, had taken him several times to magnificent dinners of
strange delicious foods in the Chinese restaurant, and was for ever
urging on him chocolates and expensive cigarettes.  And no matter
where the Chinaman saw him now, whether in his room, or on the
street, or in the Harvard Yard, he would always greet him with one
joke--a joke he repeated over and over with the unwearied delight
of a child or an idiot.  And the joke was this:  Mr. Wang would
come up slyly, his fat yellow face already beginning to work, his
fat throat beginning to tremble with hysterical laughter.  Then,
wagging his finger at the young American, the Chinaman would say:

"Lest night I see you with big flat girl. . . .  Yis, yis, yis," he
would scream with laughter as the young man started to protest,
shaping voluptuous curves meanwhile with his fat yellow hands--"Big
flat girl--like this--yis, yis, yis!" he would scream again, and
bend double, choking, stamping at the ground, "nice flat girl--like
this--yis, yis, yis, yis, yis."

He had perpetrated this "joke" so often, and at such unseasonable
places, that it had now become embarrassing.  He seemed, in fact,
to delight in coming upon his victim while he was in serious
conversation with some dignified-looking person, and he had already
caught the boy three times in this way while he was talking to
Dodd, to Professor Hatcher, and finally to a professor with a
starched prim face, who had taught American Literature for thirty
years, and whose name was Fust.  Nothing could be done to stop him;
protests at the impropriety of the proceeding only served to set
him off again; he was delighted at the embarrassment he caused and
he would shout down every protest rapturously, screaming, "Yis,
yis, yis--nice flat girl--like this, eh," and would shape fat
suggestion with his fat hands.



XVI


The purposes of Professor Hatcher's celebrated school for
dramatists seemed, as stated, to be plain and reasonable enough.
Professor Hatcher himself prudently forbore from making extravagant
claims concerning the benefits to be derived from his course.  He
did not say that he could make a dramatist out of any man who came
to take his course.  He did not predict a successful career in the
professional theatre for every student who had been a member of his
class.  He did not even say he could teach a student how to write
plays.  No.  He made, in fact, no claims at all.  Whatever he said
about his course was very reasonably, prudently, and temperately
put: it was impossible to quarrel with it.

All Professor Hatcher said about his course was that, if a man had
a genuine dramatic and theatrical talent to begin with, he might be
able to derive from the course a technical and critical guidance
which it would be hard for him to get elsewhere, and which he might
find for himself only after years of painful and even wasteful
experiment.

Certainly this seemed reasonable enough.  Moreover, Professor
Hatcher felt that the artist would benefit by what was known as the
"round-table discussion"--that is, by the comment and criticism of
the various members of the class, after Professor Hatcher had read
them a play written by one of their group.  He felt that the spirit
of working together, of seeing one's play produced and assisting in
the production, of being familiar with all the various arts of the
theatre--lighting, designing, directing, acting, and so on--was an
experience which should be of immense value to the young dramatist
of promise and of talent.  In short, although he made no assertion
that he could create a talent where none was, or give life by
technical expertness to the substance of a work that had no real
life of its own, Professor Hatcher did feel that by the beneficent
influence of this tutelage he might trim the true lamp to make it
burn more brightly.

And though it was possible to join issue with him on some of his
beliefs--that, for example, the comment and criticism of "the
group" and a community of creative spirits were good for the
artist--it was impossible to deny that his argument was reasonable,
temperate, and conservative in the statement of his purposes.

And he made this plain to every member of his class.  Each one was
made to understand that the course made no claims of magic alchemy--
that he could not be turned into an interesting dramatist if the
talent were not there.

But although each member of the class affirmed his understanding of
this fundamental truth, and readily said that he accepted it, most
of these people, at the bottom of their hearts, believed--pitiably
and past belief--that a miracle would be wrought upon their
sterile, unproductive spirits; that for them, for THEM, at least, a
magic transformation would be brought about in their miserable
small lives and feeble purposes--and all because they now were
members of Professor Hatcher's celebrated class.

The members of Professor Hatcher's class belonged to the whole lost
family of the earth, whose number is uncountable, and for this
reason they could never be forgotten.

And, first and foremost, they belonged to that great lost tribe of
people who are more numerous in America than in any other country
in the world.  They belonged to that unnumbered horde who think
that somehow, by some magic and miraculous scheme or rule or
formula, "something can be done for them."  They belonged to that
huge colony of the damned who buy thousands of books that are
printed for their kind, telling them how to run a tea-shop, how
to develop a pleasing personality, how to acquire "a liberal
education," swiftly and easily and with no anguish of the soul, by
fifteen minutes' reading every day; how to perform the act of
sexual intercourse in such a way that your wife will love you for
it; how to have children or to keep from having children; how to
write short-stories, novels, plays, and verses which are profitably
saleable; how to keep from having body-odour, constipation, bad
breath, or tartar on the teeth; how to have good manners, know the
proper fork to use for every course, and always do the proper
thing--how, in short, to be beautiful, "distinguished," "smart,"
"chic," "forceful," and "sophisticated"--finally, how to have "a
brilliant personality" and "achieve success."

Yes, for the most part, the members of Professor Hatcher's class
belonged to this great colony of the lost Americans.  They belonged
to that huge tribe of all the damned and lost who feel that
everything is going to be all right with them if they can only take
a trip, or learn a rule, or meet a person.  They belonged to that
futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well
with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be
supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and
the dark damnation of man's soul can magically be healed if only
they eat bran for breakfast, secure an introduction to a celebrated
actress, get a reading for their manuscript by a friend of Sinclair
Lewis, or win admission to Professor Hatcher's celebrated class of
dramatists.

And, in a curious way, the plays written by the people in Professor
Hatcher's class illustrated, in one form or another, this desire.
Few of the plays had any intrinsic reality, for most of these
people were lacking in the first, the last, the foremost quality of
the artist, without which he is lost: the ability to get out of his
own life the power to live and work by, to derive from his own
experience--as a fruit of all his seeing, feeling, living, joy and
bitter anguish--the palpable and living substance of his art.

Few of the people in Professor Hatcher's class possessed this
power.  Few of them had anything of their own to say.  Their lives
seemed to have grown from a stony and a fruitless soil and, as a
consequence, the plays they wrote did not reflect that life, save
by a curious and yet illuminating indirection.

Thus, in an extraordinary way, their plays--unreal, sterile,
imitative, and derivative as most of them indubitably were--often
revealed more about the lives of the people who wrote them than
better and more living work could do.  For, although few of the
plays showed any contact with reality--with that passionate
integument of blood and sweat and pain and fear and grief and joy
and laughter of which this world is made--most of them did show, in
one way or another, what was perhaps the basic impulse in the lives
of most of these people--the impulse which had brought them here to
Professor Hatcher's class.

The impulse of the people in the class was not to embrace life and
devour it, but rather to escape from it.  And in one way or another
most of the plays these people wrote were illustrative of this
desire.  For in these plays--unnatural, false, and imitative, as
they were--one could discern, in however pale and feeble a design,
a picture of the world not as its author had seen and lived and
known it, but rather as he wished to find it or believe in it.
And, in all their several forms--whether sad, gay, comic, tragic,
or fantastical--these plays gave evidence of the denial and the
fear of life.

The wealthy young dawdler from Philadelphia, for example, wrote
plays which had their setting in a charming little French café.
Here one was introduced to all the gay, quaint, charming Frenchmen--
to Papa Duval, the jolly proprietor, and Mamma Duval, his rotund
and no less jolly spouse, as well as to all the quaint and curious
habitués that are so prolific in theatrical establishments of this
order.  One met, as well, that fixture of these places: old
Monsieur Vernet, the crusty, crotchety, but kindly old gentleman
who is the café's oldest customer and has had the same table in the
corner by the window for more than thirty years.  One saw again the
familiar development of the comic situation--the day when Monsieur
Vernet enters at his appointed time and finds at his table a total
stranger.  Sacrilege!  Imprecations!  Tears, prayers, and
entreaties on the part of Papa Duval and his wife, together with
the stubborn refusal of the imperious stranger to move!  Climax:
old Monsieur Vernet storming out of the café, swearing that he will
never return.  Resolution of conflict: the efforts of Papa and
Mamma Duval to bring their most prized customer back into the fold
again, and their final success, the pacification and return of
Monsieur Vernet amid great rejoicing, thanks to a cunning stratagem
on the part of Henri, the young waiter, who wins a reward for all
these efforts, the hand of Mimi, Papa Duval's charming daughter,
from whom he has been separated by Papa Duval's stern decree.

Thus custom is restored and true love reunited by one brilliant
comic stroke!

And all this pretty little world, the contribution of a rich young
man who came from Philadelphia!  How perfectly God-damn delightful
it all was, to be sure!

The plays of old Seth Flint, the sour and withered ex-reporter,
were, if of a different colouring, cut from the same gaudy cloth of
theatrical unreality.  For forty years old Seth had pounded
precincts as a newsman, and had known city-rooms across the nation.
He had seen every crime, ruin, and incongruity of which man's life
is capable.  He was familiar with every trait of graft, with every
accursed smell and smear of the old red murder which ineradicably
fouled the ancient soul of man, and the stench of man's falseness,
treachery, cruelty, hypocrisy, cowardice, and injustice, together
with the look of brains and blood upon the pavements of the nation,
was no new thing to old Seth Flint.

His skin had been withered, his eyes deadened, his heart and spirit
burdened wearily, his faith made cynical, and his temper soured by
the black picture of mankind which he had seen as a reporter--and
because of this, in spite of this, he had remained or become--how,
why, in what miraculous fashion no one knew--a curiously honest,
sweet, and generous person, whose life had been the record of a
selfless loyalty.  He had known poverty, hardship, and self-
sacrifice, and endured all willingly without complaint: he had
taken the savings of a lifetime to send the two sons of his widowed
sister to college; he had supported this woman and her family for
years, and now, when his own life was coming to its close, he was
yielding to the only self-indulgence he had ever known--a year away
from the city-room of a Denver newspaper, a year away in the rare
ether, among the precious and æsthetic intellects of Professor
Hatcher's celebrated course, a year in which to realize the dream
of a lifetime, the vision of his youth--a year in which to write
the plays he had always dreamed of writing.  And what kind of plays
did he write?

Alas!  Old Seth did exactly what he set out to do; he succeeded
perfectly in fulfilling his desire--and, by a tragic irony, his
failure lay in just this fact.  The plays which he produced with an
astounding and prolific ease--("Three days is enough to write a
play," the old man said in his sour voice.  "You guys who take a
year to write a play give me a pain.  If you can't write a play a
week, you can't write anything; the play's no good")--these plays
were just the plays which he had dreamed of writing as a young man,
and therein was evident their irremediable fault.

For Seth's plays--so neat, brisk, glib, and smartly done--would
have been good plays in a commercial way, as well, if he had only
done them twenty years before.  He wrote, without effort and with
unerring accuracy, a kind of play which had been immensely popular
at the beginning of the twentieth century, but which people had
grown tired of twenty years before.  He wrote plays in which the
babies got mixed up in the maternity ward of a great hospital, in
which the rich man's child goes to the family of the little grocer,
and the grocer's child grows up as the heir to an enormous fortune,
with all the luxuries and securities of wealth around him.  And he
brought about the final resolution of this tangled scheme, the
meeting of these scrambled children and their bewildered parents,
with a skill of complication, a design of plot, a dexterity that
was astonishing.  His characters--all well-known types of the
theatre, as of nurse tough-spoken, shop-girl slangy, reporter
cynical, and so on--were well conceived to fret their purpose,
their lives well-timed and apt and deftly made.  He had mastered
the formula of an older type of "well-made play" with astonishing
success.  Only, the type was dead, the interest of the public in
such plays had vanished twenty years before.

So here he was, a live man, writing, with amazing skill, dead plays
for a theatre that was dead, and for a public that did not exist.

"Chekhov!  Ibsen!" old Seth would whine sourly with a dismissing
gesture of his parched old hand, and a scornful contortion of his
bitter mouth in his old mummy of a face.  "You guys all make me
tired the way you worship them!" he would whine out at some of the
exquisite young temperaments in Professor Hatcher's class.  "Those
guys can't write a play!  Take Chekhov, now!" whined Seth.  "That
guy never wrote a real play in his life!  He never knew how to
write a play!  He couldn't have written a play if he tried!  He
never learned the rules for writing a play!--That Cherry Orchard
now," whined old Seth with a sour sneering laugh, "--that Cherry
Orchard that you guys are always raving about!  That's not a play!"
he cried indignantly.  "Whatever made you think it was a play?  I
was trying to read it just the other day," he rasped, "and there's
nothing there to hold your interest!  It's got no PLOT!  There's no
story in it!  There's no suspense!  Nothing happens in it.  All you
got is a lot of people who do nothing but talk all the time.  You
never get anywhere," said Seth scornfully.  "And yet to hear you
guys rave about it, you'd think it was a great play."

"Well, what do you call a great play, then, if The Cherry Orchard
isn't one?" one of the young men said acidly.  "Who wrote the great
plays that you talk about?"

"Why, George M. Cohan wrote some," whined Seth instantly.  "That's
who.  Avery Hopwood wrote some great plays.  We've had plenty of
guys in this country who wrote great plays.  If they'd come from
Russia you'd get down and worship 'em," he said bitterly; "but just
because they came out of this country they're no good!"

In the relation of the class towards old Seth Flint, it was
possible to see the basic falseness of their relation towards life
everywhere around them.  For here was a man--whatever his defects
as a playwright might have been--who had lived incomparably the
richest, most varied and dangerous, and eventful life among them;
as he was himself far more interesting than any of the plays they
wrote, and as dramatists they should have recognized and understood
his quality.  But they saw none of this.  For their relation
towards life and people such as old Seth Flint was not one of
understanding.  It was not even one of burning indignation--of that
indignation which is one of the dynamic forces in the artist's
life.  It was rather one of supercilious scorn and ridicule.

They felt that they were "above" old Seth, and most of the other
people in the world, and for this reason they were in Professor
Hatcher's class.  Of Seth they said:

"He's really a misfit, terribly out of place here.  I wonder why he
came."

And they would listen to an account of one of Seth's latest errors
in good taste with the expression of astounded disbelief, the tones
of stunned incredulity which were coming into fashion about that
time among elegant young men.

"Not really! . . .  But he never really said THAT. . . .  You CAN'T
mean it."

"Oh, but I assure you, he did!"

". . . It's simply past belief! . . .  I can't believe he's as bad
as THAT."

"Oh, but he IS!  It's incredible, I know, but you've no idea what
he's capable of."  And so on.

And yet old Seth Flint was badly needed in that class: his bitter
and unvarnished tongue caused Professor Hatcher many painful
moments, but it had its use--oh, it had its use, particularly when
the play was of this nature:


Irene (slowly, with scorn and contempt in her voice).  So--it has
come to this!  This is all your love amounts to--a little petty
selfish thing!  I had thought you were bigger than that, John.

John (desperately).  But--but, my God, Irene--what am I to think?
I found you in bed with him--my best friend! (with difficulty).
You know--that looks suspicious, to say the least!

Irene (softly--with amused contempt in her voice).  You poor little
man!  And to think I thought your love was SO BIG.

John (wildly).  But I do love you, Irene.  That's just the point.

Irene (with passionate scorn).  Love!  You don't know what love
means!  Love is bigger than that!  Love is big enough for all
things, all people.  (She extends her arms in an all-embracing
gesture.)  My love takes in the world--it embraces all mankind!  It
is glamorous, wild, free as the wind, John.

John (slowly).  Then you have had other lovers?

Irene:  Lovers come, lovers go.  (She makes an impatient gesture.)
What is that?  Nothing!  Only love endures--my love, which is
greater than all.


Eugene would writhe in his seat, and clench his hands convulsively.
Then he would turn almost prayerfully to the bitter, mummied face
of old Seth Flint for that barbed but cleansing vulgarity that
always followed such a scene:

"Well?" Professor Hatcher would say, putting down the manuscript he
had been reading, taking off his eye-glasses (which were attached
to a ribbon of black silk) and looking around with a quizzical
smile, an impassive expression on his fine, distinguished face.
"Well?" he would say again urbanely, as no one answered.  "Is there
any comment?"

"What is she?"  Seth would break the nervous silence with his
rasping snarl.  "Another of these society whores?  You know," he
continued, "you can find plenty of her kind for three dollars a
throw without any of that fancy palaver."

Some of the class smiled faintly, painfully, and glanced at each
other with slight shrugs of horror; others were grateful, felt
pleasure well in them and said underneath their breath exultantly:

"Good old Seth!  Good old Seth!"

"Her love is big enough for all things, is it?" said Seth.  "I know
a truck driver out in Denver I'll match against her any day."

Eugene and Ed Horton, a large and robust aspirant from the Iowa
cornlands, roared with happy laughter, poking each other sharply in
the ribs.



"Do you think the play will act?" someone said.  "It seems to me
that it comes pretty close to closet drama."

"If you ask me," said Seth, "it comes pretty close to water-closet
drama. . . .  No," he said sourly.  "What that boy needs is a
little experience.  He ought to go out and get him a woman and get
all this stuff off his mind.  After that, he might sit down and
write a play."

For a moment there was a very awkward silence, and Professor
Hatcher smiled a trifle palely.  Then, taking his eye-glasses with
a distinguished movement, he looked around and said:

"Is there any other comment?"



XVII


Often during these years of fury, hunger, and unrest, when he was
trying to read all the books and know all the people, he would live
for days, and even for weeks, in a world of such mad and savage
concentration, such terrific energy, that time would pass by him
incredibly, while he tried to eat and drink the earth, stare his
way through walls of solid masonry into the secret lives of men,
until he had made the substance of all life his own.

And during all this time, although he was living a life of the most
savage conflict, the most blazing energy, wrestling day by day with
the herculean forces of the million-footed city, listening to a
million words and peering into a hundred thousand faces, he would
nevertheless spend a life of such utter loneliness that he would go
for days at a time without seeing a face or hearing a voice that he
knew, and until the sound of his own voice seemed strange and
phantasmal to him.

Then suddenly he would seem to awake out of this terrific vision,
which had been so savage, mad, and literal that its very reality
had a fabulous and dreamlike quality, and time, strange million-
visaged time, had been telescoped incredibly, so that weeks had
passed by like a single day.  He would awake out of this living
dream and see the minutes, hours, and days, and all the acts and
faces of the earth pass by him in their usual way.  And instantly,
when this happened, he would feel a bitter and intolerable
loneliness--a loneliness so acrid, grey, and bitter that he could
taste its sharp thin crust around the edges of his mouth like the
taste and odour of weary burnt-out steel, like a depleted storage
battery or a light that had gone dim, and he could feel it greyly
and intolerably in his entrails, the conduits of his blood, and in
all the substance of his body.

When this happened, he would feel an almost unbearable need to hear
the voice and see the face again of someone he had known and at
such a time as this he would go to see his Uncle Bascom, that
strange and extraordinary man who, born like the others in the
wilderness, the hills of home, had left these hills for ever.

Bascom now lived alone with his wife (for his four children were
grown up and would have none of him) in a dingy section of one of
the innumerable suburbs that form part of the terrific ganglia of
Boston, and it was here that the boy would often go on Sundays.

After a long confusing journey that was made by subway, elevated,
and street car, he would leave the chill and dismal street car at
the foot of a hill on a long, wide, and frozen street lined with
tall rows of wintry elms, with smoky wintry houses that had a look
of solid, closed and mellow warmth, and with a savage frozen waste
of tidal waters on the right--those New England waters that are so
sparkling, fresh and glorious, like a tide of sapphires, in the
springtime, and so grim and savage in their frozen desolation in
the winter.

Then the street car would bang its draughty sliding doors together,
grind harshly off with its cargo of people with pinched lips, thin
red pointed noses, and cod-fish faces, and vanish, leaving him with
the kind of loneliness and absence which a street car always leaves
when it has gone, and he would turn away from the tracks along a
dismal road or street that led into the district where his uncle
had his house.  And stolidly he would plunge forward against the
grey and frozen desolation of that place to meet him.

And at length he would pause before his uncle's little house, and
as he struck the knocker, he was always glad to hear the
approaching patter of his Aunt Louise's feet, and cheered by the
brightening glance of her small birdy features, as she opened the
door for him, inwardly exultant to hear her confirm in her bright
ladylike tones his own prediction of what she would say:  "Oh,
THEAH you ah!  I was wondering what was keeping you."

A moment later he would be greeted from the cellar or the kitchen
by his uncle Bascom's high, husky and yet strangely remote yell,
the voice of a prophet calling from a mountain:

"Hello, Eugene, my boy.  Is that YOU?"  And a moment later the old
man would appear, coming up to meet him from some lower cellar-
depth, swearing, muttering, and banging doors; and he would come
toward him howling greetings, buttoned to his chin in the frayed
and faded sweater, gnarled, stooped and frosty-looking, clutching
his great hands together at his waist; then hold one gaunt hand out
to him and howl:

"Hello, hello, hello, sit down, sit down, sit down," after which,
for no apparent reason, he would contort his gaunt face in a
horrible grimace, convolve his amazing rubbery lips, and close his
eyes and his mouth tightly and laugh through his nose in forced
snarls:  "Phuh!  Phuh Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!"



Bascom Pentland had been the scholar of his amazing family: he was
a man of powerful intelligence and disordered emotions.  Even in
his youth, his eccentricities of dress, speech, walk, manner had
made him an object of ridicule to his Southern kinsmen, but their
ridicule was streaked with pride, since they accepted the impact of
his personality as another proof that theirs was an extraordinary
family.  "He's one of 'em, all right," they said exultantly,
"queerer than any of us!"

Bascom's youth, following the war between the States, had been
seared by a bitter poverty, at once enriched and warped by a life
that clung to the earth with a rootlike tenacity that was manual,
painful, spare and stricken, and that rebuilt itself--fiercely,
cruelly, and richly--from the earth.  And because there burned and
blazed in him from the first a hatred of human indignity, a
passionate avowal of man's highness and repose, he felt more
bitterly than the others the delinquencies of his father, and the
multiplication of his father's offspring, who came regularly into a
world of empty cupboards.

"As each of them made its unhappy entrance into the world," he
would say later, his voice tremulous with passion, "I went out into
the woods striking my head against the trees, and blaspheming God
in my anger.  Yes, sir," he continued, pursing his long lip rapidly
against his few loose upper teeth, and speaking with an exaggerated
pedantry of enunciation, "I am not ashamed to confess that I did.
For we were living in conditions un-WORTHY--UNWORTHY"--his voice
rising to an evangelical yell, "I had almost said--of the condition
of animals.  And--SAY--what do you think?"--he said, with a sudden
shift in manner and tone, becoming, after his episcopal declaration,
matter of fact and whisperingly confidential.  "Why, do you know,
my boy, at one time I had to take my OWN father aside and point out
to him we were living in no way becoming decent people."--Here his
voice sank to a whisper, and he tapped Eugene on the knee with his
big, stiff finger, grimacing horribly and pursing his lip against
his dry upper teeth.

Poverty had been the mistress of his youth and Bascom Pentland had
not forgotten: poverty had burned its way into his heart.  He took
what education he could find in a backwoods school, read everything
he could, taught, for two or three years, in a country school and,
at the age of twenty-one, borrowing enough money for railway fare,
went to Boston to enrol himself at Harvard.  And, somehow, because
of the fire that burned in him, the fierce determination of his
soul, he had been admitted, secured employment waiting on tables,
tutoring, and pressing everyone's trousers but his own, and lived
in a room with two other starved wretches on $3.50 a week, cooking,
eating, sleeping, washing, and studying in the one place.

At the end of seven years he had gone through the college and the
school of theology, performing brilliantly in Greek, Hebrew, and
metaphysics.

Poverty, fanatical study, the sexual meagreness of his surroundings,
had made of him a gaunt zealot: at thirty he was a lean fanatic, a
true Yankee madman, high-boned, with grey thirsty eyes and a thick
flaring sheaf of oaken hair--six feet three inches of gangling and
ludicrous height, gesticulating madly and obliviously before a
grinning world.  But he had a grand lean head: he looked somewhat
like the great Ralph Waldo Emerson--with the brakes off.

About this time he married a young Southern woman of a good family:
she was from Tennessee, her parents were both dead, and in the
'seventies she had come North and had lived for several years with
an uncle in Providence, who had been constituted guardian of her
estate, amounting probably to about $75,000, although her romantic
memory later multiplied the sum to $200,000.  The man squandered
part of her money and stole the rest: she came, therefore, to
Bascom without much dowry, but she was pretty, bright, intelligent,
and had a good figure.  Bascom smote the walls of his room with
bloody knuckles, and fell down before God.

When Bascom met her she was a music student in Boston: she had a
deep full-toned contralto voice which was wrung from her somewhat
tremulously when she sang.  She was a small woman, birdlike and
earnest, delicately fleshed and boned, quick and active in her
movements and with a crisp tart speech which still bore, curiously,
traces of a Southern accent.  She was a brisk, serious, ladylike
little person, without much humour, and she was very much in love
with her gaunt suitor.  They saw each other for two years: they
went to concerts, lectures, sermons; they talked of music, poetry,
philosophy and of God, but they never spoke of love.  But one night
Bascom met her in the parlour of her boarding-house on Huntington
Avenue, and with a voice vibrant and portentous with the importance
of the words he had to utter, began as follows:  "Miss Louise!" he
said carefully, gazing thoughtfully over the apex of his hands,
"there comes a time when a man, having reached an age of discretion
and mature judgment, must begin to consider one of the GRAVEST--
yes! by all means one of the most important events in human life.
The event I refer to is--matrimony."  He paused, a clock was
beating out its punctual measured tock upon the mantel, and a horse
went by with ringing hoofs upon the street.  As for Louise, she sat
quietly erect, with dignified and ladylike composure, but it seemed
to her that the clock was beating in her own breast, and that it
might cease to beat at any moment.

"For a minister of the Gospel," Bascom continued, "the decision is
particularly grave, because, for him--once made, it is IRREVOCABLE,
once determined upon, it must be followed INEXORABLY, RELENTLESSLY--
aye! to the edge of the grave, to the UTTERMOST gates of death, so
that the possibility of an error in judgment is FRAUGHT"--his voice
sinking to a boding whisper--"is FRAUGHT with the most terrible
consequences.  Accordingly," Uncle Bascom said in a deliberate
tone, "having decided to take this step, realizing to the FULL--to
the FULL, mind you--its gravity, I have searched my soul, I have
questioned my heart.  I have gone up into the mount-ings and out
into the desert and communed with my MAKER until"--his voice rose
like a demon's howl--"there no longer remains an ATOM of doubt, a
PARTICLE of uncertainty, a VESTIGE of DISBELIEF!  Miss Louise, I
have decided that the young lady best fitted in every way to be my
helpmate, the partner of my joys and griefs, the confidante of my
dearest hopes, the in-SPIR-a-tion of my noblest endeavours, the
companion of my declining years, and the SPIRIT that shall
accompany me along each step of life's vexed and troubled way,
sharing with me whatever God in His INSCRUTABLE Providence shall
will, whether of wealth or poverty, grief or happiness--I have
decided, Miss Louise, that that lady must be--yourself!--and,
therefore, I request," he said slowly and impressively, "the honour
of your hand in mar-ri-age."

She loved him, she had hoped, prayed, and agonized for just such a
moment, but now that it had come she rose immediately with ladylike
dignity, and said:  "Mistah Pentland: I am honuhed by this mahk of
yoah esteem and affection, and I pwomise to give it my most UNnest
considahwation without delay.  I wealize fully, Mistah Pentland,
the gwavity of the wuhds you have just uttuhed.  Foh my paht, I
must tell you, Mistah Pentland, that if I accept yoah pwoposal, I
shall come to you without the fawchun which was WIGHTfully mine,
but of which I have been depwived and defwauded by the WASCALITY--
yes! the WASCALITY of my gahdian.  I shall come to you, theahfoh,
without the dow'y I had hoped to be able to contwibute to my
husband's fawchuns."

"Oh, my DEAR Miss Louise!  My DEAR young lady!" Uncle Bascom cried,
waving his great hand through the air with a dismissing gesture.
"Do not suppose--do not for one instant suppose, I beg of you!--
that consideration of a monetary nature could influence my
decision.  Oh, not in the slightest!" he cried.  "Not at all, not
at all!"

"Fawchnatly," Louise continued, "my inhewitance was not WHOLLY
dissipated by this scoundwel.  A pohtion, a vewy small pohtion,
remains."

"My dear girl!  My dear young lady!" Uncle Bascom cried.  "It is
not of the SLIGHTEST consequence. . . .  How much did he leave?" he
added.

Thus they were married.

Bascom immediately got a church in the Middle West: good pay and a
house.  But during the course of the next twenty years he was
shifted from church to church, from sect to sect--to Brooklyn, then
back to the Middle West, to the Dakotas, to Jersey City, to Western
Massachusetts, and finally back to the small towns surrounding
Boston.

When Bascom talked, you may be sure God listened: he preached
magnificently, his gaunt face glowing from the pulpit, his rather
high, enormously vibrant voice husky with emotion.  His prayers
were fierce solicitations of God, so mad with fervour that his
audiences uncomfortably felt they came close to blasphemy.  But,
unhappily, on occasions his own mad eloquence grew too much for
him: his voice, always too near the heart of passion, would burst
in splinters, and he would fall violently forward across his
lectern, his face covered by his great gaunt fingers, sobbing
horribly.

This, in the Middle West, where his first church had been, does not
go down so well--yet it may be successful if one weeps mellowly,
joyfully--smiling bravely through the tears--at a lovely aisle
processional of repentant sinners; but Bascom, who chose
uncomfortable titles for his sermons, would be overcome by his
powerful feelings on those occasions when his topic was "Potiphar's
Wife," "Ruth, the Girl in the Corn," "The Whore of Babylon," "The
Woman on the Roof," and so on.

His head was too deeply engaged with his conscience--he was in turn
Episcopal, Presbyterian, Unitarian, searching through the whole
roaring confusion of Protestantism for a body of doctrine with
which he could agree.  And he was for ever finding it, and later
for ever renouncing what he had found.  At forty, the most liberal
of Unitarians, the strains of agnosticism were piping madly through
his sermons: he began to hint at his new faith in prose which he
modelled on the mighty utterance of Carlyle, and in poetry, in what
he deemed the manner of Matthew Arnold.  His professional
connection with the Unitarians, and indeed with the Baptists,
Methodists, Holy Rollers, and Seventh Day Adventists, came to an
abrupt ending after he read from his pulpit one morning a
composition in verse entitled "The Agnostic," which made up in
concision what it lacked in melody, and which ended each stanza
sadly, but very plainly, on this recurrence:


     "I do not know:
      It may be so."


Thus, when he was almost fifty, Bascom Pentland stopped preaching
in public.  There was no question where he was going.  He had his
family's raging lust for property.  He became a "conveyancer"; he
acquired enough of the law of property to convey titles; but he
began to buy pieces of land in the suburbs of Boston and to build
small cheap houses, using his own somewhat extraordinary designs to
save the architect's fees and, wherever possible, doing such odd
jobs as laying the foundations, installing the plumbing, and
painting the structure.

The small houses that he--no, he did not build them!--he went
through the agonies of monstrous childbirth to produce them, he
licked, nursed, and fondled them into stunted growth, and he sold
them on long but profitable terms to small Irish, Jewish, Negro,
Belgian, Italian and Greek labourers and tradesmen.  And at the
conclusion of a sale, or after receiving from one of these men the
current payment, Uncle Bascom went homeward in a delirium of joy,
shouting in a loud voice, to all who might be compelled to listen,
the merits of the Jews, Belgians, Irish, Swiss or Greeks.

"Finest people in the world!  No question about it!"--this last
being his favourite exclamation in all moments of payment or
conviction.

For when they paid he loved them.  Often on Sundays they would come
to pay him, tramping over the frozen ground or the packed snow
through street after street of smutty grey-looking houses in the
flat weary-looking suburb where he lived.  To this dismal heath,
therefore, they came, the swarthy children of a dozen races, clad
in the hard and decent blacks in which the poor pay debts and go to
funerals.  They would advance across the barren lands, the harsh
sere earth scarred with its wastes of rust and rubbish, going
stolidly by below the blank board fences of a brick yard, crunching
doggedly through the lanes of dirty rutted ice, passing before the
grey besmutted fronts of wooden houses which in their stark,
desolate, and unspeakable ugliness seemed to give a complete and
final utterance to an architecture of weariness, sterility and
horror, so overwhelming in its absolute desolation that it seemed
as if the painful and indignant soul of man must sicken and die at
length before it, stricken, stupefied, and strangled without a
tongue to articulate the curse that once had blazed in him.

And at length they would pause before the old man's little house--
one of a street of little houses which he had built there on the
barren flatlands of the suburb, and to which he had given
magnificently his own name--Pentland Heights--although the only
eminence in all that flat and weary waste was an almost
imperceptible rise a half-mile off.  And here along this street
which he had built, these little houses, warped yet strong and
hardy, seemed to burrow down solidly like moles for warmth into the
ugly stony earth on which they were built and to cower and huddle
doggedly below the immense and terrible desolation of the northern
sky, with its rimy sun-hazed lights, its fierce and cruel rags and
stripes of wintry red, its raw and savage harshness.  And then,
gripping their greasy little wads of money, as if in the knowledge
that all reward below these fierce and cruel skies must be wrenched
painfully and minutely from a stony earth, they went in to pay him.
He would come up to meet them from some lower cellar-depth,
swearing, muttering, and banging doors; and he would come toward
them howling greetings, buttoned to his chin in the frayed and
faded sweater, gnarled, stooped and frosty-looking, clutching his
great hands together at his waist.  Then they would wait, stiffly,
clumsily, fingering their hats, while with countless squints and
grimaces and pursings of the lip, he scrawled out painfully their
receipts--their fractional release from debt and labour, one more
hard-won step toward the freedom of possession.

At length, having pocketed their money and finished the
transaction, he would not permit them to depart at once; he would
howl urgently at them an invitation to stay, he would offer long
weedy-looking cigars to them, and they would sit uncomfortably,
crouching on their buttock bones like stalled oxen, at the edges of
chairs, shyly and dumbly staring at him, while he howled question,
comment, and enthusiastic tribute at them.

"Why, my dear sir!" he would yell at Makropolos, the Greek.  "You
have a glorious past, a history of which any nation might well be
proud!"

"Sure, sure!" said Makropolos, nodding vigorously.  "Beeg
Heestory!"

"The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!" the old man howled,
"where burning Sappho loved and sung--" (Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!
phuh!)

"Sure, sure!" said Makropolos again, nodding good-naturedly but
wrinkling his lowering finger's-breadth of brow in a somewhat
puzzled fashion.  "Tha's right!  You got it!"

"Why, my dear sir!" Uncle Bascom cried.  "It has been the ambition
of my lifetime to visit those hallowed scenes, to stand at sunrise
on the Acropolis, to explore the glory that was Greece, to see the
magnificent ruins of the noblest of ancient civ-i-LIZ-a-tions!"

For the first time a dark flush, a flush of outraged patriotism,
began to burn upon the swarthy yellow of Mr. Makropolos's cheek:
his manner became heavy and animated, and in a moment he said with
passionate conviction:

"No, no, no!  No ruin!  Wat you t'ink, eh!  Athens fine town!  We
got a million pipples dere!"  He struggled for a word, then cupped
his hairy paws indefinitely:  "YOU know?  BEEG!  O, ni-ez!" he
added greasily, with a smile.  "Everyt'ing good!  We got everyt'ing
good dere as you got here!  YOU know?" he said with a confiding and
painful effort.  "Everyt'ing ni-ez!  Not old!  No, no, no!" he
cried with a rising and indignant vigour.  "New! de same as here.
Ni-ez!  You get good and cheap--everyt'ing!  Beeg place, new house,
dumbwaiter, elevator--wat chew like!--oh, ni-ez!" he said
earnestly.  "Wat chew t'ink it cost, eh?  Feefateen dollar a month!
Sure, sure!" he nodded with a swarthy earnestness.  "I wouldn't
keed you!"

"Finest people on earth!" Uncle Bascom cried with an air of great
conviction and satisfaction.  "No question about it!"--and he would
usher his visitor to the door, howling farewells into the terrible
desolation of those savage skies.

Meanwhile, Aunt Louise, although she had not heard a word of what
was said, although she had listened to nothing except the periods
of Uncle Bascom's heavily accented and particular speech, kept up a
constant snuffling laughter punctuated momently by faint whoops as
she bent over her pots and pans in the kitchen, pausing from time
to time as if to listen, and then snuffling to herself as she shook
her head in pitying mirth which rose again up to the crisis of a
faint crazy cackle as she scoured the pan; because, of course,
during the forty-five years of her life with him she had gone
thoroughly, imperceptibly, and completely mad, and no longer knew
or cared to know whether these words had just been spoken or were
the echoes of lost voices long ago.

And again, she would pause to listen, with her small birdlike
features uplifted gleefully in a kind of mad attentiveness as the
door slammed and he stumped muttering back into the house, intent
upon the secret designs of his own life, as remote and isolate from
her as if they had each dwelt on separate planets, although the
house they lived in was a small one.



Such had been the history of the old man.  His life had come up
from the wilderness, the buried past, the lost America.  The potent
mystery of old events and moments had passed around him, and the
magic light of dark time fell across him.

Like all men in this land, he had been a wanderer, an exile on the
immortal earth.  Like all of us, he had no home.  Wherever great
wheels carried him was home.

As the old man and his nephew talked together, Louise would prepare
the meal in the kitchen, which gave on the living-room where they
ate, by a swing door that she kept open, in order that she might
hear what went on.  And, while they waited, Uncle Bascom would talk
to the boy on a vast range of subjects, dealing with that
literature in which he had once been deep--the poetry of the Old
Testament, the philosophy of Hegel, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold,
whom he worshipped, or some question in the daily papers.

Uncle Bascom, seated, his fine gaunt face grave, magnificently
composed now above his arched gnarled hands, spoke with eloquent
deliberation.  He became triumphant reasoning mind: he talked with
superb balanced judgment.  All the tumult and insanity of his life
had been forgotten: no question of money or of self was involved.
Meanwhile, from the kitchen Aunt Louise kept up a constant
snuffling laughter, punctuated momently by faint whoops.  She was
convinced, of course, that her husband was mad and all his opinions
nonsensical.  Yet she had not listened to a word of what he was
saying, but only to the sound of his heavily accented, precise, and
particular speech.  From time to time, snuffling to herself, she
would look in on Eugene, trembling with laughter, and shake her
head at him in pitying mirth.

"BEYOND a doubt!  Beyond a DOUBT!" Uncle Bascom would say.  "The
quality of the best writing in the books of the Old Testament may
take rank with the best writing that has ever been done, but you
are right in believing, too, the amount of great writing is less
than it is commonly supposed to be.  There are passages, nay!
BOOKS"--his voice rising strangely to a husky howl--"of the vilest
rubbish--Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth--O vile! vile!" he cried. . . .
"And Azariah begat Amariah and Amariah begat Ahitub (Phuh!
Phuh!  Phuh!).  AHITUB!" he sneered.  "And Azariah begat Seraiah,
and Seraiah begat Jehozadak (Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!) JEHOZADAK"--he
sneered with his precise articulation, finally letting out the last
syllable with a kind of snarling contempt.  "Can you IMAGINE, can
you even DREAM," he howled, "of calling anyone a name like that!
'And Jehozadak went into captivity'--as, indeed, he ought! (phuh!
phuh! phuh!)--his VERY name would constitute a PENAL offence!
(Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!) JeHOZadak!" Uncle Bascom sneered.  "But," he
proceeded deliberately in a moment, as he stared calmly over his
great arched hands, "--but--the quality of some of the language is
God-intoxicated: the noblest poetry ever chanted in the service of
eternity."

"The Book of Wevelations," cried Aunt Louise, suddenly rushing out
of the kitchen with a carving-knife in her hand, having returned to
earth for a moment to hear him.  "The Book of Wevelations!" she
said in a hoarse whisper, her mouth puckered with disgust.
"EUGENE!  A WICKED, bloo-o-edy, kwu-u-el monument to supahstition.
Twibute to an avenging and MUH-DUH-WOUS GAWD!"  The last word
uttered in a hoarse almost inaudible whisper would find his aunt
bent double, clutching a knife in one hand, with her small bright
eyes glaring madly at us.

"Oh no, my dear, oh no," said Uncle Bascom, with astonishing,
unaccustomed sadness, with almost exquisite gentleness.  And, his
vibrant passionate voice thrilling suddenly with emotion, he added:

"The triumphant music of one of the mightiest of earth's poets: the
sublime utterance of a man for whom God had opened the mysteries of
heaven and hell."

He paused a moment, then quietly in a remote voice--in that remote
and magnificent voice which could thrill men so deeply when it
uttered poetry, he continued:  "'I am Alpha and Omega, the first
and the last, the beginning and the end'--the mightiest line, my
dear boy, the most magnificent poetry, that was ever written."  And
suddenly Uncle Bascom threw his gaunt hands before his face, and
wept in strong hoarse sobs:  "Oh, my God, my God!--the beauty, the
pity of it all! . . .  You must pardon me," he whispered after a
moment, drawing his faded sweater sleeve across his eyes.  "You
must pardon me.  It brought back--memories."

Aunt Louise, who had been stricken with a kind of fear and horror
when he began to weep, now looked at Eugene with an expression of
strong physical disgust, almost of nausea, shaking her head
slightly in an affronted and ladylike manner as might one who,
having achieved healthy and courageous discipline over all the
excesses of emotion, feels only contempt for him who gives way to
them.

She retired now with exaggerated dignity to the kitchen, served the
meal, and addressed Eugene for some time thereafter with absurd
quietness and restraint of manner, and a kind of stiff primness
about her backbone.  She was an excellent cook; there was magic in
her treatment of food, and on the occasions when Eugene was coming
out, she insisted that Bascom get her a decent piece of meat to
work with.

There would be a juicy fragrant piece of lamb, or a boiled leg of
mutton with currant jelly, or perhaps a small crisply browned roast
of beef, with small flaky biscuits, smoking hot, two or three
vegetables, and rich coffee.  Uncle Bascom, quite unperturbed by
his outbreak, would stamp into the kitchen, where he could be heard
swearing and muttering to himself, as he searched for various
things.  Later he would appear at the table bearing a platter
filled with some revolting mess of his own concoction--a mixture of
raw vegetables, chopped up--onions, carrots, beans, and raw
potatoes--for he had the full strength of his family's mania
concerning food, violent prejudices about its preparation, and
deep-seated distrust of everybody's cleanliness but his own.

"Have some, my boy.  Have some!" he would yell huskily, seating
himself and lunging toward Eugene with the awful mess, in a gesture
of violent invitation.

"Thank you, no."  Eugene would try to keep his eyes averted from
the mess and focus on the good food heaping his plate.

"You may eat that slop if you want to," Uncle Bascom would exclaim
with a scornful and sneering laugh.  "It would give ME my death of
dyspepsia."  And the silence of their eating would be broken by the
recurrent snuffling whoops of Aunt Louise, accompanied by many
pitying looks and head-shakes as she trembled with laughter and hid
her mouth.

Or, suddenly, in the full rich progress of the meal, Eugene would
be shocked out of his pleasure in the food by the mad bright eyes
of Aunt Louise bearing fiercely down upon him:

"Eugene!--don't bwood, boy!  Don't bwood!  You've got it in you--
it's in the blood!  You're one of them.  You're one of THEM!--a
PENTLAND," she croaked fatally.

"Ah-h--you DON'T know what you're talking about"--thus suddenly in
fierce distemper Uncle Bascom.  "SCOTCH!  SCOTCH-Irish!  Finest
people on earth!  No question about it whatever."

"Fugitive ideation!  Fugitive ideation!" she chattered like a
monkey over a nut.  "Mind goes off in all diwections.  Can't stick
to anything five minutes at a time.  The same thing that's wong
with the moduhn decadents.  Wead Nordau's book, Eugene.  It will
open yoah eyes," and she whispered hoarsely again:  "You're OVAH-
SEXED--ALL of you!"

"Bosh!  Bosh!" growled Uncle Bascom.  "Some more of your
psychology--the BASTARD of superstition and quackery: the black
magic of little minds--the effort of a blind man (phuh! phuh!
phuh!) crawling about in a dark room (phuh! phuh!) looking for a
BLACK CAT (phuh! phuh!) that ISN'T THERE," he yelled triumphantly,
and closed his eyes and snarled and snuffled down his nose with
laughter.

He knew nothing about it: occasionally he still read Kant, and he
could be as deep in absolute categories, moments of negation, and
definitions of a concept as she with all of her complicated and
extensive paraphernalia of phobias, complexes, fixations, and
repressions.

"Well, Eugene," thus Aunt Louise with light raillery and yet with
eager curiosity, "have you found you a nice wosy-cheeked New
England gul yet?  You had bettah watch OUT, boy!  I tell you, you
had bettah watch OUT!" she declared, kittenishly, wagging her
finger at him, before he had time to answer.

"If he has," said Uncle Bascom grimly, "he will find her sadly
lacking in the qualities of delicacy, breeding, and womanly decorum
that the Southern girl has.  Oh, yes!  No question about that
whatever!" for Uncle Bascom still had the passionate loyalty and
sentimental affection for the South that many Southerners have who
could not be induced, under any circumstances, to return.

"Take a Nawthun gul, Eugene."  Aunt Louise became at once
combative.  "They're bettah for you!  They are BETTAH.  They are
BETTAH!" she declared, shaking her head in an obdurate manner, as
if further argument was useless.  "Moah independence!  Bettah
minds!  They won't choke yoah life out by hanging awound yoah
neck," she concluded crisply.

"I will tell you a story," Uncle Bascom continued deliberately as
if she had not spoken, "that will illustrate admirably what I
mean."  Here he cleared his throat, as if he were preparing to
deliver a set speech, and began in a deliberate and formal tone:
"Some years ago I had occasion to go to Portland, Maine, on
business.  When I arrived at the North Station I found a crowd
waiting before the window: it was necessary for me to wait in line.
I was carrying a small valise which I placed on the floor between
my legs in order to get out the money for my ticket.  At this
moment the woman who stood behind me, apparently not given to
noticing very well where she was going," he snarled bitterly,
"started to move forward and stubbed her toe against the valise.
Before I had time to turn round and apologize"--he stopped
abruptly, then, leaning forward with a horrible grimace, he tapped
Eugene stiffly with his great bony fingers and continued in a
lowered voice:  "Say!  Have you any idea what she did, my boy?"

"No," Eugene said.

"Why, I give you my word, my boy," he whispered solemnly, "without
so much as 'By your leave,' she lifted her leg and KICKED me,
KICKED me"--he howled--"in the STERN!  And SHE, my boy, was a New
England woman."

"Whoo-o-op!"  Aunt Louise was off again, rocking back and forth,
holding her napkin over her mouth.

"Can you IMAGINE, can you DREAM," said Bascom, his voice an intense
whisper of disgust, "of a Southern lady, the flower of modesty and
the old aristocracy, doing such a thing as that?"

"Yes-s," hissed Aunt Louise, her cackle subsiding, leaning
intensely across the table and glaring at him, "and it SUHVED you
wight!  It SUHVED you wight!  It SUHVED you wight!  These things
would nevah happen if you thought of any one's convenience but yoah
own.  What WIGHT did you have to put yoah baggage there?  What
WIGHT?"

"Ah," he replied, with a kind of precise snarl, profoundly
contemptuous of her opinion, "you-don't-know-what-you're-talk-ing-
about!  What RIGHT? she says--Why all the right in the world," he
yelled.  "Have you ever read the conditions enumerated upon the
back of railway tickets concerning the transportation of baggage?"

"Suttinly not!" she retorted crisply.  "One does not need to wead
the backs of wailway tickets to learn how to behave like a
civilized pusson!"

"Well, I will tell them to you," said Uncle Bascom, licking his
lips, and with a look of joy upon his face.  And, at great length,
with infinite gusto, lip-pursing, and legal pedantry of elocution,
he would enumerate them all.

"And say, by the way, Eugene," he would continue without a halt,
"there is a very charming young lady who occasionally comes to my
office (with her mother, of course) who is very anxious to meet
you.  She is a musician: she appears quite often in public.  They
live in Melrose, but they came, originally, I believe, from New
Hampshire.  Finest people in the world: no question about it," his
uncle said.

And suddenly alert, scenting adventure and seduction, the young man
got the address from him immediately.

"Yes, my boy"--here Uncle Bascom fumbled through a mass of
envelopes--"you may call her, without indiscretion, over the
telephone at any time.  I have spoken to her frequently about you:
no doubt you'll find much in common.  Or, SAY!"--here a flash of
inspiration aroused him to volcanic action--"I could call her now
and let you talk to her."  And he plunged violently toward the
telephone.

"No, no, no, no, no!"  Eugene sprang after him and checked him.
For he wanted to make his own appointment luxuriously in private,
sealed darkly in a telephone booth, craftily to feel his way,
speculating on the curve of the unseen hip by the sound of the
voice; probing, with the most delicate innuendo, the depth and
richness of the promise.  He loathed all family intercession and
interference: they placed, he felt, at the outset, a crushing
restraint upon the adventure from which it could never recover.

"I had rather call her myself," he added, "when I have more time.
I don't know when I could see her now: it might be awkward calling
at just this time."

Later, while Uncle Bascom was poking furiously at the meagre coals
of the tiny furnace in the cellar, setting up a clangorous and
smoky din all through the house, Aunt Louise would bear down madly
upon the boy, whispering:

"Did you hear him!  Did you hear him!  Still mad about the women at
his age!  Can't keep his hands off them!  The lechewous old fool!"
and she cackled bitterly.  Then, with a fierce change:  "He's MAD
about them, Eugene.  He's had one after anothah for the last twenty
yeahs!  He has spent FAW-CHUNS on them!  Have you seen that gul in
his office yet?  The stenographer?"

He had, and believed he had rarely seen a more solidly dull
unattractive female than this pallid course-featured girl.  But he
only said:  "Yes."

"He has spent thousands on her, Gene!  THOUSANDS!  The old fool!
And all they do is laugh at him behind his back.  Why, even at home
heah," her eyes darting madly about the place, "he can hardly keep
his hands off me at times!  I have to lock myself in my woom to
secure pwotection," and her bright old eyes muttered crazily about
in her head.

He thought these outbursts the result of frantic and extravagant
jealousy: fruit of some passionate and submerged affection that his
aunt still bore for her husband.  This, perhaps, was true, but
later he was to find there was a surprising modicum of fact in what
she had said.



During the wintry afternoon, he would sit and smoke one of his
uncle's corn-cob pipes, filling it with the coarse cheap powerful
tobacco that lay, loosely spread, upon a bread-board in the
kitchen.

Meanwhile, his aunt, on these usual Sundays when she must remain at
home, played entire operas from Wagner on her small victrola.

Most of the records had been given her by her two daughters, and
during the week the voices of the music afforded her the only
companionship she had.  The boy listened attentively to all she
said about music, because he knew little about it, and had got from
poetry the kind of joy that music seemed to give to others.
Shifting the records quickly, his aunt would point out the
melodramatic effervescence of the Italians, the metallic precision,
the orderly profusion, the thrill, the vibration, the emptiness of
French composition.  She liked the Germans and the Russians.  She
liked what she called the "barbaric splendour" of Rimsky, but was
too late, of course, either to have heard or to care much for the
modern composers.

She would play Wagner over and over again, lost in the enchanted
forests of the music, her spirit wandering drunkenly down vast
murky aisles of sound, through which the great hoarse throats of
horns were baying faintly.  And occasionally, on Sundays, on one of
her infrequent excursions into the world, when her daughters bought
her tickets for concerts at Symphony Hall--that great grey room
lined on its sides with pallid plaster shells of Greece--she would
sit perched high, a sparrow held by the hypnotic serpent's eye of
music--following each motif, hearing minutely each subtle entry of
the mellow flutes, the horns, the spinal ecstasy of violins--until
her lonely and desolate life was spun out of her into aerial
fabrics of bright sound.

During this time, Uncle Bascom, who also knew nothing about music,
and cared so little for it that he treated his wife's passion for
it with contempt, would bury himself in the Sunday papers, or thumb
deliberately through the pages of an ancient edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica in search of arbitrament for some contested
point.

"Ah!  Here we are, just as I thought," he would declare suddenly,
with triumphant satisfaction.  "'Upon the fifth, however, in spite
of the heavy rains which had made of the roads quaking bogs,
Jackson appeared suddenly from the South, at the head of an army of
33,000 men.'"

Then they would wrangle furiously over the hour, the moment, the
place of dead event: each rushing from the room fiercely to produce
the document which would support his own contention.

"Your aunt, my boy, is not the woman she once was," Bascom would
say regretfully during her absence.  "No question about that!  At
one time she was a very remarkable woman!  Yes, sir, a woman of
very considerable intelligence--considerable, that is, for a
woman," he said, with a slight sneer.

And she, whispering, when he had gone:  "You have noticed, of
course, Gene?"

"What?"

"His mind's going," she muttered.  "What a head he had fifteen
years ago!  But NOW!--Senile decay--G. Stanley Hall--forgets
everything--" she whispered hoarsely, as she heard his returning
footfalls.

Or, as the winter light darkened greyly, slashed on the western sky
by fierce cold red, his uncle passed sheaf after sheaf of his verse
to him, sniggering nosily, and prodding the boy with his great
fingers, while his aunt cleared the table or listened to the music.
The great majority of these verses, laboured and pedantic as they
were, were variations of the motif of agnosticism, the horn on
which his ministry in the Church had fatally gored itself--and
still a brand that smouldered in his brain--not now so much from an
all-mastering conviction, as from some desire to justify himself.
These verses, which he asserted were modelled on those of his great
hero, Matthew Arnold, were all remarkably like this one:


                 MY CREED

     "Is there a land beyond the stars
      Where we may find eternal day,
      Life after death, peace after wars?
      Is there?  I cannot say.
      Shall we find there a happier life,
      All joy that here we never know,
      Love in all things, an end of strife?
      Perhaps: it may be so."


And so on.

And sniggering down his nose, Bascom would prod the young man
stiffly with his great fingers, saying, as he slyly thrust another
verse into his hand:

"Something in a lighter vein, my boy.  Just a little foolishness,
you know.  (Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh!  Phuh)"  Which was:


     "Mary had a little calf,
      It followed up her leg,
      And everywhere that Mary went,
      The boys were sure to beg."


And so on.

Uncle Bascom had hundreds of them:  Poems--Chiefly Religious, he
sent occasionally to the morning papers.  They were sometimes
printed in the Editor's Correspondence or The Open Forum.  But
Poems--Chiefly Profane he kept apparently for his own regalement.



Then, as it darkened, toward five o'clock, the boy would depart,
leaving them at times bitterly involved in a political wrangle,
with the strewn Sunday numbers of The Boston Herald and The Boston
Post around them, she parroting intensely the newspaper jargon,
assaulting Borah and "the Senate iwweconcilables," he angrily
defending Senator Lodge as a scholar and a gentleman, with whom he
had not always been in agreement, but from whom he had once
received a most courteous letter--a fact which seemed to
distinguish him in Bascom's mind as the paragon of statesmanship.

And as Eugene left, he would note, with a swift inchoate pang, the
sudden mad loneliness in Aunt Louise's eyes, doomed for another
week to her grim imprisonment.  But he did not know that her
distended and exhausted heart hissed audibly each time she ascended
from futile labour on the cold furnace, stoked with cheap slag and
coke, and that her thin blood was fed by gristly butcher's
leavings, in answer to the doctor's call for meat.

And his aunt would go with Eugene to the frost-glazed door, open
it, and stand huddled meagrely and hugging herself together beneath
the savage desolation of the Northern cold; talking to him for a
moment and calling brightly after him as he went down the icy path:
"Come again, boy!  Always glad to see you!"

And in the dull cold Sunday light he strode away, his spirit braced
by the biting air, the Northern cold, the ragged bloody sky, which
was somehow prophetic to him of glorious fulfilment, and at the
same time depressed by the grey enormous weight of Sunday tedium
and dreariness all around him.

And yet, he never lost heart that out of this dullness he would
draw some rich adventure.  He strode away with quickening pulse,
hoping to see it issue from every warmly lighted house, to find it
in the street cars, the subway or at a restaurant.  Then he would
go back into the city and dine at one of the restaurants where the
pretty waitresses served him.  Later he would go out on the
sparsely peopled Sunday streets, turning finally, as a last resort,
into Washington Street, where the moving-picture places and cheap
vaudeville houses were filled with their Sunday Irish custom.

Sometimes he went in, but as one weary act succeeded the other, and
the empty brutal laughter of the people echoed in his ears, seeming
to him forced and dishonest, as if people laughed at the ghosts of
mirth, the rotten husks of stale wit, the sordidness, hopelessness,
and sterility of their lives oppressed him hideously.  On the stage
he would see the comedian again display his red neck-tie with a
leer, and hear the people laugh about it; he would hear again that
someone was a big piece of cheese, and listen to them roar; he
would observe again the pert and cheap young comedian with nothing
to offer waste time portentously, talk in a low voice with the
orchestra leader; and the only thing he liked would be the strength
and balance of the acrobats.

Finally, drowned in a sea-depth of grey horror, and with the weary
brutal laughter of the audience ringing in his ears, he would rush
out on the street again, filled with its hideous Sunday dullness
and the sterile wink of the chop-suey signs, and take the train to
Cambridge.

And there, as the night grew late, his spirit would surge up in
him; sunken in books at midnight, with the soft numb prescience of
brooding snow upon the air, the feeling of exultancy, joy, and
invincible strength would come back; and he was sure that the door
would open for him, the magic word be spoken, and that he would
make all of the glory, power, and beauty of the earth his own.



XVIII


One day the boy telephoned the girl of whom his Uncle Bascom had
spoken.  She was coy and cautious, but sounded hopeful: he liked
her voice.  When, after some subtle circumlocutions, he asked her
for an early meeting, she countered swiftly by asking him to meet
her the following evening at the North Station: she was coming in
to town to perform at a dinner.  She played the violin.  He
understood very well that she was really anxious to see him before
admitting him to the secure licence of a suburban parlour; so he
bathed himself, threw powder under his arm-pits, and put on a new
shirt, which he bought for the occasion.

It was November: rain fell coldly and drearily.  He buttoned
himself in his long raincoat and went to meet her.  She had
promised to wear a red carnation; the suggestion was her own, and
tickled him hugely.  As the pink-faced suburbanites poured, in an
icy stream, into the hot waiting-room, he looked for her.
Presently he saw her: she came toward him immediately, since his
height was unmistakable.  They talked excitedly flustered, but
gradually getting some preliminary sense of each other.

She was a rather tall, slender girl, dressed in garments that
seemed to have been left over, in good condition, from the early
part of the century.  She wore a flat but somehow towering hat: it
seemed to perch upon her head as do those worn by the Queen of
England.  She was covered with a long blue coat, which flared and
bustled at the hips, and had screws and curls of black corded
ornament; she looked respectable and antiquated, but her costume,
and a naïve stupidity in her manner, gave her a quaintness that he
liked.  He took her to the subway, having arranged a meeting at her
home for the following night.

The girl, whose name was Genevieve Simpson, lived with her mother
and her brother, a heavy young lout of nineteen years, in a two-
family house at Melrose.  The mother, a small, full, dumpling-face
woman, whose ordinary expression in repose, in common with that of
so many women of the middle class in America who have desired one
life and followed another and found perhaps that its few
indispensable benefits, as security, gregariousness, decorum, have
not been as all-sufficient as they had hoped, was one of sullen,
white, paunch-eyed discontent.

It was this inner petulance, the small carping disparagement of
everyone and everything that entered the mean light of her world,
that made absurdly palpable the burlesque mechanism of social
heartiness.  Looking at her while she laughed with shrill falsity
at all the wrong places, he would rock with huge guffaws, to which
she would answer with eager renewal, believing that both were
united in their laughter over something of which she was, it is
true, a little vague.

It was, she felt, her business to make commercially attractive to
every young man the beauty and comfort of the life she had made for
her family, and although the secret niggling discontent of their
lives was plainly described on both her own and her daughter's
face, steeped behind their transparent masks in all the small
poisons of irritability and bitterness, they united in their pretty
tableau before the world--a tableau, he felt, something like those
final exhibitions of grace and strength with which acrobats finish
the act, the strained smile of ease and comfort, as if one could go
on hanging by his toes for ever, the grieving limbs, the whole
wrought torture which will collapse in exhausted relief the second
the curtain hides it.

"We want you to feel absolutely at home here," she said brightly.
"Make this your headquarters.  You will find us simple folk here,
without any frills," she continued, with a glance around the
living-room, letting her eye rest with brief satisfaction upon the
striped tiles of the hearth, the flowered vases of the mantel, the
naked doll, tied with a pink sash, on the piano, and the pictures
of "The Horse Fair," the lovers flying before the storm, Maxfield
Parrish's "Dawn," and Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," which
broke the spaces of the wall, "but if you like a quiet family life,
a welcome is always waiting for you here.  Oh, yes--everyone is for
each other here: we keep no secrets from each other in our little
family."

Eugene thought that this was monstrous if it was true; a swift look
at Genevieve and Mama convinced him, however, that not everything
was being told.  A mad exultancy arose in him: the old desire
returned again to throw a bomb into the camp, in order to watch its
effect; to express murderous opinions in a gentle Christian voice,
further entrenched by an engaging matter-of-factness, as if he were
but expressing the commonplace thought of all sensible people;
bawdily, lewdly, shockingly with a fine assumption of boyish
earnestness, sincerity, and naïveté.  So, in a voice heavily coated
with burlesque feeling, he said:  "Thank you, thank you, Mrs.
Simpson.  You have no idea what it means to me to be able to come
to a place like this."

"I know," said Genevieve with fine sympathy, "when you're a
thousand miles from home--"

"A thousand!" he cried, with a bitter laugh, "a thousand!  Say
rather a million."  And he waited, almost squealing in his throat,
until they should bite.

"But--but your home is in the South, isn't it?" Mrs. Simpson
inquired doubtfully.

"Home!  Home!" cried he, with raucous laugh.  "I have no home!"

"Oh, you poor boy!" said Genevieve.

"But your parents--are they BOTH dead?"

"No!" he answered, with a sad smile.  "They are both living."

There was a pregnant silence.

"They do not live together," he added after a moment, feeling he
could not rely on their deductive powers.

"O-o-oh," said Mrs. Simpson significantly, running the vowel up and
down the vocal scale.  "O-o-oh!"

"Nasty weather, isn't it?" he remarked, deliberately drawing a
loose cigarette from his pocket.  "I wish it would snow: I like
your cold Northern winters as only a Southerner can like them; I
like the world at night when it is muffled, enclosed with snow; I
like a warm secluded house, sheltered under heavy fir trees, with
the curtains drawn across a mellow light, and books, and a
beautiful woman within.  These are some of the things I like."

"Gee!" said the boy, his heavy blond head leaned forward intently.
"What was the trouble?"

"Jimmy!  Hush!" cried Genevieve, and yet they all looked toward
Eugene with eager intensity.

"The trouble?" said he, vacantly.  "What trouble?"

"Between your father and mother?"

"Oh," he said carelessly, "he beat her."

"Aw-w!  He hit her with his fist?"

"Oh, no.  He generally used a walnut walking-stick.  It got too
much for her finally.  My mother, even then, was not a young woman--
she was almost fifty, and she could not stand the gaff so well as
she could in her young days.  I'll never forget that last night,"
he said, gazing thoughtfully into the coals with a smile.  "I was
only seven, but I remember it all very well.  Papa had been brought
home drunk by the mayor."

"The MAYOR?"

"Oh, yes," said Eugene casually.  "They were great friends.  The
mayor often brought him home when he was drunk.  But he was very
violent that time.  After the mayor had gone, he stamped around the
house smashing everything he could get his hands on, cursing and
blaspheming at the top of his voice.  My mother stayed in the
kitchen and paid no attention to him when he entered.  This, of
course, infuriated him.  He made for her with the poker.  She saw
that at last she was up against it; but she had realized that such
a moment was inevitable.  She was not unprepared.  So she reached
in the flour bin and got her revolver--"

"Did she have a revolver?"

"Oh, yes," he said nonchalantly, "my Uncle Will had given it to her
as a Christmas present.  Knowing my father as he did, he told her
it might come in handy sometime.  Mama was forced to shoot at him
three times before he came to his senses."

There was a silence.

"Gee!" said the boy, finally.  "Did she hit him?"

"Only once," Eugene replied, tossing his cigarette into the fire.
"A flesh wound in the leg.  A trifle.  He was up and about in less
than a week.  But, of course, Mama had left him by that time."

"Well!" said Mrs. Simpson, after a yet longer silence, "I've never
had to put up with anything like THAT."

"No, thank heaven!" said Genevieve fervently.  Then, curiously:
"Is--is your mother Mr. Pentland's sister?"

"Yes."

"And the uncle who gave her the revolver--Mr. Pentland's brother?"

"Oh, yes," Eugene answered readily.  "It's all the same family."
He grinned in his entrails, thinking of Uncle Bascom.

"Mr. Pentland seems a very educated sort of man," said Mrs.
Simpson, having nothing else to say.

"Yes.  We went to see him when we were hunting for a house,"
Genevieve added.  "He was very nice to us.  He told us he had once
been in the ministry."

"Yes," said Eugene.  "He was a Man of God for more than twenty
years--one of the most eloquent, passionate, and gifted soul-savers
that ever struck fear into the hearts of the innumerable sinners of
the American nation.  In fact, I know of no one with whom to
compare him, unless I turn back three centuries to Jonathan
Edwards, the Puritan divine, who evoked, in a quiet voice like the
monotonous dripping of water, a picture of hell-fire so near that
the skins of the more imaginative fanatics on the front rows
visibly blistered.  However, Edwards spoke for two and a half
hours: Uncle Bascom, with his mad and beautiful tongue, has been
known to drive people insane with terror in twenty-seven minutes by
the clock.  There are still people in the asylums that he put
there," he said piously.  "I hope," he added quickly, "you didn't
ask him why he had left the Church."

"Oh, no!" said Genevieve.  "We never did that."

"Why did he?" asked Mrs. Simpson bluntly, who felt that now she had
only to ask and it would be given.  She was not disappointed.

"It was the centuries-old conflict between organized authority and
the individual," said Eugene.  "No doubt you have felt it in your
own lives.  Uncle Bascom was a poet, a philosopher, a mystic--he
had the soul of an artist which must express divine love and ideal
beauty in corporeal form.  Such a man as this is not going to be
shackled by the petty tyrannies of ecclesiastical convention.  An
artist must love and be loved.  He must be swept by the Flow of
Things, he must be a constantly expanding atom in the rhythmic
surges of the Life Force.  Who knew this better than Uncle Bascom
when he first met the choir contralto?"

"Contralto!" gasped Genevieve.

"Perhaps she was a soprano," said Eugene.  "It skills not.  Suffice
it to say they lived, they loved, they had their little hour of
happiness.  Of course, when the child came--"

"The child!" screamed Mrs. Simpson.

"A bouncing boy.  He weighed thirteen pounds at birth and is at the
present a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy."

"What became of--her?" said Genevieve.

"Of whom?"

"The--the contralto."

"She died--she died in childbirth."

"But--but Mr. Pentland?" inquired Mrs. Simpson in an uncertain
voice.  "Didn't he--marry her?"

"How could he?" Eugene answered with calm logic.  "He was married
to someone else."

And casting his head back, suddenly he sang:  "You know I'm in love
with some-boddy else, so why can't you leave me alone?"

"Well, I NEVER!"  Mrs. Simpson stared dumbly into the fire.

"Well, HARDLY ever," Eugene became allusively Gilbertian.  "She
hardly ever has a Big, Big B."  And he sang throatily:  "Oh, yes!
Oh, yes, in-deed!" relapsing immediately into a profound and moody
abstraction, but noting with delight that Genevieve and her mother
were looking at him furtively, with frightened and bewildered
glances.

"Say!"  The boy, whose ponderous jowl had been sunken on his fist
for ten minutes, now at length distilled a question.  "Whatever
became of your father?  Is he still living?"

"No!" said Eugene, after a brief pause, returning suddenly to fact.
"No!  He's still dying."

And he fixed upon them suddenly the battery of his fierce eyes, lit
with horror:

"He has a cancer."  After a moment, he concluded:  "My father is a
very great man."

They looked at him in stricken bewilderment.

"Gee!" said the boy, after another silence.  "That guy's worse than
our old man!"

"Jimmy!  Jimmy!" whispered Genevieve scathingly.

There was a very long, for the Simpson family, a very painful,
silence.

"Aha!  Aha!"  Eugene's head was full of ahas.

"I suppose you have thought it strange," Mrs. Simpson began with a
cracked laugh, which she strove to make careless, "that you have
never seen Mr. Simpson about when you called?"

"Yes," he answered with a ready dishonesty, for he had never
thought of it at all.  But he reflected at the same moment that
this was precisely the sort of thing people were always thinking
of: suddenly before the embattled front of that little family, its
powers aligned for the defence of reputation, he felt lonely, shut
out.  He saw himself looking in at them through a window: all
communication with life grouped and protected seemed for ever shut
off.

"Mother decided some months ago that she could no longer live with
Father," said Genevieve, with sad dignity.

"Sure," volunteered Jimmy, "he's livin' with another woman!"

"Jimmy!" said Genevieve hoarsely.

Eugene had a momentary flash of humorous sympathy with the departed
Simpson; then he looked at her white bickering face and felt sorry
for her.  She carried her own punishment with her.



XIX


Shall a man be dead within your heart before his rotten flesh be
wholly dead within the ground, and before the producing fats and
syrup cease to give life to his growing hair?  Shall a man so soon
be done with that which still provides a nest for working maggotry
or shall a brother leave a brother's memory before the worms have
left his tissue?  This is a pregnant subject: there should be laws
passed, and a discipline, which train a man to greater constancy.
And suddenly, out of this dream of time in which he lived, he would
awaken, and instantly, like a man freed from the spell of an
enchantment which has held him captive for many years in some
strange land, he would remember home with an intolerable sense of
pain and loss, the lost world of his childhood, and feel the
strange and bitter miracle of life and have no words for what he
wished to say.

That lost world would come back to him at many times, and often for
no cause that he could trace or fathom--a voice half-heard, a word
far-spoken, a leaf, a light that came and passed and came again.
But always when that lost world would come back, it came at once,
like a sword-thrust through the entrails, in all its panoply of
past time, living, whole, and magic as it had always been.

And always when it came to him, and at whatever time, and for
whatever reason, he could hear his father's great voice sounding in
the house again and see his gaunt devouring stride as he had come
muttering round the corner at the hour of noon long years before.

And then he would hear again the voice of his dead brother, and
remember with a sense of black horror, dream-like disbelief, that
Ben was dead, and yet could not believe that Ben had ever died, or
that he had had a brother, lost a friend.  Ben would come back to
him in these moments with a blazing and intolerable reality, until
he heard his quiet living voice again, saw his fierce scowling eyes
of bitter grey, his scornful, proud and lively face, and always
when Ben came back to him it was like this: he saw his brother in
a single image, in some brief forgotten moment of the past,
remembered him by a word, a gesture, a forgotten act; and certainly
all that could ever be known of Ben's life was collected in that
blazing image of lost time and the forgotten moment.  And suddenly
he would be there in a strange land, staring upward from his bed in
darkness, hearing his brother's voice again, and living in the far
and bitter miracle of time.

And always now, when Ben came back to him, he came within the frame
and limits of a single image, one of those instant blazing images
which from this time would haunt his memory and which more and
more, as a kind of distillation--a reward for all the savage
struggles of his Faustian soul with the protean and brain-maddening
forms of life--were to collect and concentrate the whole material
of experience and memory, in which the process of ten thousand days
and nights could in an instant be resumed.  And the image in which
Ben now always came to him was this: he saw his brother standing in
a window, and an old red light of fading day, and all the strange
and tragic legend of his destiny was on his brow, and all that any
man could ever see or know or understand of his dead brother's life
was there.

Bitter and beautiful, scorn no more.  Ben stands there in the
window, for a moment idle, his strong, lean fingers resting lightly
on his bony hips, his grey eyes scowling fiercely, bitterly and
contemptuously over the laughing and exuberant faces of the crowd.
For a moment more he scowls fixedly at them with an expression of
almost savage contempt.  Then scornfully he turns away from them.
The bitter, lean and pointed face, the shapely, flashing, close-
cropped head jerks upward, backward, he laughs briefly and with
pitying contempt as he speaks to that unknown and invisible auditor
who all his life has been the eternal confidant and witness of his
scorn.

"Oh my God!" he says, jerking his scornful head out towards the
crowd again.  "Listen to this, will you?"

They look at him with laughing and exuberant faces, unwounded by
his scorn.  They look at him with a kind of secret and unspoken
tenderness which the strange and bitter savour of his life awakes
in people always.  They look at him with faith, with pride, with
the joy and confidence and affection which his presence stirs in
everyone.  And as if he were the very author of their fondest
hopes, as if he were the fiat, not the helpless agent, of the thing
they long to see accomplished, they yell to him in their
unreasoning exuberance:  "All right, Ben!  Give us a hit now!  A
single's all we need, boy!  Bring him in!"  Or others, crying with
the same exuberance of faith:  "Strike him out, Ben!  Make him
fan!"

But now the crowd, sensing the electric thrill and menace of a
decisive conflict, has grown still, is waiting with caught breath
and pounding hearts, their eyes fixed eagerly on Ben.  Somewhere, a
thousand miles to the North, somewhere through the reddened,
slanting and fast-fading light of that October day, somewhere
across the illimitable fields and folds and woods and hills and
hollows of America, across the huge brown earth, the mown fields,
the vast wild space, the lavish, rude and unfenced distances, the
familiar, homely, barren, harsh, strangely haunting scenery of the
nation; somewhere through the crisp, ripe air, the misty, golden
pollenated light of all her prodigal and careless harvest;
somewhere far away at the heart of the great sky-soaring, smoke-
gold, and enchanted city of the North, and of their vision--the
lean right arm of the great pitcher Mathewson is flashing like a
whip.  A greyhound of a man named Speaker, quick as a deer to run,
sharp as a hawk to see, swift as a cat to strike, stands facing
him.  And the huge terrific stands, packed to the eaves incredibly
with mounting tiers of small white faces, now all breathless,
silent, and intent, all focused on two men as are the thoughts, the
hearts, the visions of these people everywhere in little towns,
soar back, are flung to the farthest edges of the field in a vision
of power, of distance, space and lives unnumbered, fused into a
single unity that is so terrific that it bursts the measures of our
comprehension and has a dream-like strangeness of reality even when
we see it.

The scene is instant, whole and wonderful.  In its beauty and
design that vision of the soaring stands, the pattern of forty
thousand empetalled faces, the velvet and unalterable geometry of
the playing field, and the small lean figures of the players, set
there, lonely, tense and waiting in their places, bright, desperate
solitary atoms encircled by that huge wall of nameless faces, is
incredible.  And more than anything, it is the light, the miracle
of light and shade and colour--the crisp, blue light that swiftly
slants out from the soaring stands and, deepening to violet, begins
to march across the velvet field and towards the pitcher's box,
that gives the thing its single and incomparable beauty.

The batter stands swinging his bat and grimly waiting at the plate,
crouched, tense, the catcher, crouched, the umpire, bent, hands
clasped behind his back, and peering forward.  All of them are set
now in the cold blue of that slanting shadow, except the pitcher,
who stands out there all alone, calm, desperate, and forsaken in
his isolation, with the gold-red swiftly fading light upon him, his
figure legible with all the resolution, despair and lonely dignity
which that slanting, somehow fatal light can give him.  Deep lilac
light is eating swiftly in from every corner of the field now, and
far off there is a vision of the misty, golden and October towers
of the terrific city.  The scene is unforgettable in the beauty,
intoxication and heroic feeling of its incredible design, and yet,
as overwhelming as the spectacle may be for him who sees it, it is
doubtful if the eye-witness has ever felt its mystery, beauty, and
strange loveliness as did that unseen and unseeing audience in a
little town.

But now the crowd, sensing the menaceful approach of a decisive
moment, has grown quiet and tense and breathless, as it stands
there in the street.  In the window, Ben sets the earphones firmly
with his hands, his head goes down, the scowl between his grey eyes
deepens to a look of listening intensity.  He begins to speak
sharply to a young man standing at a table on the floor behind him.
He snaps his fingers nervously, a cardboard placard is handed to
him, he looks quickly at it, and then thrusts it back, crying
irritably:

"No, no, no!  Strike one, I said!  Damn it, Mac, you're about as
much help to me as a wooden Indian!"

The young man on the floor thrusts another placard in his hand.
Ben takes it quickly, swiftly takes out a placard from the
complicated frame of wires and rows and columns in the window (for
it is before the day of the electric Scoreboard, and this clumsy
and complicated system whereby every strike, ball, substitution, or
base hit--every possible movement and event that can occur upon the
field--must be indicated in this way by placards printed with the
exact information, is the only one they know) and thrusts a new
placard on the line in place of the one that he has just removed.
A cheer, sharp, lusty, and immediate, goes up from the crowd.  Ben
speaks sharply and irritably to the dark and sullen-featured youth
whose name is Foxey and Foxey runs outside quickly with another
placard inscribed with the name of a new player who is coming in.
Swiftly, Foxey takes out of its groove the name of the departing
player, shoves the new one into place, and this time the rival
partisans in the crowd cheer for the pitch hitter.

In the street now there is the excited buzz and hum of controversy.
The people, who, with a strange and somehow moving loyalty, are
divided into two groups supporting the merits of two teams which
they have never seen, are eagerly debating, denying, making
positive assertions of what is likely to happen, which are
obviously extravagant and absurd in a contest where nothing can be
predicted, and so much depends on fortune, chance, and the
opportunity of the moment.

In the very forefront of the crowd, a little to the right as Ben
stands facing them, a well-dressed man in the late fifties can be
seen excitedly discussing the prospect of the game with several of
his companions.  His name is Fagg Sluder, a citizen well known to
every one in town.  He is a man who made a fortune as a contractor
and retired from active business several years ago, investing part
of his wealth in two or three large office buildings, and who now
lives on the income he derives from them.

He is a nervous energetic figure of a man, of middle height, with
greying hair, a short-cropped moustache, and the dry, spotted,
slightly concave features which characterize many Americans of his
age.  A man who, until recent years, has known nothing but hard
work since his childhood, he has now developed, in his years of
leisure, an enthusiastic devotion to the game, that amounts to an
obsession.

He has not only given to the town the baseball park which bears his
name, he is also president of the local Club, and uncomplainingly
makes good its annual deficit.  During the playing season his whole
time is spent in breathing, thinking, talking baseball all day
long: if he is not at the game, bent forward in his seat behind the
home plate in an attitude of ravenous absorption, occasionally
shouting advice and encouragement to the players in his rapid,
stammering, rather high-pitched voice that has a curiously incisive
penetration and carrying power, then he is up on the Square before
the fire department going over every detail of the game with his
cronies and asking eager, rapid-fire questions of the young red-
necked players he employs, and towards whom he displays the
worshipful admiration of a schoolboy.

Now this man, who, despite his doctor's orders, smokes twenty or
thirty strong black cigars a day, and in fact is never to be seen
without a cigar in his fingers or in his mouth, may be heard all
over the crowd speaking eagerly in his rapid, stammering voice to a
man with a quiet and pleasant manner who stands behind him.  This
is the assistant chief of the fire department and his name is
Bickett.

"Jim," Mr. Sluder is saying in his eager and excited way, "I--I--I--
I tell you what I think!  If--if--if Speaker comes up there again
with men on bases--I--I--I just believe Matty will strike him out--
I swear I do.  What do you think?" he demands eagerly and abruptly.

Mr. Bickett, first pausing to draw slowly and languorously on a
cigarette before casting it into the gutter, makes some easy, quiet
and non-committal answer which satisfies Mr. Sluder completely,
since he is paying no attention to him, anyway.  Immediately, he
claps the chewed cigar which he is holding in his stubby fingers
into his mouth, and nodding his head briskly and vigorously, with
an air of great decision, he stammers out again:

"Well--I--I--I just believe that's what he's going to do: I--I--I
don't think he's afraid of that fellow at all!  I--I--I think he
knows he can strike him out any time he feels like it."

The boy knows everyone in the crowd as he looks around him.  Here
are the other boys of his own age, and older--his fellow route-boys
in the morning's work, his school companions, delivery boys
employed by druggists, merchants, clothiers, the sons of the more
wealthy and prominent people of the town.  Here are the boys from
the eastern part of town from which he comes and in which his
father's house is built--the older, homelier, and for some reason
more joyful and confident part of town to him--though why, he does
not know, he cannot say.  Perhaps it is because the hills along the
eastern borders of the town are near and close and warm, and almost
to be touched.  But in the western part of town, the great vistas
of the soaring ranges, the distant summits of the Smokies fade far
away into the west, into the huge loneliness, the haunting
desolation of the unknown distance, the red, lonely light of the
powerful retreating sun.

But now the old red light is slanting swiftly, the crowd is waiting
tense and silent, already with a touch of sorrow, resignation, and
the winter in their hearts, for summer's over, the game is ending,
and October has come again, has come again.  In the window, where
the red slant of the sun already falls, Ben is moving quickly,
slipping new placards into place, taking old ones out, scowling,
snapping his hard, white fingers in command, speaking curtly,
sharply, irritably to the busy figures, moving at his bidding on
the floor.  The game--the last game of the series--is sharp, close,
bitterly contested.  No one can say as yet which way the issue
goes, which side will win, when it will end--but that fatality of
red slanting light, the premonitory menace of the frost, the fatal
certitude of victory and defeat, with all the sorrow and regret
that both can bring to man, are in their hearts.

From time to time, a wild and sudden cheer breaks sharply from the
waiting crowd, as something happens to increase their hope of
victory, but for the most part they are tense and silent now, all
waiting for the instant crisis, the quick end.

Behind Ben, seated in a swivel chair, but turned out facing toward
the crowd, the boy can see the gouty bulk of Mr. Flood, the owner
of the paper.  He is bent forward heavily in his seat, his thick
apoplectic fingers braced upon his knees, his mouth ajar, his
coarse, jowled, venously empurpled face and bulging yellow eyes
turned out upon the crowd, in their constant expression of slow
stupefaction.  From time to time, when the crowd cheers loudly, the
expression of brutal surprise upon Mr. Flood's coarse face will
deepen perceptibly and comically, and in a moment he will say
stupidly, in his hoarse and phlegmy tones:

"Who done that? . . .  What are they yelling for? . . .  Which
side's ahead now? . . .  What happened that time, Ben?"

To which Ben usually makes no reply whatever, but the savage scowl
between his grey eyes deepens with exasperation, and finally,
cursing bitterly, he says:

"Damn it, Flood!  What do you think I am--the whole damned
newspaper?  For heaven's sake, man, do you think all I've got to do
is answer damn-fool questions?  If you want to know what's
happening, go outside where the rest of them are!"

"Well, Ben, I just wanted to know how--" Mr. Flood begins hoarsely,
heavily, and stupidly.

"Oh, for God's sake!  Listen to this, won't you?" says Ben,
laughing scornfully and contemptuously as he addresses the
invisible auditor of his scorn, and jerking his head sideways
toward the bloated figure of his employer as he does so.  "Here!"
he says, in a disgusted manner.  "For God's sake, someone go and
tell him what the score is, and put him out of his misery!"  And
scowling savagely, he speaks sharply into the mouthpiece of the
phone and puts another placard on the line.

And suddenly, even as the busy figures swarm and move there in the
window before the waiting crowd, the bitter thrilling game is over!
In waning light, in faint shadows, far, far away in a great city of
the North, the 40,000 small empetalled faces bend forward,
breathless, waiting--single and strange and beautiful as all life,
all living, and man's destiny.  There's a man on base, the last
flash of the great right arm, the crack of the bat, the streaking
white of a clean-hit ball, the wild, sudden, solid roar, a pair of
flashing legs have crossed the rubber, and the game is over!  And
instantly, there at the city's heart, in the great stadium, and all
across America, in ten thousand streets, ten thousand little towns,
the crowd is breaking, flowing, lost for ever!  That single,
silent, most intolerable loveliness is gone for ever.  With all its
tragic, proud and waiting unity, it belongs now to the huge, the
done, the indestructible fabric of the past, has moved at last out
of that inscrutable maw of chance we call the future into the
strange finality of dark time.

Now it is done, the crowd is broken, lost, exploded, and 10,000,000
men are moving singly down 10,000 streets--toward what?  Some by
the light of Hesperus which, men say, can bring all things that
live on earth to their own home again--flock to the fold, the
father to his child, the lover to the love he has forsaken--and the
proud of heart, the lost, the lonely of the earth, the exile and
the wanderer--to what?  To pace again the barren avenues of night,
to pass before the bulbous light of lifeless streets with half-
averted faces, to pass the thousand doors, to feel again the
ancient hopelessness of hope, the knowledge of despair, the faith
of desolation.

And for a moment, when the crowd has gone, Ben stands there silent,
lost, a look of bitter weariness, disgust, and agony upon his grey
gaunt face, his lonely brow, his fierce and scornful eyes.  And as
he stands there that red light of waning day has touched the
flashing head, the gaunt, starved face, has touched the whole image
of his fiercely wounded, lost and scornful spirit with the prophecy
of its strange fatality.  And in that instant as the boy looks at
his brother, a knife is driven through his entrails suddenly, for
with an instant final certitude, past reason, proof, or any visual
evidence, he sees the end and answer of his brother's life.
Already death rests there on his proud head like a coronal.  The
boy knows in that one instant Ben will die.



XX


He visited Genevieve frequently over a period of several months.
As his acquaintance with the family deepened, the sharpness of his
appetite for seduction dwindled, and was supplanted by an ecstatic
and insatiable glee.  He felt that he had never in his life been so
enormously and constantly amused: he would think exultantly for
days of an approaching visit, weaving new and more preposterous
fables for their consumption, bursting into violent laughter on the
streets as he thought of past scenes, the implication of a tone, a
gesture, the transparent artifice of mother and daughter, the
incredible exaggeration of everything.

He was charmed, enchanted: his mind swarmed daily with monstrous
projects--his heart quivered in a tight cage of nervous exultancy
as he thought of the infinite richness of absurdity that lay stored
for him.  His ethical conscience was awakened hardly at all--he
thought of these three people as monsters posturing for his
delight.  His hatred of cruelty, the nauseating horror at the
idiotic brutality of youth, had not yet sufficiently defined itself
to check his plunge.  He was swept along in the full tide of his
adventure: he thought of nothing else.



Through an entire winter, and into the spring, he went to see this
little family in a Boston suburb.  Then he got tired of the game
and the people as suddenly as he had begun, with the passionate
boredom, weariness, and intolerance of which youth is capable.  And
now that the affair was ending, he was at last ashamed of the part
he had played in it and of the arrogant contempt with which he had
regaled himself at the expense of other people.  And he knew that
the Simpsons had themselves at length become conscious of the
meaning of his conduct, and saw that, in some way, he had made them
the butt of a joke.  And when they saw this, the family suddenly
attained a curious quiet dignity, of which he had not believed them
capable and which later he could not forget.

One night, as he was waiting in the parlour for the girl to come
down, her mother entered the room, and stood looking at him quietly
for a moment.  Presently she spoke:

"You have been coming here for some time now," she said, "and we
were always glad to see you.  My daughter liked you when she met
you--she likes you yet--" the woman said slowly, and went on with
obvious difficulty and embarrassment.  "Her welfare means more to
me than anything in the world--I would do anything to save her from
unhappiness or misfortune."  She was silent a moment, then said
bluntly, "I think I have a right to ask you a question: what are
your intentions concerning her?"

He told himself that these words were ridiculous and part of the
whole comic and burlesque quality of the family, and yet he found
now that he could not laugh at them.  He sat looking at the fire,
uncertain of his answer, and presently he muttered:

"I have no intentions concerning her."

"All right," the woman said quietly.  "That is all I wanted to
know. . . .  You are a young man," she went on slowly after a
pause, "and very clever and intelligent--but there are still a
great many things you do not understand.  I know now that we looked
funny to you and you have amused yourself at our expense. . . .  I
don't know why you thought it was such a joke, but I think you will
live to see the day when you are sorry for it.  It's not good to
make a joke of people who have liked you and tried to be your
friends."

"I know it's not," he said, and muttered:  "I'm sorry for it now."

"Still, I can't believe," the woman said, "that you are a boy who
would wilfully bring sorrow and ruin to anyone who had never done
you any harm. . . .  The only reason I am saying this is for my
daughter's sake."

"You don't need to worry about that," he said.  "I'm sorry now for
acting as I have--but you know everything I've done.  And I'll not
come back again.  But I'd like to see her and tell her that I'm
sorry before I go."

"Yes," the woman said, "I think you ought."

She went out and a few minutes later the girl came down, entered
the room, and he said good-bye to her.  He tried to make amends to
her with fumbling words, but she said nothing.  She stood very
still as he talked, almost rigid, her lips pressed tightly
together, her hands clenched, winking back the tears.

"All right," she said finally, giving him her hand.  "I'll say
good-bye to you without hard feelings. . . .  Some day . . . some
day," her voice choked and she winked furiously--"I hope you'll
understand--oh, good-bye!" she cried, and turned away abruptly.
"I'm not mad at you any longer--and I wish you luck. . . .  You
know so many things, don't you?--You're so much smarter than we
are, aren't you? . . .  And I'm sorry for you when I think of all
you've got to learn . . . of what you're going through before you
do."

"Good-bye," he said.

He never saw any of them again, but he could not forget them.  And
as the years went on, the memory of all their folly, falseness, and
hypocrisy was curiously altered and subdued and the memory that
grew more vivid and dominant was of a little family, one of
millions huddled below the immense and timeless skies that bend
above us, lost in the darkness of nameless and unnumbered lives
upon the lonely wilderness of life that is America, and banked
together against these giant antagonists, for comfort, warmth, and
love, with a courage and integrity that would not die and could not
be forgotten.



XXI


One afternoon early in May, Helen met McGuire upon the street.  He
had just driven in behind Wood's Pharmacy on Academy Street, and
was preparing to go in to the prescription counter when she
approached him.  He got out of his big dusty-looking roadster with
a painful grunt, slammed the door, and began to fumble slowly in
the pockets of his baggy coat for a cigarette.  He turned slowly as
she spoke, grunted, "Hello, Helen," stuck the cigarette on his fat
under-lip and lighted it, and then, looking at her with his brutal,
almost stupid, but somehow kindly glance, he barked coarsely:

"What's on your mind?"

"It's about Papa," she began in a low, hoarse and almost morbid
tone--"Now I want to know if this last attack means that the end
has come.  You've got to tell me--we've got the right to know about
it--"

The look of strain and hysteria on her big-boned face, her dull
eyes fixed on him in a morbid stare, the sore on her large cleft
chin, above all, the brooding insistence of her tone as she
repeated phrases he had heard ten thousand times before suddenly
rasped upon his frayed nerves, stretched them to the breaking-
point; he lost his air of hard professionalism and exploded in a
flare of brutal anger:

"You want to know what?  You've got a right to be told what?  For
God's sake,"--his tone was brutal, rasping, jeering--"pull yourself
together and stop acting like a child."  And then, a little more
quietly, but brusquely, he demanded:

"All right.  What do you want to know?"

"I want to know how long he's going to last," she said with morbid
insistence.  "Now, you're a doctor," she wagged her large face at
him with an air of challenge that infuriated him, "and you ought to
tell us.  We've got to know!"

"Tell you!  Got to know!" he shouted.  "What the hell are you
talking about?  What do you expect to be told?"

"How long Papa has to live," she said with the same morbid
insistence as before.

"You've asked me that a thousand times," he said harshly.  "I've
told you that I didn't know.  He may live another month, he may be
here a year from now--how can we tell about these things," he said
in an exasperated tone, "particularly where your father is
concerned.  Helen, three or four years ago I might have made a
prediction.  I did make them--I didn't see how W. O. could go on
six months longer.  But he's fooled us all--you, me, the doctors at
Johns Hopkins, everyone who's had anything to do with the case.
The man is dying from malignant carcinoma--he has been dying for
years--his life is hanging by a thread and the thread may break at
any time--but when it is going to break I have no way of telling
you."

"Ah-hah," she said reflectively.  Her eyes had taken on a dull
appeased look as he talked to her, and now she had begun to pluck
at her large cleft chin.  "Then you think--" she began.

"I think nothing," he shouted.  "And for God's sake stop picking at
your chin!"

For a moment he felt the sudden brutal anger that one sometimes
feels toward a contrary child.  He felt like taking her by the
shoulders and shaking her.  Instead, he took it out in words and,
scowling at her, said with brutal directness:

"Look here! . . .  You've got to pull yourself together.  You're
becoming a mental case--do you hear me?  You wander around like a
person in a dream, you ask questions no one can answer, you demand
answers no one can give--you work yourself up into hysterical
frenzies and then you collapse and soak yourself with drugs, patent
medicines, corn-licker--anything that has alcohol in it--for days
at a time.  When you go to bed at night you think you hear voices
talking to you, someone coming up the steps, the telephone.  And
really you hear nothing: there is nothing there.  Do you know what
that is?" he demanded brutally.  "Those are symptoms of insanity--
you're becoming unbalanced; if it keeps on they may have to send
you to the crazy-house to take the cure."

"Ah-hah!  Uh-huh!" she kept plucking at her big chin with an air of
abstracted reflection and with a curious look of dull appeasement
in her eyes as if his brutal words had really given her some
comfort.  Then she suddenly came to herself, looked at him with
clear eyes, and her generous mouth touched at the corners with the
big lewd tracery of her earthy humour, she sniggered hoarsely, and
prodding him in his fat ribs with a big bony finger, she said:

"You think I've got 'em, do you?  Well--" she nodded seriously in
agreement, frowning a little as she spoke, but with the faint grin
still legible around the corners of her mouth,--"I've often thought
the same thing.  You may be right," she nodded seriously again.
"There are times when I do feel off--you know?--QUEER--looney--
crazy--like there was a screw loose somewhere--Brrr!" and with the
strange lewd mixture of frown and grin, she made a whirling
movement with her finger towards her head.  "What do you think it
is?" she went on with an air of seriousness.  "Now, I'd just like
to know.  What is it that makes me act like that? . . .  Is it
woman-business?" she said with a lewd and comic look upon her face.
"Am I getting funny like the rest of them--now I've often thought
the same--that maybe I'm going through a change of life--is that
it?  Maybe--"

"Oh, change of life be damned!" he said in a disgusted tone.  "Here
you are a young woman thirty-two years old and you talk to me about
a change of life!  That has about as much sense to it as a lot of
other things you say!  The only thing you change is your mind--and
you do that every five minutes!"  He was silent for a moment,
breathing heavily and staring at her coarsely with his bloated and
unshaven face, his veined and weary-looking eyes.  When he spoke
again his voice was gruff and quiet, touched with a burly, almost
paternal tenderness:

"Helen," he said, "I'm worried about you--and not about your
father.  Your father is an old man now with a malignant cancer and
with no hope of ever getting well again.  He is tired of life, he
wants to die--for God's sake why do you want to prolong his
suffering, to try to keep him here in a state of agony, when death
would be a merciful release for him? . . .  I know there is no hope
left for your father: he has been doomed for years, the sooner the
end comes the better--"

She tried to speak but he interrupted her brusquely, saying:

"Just a minute.  There's something that I want to say to you--for
God's sake try to use it, if you can.  The death of this old man
seems strange and horrible to you because he is your father.  It is
as hard for you to think about his death as it is to think about
the death of God Almighty; you think that if your father dies there
will be floods and earthquakes and convulsions throughout nature.
I assure you that this is not true.  Old men are dying every second
of the day, and nothing happens except they die--"

"Oh, but Papa was a wonderful man," she said.  "I KNOW!  I KNOW!
Everybody who ever knew him said the same."

"Yes," McGuire agreed, "he was--he was one of the most remarkable
men I ever knew.  And that is what makes it all the harder now."

She looked at him eagerly, and said:

"You mean--his dying?"

"No, Helen," McGuire spoke quietly and with a weary patience.
"There's nothing very bad about his dying.  Death seems so terrible
to you because you know so little about it.  But I have seen so
much of death, I have seen so many people die--and I know there is
really nothing very terrible about it, and about the death of an
old man ravaged by disease there is nothing terrible at all.  It
seems terrible to those looking on--there are," he shrugged his fat
shoulders, "there are sometimes--physical details that are
unpleasant.  But the old man knows little of all that: an old man
dies as a clock runs down--he is worn out, has lost the will to
live, he wants to die, and he just stops.  That is all.  And that
will happen to your father."

"Oh, but it will be so strange now--so hard to understand!" she
muttered with a bewildered look in her eyes.  "We have expected him
to die so many times--we have been fooled so often--and now I can't
believe that it will ever happen.  I thought that he would die in
1916, I never expected him to live another year; in 1918, the year
that Ben died, none of us could see how he'd get through the
winter--and then Ben died!  No one had even thought of Ben--" her
voice grew cracked and hoarse and her eyes glistened with tears.
"We had forgotten Ben--everyone was thinking about Papa--and then
when Ben died I turned against Papa for a time.  For a while I was
bitter against him--it seemed that I had done everything for this
old man, that I had given him everything I had--my life, my
strength, my energy--all because I thought that he was going to
die--and then Ben, who had never been given anything--who had had
nothing out of life--who had been neglected and forgotten by us all
and who was the best one--the most decent of the whole crowd--Ben
was the one who had to go.  For a time after his death I didn't
care what happened--to Papa or to any one else.  I was so bitter
about Ben's death--it seemed so cruel, so rotten and unjust--that
it had to be Ben of all the people in the world--only twenty-six
years old and without a thing to show for his life--no love, no
children, no happiness, cheated out of everything, when Papa had
had so much--I couldn't stand the thought of it, even now I hate to
go to Mama's house, it almost kills me to go near Ben's room, I've
never been in it since the night he died--and somehow I was bitter
against Papa!  It seemed to me that he had cheated me, tricked me--
at times I got so bitter that I thought that he was responsible in
some way for Ben's death.  I said I was through with him, that I
would do nothing else for him, that I had done all that I intended
to do, and that somebody else would have to take care of him. . . .
But it all came back; he had another bad spell and I was afraid
that he was going to die, and I couldn't stand the thought of
it. . . .  And it has gone on now so long, YEAR after year, and YEAR
after year," she said in a frenzied tone, "always thinking that he
couldn't last and seeing him come back again, that I couldn't
believe that it would ever happen.  I can't believe it now. . . .
And what am I going to do?" she said hoarsely and desperately,
clutching McGuire by the sleeve, "what am I going to do now if he
really dies?  What is there left for me in life with Papa gone?"
Her voice was almost sobbing now with grief and desperation--"He's
all I've got to live for, Doctor McGuire.  I've got nothing out of
life that I wanted or expected--it's all been so different from the
way I thought it was--I've had nothing--no fame, no glory, no
success, no children--everything has gone--Papa is all that I have
left!  If he dies what shall I do?" she cried frantically, shaking
him by the sleeve.  "That old man is all I've got--the only thing
I've got left to live for; to keep him alive, to make him
comfortable, to ease his pain, to see he gets good food and
attention--somehow, somehow," she panted desperately, clasping her
big bony hands in a gesture of unconscious but pitiable entreaty,
and beginning to rock unsteadily on her feet as she spoke--
"somehow, somehow, to keep life in him, to keep him here, not to
let him go--that's all I've got to live for--what in the name of
God am I going to do when that is taken from me?"

And she paused, panting and exhausted by her tirade, her big face
strained and quivering, glaring at him with an air of frantic
entreaty as if it was in his power to give the answers to these
frenzied questions.  And for a moment he said nothing; he just
stood there looking at her with the coarse and brutal stare of his
blotched face, his venous yellowed eyes, the wet cigarette stuck
comically at the corner of one fat lip.

"What are you going to do?" he barked, presently.  "You're going to
get hold of yourself--pull yourself together--amount to something,
be somebody!"  He coughed chokingly to one side, for a moment there
was just the sound of his thick short breathing, then he flung the
cigarette away, and said quietly:

"Helen, for God's sake, don't throw your life away!  Don't destroy
the great creature that lies buried in you somewhere--wake it up,
make it come to life.  Don't talk to me of this old man's life as
if it were your own--"

"It is, it is!" she said in a brooding tone of morbid fatality.

"It is not!" he said curtly, "unless you make it so--unless you
play the weakling and the fool and throw yourself away.  For God's
sake, don't let that happen to you.  I have seen it happen to so
many people--some of them fine people like yourself, full of
energy, imagination, intelligence, ability--all thrown away,
frittered away like that," he flung fat fingers in the air--
"because they did not have the guts to use what God had given them--
to make a new life for themselves--to stand on their own feet and
not to lean upon another's shoulder! . . .  Don't die the death!"
he rasped coarsely, staring at her with his brutal face.  "Don't
die the rotten, lousy, dirty death-in-life--the only death that's
really horrible!  For God's sake, don't betray life and yourself
and the people who love you by dying that kind of death!  I've seen
it happen to so many people--and it was always so damned useless,
such a rotten waste!  That's what I was trying to say to you a few
minutes ago--it's not the death of the dying that is terrible, it
is the death of the living.  And we always die that death for the
same reason:--because our father dies, and takes from us his own
life, his world, his time--and we haven't courage enough to make a
new life, a new world for ourselves.  I wonder if you know how
often that thing happens--how often I have seen it happen--the
wreck, the ruin, and the tragedy it has caused in life!  When the
father goes, the whole structure of the family life goes with him--
and unless his children have the will, the stuff, the courage to
make something of their own, they die too. . . .  With you, it's
going to be very hard when your father dies; he was a man of great
vitality and a strong personality who has left a deep impression on
everyone who knew him.  And for seven years now, your father's
death has been your life. . . .  It has become a part of you, you
have brooded over it, lived with it, soaked in it, been tainted by
it--and now it is going to be hard for you to escape.  But escape
you must, and stand on your own feet--or you are lost. . . .
Helen!" he barked sharply, and fixed her with his coarse and brutal
stare--"listen to me:--your childhood, Woodson Street, getting your
father over drunks, cooking for him, nursing him, feeding him,
dressing and undressing him--I know about it all, I saw it all--and
now!"--he paused, staring at her, then made a sudden gesture
outward, palms downward, of his two thick hands--"over, done for,
gone for ever!  It's no good any more, it won't work any more, it
can't be brought back any more--forget about it!"

"Oh, I can't!  I can't!" she said desperately.  "I can't give him
up--I can't let him go--he's all I've got.  Doctor McGuire," she
said earnestly, "ever since I was a kid of ten and you first came
to get Papa over one of his sprees, I've fairly worshipped you!
I've always felt down in my heart that you were one of the most
wonderful people--the most wonderful doctor--in the world!  I've
always felt that at the end you could do anything--perform a
miracle--bring him back.  For God's sake, don't go back on me now!
Do something--anything you can--but save him, save him."

He was silent for a moment, and just stared at her with his yellow,
venous eyes.  And when he spoke his voice was filled with the most
quiet and utter weariness of despair that she had ever heard:

"Save him?" he said.  "My poor child, I can save no one--nothing--
least of all myself."

And suddenly she saw that it was true; she saw that he was lost,
that he was done for, gone, and that he knew it.  His coarse and
bloated face was mottled by great black purplish patches, his
yellow weary eyes already had the look of death in them; the
knowledge of death rested with an unutterable weariness in his
burly form, was audible in the short thick labour of his breath.
She saw instantly that he was going to die, and with that knowledge
her heart was torn with a rending pity as if a knife had been
driven through it and twisted there; all of the brightness dropped
out of the day, and in that moment it seemed that the whole
substance and structure of her life was gone.

The day was a shining one, full of gold and sapphire and sparkle,
and in the distance, toward the east, she could see the sweet
familiar green of hills.  She knew that nothing had been changed at
all, and yet even the brightness of the day seemed dull and common
to her.  It served only to make more mean and shabby the rusty
buildings and the street before her.  And the bright light filled
her with a nameless uneasiness and sense of shame: it seemed to
expose her, to show her imperfections nakedly, and instinctively
she turned away from it into the drug-store, where there were
coolness, artificial lights and gaiety, the clamour of voices and
people that she knew.  And she knew that most of them had come here
for the same reason--because the place gave them a sort of haven,
however brief and shabby, from the naked brightness of the day and
their sense of indefinable uncertitude and shame--because "it was
the only place there was to go."

Several young people, two girls and a boy were coming down among
the crowded tables towards one of the mirrored booths against the
wall, where another boy and girl were waiting for them.  As they
approached, she heard their drawling voices, talking "cute nigger-
talk" as her mind contemptuously phrased it, the vapid patter
phrased to a monotonous formula of "charm," inane, cheap,
completely vulgar, and as if they had been ugly little monsters of
some world of dwarfs she listened to them with a detached
perspective of dislike and scorn.

One of the girls--the one already in the booth--was calling to the
others in tones of playful protest, in her "cute," mannered, empty
little voice:

"HEY! theah, you all!  WHEAH you been!  Come ON, heah, man!" she
cried urgently and reproachfully toward the approaching youth--"We
been lookin' up an' down faw you!  What you been doin', anyhow?"
she cried with reproachful curiosity.  "We been WAITIN' heah an'
waitin' heah until it seemed lak you nevah WOULD come!  We wuh
about to give you up!"

"Child!" another of the girls drawled back, and made a languid
movement of the hand--a move indicative of resignation and defeat.
"Don't tawk!  I thought we nevah would get away. . . .  That Jawdan
woman came in to see Mothah just as me an' Jim was fixin' to go
out, an' child!"--again the languid movement of exhaustion and
defeat--"when that woman gits stahted tawkin' you might as well
give up!  No one else can git a wuhd in edgeways.  I'll declayah!"
the voice went up, and the hand again made its languid movement of
surrender--"I nevah huhd the lak of it in all mah days!  That's the
tawkinest woman that evah lived.  You'd a-died if you could a-seen
the way Jim looked.  I thought he was goin' to pass right out
befoah we got away from theah!"

"Lady," said Jim, who had as yet taken no part in the conversation,
"you SAID it!  It sho'ly is the truth!  That sho is ONE tawkin'
woman--an' I don't mean MAYBE, eithah!"  He drawled these words out
with an air of pert facetiousness, and then looked round him with a
complacent smirk on his young, smooth, empty face to see if his
display of wit had been noticed and properly appreciated.

And Helen, passing by, kept smiling, plucking at her chin
abstractedly, feeling toward these young people a weary disgust
that was tinged with a bitter and almost personal animosity.

"Awful little made-up girls . . . funny-looking little boys . . .
nothing to do but hang out here and loaf . . . walk up and down the
street . . . and drink coca-cola all day long . . . and to think it
seemed so wonderful to me when I was a kid, to dress up and go up
town and come in here where Papa was. . . .  How dull and cheap and
dreary it all is!"



XXII


A little after three o'clock one morning in June, Hugh McGuire was
seated at his desk in the little office which stood just to the
left of the entrance hall at the Altamont Hospital, of which
institution he was chief of staff and principal owner.  McGuire's
burly bloated form was seated in a swivel chair and sprawled
forward, his fat arms resting on the desk, which was an old-
fashioned roll-top affair with a number of small cubby-holes above
and with two parallel rows of drawers below.  In the space below
the desk and between the surgeon's fat legs there was a gallon jug
of corn whisky.

And on the desk there was a stack of letters which had also been
delivered to him the day before.  The letters had been written to
one of McGuire's own colleagues by a certain very beautiful lady of
the town, of whom it is only necessary to say that she was not
McGuire's wife and that he had known her for a long time.  The huge
man--curiously enough, not only a devoted father and a loyal
husband, but a creature whose devotion to his family had been
desperately intensified by the bitter sense of his one unfaith--had
been for many years obsessed by one of those single, fatal and
irremediable passions which great creatures of this sort feel only
once in life, and for just one woman.  Now the obsession of that
mad fidelity was gone--exploded in an instant by a spidery scheme
of words upon a page, a packet of torn letters in a woman's hand.
Hence, this sense now of a stolid, slow, and cureless anguish in
the man, the brutal deliberation of his drunkenness.  Since finding
these letters upon his desk when he had returned at seven o'clock
the night before from his visit to Gant, McGuire had not left his
office or moved in his chair, except to bend with a painful grunt
from time to time, feel between his legs with a fat hand until he
found the jug, and then, holding it with a bear-like solemnity
between his paws, drink long and deep of the raw, fiery, and
colourless liquid in the jug.  He had done this very often, and now
the jug was two-thirds empty.  As he read, his mouth was half open
and a cigarette was stuck on the corner of one fat lip, a look that
suggested a comical drunken stupefaction.  The hospital had long
since gone to sleep, and in the little office there was no sound
save the ticking of a clock and McGuire's short, thick, and
stertorous breathing.  Then when he had finished a letter, he would
fold it carefully, put it back in its envelope, rub his thick
fingers across the stubble of brown-reddish beard that covered his
bloated and discoloured face, reach with a painful grunt for the
glass jug, drink, and open up another letter.

And from time to time he would put a letter down before he had
finished reading it, take up a pen, and begin to write upon a sheet
of broad hospital stationery, of which there was a pad upon his
desk.  And McGuire wrote as he read, slowly, painfully, carefully,
with a fixed and drunken attentiveness, no sound except the minute
and careful scratching of the pen in his fat hands, and the short,
thick stertorous breathing as he bent over the tablet, his
cigarette plastered comically at the edge of one fat lip.

McGuire would read the letters over and over, slowly, carefully,
and solemnly.  Burly, motionless and with no sound save for the
short and stertorous labour of his breath, he stared with drunken
fixity at the pages which he held close before his yellowed eyes,
his bloated face.  He had read each letter at least a dozen times
during the course of the long evening.  And each time that he
finished reading it, he would fold it carefully with his thick
fingers, put it back into its envelope, bend and reach down between
his fat legs with a painful grunt, fumble for the liquor jug, and
then drink long and deep.

It seemed that a red-hot iron had been driven through his heart and
twisted there; the liquor burned in his blood and stomach like
fire; and each time that he had finished reading that long letter,
he would grunt, reach for the jug again, and then slowly and
painfully begin to scrawl some words down on the pad before him.

He had done this at least a dozen times that night, and each time
after a few scrawled lines he would grunt impatiently, wad the
paper up into a crumpled ball and throw it into the waste-paper
basket at his side.  Now, a little after three o'clock in the
morning, he was writing steadily; there was no sound now in the
room save for the man's thick short breathing and the minute
scratching of his pen across the paper.  An examination of these
wadded balls of paper, however, in the order in which they had been
written, would have revealed perfectly the successive states of
feeling in the man's spirit.

The first, which was written after his discovery of the letters,
was just a few scrawled words without punctuation or grammatical
coherence, ending abruptly in an explosive splintered movement of
the pen, and read simply and expressively as follows:

"You bitch you damned dirty trollop of a lying whore you--"

And this ended here in an explosive scrawl of splintered ink, and
had been wadded up and thrown away into the basket.



XXIII


Helen had lain awake for hours in darkness, in a strange comatose
state of terror and hallucination.  There was no sound save the
sound of Barton's breathing beside her, but in her strange drugged
state she would imagine she heard all kinds of sounds.  As she lay
there in the dark, her eyes wide open, wide awake, plucking at her
large cleft chin abstractedly, in a kind of drugged hypnosis,
thinking like a child:

"What is that? . . .  Someone is coming! . . .  That was a car that
stopped outside. . . .  Now they're coming up the steps. . . .
There's someone knocking at the door. . . .  Oh, my God! . . .
It's about Papa! . . .  He's had another attack, they've come to
get me . . . he's dead! . . .  Hugh!  Hugh!  Wake up!" she said
hoarsely, and seized him by the arm.  And he woke, his sparse hair
tousled, grumbling sleepily.

"Hugh!  Hugh!" she whispered.  "It's Papa--he's dying . . . they're
at the door now! . . . oh, for heaven's sake, get up!" she almost
screamed in a state of frenzied despair and exasperation.  "Aren't
you good for anything! . . .  Don't lie there like a dummy--Papa
may be dying!  Get up!  Get up!  There's someone at the door!  My
God, you can at least go and find out what it is!  Oh, get up, get
up, I tell you! . . .  Don't leave everything to me!  You're a man--
you can at least do that much!"--and by now her voice was almost
sobbing with exasperation.

"Well, ALL right, ALL right!" he grumbled in a tone of protest,
"I'm going!  Only give me a moment to find my slippers and my bath-
robe, won't you?"

And, hair still twisted, tall, bony, thin to emaciation, he felt
around with his bare feet until he found his slippers, stepped
gingerly into them, and put on his bath-robe, tying the cord around
his waist, and looking himself over in the mirror carefully,
smoothing down his rumpled hair and making a shrugging motion of
the shoulders.  And she looked at him with a tortured and
exasperated glare, saying:

"Oh, slow, slow, slow! . . .  My God, you're the slowest thing that
ever lived! . . .  I could walk from here to California in the time
it takes you to get out of bed."

"Well, I'M going, I'M going," he said again with surly protest.  "I
don't want to go to the front door naked--only give me a minute to
get ready, won't you?"

"Then, go, go, go!" she almost screamed at him.  "They've been
there for fifteen minutes. . . .  They're almost hammering the door
down--for God's sake go and find out if they've come because of
Papa, I beg of you."

And he went hastily, still preserving a kind of dignity as he
stepped along gingerly in his bath-robe and thin pyjamaed legs.
And when he got to the door, there was no one, nothing there.  The
street outside was bare and empty, the houses along the street dark
and hushed with their immense and still attentiveness of night and
silence and the sleepers, the trees were standing straight and lean
with their still young leafage--and he came back again growling
surlily.

"Ah-h, there's no one there!  You didn't hear anything! . . .  You
imagined the whole thing!"

And for a moment her eyes had a dull appeased look, she plucked at
her large cleft chin and said in an abstracted tone:  "Ah-hah! . . .
Well, come on back to bed, honey, and get some sleep."

"Ah, get some sleep!" he growled, scowling angrily as he took off
his robe--and scuffed the slippers from his feet.  "What chance do
I have to get any sleep any more with you acting like a crazy woman
half the time?"

She snickered hoarsely and absently, still plucking at her chin, as
he lay down beside her; she kissed him, and put her arms around him
with a mothering gesture.

"Well, I know, Hugh," she said quietly, "you've had a hard time of
it, but some day we will get away from it and live our own life.  I
know you didn't marry the whole damned family--but just try to put
up with it a little longer: Papa has not got long to live, he's all
alone over there in that old house--and she can't realize--she
doesn't understand that he is dying--she'll never wake up to the
fact until he's gone!  I lie here at night thinking about it--and I
can't go to sleep . . . I get funny notions in my head."  As she
spoke these words the dull strained look came into her eyes again,
and her big-boned generous face took on the warped outline of
hysteria--"You know, I get queer."  She spoke the word in a puzzled
and baffled way, the dull strained look becoming more pronounced--
"I think of him over there all alone in that old house, and then I
think they're coming for me--" she spoke the word "they" in this
same baffled and puzzled tone, as if she did not clearly understand
who "they" were--"I think the telephone is ringing, or that someone
is coming up the steps and then I hear them knocking at the door,
and then I hear them talking to me, telling me to come quick, he
needs me--and then I hear him calling to me, 'Baby!  Oh, baby--come
quick, baby, for Jesus' sake!'"

"You've been made the goat," he muttered, "you've got to bear the
whole burden on your shoulders.  You're cracking up under the
strain.  If they don't leave you alone I'm going to take you away
from here."

"Do you think it's right?" she demanded in a frenzied tone again,
responding thirstily to his argument.  "Why, good heavens, Hugh!
I've got a right to my own life the same as anybody else.  Don't
you think I have?  I married YOU!" she cried, as if there were some
doubts of the fact.  "I wanted a home of my own, children, my own
life--good heavens, we have a right to that just the same as anyone
else!  Don't you think we have?"

"Yes," he said grimly, "and I'm going to see we get it.  I'm tired
of seeing you made the victim!  If they don't give you some peace
or quiet we'll move away from this town."

"Oh, it's not that I mind doing it for Papa," she said more
quietly.  "Good heavens, I'll do anything to make that poor old man
happier.  If only the rest of them--well, honey," she said,
breaking off abruptly, "let's forget about it!  It's too bad you've
got to go through all this now, but it won't last for ever.  After
Papa is gone, we'll get away from it.  Some day we'll have a chance
to lead our own lives together."

"Oh, it's all right about me, dear," the man said quietly, speaking
the word "dear" in the precise and nasal way Ohio people have.  He
was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his lean seamed
face and care-worn eyes were quietly eloquent with the integrity of
devotion and loyalty that was of the essence of his life.  "I don't
mind it for myself--only I hate to see you get yourself worked up
to this condition.  I'm afraid you'll crack under the strain:
that's all I care about."

"Well, forget about it.  It can't be helped.  Just try to make the
best of it.  Now go on back to sleep, honey, and try to get some
rest before you have to get up."

And returning her kiss, with an obedient and submissive look on his
lean face, he said quietly, "Good night, dear," turned over on his
side and closed his eyes.

She turned the light out, and now again there was nothing but
darkness, silence, the huge still hush and secrecy of night, her
husband's quiet breath of sleep as he lay beside her.  And again
she could not sleep, but lay there plucking absently at her large
cleft chin, her eyes open, turned upward into darkness in a stare
of patient, puzzled, and abstracted thought.



XXIV


For a long time now, McGuire had sat there without moving, sprawled
out upon the desk in a kind of drunken stupor.  About half-past
three the telephone upon the desk began to ring, jangling the
hospital silence with its ominous and insistent clangour, but the
big burly figure of the man did not stir, he made no move to
answer.  Presently he heard the brisk heel-taps of Creasman, the
night superintendent, coming along the heavy oiled linoleum of the
corridor.  She entered, glanced quickly at him, and saying, "Shall
I take it?" picked up the phone, took the receiver from its hook,
said "hello" and listened for a moment.  He did not move.

In a moment, the night superintendent said quietly:

"Yes, I'll ask him."

When she spoke to him, however, her tone had changed completely
from the cool professional courtesy of her speech into the
telephone: putting the instrument down upon the top of the desk,
and covering the mouth-piece with her hand, she spoke quietly to
him, but with a note of cynical humour in her voice, bold, coarse,
a trifle mocking.

"It's your wife," she said.  "What shall I tell her?"

He regarded her stupidly for a moment before he answered.

"What does she want?" he grunted.

She looked at him with hard eyes touched with pity and regret.

"What do you think a woman wants?" she said.  "She wants to know if
you are coming home tonight."

He stared at her and then grunted:

"Won't go home."

She took her hand away from the mouth-piece instantly, and taking
up the phone again, spoke smoothly, quietly, with cool crisp
courtesy:

"The doctor will not be able to go home tonight, Mrs. McGuire.  He
has to operate at seven-thirty. . . .  Yes. . . .  Yes. . . .  At
seven-thirty. . . .  He has decided it is best to stay here until
the operation is over. . . .  Yes. . . .  I'll tell him. . . .
Thank YOU. . . .  Good-bye."

She hung up quietly and then turning to him, her hands arched
cleanly on starched hips, she looked at him for a moment with a
bold sardonic humour.

"What did she say?" he mumbled thickly.

"Nothing," she said quietly.  "Nothing at all.  What else is there
to say?"

He made no answer but just kept staring at her in his bloated
drunken way with nothing but the numb swelter of that irremediable
anguish in his heart.  In a moment, her voice hardening
imperceptibly, the nurse spoke quietly again:

"Oh, yes--and I forgot to tell you--you had another call tonight."

He moistened his thick lips, and mumbled:

"Who was it?"

"It was that woman of yours."

There was no sound save the stertorous labour of his breath; he
stared at her with his veined and yellowed eyes, and grunted
stolidly:

"What did she want?"

"She wanted to know if the doc-taw was theah," Creasman said in a
coarse and throaty parody of refinement.  "And is he coming in
tonight?  Really, I should like to know. . . .  Ooh, yaas,"
Creasman went on throatily, adding a broad stroke or two on her own
account.  "I simply must find out!  I cawn't get my sleep in until
I do. . . .  Well," she demanded harshly, "what am I going to tell
her if she calls again?"

"What did she say to tell me?"

"She said"--the nurse's tone again was lewdly tinged with parody--
"to tell you that she is having guests for dinner tomorrow night--
this evening--and that you simply GOT to be thöh, you, and your
wife, too--ooh, Gawd, yes!--the Reids are comin', don't-cherknow--
and if you are not thöh Gawd only knows what will happen!"

He glowered at her drunkenly for a moment, and then, waving thick
fingers at her in disgust, he mumbled:

"You got a dirty mouth . . . don't become you. . . .  Unlady-
like. . . .  Don't like a dirty-talkin' woman. . . .  Never
did. . . .  Unbecomin'. . . .  Unlady-like. . . .  Nurses all
alike . . . all dirty talkers . . . don't like 'em."

"Oh, dirty talkers, your granny!" she said coarsely.  "Now you
leave the nurses alone. . . .  They're decent enough girls, most of
'em, until they come here and listen to you for a month or two. . . .
You listen to me, Hugh McGuire; don't blame the nurses.  When it
comes to dirty talking, you can walk off with the medals any day in
the week. . . .  Even if I am your cousin, I had a good Christian
raising out in the country before I came here.  So don't talk to me
about nurses' dirty talk: after a few sessions with you in the
operating room even the Virgin Mary could use language fit to make
a monkey blush.  So don't blame it on the nurses.  Most of them are
white as snow compared to you."

"You're dirty talkers--all of you," he muttered, waving his thick
fingers in her direction.  "Don't like it. . . .  Unbecomin' in a
lady."

For a moment she did not answer, but stood looking at him, arms
akimbo on her starched white hips, a glance that was bold, hard,
sardonic, but somehow tinged with a deep and broad affection.

Then, taking her hands off her hips, she bent swiftly over him,
reached down between his legs, and got the jug and lifting it up to
the light in order to make her cynical inspection of its depleted
contents more accurate, she remarked with ironic approbation:

"My, my!  You're doing pretty well, aren't you? . . .  Well, it
won't be long NOW, will it?" she said cheerfully, and then turning
to him abruptly and accusingly, demanded:

"Do you realize that you were supposed to call Helen Gant at twelve
o'clock?"  She glanced swiftly at the clock.  "Just three and a
half hours ago.  Or did you forget it?"

He passed his thick hand across the reddish unshaved stubble of his
beard.

"Who?" he said stupidly.  "Where?  What is it?"

"Oh, nothing to worry about," she said with a light hard humour.
"Just a little case of carcinoma of the prostate.  He's going to
die anyway, so you've got nothing to worry about at all."

"Who?" he said stupidly again.  "Who is it?"

"Oh, just a man," she said gaily.  "An old, old man name Mr. Gant.--
You've been his physician for twenty years, but maybe you've
forgotten him.  You know--they come and go; some live and others
die--it's all right,--this one's going to die.  They'll bury him--
it'll all come out right one way or the other--so you've nothing to
worry about at all. . . .  Even if you kill him," she said
cheerfully.  "He's just an old, old man with cancer, and bound to
die anyway, so promise me you won't worry about it too much, will
you?"

She looked at him a moment longer; then, putting her hand under his
fat chin, she jerked his head up sharply.  He stared at her
stupidly with his yellowed drunken eyes, and in them she saw the
mute anguish of a tortured animal, and suddenly her heart was
twisted with pity for him.

"Look here," she said, in a hard and quiet voice, "what's wrong
with you?"

In a moment he mumbled thickly:

"Nothing's wrong with me."

"Is it the woman business again?  For God's sake, are you never
going to grow up, McGuire?  Are you going to remain an overgrown
schoolboy all your life?  Are you going to keep on eating your
heart out over a bitch who thinks that spring is here every time
her hind end itches?  Are you going to throw your life away, and
let your work go to smash because some damned woman in the change
of life has done you dirt?  What kind of man are you, anyway?" she
jeered.  "Jesus God!  If it's a woman that you want the woods are
full of 'em.  Besides," she added, "what's wrong with your own
wife!  She's worth a million of those flossy sluts."

He made no answer and in a moment she went on in a harsh and
jeering tone that was almost deliberately coarse:

"Haven't you learned yet, with all you've seen of it, that a piece
of tail is just a piece of tail, and that in the dark it doesn't
matter one good God-damn whether it's brown, black, white, or
yellow?"

Even as she spoke, something cold and surgical in his mind, which
no amount of alcohol seemed to dull or blur, was saying accurately:
"Why do they all feel such contempt for one another?  What is it in
them that makes them despise themselves?"

Aloud, however, waving his thick fingers at her in a gesture of fat
disgust, he said:

"Creasman, you got a dirty tongue. . . .  Don't like to hear a
woman talk like that. . . .  Never liked to hear a dirty-talkin'
woman. . . .  You're no lady!"

"Ah-h!  No lady!" she said bitterly, and let her hands fall in a
gesture of defeat.  "All right, you poor fool, if that's the way
you feel about it, go ahead and drink yourself to death over your
'lady.'  That's what's wrong with you."

And, muttering angrily, she left him.  He sat there stupidly,
without moving, until her firm heel-taps had receded down the
silent hall, and he heard a door close.  Then he reached down
between his knees and got the jug and drank again.  And again there
was nothing in the place except the sound of silence, the rapid
ticking of a little clock, the thick short breathing of the man.



XXV


Somewhere, far away, across the cool sweet silence of the night,
Helen heard the sound of a train.  For a moment she could hear the
faint and ghostly tolling of its bell, the short explosive blasts
of its hard labour, now muted almost into silence, now growing
near, immediate as it laboured out across the night from the
enclosure of a railway cut down by the river's edge; and for an
instant she heard the lonely wailing and receding cry of the
train's whistle, and then the long heavy rumble of its wheels; and
then nothing but silence, darkness, the huge hush and secrecy of
night again.

And still plucking at her chin, thinking absently, but scarcely
conscious of her thinking, like a child in reverie, she thought:

"There is a freight-train going west along the river.  Now, by the
sound, it should be passing below Patton Hill, just across from
where Riverside Park used to be before the flood came and washed it
all away. . . .  Now it is getting farther off, across the river
from the casket factory. . . .  Now it is almost gone, I can hear
nothing but the sound of wheels . . . it is going west toward
Boiling Springs . . . and after that it will come to Wilson City,
Tennessee . . . and then to Dover. . . .  Knoxville . . . Memphis--
after that?  I wonder where the train is going . . . where it will
be tomorrow night? . . .  Perhaps across the Mississippi River, and
then on through Arkansas . . . perhaps to St. Louis . . . and then
on to--what comes next?" she thought absently, plucking at her
chin--"to Kansas City, I suppose . . . and then to Denver . . . and
across the Rocky Mountains . . . and across the desert . . . and
then across more mountains and then at last to California."

And still plucking at her chin, and scarcely conscious of her
thought--not THINKING, indeed, so much as reflecting by a series of
broken but powerful images all cogent to a central intuition about
life--her mind resumed again its sleepless patient speculation:

"How strange and full of mystery life is. . . .  Tomorrow we shall
all get up, dress, go out on the streets, see and speak to one
another--and yet we shall know absolutely nothing about anyone
else. . . .  I know almost everyone in town--the bankers, the
lawyers, the butchers, the bakers, the grocers, the clerks in the
stores, the Greek restaurant man, Tony Scarsati the fruit dealer,
even the niggers down in Niggertown--I know them all, as well as
their wives and children--where they came from, what they are
doing, all the lies and scandals and jokes and mean stories,
whether true or false, that are told about them--and yet I really
know nothing about any of them.  I know nothing about anyone, not
even about myself--" and, suddenly, this fact seemed terrible and
grotesque to her, and she thought desperately:

"What is wrong with people? . . .  Why do we never get to know
one another? . . .  Why is it that we get born and live and die
here in this world without ever finding out what anyone else is
like? . . .  No, what is the strangest thing of all--why is it that
all our efforts to know people in this world lead only to greater
ignorance and confusion than before?  We get together and talk, and
say we think and feel and believe in such a way, and yet what we
really think and feel and believe we never say at all.  Why is this?
We talk and talk in an effort to understand another person, and yet
almost all we say is false: we hardly ever say what we mean or tell
the truth--it all leads to greater misunderstanding and fear than
before--it would be better if we said nothing.  Tomorrow I shall
dress and go out on the street and bow and smile and flatter
people, laying it on with a trowel, because I want them to like me,
I want to make 'a good impression,' to be a 'success'--and yet I
have no notion what it is all about.  When I pass Judge Junius
Pearson on the street I will smile and bow and try to make a good
impression on him, and if he speaks to me I shall almost fawn upon
him in order to flatter my way into his good graces.  Why?  I do
not like him, I hate his long pointed nose, and the sneering and
disdainful look upon his face: I think he is 'looking down' on me--
but I know that he goes with the 'swell' social set and is invited
out to all the parties at Catawba House by Mrs. Goulderbilt and is
received by them as a social equal.  And I feel that if Junius
Pearson should accept me as HIS social equal it would help me--get
me forward somehow--make me a success--get ME an invitation to
Catawba House.  And yet it would get me nothing; even if I were
Mrs. Goulderbilt's closest friend, what good would it do me?  But
the people I really like and feel at home with are working people
of Papa's kind.  The people I really like are Ollie Gant, and old
man Alec Ramsay, and big Mike Fogarty, and Mr. Jannadeau, and
Myrtis, my little nigger servant girl, and Mr. Luther, the fish man
down in the market, and the nigger Jacken, the fruit and vegetable
man, and Ernest Pegram, and Mr. Duncan and the Tarkintons--all the
old neighbours down on Woodson Street--and Tony Scarsati and Mr.
Pappas.  Mr. Pappas is just a Greek luncheon-room proprietor, but
he seems to me to be one of the finest people I have ever known,
and yet if Junius Pearson saw me talking to him I should try to
make a joke out of it--to make a joke out of talking to a Greek who
runs a restaurant.  In the same way, when some of my new friends
see me talking to people like Mr. Jannadeau or Mike Fogarty or
Ollie or Ernest Pegram or the Tarkintons or the old Woodson Street
crowd, I feel ashamed or embarrassed, and turn it off as a big
joke.  I laugh about Mr. Jannadeau and his dirty fingers and the
way he picks his nose, and old Alec Ramsay and Ernest Pegram
spitting tobacco while they talk, and then I wind up by appearing
to be democratic and saying in a frank and open manner--'Well, I
like them . . . I don't care what anyone says' (when no one has
said anything!), 'I like them, and always have.  If the truth is
told, they're just as good as anyone else!'--as if there is any
doubt about it, and as if I should have to justify myself for being
'democratic.'  Why 'democratic'?  Why should I apologize or defend
myself for liking people when no one has accused me?

"I'm pushing Hugh ahead now all the time; he's tired and sick and
worn out and exhausted--but I keep 'pushing him ahead' without
knowing what it is we're pushing ahead toward, where it will all
wind up.  What is it all about?  I've pushed him ahead from Woodson
Street up here to Weaver Street: and now this neighbourhood has
become old-fashioned--the swell society crowd is all moving out to
Grovemont--opposite the golf-course; and now I'm pushing him to
move out there, build upon the lot we own or buy a house.  I've
'pushed' him and myself until now he belongs to the Rotary Club and
I belong to the Thursday Literary Club, the Orpheus Society, the
Saturday Musical Guild, the Woman's Club, the Discussion Group, and
God knows what else--all these silly and foolish little clubs in
which we have no interest--and yet it would kill us if we did not
belong to them, we feel that they are a sign that we are 'getting
ahead.'  Getting ahead to what?

"And it is the same with all of us: pretend, pretend, pretend--
show-off, show-off, show-off--try to keep up with the neighbours
and to go ahead of them--and never a word of truth; never a word of
what we really feel, and understand and know.  The one who shouts
the loudest goes the farthest:--Mrs. Richard Jeter Ebbs sits up on
top of the whole heap, she goes everywhere and makes speeches;
people say 'Mrs. Richard Jeter Ebbs said so-and-so'--and all
because she shouts out everywhere that she is a lady and a member
of an old family and the widow of Richard Jeter Ebbs.  And no one
in town ever met Richard Jeter Ebbs, they don't know who he was,
what he did, where he came from; neither do they know who Mrs.
Richard Jeter Ebbs was, or where she came from, or who or what her
family was.

"Why are we all so false, cowardly, cruel, and disloyal toward one
another and toward ourselves?  Why do we spend our days in doing
useless things, in false pretence and triviality?  Why do we waste
our lives--exhaust our energy--throw everything good away on
falseness and lies and emptiness?  Why do we deliberately destroy
ourselves this way, when we want joy and love and beauty and it is
all around us in the world if we would only take it?  Why are we so
afraid and ashamed when there is really nothing to be afraid and
ashamed of?  Why have we wasted everything, thrown our loves away,
what is this horrible thing in life that makes us throw ourselves
away--to hunt out death when what we want is life?  Why is it that
we are always strangers in this world, and never come to know one
another, and are full of fear and shame and hate and falseness,
when what we want is love?  Why is it?  Why?  Why?  Why?"

And with that numb horror of disbelief and silence and the dark
about her, in her, filling her, it seemed to her suddenly that
there was some monstrous and malevolent force in life that held all
mankind in its spell and that compelled men to destroy themselves
against their will.  It seemed to her that everything in life--the
things men did and said, the way they acted--was grotesque,
perverse, and accidental, that there was no reason for anything.

A thousand scenes from her whole life, seen now with the terrible
detachment of a spectator, and dark and sombre with the light of
time, swarmed through her mind: she saw herself as a child of ten,
hanging on grimly to her father, a thin fury of a little girl,
during his sprees of howling drunkenness--slapping him in the face
to make him obey her, feeding him hot soup, undressing him, sending
for McGuire, "sobering him up" and forcing him to obey her when no
one else could come near him.  And she saw herself later, a kind of
slavey at her mother's boarding-house in St. Louis during the
World's Fair, drudging from morn to night, a grain of human dust,
an atom thrust by chance into the great roar of a distant city, or
on an expedition as blind, capricious, and fatally mistaken as all
life.  Later, she saw herself as a girl in high school, she
remembered her dreams and hopes, the pitiably mistaken innocence of
her vision of the world; her grand ambitions to "study music," to
follow a "career in grand opera"; later still, a girl of eighteen
or twenty, amorous of life, thirsting for the great cities and
voyages of the world, playing popular songs of the period--"Love Me
and the World Is Mine," "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now," "Till the
Sands of the Desert Grow Cold," and so on--for her father, as he
sat, on summer evenings, on his porch; a little later, "touring"
the little cities of the South, singing and playing the popular
"rhythm" and sentimental ballads of the period in vaudeville and
moving-picture houses.  She remembered how she had once been
invited to a week-end house party with a dozen other young men and
women of her acquaintance, and of how she had been afraid to go,
and how desperately ashamed she was when she had "to go in
swimming" with the others, and to "show her figure," her long
skinny legs, even when they were concealed by the clumsy bathing
dress and the black stockings of the period.  She remembered her
marriage then, the first years of her life with Barton, her tragic
failure to have children, and the long horror of Gant's last years
of sickness--the years of sombre waiting, the ever-impending terror
of his death.

A thousand scenes from this past life flashed through her mind now,
as she lay there in the darkness, and all of them seemed grotesque,
accidental and mistaken, as reasonless as everything in life.

And filled with a numb, speechless feeling of despair and nameless
terror, she heard, somewhere across the night, the sound of a train
again, and thought:

"My God!  My God!  What is life about?  We are all lying here in
darkness in ten thousand little towns--waiting, listening, hoping--
for what?"

And suddenly, with a feeling of terrible revelation, she saw the
strangeness and mystery of man's life; she felt about her in the
darkness the presence of ten thousand people, each lying in his
bed, naked and alone, united at the heart of night and darkness,
and listening, as she, to the sounds of silence and of sleep.  And
suddenly it seemed to her that she knew all these lonely, strange,
and unknown watchers of the night, that she was speaking to them,
and they to her, across the fields of sleep, as they had never
spoken before, that she knew men now in all their dark and naked
loneliness, without falseness and pretence as she had never known
them.  And it seemed to her that if men would only listen in the
darkness, and send the language of their naked lonely spirits
across the silence of the night, all of the error, falseness and
confusion of their lives would vanish; they would no longer be
strangers, and each would find the life he sought and never yet had
found.

"If we only could!" she thought.  "If we only could!"

Then, as she listened, there was nothing but the huge hush of night
and silence, and far away the whistle of a train.  Suddenly the
phone rang.



XXVI


A few minutes after four o'clock that morning as McGuire lay there
sprawled upon his desk, the phone rang again.  And again he made no
move to answer it: he just sat there, sprawled out on his fat
elbows, staring stupidly ahead.  Creasman came in presently, as the
telephone continued to disturb the silence of the hospital with its
electric menace, and this time, without a glance at him, answered.

It was Luke Gant.  At four o'clock his father had had another
hæmorrhage, he had lost consciousness, all efforts to awaken him
had failed, they thought he was dying.

The nurse listened carefully for a moment to Luke's stammering and
excited voice, which was audible across the wire even to McGuire.
Then, with a troubled and uncertain glance toward the doctor's
sprawled and drunken figure, she said quietly:

"Just a minute.  I don't know if the doctor is in the hospital.
I'll see if I can find him."

Putting her hand over the mouth-piece, keeping her voice low, she
spoke urgently to McGuire:

"It's Luke Gant.  He says his father has had another hæmorrhage and
that they can't rouse him.  He wants you to come at once.  What
shall I tell him?"

He stared drunkenly at her for a moment, and then, waving his
finger at her in a movement of fat impatience, he mumbled thickly:

"Nothing to do. . . .  No use . . . .  Can't be stopped. . . .
People expect miracles. . . .  Over. . . .  Done for. . . .  Tell
him I'm not here . . . gone home," he muttered, and sprawled
forward on the desk again.

Quietly, coolly, the nurse spoke into the phone again:

"The doctor doesn't seem to be here at the hospital, Mr. Gant.
Have you tried his house?  I think you may find him at home."

"No, G-g-g-god-damn it!" Luke fairly screamed across the wire.
"He's not at home.  I've already t-t-tried to get him here. . . .
N-n-n-now you look here, Miss Creasman!" Luke shouted angrily.
"You c-c-can't kid me: I know where he is--He's d-d-down there at
the hospital right now--wy-wy-wy--stinkin' drunk!  You t-t-tell
him, G-g-g-god-damn his soul, that if he d-d-doesn't come, wy-wy-
wy--P-p-p-papa's in a bad way and and and f-f-frankly, I fink it's
a rotten shame for McGuire to act this way, wy-wy-wy after he's b-
b-been Papa's doctor all these years.  F-f-frankly, I do!"

"Nothing to be done," mumbled McGuire.  "No use. . . .  All over."

"I'll see what I can do, Mr. Gant," said Creasman quietly.  "I'll
let the doctor know as soon as he comes in!"

"C-c-c-comes in, hell!" Luke stammered bitterly.  "I'm c-c-comin'
down there myself and g-g-get him if I have to wy-wy-wy d-d-drag
him here by the s-s-scruff of his neck!"  And he hung up the
receiver with a bang.

The nurse put the phone down on the desk, and turning to McGuire,
said:

"He's raving.  He says if you don't go, he'll come for you and get
you himself.  Can't you pull yourself together enough to go?  If
you can't drive the car, I'll send Joe along to drive it for you."
(Joe was a negro orderly in the hospital.)

"What's the use?" McGuire mumbled thickly, a little angrily.  "What
the hell do these people expect, anyway? . . .  I'm a doctor, not a
miracle man. . . .  The man's gone, I tell you . . . the whole gut
and rectum is eaten away . . . he can't live over a day or two
longer at the most. . . .  It's cruelty to prolong it: why the hell
should I try to?"

"All right," she said resignedly.  "Do as you please.  Only, he'll
probably be here for you himself in a few minutes.  And since they
do feel that way about it, I think you might make the effort just
to please them."

"Ah-h," he muttered wearily.  "People are all alike. . . .  They
all want miracles."

"Are you just going to sit here all night?" she said with a rough
kindliness.  "Aren't you going to try to get a little sleep before
you operate?"

He waved fat fingers at her, and did not look at her.

"Leave me alone," he mumbled; and she left him.

When she had gone, he fumbled for the jug and drank again.  And
then, while time resumed its sanded drip, and he sat there in the
silence, he thought again of the old dying man whom he had known
first when he was a young doctor just beginning and with whom his
own life had been united by so many strange and poignant memories.
And thinking of Gant, the strangeness of the human destiny returned
to haunt his mind; there was something that he could not speak, a
wonder and a mystery he could not express.

He fumbled for the jug again, and holding it solemnly in his
bearish paws, drained it.  Then he sat for several minutes without
moving.  Finally, he got up out of his chair, grunting painfully,
and fumbling for the walls, lurched out into the hall, and began to
grope his way across the corridor toward the stairs.  And the first
step fooled him as it had done so many times before; he missed his
step, even as a man stepping out in emptiness might miss, and came
down heavily upon his knees.  Then, pushing with his hands, he slid
out peacefully on the oiled green linoleum, pillowed his big head
on his arms with a comfortable grunt, and sprawled out flat,
already half dead to the world.  It was in this position--also a
familiar one--that Creasman, who had heard his thump when falling,
found him.  And she spoke sharply and commandingly as one might
speak to a little child.

"You get right up off that floor and march upstairs," she said.
"If you want to sleep you're going to your room; you'll not
disgrace us sleeping on that floor."

And like a child, as he had done so many times before, he obeyed
her.  In a moment, as her sharp command reached his drugged
consciousness, he grunted, stirred, climbed painfully to his knees,
and then, pawing carefully before him like a bear, unable or
unwilling to stand up, he began to crawl slowly up the stairs.

And it was in this position, half-way up, pawing his burly and
cumbersome way on hands and knees, that Luke Gant found him.
Cursing bitterly, and stammering with wild excitement, the young
man pulled him to his feet, Creasman sponged off the great bloated
face with a cold towel and, assisted by Joe Corpering, the negro
man, they got him down the stairs and out of the hospital into
Luke's car.

Dawn was just breaking, a faint glimmer of blue-silver light, with
the still purity of the earth, the sweet fresh stillness of the
trees, the bird-song waking.  The fresh sweet air, Luke's breakneck
driving through the silent streets, the roaring motor--finally, the
familiar and powerfully subdued emotion of a death chamber, the
repressed hysteria, the pain and tension and the terror of shocked
flesh, the aura of focal excitement around the dying man revived
McGuire.

Gant lay still and almost lifeless on the bed, his face already
tinged with the ghostly shade of death, his breath low, hoarse,
faintly rattling, his eyes half-closed, comatose, already glazed
with death.

McGuire sighted at his shining needle, and thrust a powerful
injection of caffeine, sodium, and benzoate into the arm of the
dying man.  This served partially to revive him, got him through
the low ebb of the dark, his eyes opened, cleared, he spoke again.
Bright day and morning came, and Gant still lived.  And with the
light, their impossible and frenzied hopes came back again, as they
have always been revived in desperate men.  And Gant did not die
that day.  He lived on.



XXVII


By the middle of the month Gant had a desperate attack; for four
days now he was confined to bed, he began to bleed out of the
bowels, he spent four sleepless days and nights of agony, and with
the old terror of death awake again and urgent, Helen telegraphed
to Luke, who was in Atlanta, frantically imploring him to come home
at once.

With the arrival of his son and under the stimulation of Luke's
vital and hopeful nature, the old man revived somewhat: they got
him out of bed and into a new wheel-chair which they had bought for
the purpose, and the day of his arrival Luke wheeled his father out
into the bright June sunshine and through the streets of the town,
where he again saw friends, and renewed acquaintances he had not
known in years.

The next day Gant seemed better.  He ate a good breakfast, by ten
o'clock he was up and Luke had dressed him, got him into the new
wheelchair and was wheeling him out on the streets again in the
bright sunshine.  All along the streets of the town people stopped
and greeted the old man and his son, and in Gant's weary old brain
there may perhaps have been a flicker of an old hope, a feeling
that he had come to life again.

"Wy-wy-wy-wy, he's f-f-f-fine as silk!" Luke would sing out in
answer to the question of some old friend or acquaintance, before
his father had a chance to answer.  "Aren't you, C-C-C-Colonel?
Wy-wy-wy-wy Lord God!  Mr. P-p-p-p-parker, you couldn't k-k-k-kill
him with a wy-wy-wy-wy-wy with a b-b-butcher's cleaver.  He'll be
here when you and I bofe are p-p-p-pushing daisies."  And Gant,
pleased, would smile feebly, puffing from time to time at a cigar
in the unaccustomed, clumsy, and pitifully hopeful way sick men
have.

Towards one o'clock Gant began to moan with pain again and to
entreat his son to make haste and take him home.  When they got
back before the house, Luke brought the wheel chair to a stop and
helped his father to get up.  His stammering solicitude and over-
extravagant offers of help served only to exasperate and annoy the
old man who, still moaning feebly, and sniffling with trembling
lip, said petulantly:

"No, no, no.  Just leave me alone to try to get a moment's peace, I
beg of you, I ask you, for Jesus' sake."

"Wy-wy-wy-wy, all right, P-p-p-papa," Luke stammered with earnest
cheerfulness.  "Wy-wy-wy, you're the d-d-d-doctor.  Wy-wy, I'll
just wheel the chair up on the porch and then I'll c-c-come back to
your room and f-f-f-fix you up in a j-j-j-j-jiffy."

"Oh, Jesus, I don't care what you do. . . .  Do what you like,"
Gant moaned.  "I'm in agony. . . .  O Jesus!" he wept.  "It's
fearful, it's awful, it's cruel--just leave me alone, I beg of
you," he sniffled.

"Wy-wy-wy, yes, sir, P-p-p-papa--wy, you're the doctor," Luke said.
"Can you make it by yourself all right?" he said anxiously, as his
father, leaning heavily upon his cane, started up the stone steps
toward the walk that led up to the house.

"Why, yes, now, son," Eliza, who had heard their voices and come
out on the porch, now said diplomatically, seeing that Luke's well-
meant but stammering solicitude had begun to irritate his father.
"Mr. Gant doesn't want any help--you put the car up, son, and leave
him alone, he's able to manage all right by himself."

And Luke, muttering respectfully, "Wy-wy-wy, yes, sir, P-p-p-papa,
you're the d-d-doctor," stopped then, lifted the chair up to the
walk, and began to push it toward the house, not, however, without
a troubled glance at the old man who was walking slowly and feebly
toward the porch steps.  And for a moment, Eliza stood surveying
them and then turned, to stand looking at her house reflectively
before she entered it again, her hands clasped loosely at her
waist, her lips pursed in a strong reflective expression in which
the whole pride of possession, her living and inseparable unity
with this gaunt old house, was powerfully evident.

It was at this moment, while she stood planted there upon the
sidewalk looking at the house, that the thing happened.  Gant,
still moaning feebly to himself, had almost reached the bottom of
the steps when suddenly he staggered, a scream of pain and horror
was torn from him; in that instant, the walking cane fell with a
clatter to the concrete walk, his two great hands went down to his
groin in a pitiable clutching gesture and crying out loudly:  "O
Jesus!  Save me!  Save me!" he fell to his knees, still clutching
at his entrails with his mighty hands.

Even before Eliza got to him her flesh turned goosey at the sight.
Blood was pouring from him; the bright arterial blood was already
running out upon the concrete walk, the heavy black cloth of Gant's
trousers was already sodden, turning purplish with the blood; the
blood streamed through his fingers, covering his great hands.  He
was bleeding to death through the genital organs.

Eliza rushed toward him at a strong clumsy gait; she tried to lift
him; he was too big for her to handle, and she screamed to Luke for
help.  He came at once, running at top speed across the yard and,
scarcely pausing in his stride, he picked up Gant's great figure in
his arms--it felt as light and fleshless as a bundle of dry sticks--
and turning to his mother, said curtly:

"Call Helen!  Quick!  I'll take him to his room and get his clothes
off."

And holding the old man as if he were a child, he fairly raced up
the steps and down the hall, leaving a trail of blood behind him as
he went.

Eliza, scarcely conscious of what she did, paused just long enough
to pick up Gant's black felt hat and walking-stick which had fallen
to the walk.  Then, her face white and set as a block of marble,
she rushed up the steps and down the hall toward the telephone.
Now that the end had come, after all the years of agony and
waiting, the knowledge filled her with an unbelievable, an
incredulous horror.  In another moment she was talking to her
daughter.

"Oh, child, child," she said in a low tone of utter terror, "come
quick! . . .  You father's bleeding to death!"

There was a gasp, a sob of anguish and surprise, half broken in the
throat, the receiver was banged on the hook without an answer:
within four minutes Helen had arrived, Barton, usually a deliberate
and cautious driver, having taken the dangerous hills and curves
between at murderous speed.

As she entered the hall, her mother had just finished phoning to
McGuire.  Without a word of greeting the two women rushed back
through the rear hall towards Gant's room; when they got there Luke
had already finished undressing him.  Gant lay half propped on
pillows, still holding his great hands clutched around his
genitals, the sheet beneath him was already soaked with blood, a
red wet blot that spread horribly, sickeningly even as they looked.
Gant's cold-grey eyes were bright with terror.  As his daughter
entered the room, he looked at her with the pitiable entreaty of a
child, a look that tore at her heart, that begged her--the only one
on earth who could, the only one who through black years of horror
actually had--by some miracle of strength and grace to save him.
And even as he looked at her with pitiable entreaty, she saw that
he was gone, that he was dying, and that he knew it.  Cold terror
drank her heart; without a word she seized a towel, pulled his
great hands away from that fount of jetting blood and covered him.
By the time McGuire arrived they had got a fresh sheet under him;
but the spreading horror of the great red blot could not be
checked, the sheet was soaking in bright blood the moment that they
got it down.

McGuire came in and took one look, then turned toward the window,
fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette.  Helen came to him and
seized him by his burly arms, unconsciously shaking him in the
desperation of her entreaty.

"You've got to make it stop," she said hoarsely.  "You've got to!
You've got to!"

He stared at her for a moment, then stuck the cigarette in the
corner of his thick lip, and barked coarsely:

"Stop what?  What the hell do you think I am--Jehovah?"

"You've got to!  You've got to!" she muttered again, her large
gaunt face strained with hysteria--and then, suddenly, abruptly,
quietly:

"What's to be done?"

He did not answer for a moment: he stared out of the window, his
coarse, bloated and brutally good face patched and mottled in late
western light.

"You'd better wire the others," he grunted.  "That is, if you want
them here.  Tell Steve and Daisy to come on.  They may make it.
Where's Eugene?"

"Boston."

He shrugged his burly shoulders and said nothing for a moment.

"All right.  Tell him to come on."

"How long?" she whispered.

Again he shrugged his burly shoulders, but made no answer.  He lit
his cigarette, and turned toward the bed: nothing could be heard
except Luke's heavy and excited breathing.  Both towel and sheet
were red and wet again.  Gant remained motionless, his great hands
clasped upon the towel, his eyes bright with terror and pitiable
entreaty.  McGuire opened his old leather case, squinted at the
needle, and loaded it.  Then, the cigarette still plastered on his
fat lip, coiling smoke, he walked over to the bed and even as Gant
raised his fear-bright eyes to him, he took him by his stringy arm,
and grunting "All right, W. O.," he plunged the needle in above the
elbow.  Gant moaned a little, and relaxed insensibly after the
needle had gone in: in a few minutes his eyes grew dull, and his
great hands loosened in their clutch.



XXVIII


He bled incredibly.  It was unbelievable that an old cancer-riddled
spectre of a man should have so much blood in him.  One has often
heard the phrase "bled white," and that is literally what happened
to him.  Some liquid still came from him, but it was almost
colourless, like water.  There was no more blood left in him.  And
even then he did not die.  Instead, as if to compensate him for all
these years of agony and mortal terror, this bitter clutch on life
so desperately relinquished, there came now a period of almost
total peace and clarity.  And Helen, grasping hope fiercely from
that unaccustomed tranquillity, tried to hearten him and herself
with futile words; she even seized him by his shoulders and shook
him a little, saying:

"Why, you're all right!  You're going to be all right now!  The
worst is over--you'll get well now!  Don't you know it?"

And Gant covered her fingers with his own great hand and, smiling a
little and shaking his head, looked at her, saying in a low and
gentle voice:

"Oh, no, baby.  I'm dying.  It's all right now."

And in her heart she knew at last that she was beaten; yet she
would not give up.  The final stop of that horrible flow of blood
which had continued unabated for a day, the unaccustomed tranquil
clarity of Gant's voice and mind, awakened in her again all the old
unreasoning hopefulness of her nature, its desperate refusal to
accept the ultimate.

"Oh," she said that night to Eliza, shaking her head with a strong
movement of negation--"you can't tell me!  Papa's not going to die
yet!  He'll pull through this just like he's pulled through all
those other spells.  Why, his mind is as clear and sound as a bell!
He knows everything that's going on around him!  He hasn't talked
in years as he talked to me tonight--he was more like his old self
than he's been since he took sick."

"Why, yes," Eliza answered instantly, eagerly catching up the drift
of her daughter's talk, and pursuing it with the web-like,
invincibly optimistic hopefulness of her own nature.

"Why, yes," she went on, pursing her lips reflectively and speaking
in a persuasive manner.  "And, see here, now!--Say!--Why, you know,
I got to studyin' it over tonight and it's just occurred to me--now
I'll tell you what MY theory is!  I believe that that old growth--
that awful old thing--that--well, I suppose, now, you might say--
that CANCER," she said, making a gesture of explanation with her
broad hand--"whatever it is, that awful old thing that has been
eating away inside him there for years--" here she pursed her lips
powerfully and shook her head in a short convulsive tremor of
disgust--"well, now, I give it as my theory that the whole thing
tore loose in him yesterday--when he had that attack--and," she
paused deliberately, looked her daughter straight in the eyes, and
went on with a slow and telling force--"and that he has simply gone
and got that rotten old thing out of his system."

"Then, you mean--" Helen began eagerly, seizing at this fantastic
straw as if it were the rock by which her drowning hope might be
saved--"you mean, Mama--"

"Yes, sir!" said Eliza, shaking her head slowly and positively.
"That's exactly what I mean!  I think nature has taken its own
course--I think nature has succeeded in doing what all the doctors
and hospitals in the world were not able to do--for you can rest
assured"--and here she paused, looking her daughter gravely in the
eyes--"you can rest assured that nature is the best physician in
the end!  Now, I've always said as much, and all the best
authorities agree with me.  Why, yes, now!--here!--say!--wasn't I
readin' in the paper--oh! here along, you know a week or so ago--
Doctor Royal S. Copeland!--yes, sir!--that was the very feller--
why, he said, you know--" she went on in explanatory fashion.

"Oh, but, Mama!" Helen said, desperately, unable to make her mind
believe this grotesque reasoning, and yet clutching at every word
with a pleading entreaty that begged to be convinced.

"Oh, but, Mama, surely Wade Eliot and all those other men at
Hopkins couldn't have been wrong!  Why, Mama," she cried furiously,
yet pleadingly--"you know they couldn't--after all these years--
after taking him there for treatment a dozen times or more!  Why,
Mama, those men are FAMOUS--the greatest doctors in the world!  Oh,
surely not!  Surely not!" she said desperately, and then gazed at
Eliza pleadingly again.

"H'm!" said Eliza, pursing her lips with a little scornful smile.
"It won't be the first time that a doctor has been wrong--I don't
care how famous they may be!  You can rest assured of that!  It's
always been my opinion that they're wrong about as often as they're
right--only you can't prove it on 'em.  They BURY their mistakes."
She was silent a moment, looking at her daughter in a sudden,
straight and deadly fashion, with a little smile at the corners of
her mouth.  "Now, child, I want to tell you something. . . .  I
want to tell you what I saw today."  Again she was silent, looking
straight in her daughter's eyes, smiling her quiet little smile.

"What?  What was it, Mama?" Helen demanded eagerly.

"Did you ever take a good look at that maple tree out front that
stands on your right as you come in the house?"

"Why, no," Helen said in a bewildered tone.  "How do you mean?"

"Well," said Eliza calmly, yet with a certain triumph in her voice,
"you just take a good look at it tomorrow.  That's all."

"But why--I can't see--how do you mean, Mama?"

"Now, child--" Eliza pursued her subject deliberately, with a
ruminant relish of her strong pursed lips--"I was born and brought
up in the country--close to the lap of Mother Earth, as the sayin'
goes--and when it comes to TREES--why, I reckon there's mightly
little about 'em that I don't know. . . .  Now here," she said
abruptly, coming to the centre of her argument--"did you ever see a
tree that had a big hollow gash down one side--that looked like it
had all been eaten an' rotted out by some disease that had been
destroyin' it?"

"Why, yes," Helen said, in a puzzled voice.  "But I don't see yet--"

"Well, child, I'll tell you, then," said Eliza, both voice and
worn brown eyes united in their portents of a grave and quiet
earnestness--"that tree doesn't ALWAYS die!  You'll see trees that
have had that happen to them--and they CURE themselves!  You can
see where some old rotten growth has eaten into them--and then you
can see where the tree has got the best of it--and grown up again--
as sound and healthy as it EVER was--around that old rotten growth.
And that," she said triumphantly, "that is just exactly what has
happened to that maple in the yard.  Oh, you can SEE it!" she cried
positively, at the same time making an easy descriptive gesture
with her wide hand--"you can see where it has lapped right around
that old growth--made a sort of fold, you know--and here it is just
as sound and healthy as it ever was!"

"Then you mean?--"

"I mean," said Eliza in her straight and deadly fashion--"I mean
that if a tree can do it, a MAN can do it--and I mean that if any
man alive could do it your daddy is that man--for he's had as much
strength and vitality as any man I ever saw--and MORE than a tree!"
she cried.  "Lord!  I've seen him do enough to kill a HUNDRED
trees--the things HE'S done and managed to get over would kill the
strongest tree that ever lived!"

"Oh, but Mama, surely not!" said Helen, laughing, and beginning to
pluck at her chin in an abstracted manner, amused and tickled in
spite of herself by her mother's extraordinary reasoning.  "You
know that a man is not built the same way as a tree!"

"Why," Eliza cried impatiently, "why not?  They're both Nature's
products, aren't they?  Now, here," she said persuasively, "just
stop and consider the thing for a moment.  Just imagine for a
moment that YOU'RE the tree."  Here she took her strong worn
fingers and traced a line down Helen's stomach.  "Now," she went on
persuasively, "you've got some kind of growth inside you--call it
what you like--a tumour, a growth, a cancer--anything you will--and
your HEALTHY tissues get to work to get the BEST of that growth--to
build up a wall around it--to destroy it--to replace it with sound
tissues, weed it out!  Now," she said, clenching her fingers in a
loose but powerful clasp--"if a TREE can do that, doesn't it stand
to reason that a MAN can do the same?  Why, I wouldn't doubt it for
a moment!" she cried powerfully.  "Not a bit of it."

Thus the two women talked together according to the laws of their
nature--the one with an invincible and undaunted optimism that
persauded itself in the octopal pursuit of its own reasonings, the
other clutching like a drowning person at a straw.



XXIX


He had not heard from any of his family for some weeks, but late
that night, while he was reading in his room on Trowbridge Street,
he received the following telegram from home:  "Father very ill
doctor says cannot live come at once."  The telegram was signed by
his mother.

He telephoned the railway information offices and was informed that
there was a train for New York and the South in about an hour.  If
he hurried, he could catch it.  He did not have enough money for
the fare; he knew that he might hunt up Starwick, Dodd, Professor
Hatcher, or other people that he knew, and get the money, but the
delay would make him miss the train.  Accordingly, he appealed to
the person he knew best in the house, and who would be, he thought,
most likely to help him.  This was Mr. Wang, the Chinese student.

Mr. Wang was as good-hearted as he was stupid and childlike and
now, faced with the need of getting money at once, the boy appealed
to him.  Mr. Wang came to his door and blinked owlishly; behind him
the room was a blur of smoke and incense, and the big cabinet
victrola was giving forth for the dozenth time that evening the
hearty strains of "Yes, We Have No Bananas."

When Mr. Wang saw him, his round yellow face broke into a foolish
crease of merriment; he began to shake his finger at the young man
waggishly, and his throat already beginning to choke and squeak a
little with his jest, he said:

"I s'ink lest night I see you with nice--"  Something in the
other's manner cut him short; he stopped, his round foolish face
grew wondering and solemn, and in a doubtful and inquiring tone, he
said:

"You say--?"

"Listen, Wang: I've just got this telegram from home.  My father is
very sick--they think that he is dying.  I've got to get money to
go home at once.  I need fifty dollars: can you let me have it?"

As Mr. Wang listened, his sparkling eyes grew dull as balls of tar,
his round yellow moon of face grew curiously impassive.  When the
boy had finished, the Chinese thrust his hands into the wide
flowered sleeves of his dressing gown, and then with a curious
formal stiffness said:

"Will you come in?  Please."

The boy entered, and Mr. Wang, closing the door, turned, thrust his
hand in his sleeves again, marched across the room to a magnificent
teak-wood desk and opening a small drawer, took out a roll of
bills, peeled off two twenties and a ten, and coming back to where
his visitor was standing, presented the money to him with a stiff
bow, and his round face still woodenly impassive, said again:

"Please."

The young man seized the money and saying, "Thank you, Wang, I'll
send it to you as soon as I get home," ran back to his room and
began to hurl clothing, shirts, socks, toilet articles, into his
valise as hard as he could.  He had just finished when there was a
tapping on the door and the Chinese appeared again.  He marched
into the room with the same ceremonious formality that had
characterized his former conduct and bowing stiffly again,
presented the boy with two magnificent fans of peacock feathers of
which the lacquered blades were delicately and beautifully
engraved.

And bowing stiffly again, and saying, "Please!" he turned and
marched out of the room, his fat hands thrust into the wide sleeves
of the flowered dressing gown.

Thirty minutes later he was on his way, leaving behind him, in the
care of Mrs. Murphy, most of his belongings--the notebooks,
letters, books, old shoes, worn-out clothes and battered hats, the
thousands of pages of manuscript that represented the accretions of
three years--that immense and nondescript collection of past
events, foredone accomplishment, and spent purposes, the very sight
of which filled him with weariness and horror but which, with the
huge acquisitive mania of his mother's blood, he had never been
able to destroy.



In this way he left Cambridge and a life he had known for two
years; instantly recalled, drawn back by the hand of death into the
immediacy of a former life that had grown strange as dreams.
It was toward the end of June, just a day or two before the
commencement exercises at the university.  That year he had been
informed of his eligibility for the Master's degree--a degree he
had neither sought nor known he had earned and, at the time he had
received the telegram, he had been waiting for the formal exercises
at which he would receive the degree--a wait prompted more by his
total indecision as to his future purpose than by any other cause.
Now, with explosive suddenness, his purpose had been shaped,
decided for him, and with the old feeling of groping bewilderment,
he surveyed the history of the last two years and wondered why he
had come, why he was here, toward what blind goal he had been
tending: all that he had to "show" for these years of fury,
struggle, homelessness and hunger was an academic distinction which
he had not aimed at, and on which he placed small value.

And it was in this spirit that he left the place.  Rain had begun
to fall that night, it fell now in torrential floods.  The gay
buntings and Japanese lanterns with which the Harvard Yard was
already decked were reduced to sodden ruin, and as he raced towards
the station in a taxi, the streets of Cambridge, and the old,
narrow, twisted and familiar lanes of Boston were deserted--pools
of wet light and glittering ribbons swept with storm.

When he got to the South station he had five minutes left to buy
his ticket and get on his train.  In spite of the lashing storm and
the lateness of the hour, that magnificent station, which at that
time--before the later "improvements" had reduced it to a
glittering sterility of tile and marble--was one of the most
thrilling and beautiful places in the world, was still busy with
the tides of people that hurry for ever through the great stations
of America, and that no violence of storm can check.

The vast dingy sweep of the cement concourse outside the train-
gates was pungent, as it had always been, with the acrid and
powerfully exciting smell of engine smoke, and beyond the gates,
upon a dozen tracks, great engines, passive and alert as cats,
purred and panted softly, with the couched menace of their
tremendous stroke.  The engine smoke rose up straight in billowing
plumes to widen under vaulting arches, to spread foggily throughout
the enormous spaces of the grimy sheds.  And beside the locomotives,
he could see the burly denimed figures of the engineers, holding
flaming torches and an oil-can in their hands as they peered and
probed through the shining flanges of terrific pistoned wheels much
taller than their heads.  And for ever, over the enormous cement
concourse and down the quays beneath the powerful groomed
attentiveness of waiting trains the tides of travellers kept
passing, passing, in their everlasting change and weft, of voyage
and return--of speed and space and movement, morning, cities, and
new lands.

And caught up in the vaulting arches of those immense and grimy
sheds he heard again the murmurous sound of time--that sound remote
and everlasting, distilled out of all the movement, frenzy, and
unceasing fury of our unresting lives, and yet itself detached, as
calm and imperturbable as the still sad music of humanity, and
which, made up out of our million passing lives, is in itself as
fixed and everlasting as eternity.

They came, they paused and wove and passed and thrust and vanished
in their everlasting tides, they streamed in and out of the portals
of that enormous station in unceasing swarm; great trains steamed
in to empty them, and others steamed out loaded with their nameless
motes of lives, and all was as it had always been, moving,
changing, swarming on for ever like a river, and as fixed,
unutterable in unceasing movement and in changeless change as the
great river is, and time itself.

And within ten minutes he himself, another grain of dust borne
onward on this ceaseless tide, another nameless atom in this
everlasting throng, another wanderer in America, as all his fathers
were before him, was being hurled into the South again in the huge
projectile of a train.  The train swept swiftly down the gleaming
rails, paused briefly at the Back-Bay station, then was on its way
again, moving smoothly, powerfully, almost noiselessly now, through
the outer stretches of the small dense web of Boston.  The town
swept smoothly past: old blanks of wall, and old worn brick, and
sudden spokes of streets, deserted, lashed with rain, set at the
curbs with glittering beetles of its wet machinery and empetalled
with its wet and sudden blooms of life.  The flushed spoke-wires
crossed his vision, lost the moment that he saw them, his for ever,
gone, like all things else, and never to be captured, seen a
million times, yet never known before--as haunting, fading,
deathless as a dream, as brief as is the bitter briefness of man's
days, as lost and lonely as his life upon the mighty breast of
earth, and of America.

Then the great train, gathering now in speed and mounting smoothly
to the summit of its tremendous stroke, was running swiftly through
the outskirts of the city, through suburbs and brief blurs of light
and then through little towns and on into the darkness, the wild
and secret loneliness of earth.  And he was going home again into
the South and to a life that had grown strange as dreams, and to
his father who was dying and who had become a ghost and shadow of
his father to him, and to the bitter reality of grief and death.
And--how, why, for what reason he could not say--all he felt was
the tongueless swelling of wild joy.  It was the wild and secret
joy that has no tongue, the impossible hope that has no explanation,
the savage, silent, and sweet exultancy of night, the wild and
lonely visage of the earth, the imperturbable stroke and calmness of
the everlasting earth, from which we have been derived, wherein
again we shall be compacted, on which all of us have lived alone as
strangers, and across which, in the loneliness of night, we have
been hurled onward in the projectile flight of mighty trains--
America.

Then the great train was given to the night and darkness, the great
train hurtled through the night across the lonely, wild, and secret
earth, bearing on to all their thousand destinations its freight of
unknown lives--some to morning, cities, new lands, and the joy of
voyages, and some to known faces, voices, and the hills of home--
but which to certain fortune, peace, security, and love, no man
could say.



The news that Gant was dying had spread rapidly through the town
and, as often happens, that news had brought him back to life again
in the heart and living memory of men who had known him, and who
had scarcely thought of him for years.  That night--the night of
his death--the house was filled with some of the men who had known
him best since he came to the town forty years before.

Among these people were several of the prominent and wealthy
business men of the community: these included, naturally, Eliza's
brothers, William and James Pentland, both wealthy lumber dealers,
as well as one of her younger brothers, Crockett, who was Will
Pentland's bookkeeper, a pleasant, ruddy, bucolic man of fifty
years.  Among the other men of wealth and influence who had been
Gant's friends there was Fagg Sluder, who had made a fortune as a
contractor and retired to invest his money in business property,
and to spend his time seated in an easy creaking chair before the
fire department, in incessant gossip about baseball with the
firemen and the young professional baseball players whose chief
support he was, whose annual deficit he cheerfully supplied, and to
whom he had given the local baseball park, which bore his name.  He
had been one of Gant's best friends for twenty years, he was
immensely fond of him, and now, assembled in the broad front hall
in earnest discussion with the Pentlands and Mike Fogarty, another
of Gant's friends, and armed with the invariable cigar (despite his
doctor's orders he smoked thirty or forty strong black cigars every
day), which he chewed on, took out of his mouth, and put back
again, with quick, short, unconscious movements, he could be heard
saying in the rapid, earnest, stammering tone that was one of the
most attractive qualities of his buoyant and constantly hopeful
nature:

"I-I-I-I just believe he's going to pull right out of this and-and-
and-get well!  Why-why-why-why-when I went in there tonight he
spoke right up and-and-and knew me right away!" he blurted out,
sticking the cigar in his mouth and chewing on it vigorously a
moment--"why-why-why his mind is-is-is-is just as clear--as it
always was--spoke right up, you know, says 'Sit down, Fagg'--shook
hands with me--knew me right away--talked to me just the same way
he always talked--says 'Sit down, Fagg.  I'm glad to see you.  How
have you been?' he says--and-and-and--I just believe he's going to
pull right out of this," Mr. Sluder blurted out,--"be damned if I
don't--what do YOU say, Will?" and snatching his chewed cigar butt
from his mouth he turned eagerly to Will Pentland for confirmation.
And Will, who, as usual, had been paring his stubby nails during
the whole course of the conversation, his lips pursed in their
characteristic family grimace, now studied his clenched fingers for
a moment, pocketed his knife and turning to Fagg Sluder, with a
little birdlike nod and wink, and with the incomparable Pentland
drawl, at once precise and full of the relish of self-satisfaction,
said:

"Well, if any man alive can do it, W. O. is that man.  I've seen
him time and again when I thought every breath would be his last--
and he's got over it every time.  I've always said," he went on
precisely, and with a kind of deadly directness in his small
compact and almost wizened face, "that he has more real vitality
than any two men that I ever knew--he's got out of worse holes than
this before--and he may do it again."  He was silent a moment, his
small packed face pursed suddenly in its animal-like grimace that
had an almost savage ferocity and a sense of deadly and indomitable
power.

Even more astonishing and troubling was the presence of these four
older members of the Pentland family gathered together in his
mother's hall.  As they stood there talking--Eliza with her hands
held in their loose and powerful clasp across her waist, Will
intently busy with his finger-nails, Jim listening attentively to
all that was said, his solid porcine face and small eyes wincing
from time to time in a powerful but unconscious grimace, and
Crockett, gentlest, ruddiest, most easy-going and dreamy of them
all, speaking in his quiet drawling tone and stroking his soft
brown moustaches in a gesture of quiet and bucolic meditation, Luke
could not recall having seen so many of them together at one time
and the astonishing enigma of their one-ness and variety was
strikingly apparent.

What was it?--this indefinable tribal similarity that united these
people so unmistakably.  No one could say: it would have been
difficult to find four people more unlike in physical appearance,
more strongly marked by individual qualities.  Whatever it was--
whether some chemistry of blood and character, or perhaps some
physical identity of broad and fleshy nose, pursed reflective lips
and flat wide cheeks, or the energies of powerfully concentrated
egotisms--their kinship with one another was astonishing and
instantly apparent.



XXX


In a curious and indefinable way the two groups of men in the hall
had become divided: the wealthier group of prominent citizens,
which was composed of the brothers William, James, and Crockett
Pentland, Mr. Sluder and Eliza, stood in a group near the front
hall door, engaged in earnest conversation.  The second group,
which was composed of working men, who had known Gant well and
worked for or with him--a group composed of Jannadeau the jeweller,
old Alec Ramsay and Saul Gudger, who were stone-cutters, Gant's
nephew, Ollie Gant, who was a plasterer, Ernest Pegram, the city
plumber, and Mike Fogarty, who was perhaps Gant's closest friend, a
building contractor--this group, composed of men who had all their
lives done stern labour with their hands, and who were really the
men who had known the stone-cutter best, stood apart from the group
of prominent and wealthy men who were talking so earnestly to
Eliza.

And in this circumstance, in this unconscious division, in the air
of constraint, vague uneasiness and awkward silence that was
evident among these working men, as they stood there in the hall
dressed in their "good clothes," nervously fingering their hats in
their big hands, there was something immensely moving.  The men had
the look that working people the world over have always had when
they found themselves suddenly gathered together on terms of social
intimacy with their employers or with members of the governing
class.

And Helen, coming out at this instant from her father's room into
the hall, suddenly saw and felt the awkward division between these
two groups of men, as she had never before felt or noticed it, as
sharply as if they had been divided with a knife.

And, it must be admitted, her first feeling was an unworthy one--an
instinctive wish to approach the more "important" group, to join
her life to the lives of these "influential" people who represented
to her a "higher" social level.  She found herself walking towards
the group of wealthy and prominent men at the front of the hall,
and away from the group of working men who had really been Gant's
best friends.

But seeing the brick-red race of Alec Ramsay, the mountainous
figure of Mike Fogarty, suddenly with a sense of disbelief and
almost terrified revelation of the truth, she thought:  "Why-why-
why--these men are really the closest friends he's got--not rich
men like Uncle Will or Uncle Jim or even Mr. Sluder--but men like
Mike Fogarty--and Jannadeau--and Mr. Duncan--and Alec Ramsay--and
Ernest Pegram--and Ollie Gant--but--but--good heavens, no!" she
thought, almost desperately--"surely these are not his closest
friends--why-why--of course, they're decent people--they're honest
men--but they're only common people--I've always considered them as
just WORKING men--and-and-and--my God!" she thought, with that
terrible feeling of discovery we have when we suddenly see
ourselves as others see us--"do you suppose that's the way people
in this town think of Papa?  Do you suppose they have always
thought of him as just a common working man--oh, no! but of course
not!" she went on impatiently, trying to put the troubling thought
out of her mind.  "Papa's not a working man--Papa is a BUSINESS
man--a well-thought-of business man in this community.  Papa has
always owned property since he came here--he has always had his own
shop"--she did not like the sound of the word "shop," and in her
mind she hastily amended it to "place"--"he's always had his own
place, up on the public square--he's--he's rented places to other
people--he's--he's--oh, of course not!--Papa is different from men
like Ernest Pegram, and Ollie, and Jannadeau and Alec Ramsay--why,
they're just working men--they work with their hands--Ollie's just
an ordinary plasterer--and-and--Mr. Ramsay is nothing but a stone-
cutter."

And a small insistent voice inside her said most quietly:  "And
your father?"

And suddenly Helen remembered Gant's great hands of power and
strength, and how they now lay quietly beside him on the bed, and
lived and would not die, even when the rest of him had died, and
she remembered the thousands of times she had gone to his shop in
the afternoon and found the stone-cutter in his long striped apron
bending with delicate concentration over a stone inscription on a
trestle, holding in his great hands the chisel and the heavy wooden
mallet the stone-cutters use, and remembering, the whole rich and
living compact of the past came back to her, in a rush of
tenderness and joy and terror, and on that flood a proud and bitter
honesty returned.  She thought:  "Yes, he was a stone-cutter, no
different from these other men, and these men were his real
friends."

And going directly to old Alec Ramsay she grasped his blunt thick
fingers, the nails of which were always whitened a little with
stone dust, and greeted him in her large and spacious way:

"Mr. Ramsay," she said, "I want you to know how glad we are that
you could come.  And that goes for all of you--Mr. Jannadeau, and
Mr. Duncan, and Mr. Fogarty, and you, Ernest, and you, too, Ollie--
you are the best friends Papa has, there's no one he thinks more of
and no one he would rather see."

Mr. Ramsay's brick-red face and brick-red neck became even redder
before he spoke, and beneath his grizzled brows his blue eyes
suddenly were smoke-blue.  He put his blunt hand to his moustache
for a moment, and tugged at it, then he said in his gruff, quiet,
and matter-of-fact voice:

"I guess we know Will about as well as anyone, Miss Helen.  I've
worked for him off and on for thirty years."

At the same moment, she heard Ollie Gant's easy, deep, and powerful
laugh, and saw him slowly lift his cigarette in his coarse paw; she
saw Jannadeau's great yellow face and massive domy brow, and heard
him laugh with guttural pleasure, saying, "Ah-h!  I tell you vat!
Dat girl has alvays looked out for her datty--she's de only vun dat
coult hantle him; efer since she vas ten years olt it has been de
same."  And she was overwhelmingly conscious of that immeasurable
mountain of a man, Mike Fogarty, beside her, the sweet clarity of
his blue eyes and the almost purring music of his voice as he
gently laid his mutton of a hand upon her shoulder for a moment,
saying:

"Ah, Miss Helen, I don't know how Will could have got along all
these years without ye--for he has said the same himself a thousand
times--aye! that he has!"

And instantly, having heard these words, and feeling the strong
calm presences of these powerful men around her, it seemed to Helen
she had somehow re-entered a magic world that she thought was gone
for ever.  And she was immensely content.

At the same moment, with a sense of wonder, she discovered an
astonishing thing, that she had never noticed before, but that she
must have heard a thousand times;--this was that of all these
people, who knew Gant best, and had a deep and true affection for
him, there were only two--Mr. Fogarty and Mr. Ramsay--who had ever
addressed him by his first name.  And so far as she could now
remember, these two men, together with Gant's mother, his brothers,
his sister Augusta, and a few of the others who had known him in
his boyhood in Pennsylvania, were the only people who ever had.
And this revelation cast a strange, a lonely and a troubling light
upon the great gaunt figure of the stone-cutter, which moved her
powerfully and which she had never felt before.  And most strange
of all was the variety of names by which these various people
called her father.

As for Eliza, had any of her children ever heard her address her
husband as anything but "Mr. Gant"--had she ever called him by one
of his first names--their anguish of shame and impropriety would
have been so great that they could hardly have endured it.  But
such a lapse would have been incredible: Eliza could no more have
addressed Gant by his first name than she could have quoted Homer's
Greek; had she tried to address him so, the muscles of her tongue
would have found it physically impossible to pronounce the word.
And in this fact there was somehow, now that Gant was dying, an
enormous pathos.  It gave to Eliza's life with him a pitiable and
moving dignity, the compensation of a proud and wounded spirit for
all the insults and injuries that had been heaped upon it.  She had
been a young countrywoman of twenty-four when she had met him; she
had been ignorant of life and innocent of the cruelty, the
violence, the drunkenness and abuse of which men are capable; she
had borne this man fifteen children, of whom eight had come to
life, and had for forty years eaten the bread of blood and tears
and joy and grief and terror; she had wanted affection and had been
given taunts, abuse, and curses, and somehow her proud and wounded
spirit had endured with an anguished but unshaken fortitude all the
wrongs and cruelties and injustices of which he had been guilty
toward her.  And now at the very end her pride still had this
pitiable distinction, her spirit still preserved this last
integrity: she had not betrayed her wounded soul to a shameful
familiarity, he had remained to her--in mind and heart and living
word--what he had been from the first day that she met him: the
author of her grief and misery, the agent of her suffering, the
gaunt and lonely stranger who had come into her hills from a
strange land and a distant people--that furious, gaunt, and lonely
stranger with whom by fatal accident her destiny--past hate or love
or birth or death or human error and confusion--had been insolubly
enmeshed, with whom for forty years she had lived, a wife, a
mother, and a stranger--and who would to the end remain to her a
stranger--"Mr. Gant."

What was it?  What was the secret of this strange and bitter
mystery of life that had made of Gant a stranger to all men, and
most of all a stranger to his wife?  Perhaps some of the answer
might have been found in Eliza's own unconscious words when she
described her meeting with him forty years before:

"It was not that he was old," she said,--"he was only thirty-three--
but he LOOKED old--his WAYS were old--he lived so much among old
people.--Pshaw!" she continued, with a little puckered smile, "if
anyone had told me that night I saw him sitting there with Lydia
and old Mrs. Mason--that was the very day they moved into the
house, the night he gave the big dinner--and Lydia was still alive
and, of course, she was ten years older than he was, and that may
have had something to do with it--but I got to studying him as he
sat there; of course, he was tired and run down and depressed and
worried over all that trouble that he'd had in Sidney before he
came up here, when he lost everything, and he knew that Lydia was
dying, and that was preyin' on his mind--but he LOOKED old, thin as
a rake you know, and sallow and run down, and with those OLD ways
he had acquired, I reckon, from associatin' with Lydia and old Mrs.
Mason and people like that--but I just sat there studying him as he
sat there with them and I said--'Well, you're an old man, aren't
you, sure enough?'--pshaw! if anyone had told me that night that
some day I'd be married to him I'd have laughed at them--I'd have
considered that I was marrying an old man--and that's just exactly
what a lot of people thought, sir, when the news got out that I was
goin' to marry him--I know Martha Patton came running to me, all
excited and out of breath--said, 'Eliza!  You're not going to marry
that old man--you know you're not!'--you see, his WAYS were old, he
LOOKED old, DRESSED old, ACTED old--everything he did was old;
there was always, it seemed, something strange and old-like about
him, almost like had he been born that way."

And it was at this time that Eliza met him, saw him first--"Mr.
Gant"--an immensely tall, gaunt, cadaverous-looking man, with a
face stern and sad with care, lank drooping moustaches, sandy hair,
and cold-grey staring eyes--"not so old, you know--he was only
thirty-three--but he LOOKED old, he ACTED old, his WAYS were old--
he had lived so much among older people he seemed older than he
was--I thought of him as an old man."

This, then, was "Mr. Gant" at thirty-three, and since then,
although his fortunes and position had improved, his character had
changed little.  And now Helen, faced by all these working men, who
had known, liked, and respected him, and had now come to see him
again before he died--suddenly knew the reason for his loneliness,
the reason so few people--least of all, his wife--had ever dared
address him by his first name.  And with a swift and piercing
revelation, his muttered words, which she had heard him use a
thousand times when speaking of his childhood--"We had a tough time
of it--I tell you what, we did!"--now came back to her with the
unutterable poignancy of discovery.  For the first time she
understood what they meant.  And suddenly, with the same swift and
nameless pity, she remembered all the pictures which she had seen
of her father as a boy and a young man.  There were a half-dozen of
them in the big family album, together with pictures of his own and
Eliza's family: they were the small daguerreotypes of fifty years
before, in small frames of faded plush, with glass covers, touched
with the faint pale pinks with which the photographers of an
earlier time tried to paint with life the sallow hues of their
photography.  The first of these pictures showed Gant as a little
boy; later, a boy of twelve, he was standing in a chair beside his
brother Wesley, who was seated, with a wooden smile upon his face.
Later, a picture of Gant in the years in Baltimore, standing, his
feet crossed, leaning elegantly upon a marble slab beside a vase;
later still, the young stone-cutter before his little shop in the
years at Sidney; finally, Gant, after his marriage with Eliza,
standing with gaunt face and lank drooping moustaches before his
shop upon the square, in the company of Will Pentland, who was at
the time his business partner.

And all these pictures, from first to last, from the little boy to
the man with the lank drooping moustaches, had been marked by the
same expression: the sharp thin face was always stern and sad with
care, the shallow cold-grey eyes always stared out of the bony
cage-formation of the skull with a cold mournfulness--the whole
impression was always one of gaunt sad loneliness.  And it was not
the loneliness of the dreamer, the poet, or the misjudged prophet,
it was just the cold and terrible loneliness of man, of every man,
and of the lost American who has been brought forth naked under
immense and lonely skies, to "shift for himself," to grope his way
blindly through the confusion and brutal chaos of a life as naked
and unsure as he, to wander blindly down across the continent, to
hunt for ever for a goal, a wall, a dwelling-place of warmth and
certitude, a light, a door.

And for this reason, she now understood something about her father,
this great gaunt figure of a stone-cutter that she had never
understood or thought about before: she suddenly understood his
order, sense of decency and dispatch; his love of cleanness,
roaring fires, and rich abundance, his foul drunkenness, violence,
and howling fury, his naked shame and trembling penitence, his good
clothes of heavy monumental black that he always kept well pressed,
his clean boiled shirts, wing collars, and his love of hotels,
ships, and trains, his love of gardens, new lands, cities, voyages.
She knew suddenly that he was unlike any other man that ever lived,
and that every man that ever lived was like her father.  And
remembering the cold and mournful look in his shallow staring eyes
of cold hard grey, she suddenly knew the reason for that look, as
she had never known it before, and understood now why so few men
had ever called him by his first name--why he was known to all the
world as "Mr. Gant."



Having joined this group of working men, Helen immediately felt an
indefinable but powerful sense of comfort and physical well-being
which the presence of such men as these always gave to her.  And
she did not know why; but immediately, once she had grasped Mr.
Ramsay by the hand, and was aware of Mike Fogarty's mountainous
form and clear-blue eye above her, and Ollie Gant's deep and lazy
laugh, and the deliberate and sensual languor with which he raised
his cigarette to his lips with his powerful plasterer's hand,
drawing the smoke deep into his strong lungs and letting it trickle
slowly from his nostrils as he talked--she was conscious of a
feeling of enormous security and relief which she had not known in
years.

And this feeling, as with every person of strong sensuous
perceptions, was literal, physical, chemical, astoundingly acute.
She not only felt an enormous relief and joy to get back to these
working people, it even seemed to her that everything they did--the
way Mr. Duncan held his strong cheap cigar in his thick dry
fingers, the immense satisfaction with which he drew on it, the
languid and sensual trickling of cigarette smoke from Ollie Gant's
nostrils, his deep, good-natured, indolently lazy laugh, even the
perceptible bulge of tobacco-quid in Alec Ramsay's brick-red face,
his barely perceptible rumination of it--all these things, though
manlike in their nature, seemed wonderfully good and fresh and
living to her--the whole plain priceless glory of the earth
restored to her--and gave her a feeling of wonderful happiness and
joy.

And later that night when all these men, her father's friends, had
gone into his room, filling it with their enormous and full-blooded
vitality, as she saw him lying there, wax-pale, bloodless,
motionless, yet with a faint grin at the edge of his thin mouth as
he received them, as she heard their deep full-fibred voices, Mike
Fogarty's lilting Irish, Mr. Duncan's thick Scotch burr, Ollie
Gant's deep and lazy laugh, and the humour of Alec Ramsay's deep,
gruff and matter-of-fact tone, relating old times--"God, Will!" he
said, "at your worst, you weren't in it compared to Wes!  He was a
holy terror when he drank!  Do you remember the day he drove his
fist through your plate-glass window right in the face of
Jannadeau--and went home then and tore all the plumbing out of the
house and pitched the bath-tub out of the second-storey window into
Orchard Street--God!  Will!--you weren't in it compared to Wes"--as
she heard all this, and saw Gant's thin grin and heard his faint
and rusty cackle, his almost inaudible "E'God!  Poor Wes!"--she
could not believe that he was going to die, the great full-blooded
working men filled the room with the vitality of a life which had
returned in all its rich and living flood, and seemed intolerably
near and familiar--and she kept thinking with a feeling of
wonderful happiness and disbelief:  "Oh, but Papa's not going to
die!  It's not possible!  He can't!  He can't!"



XXXI


The dying man himself was no longer to be fooled and duped by hope;
he knew that he was done for, and he no longer cared.  Rather, as
if that knowledge had brought him a new strength--the immense and
measureless strength that comes from resignation and that has
vanquished terror and despair--Gant had already consigned himself
to death, and now was waiting for it, without weariness or anxiety,
and with a perfect and peaceful acquiescence.

This complete resignation and tranquillity of a man whose life had
been so full of violence, protest, and howling fury stunned and
silenced them and left them helpless.  It seemed that Gant, knowing
that often he had lived badly, was now determined to die well.  And
in this he succeeded.  He accepted every ministration, every visit,
every stammering reassurance, or frenzied activity, with a passive
gratefulness which he seemed to want everyone to know.  On the
evening of the day after his first hæmorrhage, he asked for food
and Eliza, bustling out, pathetically eager to do something, killed
a chicken and cooked it for him.

And as if, from that infinite depth of death and silence from which
he looked at her, he had seen, behind the bridling brisk activity
of her figure, for ever bustling back and forth, saying confusedly--
"Why, yes!  The very thing!  This very minute, sir!"--had seen the
white strained face, the stricken eyes of a proud and sensitive
woman who had wanted affection all her life, had received for the
most part injury and abuse, and who was ready to clutch at any
crust of comfort that might console or justify her before he died--
he ate part of the chicken with relish, and then, looking up at
her, said quietly:

"I tell you what--that was a good chicken."

And Helen, who had been sitting beside him on the bed, and feeding
him, now cried out in a tone of bantering and good-humoured
challenge:

"What!  Is it better than the ones _I_ cook for you?  You'd better
not say it is--I'll beat you if you do.'"

And Gant, grinning feebly, shook his head, and answered:

"Ah-h!  Your mother is a good cook, Helen.  You're a good cook,
too--but there's no one else can cook a chicken like your mother!"

And stretching out his great right hand, he patted Eliza's worn
fingers with his own.

And Eliza, suddenly touched by that word of unaccustomed praise and
tenderness, turned and rushed blindly from the room at a clumsy
bridling gait, clasping her hands together at the wrist, her weak
eyes blind with tears--shaking her head in a strong convulsive
movement, her mouth smiling a pale tremulous smile, ludicrous,
touching, made unnatural by her false teeth, whispering over and
over to herself, Poor fellow!  Says, 'There's no one else can cook
a chicken like your mother.'  Reached out and patted me on the
hand, you know.  Says 'I tell you what, there's no one who can cook
a chicken like your mother.'  I reckon he wanted to let me know, to
tell me, but says, 'The rest of you have all been good to me,
Helen's a good cook, but there's no one else can cook like your
mother.'"

"Oh, here, here, here!" said Helen, who, laughing uncertainly had
followed her mother from the room when Eliza had rushed out, and
had seized her by the arms, and shook her gently, "good heavens!
HERE!  You mustn't carry on like this!  You mustn't take it this
way!  Why, he's all right!" she cried out heartily and shook Eliza
again.  "Papa's going to be all right!  Why, what are you crying
for?" she laughed.  "He's going to get well now--don't you know
that?"

And Eliza could say nothing for a moment but kept smiling that
false trembling and unnatural smile, shaking her head in a slight
convulsive movement, her eyes blind with tears.

"I tell you what," she whispered, smiling tremulously again and
shaking her head, "there was something about it--you know, the way
he said it--says, 'There's no one who can come up to your mother'--
there was something in the way he said it!  Poor fellow, says,
'None of the rest of you can cook like her'--says, 'I tell you
what, that was certainly a good chicken'--Poor fellow!  It wasn't
so much what he said as the way he said it--there was something
about it that went through me like a knife--I tell you what it
did!"

"Oh, here, here, here!" Helen cried again, laughing.  But her own
eyes were also wet, the bitter possessiveness that had dominated
all her relations with her father, and that had thrust Eliza away
from him, was suddenly vanquished.  At that moment she began to
feel an affection for her mother that she had never felt before, a
deep and nameless pity and regret, and a sense of sombre
satisfaction.

"Well," she thought, "I guess it's all she's had, but I'm glad
she's got that much to remember.  I'm glad he said it: she'll
always have that now to hang on to."

And Gant lay looking up from that sunken depth of death and
silence, his great hands of living power quiet with their immense
and passive strength beside him on the bed.



XXXII


Towards one o'clock that night Gant fell asleep and dreamed that he
was walking down the road that led to Spangler's Run.  And although
he had not been along that road for fifty years everything was as
fresh, as green, as living and familiar as it had ever been to him.
He came out on the road from Schaefer's farm, and on his left he
passed by the little white frame church of the United Brethren, and
the graveyard about the church where his friends and family had
been buried.  From the road he could see the line of family
gravestones which he himself had carved and set up after he had
returned from serving his apprenticeship in Baltimore.  The stones
were all alike: tall flat slabs of marble with plain rounded tops,
and there was one for his sister Susan, who had died in infancy,
and one for his sister Huldah, who had died in childbirth while the
war was on, and one for Huldah's husband, a young farmer named Jake
Lentz who had been killed at Chancellorsville, and one for the
husband of his oldest sister, Augusta, a man named Martin, who had
been an itinerant photographer and had died soon after the war, and
finally one for Gant's own father.  And since there were no stones
for his brother George or for Elmer or for John, and none for his
mother or Augusta, Gant knew that he was still a young man, and had
just recently come home.  The stones which he had put up were still
white and new, and in the lower right-hand corner of each stone, he
had carved his own name: W. O. Gant.

It was a fine morning in early May and everything was sweet and
green and as familiar as it had always been.  The graveyard was
carpeted with thick green grass, and all around the graveyard and
the church there was the incomparable green velvet of young wheat.
And the thought came back to Gant, as it had come to him a thousand
times, that the wheat around the graveyard looked greener and
richer than any other wheat that he had ever seen.  And beside him
on his right were the great fields of the Schaefer farm, some
richly carpeted with young green wheat, and some ploughed, showing
great bronze-red strips of fertile nobly-swelling earth.  And
behind him on the great swell of the land, and commanding that
sweet and casual scene with the majesty of its incomparable lay was
Jacob Schaefer's great red barn and to the right the neat brick
house with the white trimming of its windows, the white picket
fence, the green yard with its rich tapestry of flowers and lilac
bushes and the massed leafy spread of its big maple trees.  And
behind the house the hill rose, and all its woods were just
greening into May, still smoky, tender and unfledged, gold-yellow
with the magic of young green.  And before the woods began there
was the apple orchard half-way up the hill; the trees were heavy
with the blossoms and stood there in all their dense still bloom
incredible.

And from the greening trees the bird-song rose, the grass was thick
with the dense gold glory of the dandelions, and all about him were
a thousand magic things that came and went and never could be
captured.  Below the church, he passed the old frame-house where
Elly Spangler, who kept the church keys, lived, and there were
apple trees behind the house, all dense with bloom, but the house
was rickety, unpainted and dilapidated as it had always been, and
he wondered if the kitchen was still buzzing with a million flies,
and if Elly's half-wit brothers, Jim and Willy, were inside.  And
even as he shook his head and thought, as he had thought so many
times, "Poor Elly," the back door opened and Willy Spangler, a man
past thirty, wearing overalls and with a fond, foolish witless
face, came galloping down across the yard toward him, flinging his
arms out in exuberant greeting, and shouting to him the same
welcome that he shouted out to everyone who passed, friends and
strangers all alike--"I've been lookin' fer ye!  I've been lookin'
fer ye, Oll," using, as was the custom of the friends and kinsmen
of his Pennsylvania boyhood, his second name--and then, anxiously,
pleadingly, again the same words that he spoke to everyone:  "Ain't
ye goin' to stay?"

And Gant, grinning, but touched by the indefinable sadness and pity
which that kind and witless greeting had always stirred in him
since his own childhood, shook his head, and said quietly:

"No, Willy.  Not today.  I'm meeting someone down the road"--and
straightway felt, with thudding heart, a powerful and nameless
excitement, the urgency of that impending meeting--why, where, with
whom, he did not know--but all-compelling now, inevitable.

And Willy, still with wondering, foolish, kindly face followed
along beside him now, saying eagerly, as he said to everyone:

"Did ye bring anythin' fer me?  Have ye got a chew?"

And Gant, starting to shake his head in refusal, stopped suddenly,
seeing the look of disappointment on the idiot's face, and putting
his hand in the pocket of his coat, took out a plug of apple-
tobacco, saying:

"Yes.  Here you are, Willy.  You can have this."

And Willy, grinning with foolish joy, had clutched the plug of
tobacco and, still kind and foolish, had followed on a few steps
more, saying anxiously:

"Are ye comin' back, Oll?  Will ye be comin' back real soon?"

And Gant, feeling a strange and nameless sorrow, answered:

"I don't know, Willy"--for suddenly he saw that he might never come
this way again.

But Willy, still happy, foolish, and contented, had turned and
galloped away toward the house, flinging his arms out and shouting
as he went:

"I'll be waitin' fer ye.  I'll be waitin' fer ye, Oll."

And Gant went on then, down the road, and there was a nameless
sorrow in him that he could not understand and some of the
brightness had gone out of the day.

When he got to the mill, he turned left along the road that went
down by Spangler's Run, crossed by the bridge below, and turned
from the road into the wood-path on the other side.  A child was
standing in the path, and turned and went on ahead of him.  In the
wood the sunlight made swarming moths of light across the path and
through the leafy tangle of the trees: the sunlight kept shifting
and swarming on the child's golden hair, and all around him were
the sudden noises of the wood, the stir, the rustle, and the bullet
thrum of wings, the cool broken sound of hidden water.

The wood got denser, darker as he went on and coming to a place
where the path split away into two forks, Gant stopped, and turning
to the child said, "Which one shall I take?"  And the child did not
answer him.

But someone was there in the wood before him.  He heard footsteps
on the path, and saw a footprint in the earth, and turning took the
path where the footprint was and where it seemed he could hear
someone walking.

And then, with the bridgeless instancy of dreams, it seemed to him
that all of the bright green-gold around him in the wood grew dark
and sombre, the path grew darker, and suddenly he was walking in a
strange and gloomy forest, haunted by the brown and tragic light of
dreams.  The forest shapes of great trees rose around him, he could
hear no bird-song now, even his own feet on the path were
soundless, but he always thought he heard the sound of someone
walking in the wood before him.  He stopped and listened: the steps
were muffled, softly thunderous; they seemed so near that he
thought that he must catch up with the one he followed in another
second, and then they seemed immensely far away, receding in the
dark mystery of that gloomy wood.  And again he stopped and
listened, the footsteps faded, vanished, he shouted, no one
answered.  And suddenly he knew that he had taken the wrong path,
that he was lost.  And in his heart there was an immense and quiet
sadness, and the dark light of the enormous wood was all around
him; no birds sang.



XXXIII


Gant awoke suddenly and found himself looking straight up at Eliza,
who was seated in a chair beside the bed.

"You were asleep," she said quietly with a grave smile, looking at
him in her direct and almost accusing fashion.

"Yes," he said, breathing a little hoarsely, "what time is it?"

It was a few minutes before three o'clock in the morning.  She
looked at the clock and told him the time: he asked where Helen
was.

"Why," said Eliza quickly, "she's right here in this hall room: I
reckon she's asleep, too.  Said she was tired, you know, but that
if you woke up and needed her to call her.  Do you want me to get
her?"

"No," said Gant.  "Don't bother her.  I guess she needs the rest,
poor child.  Let her sleep."

"Yes," said Eliza, nodding, "and that's exactly what you must do,
too, Mr. Gant.  You try to go on back to sleep now," she said
coaxingly, "for that's what we all need.  There's no medicine like
sleep--as the fellow says, it's Nature's sovereign remedy," said
Eliza, with that form of sententiousness that she was very fond of--
"so you go on, now, Mr. Gant, and get a good night's sleep, and
when you wake up in the morning, you'll feel like a new man.
That's half the battle--if you can get your sleep, you're already
on the road to recovery."

"No," said Gant, "I've slept enough."

He was breathing rather hoarsely and heavily and she asked him if
he was comfortable and needed anything.  He made no answer for a
moment, and then muttered something under his breath that she could
not hear plainly, but that sounded like "little boy."

"Hah?  What say?  What is it, Mr. Gant?" Eliza said.  "Little boy?"
she said sharply, as he did not answer.

"Did you see him?" he said.

She looked at him for a moment with troubled eyes, then said:

"Pshaw, Mr. Gant, I guess you must have been dreaming."

He did not answer, and for a moment there was no sound in the room
but his breathing, hoarse, a little heavy.  Then he muttered:

"Did someone come into the house?"

She looked at him sharply, inquiringly again, with troubled eyes:

"Hah?  What say?  Why, no, I think not," she said doubtfully,
"unless you may have heard Gilmer come in an' go up to his room."

And Gant was again silent for several moments, breathing a little
heavily and hoarsely, his hands resting with an enormous passive
strength upon the bed.  Presently he said quietly:

"Where's Bacchus?"

"Hah?  Who's that?" Eliza said sharply, in a startled kind of tone.
"Bacchus?  You mean Uncle Bacchus?"

"Yes," said Gant.

"Why, pshaw, Mr. Gant!" cried Eliza laughing--for a startled moment
she had wondered if "his mind was wanderin'," but one glance at his
quiet eyes, the tranquil sanity of his quiet tone, reassured her--

"Pshaw!" she said, putting one finger up to her broad nose-wing and
laughing slyly.  "You must have been havin' queer dreams, for a
fact!"

"Is he here?"

"Why, I'll vow, Mr. Gant!" she cried again.  "What on earth is in
your mind?  You know that Uncle Bacchus is way out West in Oregon--
it's been ten years since he came back home last--that summer of
the reunion at Gettysburg."

"Yes," said Gant.  "I remember now."

And again he fell silent, staring upward in the semi-darkness, his
hands quietly at rest beside him, breathing a little hoarsely, but
without pain.  Eliza sat in the chair watching him, her hands
clasped loosely at her waist, her lips pursed reflectively, and a
puzzled look in her eyes.  "Now I wonder whatever put that in his
mind?" she thought.  "I wonder what made him think of Bacchus?  Now
his mind's not wanderin'--that's one thing sure.  He knows what
he's doing just as well as I do--I reckon he must have dreamed it--
that Bacchus was here--but that's certainly a strange thing, that
he should bring it up like this."

He was so silent that she thought he might have gone to sleep
again, he lay motionless with his eyes turned upward in the semi-
darkness of the room, his hands immense and passive at his side.
But suddenly he startled her again by speaking, a voice so quiet
and low that he might have been talking to himself.

"Father died the year before the war," he said, "when I was nine
years old.  I never got to know him very well.  I guess Mother had
a hard time of it.  There were seven of us--and nothing but that
little place to live on--and some of us too young to help her much--
and George away at war.  She spoke pretty hard to us sometimes--
but I guess she had a hard time of it.  It was a tough time for all
of us," he muttered, "I tell you what, it was."

"Yes," Eliza said, "I guess it was.  I know, she told me--I talked
to her, you know, the time we went there on our honeymoon--whew!
what about it?" she shrieked faintly and put her finger up to her
broad nose-wing with the same sly gesture--"it was all I could do
to keep a straight face sometimes--why, you know, the way she had
of talkin'--the expressions she used--oh! came right out with it,
you know--sometimes I'd have to turn my head away so she wouldn't
see me laughin'--says, you know, 'I was left a widow with seven
children to bring up, but I never took charity from no one; as I
told 'em all, I've crawled under the dog's belly all my life; now I
guess I can get over its back.'"

"Yes," said Gant with a faint grin.  "Many's the time I've heard
her say that."

"But she told it then, you know," Eliza went on in explanatory
fashion, "about your father and how he'd done hard labour on a farm
all his life and died--well, I reckon you'd call it consumption."

"Yes," said Gant.  "That was it."

"And," Eliza said reflectively, "I never asked--of course, I didn't
want to embarrass her--but I reckon from what she said, he may have
been--well, I suppose you might say he was a drinkin' man."

"Yes," said Gant, "I guess he was."

"And I know she told it on him," said Eliza, laughing again, and
passing one finger slyly at the corner of her broad nose-wing, "how
he went to town that time--to Brant's Mill, I guess it was--and how
she was afraid he'd get to drinkin', and she sent you and Wes along
to watch him and to see he got home again--and how he met up with
some fellers there and, sure enough, I guess he started drinkin'
and stayed away too long--and then, I reckon he was afraid of what
she'd say to him when he got back--and that was when he bought the
clock--it's that very clock upon the mantel, Mr. Gant--but that
was when he got the clock, all right--I guess he thought it would
pacify her when she started out to scold him for gettin' drunk and
bein' late."

"Yes," said Gant, who had listened without moving, staring at the
ceiling, and with a faint grin printed at the corners of his mouth,
"well do I remember: that was it, all right."

"And then," Eliza went on, "he lost the way comin' home--it had
been snowin', and I reckon it was getting dark, and he had been
drinkin'--and instead of turnin' in on the road that went down by
your place he kept goin' on until he passed Jake Schaefer's farm--
an' I guess Wes and you, poor child, kept follerin' where he led,
thinkin' it was all right--and when he realized his mistake he said
he was tired an' had to rest a while and--I'll vow! to think he'd
go and do a thing like that," said Eliza, laughing again--"he lay
right down in the snow, sir, with the clock beside him--and went
sound to sleep."

"Yes," said Gant, "and the clock was broken."

"Yes," Eliza said, "she told me about that too--and how she heard
you all come creepin' in real quiet an' easy-like about nine
o'clock that night, when she and all the children were in bed--an'
how she could hear him whisperin' to you and Wes to be quiet--an'
how she heard you all come creepin' up the steps--and how he came
tip-toein' in real easy-like an' laid the clock down on the bed--I
reckon the glass had been broken out of it--hopin' she'd see it
when she woke up in the morning an' wouldn't scold him then for
stayin' out--"

"Yes," said Gant, still with the faint attentive grin, "and then
the clock began to strike."

"Whew-w!" cried Eliza, putting her finger underneath her broad
nose-wing--"I know she had to laugh about it when she told it to
me--she said that all of you looked so sheepish when the clock
began to strike that she didn't have the heart to scold him."

And Gant, grinning faintly again, emitted a faint rusty cackle that
sounded like "E'God!" and said:  "Yes, that was it.  Poor fellow."

"But to think," Eliza went on, "that he would have no more sense
than to do a thing like that--to lay right down there in the snow
an' go to sleep with you two children watchin' him.  And I know how
she told it, how she questioned you and Wes next day, and I reckon
started in to scold you for not takin' better care of him, and how
you told her, 'Well, Mother, I thought that it would be all right.
I kept steppin' where he stepped, I thought he knew the way.'  And
said she didn't have the heart to scold you after that--poor child,
I reckon you were only eight or nine years old, and boy-like
thought you'd follow in your father's footsteps and that everything
would be all right."

"Yes," said Gant, with the faint grin again, "I kept stretchin' my
legs to put my feet down in his tracks--it was all I could do to
keep up with him. . . .  Ah, Lord," he said, and in a moment said
in a faint low voice, "how well I can remember it.  That was just
the winter before he died."

"And you've had that old clock ever since," Eliza said.  "That very
clock upon the mantel, sir--at least, you've had it ever since I've
known you, and I reckon you had it long before that--for I know you
told me how you brought it South with you.  And that clock must be
all of sixty or seventy years old--if it's a day."

"Yes," said Gant, "it's all of that."

And again he was silent, and lay so still and motionless that there
was no sound in the room except his faint and laboured breathing,
the languid stir of the curtains in the cool night breeze, and the
punctual tocking of the old wooden clock.  And presently, when she
thought that he might have gone off to sleep again, he spoke, in
the same remote and detached voice as before:

"Eliza,"--he said--and at the sound of that unaccustomed word, a
name he had spoken only twice in forty years--her white face and
her worn brown eyes turned toward him with the quick and startled
look of an animal--"Eliza," he said quietly, "you have had a hard
life with me, a hard time.  I want to tell you that I'm sorry."

And before she could move from her white stillness of shocked
surprise, he lifted his great right hand and put it gently down
across her own.  And for a moment she sat there bolt upright,
shaken, frozen, with a look of terror in her eyes, her heart
drained of blood, a pale smile trembling uncertainly and
foolishly on her lips.  Then she tried to withdraw her hand with a
clumsy movement, she began to stammer with an air of ludicrous 
embarrassment, she bridled, saying--"Aw-w, now, Mr. Gant.  Well,
now, I reckon,"--and suddenly these few simple words of regret and
affection did what all the violence, abuse, drunkenness and injury
of forty years had failed to do.  She wrenched her hand free like a
wounded creature, her face was suddenly contorted by that grotesque
and pitiable grimace of sorrow that women have had in moments of
grief since the beginning of time, and digging her fist into her
closed eye quickly with the pathetic gesture of a child, she
lowered her head and wept bitterly.

"It was a hard time, Mr. Gant," she whispered, "a hard time, sure
enough. . . .  It wasn't all the cursin' and the drinkin'--I got
used to that. . . .  I reckon I was only an ignorant sort of girl
when I met you and I guess," she went on with a pathetic and
unconscious humour, "I didn't know what married life was like . . .
but I could have stood the rest of it . . . the bad names an' all
the things you called me when I was goin' to have another child . . .
but it was what you said when Grover died . . . accusin' me of
bein' responsible for his death because I took the children to St.
Louis to the Fair--" and at the words as if an old and lacerated
wound had been reopened raw and bleeding, she wept hoarsely,
harshly, bitterly--"that was the worst time that I had--sometimes I
prayed to God that I would not wake up--he was a fine boy, Mr.
Gant, the best I had--like the write-up in the paper said he had
the sense an' judgment of one twice his age . . . an' somehow it
had grown a part of me, I expected him to lead the others--when he
died it seemed like everything was gone . . . an' then to have you
say that I had--" her voice faltered to a whisper, stopped: with a
pathetic gesture she wiped the sleeve of her old frayed sweater
across her eyes and, already ashamed of her tears, said hastily:

"Not that I'm blamin' you, Mr. Gant. . . .  I reckon we were both
at fault . . . we were both to blame . . . if I had it to do all
over I know I could do better . . . but I was so young and ignorant
when I met you, Mr. Gant . . . knew nothing of the world . . .
there was always something strange-like about you that I didn't
understand."

Then, as he said nothing, but lay still and passive, looking at the
ceiling, she said quickly, drying her eyes and speaking with a
brisk and instant cheerfulness, the undaunted optimism of her ever-
hopeful nature:

"Well, now, Mr. Gant, that's all over, and the best thing we can do
is to forget about it. . . .  We've both made our mistakes--we
wouldn't be human if we didn't--but now we've got to profit by
experience--the worst of all this trouble is all over--you've got
to think of getting well now, that's the only thing you've got to
do, sir," she said pursing her lips and winking briskly at him--
"just set your mind on getting well--that's all you've got to do
now, Mr. Gant--and the battle is half won.  For half our ills and
troubles are all imagination," she said sententiously, "and if
you'll just make up your mind now that you're going to get well--
why, sir, you'll do it," and she looked at him with a brisk nod.
"And we've both got years before us, Mr. Gant--for all we know, the
best years of our life are still ahead of us--so we'll both go on
and profit by the mistakes of the past and make the most of what
time's left," she said.  "That's just exactly what we'll do!"

And quietly, kindly, without moving, and with the impassive and
limitless regret of a man who knows that there is no return, he
answered:

"Yes, Eliza.  That is what we'll do."

"And now," she went on coaxingly, "why don't you go on back to
sleep now, Mr. Gant?  There's nothin' like sleep to restore a man
to health--as the feller says, it's Nature's sovereign remedy,
worth all the doctors and all the medicine on earth," she winked at
him, and then concluded on a note of cheerful finality; "so you go
on and get some sleep now, and tomorrow you will feel like a new
man."

And again he shook his head in an almost imperceptible gesture of
negation:

"No," he said, "not now.  Can't sleep."

He was silent again, and presently, his breath coming somewhat
hoarse and laboured, he cleared his throat, and put one hand up to
his throat, as if to relieve himself of some impediment.

Eliza looked at him with troubled eyes and said:

"What's the matter, Mr. Gant?  There's nothing hurtin' you?"

"No," he said.  "Just something in my throat.  Could I have some
water?"

"Why, yes, sir!  That's the very thing!"  She got up hastily, and
looking about in a somewhat confused manner, saw behind her a
pitcher of water and a glass upon his old walnut bureau, and saying
"This very minute, sir!" started across the room.

And at the same moment, Gant was aware that someone had entered the
house, was coming towards him through the hall, would soon be with
him.  Turning his head towards the door he was conscious of
something approaching with the speed of light, the instancy of
thought, and at that moment he was filled with a sense of
inexpressible joy, a feeling of triumph and security he had never
known.  Something immensely bright and beautiful was converging in
a flare of light, and at that instant, the whole room blurred
around him, his sight was fixed upon that focal image in the door,
and suddenly the child was standing there and looking towards him.

And even as he started from his pillows, and tried to call his wife
he felt something thick and heavy in his throat that would not let
him speak.  He tried to call to her again but no sound came, then
something wet and warm began to flow out of his mouth and nostrils,
he lifted his hands up to his throat, the warm wet blood came
pouring out across his fingers; he saw it and felt joy.

For now the child--or someone in the house was speaking, calling to
him; he heard great footsteps, soft but thunderous, imminent, yet
immensely far, a voice well known, never heard before.  He called
to it, and then it seemed to answer him; he called to it with faith
and joy to give him rescue, strength, and life, and it answered him
and told him that all the error, old age, pain and grief of life
were nothing but an evil dream; that he who had been lost was found
again, that his youth would be restored to him and that he would
never die, and that he would find again the path he had not taken
long ago in a dark wood.

And the child still smiled at him from the dark door; the great
steps, soft and powerful, came ever closer, and as the instant
imminent approach of that last meeting came intolerably near, he
cried out through the lake of jetting blood, "Here, Father, here!"
and heard a strong voice answer him, "My son!"

At that instant he was torn by a rending cough, something was
wrenched loose in him, the death-gasp rattled through his blood,
and a mass of greenish matter foamed out through his lips.  Then
the world was blotted out, a blind black fog swam up and closed
above his head, someone seized him, he was held, supported in two
arms, he heard someone's voice saying in a low tone of terror and
of pity, "Mr. Gant!  Mr. Gant!  Oh, poor man, poor man!  He's
gone!"  And his brain faded into night.  Even before she lowered
him back upon the pillows, she knew that he was dead.



Eliza's sharp scream brought three of her children--Daisy, Steve,
and Luke, and the nurse, Bessie Gant, who was the wife of Gant's
nephew Ollie--running from the kitchen.  At the same moment Helen,
who had taken an hour's sleep--her first in two days--in the little
hall-bedroom off the porch, was wakened by her mother's cry, the
sound of a screen-door slammed, and the sound of footsteps running
past her window on the porch.  Then, for several minutes she had no
consciousness of what she did, and later she could not remember it.
Her actions were those of a person driven by a desperate force, who
acts from blind intuition, not from reason.  Instantly, the moment
that she heard her mother scream, the slam of the screen-door, and
the running feet, she knew what had happened, and from that moment
she knew only one frenzied desire; somehow to get to her father
before he died.

The breath caught hoarse and sharp in her throat in a kind of
nervous sob, it seemed that her heart had stopped beating and that
her whole life-force was paralyzed; but she was out of her bed with
a movement that left the old springs rattling, and she came across
the back-porch with a kind of tornado-like speed that just came
instantly from nowhere: in a moment she was standing in the open
door with the sudden bolted look of a person who had been shot
through the heart, staring at the silent group of people, and at
the figure on the bed, with a dull strained stare of disbelief and
horror.

All the time, although she was not conscious of it, her breath kept
coming in a kind of hoarse short sob, her large big-boned face had
an almost animal look of anguish and surprise, her mouth was partly
open, her large chin hung down, and at this moment, as they turned
towards her she began to moan, "Oh-h, oh-h, oh-h, oh-h!" in the
same unconscious way, like a person who has received a heavy blow
in the pit of the stomach.  Then her mouth gaped open, a hoarse and
ugly cry was torn from her throat--a cry not of grief but loss--and
she rushed forward like a mad woman.  They tried to stop her, to
restrain her, she flung them away as if they had been rag dolls and
hurled herself down across the body on the bed, raving like a
maniac.

"Oh, Papa, Papa. . . .  Why didn't they tell me? . . .  Why didn't
they let me know? . . .  Why didn't they call me? . . .  Oh, Papa,
Papa, Papa! . . . dead, dead, dead . . . and they didn't tell
me . . . they didn't let me know . . . they let you die . . . and I
wasn't here! . . . I wasn't here!"--and she wept harshly, horribly,
bitterly, rocking back and forth like a mad woman, with a dead man
in her arms.  She kept moaning, ". . . They didn't tell me . . .
they let you die without me . . . I wasn't here . . . I wasn't
here . . ."

And even when they lifted her up from the bed, detached her arms
from the body they had held in such a desperate hug, she still kept
moaning in a demented manner, as if talking to the corpse, and
oblivious of the presence of these living people:

"They never told me . . . they never told me. . . .  They let you
die here all by yourself . . . and I wasn't here . . . I wasn't
here."

All of the women, except Bessie Gant, had now begun to weep
hysterically, more from shock, exhaustion, and the nervous strain
than from grief, and now Bessie Gant's voice could be heard
speaking to them sharply, coldly, peremptorily, as she tried to
bring back order and calmness to the distracted scene:

"Now, you get out of here--all of you! . . .  There's nothing more
any of you can do--I'll take care of all the rest of it! . . .  Get
out, now . . . I can't have you in the room while there's work to
do. . . .  Helen, go on back to bed and get some sleep. . . .
You'll feel better in the morning."

"They never told me! . . .  They never told me," she turned and
stared stupidly at Bessie Gant with dull glazed eyes.  "Can't you
do something? . . .  Where's MacGuire?  Has anyone called him yet?"

"No," said the nurse sharply and angrily, "and no one's going to.
You're not going to get that man out of bed at this hour of the
night when there's nothing to be done. . . .  Get out of here, now,
all of you," she began to push and herd them towards the door.  "I
can't be bothered with you. . . .  Go somewhere--anywhere--get
drunk--only don't come back in here."

The whole house had come to life; in the excitement, shock, and
exhaustion of their nerves the dead man still lying there in such a
grotesque and twisted position, was forgotten.  One of Eliza's
lodgers, a man named Gilmer, who had been in the house for years,
was wakened, went out, and got a gallon of corn whisky; everyone
drank a great deal, became, in fact, somewhat intoxicated; when the
undertakers came to take Gant away, none of the family was present.
No one saw it.  They were all in the kitchen seated around Eliza's
battered old kitchen table, with the jug of whisky on the table
before them.  They drank and talked together all night long until
dawn came.



XXXIV


The morning of Gant's funeral the house was filled with people who
had known him and the air was heavy with the sweet, cloying
fragrance of the funeral flowers: the odours of lilies, roses, and
carnations.  His coffin was banked with flowers, but in the centre
there was a curious and arresting plainness, a simple wreath of
laurel leaves.  Attached to the wreath was a small card on which
these words were written:  "Hugh McGuire."

And people passing by the coffin paused for a moment and stared at
the name with a feeling of unspoken wonder in their hearts.  Eliza
stood looking at the wreath a moment with hands clasped across her
waist, and then turned away, shaking her head rapidly, with a short
convulsive pucker of her lips, as she spoke to Helen in a low
voice:

"I tell you what--it's pretty strange when you come to think of it--
it gives you a queer feeling--I tell you what, it does."

And this expressed the emotion that everyone felt when they saw the
wreath.  For Hugh McGuire had been found dead at his desk at six
o'clock that morning, the news had just spread through the town,
and now, when people saw the wreath upon Gant's coffin, there was
something in their hearts they could not utter.

Gant lay in the splendid coffin, with his great hands folded
quietly on his breast.  Later, the boy could not forget his
father's hands.  They were the largest, most powerful, and somehow
the most shapely hands he had ever seen.  And even though his great
right hand had been so crippled and stiffened by an attack of
inflammatory rheumatism ten years before that he had never regained
the full use of it, and since that time could only hold the great
wooden mallet that the stone-cutters use in a painful and clumsy
half-clasp between the thumb and the big stiffened fingers, his
hands had never lost their character of life, strength, and
powerful shapeliness.

The hands had given to the interminable protraction of his living
death a kind of concrete horror that it otherwise would not have
had.  For as his powerful gaunt figure waned and wasted under the
ravages of the cancer that was consuming him until he had become
only the enfeebled shadow of his former self, his gaunt hands, on
which there was so little which death could consume, lost none of
their former rock-like heaviness, strength and shapely power.
Thus, even when the giant figure of the man had become nothing but
a spectral remnant of itself, sunk in a sorrow of time, awaiting
death, those great, still-living hands of power and strength hung
incredibly, horribly, from that spectral form of death to which
they were attached.

And for this reason those powerful hands of life evoked, as nothing
else could have done, in an instant searing flash of memory and
recognition the lost world of his father's life of manual power,
hunger, fury, savage abundance and wild joy, the whole enchanted
structure of that lost life of magic he had made for them.
Constantly, those great hands of life joined, with an almost
grotesque incongruity, to that scarecrow form of wasting death
would awake for them, as nothing else on earth could do, all of the
sorrowful ghosts of time, the dream-like spell and terror of the
years between, the years of phantom death, the horror of unreality,
strangeness, disbelief, and memory, that haunted them.

So was it now, even in death, with his father's hands.  In their
powerful, gaunt and shapely clasp, as he lay dead in his coffin,
there seemed to be held and gathered, somehow, all of his life that
could never die--a living image of the essential quality of his
whole life with its fury and unrest, desire and hunger, the
tremendous sweep and relish of its enormous appetites and the huge
endowment of its physical and sensual powers.

Thus, one could suppose that on the face of a dead poet there might
remain--how, where or in what way we could not tell, a kind of
flame, a light, a glory,--the magic and still living chrysm of his
genius.  And on the face of the dead conqueror we might still see
living, arrogant, and proud with all its dark authorities the frown
of power, the inflexible tyranny of stern command, the special
infinitude of the invincible will that would not die with life, and
that incredibly remains, still dark and living in its scorn and
mockery of time.

Then, on the face of an old dead prophet or philosopher there would
live and would not die the immortality of proud, lonely thought.
We could not say just where that spirit rested.  Sometimes it would
seem to rest upon the temples of the grand and lonely head.
Sometimes we would think it was a kind of darkness in the shadows
of the closed and sunken eyes, sometimes the marsh fire of a dark
and lambent flame that hovered round the face, that could never be
fixed, but that we always knew was there.

And just as poet, prophet, priest and conqueror might each retain
in death some living and fitting image of his whole life's truth,
so would the strength, the skill, all of the hope, hunger, fury,
and unrest that had lashed and driven on through life the gaunt
figure of a stone-cutter be marvellously preserved in the granite
power and symmetry of those undying hands.

Now the corpse was stretched out on the splendid satin cushions of
the expensive coffin.  It had been barbered, powdered, disembowelled,
and pumped full of embalming fluid.  As it lay there with its waxen
head set forward in its curious gaunt projectiveness, the pale lips
firmly closed and with a little line of waxen mucus in the lips, the
women came forward with their oily swollen faces, and a look of
ravenous eagerness in their eyes, stared at it hard and long, lifted
their sodden handkerchiefs slowly to their oily mouths, and were
borne away, sobbing hysterically, by their equally oily, ravenous,
sister orgiasts in sorrow.

Meanwhile his father's friends, the stone-cutters, masons, building
contractors, butchers, business men and male relatives were
standing awkwardly about, dressed in their good, black clothes
which they seemed not to wear so much as to inhabit with a kind of
unrestful itchiness, lowering their eyes gravely and regretfully as
the women put on their revolting show, talking together in low
voices, and wondering when it would all be over.

These circumstances, together with the heavy unnatural languor of
the funeral smells, the sweet-sick heaviness of the carnations, the
funereal weepy blacks in which the women had arrayed themselves,
the satiny sandalwood scent that came from the splendid coffin, and
the fragrant faintly acrid odour of embalmed flesh, particularly
when blended with the smell of cooking turnip greens, roast pork
and apple sauce out in the kitchen, combined to create an
atmosphere somewhat like a dinner in a comfortably furnished
morgue.

In all this obscene pomp of burial there was something so
grotesque, unnatural, disgusting, and remote from all he could
remember of the dead man's life and personality that everything
about him--even the physical horror of his bloody death--now seemed
so far away he could hardly believe it ever happened.  Therefore,
he stared at this waxen and eviscerated relic in the coffin with a
sense of weird disbelief, unable to relate it to the living man who
had bled great lakes of blood the night before.

Yet, even in his death, his father's hands still seemed to live,
and would not die.  And this was the reason why the memory of those
hands haunted him then and would haunt him for ever after.  This
was the reason why, when he would try to remember how he looked
when dead, he could remember nothing clearly except the powerful
sculptured weight and symmetry of his tremendous hands as they lay
folded on his body in the coffin.  The great hands had a stony,
sculptured and yet living strength and vitality, as if Michelangelo
had carved them.  They seemed to rest there upon the groomed,
bereft and vacant horror of the corpse with a kind of terrible
reality as if there really is, in death, some energy of life that
will not die, some element of man's life that must persist and that
resumes into a single feature of his life the core and essence of
his character.



XXXV


Starwick had now become his best and closest friend.  Suddenly, it
occurred to him with a strange and bitter sense of loss and lack
that Starwick was the only friend of his own age that he had ever
known to whom he had fully and passionately revealed his own life,
of whose fellowship and comradeship he had never grown weary.
Friends he had had--friends in the casual and indifferent sense in
which most friendship is understood--but until now he had never
held a friend like Starwick in his heart's core.

Why was it?  What was this grievous lack or loss--if lack or loss
it was--in his own life?  Why was it that, with his fierce, bitter,
and insatiate hunger for life, his quenchless thirst for warmth,
joy, love, and fellowship, his constant image, which had blazed in
his heart since childhood, of the enchanted city of the great
comrades and the glorious women, that he grew weary of people
almost as soon as he met them?  Why was it that he seemed to
squeeze their lives dry of any warmth and interest they might have
for him as one might squeeze an orange, and then was immediately
filled with boredom, disgust, dreary tedium, and an impatient
weariness and desire to escape so agonizing that it turned his
feeling almost into hatred?

Why was it that his spirit was now filled with this furious unrest
and exasperation against people because none of them seemed as good
as they should be?  Where did it come from--this improvable and yet
unshakable conviction that grew stronger with every rebuff and
disappointment--that the enchanted world was here around us ready
to our hand the moment that we chose to take it for our own, and
that the impossible magic in life of which he dreamed, for which he
thirsted, had been denied us not because it was a phantom of
desire, but because men had been too base and weak to take what was
their own?

Now, with Starwick, and for the first time, he felt this magic
constantly--this realization of a life for ever good, for ever warm
and beautiful, for ever flashing with the fires of passion, poetry
and joy, for ever filled with the swelling and triumphant
confidence of youth, its belief in new lands, morning, and a
shining city, its hope of voyages, its conviction of a fortunate,
good and happy life--an imperishable happiness and joy--that was
impending, that would be here at any moment.

For a moment he looked at the strange and delicate face of the
young man beside him, reflecting, with a sense of wonder, at his
communion with this other life, so different from his own in kind
and temper.  What was it?  Was it the sharp mind, that original and
penetrating instrument which picked up the old and weary problems
of the spirit by new handles, displaying without labour planes and
facets rarely seen?  With what fierce joy he welcomed those long
walks together in the night, along the quiet streets of Cambridge,
or by the marvellous river that wound away small and magical in the
blazing moonlight into the sweet, dark countryside!  What other
pleasure, what other appeasement of his mind and sense had been so
complete and wonderful as that which came from this association as,
oblivious of the world, they carried on their fierce debate about
all things under heaven; his own voice, passionate, torrential, and
wild, crying out against the earth, the moon, invoking all the gods
of verse and magic while his mind played rivers of lightning across
the vast fields of reading and experience!

And how eagerly he waited for the answers of that other voice,
quiet, weary, drawling--how angrily he stormed against its
objections, how hungrily and gratefully he fed upon its agreement!
What other tongue had had the power to touch his pride and his
senses as this one had--how cruelly had its disdain wounded him,
how magnificently had its praise filled his heart with glory!  On
these nights when he and Starwick had walked along the river in
these vehement, passionate, and yet affectionate debates, he would
relive the scene for hours after it had ended, going over their
discussion again and again, remembering every gesture, every
intonation of the voice, every flash of life and passion in the
face.  Late in the night he would pace up and down his room, or
pause dreaming by his window, still carrying on in his mind the
debate with his friend, inventing and regretting splendid things he
might have said, exulting in those he had said and in every word of
approval or burst of laughter he had provoked.  And he would think:
Ah, but I was GOOD there!  I could see how he admired me, how high
a place I have in his affection.  For when he says a thing he MEANS
it: he called me a poet, his voice was quiet and full of passion;
he said my like had never been, that my destiny was great and sure.

Was this, then, the answer?



Until this period of his life he had drunk very little: in spite of
the desperate fear his mother had that each of her children
inherited the whisky disease--"the curse of liquor," as she called
it--from their father, he felt no burning appetite for stimulant.
Alone, he never sought it out, he never bought a bottle for
himself: solitary as his life had become, the idea of solitary
drinking, of stealthy alley potations from a flask, filled him with
sodden horror.

Now, in the company of Starwick, he was drinking more frequently
than he had ever done before.  Alcohol, indeed, until his twentieth
year had been only a casual and infrequent spirit--once, in his
seventeenth year, when he had come home from college at the
Christmas vacation, he had got very drunk on various liquors which
his brother Luke had brought home to his father, and which he had
mixed together in a tumbler and drunk without discretion.  And
there had been one or two casual sprees during his years at
college, but until this time he had never known the experience of
frequent intoxication.

But now, in the company of Frank Starwick, he went every week or so
to a little restaurant which was situated in the Italian district
of the eastern quarter of town, beyond Scollay Square and across
Washington Street.  The place was Starwick's own discovery, he
hoarded his knowledge of it with stern secrecy, yielding it up only
to a few friends--a few rare and understanding spirits who would
not coarsely abuse the old-world spirit of this priceless place,
because, he said:

"It would be a pity if it ever got known about.  It really would,
you know. . . .  I mean, the kind of people who would begin to go
there would ruin it. . . .  They really would. . . .  I mean, it's
QUITE astonishing to find a place of that sort here in Boston."

It was the beginning of that dark time of blood, and crime, and
terror which the years of prohibition brought and which was to
leave its hideous mutilation not only upon the soul and conscience
of the nation, but upon the lives of millions of people--
particularly the young everywhere.  At this time, however, the
ugly, jeering, open arrogance of the later period--the foul smell
of privilege and corruption, the smirk of protection, and the
gangster's sneer, were not so evident as they became in the years
that followed.  At this time, it was by no means easy "to get a
drink": the speak-easy had already started on its historic career,
but was still more or less what its name suggested--a place to be
got at quietly and by stealth, a place of low voices, furtive and
suspicious eyes, and elaborate precautions.

The place which Starwick had "discovered," and which he hoarded
with such precious secrecy, was a small Italian restaurant known as
Posillippo's, which occupied the second floor of an old brick
building in an obscure street of the Italian quarter.  Frank
pronounced the name strongly and lovingly--"Pothillippo's"--in the
mannered voice, and with the affected accent which all foreign and
exotic names--particularly those that had a Latin flavouring--
inspired in him.

Arrived at "Pothillippo's," Frank, who even at this time did all
things with the most lavish and lordly extravagance, and who tipped
generously at every opportunity, would be welcomed obsequiously by
the proprietor and the waiters, and then would order with an air of
the most refined and sensual discrimination from his favourite
waiter, a suave and fawning servitor named Nino.  There were other
waiters just as good as Nino, but Frank expressed an overwhelming
preference for him above all others because, he said, Nino had the
same face as one of the saints in a painting by Giotto, and because
he professed to find all of the ancient, grave and exquisite rhythm
of the ancient Tuscan nobility composed in the one figure of this
waiter.

"But have you noticed the way he uses his hands while talking?"
Frank would say in a tone of high impassioned earnestness.--"Did
you notice that last gesture?  It is the same gesture that you find
in the figure of the disciple Thomas in Leonardo's painting of 'The
Last Supper.'  It really is, you know. . . .  Christ!" he would
cry, in his high, strange, and rather womanish tone.  "The
centuries of art, of living, of culture--the terrific knowledge ALL
these people have--the kind of thing you'll never find in people in
this country, the kind of thing that no amount of college education
or books can give you--all expressed in a single gesture of the
hands of this Italian waiter. . . .  The whole thing's QUITE
astonishing, it really is, you know."

The real reason, however, that Frank preferred Nino to all the
other waiters in "Pothillippo's" establishment was that he liked
the sound of the word "Nino" and pronounced it beautifully.

"Nino!" Frank would cry, in a high, strange, and rather womanish
voice--"Nino!"

"Sì, signor," Nino would breathe unctuously, and would then stand
in an attitude of heavy and prayerful adoration, awaiting the young
lord's next commands.

"Nino," Frank would then go on in the tone and manner of a sensuous
and weary old-world sophisticate.  "Quel vin avez-vous? . . . Quel
vin--rouge--du--très--bon.  Vous--comprenez?" said Frank, using up
in one speech most of his French words, but giving a wonderful
sense of linguistic mastery and complete eloquence in two
languages.

"Mais si, signer!" Nino would answer immediately, skilfully
buttering Frank on both sides--the French and the Italian--with
three masterly words.

"Le Chianti est TRÈS, TRÈS bon! . . .  C'est parfait, monsieur," he
whispered, with a little ecstatic movement of his fingers.
"Admirable!"

"Bon," said Frank with an air of quiet decision.  "Alors, Nino," he
continued, raising his voice as he pronounced these two words,
which were among his favourites.  "Alors, une bouteille du Chianti--
n'est-ce pas--"

"Mais si, signor!" said Nino, nodding enthusiastically.  "Si--et
pour manger?" he went on coaxingly.

"Pour manger?" Frank began--"Ecoute, Nino--vous pouvez recommander
quelque chose--quelque chose D'EXTRAORDINAIRE!" Frank cried in a
high impassioned tone.  "Quelque chose de la MAISON!" he concluded
triumphantly.

"Mais si!" Nino cried enthusiastically.  "Sì, signor. . . .
Permettez-moi! . . .  Le spaghetti," he whispered seductively,
rolling his dark eyes rapturously aloft, and making a little
mincing movement, indicative of speechless ecstasy, of his thumb
and forefinger.  "Le spaghetti . . .  de la . . . maison . . .  ah,
signor," Nino breathed--"le spaghetti avec la sauce de la maison
est merveilleux . . . merveilleux!" he whispered.

"Bon," said Starwick nodding.  "Alors, Nino--le spaghetti pour
deux--vous comprenez?"

"Mais si, signor!  Si," Nino breathed.  "Parfaitement"--and wrote
the miraculous order on his order pad.  "Et puis, monsieur," said
Nino coaxingly, and with complete humility.  "Permettez-moi de
recommander--le poulet," he whispered rapturously--"le poulet
rôti," he breathed, as if unveiling the rarest secrets of cookery
that had been revealed since the days of Epicurus--"le poulet rôti
. . . de la maison," again he made the little speechless movement
of the finger and the thumb, and rolled his rapturous eyes around--
"ah, signor," said Nino, "Vous n'aurez pas de regrets si vous
commandez le poulet."

"Bon. . . .  Bon," said Starwick quietly and profoundly.  "Alors,
Nino--deux poulets rôtis, pour moi et pour monsieur," he commanded.

"Bon, bon," said Nino, nodding vigorously and writing with
enthusiasm--"et pour la salade, messieurs," he paused--looking
inquiringly and yet hopefully at both his lordly young patrons.

And so it went, until the menu had all been gone through in mangled
French and monosyllabic Italian.  When this great ceremony was
over, Frank Starwick had done nothing more nor less than order the
one-dollar table-d'hôte dinner which Signor "Pothillippo" provided
for all the patrons of his establishment and whose order--soup,
fish, spaghetti, roasted chicken, salad, ice-cream, cheese, nuts
and bitter coffee--was unchangeable as destiny, and not to be
altered by the whims of common men, whether they would or no.

And yet Frank's manner of ordering his commonplace rather dreary
meal was so touched by mystery, strangeness, an air of priceless
rarity and sensual refinement, that one would smack his lips over
the various dishes with a gourmandizing gusto, as if the art of
some famous chef had really been exhausted in their preparation.

And this element of Frank Starwick's character was one of the
finest and most attractive things about him.  It was, perhaps as
much as anything else, the reason why people of all kinds were
drawn to him, delighted to be with him, and why Frank could command
the boundless affection, devotion, and support of people more than
anyone the other boy had ever known.

For, in spite of all Frank's affectations of tone, manner, gesture,
and accent, in spite of the elaborately mannered style of his whole
life--no! really BECAUSE of them (for what were all these manners
and affectations except the evidence of Frank's constant effort to
give qualities of strangeness, mystery, rareness, joy and pleasure
to common things that had none of these qualities in themselves?)--
the deep and passionate desire in Frank's spirit to find a life
that would always be good, beautiful, and exciting was apparent.

And to an amazing degree, Frank Starwick succeeded in investing all
the common and familiar acts and experiences of this world with
this strange and romantic colour of his own personality.

When one was with him, everything--"le Chianti de la maison," a
cigarette, the performance of a play, a poem or a book, a walk
across the Harvard Yard, or along the banks of the Charles River--
became strange and rare and memorable, and for this reason Frank,
in spite of the corrupt and rotten spot which would develop in his
character and eventually destroy him, was one of the rarest and
highest people that ever lived, and could never be forgotten by
anyone who had ever known him and been his friend.

For, by a baffling paradox, these very affectations of Frank's
speech and dress and carriage, the whole wrought manner of his
life, which caused many people who disbelieved him to dismiss him
bitterly as an affected and artificial poseur, really came from
something innocent and naïve and good in Frank's character--
something as innocent and familiar as the affectations of Tom
Sawyer when he told tall stories, invented wild, complicated, and
romantic schemes, when none was necessary, or used big words to
impress his friends, the nigger Jim, or Huckleberry Finn.



Thus, the two young men would stay in "Pothillippo's" until late at
night when the place closed, drinking that wonderful "Chianti de la
maison," so preciously and lovingly described, which was really
nothing but "dago red," raw, new, and instantaneous in its
intoxication, filled with headaches and depression for to-morrow
morning, but filled now with the mild, soaring, jubilant and
triumphant drunkenness that only youth can know.

And they would leave this place of Latin mystery and languor at one
o'clock in the morning, Frank shouting in a high drunken voice
before he left, "Nino!  Nino!--Il faut quelque chose à boire avant
de partir--Nino!--Nino!--Encora!  Encora!"--pronouncing his last
Italian word victoriously.

"Mais si, signor," Nino would answer, smiling somewhat anxiously.
"Du vin?"

"Mais non, mais non, Nino" Frank would cry violently.  "Pas de vin--
du wis-kee, Nino!  Du wis-kee!"

Then they would gulp down drinks of the raw and powerful beverage
to which the name of whisky had been given in that era, and leaving
a dim blur of lights, a few dim blots of swarthy, anxiously smiling
faces behind them, they would reel dangerously down the rickety
stairs and out into the narrow, twisted streets, the old grimed web
of sleeping quietness, the bewildering, ancient, and whited streets
of Boston.

Above them, in the cool sweet skies of night, the great moons of
the springtime, and New England, blazed with a bare, a lovely and
enchanted radiance.  And around them the great city and its
thousand narrow twisted streets lay anciently asleep beneath that
blazing moon, and from the harbour came the sound of ships, the
wasting, fresh, half-rotten harbour-smells, filled with the thought
of ships, the sea, the proud exultancy of voyages.  And out of the
cobbled streets and from the old grimed buildings--yes! from the
very breast and bareness of that springtime moon and those lovely
lilac skies, there came somehow--God knows how--all of the sweet
wildness of New England in the month of May, the smell of the
earth, the sudden green, the glorious blossoms--all that was wild,
sweet, strange, simple, instantly familiar--that impossible
loveliness, that irresistible magic, that unutterable hope for the
magic that could not be spoken, but that seemed almost in the
instant to be seized, grasped, and made one's own for ever--for the
hunger, possession and fulfilment--and for God knows what--for that
magic land of green, its white and lovely houses, and the white
flesh, the moon-dark hair, the depthless eyes and everlasting
silence of its secret, dark, and lavish women.

Dark Helen in our hearts for ever burning--oh, no more!

Then the two young men would thread that maze of drunken moonlit
streets, and feel the animate and living silence of the great city
all around them, and look then at the moon with drunken eyes, and
see the moon, all bare and drunken in the skies, the whole earth
and the ancient city drunk with joy and sleep and springtime and
the enchanted silences of the moon-drunk squares.  And they would
come at length to Cambridge, to find the moonlight dark upon the
sleeping silence of the university and Harvard Square, and
exultancy and joy welled up in them for ever; wild shouts and songs
and laughter were torn from their throats and rang out through the
sleeping streets of Cambridge, filling the moon-sweet air with
jubilation, for they were drunken, young, and twenty--immortal
confidence and victorious strength possessed them--and they knew
that they could never die.

Immortal drunkenness!  What tribute can we ever pay, what song can
we ever sing, what swelling praise can ever be sufficient to
express the joy, the gratefulness, and the love which we, who have
known youth and hunger in America, have owed to alcohol?

We are so lost, so lonely, so forsaken in America: immense and
savage skies bend over us, and we have no door.

But you, immortal drunkenness, came to us in our youth when all our
hearts were sick with hopelessness, our spirits maddened with
unknown terrors, and our heads bowed down with nameless shame.  You
came to us victoriously, to possess us, and to fill our lives with
your wild music, to make the goat-cry burst from our exultant
throats, to make us know that here upon the wilderness, the savage
land, that here beneath immense, inhuman skies of time, in all the
desolation of the cities, the grey unceasing flood-tides of the
man-swarm, our youth would soar to fortune, fame, and love, our
spirits quicken with the power of mighty poetry, our work go on
triumphantly to fulfilment until our lives prevailed.

What does it matter, then, if since that time of your first coming,
magic drunkenness, our head has grown bald, our young limbs heavy,
and if our flesh has lain battered, bleeding in the stews?

You came to us with music, poetry, and wild joy when we were
twenty, when we reeled home at night through the old moon-whitened
streets of Boston and heard our friend, our comrade, and our dead
companion shout through the silence of the moon-white square:  "You
are a poet and the world is yours."

And victory, joy, wild hope, and swelling certitude and tenderness
surged through the conduits of our blood as we heard that drunken
cry, and triumph, glory, proud belief were resting like a chrysm
around us as we heard that cry, and turned our eyes then to the
moon-drunk skies of Boston, knowing only that we were young, and
drunk, and twenty, and that the power of mighty poetry was within
us, and the glory of the great earth lay before us--because we were
young and drunk and twenty, and could never die!



XXXVI


When Oswald Ten Ecyk left his $8000 job on the Hearst Syndicate and
came to Cambridge to enroll in Professor Hatcher's celebrated
course for dramatists, he had saved a sum rare in the annals of
journalism--$700.  When he got through paying the tuition,
admission, and other accessory fees that would entitle him to a
membership in good standing in the graduate school of the
university, something less than $500 remained.  Oswald got an attic
room in Cambridge, in a square, smut-grey frame-house which was the
home of an Irish family named Grogan.  To reach his room, he had to
mount a rickety flight of stairs that was almost as steep as a
ladder, and when he got there, he had to manage his five feet five
of fragile stature carefully in order to keep from cracking his
head upon the sloping white-washed walls that followed the steep
pitch of the roof with painful fidelity.  The central part of
Oswald's room, which was the only place in which the little man
could stand erect, was not over four feet wide: there was a single
window at the front where stood his writing table.  He had a couple
of straight chairs, a white iron cot pushed in under the eave of
the left side, a few bookshelves pushed in under the eave of the
right.  It could literally be said that the playwright crawled to
bed, and when he read he had to approach the poets as a poet
should--upon his knees.

For this austere cell, Professor Hatcher's dramatist paid Mrs. Mary
Grogan fifteen dollars every month.  Therefore, when the primary
fees of tuition and matriculation and the cell in Mrs. Grogan's
house had been accounted for, Oswald Ten Eyck had all of $300 left
to take care of clothing, food, tobacco, books, and plays during
the ensuing period of nine months.  This sum perhaps was adequate,
but it was not grand, and Ten Eyck, poet though he was, was subject
to all those base cravings of sensual desire that 100 pounds of
five feet five is heir to.

This weakness of the flesh was unhappily reflected in the artist's
work.  During the brief period of his sojourn in Professor
Hatcher's class, his plays were numerous but for the most part low.
Ten Eyck turned them out with the feverish haste which only a
trained newspaper-man can achieve when driven on by the cherished
ambition of a lifetime and the knowledge that art is long and $300
very fleeting.  He had started out most promisingly in the
fleshless ethers of mystic fantasy, but he became progressively
more sensual until at the end he was practically wallowing in a
trough of gluttony.

The man, in fact, became all belly when he wrote--and this was
strange in a frail creature with the large burning eyes of a
religious zealot, hands small-boned, fleshless as a claw, and a
waist a rubber band would have snapped round comfortably.  He
seemed compact of flame and air and passion and an agonizing
shyness.  Professor Hatcher had great hopes for him--the whole atom
was framed, Professor Hatcher thought, for what the true Hatcherian
called "the drama of revolt," but the flaming atom fooled him,
fooled him cruelly.  For after the brilliant promise of that first
beginning--a delicate, over-the-hills-and-far-away fantasy
reminiscent of Synge, Yeats, and the Celtic Dawn--brain bowed to
belly, Ten Eyck wrote of food.

His second effort was a one-act play whose action took place on the
sidewalk in front of a Childs restaurant, while a white-jacketed
attendant deftly flipped brown wheat-cakes on a plate.  The
principal character, and in fact the only speaker in this play, was
a starving poet who stood before the window and delivered himself
of a twenty-minute monologue on a poet's life and the decay of
modern society, in the course of which most of the staple victuals
on the Childs menu were mentioned frequently and with bitter
relish.

Professor Hatcher felt his interest waning: he had hoped for finer
things.  Yet a wise caution learned from errors in the past had
taught him to forbear.  He knew that out of man's coarse earth the
finer flowers of his spirit sometimes grew.  Some earlier members
of his class had taught him this, some who had written coarsely of
coarse things.  They wrote of sailors, niggers, thugs, and
prostitutes, of sunless lives and evil strivings, of murder,
hunger, rape, and incest, a black picture of man's life unlighted
by a spark of grace, a ray of hope, a flicker of the higher vision.
Professor Hatcher had not always asked them to return--to "come
back for a second year," which was the real test of success and
future promise in the Hatcherian world.  And yet, unknighted by
this accolade, some had gone forth and won renown: their grim plays
had been put on everywhere and in all languages.  And the only
claim the true Hatcherian could make of them was:  "Yes, they were
with us but not of us: they were not asked to come back for a
second year."

There were some painful memories, but Professor Hatcher had derived
from them a wise forbearance.  His hopes for Oswald Ten Eyck were
fading fast, but he had determined to hold his judgment in abeyance
until Oswald's final play.  But, as if to relieve his distinguished
tutor from a painful choice, Ten Eyck himself decided it.  After
his third play there was no longer any doubt of the decision.  For
that play, which Oswald called "Dutch Fugue," would more aptly have
been entitled "No Return."

It was a piece in four acts dealing with the quaintly flavoured
life and customs of his own people, the Hudson River Dutch.  The
little man was hotly proud of his ancestry, and always insisted
with a slight sneer of aristocratic contempt:  "Not the Pennsylvania
Dutch--Good God, no!  THEY'RE not Dutch but German: the REAL Dutch,
the OLD Dutch, CATSKILL Dutch!"  And if Ten Eyck's interest in food
had been uncomfortably pronounced in his earlier work, in this final
product of his curious genius, his sensual appetites became indecent
in their unrestraint.  It is doubtful if the long and varied annals
of the stage have ever offered such a spectacle: the play became a
sort of dramatic incarnation of the belly, acted by a cast of
fourteen adults, male and female, all of whom were hearty eaters.

The central events of that extraordinary play, which were a birth,
a death, a wedding, were all attended by eating, drinking, and the
noises of the feast.  Scene followed scene with kaleidoscopic
swiftness: the jubilant merry-making of the christening had hardly
died away before the stage was set, the trestles groaning, with the
more sombre, sober and substantial victuals of the funeral; and the
wheels of the hearse had hardly echoed away into the distance
before the scene burst out in all the boisterous reel and rout and
feasting of the wedding banquet.  Of no play that was ever written
could it be more aptly said that "the funeral baked meats did
coldly furnish forth the marriage tables," and what is more, they
almost furnished forth the casket and the corpse as well.  Finally,
the curtain fell as it had risen, upon a groaning table surrounded
by the assembled cast of fourteen famished gluttons--a scene in
which apparently the only sound and action were provided by the
thrust of jowl and smack of lip, a kind of symphonic gluttony of
reach and grab, cadenced by the stertorous breathing of the eaters,
the clash of crockery, and the sanguinary drip of rare roast beef--
the whole a prophetic augury that flesh was grass and man's days
fleeting, that life would change and reappear in an infinite
succession of births and deaths and marriages, but that the holy
rites of eating and the divine permanence of good dinners and roast
beef were indestructible and would endure for ever.

Ten Eyck read the play himself one Friday afternoon to Professor
Hatcher and his assembled following.  He read in a rapid high-
pitched voice, turning the pages with a trembling claw, and
thrusting his long fingers nervously through his disordered mop of
jet-black hair.  As he went on, the polite attention of the class
was changed insensibly to a paralysis of stupefaction.  Professor
Hatcher's firm thin lips became much firmer, thinner, tighter.  A
faint but bitter smile was printed at the edges of his mouth.
Then, for a moment, when the playwright finished, there was
silence: Professor Hatcher slowly raised his hand, detached his
gold-rimmed glasses from his distinguished nose, and let them fall
and dangle on their black silk cord.  He looked around the class;
his cultivated voice was low, controlled, and very quiet.

"Is there any comment?" Professor Hatcher said.

No one answered for a moment.  Then Mr. Grey, a young patrician
from Philadelphia, spoke:

"I think," he said with a quiet emphasis of scorn, "I think he
might very well get it produced in the Chicago Stock Yards."

Mr. Grey's remark was ill-timed.  For the Stock Yards brought to
Ten Eyck's mind a thought of beef, and beef brought back a memory
of his palmy days with Mr. Hearst when beef was plenty and the pay-
cheques fat, and all these thoughts brought back the bitter memory
of the day before which was the day when he had eaten last: a
single meal, a chaste and wholesome dinner of spaghetti, spinach,
coffee, and a roll.  And thinking, Ten Eyck craned his scrawny neck
convulsively along the edges of his fraying collar, looked
desperately at Professor Hatcher, who returned his gaze inquiringly;
ducked his head quickly, bit his nails and craned again.  Then,
suddenly, seeing the cold patrician features of young Mr. Grey, his
blue shirt of costly madras, his limp crossed elegance of legs and
pleated trousers, the little man half rose, scraping his chair back
from the table round which the class was sitting, and with an
inclusive gesture of his claw-like hand, screamed incoherently:

"These!  These! . . .  We have the English. . . .  As for
the Russians. . . .  Take the Germans--Toller--Kaiser--the
Expressionists. . . .  But the Dutch, the Dutch, the CATSKILL
Dutch. . . ."  Pointing a trembling finger towards Mr. Grey, he
shrieked:  "The Philadelphia Cricket Club. . . .  God!  God!" he
bent, racked with soundless laughter, his thin hands pressed
against his sunken stomach.  "That it should come to this!" he
said, and suddenly, catching Professor Hatcher's cold impassive eye
upon him, he slumped down abruptly in his seat, and fell to biting
his nails.  "Well, I don't know," he said with a foolish little
laugh.  "Maybe--I guess . . ." his voice trailed off, he did not
finish.

"Is there any other comment?" said Professor Hatcher.

There was none.

"Then," said Professor Hatcher, "the class is dismissed until next
Monday."

Professor Hatcher did not look up as Ten Eyck went out.

When Oswald got out into the corridor, he could hear the last
footfalls of the departing class echoing away around the corner.
For a moment, he leaned against the wall: he felt hollow, weak, and
dizzy: his knees bent under him like rubber, and his head, after
its recent flood of blood and passion, felt swollen, light, and
floating as a toy balloon.  Suddenly he remembered that it was
Friday.  Saturday, the day on which he could next allow himself to
take a little from his dwindling hoard--for such was the desperate
resolution made at the beginning and adhered to ever since--
Saturday shone desperately far away, a small and shining disc of
light at the black mouth of an interminable tunnel, and all giddy,
weak, and hollow as he was, he did not see how he could wait!  So
he surrendered.  He knew that if he hurried now he would be just in
time for old Miss Potter's Friday afternoon.  And torn between
hunger and disgust, Ten Eyck gave in again to hunger as he had done
a score of times before, even when he knew that he must face again
that crowning horror of modern life, the art party.



Miss Potter was a curious old spinster of some property, and she
lived, with a companion, in a pleasant house on Garden Street, not
far from the University.  Miss Potter's companion was also an aged
spinster: her name was Miss Flitcroft; the two women were
inseparable.  Miss Potter was massively constructed; a ponderous
woman who moved heavily and with wheezing difficulty, and whose
large eyes bulged comically out of a face on which a strange fixed
grin was always legible.

Miss Flitcroft was a wren of a woman, with bony little hands, and
an old withered, rather distinguished-looking face: she wore a band
of velvet around her stringy neck.  She was not only a companion,
she was also a kind of nurse to Miss Potter, and she could give
relief and comfort to the other woman as no one else could.

For Miss Potter was really very ill: she had a savage love of life,
a desperate fear of death, and she knew that she was dying.  But
even the woman's sufferings, which were obviously intense, were
touched by that grotesque and ridiculous quality that made Ten Eyck
want to howl with explosive laughter, even when he felt a rending
pity for her.  Thus, at table sometimes, with all her tribe of
would-be poets, playwrights, composers, novelists, painters,
critics, and enfeebled litterateurs gathered around her, putting
away the delicious food she had so abundantly provided, Miss Potter
would suddenly begin to choke, gasp, and cough horribly; her eyes
would bulge out of her head in a fish-like stare, and looking
desperately at Miss Flitcroft with an expression of unutterable
terror, she would croak:  . . . "Dying!  Dying!  I tell you I'm
dying!"

"Nonsense!" Miss Flitcroft would answer tartly, jumping up and
running around behind Miss Potter's chair.  "You're no such
thing! . . .  You've only choked yourself on something you have
eaten!  There!" and she would deliver herself straightway of a
resounding whack upon Miss Potter's meaty, mottled back (for on
these great Friday afternoons, Miss Potter came out sumptuously
in velvet, which gave ample glimpses of her heavy arms and breasts
and the broad thick surface of her shoulders).

"If you didn't eat so fast these things would never happen!" Miss
Flitcroft would say acidly, as she gave Miss Potter another
resounding whack on her bare shoulders.  "Now you get over this
nonsense!" . . . whack!  "There's nothing wrong with you--do you
hear?" . . . whack!  "You're frightened half out of your wits," . . .
whack! . . . "just because you've tried to stuff everything down
your throat at once!" whack! whack!

And by this time Miss Potter would be on the road to recovery,
gasping and panting more easily now, as she continued to look up
with a fixed stare of her bulging eyes at Miss Flitcroft, with an
expression full of entreaty, dawning hopefulness, apology, and
pitiable gratitude.

As for Ten Eyck, his pain and embarrassment when one of these
catastrophes occurred were pitiable.  He would scramble to his
feet, stand helplessly, half-crouched, casting stricken glances
toward the most convenient exit as if contemplating the possibility
of a sudden and inglorious flight.  Then he would turn again toward
the two old women, his dark eyes fixed on them in a fascinated
stare in which anguish, sympathy, helplessness and horror were all
legible.



For several years, in spite of her ill health, Miss Potter had
fiddled around on the edges of Professor Hatcher's celebrated
course at the university.  She had written a play or two herself,
took a passionate interest in what she called "the work," was
present at the performances of all the plays, and was a charter
member of Professor Hatcher's carefully selected and invited
audiences.  Now, whether by appointment or self-election, she had
come to regard herself as a kind of ambassadress for Professor
Hatcher's work and was the chief sponsor of its social life.

The grotesque good old woman was obsessed by that delusion
which haunts so many wealthy people who have no talent and no
understanding, but who are enchanted by the glamour which they
think surrounds the world of art.  Miss Potter thought that through
these Friday afternoons she could draw together all the talent,
charm, and brilliance of the whole community.  She thought that she
could gather here not only Professor Hatcher's budding dramatists
and some older representatives of the established order, but also
poets, painters, composers, philosophers, "radical thinkers,"
people "who did interesting things," of whatever kind and quality.
And she was sure that from his mad mélange everyone would derive a
profitable and "stimulating" intercourse.

Here, from the great "art community" of Cambridge and Boston, came
a whole tribe of the feeble, the sterile, the venomous and inept--
the meagre little spirits of no talent and of great pretensions:
the people who had once got an essay printed in The Atlantic
Monthly or published "a slender volume" of bad verse; the composers
who had had one dull academic piece performed a single time by the
Boston Symphony; the novelists, playwrights, painters, who had none
of the "popular success" at which they sneered and which they
pretended to despise, but for which each would have sold his shabby
little soul; the whole wretched poisonous and embittered crew of
those who had "taken" someone's celebrated course, or had spent a
summer at the MacDowell Colony--in short, the true philistines of
art--the true enemies of the artist's living spirit, the true
defilers and betrayers of creation--the impotent fumbling little
half-men of the arts whose rootless, earthless, sunless lives have
grown underneath a barrel, and who bitterly nurse their fancied
injuries, the swollen image of their misjudged worth, and hiss and
sting in all the impotent varieties of their small envenomed hate;
who deal the stealthy traitor's blow in darkness at the work and
talent of far better men than they.

Usually, when Ten Eyck went to Miss Potter's house he found several
members of Professor Hatcher's class who seemed to be in regular
attendance on all these Friday afternoons.  These others may have
come for a variety of reasons: because they were bored, curious, or
actually enjoyed these affairs, but the strange, horribly shy and
sensitive little man who bore the name of Oswald Ten Eyck came from
a kind of desperate necessity, the ravenous hunger of his meagre
half-starved body, and his chance to get his one good dinner of the
week.

It was evident that Ten Eyck endured agonies of shyness, boredom,
confusion, and tortured self-consciousness at these gatherings, but
he was always there, and when they sat down at the table he ate
with the voracity of a famished animal.  The visitor to Miss
Potter's reception room would find him, usually backed into an
inconspicuous corner away from the full sound and tumult of the
crowd, nervously holding a tea-cup in his hands, talking to someone
in the strange blurted-out desperate fashion that was characteristic
of him, or saying nothing for long periods, biting his nails,
thrusting his slender hands desperately through his mop of black
disordered hair, breaking from time to time into a shrill, sudden,
almost hysterical laugh, blurting out a few volcanic words, and then
relapsing into his desperate hair-thrusting silence.

The man's agony of shyness and tortured nerves was painful to
watch: it made him say and do sudden, shocking and explosive things
that could suddenly stun a gathering such as this, and plunge him
back immediately into a black pit of silence, self-abasement and
despair.  And as great as his tortured sensitivity was, it was
greater for other people than for himself.  He could far better
endure a personal affront, a wounding of his own quick pride, than
see another person wounded.  His anguish, in fact, when he saw this
kind of suffering in other people would become so acute that he was
no longer responsible for his acts: he was capable of anything on
such an occasion.

And such occasions were not lacking at Miss Potter's Friday
afternoons.  For even if the entire diplomatic corps had gathered
there in suavest mood, that good grotesque old woman, with her
unfailing talent for misrule, would have contrived to set every
urbane minister of grace snarling for the other's blood before an
hour had passed.  And with that museum collection of freaks,
embittered æsthetes and envenomed misfits of the arts, that did
gather there, she never failed.  Her genius for confusion and
unrest was absolute.

If there were two people in the community who had been destined
from birth and by every circumstance of education, religious
belief, and temperament, to hate each other with a murderous hatred
the moment that they met, Miss Potter would see to it instantly
that the introduction was effected.  If Father Davin, the
passionate defender of the faith and the foe of modernism in all
its hated forms, had been invited to one of Miss Potter's Friday
afternoons, he would find himself shaking hands before he knew it
with Miss Shanksworth, the militant propagandist for free love,
sterilization of the unfit, and the unlimited practice of birth
control by every one, especially the lower classes.

If the editor of The Atlantic Monthly should be present, he would
find himself, by that unerring drawing together of opposites which
Miss Potter exercised with such accuracy, seated next to the person
of one Sam Shulemovitch, who as leader and chief editorial writer
of an organ known as Red Riot or The Worker's Dawn, had said
frequently and with violence that the sooner The Atlantic Monthly
was extinguished, and its writers, subscribers, and editorial staff
embalmed and put on exhibition in a museum, the better it would be
for every one.

If the radical leader who had just served a sentence in prison for
his speeches, pamphlets, and physical aggressions against the
police, or members of the capitalist class, should come to one of
Miss Potter's Friday afternoons, he would find himself immediately
debating the merits of the present system and the need for the
swift extinction of the wealthy parasite with a maiden lady from
Beacon Street who had a parrot, two Persian kittens, and a
Pekinese, three maids, a cook, a butler, chauffeur and motor car, a
place at Marblehead, and several thousand shares of Boston and
Maine.

And so it went, all up and down the line, at one of Miss Potter's
Friday afternoons.  There, in her house, you could be sure that if
the lion and the lamb did not lie down together their hostess would
seat then in such close proximity to each other that the ensuing
slaughter would be made as easy, swift, and unadorned as possible.

And as the sound of snarl and curse grew louder in the clamorous
tumult of these Friday afternoons, as the face grew livid with its
hate, as the eye began to glitter and the vein to swell upon the
temple, Miss Potter would look about her with triumphant
satisfaction, seeing that her work was good, thinking with delight:

"How stimulating!  How fine it is to see so many interesting people
together--people who are really doing things!  To see the flash and
play of wit, to watch the clash of brilliant intellects, to think
of all these fine young men and women have in common, and of the
mutual benefits they will derive from contact with one another!--
ah-ha!  What a delightful thing to see--but who is this that just
came--" she would mutter, peering toward the door, for she was very
near-sighted--"who?  WHO?--O-oh!  Professor Lawes of the Art
Department--oh, Professor Lawes, I'm so glad you could come.  We
have the most INTERESTING young man here today--Mr. Wilder, who
painted that picture everyone's talking about--"Portrait of a Nude
Falling Upon Her Neck in a Wet Bathroom"--Mr. Wilder, this
is Doctor Lawes, the author of Sanity and Tradition in the
Renaissance--I know you're going to find SO much in common."

And having done her duty, she would wheeze heavily away, looking
around with her strange fixed grin and bulging eyes to see if she
had left anything or anyone undone or whether there was still hope
of some new riot, chaos, brawl, or bitter argument.

And yet there was a kind of wisdom in her too, that few who came
there to her house suspected: a kind of shrewdness in the fixed
bulging stare of her old eyes that sometimes saw more than the
others knew.  Perhaps it was only a kind of instinct of the old
woman's warm humanity that made her speak to the fragile little man
with burning eyes more gently than she spoke to others, to seat him
on her right hand at the dinner table, and to say from time to
time:  "Give Mr. Ten Eyck some more of that roast beef.  Oh, Mr.
Ten Eyck, DO--you've hardly eaten anything."

And he, stretched out upon the rack of pride and all the bitter
longing of his hunger, would crane convulsively at his collar and
laugh with a note of feeble protest, saying, "Well--I don't
know . . .  I really think . . .  if you want me to. . . .  Oh! all
right then," as a plate smoking with her lavish helping was placed
before him, and would straightway fall upon it with the voracity of
a famished wolf.



When Ten Eyck reached Miss Potter's on that final fateful Friday,
the other guests were already assembled.  Miss Thrall, a student of
the woman's section of Professor Hatcher's course, was reading her
own translation of a German play which had only recently been
produced.  Miss Potter's reception rooms--which were two large
gabled rooms on the top floor of her house, ruggedly festooned with
enormous fishing nets secured from Gloucester fishermen--were
crowded with her motley parliament, and the whole gathering was
discreetly hushed while the woman student read her play.

It was a scene to warm the heart of any veteran of æsthetic
parties.  The lights were soft, shaded, quietly and warmly subdued:
the higher parts of the room were pools of mysterious gloom from
which the Gloucester fishing nets depended, but within the radius
of the little lamps, one could see groups of people tastefully
arranged in all the attitudes of rapt attentiveness.  Some of the
young women slouched dreamily upon sofas, the faces and bodies
leaning toward the reader with a yearning movement, other groups
could be vaguely discerned leaning upon the grand piano, or
elegantly slumped against the walls with tea-cups in their hands.
Mr. Cram, the old composer, occupied a chosen seat on a fat sofa;
he drew voluptuously on a moist cigarette which he held daintily
between his dirty fingers, his hawk-like face turned meditatively
away into the subtle mysteries of the fishing nets.  From time to
time he would thrust one dirty hand through the long sparse locks
of his grey hair, and then draw deeply, thoughtfully on his
cigarette.

Some of the young men were strewn about in pleasing postures on the
floor, in attitudes of insouciant grace, gallantly near the ladies'
legs.  Ten Eyck entered, looked round like a frightened rabbit,
ducked his head, and then sat down jack-knife fashion beside them.

Miss Thrall sat on the sofa with the old composer, facing her
audience.  The play that she was reading was one of the new German
Expressionist dramas, at that time considered one of "the most
vital movements in the world theatre," and the young lady's
translation of the play which bore the vigorous title of You Shall
Be Free When You Have Cut Your Father's Throat, ran somewhat in
this manner:


Elektra: (advancing a step to the top of the raised dais, her face
blue with a ghastly light, and her voice low and hoarse with
passion as she addresses the dark mass of men below her.)  Listen,
man!  To you it is now proper that I speak must.  Do you by any
manner of means know who this woman who now before you speaking
stands may be?  (With a sudden swift movement she, the purple-
reddish silk-stuff of the tunic which she wearing is, asunder in
two pieces rips, her two breasts exposing.)

(A low swiftly-growing-and-to-the-outer-edges-of-the-crowd-thunder-
becoming mutter of astonishment through the great crowd surges.)

Elektra: (Thunder louder becomes, and even with every moment
growing yet) Elektra!  (The sound to a mighty roar arisen has, and
now from every throat is in a single shout torn.)  ELEKTRA!

Elektra: (quietly)  Ja!  Man, thou hast said it.  I am Elektra!

The Crowd: (with from their throats an even-stronger roar yet)
ELEKTRA.  It is Elektra!

Elektra: (her voice even lower and more hoarse becoming, her eyes
with the red blood-pains of all her heart-grief with still greater
love-sorrow at the man-mass gleaming.)  Listen, man.  Slaves,
workers, the of your fathers' sons not yet awakened--hear!  Out of
the night-dark of your not yet born souls to deliver you have I
come!  So, hear!  (Her voice even lower with the low blood-pain
heart-hate hoarse becoming.)  To-night must you your old with-
crime-blackened and by-ignorance-blinded father's throat cut!  I
have spoken: so must it be.

A voice, Homunculus: (from the crowd, pleadingly, with protest.)
Ach!  Elektra!  Spare us!  Please!  With the blood-lust malice-
blinded your old father's throat to cut not nice is.

Elektra: (raising her arm with a cold imperious gesture of
command.)  As I have spoken, must it be!  Silence!

(Homunculus starts to interrupt: again she speaks, her voice more
loud and stern becoming.)  Silence!  Silence!



At this moment there was a loud and sibilant hiss from the door.
Miss Potter, who had been on the point of entering the room, had
been halted by the sight of Miss Thrall's arm uplifted in command
and by the imperious coldness of her voice as she said "Silence!"
Now as Miss Thrall stopped and looked up in a startled manner, Miss
Potter, still hissing loudly, tiptoed ponderously into the room.
The old woman advanced with the grace of a hydropic hippopotamus,
laying her finger to her lips as she came on, looking all around
her with her fixed grin and bulging eyes, and hissing loudly for
the silence she had thus violently disrupted every time she laid
her finger to her lips.

Every one STARED at her in a moment of blank and horrible
fascination.  As for Miss Thrall, she gaped at her with an
expression of stupefaction which changed suddenly to a cry of alarm
as Miss Potter, tiptoeing blindly ahead, barged squarely into the
small crouched figure of Oswald Ten Eyck, and went plunging over
him to fall to her knees with a crash that made the fish-nets
dance, the pictures swing, and even drew a sympathetic resonant
vibration from the polished grand piano.

Then, for one never-to-be-forgotten moment, while everyone STARED
at her in a frozen paralysis of horrified astonishment, Miss Potter
stayed there on her knees, too stunned to move or breathe, her eyes
bulging from her head, her face turned blindly upward in an
attitude of grotesque devotion.  Then as she began to gasp and
cough with terror, Ten Eyck came to life.  He fairly bounded off
the floor, glanced round him like a startled cat, and spying a
pitcher on a tray, rushed toward it wildly, seized it in his
trembling hands, and attempted to pour a glass of water, most of
which spilled out.  He turned, still clutching the glass in his
hand, and panting out "Here!  Here! . . .  Take this!" he rushed
toward Miss Potter.  Then, terrified by her apoplectic stare, he
dashed the contents of the glass full in her face.

A half-dozen young men sprang to her assistance and lifted her to
her feet.  The play was forgotten, the whole gathering broke into
excited and clamorous talk, above which could be heard Miss
Flitcroft's tart voice, saying sharply, as she whacked the
frightened and dripping old woman on the back:

"Nonsense!  You're not!  You're no such thing! . . .  You're just
frightened out of your wits; that's all that's the matter with you--
If you ever stopped to look where you were going, these things
would never happen!"

Whack!

Both Oswald and Miss Potter had recovered by the time the guests
were assembled round the table.  As usual, Oswald found he had been
seated on Miss Potter's right hand: and the feeling of security
this gave him, together with the maddening fragrance of food, the
sense of ravenous hunger about to be appeased, filled him with an
almost delirious joy, a desire to shout out, to sing.  Instead, he
stood nervously beside his chair, looking about with a shy and
timid smile, passing his fingers through his hair repeatedly,
waiting for the other guests to seat themselves.  Gallantly, he
stood behind Miss Potter's chair, and pushed it under her as she
sat down.  Then, with a feeling of jubilant elation, he sat down
beside her and drew his chair up.  He wanted to talk, to prove
himself a brilliant conversationalist, to surprise the whole
gathering with his wit, his penetration, his distinguished ease.
Above all, he wanted to eat and eat and eat!  His head felt light
and drunk and giddy, but gloriously so--he had never been so
superbly confident in his life.  And in this mood, he unfolded his
napkin, and smiling brightly, turned to dazzle his neighbour on his
right with the brilliant effervescence of wit that already seemed
to sparkle on his lips.  One look, and the bright smile faded, wit
and confidence fell dead together, his heart shrank instantly and
seemed to drop out of his very body like a rotten apple.  Miss
Potter had not failed.  Her unerring genius for calamity had held
out to the finish.  He found himself staring into the poisonous
face of the one person in Cambridge that he hated most--the
repulsive visage of the old composer, Cram.

An old long face, yellowed with malevolence, a sudden fox-glint of
small eyes steeped in a vitriol of ageless hate, a beak of cruel
nose, and thin lips stained and hardened in a rust of venom, the
whole craftily, slantingly astare between a dirty frame of sparse
lank locks.  Cackling with malignant glee, and cramming crusty
bread into his mouth, the old composer turned and spoke:

"Heh!  Heh!  Heh!"--Crunch, crunch--"It's MISTER Ten Eyck, isn't
it?  The man who wrote that play Professor Hatcher put on at his
last performance--that mystical fantasy kind of thing.  That was
YOUR play, wasn't it?"

The old yellow face came closer, and he snarled in a kind of
gloating and vindictive whisper:  "Most of the audience HATED it!
They thought it very BAD, sir--very bad!"  Crunch, crunch.  "I am
only telling you because I think you ought to know--that you may
profit by the criticism."

And Ten Eyck, hunger gone now, shrank back as if a thin poisoned
blade had been driven in his heart and twisted there.  "I--I--I
thought some of them rather liked it.  Of course I don't know--I
can't say--" he faltered hesitantly, "but I--I really thought some
of the audience--liked it."

"Well, they DIDN'T," the composer snarled, still crunching on his
crust of bread.  "Everyone that I saw thought that it was terrible.
Heh!  Heh!  Heh!  Heh!  Except my wife and I--"  Crunch, crunch.
"We were the only ones who thought that it was any good at all, the
only ones who thought there would ever be any HOPE for you.  And we
found parts of it--a phrase or sentence here and there--now and
then a scene--that we LIKED.  As for the rest of them," he suddenly
made a horrible downward gesture with a clenched fist and pointing
thumb, "it was THUMBS DOWN, my boy!  Done for!  No good. . . .
That's what they thought of YOU, my boy.  And that," he snarled
suddenly, glaring round him, "THAT is what they've thought of ME
all these years--of ME, the greatest composer that they have, the
man who has done more for the cause of American music than all the
rest of them combined--ME! ME! ME! the prophet and the seer!" he
fairly screamed, "THUMBS DOWN!  Done for!  No good any more!"

Then he grew suddenly quiet, and leaning toward Ten Eyck with a
gesture of horrible clutching intimacy, he whispered:  "And THAT'S
what they'll always think of you, my boy--of anyone who has a grain
of talent--Heh!  Heh!  Heh!  Heh!"  Peering into Ten Eyck's white
face, he shook him gently by the arm, and cackled softly a
malevolent tenderness, as if the evidence of the anguish that his
words had caused had given him a kind of paternal affection for his
victim.  "That's what they said about your play, all right, but
don't take it too seriously.  It's live and learn, my boy, isn't
it?--profit by criticism--a few hard knocks will do you no harm.
Heh!  Heh!  Heh!  Heh!  Heh!"

And turning, satisfied with the anguish he had caused, he thrust
out his yellowed face with a vulture's movement of his scrawny
neck, and smacking his envenomed lips with relish, drew noisily
inward with slobbering suction on a spoon of soup.



As for Ten Eyck, all hunger now destroyed by his sick shame and
horror and despair, he turned, began to toy nervously with his
food, and forcing his pale lips to a trembling and uncertain smile,
tried desperately to compel his brain to pay attention to something
that was being said by the man across the table who was the guest
of honour for the day, and whose name was Hunt.

Hunt had been well known for his belligerent pacifism during the
war, had been beaten by the police and put in jail more times than
he could count, and now that he was temporarily out of jail, he was
carrying on his assault against organized society with more
ferocity than ever.  He was a man of undoubted courage and deep
sincerity, but the suffering he had endured, and the brutal
intolerance of which he had been the victim, had left its
mutilating mark upon his life.  His face was somehow like a scar,
and his cut, cruel-looking mouth could twist like a snake to the
corner of his face when he talked.  And his voice was harsh and
jeering, brutally dominant and intolerant, when he spoke to anyone,
particularly if the one he spoke to didn't share his opinions.

On this occasion, Miss Potter, with her infallible talent for
error, had seated next to Hunt a young Belgian student at the
university, who had little English, but a profound devotion to the
Roman Catholic Church.  Within five minutes, the two were embroiled
in a bitter argument, the Belgian courteous, but desperately
resolved to defend his faith, and because of his almost incoherent
English as helpless as a lamb before the attack of Hunt, who went
for him with the rending and pitiless savagery of a tiger.  It was
a painful thing to watch: the young man, courteous and soft-spoken,
his face flushed with embarrassment and pain, badly wounded by the
naked brutality of the other man's assault.

As Ten Eyck listened, his spirit began to emerge from the blanket
of shame and sick despair that had covered it, a spark of anger and
resentment, hot and bright, began to glow, to burn, to spread.  His
large dark eyes were shining now with a deeper, fiercer light than
they had had before, and on his pale cheeks there was a flush of
angry colour.  And now he no longer had to force himself to listen
to what Hunt was saying: anger had fanned his energy and his
interest to a burning flame; he listened tensely, his ears seemed
almost to prick forward on his head, from time to time he dug his
fork viciously into the table-cloth.  Once or twice, it seemed that
he would interrupt.  He cleared his throat, bent forward, nervously
clutching the table with his claw-like hands, but each time ended
up thrusting his fingers through his mop of hair, and gulping down
a glass of wine.

As Hunt talked, his voice grew so loud in its rasping arrogance
that everyone at the table had to stop and listen, which was what
he most desired.  And there was no advantage, however unjust, which
the man did not take in this bitter argument with the young
Belgian.  He spoke jeeringly of the fat priests of the old corrupt
Church, fattening themselves on the blood and life of the oppressed
workers; he spoke of the bigotry, oppression, and superstition of
religion, and of the necessity for the workers to destroy this
monster which was devouring them.  And when the young Belgian, in
his faltering and painful English, would try to reply to these
charges, Hunt would catch him up on his use of words, pretend to be
puzzled at his pronunciation, and bully him brutally in this
manner:

"You think WHAT? . . .  WHAT? . . .  I don't understand what you're
saying half the time. . . .  It's very difficult to talk to a man
who can't speak decent English."

"I--vas--say--ink," the young Belgian would answer slowly and
painfully, his face flushed with embarrassment--"--vas--say--ink--
zat--I sink--zat you--ex--ack--sher--ate--"

"That I WHAT?--WHAT?  What is he trying to say, anyway?" demanded
Hunt, brutally, looking around the table as if hoping to receive
interpretation from the other guests.  "Oh-h!" he cried suddenly,
as if the Belgian's meaning had just dawned on him.  "EXAGGERATE!
That's the word you're trying to say!" and he laughed in an ugly
manner.

Oswald Ten Eyck had stopped eating and turned white as a sheet.
Now he sat there, looking across in an agony of tortured sympathy
at the young Belgian, biting his nails nervously, and thrusting his
hands through his hair in a distracted manner.  The resentment and
anger that he had felt at first had now burned to a white-heat of
choking, murderous rage.  The little man was taken out of himself
entirely.  Suddenly his sense of personal wrong, the humiliation
and pain he had himself endured, was fused with a white-hot anger
of resentment for every injustice and wrong that had ever been done
to the wounded soul of man.  United by that agony to a kind of
savage fellowship with the young Belgian, with the insulted and the
injured of the earth, of whatsoever class or creed, that burning
coal of five feet five flamed in one withering blaze of wrath, and
hurled the challenge of its scorn at the oppressor.

The thing happened like a flash.  At the close of one of Hunt's
jeering tirades, Ten Eyck jumped from his chair, and leaning half
across the table, cried out in a high shrill voice that cut into
the silence like a knife:

"Hunt!  You are a swine, and everyone who ever had anything to do
with you is likewise a swine!"  For a moment he paused, breathing
hard, clutching his napkin in a bony hand.  Slowly his feverish
eyes went round the table, and suddenly, seeing the malevolent
stare of the old composer Cram fixed upon him, he hurled the wadded
napkin down and pointing a trembling finger at that hated face, he
screamed:  "And that goes for you as well, you old bastard! . . .
It goes for all the rest of you," he shrieked, gesturing wildly.
"Hunt . . . Cram!  CRAM! . . .  God!" he cried, shaking with
laughter.  "THERE'S a name for you! . . .  It's perfect. . . .
Yes, you!  You swine!" he yelled again, thrusting his finger at
Cram's yellowed face so violently that the composer scrambled back
with a startled yelp.  "And all the rest of you!" he pointed
towards Miss Thrall--"You--the Expressionist!"  And he paused,
racked terribly again by soundless laughter--"The Greeks--the
Russians--Oh how we love in Spain!--and fantasy--why, Goddam my
soul to hell, but it's delightful!" he fairly screamed, and then
pointing a trembling finger at several in succession he yelled:
"You?--And you?--And you?--What the hell do you know about
anything? . . .  Ibsen--Chekov--the Celtic Dawn--BOSH!" he snarled,
"Food!  Food!  Food!--you Goddam fools! . . .  That's all that
matters."  He picked up a morsel of his untouched bread and hurled
it savagely upon the table--"Food!  Food!--Ask Cram--he knows. . . .
Now," he said, panting for breath and pointing a trembling
finger at Miss Potter--"Now," he panted, "I want to tell YOU
something."

"Oh . . . Mr. . . . Ten . . . Eyck," the old woman faltered in a
tone of astonished reproach, "I . . . never . . . believed it
possible . . . you could--"

Her voice trailed off helplessly, and she looked at him.  And Ten
Eyck, suddenly brought to himself by the bulging stare of that good
old creature fixed on him with wounded disbelief, suddenly laughed
again, shrilly and hysterically, thrust his fingers through his
hair, looked about him at the other people whose eyes were fixed on
him in a stare of focal horror, and said in a confused, uncertain
tone:  "Well, I don't know--I'm always--I guess I said something
that--oh, damn it, what's the use?" and with a desperate, stricken
laugh, he slumped suddenly into his chair, craned convulsively at
his collar, and seizing a decanter before him poured out a glass of
wine with trembling haste and gulped it down.

Meanwhile, all around the table people began to talk with that kind
of feverish eagerness that follows a catastrophe of this sort, and
Hunt resumed his arguments, but this time in a much quieter tone
and with a kind of jeering courtesy, accompanying his remarks from
time to time with a heavy sarcasm directed toward Ten Eyck--"If I
may say so--since, of course, Mr. Ten Eyck considers me a swine"--
or--"if you will pardon such a remark from a swine like me"--or--
"as Mr. Ten Eyck has told you I am nothing but a swine," and so on.

The upshot of it was that Ten Eyck gulped down glass after glass of
the strong wine, which raced instantly through his frail starved
body like a flame.

He got disgracefully drunk, sang snatches of bawdy songs, screamed
with maudlin laughter, and began to pound enthusiastically on the
table, shaking his head to himself and shouting from time to time:

"You're right, Hunt! . . .  God-damn it, man, you're right! . . .
Go on! . . .  Go on!  I agree with you!  You're right!  Everybody
else is wrong but Hunt and Cram! . . .  Words by Hunt, music by
Cram . . . no one's right but Hunt and Cram!"

They tried to quiet him, but in vain.  Suddenly Miss Potter began
to cough and choke and gasp, pressed both hands over her heart, and
gasped out in a terror-stricken voice:

"Oh, my God, I'm dying!"

Miss Flitcroft jumped to her feet and came running to her friend's
assistance, and then while Miss Flitcroft pounded the old woman on
her back and the guests scrambled up in a general disruption of the
party, Oswald Ten Eyck staggered to the window, flung it open, and
looking out across one of the bleak snow-covered squares of
Cambridge, screamed at the top of his voice:

"Relentless! . . .  Relentless! . . .  Juh sweez un art-e-e-este!"
Here he beat on his little breast with a claw-like hand and yelled
with drunken laughter, "And, Goddamn it, I will always be
relentless . . . relentless . . . relentless!"

The cool air braced him with its cleansing shock: for a moment, the
fog of shame and drunkenness shifted in his brain, he felt a
vacancy of cold horror at his back, and turning suddenly found
himself confronted by the frozen circle of their faces, fixed on
him.  And even in that instant glimpse of utter ruin, as the
knowledge of this final catastrophe was printed on his brain, over
the rim of frozen faces he saw the dial-hands of a clock.  The time
was seven-fifty-two: he knew there was a train at midnight for New
York--and work, food, freedom, and forgetfulness.  He would have
four hours to go home and pack: if he hurried he could make it.

Little was heard of him thereafter.  It was rumoured that he had
gone back to his former lucrative employment with Mr. Hearst: and
Professor Hatcher smiled thinly when he heard the news; the young
men looked at one another with quiet smiles.

And yet he could not wholly be forgotten: occasionally someone
mentioned him.

"A strange case, wasn't it?" said Mr. Grey.  "Do you remember how
he looked?  Like . . . like . . . really, he was like some mediæval
ascetic.  I thought he had something.  I thought he would do
something . . . I really did, you know!  And then--heavens!--that
last play!"  He tossed his cigarette away with a movement of
dismissal.  "A strange case," he said with quiet finality.  "A man
who looked as if he had it and who turned out--all belly and no
brain."

There was silence for a moment while the young men smoked.

"I wonder what it was," another said thoughtfully at length.  "What
happened to him?  I wonder why."

There was no one there who knew the answer.  The only one on earth,
perhaps, who could have given it was that curious old spinster
named Miss Potter.  For blind to many things that all these clever
young men knew, that good grotesque old empress of confusion still
had a wisdom that none of them suspected.  But Miss Potter was no
longer there to tell them, even if she could.  She had died that
spring.



Later it seemed to Gene that the cold and wintry light of
desolation--the red waning light of Friday in the month of March--
shone for ever on the lives of all the people.  And for ever after,
when he thought of them, their lives, their faces and their words--
all that he had seen and known of them--would be fused into a
hopeless, joyless image which was somehow consonant to that
accursed wintry light that shone upon it.  And this was the image:

He was standing upon the black and grimy snow of winter before Miss
Potter's house, saying good-bye to a group of her invited guests.
The last red wintry light of Friday afternoon fell on their lives
and faces as he talked to them, and made them hateful to him, and
yet he searched those faces and talked desperately to see if he
could find there any warmth or love or joy, any ring of hope for
himself which would tell him that his sick heart and leaden spirit
would awake to life and strength again, that he would get his hands
again on life and love and labour, and that April would come back
again.

But he found nothing in these cold and hateful faces but the lights
of desolation, the deadly and corrupt joy that took delight in its
own death, and breathed, without any of the agony and despair he
felt, the poisonous ethers of its own dead world.  In those cold
hateful faces as that desolate and wintry light fell on them he
could find no hope for his own life or the life of living men.
Rather, he read in their pale faces, and in their rootless and
unwholesome lives, which had come to have for him the wilted yellow
pallor of nameless and unuseful plants such as flourish under
barrels, a kind of cold malicious triumph, a momentary gleam in
pale fox-eyes, which said that they looked upon his desperate life
and knew the cause of his despair, and felt a bitter triumph over
it.  The look on their cold faces and in their fox-eyes said to him
that there was no hope, no work, no joy, no triumph, and no love
for such as he, that there could be nothing but defeat, despair and
failure for the living of this world, that life had been devoured
and killed by such as these, and had become rats' alley, death-in-
life for ever.

And yet he searched their hated faces desperately in that cold red
light, he sought frantically in their loathed faces for a ray of
hope, and in his drowning desolation shameful words were wrenched
from him against his will--words of entreaty, pleading, pitiful
begging for an alms of mercy, a beggarly scrap of encouragement,
even a word of kindly judgment on his life, from these cold and
hateful faces that he loathed.

"But my work--this last work that I did--don't you think--didn't it
seem to you that there was something good in it--not much, perhaps,
but just enough to give me hope? . . .  Don't you think if I go on
I may do something good some day--for God's sake, tell me if you
do?--or must I die here in this barren and accursed light of Friday
afternoon, must I drown and smother in this poisonous and lifeless
air, wither in this rootless, yellow, barren earth below the
barrel, die like a mad dog howling in the wilderness, with the
damned, cold, hateful sneer of your impotent lives upon me?

"Tell me, in God's name, man, is there no life on earth for such as
I?  Has the world been stripped for such as you?  Have all joy,
hope, health, sensual love, and warmth and tenderness gone out of
life--are living men the false men, then, and is all truth and work
and wisdom owned by rats' alley and the living dead such as
yourself?--For God's sake, tell me if there is no hope for me!  Let
me have the worst, the worst, I beg of you.  Is there nothing for
me now but the grey gut, the sick heart, and the leaden spirit?  Is
there nothing now but Friday afternoon in March, Miss Potter's
parties, and your damned poisonous, sterile, cold, life-hating
faces?  For God's sake tell me now if I am no good, am false while
you, the living dead, are true--and had better cut my throat or
blow my brains out than stay on longer in this world of truth,
where joy is dead, and only the barren rootless lives of dead men
live!--In God's name, tell me now, if this is true--or do you find
a rag of hope for me?"

"Ah," the old composer Cram would answer, arranging the folds of
his dirty scarf, and peering out malevolently underneath his sparse
lank webs of dirty grey, as the red and wintry light fell
hopelessly on his poisonous old face.  "--Ah-h," he rasped
bitterly, "--my wife and I liked some things in that play of yours
that Professor Hatcher put on in his Playshop. . . .  My wife and I
liked one or two speeches in that play," he rasped, "but"--for a
moment a fox's glittering of malevolent triumph shone in his eyes
as he drove the fine blade home "--no one else did!--No one else
thought it was any good at all!" he cackled malevolently.  "I heard
people saying all around me that they HATED it," he gloated,
"--that you had no talent, no ability to write, and had better go
back where you came from--live some other kind of life--or KILL
yourself," he gloated--"That's the way it is, my boy!--Nothing but
defeat and misery and despair for such as you in life! . . .  That
has been my lot, too," he cackled vindictively, rubbing his dry
hands in glee.  "They've always hated what I did--if I ever did
anything good I was lucky if I found two people who liked it.  The
rest of them HATED it," he whispered wildly.  "There's no hope for
you--so DIE, DIE, DIE," he whispered, and cackling with malevolent
triumph, he rubbed his dry hands gleefully.

"Meeker, for God's sake," the boy cried, turning to the elegant
figure of the clergyman, who would be carefully arranging around
his damned luxurious neck the rich folds of a silk blue scarf--
"Meeker, do you feel this way about it, too? . . .  Is that your
opinion? . . .  Do you find nothing good in what I do?"

--"You see, old chap, it's this way," Meeker answered, in his soft
voice, and drew with languor on one of his expensive straw-tipped
cigarettes--"You have lots of ability, I am sure"--here he paused
to inhale meditatively again--"but don't you think, old boy, it's
critical rather than creative?--now with Jim here it's different,"
he continued, placing one hand affectionately on Hogan's narrow
shoulders--"Jim here's a great genius--like Shelley--with a great
gift waiting for the world"--Here Hogan lowered his pale weak face
with a simpering smile of modesty, but not before the boy had seen
the fox's glitter of vindictive triumph in his pale dull eyes--"but
you have nothing of that sort to give.  Why don't you try to make
the best of what you have?" he said with hateful sympathetic
urbanity and put the cigarette to elegant and reflective lips
again.

"Hogan," the boy cried hoarsely, turning to the poet,"--is that
your answer, too?  Have you no word of hope for me?--but no, you
damned, snivelling, whining upstart--you are gloating at your
rotten little triumph, aren't you?  I'd get nothing out of you,
would I?"

"Come on, Jim," said Meeker quietly.  "He's becoming abusive. . . .
The kind of attack you make is simply stupid," he now said.  "It
will get you nowhere."

"And so raucous--so raucous," said Hogan, smirking nervously.  "It
means nothing."

And the three hated forms of death would go away then rapidly,
snickering among themselves, and he would turn again, filled with
the death of life, the end of joy, again, again, to prowl the
wintry, barren, and accursed streets of Friday night.



XXXVII


It had been almost two years since Eugene had last seen Robert
Weaver, but now, by one of those sudden hazards of blind chance
that for a moment bring men's lives together and in an instant show
them more than years together could have done, he was to see the
other youth again.

One night in his second year at Cambridge he was reading in his
room at about two o'clock in the morning, at the heart and core of
the brooding silence of night that had come to mean so much to him,
and that had the power to stir him as no other time of day could do
with a feeling of swelling and exultant joy.  The house had gone to
sleep long before and there was no sound anywhere: it was late in
winter, along in March, and the ice and snow had been packed and
frozen on the earth for months with a kind of weary permanence--
with a tenacity that gave to winter a harsh and dreary reality, a
protraction of grey days and grim grey light which made the memory
of other seasons, and particularly the hope of spring, remote and
almost unbelievable.  The street outside was frozen in this living
and animate silence of great cold: suddenly this still perfection
of night and darkness was shattered by the engines of a powerful
motor which turned into the end of the street from Massachusetts
Avenue, and tore along before the house at drunken speed with a
roaring explosion of sound.  Then, without slackening its speed,
the brakes were jammed on, the car skidded murderously to a halt on
the slippery pavement, and immediately backed up at full speed
until it came before the house again, skidded to a halt and was
abruptly silent.

Someone got out with the same violent impatience, slammed the door,
and then for a moment he could hear him hunting along the street,
swearing and muttering to himself; at length he came back to the
house started up the steps on which he slipped or stumbled and fell
heavily, after which he heard Robert cursing in a tone of hoarse
and feverish discontent:  "The God-damnedest place I ever saw. . . .
Did they never hear of a light around here? . . .  Who the hell
would want to live in a place like this?"

He began to hammer at the front door and to bawl out Eugene's name
at the top of his voice: then he came up outside his windows and
began to knock on the glass impatiently with his fist.  Eugene went
to the door and let him in: he entered the room without a word, and
with the intent driving movement of a man who is very drunk; then
he looked at him scornfully and accusingly, and barked out:  "What
time do you go to bed? . . .  Do you stay up all night? . . .  What
do you do, sleep all morning?" . . .  He looked around the room:
the floor was strewn with books he had been reading and littered
with pieces of paper on which he had been writing.  Robert broke
into his sudden, hoarse, falsetto laugh:  "The damnedest place I
ever saw!" he said.  "Do you sleep on that thing?" he said
contemptuously, pointing to his cot bed which stood along the wall
in one corner of the room.

"No, Robert," he said, "I sleep on the floor.  I use that for an
ice-box."

"What's that in the corner?" Robert asked, pointing to some dirty
shirts he had thrown there.  "Shirts? . . .  How long has it been
since you sent anything to the laundry? . . .  What do you do when
you want a shirt, go out and buy one? . . .  Do you ever take a
bath? . . .  Have you had a bath since you came to Harvard?"  He
laughed suddenly, hoarsely and wildly again, hurled himself into a
chair, sighed sharply with a weary and impatient discontent, began
to pass his hand across his forehead with an abstracted and weary
movement, and said, "Lord!  Lord!  Lord! . . .  The things I've
done!" he shook his head mournfully.  "Why, it's awful," he said,
and he started to shake his head again.

"Why don't you try to talk a little louder?" Eugene suggested.  "I
think there are a few people over in South Boston who haven't heard
you yet."

He laughed, hoarsely and abruptly, and then resumed his abstracted
and repentant shaking of the head, sighing heavily from time to
time and saying, "Lord!"

It was the first time Eugene had seen Robert in two years.  Under
the hard light that he kept burning in his room he now looked
closely at him: he wore a Derby hat that became his small lean head
well, and he had on a magnificent fur coat, such as the rich
Harvard boys wear, that came down almost to his shoe-tops.  For the
rest, he was quietly and elegantly tailored with the distinction he
had always seemed to get into his clothes--there was always, even
in his boyhood, a kind of formal dignity in his dress: he always
wore a stiff, starched collar.

Robert's face had grown thinner, he looked haggard and a good deal
older: the lines of his sharp, incisive features were more deeply
cut and his eyes, now injected and bloodshot from heavy drinking,
were more wild and feverish in their restless discontent than they
had ever been--he seemed to be lashed and driven by a savage and
desperate hunger which he could neither satisfy nor articulate: he
was being consumed and torn to pieces by a torment of desire and
longing, the cause of which he could not define, and which he had
no means to assuage or quench.

He had a bottle half filled with whisky in the pocket of his fur
coat: he took it out and offered Eugene a drink, and after he had
drunk he put the bottle to his lips and gulped down all that
remained in a single draught.  Then he flung the empty bottle away
impatiently on the table; it was obvious that the liquor, instead
of giving him some peace or comfort, acted as savagely and
immediately as oil poured on the tumult of a raging fire--it fed
and spurred the madness in him and gave him no release until he had
drunk himself into a state of paralysis and stupefaction.  He was
one of those men for whom alcohol was a fatal and uncontrollable
stimulant: having once drawn the cork from a bottle and tasted his
first drink he was then powerless to resist or stop: he drank until
he could drink no more, and he would beg, fight, lie, cheat, crawl
or walk or incur any desperate risk or danger to get more drink.
Yet, he told Eugene that until his twenty-first year he had never
tasted liquor: he began to drink during his last year in college,
and during the two years that followed he had gone far on the road
toward alcoholism.

Eugene asked him how he had found out where he lived and, still
passing his hand across his forehead, he answered in an impatient
and abstracted tone:  "Oh . . . I don't know. . . .  Someone told
me, I guess. . . .  I think it was Arthur Kittrell," and then
he fell to shaking his head again, and saying, "Awful! awful!
awful! . . .  Do you know how much money I've spent so far this
year? . . .  Forty-eight hundred dollars. . . .  So help me, God.
I hope I may die if I'm not telling you the truth!  Why, it's
awful!" he said, and burst into a laugh.

"Have you travelled around a lot?" Gene asked.

"Have I?  My God!  I've spent only one week-end in New Haven since
the beginning of the year," he said.  "Why, it's terrible! . . .
Do you know whom I'm rooming with?" he demanded.

"No."

"Andy Westerman," he said impressively and then, as the name
communicated none of its significance to Gene, he added impatiently:
"Why, you've heard of the Westermans, haven't you? . . .  My God!
what have you been doing all your life? . . . You've heard of the
Westerman vacuum cleaners and electric refrigerators, haven't
you? . . .  Why, he's worth $20,000,000 if he's worth a cent! . . .
The craziest man that ever lived!" he said, breaking suddenly into
a sharp recollective laugh.

"Who?  Westerman?"

"No. . . .  My room-mate . . . that damned Andy Westerman. . . .
Do you want to meet him?"

"Is he up here with you?"

"Why, that's what I'm telling you," he said impatiently.

"Where is he?"

"I don't know," said Robert with a laugh.  "In jail by now, I
reckon. . . .  I left him down at the Copley Plaza an hour ago
stopping everyone who came in and asking him if he'd ever been to
Harvard. . . .  If the man said yes, Andy would haul off and hit
him as hard as he could. . . .  God! the craziest man!" he said.
Then, in a feverish staccato monologue, he continued:  "The
damnedest story you ever heard. . . .  You never heard anything
like the way I met him in your life. . . .  Passed right out in the
gutter on Park Avenue one night. . . .  All alone. . . .  They'd
given me knock-out drops in some joint and robbed me. . . .  Waked
up in the most magnificent apartment you ever saw in your life. . . .
Most beautiful woman you ever saw sitting right there on the bed
holding my hand. . . .  Andy Westerman's sister. . . .  God!
they've got stuff in that place that cost a fortune. . . .  They've
got one picture that the old man paid a hundred thousand dollars
for. . . .  Damned little thing that doesn't take up a foot of
space. . . .  Twenty million dollars!  Yes, sir! . . .  And those
two get it all. . . .  Why, it'll ruin me!" he burst out.  "It
takes every cent I can get to keep up with 'em. . . .  My God!  I
never saw a place like this in my life! . . .  These people up here
think no more of spending a thousand dollars than we'd think of
fifty cents down home. . . .  God!  I've got to do something. . . .
I've got to get money somehow. . . .  Yes, sir, Robert is going to
be right up there among them. . . .  Apartment on Park Avenue and
everything. . . .  God! that's the most beautiful woman in the
world!  All I want is to sleep with her just once. . . .  Yes, sir,
just once. . . .

"And to think that she'd go and throw herself away on that damned
consumptive little . . . !" he fairly ground his teeth together,
turned away abruptly, and did not finish.

"Throw herself away on whom?  Who is this, Robert?"

"Ah-h! that damned little fellow Upshaw that she's married to: been
waiting--praying--hoping that he'd die for months--she'll marry me
just as soon as he's out of the way--and he knows it!  The damned
little rat!"  He gnashed his teeth savagely.  "He's hanging on just
as long as he can to spite us!"  And he cursed bitterly, with a
terrible unconscious humour, against a man who was too stubborn to
oblige him by an early death.

Then he jumped up and said abruptly:  "Do you want to go to New
York with me?"

"When?"

"Right now!" said Robert.  "I'm ready to go this very minute.  Come
on!"--and he started impatiently toward the door.

When Eugene made no move to follow him, he turned and came back,
saying in a resentful tone:  "Well, are you coming, or are you just
trying to bluff about it?"

For a moment, the boy was infected by the other's madness, too near
akin to his own ever to be wholly strange to him.  The prospect of
that reckless, drunken, purposeless flight through darkness towards
the magic city held him with hypnotic power.  Then, rudely,
painfully, he broke the spell and answered curtly:

"I wouldn't go as far as Harvard Square with you tonight, Robert.
Not if you're going to drive that car.  You're too drunk to know
what you're doing and you'll have a smash-up as sure as you live if
you try to drive."

He was, in fact, wildly and dangerously drunk by now and Eugene
began to think of some way of persuading him to go to sleep and of
finding some place where he could spend the night: in his own room
there was only a single cot, and it was too late to rouse the
Murphys--they had been in bed for hours.  Then he remembered that
Mr. Wang had an extra couch in one of his rooms: it was a very
comfortable one and he did not think that Wang would make any
objection to Robert's sleeping there if he explained the situation
to him.  Therefore, he cautioned Robert to keep quiet, and went to
Wang's door and knocked.  Presently he appeared sleepily, thrusting
out his fat, drowsy, and troubled face to see what the trouble was:
when Eugene told him he agreed very generously and readily to let
Robert sleep upon the couch and thus the young man got him settled
at length, although not before the sudden apparition of a dragon
with a scaly tail--one of the drawings that hung above the couch--
had wrested from him a howl of terror: he had sprung out of bed and
rushed out of Wang's apartment and into Eugene's, saying hoarsely,
and in a tone of frightened indignation:  "Do you expect me to
spend the night alone in there with that damned Chinaman and his
dragon? . . .  How do I know what he'll do? . . .  One of those
people would cut your throat while you're asleep and think nothing
of it. . . .  I'm not going to stay in there."  Gene finally
persuaded him of Wang's innocence and kindness, and at length he
went off to sleep after drinking the better part of a bottle of
Wang's rice wine.



XXXVIII


One Sunday morning early in the month of May, Starwick and Eugene
had crossed the bridge that led to the great stadium, and turned
right along a path that followed the winding banks of the Charles
River.  Spring had come with the sudden, almost explosive
loveliness that marks its coming in New England: along the banks of
the river the birch trees leaned their slender, white and beautiful
trunks, and their boughs were coming swiftly into the young and
tender green of May.

That spring--which, for Eugene, would be the third and last of his
years in Cambridge--Starwick had become more mannered in his dress
and style than ever before.  During the winter, much to Professor
Hatcher's concern--a concern which constantly became more troubled
and which he was no longer able to conceal--the darling protégé on
whom his bounty and his favour had been lavished, and to whom, he
had fondly hoped, he would one day pass on the proud authorities of
his own position when he himself should become too old to carry on
"the work," had begun to wear spats and carry a cane and be
followed by a dog.

Now, with the coming of spring, Frank had discarded the spats, but
as they walked along beside the Charles, he twirled his elegant
light stick with an air of languid insouciance, interrupting his
conversation with his friend now and then to speak sharply to the
little dog that frisked and scampered along as if frantic with the
joy of May, crying out to the little creature sharply, commandingly,
and in a rather womanish tone from time to time:

"Heel, Tang!  Heel, I say!"

And the dog, a shaggy little terrier--the gift of some wealthy and
devoted friends of Frank's on Beacon Hill--would pause abruptly in
its frisking, turn its head, and look towards its owner with the
attentive, puzzled, and wistfully inquiring look that dogs and
little children have, as if to say:  "What is it, master?  Are you
pleased with me or have I done something that was wrong?"

And in a moment, in response to Frank's sharper and more peremptory
command, the little dog, with a crestfallen and somewhat apologetic
look, would scamper back from its wild gaieties along the green
banks of the Charles, to trot meekly along the path behind the two
young men, until its exuberant springtime spirits got the best of
it again.

From time to time, they would pass other students, in pairs or
groups, striding along the pleasant path; and when these young men
saw Starwick twirling his stick and speaking to the little dog,
they would grin broadly at each other and stare curiously at
Starwick as they passed.

Once Starwick paused to call "Heel!" sharply to the little dog at
the very moment it had lifted its leg against a tree, and the dog,
still holding its leg up, had looked inquiringly around at Starwick
with such a wistful look that some students who were passing had
burst out in hearty laughter.  But Starwick, although the colour of
his ruddy face deepened a shade, had paid no more attention to
these ruffians than if they had been scum in the gutter.  Rather,
he snapped his fingers sharply, and cried "Heel!" again, at which
the little dog left its tree and came trotting meekly back to its
obedient position.

Suddenly, while one of these episodes was being enacted, Eugene
heard the bright wholesome tones of a familiar voice, and turning
round with a startled movement, found himself looking straight into
the broad and beaming countenance of Effie Horton and her husband
Ed.

"WELL!" Effie was saying in her rich bright voice of Iowa.  "Look
who's here!  I THOUGHT those long legs looked familiar," she went
on in her tone of gay and lightsome, and yet wholesome, banter,
"even from a distance!  I told Pooly--" this, for an unknown
reason, was the affectionate nickname by which Horton was known to
his wife and all his friends from Iowa--"I told Pooly that there
was only one pair of legs as long as that in Cambridge.  'It MUST
be Eugene,' I said.--Yes sir!" she went on brightly, shaking her
head with a little bantering movement, her broad and wholesome face
shining with good nature all the time.  "It IS Eugene--and MY! MY!
MY!--I just wish you'd look at him," she went on gaily, in her
tones of full rich fellowship and banter in which, however, a trace
of something ugly, envious, and mocking was evident--"all dressed
up in his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes out for a walk this fine
morning just to give the pretty girls a treat!  Yes, sir!" she
cried again, shaking her head in wondering admiration, and with an
air of beaming satisfaction, "I'll BET you that's JUST what he's
going to do."

He flushed, unable to think of an apt reply to this good-natured
banter, beneath whose hearty good-fellowship he felt the presence
of something that was false, ugly, jeering and curiously tormented,
and while he was blundering out a clumsy greeting, Horton, laughing
with lazy good-nature at his confusion, slapped him on the back and
said:

"How are yuh, kid? . . .  Where the hell have you been keeping
yourself, anyway?"

The tone was almost deliberately coarse and robust in its hearty
masculinity, but beneath it one felt the same false and spurious
quality that had been evident in the woman's tone.

--"And here is MISTER Starwick!" Effie now cried brightly.  "--And
I WISH you'd LOOK!" she went on, as if enraptured by the spectacle--
"all dressed up with a walking-stick and a dog--and yes, SIR!"
she exclaimed ecstatically, after an astonished examination of
Frank's sartorial splendour--"wearing a BEE-YEW-TEEFUL brown tweed
suit that looks as if it just came out of the shop of a London
tailor! . . .  MY! MY! MY! . . .  I tell YOU!" she went on
admiringly--"I just wish the folks back home could see us now,
Pooly--"

Horton laughed coarsely, with apparent good nature, but with an
ugly jeering note in his voice.

"--I just wish they could see us now!" she said.  "It's not
everyone can say they knew two London swells--and here they are--
Mr. Starwick with his cane and his dog--and Eugene with his new
suit--yes, SIR!--and talking to us just as if we were their
equals."

Eugene flushed, and then with a stiff and inept sarcasm, said:

"I'll try not to let it make any difference between us, Effie."

Horton laughed coarsely and heartily again, with false good nature,
and then smote the boy amiably on the back, saying:

"Don't let her kid you, son!  Tell her to go to hell if she gets
fresh with you!"

"--And how is Mr. Starwick these fine days!" cried Effie gaily, now
directing the artillery of her banter at his unworthy person--
"Where is that great play we've all been waiting for so eagerly
for, lo! these many years!  I tell YOU!" she exclaimed with rich
conviction--"I'm going to be right there on the front row the night
it opens up on Broadway!--I know that a play that has taken anyone
so many years will be a masterpiece--every word pure gold--I don't
want to miss a WORD of it."

"Quite!" said Starwick coldly, in his mannered and affected tone.
His ruddy face had flushed crimson with embarrassment; turning, he
called sharply and coldly to the little dog, in a high and rather
womanish voice:  "Heel, Tang!  Heel, I say!"

He snapped his fingers and the little dog came trotting meekly
toward him.  Before Starwick's cold and scornful impassivity,
Effie's broad and wholesome face did not alter a jot from its
expression of radiant goodwill, but suddenly her eyes, which, set
in her robust and friendly countenance, were the tortured mirror of
her jealous, envious, possessive, and ravenously curious spirit,
had grown hard and ugly, and the undernote of malice in her gay
tones was more apparent than ever when she spoke again.

"Pooly," she said, laughing, taking Horton affectionately by the
arm and drawing close to him with the gesture of a bitterly jealous
and possessive female, who, by the tortured necessity of her own
spirit, must believe that "her man" is the paragon of the universe,
and herself the envy of all other women, who lust to have him, but
must gnash their teeth in vain--"Pooly," she said lightly, and
drawing close to him, "maybe that's what's wrong with us! . . .
Maybe that's what it takes to make you write a great play! . . .
Yes, SIR!" she said gaily, "I believe that's it! . . .  I believe
I'll save up all my spending money until I have enough to buy you a
bee-yew-teeful tailored suit just like the one that Mr. Starwick
has on. . . .  Yes, SIR!"  She nodded her head emphatically in a
convinced manner.  "That's just EXACTLY what I'm going to do! . . .
I'm going to get Mr. Starwick to give me the address of his tailor--
and have him make you a BEE-YEW-TEEFUL new suit of English
clothes--and then, maybe, you'll turn into a great genius like Mr.
Starwick and Eugene!"

"The hell you will!" he said coarsely and heartily.  "What's wrong
with the one I got on?  I only had it three years--why, it's as
good as the day I bought it."  And he laughed with hearty, robust
masculinity.

"Why, Poo-o-ly!" she said reproachfully.  "It's turning GREEN!  And
I do so want you to get dressed up and be a GENIUS like Mr.
Starwick!"

"Nope!" he said in his tone of dominant finality.  "I'll wear this
pair of pants till it falls off me.  Then I'll go into Filene's
bargain basement and buy another pair.  Nope!  You can't make an
æsthete out of me!  I can write just as well with a hole in the
seat of my breeches as not."  And laughing coarsely, with robust
and manly good nature, he smote Eugene on the back again, and
rasped out heartily:

"Ain't that right, kid?"

"Oh, POOLY!" cried Effie reproachfully--"And I do SO want you to be
a genius--like Mr. Starwick!"

"Now, wait a minute!  Wait a minute!" he rasped, lifting a
commanding hand, as he joined with her in this ugly banter.
"That's different!  Starwick's an artist--I'm nothing but a writer.
They don't understand the way we artists work--do they, Starwick?
Now an artist is sensitive to all these things," he went on in a
jocose explanatory tone to his wife.  "He's got to have the right
ATMOSPHERE to work in.  Everything's got to be just right for us
artists--doesn't it, Starwick?"

"Quite!" said Starwick coldly.

"Now with me it's different," said Horton heavily.  "I'm just one
of those big crude guys who can write anywhere.  I get up in the
morning and write, whether I feel like it or not.  But it's
different with us artists, isn't it, Starwick?  Why, with a real
honest-to-God-dyed-in-the-wool ARTIST like Starwick, his whole life
would be ruined for a MONTH if his pants didn't fit or if his neck-
tie was of the wrong shade. . . .  Ain't that right, Starwick?"

And he laughed heavily, apparently with robust fellowship, hearty
good nature, but his eyes were ugly, evil, jeering, as he spoke.

"Quite!" said Starwick as before; and, his face deeply flushed, he
called sharply to his dog, and then, turning inquiringly to Eugene,
said quietly:  "Are we ready?"

"Oh, I SEE, I SEE!" cried Effie, with an air of gay enlightenment.
"That's what everyone is all dressed up about!--You're out for a
walk, aren't you?--all among the little birdies, and the beeses,
and the flowers!  MY!  MY!  How I wish I could go along!  Pooly!"
she said coaxingly, "why don't you take ME for a walk sometime?
I'd love to hear the little birdies sing!  Come on, dear.  Won't
you?" she said coaxingly.

"Nope!" he boomed out finally.  "I walked you across the bridge and
I walked to the corner this morning for a paper.  That's all the
walking that I'm going to do today.  If you want to hear the little
birdies sing, I'll buy you a canary."  And turning to Eugene, he
smote him on the shoulder again, and laughing with coarse laziness,
said:

"You know me, kid. . . .  You know how I like exercise, don't you?"

"Well, then, if we can't go along to hear the little birdies sing
to Mr. Starwick and Eugene, I suppose we'll have to say good-bye,"
said Effie regretfully.  "We've got no right to keep them from the
little birdies any longer--have we, dear?  And think what a treat
it will be for all the little birdies. . . .  And you, Eugene!" she
cried out gaily and reproachfully, but now with real warmth and
friendship in her voice.  "We haven't seen you at our home in a-a-
ages!  What's WRONG with you? . . .  You come up soon or I'll be
mad at you."

"Sure," Horton came out in his broad Iowa accent, putting his hand
gently on the boy's shoulder.  "Come up to see us, kid.  We'll cook
some grub and chew the rag a while.  You know, I'm not coming back
next year--" for a moment Horton's eyes were clear, grey, luminous,
deeply hurt, and full of pride and tenderness.  "We're going to New
Hampshire with Jim Madden.  So come up, kid, as soon as you can: we
ought to have one more session before I go."

And the boy, suddenly touched and moved, felt a genuine affection,
the real friendliness--an animal-like warmth and kindliness and
affection that was the truest and most attractive element in
Horton's personality.

And nodding his head, suddenly feeling affection for them both
again, he said:

"All right, Ed.  I'll see you soon.  So long, Effie.  Good-bye.
Goodbye, Ed."

"Good-bye, kid.  So long, Starwick," Horton said in a kindly tone.
"We'll be looking for you, Gene--So long!"

Then they parted, in this friendly manner, and Starwick and Eugene
continued their walk along the river.  Starwick walked quietly,
saying nothing; from time to time he called sharply to the little
dog, commanding him to come to "heel" again.

The two young men had not seen each other for two months, save at
Professor Hatcher's class, and then their relations had been
formal, cold, and strained.  Now Starwick, with a quick friendly
and generous spontaneity, had broken through the stubborn and
resentful pride of the other youth, had made the first advance
toward reconciliation, and, as he was able to do with everyone when
and where he pleased, had instantly conquered his friend's
resentful feelings and won him back with the infinite grace, charm,
and persuasiveness of his own personality.

Yet, during the first part of their walk along the river their
conversation, while friendly, had almost been studiously detached
and casual, and was the conversation of people still under the
constraint of embarrassment and diffidence, who are waiting for the
moment to speak things in which their lives and feelings are more
intimately concerned.

At length they came to a bending in the river where there was a
bank of green turf on which in the past they had often sat and
smoked and talked while that small and lonely river flowed before
them.  Seated here again, and provided with cigarettes, a silence
came between them, as if each was waiting for the other one to
speak.

Presently when Eugene looked towards his companion, Starwick's
pleasant face with the cleft chin was turned towards the river in a
set stare, and even as the other young man looked at him, his ruddy
countenance was contorted by the animal-like grimace swift and
instant, which the other boy had often seen before, and which had
in it, somehow, a bestial and inarticulate quality, a kind of
unspeakable animal anguish that could find no release.

In a moment, lowering his head, and staring away into the grassy
turf, Starwick said quietly:

"Why have you not been in to see me these last two months?"

The other young man flushed, began to speak in a blundering and
embarrassed tone and then, angered by his own confusion, burst out
hotly:

"Look here, Frank--why have you got to be so damned mysterious and
secretive in everything you do?"

"Am I?" said Starwick quietly.

"Yes, you are!  You've been that way ever since I met you."

"In what way?" Starwick asked.

"Do you remember the first time I met you?" the other one demanded.

"Perfectly," Starwick said.  "It was during your first year in
Cambridge, a few days after you arrived.  We met for dinner at the
'Cock Horse Tavern'."

"Yes," the other said excitedly.  "Exactly.  You had written me a
note inviting me to dinner, and asking me to meet you there.  Do
you remember what was in that note?"

"No.  What was it?"

"Well, you said:  'Dear Sir--I should be pleased if you will meet
me for dinner at seven-thirty, Wednesday evening, at the "Cock
Horse Tavern" on Brattle Street.'  And the note was signed,
'Francis Starwick.'"

"Well?" Starwick demanded quietly.  "And what was wrong with that?"

"Nothing!" the other young man cried, his face flushing to a darker
hue and the excitement of his manner growing.  "Nothing, Frank!
Only, if you were going to invite a stranger--someone you had never
met before--to dinner--why the hell couldn't you have told him who
you are and the purpose of the meeting?"

"I should think the purpose of the meeting was self-evident," said
Starwick calmly.  "The purpose was to have dinner together.  Does
that demand a whole volume of explanation?  No," he said coldly, "I
confess I see nothing extraordinary about that at all."

"Of course there wasn't!" the other youth exclaimed with vehement
excitement.  "Of course there was nothing extraordinary about it!
Why, then, did you attempt, Frank, to make something extraordinary
out of it?"

"It seems to me that you're the one who's doing that!" Starwick
answered.

"Yes, but, damn it, man," the other cried angrily "--don't you see
the point?  You're that way with everything you do!  You try to
surround the simplest act with this great air of mystery and
secrecy," he said bitterly.  "Inviting me to dinner was all right--
it was fine!" he shouted.  "I was a green kid of twenty who knew no
one here, and I was scared to death.  It was wonderful to get an
invitation from someone asking me to dinner.  But when you sent the
invitation, why couldn't you have added just a word or two by way
of explanation?  Why couldn't you have stated one or two simple
facts that would have made the reason for your invitation clear?"

"For example?" Starwick said.

"Why, Frank, simply that you were Professor Hatcher's assistant in
the course, and that this thing of inviting people out to dinner
was just a way you and Professor Hatcher had of getting acquainted
with the new people," the other youth said angrily.  "After all,
you can't get an invitation to dinner from someone you don't know
without wondering what it's all about."

"And yet you came," said Starwick.

"Yes, of course I came!  I think I would have come if I had never
heard of you before--I was so bewildered and rattled by this new
life, and so overwhelmed by living in a big city for the first time
in my life that I would have accepted any kind of invitation--
jumped at the chance of meeting anyone!  However, I already knew
who you were when your invitation came.  I had heard that a man
named Starwick was Hatcher's assistant.  I figured therefore that
the invitation had something to do with your connection with
Professor Hatcher and the course--that you were inviting me to make
me feel more at home up here, to establish a friendly relation, to
give me what information you could, to help the new people out in
any way you could.  But when I met you, what happened?" he went on
indignantly.  "Never a word about the course, about Professor
Hatcher, about your being his assistant--you pumped me with
questions as if I were a prisoner in the dock and you the
prosecuting lawyer.  You told me nothing about yourself and asked a
thousand questions about me--and then you shook hands coldly, and
departed!--Always this air of secrecy and mystery, Frank!" the boy
went on angrily.  "That's always the way it is with you--in
everything you do!  And yet you wonder why people are surprised at
your behaviour!  For weeks at a time I see you every day.  We get
together in your rooms and talk and argue about everything on
earth.  You come and yell for me in my place at midnight and then
we walk all over Cambridge in the dead of night.  We go over to
Posillippo's place in Boston and eat and drink and get drunk
together, and when you pass out, I bring you home and carry you
upstairs and put you to bed.  Then the next day, when I come round
again," the boy cried bitterly, "what has happened?  I ring the
bell.  Your voice comes through the place as cold as hell--'Who is
it?' you say.  'Why,' I say, 'it's your old friend and drunken
companion, Eugene Gant, who brought you home last night.'--'I'm
sorry,' you say, in a tone that would freeze a polar bear--'I can't
see you.  I'm busy now'--and then you hang up in my face.  The
season of the great mystery has now begun," he went on sarcastically.
"The great man is closeted in his sanctum COMPOSING," he sneered.
"Not WRITING, mind you, but COMPOSING with a gold-tipped quill
plucked from the wing of a Brazilian condor--so, out, out, damned
spot--don't bother me, Gant--begone, you low fellow--on your way,
burn!--the great master, Signor Francis Starwick, is upstairs in a
purple cloud, having a few immortal thoughts today with Amaryllis,
his pet muse--"

"Gene!  Gene!" said Starwick laughing, a trace of the old-mannered
accent returning to his voice again.  "You are MOST unfair!  You
really are, you know!"

"No--but, Frank, that's just the way you act," the other said.
"You can't see enough of someone for weeks at a time and then you
slam the door in his face.  You pump your friends dry and tell them
nothing about yourself.  You try to surround everything you do with
this grand romantic air of mysterious secrecy--this there's-more-
to-this-than-meets-the-eye manner.  Frank, who the hell do you
think you are, anyway, with these grand airs and mysterious manners
that you have?  Is it that you're not the same as other men?" he
jeered.  "Is it that, like Cæsar, you were from your mother's womb
untimely ripped?  Is it that you are made from different stuff than
the damned base clay of blood and agony from which the rest of us
have been derived?"

"What have I ever done," said Starwick flushing, "to give you the
impression that I think of myself that way?"

"For one thing, Frank, you act sometimes as if the world exists
solely for the purpose of being your oyster.  You sometimes act as
if friendship, the affection of your friends, is something that
exists solely for your pleasure and convenience and may be turned
on and off at will like a hot-water faucet--that you can use their
time, their lives, their feelings when they amuse and interest you--
and send them away like whipped dogs when you are bored, tired,
indifferent, or have something else it suits you better to do."

"I am not aware that I have ever done that," said Starwick quietly.
"I am sorry if you think I have."

"No, but, Frank--what can you expect your friends to think?  I have
told you about my life, my family, the kind of place and people I
came from--but you have told me nothing.  You are the best friend I
have here in Cambridge--I think," the boy said slowly, flushing,
and with some difficulty, "one of the best friends I have ever had.
I have not had many friends--I have known no one like you--no one
of my own age to whom I could talk as I have talked to you.  I
think I enjoy being with you and talking to you more than to anyone
I have ever known.  This friendship that I feel for you has now
become a part of my whole life and has got into everything I do.
And yet, at times, I run straight into a blank wall.  I could no
more separate my friendship for you from the other acts and
meetings of my life than I could divide into two parts of my body
my father's and my mother's blood.  With you it's different.  You
seem to have all your friends partitioned off and kept separate
from one another in different cells and sections of your life.  I
know now that you have three or four sets of friends and yet these
different groups of people never meet one another.  You go about
your life with all these different sets of people in this same
secret and mysterious manner that characterizes everything you do.
You have these aunts and cousins here in Cambridge that you see
every week, and who, like everyone else, lay themselves out to do
everything they can to make your life comfortable and pleasant.
You know these swells over on Beacon Hill in Boston, and you have
some grand, mysterious and wealthy kind of life with them.  Then
you have another group here at the university--people like Egan,
and Hugh Dodd and myself.  And at the end, Frank," the boy said
almost bitterly--"what is the purpose of all this secrecy and
separation among your friends?  There's something so damned
arrogant and cold and calculating about it--it's almost as if you
were one of these damned, wretched, self-centred fools who have
their little time and place for everything--an hour for social
recreation and an hour for useful reading, another hour for healthy
exercise, and then four hours for business, an hour for the concert
and an hour for the play, an hour for 'business contracts' and an
hour for friendship--Surely to God, Frank, you of all people on
earth are not one of these damned, smug, vain, self-centred
egoists--who would milk this earth as if it were a great milk cow
here solely for their enrichment, and who, at the end, in spite of
all their damned, miserable, self-seeking profit for themselves
remain nothing but the God-damned smug, sterile, misbegotten set of
impotent and life-hating bastards that they are--Surely to God,
you, of all people in the world, are not one of these," he fairly
yelled, and sat there panting, exhausted by the tirade, and glaring
at the other youth with wild, resentful eyes.

"Eugene!" cried Starwick sharply, his ruddy features darkened with
an angry glow.  "You are being most unjust!  What are you saying
simply is not true."  He was silent a moment, his face red and
angry-looking, as he stared out across the river--"If I had known
that you felt this way," he went on quietly, "I should have
introduced you to my other friends--what you call these separate
groups of people--long ago.  You may meet them any time you wish,"
he concluded.  "It simply never occurred to me that you would be
interested in knowing them."

"Oh, Frank, I'm not!" the other boy cried impatiently, with a
dismissing movement of the hand.  "I don't want to meet them--I
don't care who they are--or how rich and fashionable or 'artistic'
they may be.  The thing I was kicking about was what seemed to me
to be your air of secrecy--the mysterious manner in which you go
about things: it seemed to me that there was something deliberately
calculating and secretive in the way you shut one part of your life
off from the people who know and like you best."

Starwick made no answer for a moment, but sat looking out across
the river.  And for a moment, the old grimace of bestial, baffled
pain passed swiftly across his ruddy features, and then he said, in
a quiet and weary tone:

"Perhaps you are right.  I had never thought about it in that way.
Yes, I can see now that you have told me much more about yourself--
your family, your life before you came here--than I have told you
about mine.  And yet it never occurred to me that I was being
mysterious or secretive.  I think it is easier for you to speak
about these things than it is for me.  There is a great river of
energy in you and it keeps bursting over and breaking loose.  You
could not hold it back if you tried.  With me, it's different.  I
have not got that great well of life and power in me, and I could
not speak as you do if I tried.  Yet, Gene, if there is anything
you want to know about my life before I came here, or what kind of
people I came from, I would tell you willingly."

"I have wanted to know more about you, Frank," the other young man
said.  "All that I know about your life before you came here is
that you come from somewhere in the Middle West, and yet are
completely different from anyone I ever knew who came from there."

"Yes," said Starwick quietly.  "From Horton, for example?" his tone
was still quiet, but there was a shade of irony in it.

"Well," the other boy said, flushing, but continuing obstinately,
"--yes, from Horton.  He is from Iowa; you can see, smell, read,
feel Iowa all over him, in everything he says and does--"

"'It's--a--DARN--GOOD--YARN,'" said Starwick, beginning to burble
with laughter as he imitated the heavy, hearty, sonorous
robustiousness of Horton's voice when he pronounced his favourite
judgment.

"Yes," said Eugene, laughing at the imitation, "that's it, all
right--'it's a DARN GOOD YARN.'  Well, Frank, you couldn't be more
different from Horton if you had come from the planet Mars, and yet
the place you came from out there in the Middle West, the kind of
life you knew when you were growing up, could not have been so
different from Ed Horton's."

"No," said Starwick quietly.  "As a matter of fact, I know where he
is from--it's not over fifty miles from the town I was born in,
which is in Illinois, and the life in both places is much the
same."

He was silent a moment longer, as he stared across the river, and
then continued in a quiet voice that had a calm, weary, and almost
inert detachment that characterized these conversations with his
friend, and that was almost entirely free of mannered speech:

"As to the kind of people that we came from," he continued, "I
can't say how different they may be, but I should think it very
likely that Horton's people are much the same kind of people as my
own--"

"His father is a Methodist minister," the other young man quickly
interposed.  "He told me that."

"Yes," said Starwick in his quiet and inert voice--"and Horton is
the rebel of the family."  His tone had not changed apparently in
its quality by an atom, yet the quiet and bitter irony with which
he spoke was evident.

"How did you know that?" the other youth said in a surprised tone.
"Yes--that's true.  His wife told me that Ed and his father are
scarcely on speaking terms--the old man prays for the salvation of
Ed's soul three times a day, because he is trying to write plays
and wants to get into the theatre.  Effie Horton says Ed's father
still writes Ed letters begging him to repent and mend his ways
before his soul is damned for ever: she says the old man calls the
theatre the Devil's Workshop."

"Yes," said Starwick in his quiet and almost lifeless tone that
still had curiously the cutting edge of a weary and detached
sarcasm--"and Horton has bearded the Philistines in their den,
hasn't he, and given all for art?"

"Isn't that a bit unjust?  I know you don't think very highly of Ed
Horton's ability, but, after all, the man must have had some
genuine desire to create something--some real love for the theatre--
or he would not have broken with his family and come here."

"Yes.  I suppose he has.  Many people have that desire," said
Starwick wearily.  "Do you think it is enough?"

"No, I do not.  And yet I think a man who has it is better off--
will have a better life, somehow--than the man who does not have it
at all."

"Do you?" Starwick answered in a dead tone.  "I wish I thought so,
too."

"But don't you, Frank?  Surely it is better to have some kind of
talent, however small, than none at all."

"Would you say, then," Starwick answered, "that it was better to
have some kind of child--however puny, feeble, ugly, and diseased--
as King Richard said about himself, brought into the world 'scarce
half made up'--than to have no child at all?"

"I would not think so.  No."

"Have you ever thought, Eugene, that the great enemy of life may
not be death, but life itself?" Starwick continued.  "Have you
never noticed that the really evil people that one meets--the
people who are filled with hatred, fear, envy, rancour against
life--who wish to destroy the artist and his work--are not figures
of satanic darkness, who have been born with a malignant hatred
against life, but rather people who have had the seeds of life
within themselves and been destroyed by them?  They are the people
who have been given just enough to get a vision of the promised
land--however brief and broken it may be--"

"But not enough to get there?  Is that what you mean?"

"Exactly," Starwick answered.  "They are left there in the desert,
maddened by the sight of water they can never reach, and all the
juices of their life then turn to gall and bitterness--to envy and
malignant hate.  They are the old women in the little towns and
villages with the sour eyes and the envenomed flesh who have so
poisoned the air with their envenomed taint that everything young
and beautiful and full of joy that lives there will sicken and go
dead and vicious and malignant as the air it breathes.  They are
the lecherous and impotent old men of the world, those foul,
palsied creatures with small rheumy eyes who hate the lover and his
mistress with the hate of hell and eunuchry--who try to destroy
love with their hatred and the slanderous rumour of their poisoned
tongues.  And, finally, they are the eunuchs of the arts--the men
who have the lust, without the power, for creation, and whose life
goes dead and rotten with its hatred of the living artist and the
living man."

"And you think that Horton will be one of these?"

Again Starwick was silent for a moment, staring out across the
river.  When he spoke again, he did not answer his companion's
question directly, but in a quiet and inert tone in which the
cutting edge of irony was barely evident, he said:

"My GOD!  Eugene"--his voice was so low and wearily passionate with
revulsion that it was almost inaudible--"if ever you may come to
know, as I have known all my life, the falseness in a hearty laugh,
the envy and the malice in a jesting word, the naked hatred in a
jeering eye, and all the damned, warped, poisonous constrictions of
the heart--the horrible fear and cowardice and cruelty, the naked
shame, the hypocrisy, and the pretence, that are masked there
behind the full hearty tones, the robust manliness of the Hortons
of this earth . . ."  He was silent a moment longer, and then went
on in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone--"I was the youngest in a family
of nine children--the same kind of family that you will find
everywhere.  I was the only delicate flower among them," he went on
with a cold impassive irony.  "We were not rich people . . . a big
family growing up with only a small income to support us.
They were all good people," he said quietly.  "My father was
superintendent of a small farm-machinery plant, and before that
they were farming people, but they sent me to school, and after
that to college.  I was the 'bright boy' of the town"--again the
weary irony of his voice was evident--"the local prodigy, the
teacher's pet. . . .  Perhaps that is my destiny; to have
something of the artist's heart, his soul, his understanding, his
perceptions--never to have his power, the hand that shapes, the
tongue that can express--oh, God!  Eugene! is THAT to be my life--
to have all that I know and feel and would create rot still-born in
my spirit, to be a wave that breaks for ever in mid-ocean, the
shoulder of a strength without the wall--my God!  My God! to come
into this world scarce half made up, to have the spirit of the
artist and to lack his hide, to feel the intolerable and
unspeakable beauty, mystery, loveliness, and terror of this
immortal land--this great America--and a skin too sensitive, a hide
too delicate and rare--" his voice was high and bitter with his
passion--"to declare its cruelty, its horror, falseness, hunger,
the warped and twisted soul of its frustration, and lacking hide
and toughness, born without a skin, to make an armour, school a
manner, build a barrier of my own against its Hortons--"

"And is that why--?" the other boy began, flushed, and quickly
checked himself.

"Is that why--what?" said Starwick, turning, looking at him.  Then
as he did not answer, but still remained silent, flushed with
embarrassment, Starwick laughed, and said:  "Is that why I am an
affected person--a poseur--what Horton calls a 'damned little
æsthete'--why I speak and act and dress the way I do?"

The other flushed miserably and muttered:

"No, I didn't say that, Frank!"

Starwick laughed suddenly, his infectious and spontaneous laugh,
and said:

"But why not?  Why shouldn't you say it?  Because it is the truth.
It really is, you know," and almost mockingly at these words, his
voice assumed its murmured and affected accent.  Then he said
quietly again:

"Each man has his manner--with each it comes for his own reason--
Horton's, so that his hearty voice and robust way may hide the
hatred in his eyes, the terror in his heart, the falseness and
pretence in his pitiable warped small soul.  He has his manner, I
have mine--his for concealment, mine for armour, because my native
hide was tender and my skin too sensitive to meet the Hortons of
the earth--and somewhere, down below our manner, stands the naked
man."  Again he was silent and in a moment he continued quietly:

"My father was a fine man and we never got to know each other very
well.  The night before I went away to college he 'took me to one
side' and talked to me--he told me how they had their hearts set on
me, and he asked me to become a good and useful man--a good
American."

"And what did you say, Frank?"

"Nothing.  There was nothing I could say. . . .  Our house stands
on a little butte above the river," he went on quietly in a moment,
"and when he had finished talking I went out and stood there
looking at the river."

"What river, Frank?"

"There is only one," he answered.  "The great slow river--the dark
and secret river of the night--the everlasting flood--the unceasing
Mississippi. . . .  It is a river that I know so well, with all my
life that I shall never tell about.  Perhaps you will some day--
perhaps you have the power in you--And if you do--" he paused.

"And if I do?"

"Speak one word for a boy who could not speak against the Hortons
of this land, but who once stood above a river--and who knew
America as every other boy has known it."  He turned, smiling:  "If
thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity
awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my
story."

In a moment he got up, and laughing his infectious laugh, said:

"Come on, let's go."

And together they walked away.




BOOK III



TELEMACHUS



XXXIX


October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: frost
was early, burning the thick green on the mountain sides to massed
brilliant hues of blazing colours, painting the air with sharpness,
sorrow and delight--and with October.  Sometimes, and often, there
was warmth by day, an ancient drowsy light, a golden warmth and
pollenated haze in afternoon, but over all the earth there was the
premonitory breath of frost, an exultancy for all the men who were
returning, a haunting sorrow for the buried men and for all those
who were gone and would not come again.

His father was dead, and now it seemed to him that he had never
found him.  His father was dead, and yet he sought him everywhere,
and could not believe that he was dead, and was sure that he would
find him.  It was October and that year, after years of absence and
of wandering, he had come home again.

He could not think that his father had died, but he had come home
in October, and all the life that he had known there was strange
and sorrowful as dreams.  And yet he saw it all in shapes of
deathless brightness--the town, the streets, the magic hills, and
the plain prognathous faces of the people he had known.  He saw
them all in shapes of deathless brightness, and everything was
instantly familiar as his father's face, and stranger, more
phantasmal than a dream.

Their words came to him with the accents of an utter naturalness,
and yet were sorrowful and lost and strange like voices speaking in
a dream, and in their eyes he read a lost and lonely light, as if
they were all phantoms and all lost, or as if he had revisited the
shores of this great earth again with a heart of fire, a cry of
pain and ecstasy, a memory of intolerable longing and regret for
all the glorious and exultant life that he had known and which he
must visit now for ever as a fleshless ghost, never to touch, to
hold, to have its palpable warmth and substance for his own again.
He had come home again, and yet he could not believe his father was
dead, and he thought he heard his great voice ringing in the street
again, and that he would see him striding toward him across the
Square with his gaunt earth-devouring stride, or find him waiting
every time he turned the corner, or lunging toward the house
bearing the tremendous provender of his food and meat, bringing to
them all the deathless security of his strength and power and
passion, bringing to them all again the roaring message of his
fires that shook the fire-full chimney-throat with their terrific
blast, giving to them all again the exultant knowledge that the
good days, the magic days, the golden weather of their lives would
come again, and that this dreamlike and phantasmal world in which
they found themselves would waken instantly, as it had once, to all
the palpable warmth and glory of the earth, if only his father
would come back to make it live, to give them life, again.

Therefore, he could not think that he was dead, and yet it was
October, and that year he had come home again.  And at night, in
his mother's house, he would lie in his bed in the dark, hearing
the wind that rattled dry leaves along the empty pavement, hearing,
far-off across the wind, the barking of a dog, feeling dark time,
strange time, dark secret time, as it flowed on around him,
remembering his life, this house, and all the million strange and
secret visages of time, dark time, thinking, feeling, thinking:

"October has come again, has come again. . . .  I have come home
again and found my father dead . . . and that was time . . .
time . . . time. . . .  Where shall I go now?  What shall I do?  For
October has come again, but there has gone some richness from the
life we knew, and we are lost."

Storm shook the house at night--the old house, his mother's house--
where he had seen his brother die.  The old doors swung and creaked
in darkness, darkness pressed against the house, the darkness
filled them, filled the house at night, it moved about them soft
and secret, palpable, filled with a thousand secret presences of
sorrowful time and memory, moving about him as he lay below his
brother's room in darkness, while storm shook the house in late
October, and something creaked and rattled in the wind's strong
blast.  It was October, and he had come home again: he could not
believe that his father was dead.

Wind beat at them with burly shoulders in the night.  The darkness
moved there in the house like something silent, palpable--a spirit
breathing in his mother's house, a demon and a friend--speaking to
him its silent and intolerable prophecy of flight, of darkness and
the storm, moving about him constantly, prowling about the edges of
his life, ever beside him, with him, in him, whispering:

"Child, child--come with me--come with me to your brother's grave
tonight.  Come with me to the places where the young men lie whose
bodies have long since been buried in the earth.  Come with me
where they walk and move again tonight, and you shall see your
brother's face again, and hear his voice, and see again, as they
march toward you from their graves the company of the young men who
died, as he did, in October, speaking to you their messages of
flight, of triumph, and the all-exultant darkness, telling you that
all will be again as it was once."

October had come again, and he would lie there in his mother's
house at night, and feel the darkness moving softly all about him,
and hear the dry leaves scampering on the street outside, and the
huge and burly rushes of the wind.  And then the wind would rush
away with huge caprice, and he could hear it far off roaring with
remote demented cries in the embraces of great trees, and he would
lie there thinking:

"October has come again--has come again"--feeling the dark around
him, not believing that his father could be dead, thinking:  "The
strange and lonely years have come again. . . .  I have come home
again . . . come home again . . . and will it not be with us all as
it has been?"--feeling the darkness as it moved about him,
thinking:  "Is it not the same darkness that I knew in childhood,
and have I not lain here in bed before and felt this darkness
moving all about me? . . .  Did we not hear dogs that barked in
darkness, in October?" he then thought.  "Were not their howls far
broken by the wind? . . .  And hear dry leaves that scampered on
the streets at night . . . and the huge and burly rushes of the
wind . . . and hear huge limbs that stiffly creak in the remote
demented howlings of the burly wind . . . and something creaking in
the wind at night . . . and think, then, as we think now, of all
the men who have gone and never will come back again, and of our
friends and brothers who lie buried in the earth? . . .  Oh, has
not October now come back again?" he cried.  "As always--as it
always was?"--and hearing the great darkness softly prowling in his
mother's house at night, and thinking, feeling, thinking, as he lay
there in the dark:

"Now October has come again which in our land is different from
October in the other lands.  The ripe, the golden month has come
again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.  Frost sharps
the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth
turn home again.  The country is so big you cannot say the country
has the same October.  In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as
driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright
and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red,
and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling about you
as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the
sun, so that you cannot say where sunlight shakes and flutters on
the ground and where the leaves.

"Meanwhile the Palisades are melting in massed molten colours, the
season swings along the nation, and a little later in the South
dense woodings on the hill begin to glow and soften, and when they
smell the burning wood-smoke in Ohio children say:  'I'll bet that
there's a forest fire in Michigan.'  And the mountaineer goes
hunting down in North Carolina; he stays out late with mournful
flop-eared hounds, a rind of moon comes up across the rude lift of
the hills: what do his friends say to him when he stays out late?
Full of hoarse innocence and laughter, they will say:  'Mister,
yore ole woman's goin' to whup ye if ye don't go home.'"

Oh, return, return!

"October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the
granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness,
and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York
Imperials run.  The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape,
the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow,
creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in
blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.

"The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried
ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania and the big
stained teeth of crunching horses.  The indolent hooves kick
swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood
and apples--this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all:
the sweat, the labour, and the plough are over.  The late pears
mellow on a sunny shelf; smoked hams hang to the warped barn
rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit.
Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning, up in Maine, the
chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind and in
Virginia the chinkapins are falling.

"There is a smell of burning in small towns in afternoon, and men
with buckles on their arms are raking leaves in yards as boys come
by with straps slung back across their shoulders.  The oak leaves,
big and brown, are bedded deep in yard and gutter: they make deep
wadings to the knee for children in the streets.  The fire will
snap and crackle like a whip, sharp acrid smoke will sting the
eyes, in mown fields the little vipers of the flame eat past the
black coarse edges of burned stubble like a line of locusts.  Fire
drives a thorn of memory in the heart.

"The bladed grass, a forest of small spears of ice, is thawed by
noon: summer is over but the sun is warm again, and there are days
throughout the land of gold and russet.  But summer is dead and
gone, the earth is waiting, suspense and ecstasy are gnawing at the
hearts of men, the brooding prescience of frost is there.  The sun
flames red and bloody as it sets, there are old red glintings on
the battered pails, the great barn gets the ancient light as the
boy slops homeward with warm foaming milk.  Great shadows lengthen
in the fields, the old red light dies swiftly, and the sunset
barking of the hounds is faint and far and full of frost: there are
shrewd whistles to the dogs, and frost and silence--this is all.
Wind stirs and scuffs and rattles up the old brown leaves, and
through the night the great oak leaves keep falling.

"Trains cross the continent in a swirl of dust and thunder, the
leaves fly down the tracks behind them: the great trains cleave
through gulch and gulley, they rumble with spoked thunder on the
bridges over the powerful brown wash of mighty rivers, they toil
through hills, they skirt the rough brown stubble of shorn fields,
they whip past empty stations in the little towns and their great
stride pounds its even pulse across America.  Field and hill and
lift and gulch and hollow, mountain and plain and river, a
wilderness with fallen trees across it, a thicket of bedded brown
and twisted undergrowth, a plain, a desert, and a plantation, a
mighty landscape with no fenced niceness, an immensity of fold and
convolution that can never be remembered, that can never be
forgotten, that has never been described--weary with harvest,
potent with every fruit and ore, the immeasurable richness
embrowned with autumn, rank, crude, unharnessed, careless of scars
or beauty, everlasting and magnificent, a cry, a space, an
ecstasy!--American earth in old October.

"And the great winds howl and swoop across the land: they make a
distant roaring in great trees, and boys in bed will stir in
ecstasy, thinking of demons and vast swoopings through the earth.
All through the night there is the clean, the bitter rain of
acorns, and the chestnut burrs are plopping to the ground.

"And often in the night there is only the living silence, the
distant frosty barking of a dog, the small clumsy stir and feathery
stumble of the chickens on limed roosts, and the moon, the low and
heavy moon of autumn, now barred behind the leafless poles of
pines, now at the pine-woods' brooding edge and summit, now falling
with ghost's dawn of milky light upon rimed clods of fields and on
the frosty scurf on pumpkins, now whiter, smaller, brighter,
hanging against the steeple's slope, hanging the same way in a
million streets, steeping all the earth in frost and silence.

"Then a chime of frost-cold bells may peal out on the brooding air,
and people lying in their beds will listen.  They will not speak or
stir, silence will gnaw the darkness like a rat, but they will
whisper in their hearts:

"'Summer has come and gone, has come and gone.  And now--?'  But
they will say no more, they will have no more to say: they will
wait listening, silent and brooding as the frost, to time, strange
ticking time, dark time that haunts us with the briefness of our
days.  They will think of men long dead, of men now buried in the
earth, of frost and silence long ago, of a forgotten face and
moment of lost time, and they will think of things they have no
words to utter.

"And in the night, in the dark, in the living sleeping silence of
the towns, the million streets, they will hear the thunder of the
fast express, the whistles of great ships upon the river.

"What will they say then?  What will they say?"



Only the darkness moved about him as he lay there thinking, feeling
in the darkness: a door creaked softly in the house.

"October is the season for returning: the bowels of youth are
yearning with lost love.  Their mouths are dry and bitter with
desire: their hearts are torn with the thorns of spring.  For
lovely April, cruel and flowerful, will tear them with sharp joy
and wordless lust.  Spring has no language but a cry; but crueller
than April is the asp of time.

"October is the season for returning: even the town is born anew,"
he thought.  "The tide of life is at the full again, the rich
return to business or to fashion, and the bodies of the poor are
rescued out of heat and weariness.  The ruin and horror of the
summer are forgotten--a memory of hot cells and humid walls, a hell
of ugly sweat and labour and distress and hopelessness, a limbo of
pale greasy faces.  Now joy and hope have revived again in the
hearts of millions of people, they breathe the air again with
hunger, their movements are full of life and energy.  The mark of
their summer's suffering is still legible upon their flesh, there
is something starved and patient in their eyes, and a look that has
a child's hope and expectation in it.

"All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea,
travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the
long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken--
all things that live upon this earth return, return: Father, will
you not, too, come back again?

"Where are you now, when all things on the earth come back again?
For have not all these things been here before, have we not seen
them, heard them, known then, and will they not live again for us
as they did once, if only you come back again?

"Father, in the night-time, in the dark, I have heard the thunder
of the fast express.  In the night, in the dark, I have heard the
howling of the winds among great trees, and the sharp and windy
raining of the acorns.  In the night, in the dark, I have heard the
feet of rain upon the roofs, the glut and gurgle of the gutter
spouts, and the soaking gulping throat of all the mighty earth,
drinking its thirst out in the month of May--and heard the
sorrowful silence of the river in October.  The hill-streams foam
and welter in a steady plunge, the mined clay drops and melts and
eddies in the night, the snake coils cool and glistening under
dripping ferns, the water roars down past the mill in one sheer
sheet-like plunge, making a steady noise like wind, and in the
night, in the dark, the river flows by us to the sea.

"The great maw slowly drinks the land as we lie sleeping: the mined
banks cave and crumble in the dark, the earth melts and drops into
its tide, great horns are baying in the gulph of night, great boats
are baying at the river's mouth.  Thus, darkened by our dumpings,
thickened by our stains, rich, rank, beautiful, and unending as all
life, all living, the river, the dark immortal river, full of
strange tragic time is flowing by us--by us--by us--to the sea.

"All this has been upon the earth and will abide for ever.  But you
are gone; our lives are ruined and broken in the night, our lives
are mined below us by the river, our lives are whirled away into
the sea and darkness and we are lost unless you come to give us
life again.

"Come to us, Father, in the watches of the night, come to us as you
always came, bringing to us the invincible sustenance of your
strength, the limitless treasure of your bounty, the tremendous
structure of your life that will shape all lost and broken things
on earth again into a golden pattern of exultancy and joy.  Come to
us, Father, while the winds howl in the darkness, for October has
come again, bringing with it huge prophecies of death and life and
the great cargo of the men who will return.  For we are ruined,
lost, and broken if you do not come, and our lives, like rotten
chips, are whirled about us onward in darkness to the sea."

So, thinking, feeling, speaking, he lay there in his mother's
house, but there was nothing in the house but silence and the
moving darkness: storm shook the house and huge winds rushed upon
them, and he knew then that his father would not come again and
that all the life that he had known was now lost and broken as a
dream.



XL


During the whole course of that last October--the last October he
would spend at home--he was waiting day by day with a desperation
of wild hope for a magic letter--one of those magic letters for
which young men wait, which are to bring them instantly the
fortune, fame, and triumph for which their souls thirst and their
hearts are panting, and which never come.

Each morning he would get up with a pounding heart, trembling
hands, and chattering lips, and then, like a man in prison who is
waiting feverishly for some glorious message of release or pardon
which he is sure will come that day, he would wait for the coming
of the postman.  And when he came, even before he reached the
house, the moment that Eugene heard his whistle he would rush out
into the street, tear the mail out of his astounded grasp, and
begin to hunt through it like a madman for the letter which would
announce to him that fortune, fame, and glittering success were
his.  He was twenty-two years old, a madman and a fool, but every
young man in the world has been the same.

Then, when the wonderful letter did not come, his heart would sink
down to his bowels like lead; all of the brightness, gold, and
singing would go instantly out of the day and he would stamp back
into the house, muttering to himself, sick with despair and misery
and thinking that now his life was done for, sure enough.  He could
not eat, sleep, stand still, sit down, rest, talk coherently, or
compose himself for five minutes at a time.  He would go prowling
and muttering around the house, rush out into the streets of the
town, walk up and down the main street, pausing to talk with the
loafers before the principal drug store, climb the hills and
mountains all around the town and look down on the town with a kind
of horror and disbelief, an awful dreamlike unreality because the
town, since his long absence and return to it, and all the people
in it, now seemed as familiar as his mother's face and stranger
than a dream, so that he could never regain his life or corporeal
substance in it, any more than a man who revisits his youth in a
dream, and so that, also, the town seemed to have shrunk together,
got little, fragile, toy-like in his absence, until now when he
walked in the street he thought he was going to ram his elbows
through the walls, as if the walls were paper, or tear down the
buildings, as if they had been made of straw.

Then he would come down off the hills into the town again, go home,
and prowl and mutter around the house, which now had the same real-
unreal familiar-strangeness that the town had, and his life seemed
to have been passed there like a dream.  Then, with a mounting hope
and a pounding heart, he would begin to wait for the next mail
again; and when it came, but without the letter, this furious
prowling and lashing about would start all over again.  His family
saw the light of madness in his eyes and in his disconnected
movements, and heard it in his incoherent speech.  He could hear
them whispering together, and sometimes when he looked up he could
see them looking at him with troubled and bewildered faces.  And
yet he did not think that he was mad, nor know how he appeared to
them.

Yet, during all this time of madness and despair his people were as
kind and tolerant as anyone on earth could be.

His mother, during all this time, treated him with kindness and
tolerance, and according to the law of her powerful, hopeful,
brooding, octopal, and web-like character, with all its meditative
procrastination, never coming to a decisive point, but weaving, re-
weaving, pursing her lips, and meditating constantly and with a
kind of hope, even though in her deepest heart she really had no
serious belief that he could succeed in doing the thing he wanted
to do.

Thus, as he talked to her sometimes, going on from hope to hope,
his enthusiasm mounting with the intoxication of his own vision, he
would paint a glittering picture of the fame and wealth he was sure
to win in the world as soon as his play was produced.  And his
mother would listen thoughtfully, pursing her lips from time to
time, in a meditative fashion, as she sat before the fire with her
hands folded in a strong loose clasp above her stomach.  Then,
finally, she would turn to him and with a proud, tremulous, and yet
bantering smile playing about her mouth, such as she had always
used when he was a child, and had perhaps spoken of some project
with an extravagant enthusiasm, she would say:

"Hm, boy!  I tell you what!" his mother said, in this bantering
tone, as if he were still a child.  "That's mighty big talk--as the
sayin' goes,"--here she put one finger under her broad red nose-
wing and laughed shyly, but with pleasure--"as the sayin' goes,
mighty big talk for poor folks!" said his mother.  "Well, now," she
said in a thoughtful and hopeful tone, after a moment's pause, "you
may do it, sure enough.  Stranger things than that have happened.
Other people have been able to make a success of their writings--
and there's one thing sure!"  His mother cried out strongly with
the loose, powerful and manlike gesture of her hand and index
finger which was characteristic of all her family--"there's one
thing sure!--what one man has done another can do if he's got grit
and determination enough!"  His mother said, putting the full
strength of her formidable will into these words--"Why, yes, now!"
she now said, with a recollective start, "Here, now!  Say!" she
cried--"wasn't I reading?--didn't I see?  Why, pshaw!--yes! just
the other day--that all these big writers--yes, sir!  Irvin S.
Cobb--there was the very feller!" cried his mother in a triumphant
tone--"Why, you know," she continued, pursing her lips in a
meditative way, "--that he had the very same trials and
tribulations--as the sayin' goes--as everyone else!  Why, yes!--
here he told it on himself--admitted it, you know--that he kept
writin' these stories for years, sendin' them out, I reckon, to all
the editors and magazines--and having them all sent back to him.
That's the way it was," she said, "and now--look at him!  Why, I
reckon they'd pay him hundreds of dollars for a single piece--yes!
and be glad of the chance to get it," said his mother.

Then for a space his mother sat looking at the fire, while she
slowly and reflectively pursed her lips.

"Well," she said slowly at length, "you may do it.  I hope you do.
Stranger things than that have happened.--Now, there's one thing
sure," she said strongly, "you have certainly had a good education--
there's been more money spent upon your schoolin' than on all the
rest of us put together--and you certainly ought to know enough to
write a story or a play!--Why, yes, boy!  I tell you what," his
mother now cried in the old playful and bantering tone, as if she
were speaking to a child, "if I had YOUR education I believe I'd
try to be a writer, too!  Why, yes!  I wouldn't mind getting out of
all this drudgery and house-work for a while--and if I could earn
my living doin' some light easy work like that, why, you can bet
your bottom dollar, I'd do it!" cried his mother.  "But, say, now!
See here!" his mother cried with a kind of jocose seriousness--
"maybe that'd be a good idea, after all!  Suppose you write the
stories," she said, winking at him,--"and I tell, you what I'll
do!--Why, I'll TELL 'em to you!  Now, if I had your education and
your command of language," said his mother, whose command of
language was all that anyone could wish--"I believe I could tell a
pretty good story--so if you'll write 'em out," she said, with
another wink, "I'll tell you what to write--and I'll BET you--I'll
BET you," said his mother, "that we could write a story that would
beat most of these stories that I read, all to pieces!  Yes, sir!"
she said, pursing her lips firmly, and with an invincible
conviction--"and I bet you people would buy that story and come to
see that play!" she said.  "Because I know what to tell 'em and the
kind of thing people are interested in hearing," she said.

Then for a moment more she was silent and stared thoughtfully into
the fire.

"Well," she said slowly, "you may do it.  You may do it, sure
enough!  Now, boy," she said, levelling that powerful index finger
toward him, "I want to tell you!  Your grandfather, Tom Pentland,
was a remarkable man--and if he'd had your education he'd a-gone
far!  And everyone who ever knew him said the same! . . .  Oh!
stories, poems, pieces in the paper--why, didn't they print
something of his every week or two!" she cried.  "And that's
exactly where you get it," said his mother.  "--But, say, now," she
said in a persuasive tone, after a moment's meditation, "I've been
thinkin'--it just occurred to me--wouldn't it be a good idea if you
could find some work to do--I mean, get you a job somewheres of
some light easy work that would give you plenty of time to do your
writin' as you went on!  Now, Rome wasn't built in a day, you
know!" his mother said in the bantering tone, "--and you might have
to send that play around to several places before you found the one
who could do it right for you!  So while you're waitin'," said his
mother persuasively, "why, wouldn't it be a good idea if you got a
little light newspaper work, or a job teachin' somewheres--pshaw!
you could do it easy as falling off a log," his mother said
contemptuously.  "I taught school myself before I got married to
your papa, and I didn't have a bit of trouble!  And all the
schoolin' I ever had--all the schoolin' that I ever had," she cried
impressively, "was six months one time in a little backwoods
school!  Now if I could do it, there's one thing sure, with all
your education you ought to be able to do it, too!  Yes, sir,
that's the very thing!" she said.  "I'd do it like a shot if I were
you."

He said nothing, and his mother sat there for a moment looking at
the fire.  Suddenly she turned, and her face had grown troubled and
sorrowful and her worn and faded eyes were wet with tears.  She
stretched her strong rough hand out and put it over his, shaking
her head a little before she spoke:

"Child, child!" she said.  "It worries me to see you act like this!
I hate to see you so unhappy!  Why, son," his mother said, "what if
they shouldn't take it now!  You've got long years ahead of you and
if you can't do it now, why, maybe, some day you will!  And if you
don't!" his mother cried out strongly and formidably, "why, Lord,
boy, what about it!  You're a young man with your whole life still
before you--and if you can't do this thing, why, there are other
things you can do! . . .  Pshaw! boy, your life's not ended just
because you find out that you weren't cut out to be a playwriter,"
said his mother, "There are a thousand things a young man of your
age could do!  Why, it wouldn't bother me for a moment!" cried his
mother.

And he sat there in front of her invincible strength, hope, and
fortitude and her will that was more strong than death, her
character that was as solid as a rock; he was as hopeless and
wretched as he had ever been in his life, wanting to say a thousand
things to her and saying none of them, and reading in her eyes the
sorrowful message that she did not believe he would ever be able to
do the thing on which his heart so desperately was set.



At this moment the door opened and his brother entered the room.
As they stared at him with startled faces, he stood there looking
at them out of his restless, tormented grey eyes, breathing his
large and unhappy breath of unrest and nervousness, a harassed look
on his handsome and generous face, as with a distracted movement he
thrust his strong, impatient fingers through the flashing mop of
his light brown hair, that curled everywhere in incredible whorls
and screws of angelic brightness.

"Hah?" his mother sharply cried, as she looked at him with her
white face, the almost animal-like quickness and concentration of
her startled attention.  "What say?" she said in a sharp startled
tone, although as yet his brother had said nothing.

"W-w-w-wy!" he began in a distracted voice, as he thrust his
fingers through his incredible flashing hair and his eyes flickered
about absently and with a tormented and driven look, "I was just f-
f-f-finkin'--" he went on in a dissonant and confused tone; then,
suddenly catching sight of her white startled face, he smote
himself suddenly and hard upon his temple with the knuckle of one
large hand, and cried out "Haw!" in a tone of such idiotic
exuberance and exultancy that it is impossible to reproduce in
words the limitless and earthly vulgarity of its humour.  At the
same time he prodded his mother stiffly in the ribs with his clumsy
fingers, an act that made her shriek out resentfully, and then say
in a vexed and fretful tone:

"I'll vow, boy!  You act like a regular idiot!  If I didn't have
any more sense than to go and play a trick like that--I'd be ash-a-
a-med--ash-a-a-a-med," she whispered, with a puckered mouth, as she
shook her head at him in a movement of strong deprecation, scorn,
and reproof.  "I'd be ASHAMED to let anyone know I was such a
fool," his mother said.

"Whah!  WHAH!" Luke shouted with his wild, limitlessly exuberant
laugh, that was so devastating in its idiotic exultancy that all
words, reproaches, scorn, or attempts at reason were instantly
reduced to nothing by it.  "Whee!" he cried, prodding her in her
resentful ribs again, his handsome face broken by his huge and
exuberant smile.  Then, as if cherishing something secret and
uncommunicably funny in its idiotic humour, he smote himself upon
the forehead again, cried out, "Whah--WHAH!" and then, shaking his
grinning face to himself in this movement of secret and convulsive
humour, he said:  "Whee!  Go-o-d-damn!" in a tone of mincing and
ironic refinement.

"Why, what on earth has got into you, boy?" his mother cried out
fretfully.  "Why, you're actin' like a regular simpleton, I'll vow
you are!"

"Whah!  WHAH!" Luke cried exultantly.

"Now, I don't know where it comes from," said his mother
judicially, with a deliberate and meditative sarcasm, as if she
were seriously considering the origin of his lunacy.  "There's one
thing sure: you never got it from me.  Now, all my people had their
wits about them--now, say what you please," she went on in a
thoughtful tone, as she stared with puckered mouth into the fire,
"I never heard of a weak-minded one in the whole crowd--"

"Whah--WHAH!" he cried.

"--So you didn't get it from any of my people," she went on with
deliberate and telling force--"no, you didn't!" she said.

"WHAH-H!" he prodded her in the ribs again, and then immediately,
and in a very earnest tone, he said:

"W-w-w-wy, I was just f-f-f-finkin' it would be a good idea if we
all w-w-w-went for a little ride.  F-f-f-frankly, I fink it would
do us good," he said, looking at Eugene with a very earnest look in
his restless and tormented eyes.  "I fink we need it!  F-f-f-
frankly, I fink we do," he said, and then added abruptly and
eagerly as he thrust his clumsy fingers through his hair:  "W-w-w-
wy, what do you say?"

"Why, yes!" his mother responded with an instant alacrity as she
got up from her chair.  "That's the very thing!  A little breath of
fresh air is just the thing we need--as the feller says," she said,
turning to Eugene now and beginning to laugh slyly, and with
pleasure, passing one finger shyly underneath her broad red nose-
wing as she spoke--, "as the feller says, it costs nothin' and it's
Nature's sovereign remedy, good for man and good for beast!--So
let's all get out into the light of open day again," she said with
rhetorical deliberation, "and breathe in God's fresh air like He
intended we should do--for there's one thing sure," his mother went
on in tones of solemn warning, which seemed directed to a vast
unseen audience of the universe rather than to themselves, "there's
one thing sure--you can't violate the laws of God or nature," she
said decisively, "or you'll pay for it--as sure as you're born.  As
sure as you're born," she whispered.  "Why, yes, now!"--she went
on, with a start of recollective memory--"Here now!--Say!--Didn't
I see it--wasn't I readin'?--Why, here, you know, the other day,"
she went on impatiently, as if the subject of these obscure broken
references must instantly be clear to everyone--"why, it was in the
paper, you know--this article written by Doctor Royal S. Copeland,"
his mother said, nodding her head with deliberate satisfaction over
his name, and pronouncing the full title sonorously with the
obvious satisfaction that titles and distinctions always gave her--
"that's who it was all right, sayin' that fresh air was the thing
that everyone must have, and that all of us should take good care
to--"

"Now, M-m-m-m-mama," said Luke, who had paid no attention at all to
what she had been saying, but had stood there during all the time
she was speaking, breathing his large, weary, and unhappy breath,
thrusting his clumsy fingers through his hair, as his harassed and
tormented eyes flickered restlessly about the room in a driven but
unseeing stare:--"Now, M-m-m-mama!" he said in a tone of
exasperated and frenzied impatience, "if we're g-g-g-going we've g-
g-g-got to get started!  N-n-n-now I d-d-don't mean next W-w-w-w-
Wednesday," he snarled, with exasperated sarcasm, "I d-d-d-don't m-
m-m-mean the fifteenth of next July.  But--NOW--NOW--NOW," he
muttered crazily, coming to her with his large hands lifted like
claws, the fingers working, and with a look of fiendish madness in
his eyes.

"Now!" he whispered hoarsely.  "This week!  Today!  This afternoon!
A-a-a-a-at once!" he barked suddenly, jumping at her comically;
then thrusting his hand through his hair again, he said in a weary
and exasperated voice:

"M-m-m-mama, will you please get ready?  I b-b-b-beg of you.  I
beseech you--PLEASE!" he said, in tortured entreaty.

"ALL right!  ALL right!" his mother replied instantly in a tone of
the heartiest and most conciliatory agreement.  "I'll be ready in
five minutes!  I'll just go back here and put on a coat over this
old dress--so folks won't see me," she laughed shyly, "an' I'll be
ready before you know it!--Pshaw, boy!" she now said in a rather
nettled tone, as if the afterthought of his impatience had angered
her a little, "now you don't need to worry about MY being ready,"
she said, "because when the time comes--I'll be THERE!" she said,
with the loose, deliberate, man-like gesture of her right hand and
in tones of telling deliberation.  "Now you worry about yourself!"
she said.  "For I'll be ready before YOU are--yes, and I'm never
late for an appointment, either," she said strongly, "and that's
more than YOU can say--for I've seen you miss 'em time an' time
again."

During all this time Luke had been thrusting his fingers through
his hair, breathing heavily and unhappily, and pawing and muttering
over a mass of thumbed envelopes and papers which were covered with
the undecipherable scrawls and jottings of his nervous hand:  "T-t-
t-Tuesday," he muttered, "Tuesday . . . Tuesday in Blackstone--B-b-
b-b-Blackstone--Blackstone--Blackstone, South Car'lina," he
muttered in a confused and distracted manner, as if these names
were completely meaningless to him, and he had never heard them
before.  "Now--AH!" he suddenly sang out in a rich tenor voice, as
he lifted his hand, thrust his fingers through his hair, and stared
wildly ahead of him--"meet Livermore in Blackstone Tuesday morning--
see p-p-p-p-prospect in G-g-g-g-Gadsby Tuesday afternoon about--
about--about--Wheet!"--here he whistled sharply, as he always did
when he hung upon a word--"about a new set of batteries for his
Model X--Style 37--lighting system--which the cheap p-p-p-penny-
pinching South Car'lina bastard w-w-w-wants for nothing--Wednesday
m-m-m-morning b-b-b-back to Blackstone--F'ursday . . . w-w-w-wy,"
he muttered pawing clumsily and confusedly at his envelopes with a
demented glare--"F-f-f-f-f'ursday--you--ah--j-j-j-jump over to C-c-
c-Cavendish to t-t-t-try to persuade that ignorant red-faced
nigger-Baptist son of a bitch that it's f-f-f-for his own b-b-b-
best interests to scrap the-the-w-w-w-wy the d-d-d-decrepit pile of
junk he's been using since S-s-s-Sherman marched through Georgia
and b-b-b-buy the new X50 model T Style 46 transmission--

"M-m-m-mama!" he cried suddenly, turning toward her with a movement
of frenzied and exasperated entreaty.  "Will you PLEASE kindly have
the g-g-g-goodness and the m-m-m-mercy to do me the favour to b-b-
b-begin to commence--w-w-w-w-wy--to start--to make up your mind--to
get ready," he snarled bitterly.  "W-w-w-w-wy sometime before
midnight--I b-b-b-beg of you . . . I beseech you . . . I ask it of
you p-p-p-PLEASE! for MY sake--for ALL our sakes--for GOD'S sake!"
he cried with frenzied and maddened desperation.

"ALL right!  ALL right!" his mother cried hastily in a placating
and reassuring tone, beginning to move with an awkward, distracted,
bridling movement that got her nowhere, since there were two doors
to the parlour and she was trying to go out both of them at the
same time.  "ALL right!" she said decisively, at length getting
started toward the door nearest her.  "I'll just go back there an'
slip on a coat--and I'LL BE WITH YOU in a jiffy!" she said with
comforting assurance.

"If you PLEASE!" Luke said with an ironic and tormented
obsequiousness of entreaty, as he fumbled through his mass of
envelopes.  "If you PLEASE!  W-w-w-wy I'd certainly be m-m-m-m-much
obliged to you if you would!" he said.

At this moment, however, a car halted at the curb outside, someone
got out, and in a moment more they could hear Helen's voice, as she
came towards the house, calling back to her husband in tones of
exasperated annoyance:

"All RIGHT! Hugh!  All RIGHT!  I'm coming!"--although she was
really going toward the house.  "Will you KINDLY leave me alone for
just a moment?  Good heavens!  Will I never get a little peace?
All right!  All right!  I'm coming!  For God's sake, leave me ALONE
for just five minutes, or you'll drive me crazy!" she stormed, and
with a high-cracked note of frenzied strain and exasperation that
was almost like hysteria.

"All right, Mr. Barton," she now said to her husband in a more
good-humoured tone.  "Now you just hold your horses for a minute
and I'll come on out.  The house is not going to burn down before
we get there."

His lean, seamed, devoted face broke into a slow, almost unwilling
grin, in which somehow all of the submission, loyalty and goodness
of his soul was legible, and Helen turned, came up on the porch,
opened the hall door, and came into the parlour where they were,
beginning to speak immediately in a tone of frenzied and tortured
exacerbation of the nerves and with her large, gaunt, liberal
features strained to the breaking point of nervous hysteria.

"My GOD!" she said in a tone of weary exasperation.  "If I don't
get away from them soon I'm going to lose my mind! . . .  From the
moment that I get up in the morning I never get a moment's peace!
Someone's after me all day long from morn to night!  Why, good
heavens, Mama!" she cried out in a tone of desperate fury, and as
if Eliza had contradicted something she had said, "I've got
troubles enough of my own, without anyone else putting theirs on
me!  Have they got no one else they can go to?  Haven't they got
homes of their own to look after?  Do I have to bear the burden of
it all for everyone ALL my life?" she stormed in a voice that was
so hoarse, strained and exasperated now that she was almost
weeping.  "Do I have to be the goat ALL my life?  Oh, I want a
little peace," she cried desperately, "I just want to be left alone
by myself once in a while!--The rest of you don't have to worry!"
she said accusingly.  "You don't have to stand for it.  You can get
away from it!" she cried.  "You don't know--you don't KNOW!" she
said furiously, "what I put up with--but if I don't get away from
it soon, I'm going all to pieces."

During all the time that Helen had been pouring out her tirade of
the wrongs and injuries that had been inflicted on her, Luke had
acted as a kind of dutiful and obsequious chorus, punctuating all
the places where she had to pause to pant for breath, with such
remarks as--

"W-w-w-w-well, you d-d-do too much for everyone and they don't
appreciate it--that's the trouble," or, "I f-f-f-f-fink I'd tell
them all to p-p-p-p-politely step to hell--f-f-frankly I fink you
owe it to yourself to do it!  W-w-w-wy you'll only w-w-w-wear
yourself out doing for others and in the end you d-d-d-don't get so
m-m-m-much as one good Goddamn for all your trouble!  F-f-f-
frankly, I mean it!" he would say with a very earnest look on his
harassed and drawn face.  "W-w-w-wy hereafter I'd let 'em g-g-g-g-
go to hell!"

--"If they'd only show a little appreciation once in a while I
wouldn't mind so much," she panted.  "But do you think they care?
Do you think it ever occurs to them to lift a hand to help me when
they see me working my fingers to the bone for them?  Why"--and
here her big-boned generous face worked convulsively--"if I should
work myself to death for them, do you think any of them would even
so much as send a bunch of flowers to the funeral?"

Luke laughed with jeering scorn:  "W-w-w-wy," he said, "it is to
laugh!  It is to laugh!  They w-w-wouldn't send a G-g-g-g-God-damn
thing--n-n-n-not even a ten-cent b-b-b-bunch of-of-w-w-w-w-wy--of
turnip-greens!" he said.



"All RIGHT!  All RIGHT!" Helen again cried furiously through the
door, as Barton sounded a long imperative blast of protest and
impatience on his horn.  "All RIGHT! Hugh!  I'm coming!  Good
heavens, can't you leave me in peace for just five minutes? . . .
Hugh, PLEASE!  Please!" she stormed in a tone of frenzied
exasperation as he sourly answered her.  "Give me a little time
alone, I beg of you--or I'll go mad!"--And she turned to them
again, panting and with the racked and strained expression of
hysteria on her big-boned features.  In a moment, her harassed and
driven look relaxed somewhat, and the big rough bawdy smile began
to shape itself again around the corners of her generous mouth.

"My God, Mama," she said in a tone of quiet and weary despair, but
with this faint lewd smile about her mouth and growing deeper as
she spoke, "what am I going to do about it?  Will you please tell
me that?  Did you have to put up with that when you and Papa were
together?  Is that the way it is?  Is there no such thing as peace
and privacy in this world?  Now, I'd like to know.  When you marry
one of them, does that mean that you'll never get a moment's peace
or privacy alone as long as you live?  Now, there are some things
you like to do alone"--she said, and by this time the lewd smile
had deepened perceptibly around her mouth.  "Why, it's got so," she
said, "that I'm almost afraid to go to the bathroom any more--"

"Whew-w!" shrieked Eliza, laughing, putting one finger underneath
her nose.

"Yes, sir," Helen said quietly, with the lewd smile now deep and
loose around her mouth.  "I've just got so I'm almost afraid to go,
I don't know from one moment to the next whether one of them is
going to come in and keep me company or not."

"Whew!" Eliza cried.  "Why, you'll have to put up signs!  'No
Visitors Allowed!'--that's exactly what you ought to say!  I'd fix
'em!  I'd do it like a shot," she said.

Helen sniggered hoarsely, and absently began to pluck at her chin.

"But OH!" she said with a sigh.  "If only they'd leave me alone an
hour a day!  If only I could get away for just an hour--"

"W-w-w-wy!" Luke began.  "Why don't you c-c-come with us!  F-f-f-
frankly, I fink you ought to do it!  I fink the change would do you
good," he said.

"Why?" she said rather dully, yet curiously.  "Where are you
going?"

"W-w-w-wy," he said, "we were just starting for a little ride. . . .
Mama!" he burst out suddenly in a tone of exasperated entreaty--
"Will you k-k-k-kindly go and get yourself ready?  W-w-wy, it's
g-g-g-going to get d-d-d-dark before we get started," he said
bitterly, as if she had kept him waiting all this time.  "Now,
PLEASE--I b-b-b-beg of you--to g-g-g-get ready--wy-wy-wy without
f-f-f-further delay--now, I ask it of you, for God's sake!" he said,
and then turning to Helen with a movement of utter exasperation and
defeat, he shuddered convulsively, thrust his fingers through his
hair, and moaned "Ah-h-h-h-h-h!" after which he began to mutter "My
God!  My God!  My God!"

"All RIGHT, sir!  All RIGHT!" Eliza said briskly, in a conciliatory
tone.  "I'll just go right back there and put my coat and hat on
and I won't keep you waitin' FIVE--"

"Wy, wy, wy.  If you p-p-please, Mama," said Luke with a tortured
and ironic bow.  "If you p-p-please."

At length, they really did get out of the house and were assembled
on the curb in the last throes of departure.  Luke, breathing
stertorously his large unhappy breath, began to walk about his
battered little car, casting uneasy and worried looks at it and
falling upon it violently from time to time, kicking it in the
tyres with his large flat feet, smiting it with a broad palm and
seizing it by the sides and shaking it so savagely that its instant
dissolution seemed inevitable.  Meanwhile Eliza stood planted
solidly, facing her house, her hands clasped loosely at the waist
and her powerful and delicate mouth pursed reflectively as she
surveyed her property--a characteristic gesture that always marked
every departure from the house and every return to it, in which the
whole power and relish of possession were evident.  As for Barton,
while these inevitable ceremonies were taking place, he just sat in
his car with a kind of sour resigned patience, and waited.  And
Helen, while this was going on, had taken Eugene by the arm and
walked a few paces down the street with him, talking all the time
in a broken and abstracted way, of which the reference could only
be inferred:

"You see, don't you? . . .  You see what I've got to put up with,
don't you? . . .  You only get it for a little while when you come
here, but with me it's ALL the time and ALL the time"--Suddenly she
turned to him, looked him directly in the eye, and speaking quietly
to him, but with a curious, brooding and disturbing inflection in
her voice, she said:

"Do you know what day this is?"

"No."

"Do you realize that Ben died five years ago this morning?--I was
thinking of it yesterday when she was talking about getting that
room ready for those people who are coming," she muttered, and with
a note of weary bitterness in her voice.  For a moment her big-
boned face was marked with the faint tension of hysteria, and her
eyes looked dark and lustreless and strained as she plucked
absently at her large chin.  "But do you see how she can do it?"
she went on in a low tone of brooding and weary resignation.  "Do
you understand how she can ever bear to go back in there?  Do you
see how she can rent that room out to any cheap lodger who comes
along?  Do you realize that she's got the same bed in there he died
on," she said morbidly, "the same mattress?--K-k-k-k-k-k!" she
laughed softly and huskily, poking at his ribs.  "She'll have you
sleeping on it next--"

"I'll be damned if she does!"

"K-k-k-k-k-k-k!"

"Do you think I could be sleeping on it now?" Eugene said with a
feeling of black horror and dread around his heart.

"K-k-k-k-k-k!" she snickered.  "Would you like that?  Would you
sleep better if you knew it was? . . .  No," she said quietly,
shaking her head.  "Uh-uh!  I don't think so.  It's still up there
in the same room.  She may have painted the bed, but otherwise I
don't think she's changed a thing.  Have you ever been back up
there since he died?" she said curiously.

"My GOD, no!  Have you?"

She shook her head:  "Not I," she said with weary finality.  "I've
never even been upstairs since that morning. . . .  Hugh hates the
place," she muttered, looking towards him.  "He doesn't even like
to stop and wait for me.  He won't come in."

Then she was silent for a moment as they looked at the gaunt ugly
bay of the room upstairs where Ben had died.  In the yard the maple
trees were thinning rapidly; the leaves were sere and yellow and
were floating to the ground.  And the old house stood there in all
its ugly, harsh, and prognathous bleakness, its paint of rusty
yellow scaling from it in patches, and weathered and dilapidated as
Eugene had never seen it before, but incredibly near, incredibly
natural and familiar, so that all its ghosts of pain and grief and
bitterness, its memories of joy and magic and lost time, the
thousand histories of all the vanished people it had sheltered,
whom all of them had known, revived instantly with an intolerable
and dream-like strangeness and familiarity.

And now, as they looked up at the bleak windows of the room in
which he died, the memory of his death's black horror passed across
their souls a minute, and then was gone, leaving them only with the
fatality of weary resignation which they had learned from it.  In a
moment, with a look of ancient and indifferent weariness and grief
in her eyes, Helen turned to him, and with a faint rough smile
around her mouth, said quietly:

"Does he ever bother you at night?--When the wind begins to howl
around the house, do you ever hear him walking up there?  Has he
been in to see you yet?--K-k-k k-k-k!" she poked him with her big
stiff finger, laughing huskily, and then in a low, sombrely
brooding tone, as if the grisly suggestion were his, she shook her
head, saying:

"Forget about it!  They don't come back, Eugene!  I used to think
they did, but now I know they never do.--He won't come," she
muttered, as she shook her head.  "Forget about it.  He won't come.
Just forget about it," she continued, looking at Eliza with weary
resignation.  "It's not her fault.  I used to think that you could
change them.  But you can't.  Uh-uh!" she muttered, plucking at her
large cleft chin.  "It can't be done.  They never change."

Luke stood distractedly for a moment on the curbstone, breathing
his large unhappy breath and thrusting his clumsy fingers strongly
through the flashing whirls and coils of his incredible hair.

"Now--ah!" he sang out richly.  "Let me see!  I--wy--I fink!  M-m-
m-mama, if you PLEASE!" he said.  "Wy if you PLEASE!" with an
exasperated and ironic obsequiousness.

She had been standing there, planted squarely on the sidewalk,
facing her house.  She stood with her hands clasped loosely across
her stomach, and as she looked at the gaunt weathered shape of the
old house, her mouth was puckered in an expression of powerful
rumination in which the whole terrible legend of blood and hunger
and desperate tenacity--the huge clutch of property and possession
which, with her, was like the desperate clutch of life itself--was
evident.

What was this great claw in her life--this thing that was stronger
than life or death or motherhood--which made her hold on to
anything which had ever come into her possession, which made her
cling desperately to everything which she had ever owned--old
bottles, papers, pieces of string, worn-out gloves with all the
fingers missing, frayed cast-off sweaters which some departed
boarder had left behind him, postcards, souvenirs, sea-shells,
coco-nuts, old battered trunks, dilapidated furniture which could
be no longer used, calendars for the year 1906, showing coy maidens
simpering sidewise out beneath the crisply ruffled pleatings of a
Japanese parasol--a mountainous accumulation of old junk for which
the old dilapidated house had now become a fit museum.

Then in the wink of an eye she would pour thousands of dollars
after the crazy promises of boom-town real-estate speculation that
by comparison made the wildest infatuation of a drunken race-track
gambler look like the austere process of a coldly reasoning mind.

Even as she stood there staring at her house with her pursed mouth
of powerful and ruminant satisfaction, another evidence of this
madness of possession was staring in their face.  At the end of the
alley slope, behind the house, there was a dilapidated old shed or
house of whitewashed boards, which had been built in earlier times
as a carriage house.  Now through the open entrance of this shed
they could see the huge and dusty relic of Eliza's motor car.  She
had bought it four years before, and bought it instantly one day
before they knew about it, and paid $2000 in hard cash for it--and
why she bought it, what mad compulsion of her spirit made her buy
it, no one knew, and least of all Eliza.

For from that day to this that car had never left the carriage
house.  Year by year, in spite of protest, oaths, and prayers, and
all their frantic pleading, she had got no use from it herself, and
would let no one else use it.  No, what is more, she had even
refused to sell it later, although a man had made her a good offer.
Rather she pursed her lips reflectively, smiled in a bantering
fashion, and said evasively:  "Well, I'll see now!  I'll think it
over!--I want to study about it a little--you come back later and
I'll let you know! . . .  I want to think about it!"--as if, by
hanging on to this mass of rusty machinery, she hoped it would
increase in value and that she could sell it some day for twice the
price she paid for it, if only she "held on" long enough.

And at first they had all wrestled by turns with the octopal
convolutions of her terrific character, exhausting all the strength
and energy in them against the substance of a will that was like
something which always gave and never yielded, which could be
grasped, compressed, and throttled in the hard grip of their
furious hands, only to bulge out in new shapes and forms and
combinations--which flowed, gave, withdrew, receded and advanced,
but which remained itself for ever, and beat everything before it
in the end.

Now, for a moment, as Luke saw the car he was goaded into the old
madness of despair.  Thrusting his fingers through his hair, and
with a look of desperate exasperation in his tortured eyes, he
began:  "M-m-m-mama--M-m-m-mama--I beg of you, I--wy I entreat
you,--w-w-w-wy I BESEECH you either to s-s-s-sell that God-damn
thing or--wy--g-g-g-get a little s-s-service out of it."

"Well, now," Eliza said quickly and in a conciliatory tone, "we'll
see about it!"

"S-s-s-see about it!" he stammered bitterly.  "See about it!  In G-
g-g-God's name, what is there to see about?  M-m-m-mama, the car's
there--there--there--" he muttered crazily, poking his clumsy
finger in a series of jerky and convulsive movements in the
direction of the carriage house.  "It's THERE!" he croaked madly.
"C-c-c-can't you understand that?  W-w-w-wy, it's rotting away on
its God-damn wheels--M-m-m-mama, will you PLEASE get it into your
head that it's not g-g-g-going to do you or anyone else any good
unless you take it out and use it?"

"Well, as I say now"--she began hastily, and in a diplomatic tone
of voice.

"M-m-m-m-mama"--he began, again thrusting at his hair--"wy, I beg
of you--I beseech you to sell it, g-g-g-give it away, or wy-wy-wy
try to get a little use out of it!--Let me take it out and drive
you round the block in it--w-w-w-wy--just once!  Just once!  F-f-f-
frankly, I'd like to have the satisfaction of knowing you'd had
THAT much out of it!" he said.  "Wy, I'll p-p-p-pay for the p-p-p-
petrol, if that's what's worrying you!  Wy, I'll do it with
pleasure! . . .  But just let me take it out of that G-g-g-g-God-
damn place if all--if all--wy if all I do is drive you to the
corner!  Now, PLEASE!" he begged, with an almost frantic note of
entreaty.

"Why, no, boy!" she cried out in a startled tone.  "We can't do
that!"

"C-c-c-can't do that!" he stuttered bitterly.  "Wy, in G-g-g-g-
God's name, why can't we?"

"I'd be AFRA-A-ID!" she said with a little troubled smile, as she
shook her head.  "Hm!  I'd be AFRAID!"

"Wy-wy-wy-wy AFRAID?" he yelled.  "Wy, what's there to be afraid
of, in God's name?"

"I'd be afraid you'd DO something to it," she said with her
troubled smile.  "I'd be afraid you'd smash it up or run over
someone with it.  No, child," she said gravely, as she shook her
head.  "I'd be afraid to let you drive it.  You're too nervous."

"Ah-h-h-h-h-h!" he breathed clutching convulsively in his hair as
his eyes flickered madly about in his head.  "Ah-h-h-h-h!  M-m-m-
merciful God!" he muttered.  "M-m-m-m-m-merciful God!"--and then
laughed wildly, frantically, and bitterly.

Now Helen spoke curiously, plucking reflectively at her large chin,
but with weariness and resignation in her accent as if already she
knew the answer:

"Mama, what are you going to do with your car?  It seems a shame to
let it rot away back there after you've paid out all that money for
it.  Aren't you going to try to get any use out of it at all?"

"Well, now, as I say," Eliza began smugly, pursing her lips with
ruminative relish as she looked into the air, "I'm just waitin' for
the chance--I'm just waitin' till the first fine day to come along--
and then, I've got a good notion to take that thing out and learn
to run it myself."

"Oh, Mama," Helen began quietly and wearily, "good heavens--"

"Why, yes!" Eliza cried nodding her head briskly.  "I could do it!
Now, I can do most anything when I make my mind up to it!  Now I've
never seen anything yet I couldn't do if I had to! . . .  So I'm
just waitin' until spring comes round again, and I'm goin' to take
that car out and drive it all around," she said.  "I'm just goin'
to sit up there an' enjoy the scenery an' have a big time," said
Eliza with her little tremulous smile.  "That's what I'm goin' to
do," she said.

"All right," Helen said wearily.  "Have it your own way.  Do as you
please: it's your own funeral!  Only it seems a shame to let it go
to waste after you've spent all that money on it."

But turning to Eugene, and speaking in a lowered tone, she said to
him, with the faint tracing of hysteria on her big-decent face and
weariness and resignation in her voice:

"Well, what are you going to do about it?  I used to think that you
could change her, but now I know she never will. . . .  I've given
up trying.  It's no use," she muttered.  "It's no use.  I worked my
fingers to the bone to help them save a copper--and you see what
comes of it. . . .  I did the work of a nigger in the kitchen from
the time I was ten years old--and you see what comes of it, don't
you?  I went off and sang my way around the country in cheap
moving-picture shows . . . and came up here and waited on the
tables to help feed a crowd of cheap boarders--and Luke sold The
Saturday Evening Post, and peddled hot dogs and toy balloons--and
you got up at three o'clock, carried the morning paper--and they
let Ben go to hell until his lungs were gone and it was too late--
and you see what it all comes to in the end, don't you? . . .  It's
all given away to real-estate men or thrown away for motor cars
they never use.  I've given up worrying," she said.  "I don't think
about it any more. . . .  They don't change," she muttered.  "I
used to think they did, but now I know they don't.  Uh-uh!  They
don't change! . . .  Well, forget about it," and she turned wearily
away.

The year Eliza bought the car, Eugene was eighteen years old and
was a Junior at the State University.  When he came home that year
he asked her if she would let him learn to drive it.  It was about
the time when everyone in town was beginning to own motor cars.
When he walked up town everyone he knew would drive by him in a
car.  Everyone on earth was beginning to live upon a wheel.
Somehow it gave him a naked and desolate feeling, as if he had
nowhere to go and no door to enter.  When he asked her if she would
let him take the car out and learn to drive it, she had looked at
him a moment with her hands clasped loosely at the waist, her head
cocked quizzically to one side, and the little tremulous and
bantering smile that had always filled him with such choking
exasperation and wordless shame, and somehow with a nameless and
intolerable pity, too, because behind it he felt always her high
white forehead and her faded, weak, and childlike eyes, the naked
intelligence, whiteness, and immortal innocence of the child that
was looking straight through the mask of years with all the
deathless hope and faith and confidence of her life and character.

Now, for the last time, he asked her again the question he had
asked with such an earnest hope so many times before.  And
instantly, as if he had dreamed her answer, she replied--the same
reply that she had always made, the only reply the invincible
procrastination of her soul could make.

"Hm!" she said, making the bantering and humming noise in her
throat as she looked at him.  "WHA-A-A-T!  Why, you're my BA-A-A-
BY!" she said with jesting earnestness, as she laid her strong worn
hand loosely on his shoulder.  "No, sir!" she said quickly and
quietly, shaking her head in a swift sideways movement.  "I'd be
AFRA-A-ID, afraid," she whispered.

"Mama, afraid of what?"

"Why, child," she said gravely, "I'd be afraid you'd go and hurt
yourself.  Uh-uh!" she shook her head quickly and shortly.  "I'd be
afraid to let you try it--well, we'll see," she said, turning it
off easily in an evasive and conciliatory tone.  "We'll see about
it.  I'd like to study about it a little first."

After that there was nothing to do except to curse and beat their
fists into the wall.  And after that there was nothing to do at
all.  She had beaten them all, and they knew it.  Their curses,
prayers, oaths, persuasions and strangled cries availed them
nothing.  She had beaten them all, and finally they spoke no more
to her or to themselves about her motor car: the gigantic folly of
that mad wastefulness evoked for them all memories so painful,
desolate and tragic--a memory of the fatality of blood and nature
which could not be altered, of the done which could be undone
never, and of the web of fate in which their lives were meshed--
that they knew there was no guilt, no innocence, no victory, and no
change.  They were what they were, and they had no more to say.

So was it now as she stood planted there before her house.  As she
had grown older, her body had grown clumsier with the shapeless
heaviness of age: as she stood there with her hands clasped in this
attitude of ruminant relish, she seemed to be planted solidly on
the pavement and somehow to own, inhabit, and possess the very
bricks she walked on.  She owned the street, the pavement, and
finally her terrific ownership of the house was as apparent as if
the house were living and could speak to her.  For the rest of them
that old bleak house had now so many memories of grief and death
and intolerable, incurable regret that in their hearts they hated
it; but although she had seen a son strangle to death in one of its
bleak rooms, she loved the house as if it were a part of her own
life--as it was--and her love for it was greater than her love for
anyone or anything else on earth.

And yet, for her, even if that house, the whole world, fell in
ruins around her, there could be no ruin--her spirit was as
everlasting as the earth on which she walked, and could not be
touched--no matter what catastrophes of grief, death, tragic loss,
and unfulfilment might break the lives of other men--she was
triumphant over the ravages of time and accident, and would be
triumphant to her death.  For there was only the inevitable
fulfilment of her own destiny--and ruin, loss, and death availed
not--she would be fulfilled.  She had lived ten lives, and now she
was embarked upon another one, and so it had been ordered in the
beginning: this was all that mattered in the end.

But now, Luke, seeing her, as she stood planted there in all-
engulfing rumination, thrust his hands distractedly through his
shining hair again, and cried to her with exasperated entreaty:

"W-w-w-wy, Mama, if you PLEASE!  I b-b-b-beg of you and BESEECH
you, if you PLEASE!"

"I'm READY!" Eliza cried, starting and turning from her powerful
contemplation of her house.  "This very minute, sir!  Come on!"

"Wy, if you p-p-p-PLEASE!" he muttered, thrusting at his hair.

They walked towards his car, which he had halted in the alley-way
beside the house.  A few leaves, sere and yellow, from the maples
in the yard were drifting slowly to the ground.



XLI


During all that time, when he was waiting with a desperate hope
that rose each day to the frenzy of a madman's certitude, and sank
each day to the abyss of his despair, for the magic letter which
was coming to him from the city, and which would instantly give him
all the fortune, fame, and triumph for which his soul was panting,
his family looked at him with troubled question in their eyes.  His
enthusiastic hopes and assurances of the great success that he
would have from writing plays seemed visionary and remote to them.
Perhaps they were right about this, although the reason that they
had for thinking so was wrong.

Thus, although they said little to Eugene at this time about his
plans for the future, and what they did say was meant to hearten
him, their doubt and disbelief were evident, and sometimes when he
came into the house he could hear them talking in a troubled way
about him.

"Mama," he heard his sister say one day, as she sat talking with
his mother in the kitchen, "what does Gene intend to do?  Have you
heard him say yet?"

"Why, no-o-o!" his mother answered slowly, in a puzzled and
meditative tone.  "He hasn't said.  At least he says he's goin' to
write plays,--of course, I reckon he's waiting to hear from those
people in New York about that play he's written," she added
quickly.

"Well, I know," his sister answered wearily.  "That's all very
fine--if he can do it.  But, good heavens, Mama!" she cried
furiously--"you can't live on hope like that!  Gene's only one out
of a million!  Can't you realize that?--Why, they used to think I
had some talent as a singer"--here she laughed ironically, a husky
high falsetto, "I used to think so myself--but you don't notice
that it ever got me anywhere, do you?  No, sir!" she said
positively.  "There are thousands more just like Gene, who are
trying to get ahead and make a name for themselves.  Why should he
think he's any better than the rest of them?  Why, it might be
years before he got a play produced--and even then, how can he tell
that it would be a success?--What's he going to live on?  How's he
going to keep going until all this happens?  What's he going to
do?--You know, Mama, Gene's no little boy any more.  Please get
that into your head," she said sharply, as if her mother had
questioned the accuracy of her remark.  "No, sir!  No, sir!" she
laughed ironically and huskily.  "Your baby is a grown man, and
it's time he waked up to the fact that he's got to support himself
from now on.--Mama, do you realize that it has been over four
months since Gene left Harvard and, so far as I can see, he has
made no effort yet to get a job?  What does he intend to do?" she
said angrily.  "You know, he just can't mope around like this ALL
his days!  Sooner or later he's got to find some work to do!"

In all these words there was apparent not so much hostility and
antagonism as the driving fury and unrest of Helen's nervous,
exacerbated, dissonant, and unhappy character, which could lavish
kindness and affection one moment and abuse and criticism the next.
These were really only signs of the frenzy and unrest in her large,
tortured, but immensely generous spirit.  Thus, she would rage and
storm at her husband at one moment for "moping about the house,"
telling him, "for heaven's sake am I never to be left alone?  Am I
never to get a moment's peace or quiet?  Must I have you around me
every moment of my life?  In God's name, Hugh--go! go! go!--Leave
me alone for a few minutes, I beg of you!"--and by this time his
sister's voice would be cracked and strident, her breath coming
hoarsely and almost with a sob of hysteria.  And yet, she could be
just as violent in her sense of wrong and injustice done to her if
she thought he was giving too much time to business, rushing
through his meals, reading a book when he should be listening to
her tirade, or staying away from home too much.

Poor, tortured, and unhappy spirit, with all the grandeur, valour,
and affection that Eugene knew so well, it had found, since her
father's death, no medicine for the huge and constant frenzy of its
own unrest, no guide or saviour to work for it the miracle of
salvation it must work itself, and it turned and lashed out at the
world, demanding a loneliness which it could not have endured for
three days running, a peace and quiet from its own fury, a release
from its own injustice.  And it was for this reason--because her
own unrest and frenzy made her lash out constantly against the
world, praising one week, condemning the next, accusing life and
people of doing her some injury or wrong that she had done herself--
it was for this reason, more than for any other, that Helen now
lashed out about Eugene to their mother.

And because Eugene was strung on the same wires, shaped from the
same clay, cut from the same kind and plan and quality, he stood
there in the hall as he heard her, his face convulsed and livid,
his limbs trembling with rage, his bowels and his heart sick and
trembling with a hideous grey nausea of hopelessness and despair,
his throat choking with an intolerable anguish of resentment and
wrong, as he heard Helen's voice, and before he rushed back into
the kitchen to quarrel with her and his mother.

"Well, now," he heard his mother say in a diplomatic and hopeful
tone that somehow only served to increase his feeling of rage and
exasperation--"well, now--well, now," she said, "let's wait and
see!  Let's wait and see what happens with this play.  Perhaps
he'll hear tomorrow that they have taken it.  Maybe it's going to
be all right, after all!"

"Going to be all right!" Eugene fairly screamed at this juncture,
rushing in upon them in the kitchen.  "You're God-damned right it's
going to be all right.  I'll tell you what's all right!" he panted,
because his breath was labouring against his ribs as if he had run
up a steep hill--"if it was some damned real-estate man, that would
be all right!  If it's some cheap low-down lawyer, that would be
all right!  If it was some damned rascal sitting on his tail up
here in the bank, cheating you out of all you've got, that would be
all right--hey?" he snarled, conscious that his words had no
meaning or coherence, but unable to utter any of the things he
wished to say and that welled up in that wave of hot and choking
resentment.  "O yes!  The big man!  The great man!  The big deacon--
Mr. Scroop Pegram--the big bank president--that would be all
right, wouldn't it?" he cried in a choked and trembling voice.
"You'd get down on your hands and knees, and crawl if he spoke to
you, wouldn't you?--'O thank you, Mr. Pegram, for letting me put my
money in your bank so you can loan it out to a bunch of God-damn
real-estate crooks,'" he sneered, in an infuriated parody of
whining servility.  "'Thank you, sir,'" he said, and in spite of
the fact that these words made almost no coherent meaning, his
mother began to purse her lips rapidly in an excited fashion, and
his sister's big-boned face reddened with anger.

"Now," his mother said sternly, as she levelled her index finger at
him, "I want to tell you something!  You may sneer all you please,
sir, at Scroop Pegram, but he's a man who has worked all his life
for everything he has--"

"Yes," Eugene said bitterly, "and for everything YOU have, too--for
that's where it's going in the end."

"He has made his OWN way since his childhood," Eliza continued
sternly and deliberately--"no one ever did anything for him, for
there's one thing sure:--there was no one in his family who was in
a position to do it.--What he's done he's done for himself, without
assistance and," his mother said in a stern and telling voice,
"without education--for he never had three months' schoolin' in his
life--and today he's got the respect of the community as much as
any man I know."

"Yes!  And most of their money, too," Eugene cried.

"You'd better not talk!" Helen said.  "If I were you I wouldn't
talk!  Don't criticize other people until you show you've got it in
you to do something for yourself," she said.

"You!  You!" Eugene panted.  "I'll show you!  Talking about me when
my back is turned, hey?  That's the kind you are!  All right!  You
wait and see!  I'll show you!" he said, in a choked and trembling
whisper of fury and resentment.

"All right," Helen said in a hard and hostile voice.  "I'll wait
and see.  I hope you do.  But you've got to show me that you've got
it in you.  It's time for you to quit this foolishness and get a
job!  Don't criticize other people until you show you've got it in
you to support yourself," she said.

"No," said Eliza, "for we've done as much for you as we are able
to.  You've had as good an education as anyone could want--and now
the rest is up to you," she said sternly.  "I've got no more money
to pay out on you, so you can make your mind up to it from now on,"
she said.  "You've got to shift for yourself."

And in the warm and living silence of the kitchen they looked at
one another for a moment, all three, breathing heavily, and with
hard and bitter eyes.

"Well, Gene," Helen said, "I know.  Try to forget about it.  You'll
change as you grow older," she said wearily.  "We've all been like
that.  We all have these wonderful ambitions to be somebody famous,
but that all changes.  I had them, too," she said.  "I was going to
be a great singer, and have a career in opera, but that's all over
now, and I know I never will.  You forget about it," she said
quietly and wearily.  "It all seems wonderful to you, and you think
that you can't live without it, but you forget about it.  Oh, of
course you will!" she muttered, "of course!  Why!" she cried,
shaking Eugene furiously, and now her voice had its old hearty and
commanding ring, "I'm going to beat you if you act like this!  What
if they don't take your play!  I'll bet that has happened to plenty
of people--Yes, sir!" she cried.  "I'll bet that has happened to
all of them when they started out--and then they went on and made a
big success of it later!  Why, if those people didn't take my
play," she said, "I'd sit down and write another one so good they'd
be ashamed of themselves!  Why, you're only a kid yet!" she cried
furiously, shaking Eugene, and frowning fiercely but with her
tongue stuck out a little and a kind of grin on her big-boned
liberal-looking face.  "Don't you know that!  You've got LOADS of
time yet!  Your life's ahead of you!  Of course you will!  Of
course you will!" she cried, shaking him.  "Don't let a thing like
this get you down!  In ten years' time you'll look back on all this
and laugh to think you were ever such a fool!  Of course you
will!"--and then as her husband, who had driven up before their
mother's house, now sounded on the horn for her, she said again, in
the quiet and weary tone:  "Well, Gene, forget about it!  Life's
too short!  I know," she said mysteriously, "I know!"

Then, as she started to go, she added casually:  "Honey, come on
over for supper, if you want to.--Now it's up to you.  You can suit
yourself!--You can do exactly as you please," she said in the
almost hard, deliberately indifferent tone with which she usually
accompanied these invitations:

"What would you like to eat?" she now said meditatively.  "How
about a nice thick steak?" she said juicily, as she winked at him.
"I've got the whole half of a fried chicken left over from last
night, that you can have if you come over!--Now it's up to you!"
she cried out again in that almost hard challenging tone, as if he
had shown signs of unwillingness or refusal.  "I'm not going to
urge you, but you're welcome to it if you want to come.--How about
a big dish full of string beans--some mashed potatoes--some stewed
corn, and asparagus?  How'd you like some great big wonderful
sliced tomatoes with mayonnaise?--I've got a big deep peach and
apple pie in the oven--do you think that'd go good smoking hot with
a piece of butter and a hunk of American cheese?" she said, winking
at him and smacking her lips comically.  "Would that hit the spot?
Hey?" she said, prodding him in the ribs with her big stiff fingers
and then saying in a hoarse, burlesque, and nasal tone, in
extravagant imitation of a girl they knew who had gone to New York
and had come back talking with the knowing, cock-sure nasal tone of
the New Yorker.

"Ah, fine, boys!" Helen said, in this burlesque tone.  "Fine!  Just
like they give you in New York!" she said.  Then turning away
indifferently, she went down the steps, and across the walk towards
her husband's car, calling back in an almost hard and aggressive
tone:

"Well, you can do exactly as you like!  No one is going to urge you
to come if you don't want to!"

Then she got into the car and they drove swiftly off down-hill,
turned the corner and vanished.



The reason, in fact, which argued in Eugene's family's mind against
his succeeding in the work he wished to do was the very thing that
should have been all in his favour.  But neither he nor his family
thought so.  It was this: a writer, they thought, should be a
wonderful, mysterious, and remote sort of person--someone they had
never known, like Irvin S. Cobb.  "Now, this boy," they argued in
their minds, "our son and brother, is neither wonderful,
mysterious, nor remote.  We know all about him, we all grew up
together here, and there's no use talking--he's the same kind of
people that we are.  His father was a stone-cutter--a man who was
born on a farm and had to work all his life with his hands.  And
five of his father's brothers were also stone-cutters, and had to
earn their living in the same way--by the sweat of their brow.  And
his mother is a hard-working woman who brought up a big family,
runs a boarding-house and has had to scrape and save and labour all
her life.  Everyone in this part of the country knows her family:
her brothers are respected business men in town here, and there are
hundreds of her kinsfolk--farmers, storekeepers, carpenters,
lumber-dealers, and the like--all through this section.  Now,
they're all good, honest, decent, self-respecting people--no one
can say they're not--but there's never been a writer in the crowd.
No--and no doctors or lawyers either.  Now there may have been a
preacher or two--his Uncle Bascom was a preacher and a highly
educated man too, always poking his nose into a book and went to
Harvard, and all--yes, and now that we remember, always had queer
notions like this boy--had to leave the Church, you know, for being
an agnostic, and was always writing poems, and all such as that.
Well, this fellow is one of the same kind--a great book-reader but
with no practical business sense--and it seems to us he ought to
get a job somewhere teaching school, or maybe some newspaper work--
which he could do--or, perhaps, he should have studied law."

So did their minds work on this subject.  Yet the very argument
they made--that he was the same kind of person as the rest of them,
and not remote, wonderful, or mysterious--should have been the
chief thing in his favour.  But none of them could see this.  For
where they thought there was nothing wonderful or mysterious about
them, he thought that there was; and none of them could see that
his greatest asset, his greatest advantage, if he had any, was that
he was made out of the same earth--the same blood, bone, character,
and fury--as the rest of them.  For, could they only have known it,
the reason he read all the books was not, as they all thought,
because he was a bookish person, for he was not, but for the same
reason that his mother was mad about property--talked, thought,
felt, and dreamed about real estate all the time, and wanted to own
the earth just as he wanted to devour it.  Again, the fury that had
made him read the books was the same thing that drove his brothers
and his sisters around incessantly, feeding the huge fury of their
own unrest, and making them talk constantly and to everyone, until
they knew all about the lives of all the butchers, bakers,
merchants, lawyers, doctors, Greek restaurant owners, and Italian
fruit-dealers in the community.

If they had understood this--that he had the same thing in him that
they all had in them--they would have understood about his wanting
to be a writer, and even the trouble in which presently he would
involve himself, and that seemed so catastrophic and disgraceful to
him at that time, would not have seemed so bad to them, for his
father, one of his brothers, and several of his kinsmen had been in
this same trouble--and it had caused no astonishment at all.  But
now that he had done this thing--now that the one they looked on as
the scholar, and the bookish person, had done it--it was as if the
leading deacon of the Church had been caught in a raid on a bawdy-
house.

Finally, there was to be some irony for Eugene later in the fact
that, had he only known it and grasped it, there was ready to his
use in that one conflict all of the substance and energy of the
human drama, and that the only thing that was wonderful or
important was that they were all full of the passion, stupidity,
energy, hope, and folly of living men--fools, angels, guiltless and
guilty all together, not to be praised or blamed, but just blood,
bone, marrow, passion, feeling--the whole swarming web of life and
error in full play and magnificently alive.  As for the fancied
woes and hardships of the young artist in conflict with the dull
and brutal Philistines,--that, he saw later, had had nothing to do
with it, and was not worth a damn, any more than the plays that had
been written in Professor Hatcher's class, and in which a
theatrical formula for living was presented in place of life.  No;
the conflict, the comedy, the tragedy,--the pain, the pride, the
folly and the error--might have been just the same had Eugene
wanted to be an aviator, a deep-sea diver, a bridge-builder, a
professional pall-bearer, or a locomotive engineer.  And the study
of life was there in all its overwhelming richness, was right there
in his grasp, but he could not see it, and would not use it.
Instead he went snooping and prowling around the sterile old
brothels of the stage, mistaking the glib concoctions of a
counterfeit emotion for the very flesh and figure of reality.  And
this also has been true of every youth that ever walked the earth.



The letter came at length one grey day in late October; and
instantly, when he had opened it, and read the first words "We
regret," his life went grey as that grey day, and he thought that
he would never have heart or hope nor know the living joy of work
again.  His flesh went dead and cold and sick, yet he read the
smooth lying phrases in the letter with the stolid face with which
people usually receive bad news, and even tried to insinuate a
thread of hope, to suck a kind of meagre and hopeless comfort from
the hard, yet oily, words, "We are looking forward with great
interest to reading your next play, and we hope you will send it to
us as soon as it is completed." . . . "Our members were divided in
their opinion, four voting to reconsider it and five for rejection
. . . although all were agreed on the freshness and vitality of the
writing . . . while the power of some of the scenes is undeniable
. . . we must reluctantly. . . .  You are one of the young men whose
work we are watching with the greatest interest . . ." and so on.

Those on whom the naked weight of shame has rested, who have felt
its grey and hideous substance in their entrails, will not smile
calmly and with comfort if their memory serves them.

Now a huge, naked, and intolerable shame and horror pressed down on
Eugene with a crushing and palpable weight out of the wet, grey
skies of autumn.  The hideous grey stuff filled him from brain to
bowels, was everywhere and in everything about him so that he
breathed it out of the air, felt it like a naked stare from walls
and houses and the faces of the people, tasted it on his lips, and
endured it in the screaming and sickened dissonance of ten thousand
writhing nerves so that he could no longer sit, rest, or find
oblivion, exhaustion, forgetfulness or repose anywhere he went, or
release from the wild unrest that drove him constantly about.  He
went to bed only to get up and prowl again the wet and barren
little streets of night; he ate, and instantly vomited up again all
he had eaten, and then like a dull, distressed and nauseated brute,
he would sullenly and wretchedly eat again.

He saw the whole earth with the sick eyes, the sick heart, the sick
flesh, and writhing nerves of this grey accursed weight of shame
and horror in which his life lay drowned, and from which it seemed
he could never more emerge to know the music of health and joy and
power again; and from which, likewise, he could not die, but must
live hideously and miserably the rest of his days, like a man
doomed to live for ever in a state of retching and abominable
nausea of heart, brain, bowels, flesh and spirit.

It seemed to him that all was lost, that he had been living in a
fool's dream for years, and that now he had been brutally wakened
and saw himself as he was--a naked fool--who had never had an ounce
of talent, and who no longer had an ounce of hope--a madman who had
wasted his money and lost precious years when he might have learned
some work consonant with his ability and the lives of average men.
And it now seemed to him that his family had been terribly and
mercilessly right in everything they had said and felt, and that he
had been too great a fool to understand it.  His sense of ruin and
failure was abysmal, crushing, and complete.



XLII


It was in this temper, after two days of aimless and frenzied
wandering about the streets of the town, and over the hills that
surrounded it, during which time he was no more conscious of what
he did, said, ate, thought or felt than a man in a trance, that
Eugene started off suddenly to visit his other married sister, who
lived in a little town in South Carolina.  He had not seen her
since his father's death two years ago; she had written him a few
days before asking him to come down, and now, driven more by a fury
of flight and movement than by any other impulse, he wired her he
was coming, and started out in one of the Public Service motor cars
which at that time made the trip across the mountains.  Luke had
arranged to meet him sixty miles from home at the town of
Blackstone, in South Carolina, and drive him the remainder of the
distance to his sister's house.

He set out on a day in late October, wild and windy, full of ragged
torn clouds of light that came and went from grey to gold and back
to grey again.  And everything that happened on that savage day he
was to remember later with a literal and blazing intensity.

Autumn had come sharp and quick that year.  October had been full
of frost and nipping days, the hills were glorious that year as
Eugene had never seen them before.  Now, only a day or two before,
there had been, despite the early season, a sudden and heavy fall
of snow.  It still lay, light but fleecy, in the fields; and on the
great bulk of the hills it lay in a pattern of shining white, stark
greys and blacks, and the colours of the leaves, which now had
fallen thickly and had lost their first sharp vividness, but were
still burning with a dull massed molten glow.

An hour away, and twenty-five miles from home, the car had drawn up
before the post office of a mountain village or resort which lay at
the crest of the last barrier of the hills, before the road dropped
sharply down the mountain-side to South Carolina.

While they were halted here, another car drove up--an open,
glittering, and expensive-looking projectile of light grey--and in
it were three young men from home, two of whom Eugene knew.  This
car drew up abreast, stopped, and he saw that its driver was Robert
Weaver.  And although he had not seen the other youth since a
midnight visit Robert had made to his room in Cambridge, the latter
peered over towards him owlishly and without a word of greeting and
with that abrupt, feverish, and fragmentary speech that was
characteristic of him and was constantly becoming more dissonant
and broken, he barked out:

"Who's in there?  Who's that sitting up there in the front seat?
Is that you, Gene?" he called.

When Gene assured him that it was, Robert asked where he was going.
When he told him "Blackstone," he demanded at once that he leave
the service car and come with him.

"We're going there, too," he said.  Turning to his comrades, he
added earnestly:

"Aren't we?  Isn't that where we're going, boys?"

The two young men to whom he spoke now laughed boisterously,
crying:  "Yeah!  That's right!  That's where we're going, Robert,"
and one of them added with a solemn gravity:

"We're going to--Blackstone," here a slight convulsion seemed to
seize his throat, he swallowed hard, hiccoughed, and concluded, "to
see a football game"--a statement which again set them off into
roars of boisterous laughter.  Then they all shouted at Eugene:

"Come on!  Come on!  Get in!  We've lots of room."

Eugene got out of the service car, paid the driver, took the small
hand-case he had, and got into the other car with Robert and his
two companions.  They drove off fast, and almost immediately they
were dropping down the mountain, along the sinuous curves and turns
of the steep road.

Robert's two companions on this journey were young men whom Eugene
had not known in boyhood, with whom he had now only a speaking
acquaintance, and both of whom were recent comers to the town.  The
older of these two was a man named Emmet Blake, and he now sat
beside Robert on the front seat of the car.

Emmet Blake was a man of twenty-seven years, a frail and almost
wasted-looking figure of medium height, straight black hair, black
eyes, and a thin, febrile, and corrupted-looking face which,
although almost dead-white in its colour, was given a kind of dark
and feverish vitality by a faint thin smile that seemed always to
hover about the edges of his mouth, and the dark unnatural glitter
of his black eyes.

He lived a reckless and dissipated life and drank heavily: time
after time, after a hæmorrhage of the lungs, he had been taken to a
sanatorium in an ambulance, and his death had seemed to be a matter
of only a few hours.  And time after time he had come out again,
and immediately started on another wild spree of women and corn
whisky with Robert and others of the same breed.  He was well-off
as to money, and lived expensively, because he was a nephew of
George Blake, the great Middle-Western manufacturer of cheap motor
cars, which in twenty years' time had created twenty thousand jokes
and glutted the highways of the earth in twenty million tinny and
glittering repetitions.

The name of the other youth, who was Eugene's own age and sat
beside him on the back seat, was Kitchin.  He was a tall, dark,
handsome fellow, with agreeable manners and a pleasant voice, the
nephew of a retired physician in the town but not native to the
place.  Eugene had seen him on the streets, but had never talked to
him before.  It was evident that both Robert and his two friends
had been drinking, although not heavily: there was in their manner
the subdued yet wild and mounting elation of young men when they
begin to drink.  They laughed a great deal, rather hilariously, and
for no good reason: they insisted frequently that they were going
to the town of Blackstone to see a football game, an announcement
which would set them off again in roars of laughter.

Almost as soon as Eugene got into the car, and even as they started
off again, Blake thrust his thin hand into the leather pocket of
the door beside him, produced a bottle that was three-quarters full
of Scotch whisky, and turning, gave it to Eugene, saying:

"Take a big one, Gant.  We're all ahead of you."

He drank long and deep, gulping the fiery liquor down his throat
recklessly, feeling suddenly an almost desperate sense of release
from the grey misery of hopelessness which had crushed him down for
days now, since the letter had come.  When he had finished he
handed the bottle back to Emmet Blake, who took it, looked at it
with a thin, evil, speculative smile, and said:

"Well, that's pretty good.  What do you say, Robert?  Shall we let
him pass on that?"

"Hell, no!" cried Robert hoarsely, looking swiftly round at the
bottle.  "That's no drink!  Make him take a good one, Emmet.
You've got to do better than that if you keep up with us," he
cried, and then he burst out suddenly in his staccato laugh,
shaking his head to himself as he bent over the wheel, and crying
out:  "Lord!  Lord!"

Blake handed Eugene the bottle again, and he drank some more.  Then
Kitchin took the bottle and drank; he handed it back to Emmet
Blake, who drank, and Blake handed it to Robert, who took it with
one hand, his face turned slightly from the wheel, his eyes still
fastened on the road, and drank until the bottle was empty.  Then
he flung it away from him across his arm.  The bottle went sailing
out across the road and down the gulch or deep ravine that sloped
away beside them far down: the bottle struck a rock, exploding
brilliantly in a thousand glittering fragments, and they all roared
happily, and cheered.

They had finished up that bottle in one round of gulps and
swallows, passing it from hand to hand as they rushed down the
mountain-side, and almost instantly they were at work on a beverage
of a yet more instant and fiery power--raw, white corn-whisky, in a
gallon jug, clear as water, rank and nauseous to an unaccustomed
throat, strong and instant as the kick of a mule, fiery, choking,
formidable, and savage.  They hooked their thumbs into the handle
of the jug and brought the stuff across their shoulders with a
free-hand motion; they let the wide neck pour into their tilted
throats with a fat thick gurgle, and they gulped that raw stuff
down with greedy gulpings like water going down a gully drain.

It was a drink that would have felled an ox, a terrific lightning-
blast of alcohol that would have thrown Polyphemus to the earth;
and yet it was not drink alone that made them drunk that day.  For
they were all young men, and they had shouted, sung, and roared
with laughter, and pounded one another with affectionate delight as
they rushed on--and it was not drink alone that made them drunk.

For they felt that everything on earth was good and glorious, that
everything on earth was made for their delight, that they could do
no wrong and make no error, and that such invincible strength was
in them that trees would fall beneath their stroke, the immortal
hills bow down before their stride, and that nothing in the world
could stop them.

And for Eugene it seemed that everything had come to life for him
at once--that he had emerged instantly and victoriously from the
horror of shame, the phantasmal and dreamlike unreality that had
held him in its spell.  It seemed to him that all the earth had
come to life again in shapes of deathless and familiar brightness,
that he had gloriously re-entered a life he thought he had lost for
ever, and that all the plain priceless joy and glory of the earth
was his, as it had never been before.

And first of all, and with an almost intolerable relief and
happiness, he was conscious of the pangs of hunger: his famished
belly and his withered stomach, which had for days shrunk wearily
and with disgust from food, now, under the stimulation of a
ravenous hunger, fairly pleaded for nourishment.  He thought of
food--food in a hundred glorious shapes and varieties: the literal
sensual images of food blazed in his mind like paintings from the
brush of a Dutch master, and it seemed to him that no one had ever
painted, spoken, or written about food before in a way that would
do it justice.

Later, these were the things Eugene would remember from that day
with a living joy, for it was as if he had been born again, or
discovered the world anew in all its glory.  And besides all this--
a part, an element in all this whole harmonious design of
triumphant joy and rediscovery--was the way the hills had looked
that day as they came down the mountain, the smell of the air which
was mellow and autumnal, and yet had in it the premonitory breath
of frost and sharpness, and the wild joy, power, and ecstasy that
had filled their hearts, their throats, their lives--the sense of
victory, triumph, and invincible strength, and of some rare,
glorious, and intolerable happiness that was pending for them, and
which seemed to swell the tremendous and exulting music of that
magic day.

Around them, above them, below them--for the living and shining air
of autumn, from the embrowned autumnal earth, from the great shapes
of the hills behind them with their molten mass of colour--dull
browns, rich bitter reds, dark bronze, and mellow yellow--from the
raw crude clay of the piedmont earth and the great brown stubble of
the cotton-fields--from a thousand impalpable and unutterable
things, there came this glorious breath of triumph and delight.  It
was late October, there was a smell of smoke upon the air, an odour
of burning leaves, the barking of a dog, a misty red, a pollenated
gold in the rich, fading, sorrowful, and exultant light of the
day,--and far off, a sound of great wheels pounding on a rail, the
wailing whistle, and the tolling bell of a departing train.

And finally, the immortal visage of the earth itself, with the
soaring and limitless undulations of its blue ranges, the great
bulk of the autumn hills, immense and near, the rugged, homely, and
familiar trees--the pines, oaks, chestnuts, maples, locusts--the
homely look of the old red clay--the unforgettable and indescribable
naturalness of that earth--with its rudeness, wildness, richness,
rawness, ugliness, fathomless mystery and utter familiarity, and
finally the lonely, haunting, and enchanted music that it made--the
strange spirit of time and solitude that hovered above it eternally,
and which can never be described, but which may be evoked by a cow-
bell broken by the wind in distant valleys, the lonely whistle of a
departing train, or simply a sinuous gust of wind that smokes its
way across coarse mountain grasses when spring comes--all this,
which Eugene had felt and known in his childhood, and yet had never
had a tongue to utter, he seemed now to know and understand so well
that he had himself become its tongue and utterance, the more its
child because he had been so long away from it, the more its eye
because he now saw it again as it must have seemed to the first men
who ever saw it, with the eyes of discovery, love, and recognition.

And yet, for him all these things spoke instantly, intolerably,
exultantly, not of home, return, and settlement, but of one image,
which now burned for ever in his brain, rose like a triumphant
music in his heart.  And that image was the image of the enchanted
city, in which, it now seemed, all the frenzy and unrest of his
spirit would find a certain goal and triumph, and toward which
everything on earth, and all the hope and joy now rising in his
heart, was tending.



When they got down off the mountain into South Carolina they were
very drunk.  On a dusty sand-clay road between some cotton-fields
they stopped the car, and walked out into the fields to make water.
The cotton stood stiff and dry and fleecy in its pods, the coarse
brown stalks rose up in limitless planted rows, and underneath, he
could see the old and homely visage of the red-clay earth.

At one edge of the field, and seeming very far away and lonely-
looking, there was a negro shanty, and behind this a desolate
wooded stretch of pine.  Over all the earth at once, now that the
roar of the engine had stopped, there was an immense and brooding
quietness, a drowsed autumnal fume and warmth, immensely desolate
and mournful, holding somehow a tragic prophecy of winter that must
come, and death, and yet touched with the lonely, mournful and
exultant mystery of the earth.

Eugene pulled several of the big cotton-stalks out of the dry red
earth, thrust one through the button-hole of his coat lapel, and
tore it through exultantly, although the stalk was two feet long.
Then he reeled back toward the car again, holding the other stalks
of cotton in his hands, got into the car, and at once began to talk
to his companions about the cotton--ending up in a passionate
oration about the hills, the fields, the cotton and the earth--
trying to tell them all about "the South" and making of the stalks
of cotton and "the South" a kind of symbol, as young men will,
although they all felt and acted just as young men anywhere would
do.

But at that moment, all Eugene was trying to say about his years
away from home, and his return, and how he had discovered his own
land again and was, "by God!" one of them--waving the stalks of
cotton as he talked, and finding the whole core and kernel of all
he wished to say in these stalks of cotton--all of this, although
incoherent, drunken, and confused, seemed so eloquent and beautiful
to him, so truthful, passionate, and exact--that he began to weep
for joy as he talked to them.  And they--they were, of course,
delighted: they howled with laughter, cheered enthusiastically,
slapped him on the back, and shook hands all round, crying--"By
God!  Listen to him talk! . . .  Give 'em hell, son!  We're with
you! . . .  Hot-damn!  Thataway, boy! . . .  Stay with 'em! . . .
Whee!"

Meanwhile, Robert was driving at terrific speed.  They had begun to
rip and tear along between the cotton-fields and over the dusty
sand-clay roads, mistaking the screams of women and the shouts of
men, as they swerved by their cars and wagons in a cloud of yellow
dust and at a murderous clip, for admiring applause and enthusiastic
cheers, an illusion which only spurred them on to
greater efforts.

The upshot of it was that they finally tore into town, careening
hideously along a central street and with no slackening of their
speed whatever.  The excited people in that part of the State had
been phoning in about them for the last fifteen miles of their mad
journey, and now they were halted suddenly at sight of the police,
who stood lined up across the street in a double row--big, red-
faced, country cops--to stop them.

The first brilliant, sparkling and wildly soaring effects of their
intoxication had now worn off and, although they still felt full of
power and a savage rending strength, the corn whisky was now
smouldering in their veins more dully and with a sombre and brutal
drunkenness.  Eugene seemed to see all shapes and figures clearly--
the coarse red faces of the country cops and their clumsy lumbering
bodies, and the street drowsy and dusty in the warmish autumn
afternoon.

The grasses on the lawns of houses were faded, sere and withered-
looking, the leaves upon the trees had thinned and hung yellowed,
dry and dead, and in the gutters a few dead leaves stirred dryly, a
few scampered dryly in the streets before a moment's gust of wind,
and then lay still again.

Robert slowed down and stopped before that solid wall of beefy
country blue and red: the police surrounded them and clambered
heavily over the sides of the car, two standing on the running-
boards, two on either side of Eugene on the back seat, and one with
Robert and Emmet Blake up front.

"All right, boys," said one of them, good-naturedly and casually
enough, in the full, sonorous and somewhat howling voice of the
countryman, "drive on down thar to the station-house now."

"Yes, SIR!  Yes, SIR!" Robert replied at once in a meek and
obedient tone, and with a comical drunken alacrity.  "How do you
get there, Captain?" he said with a cunning and flattering
ingratiation.

"Right down this here street to your right," said the policeman in
his drawling and countrified tone, "until you come to that 'air
second turning where you see that 'air f'ar hydrant.  Turn in to
the left thar," he said.

"Yes, sir!" said Robert heartily, starting the car again.  "We're
all strangers here," he lied, as if he hoped this lie might make
amends for them.  "We don't know our way about yet."

"Well," the policeman drawled with a kind of ugly heartiness,
"maybe the next time you come back you'll be better acquainted
here," he said, winking at his comrades, and they all guffawed.
"We're glad to see you, boys," he continued, still with this ugly
falseness of good nature in his tone.  "We been hearin' about you,"
he said, winking at his fellows again, "an' we wanted to git
acquainted."

Here the policemen laughed again with sonorous countrified
appreciation of their spokesman's wit.

The policemen were all big beefy men, with hearty drawling voices,
red countrified faces.  They had large square feet, wore dusty-
looking black slouch hats with a wide brim, and were dressed in
rather gaudy but slovenly-looking uniforms, with stripes of gold
braid running up the sides of their baggy trousers, and with the
lower brass buttons of their heavy blue coats unbuttoned, exposing
areas of soiled shirts and paunchy bellies.  Their faces had a look
of a slow but powerful energy, a fathomless and mindless animal
good nature, and at the same time a fathomless and mindless animal
cruelty--instant, volcanic, and murderous--written terribly,
somehow, into their wide, thin and horribly cruel mouths, in which
there was legible a vitality that had all the wild and sensual
force of nature packed into it, and was therefore beyond nature--
almost supernatural--in its savage and mindless qualities.

He had seen them standing idly on the corners of the little towns,
huge and slovenly, swinging their thonged clubs in the great
muttons of their hands, surveying with their great red faces and
their wide thin mouths of fathomless cruelty and good nature the
crowds that swarmed around them.  He had heard their drawling
howling accents of the country, that had all of the moisture and
distance of the earth in them, and seen their slow minds wake to a
mindless and murderous fury.  Once as a child he had seen one of
them, a ponderous giant so huge he lurched from side to side when
he walked, and seemed to fill up the street with his size, beat a
drunken old man--a little howling integument of bone and gristle--
to death with his club, smashing the little old man across the
skull until the blood rushed out in torrents through his sparse
silvery hair, lacing its way in channels of brilliant red across
his face and through his beard until it seemed incredible so small
and old a man could have such fountains of bright blood in him.

And these huge creatures evoked for Eugene a whole history of this
earth and people, monstrous, savage, and unutterable--a congruent
and unspeakable legend which he knew, and all of them knew, down to
the roots, and which he could not speak about and had to speak
about, somehow, or die.  For in these men there was evident not
only the savage and mindless energy of the earth itself, with all
that was wild, sensual, fecund, cruel and good-natured--the whole
weather of life--but there was also evident the fear, the shame,
the horror that had crushed them beneath its ocean weight of
nameless and cowering dread and broken or destroyed their souls.



The two policemen who had clambered into the back seat of the car
and now sat on each side of Eugene had these mountainous and fleshy
figures, heavy, yet with a kind of solid and ugly softness, meaty,
and without the muscular and sinewy leanness of young men.  The
back seat of the car was a narrow one--the car was a new "sports
model" designed only for four people--and now the huge fleshy
figures of these two policemen, wedged against Eugene, gave him a
feeling of disgust and revulsion.

Nevertheless, the feeling of exultant and jubilant power had not
yet worn off, and although he had understood at once, when he saw
the men lined up across the street, that they were under arrest and
would be taken to the city jail, this sordid prospect caused him no
uneasiness whatever.  Rather, the feeling of drunken joy was still
so powerful in him that everything on earth seemed good, and
everything that happened wonderful.  He hailed the experience of
being arrested and taken to jail exultantly as if some fortunate
and glorious experience was in store for him, and his exuberant
affection for the world was so great that he even liked the
policemen.

Eugene howled with laughter, smote them on their broad backs, flung
his arms out and around their shoulders, saying, "By God, you're
fine fellows, both of you, and you've got to have a drink!"

At this Robert laughed uneasily, saying to the policemen:

"Don't pay any attention to him!  We haven't got anything to drink--
I swear we haven't."

One of them had been rummaging around, however, and now
triumphantly produced the jug from its hiding place beneath Blake's
legs.

"Here it is, boys," he cried, as he displayed it.  "I've got it."

The glass jug was almost empty, but there was still perhaps an inch
of the whisky at the bottom.  Robert's face had a worried look, for
the law was such that a capture of this sort might also mean the
confiscation of the owner's car.

Blake, meanwhile, had been talking in a low, craftily persuasive
tone of drunken insinuation and bribery to the policeman up front,
saying:

"Now I know you boys don't want to get us into any trouble.  We
weren't doing anything wrong--just having a drink or two together
and if you fellows will just forget about this thing, we'll fix it
up right with you--anything you say," he whispered cunningly, "and
get on out of town right now without anyone knowing a thing about
it.  What do you say, now?  Come on!  You can do it," he said, with
a leer of ingratiation.

The policeman to whom he spoke smiled good-naturedly, but said
nothing.  At this moment they drove up before the station-house, a
shabby-looking little building of brick, with bars over the window,
and which was situated on a side-street.

The shabby street looked warm, faded, sleepy, touched with the
ghosts of autumn, but in an instant, as the police got out, opened
the doors, and the gay men clambered down drunkenly among them, a
rabble-rout of ragged negro boys, grinning, gape-mouthed countrymen
with red faces, slouchy-looking barbers in their shirt-sleeves, and
wormy-looking loafers, had gathered magically from nowhere, stood
in a ring about them and snickered and shuffled about, pressed up
to the barred windows and peered in curiously with shaded eyes as
the policemen took them into the station.

As they started, Robert held back a little, and said hoarsely, and
in a plaintive, troubled voice to the policeman who had him by the
arm:

"What are you taking us in here for?  We weren't doing anything.
Honest we weren't.  What are you going to do to us?"

The policeman smiled good-humouredly, and then said in a hearty
reassuring voice:

"Aw, we're not goin' to do anything to you.  We were just afraid
you boys might run into something and hurt yourself, that's all.
We're just goin' to take you in here, and let you stay here a
little while until you feel better," he said, at the same time
winking at his fellows.

"Well," said Robert sullenly, casting a troubled and unwilling
glance back at his shining car, "--I want to find my car here when
I come out.  Now if anything happens to that car, there's going to
be trouble," he said ominously.

"That car will be right here when you come out the way you left
it," the policeman said heartily.  "No one is goin' to touch it.
No, sir!  I'll look after that car myself!" he said, winking again
at the others.

"All right, then," said Robert.  "That's all I want to know."

Then they marched all of them into the station-house.

The room they entered was a large one, and at first, because they
had come into it out of the brightness of the sun, and the swimming
confusion of drunkenness and arrest, it was so dark Eugene could
not distinguish clearly any of its features.  Then he saw that it
was a square, rather high room with worn wooden floors, wainscoting
of a dark varnished brown, and above that rude calcimined walls of
white.  In the wall along the street there were, besides the door,
two barred windows which were very dirty and not very large, and
did not give much light.

At one end of the room, as they came in, there was a row of dull
green lockers, probably for the use of the police, and at the other
end a high, square, somewhat majestical-looking desk, which was
also of a dark maply-brown and which seemed to be built on an
elevated rostrum or platform a few inches high.  Over this desk a
light with a green glass shade was burning, and behind it another
large red-faced policeman was sitting.  By his look of authority,
and the military opulence of his slovenly uniform--for he had
epaulets of thick gold braid upon his shoulders that would have
glorified the uniform of a general in the Marine Corps--he seemed
to be the superior in command.

As for the rest of the room, there was little decoration save for a
row of worn and rickety-looking wooden chairs with rounded backs
along the wall, and a liberal distribution of large brass spittoons
which, to judge from the bare wooden boards around them, were used
less frequently as receptacles than as targets, and obviously with
uncertain success.

Finally, the whole place had the unforgettable look and smell that
police-stations everywhere--and particularly those in little towns--
have always had.  Its stale dark air was impregnated with the
odour of cheap cigars and tobacco-juice, of old worn varnished
wood, of human sweat and urine and heavy wool, and with the strong
tarry odour of a sanitary disinfectant.  And somehow, in this
stale, dark and weary odour, there was also a quality of terror,
menace, and foreboding--as if the huge and dingy chronicle of human
tragedy and error which this grim room had witnessed--all the
brutal, shabby sinfulness of a little town--that swarming, hideous
and tawdry fraternity of poverty, vice and error--dredged from its
rat-holes in the dark depths of old brick buildings, hunted out of
cheap hotels, pool rooms, greasy little lunch rooms, nigger shacks,
and the rickety wooden brothels near the railroad tracks, with its
vast brotherhood of scarred and battered men and women--chain-gang
niggers, drunken country youths and cheap bootleggers, grimy
prostitutes and all their furtive bawds and pimps, cutters,
sluggers, slabbers, slashers, and brawlers--both those who live by
vice and those who are its victims--this whole huge earth of pain
and crime and misery had left the terrible imprint of its history
so indelibly there that the weary air was impregnated with sorrow
and fear, and the wood, walls, floors and ceilings were seasoned
and ingrained with the substance of human wretchedness.



When they had come in, the police had lined up Eugene's three
companions before the imposing rostrum where the desk officer was
sitting, but they had placed him carefully to one side against the
wall, like an object too rare and precious for ordinary usage.
Now, as the great man behind the desk glowered down gloomily and
mistrustfully at them, one of the police spoke to the desk sergeant
and, turning toward Eugene with a nod of the head, declared in a
full countrified tone:

"This big 'un here's the drunkest of the lot."

And the enthroned law bent his gloomy gaze upon him with a hostile
and suspicious look which said as plain as words that it was no
more than he had suspected.

Eugene had not realized, in fact, until he felt that wall against
his shoulders, how very drunk he was; but he was drunker now than
he had ever been in all his life before.  He could feel his back
slide down along the wall, and then his bending knees would
straighten with a jerk, and he would solemnly begin to slide up the
wall again.  Meanwhile the room swam and rocked and then was still
before his eyes: the shapes of things would melt into a smear, and
then resolve into their proper selves once more.

And he was conscious that the police were searching him and his
companions, patting their pockets to see if they carried weapons,
examining wallets and letters for identifications, taking their
watches from them, and arraigning them on a series of formal
charges, some of which had no bearing on their case whatever.
Drunk, assuredly, they were; disorderly they might have been--
although it had not seemed so to them; of driving in a reckless
manner they were guilty; but of resisting an officer in the
performance of his duty they had been, up to that time, spotlessly
innocent.

But such were the charges delivered against them in sonorous and
countrified tones.  And in the solemn voices of the policemen, the
knowing and portentous way in which they searched the young men--as
if they were a gang of armed desperadoes, and in a manner that
smacked of correspondence-school detective methods--and finally in
the solemn countrified tones of the one who had pointed to Eugene,
saying:  "This big 'un here's the drunkest of the lot," there was
something comical and ludicrous.

But in their sense of banded authority, in the stubborn almost
conspiratorial way in which they had now hardened in a group
against the young men, forsaking the good-humoured and jovial
manners which had heretofore distinguished them, there was
something ugly and revolting--something stupid, provincial, mob-
like, and unreasoning, which told the young men plainly that "they
had them" now, that they were "foreigners," therefore suspect, and
must bow their heads in silence to the obdurate and capricious
tyrannies of a local and, for them, impregnable authority.

At length, the sonorous formalities of their arraignment having
been completed, the sergeant having scrawled and written in his
ledger, the man looked up and ordered sternly:

"All right, boys!  Take 'em back and lock 'em up!"

Then the young men were marched back along a corridor into a large
two-storeyed room, which had brick walls and cement floors, two
rows of dirty barred windows, a grey and gelid light, and a general
feel of raw and clammy dankness.  This room, which had a harsh
angular steel-and-cement newness that the other did not have,
seemed to be of more recent construction, and to have been added on
to the front part of the jail.  In this room, also, there were
several rows of cells, ascending in tiers up to the ceiling.  When
they entered, the place was quiet, but immediately a drunken
negress in one of the cells began to bawl and rave and sob,
smashing, hammering, and rattling the bars of her cell like a
demented ape.  There was everywhere a foul rank odour of undrained
faecal matter, tempered with the odour of the tarry disinfectant,
and cut more sharply with the acrid smell of some ammoniacal fluid.

At the first row of cells they paused, and the police in charge of
Robert and Emmet Blake (for Eugene now discovered with a sense of
shock that Kitchin was not with them) unlocked the doors of cells
two and three and thrust Blake and Robert into them.  The last, or
end, cell in the row, Eugene now saw was intended for his occupancy
and he stood waiting obediently, in the relaxed grip of one of the
policemen, until his comrade should unlock the door.

Suddenly, as the door swung open, and Eugene stepped forward into
the cell, his vision cleared somewhat, and he saw a young negro
standing in the cell, beside the iron bed that projected from the
wall, looking toward him with a startled expression on his face
that suggested he had been asleep upon the cot, and had been rudely
wakened by their entrance.  Instantly, one fixed and all-obsessing
belief began to burn in Eugene's inflamed and drunken brain.  He
thought that he was being put here with this negro because the jail
was crowded and the cell-space scanty, and further--and this was
the thing that maddened him and that he found intolerable--because,
as the policeman had said when they arraigned the young men, "this
big 'un here's the drunkest of the lot," and they thought he was
too drunk to notice or to care about the advantage they were taking
of him.

For this reason--and this reason only--he now acted as he did.  As
far as the negro himself was concerned, Eugene bore no grudge
against him, and the feeling of shame and degradation which had
swept over him in an overwhelming flood when he saw the cell and
knew he was to be locked in it like an animal was so great that he
would not have cared with whom he had to share that cell, if it had
been the custom of the country so to share it.  But the custom of
the country was not so, he knew, and the belief that he was being
put upon, his drunkenness taken advantage of, and that he was being
dealt with less fairly than the others, now so stung his maddened
pride that he turned and kicked the iron door back in the faces of
the two policemen, just as they were closing it.

Then he started to come out of the cell.  When he did, the two big
red-faced policemen came running forward with a lumbering, panting,
and somehow revolting clumsiness and tried to push him back into
the cell.  When this happened, something dark, grey, and terrible
that he had never known before rose up in his soul--and this thing,
which now came to him for the first time, was to return often in
the savage years that followed.

As the police came rushing towards Eugene his fury and desperation
were so great that he felt little or no fear, but the sensations of
horror and disgust were so terrible that they drove him mad, and he
seemed to be drowning in them.  And the first visible and physical,
although perhaps not the basic, causes of these sensations of
horror and disgust came from the mountainous figures of the two
policemen, and the feel of their huge soft-solid bodies as they
jammed against him.  For, if they had quelled his rebellion at the
outset by smashing him over the head with their clubs, he might
have felt a moment's fear before the club crashed on his skull, but
he would not have felt horror and disgust.

But the sight, the feel, the smell, the look of these huge soft-
solid bodies of mountainous flesh, and the revolting clumsiness of
their movements, made the thing horrible.  As they rushed towards
Eugene and tried to thrust him back into the cell, he grabbed hold
of the bars on either side of the door, and began to howl at them
and curse them foully, and to butt at them with his head.  When
this happened the policemen braced themselves together like turn-
squat Buddhas, holding on to the bars with their huge muttony
hands, that had no leanness in them, and butted back at Eugene with
their huge soft-solid stomachs.

They stood, half-squatly, side by side, their muttony hands gripped
around the bars, their great red faces moist and panting, their
huge buttocks somehow obscenely womanish in their fat breadth, as
they butted back clumsily at him with their soft ponderous bellies--
all of this, and the revolting contact of their flesh against his
own, filled him with such an infinite loathing of horror and
disgust that he went mad.

He started to come out of the cell.  When he did, the two big
police men came running forward with a lumbering clumsiness and
tried to push him back in.  One of the men raised his ponderous
fist and shouted:  "Git back in thar now or I'll hit ye."  A huge
muttony fist smashed squarely on his nose and mouth: he butted,
cursed, amid a pin-wheel aura of exploding rockets: the fist
smashed hard again below one eye: the boy screamed like a wounded
animal and cursing horribly all the time began to use his head as a
battering ram, butting again and again at the fat red faces.

Meanwhile the other one, grunting and puffing, and with his tongue
between his teeth, began to thump, tug and wrench at the fingers of
one hand, trying to loosen them from the bar, and saying to his
fellow:

"You git his other hand, Jim, an' try to make him turn a-loose."

During all this time that Eugene had been cursing and butting at
these men, he had also been shouting:  "You God-damned red-faced
South Car'lina bastards, you're not going to lock me up in here
with a nigger--no, you ain't!"--and now he felt something rough and
woolly scraping underneath his arm.  It was the frightened negro's
head.  He went squirming out below Eugene's arm until he was
outside peering with white eyeballs over a policeman's shoulder,
and when Eugene saw they would not try to keep the negro there with
him, he went back in the cell and was locked up.  He felt very
sick, and everything was swimming nauseously around him: for a
while he leaned over the w.c. and vomited into it.  Then he sat
down on the edge of the cot and stared ahead, thinking about
nothing, but with something hideous, like a great grey smear,
inside him.



XLIII


How long he sat there in this way he did not know, for time would
pass in a hideous smear of brownish grey while all things reeled,
mixed, and were fused drunkenly and shapelessly around him--and
then for a moment time would burn in his mind like a small hard
light of brilliant colour, and he would see everything with an
exact and blazing vividness and hear the voices of his comrades in
their cells.

The cell Eugene sat in was a little cubicle of space, perhaps eight
feet deep and four or five feet wide.  Its only furnishings were a
black iron cot or bed which projected from the wall and could be
turned up or out, and which had no springs or mattress on it, and a
w.c. of dirty white enamel, which had no seat, and was broken and
would not flush so that it had run over and spilled out upon the
cement floor.  The walls and ceilings of the cell were made of some
hard slate-like substance of black-grey, scrawled with the familiar
obscenities and pictures of its former occupants.  Because of these
solid walls, each cell was cut off from its neighbours and for this
reason he could not see Emmet Blake, who had the cell next to him,
nor Robert, who had the cell on the other side of Emmet, but now,
as his mind swam from the stupor of its drunkenness, he could hear
their voices and began to listen to their conversation.

Both were still quite drunk, and for a while they continued a kind
of mournful drunken chant, each responding to the other with a
repetition of his own misfortune.

"Yes, sir," Robert would say, heaving a sigh and speaking in a
hoarse, mournfully drunken voice, "this is certainly a hell of a
way to treat a man who's just been admitted to the bar six weeks
ago!  A hell of a thing!" he said.

And Blake would answer:

"Yes, sir!  And I'll tell YOU what IS a hell of a thing!  This is a
hell of a way to treat George Blake's nephew!  A hell of a way!" he
said.  "If my uncle knew about this he'd come down here and tear
their damned little jail to pieces!  He'd RUIN their town!" he
cried.  "Yes, sir!  He'd wash 'em out and send 'em to the cleaners!
Why!" Blake now said in a tone of drunken boastfulness, "there are
70,000 Blake dealers in the United States ALONE--and if they knew
that _I_ was here," he said, "every damned one of them would be on
his way here in five minutes to get us out!"

"Lord!  Lord!" said Robert, in a kind of mournful brooding
ululation, as if he had not heard Blake's words at all.  "Who'd
have thought it?  A young attorney just admitted to the bar six
weeks ago and here he is in jail!  The damnedest thing I ever heard
of!" he declared.

"Yes, sir," Blake declared, not by way of response, but with the
same self-centred concentration on the indignity which had been
visited on him.  "If you told any Blake dealer in the country that
George Blake's nephew was down here in the Blackstone jail, he
wouldn't believe you.  Uncle George will carry this thing to the
Supreme Court when we get out," he said.  "It is certainly a hell
of a thing to happen to George Blake's nephew!"

"Yes, sir," Robert answered, "a hell of a thing to happen is RIGHT--
and here I've only had my licence to practise for six weeks.  Why,
it's awful!" he said solemnly.

"Robert!" Blake cried suddenly, getting to his feet.--"Do you guess
these damned Blackstone cops know who I am?  Do you guess they
realize they've got George Blake's nephew here?"  Here he went to
the door of his cell, rattled it violently, and yelled:  "Hey--y!
I'm George Blake's nephew!  Do you know you've got George Blake's
nephew back here?  Come and let me out!" he shouted.  No one
answered.

Then they would be silent for a while, and mournful, brooding
drunken time would pass around them.

Then Blake would say:

"Robert?"

"What do you want?" said Robert mournfully.

"What time is it?"

"Hell, how do I know what time it is?" said Robert in a sullen and
protesting tone.  "You know they took my watch."  Then there would
be silence for a moment more.

"Emmet?" Robert would then say.

"All right.  What is it?"

"Did they take your watch, too?"

"Yes!" Blake shouted suddenly in an angry and excited tone.  "And
that was an eighteen carat, thirty-two jewel platinum-case watch
that Uncle George bought for me in Switzerland.  That watch is
worth $225 and I'd better get it back when I get out of here!" he
shouted rattling the door.  "Do you hear?  If those sons of bitches
try to steal my watch, my Uncle George will put 'em ALL in jail!  I
want it back!" he shouted.

No one answered.

Then they were silent for another spell of time, and finally Robert
said in a hoarse, brooding, and mournful tone:

"Eugene?"

"Well."

"Are you there?"

"Where the hell do you think I am?" Eugene said bitterly.  "You
don't see any holes in this place you can crawl out of, do you?"

Robert laughed his hoarse falsetto laugh, and then said with a kind
of brooding wonder:

"Lord!  Lord!  Who'd have thought it?  Who'd ever have thought
Eugene and I would get put in jail together here in Blackstone,
South Carolina.  Here I am just out of Yale and admitted to the bar
six weeks ago and you--boy!" he laughed suddenly his annoying
falsetto laugh, and concluded--"Just got back from three years at
Harvard and here you are in jail already!  Lord!  Lord!  What are
you going to tell your mother when she sees you?  What's she going
to say when you tell her you've been in jail?"

"Oh, I don't know!" the other said angrily.  "Shut up!"

Robert laughed his annoying falsetto laugh again, and said:

"Boy!  I'd hate to have to face her!  I'm glad I'm not in YOUR
shoes!"

"Not in MY shoes!" the other shouted in an exasperated tone.  "You
damned fool, you are in my shoes!"

Then they were silent for a spell, and grey time ticked wearily
around them the slow remorseless sound of interminable minutes.

Presently Blake spoke, out of a drunken silence, saying:

"Gant?"

"What is it?"

"What time is it now?"

"I don't know.  They have my watch," he said.

And grey time ticked around them.

"Robert," Eugene said at length, straightening from his dejected
stupor on the cot, "did you see that nigger?"

"What nigger?" Robert said stupidly.

"Why, the nigger they tried to put in here with me!" he said.

"Why, I didn't see any nigger, Gene," said Robert, in a hoarse and
drunken tone of mild and melancholy protest.  "When was this?"

"Why, Robert!" the other boy now cried in an excited voice and with
a feeling of hideous dread inside him.  "You were right here all
the time!  Didn't you hear us?"

"Why no, Eugene," Robert answered in a slow protesting voice that
had dull wonder and surprise in it.  "I didn't hear anything," he
said.

"Why, my God, Robert!" Eugene now cried excitedly, and even with a
kind of frenzy in his tone.  "You must have heard us!  Why, we were
fighting here for ten minutes!" he said, for the time of the
struggle now seemed at least that long to him.

"Who?" said Robert, dully and stupidly.

"Why, me and those two big cops!" he cried.  "Good God, Robert,
didn't you see us?--didn't you hear us?--butting and kicking like a
goat--hitting me over the head, trying to make me turn a-loose!" he
cried in an excited, almost incoherent tone.

"Who did?" Robert stupidly inquired.

"Why--those two big cops, Robert--that's who!  Good God, do you
mean to tell me that you never heard us when we were cursing and
butting away there right in front of you?"

"I didn't hear anything--I thought you said a nigger," he said in a
stupid and confused tone.

"Why, Robert, that's what I'm telling you!" Eugene shouted.  "They
had him in here--"

"Where?"

"Why, in the cell!  They were trying to put me in here with him!
That's what the trouble was about!" he said.

"Why, Eugene," Robert said with an uneasy and troubled laugh, which
yet had a note of good-natured derision in it that was maddening,
"I didn't see any nigger.  Did you, Emmet?  I was right here all
the time and I didn't hear any trouble. . . .  YOU'VE been
dreaming," Robert now said, with a conviction in his tone that
goaded the other boy almost past endurance, and yet struck a knife
of cold terror into his heart.  And he began to laugh hoarsely his
annoying and derisive laugh, as he shook his head, and said: "Lord!
LORD!--He's in there seeing niggers and policemen and I don't know
what-all."  And here he laughed hoarsely again, his derisive and
falsetto laugh, and said:  "BOY!  You've got 'em!  You've GOT 'em
bad!  You've been seeing things!"

"Robert, God-damn it!" Eugene now fairly screamed, "I tell you he
was here!  I tell you I saw him standing in the cell when I came
in!  I know what I'm talking about, Robert!--there was a nigger
here when I came in!"

"Why, hell, Eugene!" Robert said more kindly, but with a hoarse
derisive laugh, "you've just been seeing things, son.  There was no
one there; you just imagined it.  I reckon you just passed out and
dreamed it happened!"

"Dreamed!  Dreamed!" Eugene shouted, "God-damn it, Robert, don't
you think I know when I'm dreaming?  I'll show you if it was a
dream!  I'll prove it to you that it really happened!  I can prove
it by Blake!" he cried.  "Ask Blake! . . .  Blake!  Blake!  Blake!"
he shouted.

And grey time slid with its slow sanded drop around them.

Blake did not answer: he had not heard their conversation and now
they heard him talking softly, slowly, murderously to himself.

"Yes, sir," he was saying, in a low, quiet, drunkenly intent
soliloquy.  "Yes, sir, I'll kill him! . . .  So help me, God, I'll
kill him dead, as sure as my name is Emmet Blake! . . .  I'll pull
out my forty-five. . . .  I'll get my forty-five out when I go home
. . . and I'll go Ping!  Ping!  Ping! the minute that I see him.
I'll go Ping!  Ping!  Ping!" cried Blake.  "I'll kill him dead, so
help me, God, if it's the last thing that I ever do!"

"I'll kill him!" Blake continued in a tone of dogged, drunken
repetition, still talking to himself.  "When I get home I'll kill
him if it's the last thing I ever do!"

"And I'll kill YOU, too," Blake muttered in this same brooding and
intent oblivion of drunken soliloquy.  "You God-damned whore, I'll
kill you, too!  I'll kill the two of you together! . . .  The
bitch!  The bitch!  The dirty bitch!" the man now screamed,
starting to his feet, and now really with a tortured note of agony
and desperation in his voice.  "I know where you are this minute!
I know you're with him!  I know you'll sleep with him tonight, you--
dirty--low-down--"

"Emmet, you damned fool, shut up!" Robert now said, with a troubled
and protesting laugh.  "Do you want everyone in the whole damned
place to hear you?"  The dreadful shame and anguish in the man's
desperate life had burst nakedly through his drunkenness, and the
hideous mutilation of his soul was suddenly stripped bare--"Don't
talk like that," said Robert, with a troubled laugh--"you'll be
sorry tomorrow for what you said, you know you will: oh, Emmet,
shut up!" Robert said again with a protesting and embarrassed
laugh.

For Blake was now sobbing horribly in his cell: as Eugene stood
leaning against the wall next to him, he could hear him sobbing and
pounding his thin fist savagely into the grey-slate substance of
the wall, while he went on:

"The whore!  The dirty whore!" he wept.  "I know that she's just
waiting for me to die!  I know that's what she wants!  I know
that's all she's waiting for! . . .  That's what you want, you
bitch, isn't it?  You'd like that, wouldn't you?  That would just
suit you, wouldn't it? . . .  Ah, I've fooled you!  I've fooled
you, haven't I?" he panted, with a savage and vindictive triumph in
his voice.  "You've been waiting for it for the last two years,
haven't you?  And I've fooled you every time," he gasped.  "And
I'll fool you yet--you bitch, you dirty bitch!"

And they sat there, saying nothing, listening with desolation in
their hearts to the man's naked shame, and now hearing nothing but
his gasping sobs and the slow grey wear and waste of time around
them.  And then his sobbing breath grew quieter, they could hear
him panting feebly, like an exhausted runner, and presently he went
over and sat down upon his cot, and there was nothing but time and
silence all about them.

Finally Blake spoke again, and now in a voice that was quiet,
lifeless, and curiously sober, as if this outlet and easement of
his grief had also quenched the drunkenness in him.

"Gant?" he said, in a quiet and lifeless tone that penetrated
curiously the grey silence all around them.

"Yes," said Eugene.

"I never met you till today," said Blake, "and I want you to know
I've got no grudge against you."

"Why, Eugene never did anything to you, Emmet," said Robert at this
point, in a tone of protest.  "Why should you have anything against
him?"

"Now, WAIT a minute!" said Blake pugnaciously.  "Eugene," he went
on in a maudlin tone of voice, "I'm friends with everyone, I
haven't got an enemy in the world. . . .  There's just one man in
this world I hate," he went on sombrely, "and I hate his guts--I
hate his life--Goddamn him!  I hate the air he breathes!" he
snarled, and then was silent for a moment.  "Eugene," he went on in
a moment, in a low voice, and with a tone of brooding drunken
insinuation, "you know the man I mean, don't you?"

Eugene made no answer, and in a moment he repeated the question, in
a more insistent and pugnacious tone:

"DON'T you?" he demanded.

And Eugene said, "Yes."

"You're damned right you do," he said in a low, ruminant, and
brooding tone.  "Everybody knows whom I mean.  He's a cousin of
yours," said Blake, and then began to mutter to himself:

"I'll kill him!  So help me, God, I'll kill him!"  And suddenly,
starting from his cot with a scream of baffled misery and anguish,
he began to beat his fist into the hard slate wall again, yelling:

"I'll kill you!  I'll kill you! . . .  You son of a bitch, I'll
kill the two of you! . . .  I'll send you both to hell where you
belong, if it's the last thing that I ever do!"

And he began to sob horribly and curse foully, and pounded his fist
into the wall again until he was exhausted, and went back and sat
down on his cot again, muttering his drunken and impotent threats.

And Eugene did not try to answer him, for there was nothing he
could say.  George Pentland was his cousin, and had taken Blake's
wife away from him, and got her love; and Blake was dying, and they
knew it.  And suddenly it seemed to Eugene that there was in this
whole story something dark and hideously shameful which he had
never clearly seen in life before, which could not be endured, and
which yet suspended over every man who ever lived the menace of its
intolerable humiliation and dishonour.

For to see a man--a manly-looking man, strong of body, fearless and
bold of glance, deep of voice--physically humiliated and disgraced,
slapped and whipped like a cur before his wife, his mistress, or
his children, and forced to yield, retreat and slink away, to see
his face turn white and the look of the coward shine through his
mask of manhood, is not an easy thing to see.



Presently they heard steps coming along the corridor again, and
they were so certain they belonged to a messenger bringing them
release that they all arose instinctively, and stood before the
barred doors of the cells, waiting to walk out into the air of
freedom again.  To their astonishment the visitor was Kitchin.
They had forgotten him completely, and now as they saw him doing a
gleeful caper before their cells, with a grin of triumphant
satisfaction written wide across his face, they looked at him with
the astounded recognition of men who see a face which they had
known years before, but have forgotten--in the lapse of time and
memory.

"Where?--" Robert began hoarsely and accusingly, in a tone of
astounded stupefaction.  "Where have YOU been all this time?"

"Out front!" said Kitchin exultantly.  "Sitting in your car!"

"Out front!" cried Robert in a bewildered and resentful tone.
"Didn't they lock you up, too?"

"Hell, no!" cried Kitchin, fairly dancing about with gleeful
satisfaction.  "They never touched me!  And I'd had as much to
drink as any of you.  I've been sittin' out front all afternoon
reading the paper!  I guess they thought I was the only sober one
of the crowd," he said modestly.  And this apparently was the
reason for his astonishing freedom--this and another, more
mercenary reason, which will presently be apparent.

"Why, what do they mean by keeping us locked up back here while
you're out front there reading the paper?  Darnedest thing I ever
heard of!" Robert barked.  "Kitchin!" he now said angrily.  "You go
out there and tell them we want out of here!"

"I told 'em!  I told 'em!" Kitchin said virtuously.  "That's what
I've been telling them all afternoon."

"Well, what do they say?" Robert demanded impatiently.

"Boys," said Kitchin now, shaking his head regretfully, but unable
to conceal his own elation and sense of triumph, "I've got news for
you--and I'm afraid it's not going to be good news, either.  How
much money you got?"

"Money!" Robert cried, in an astounded tone, as if the uses of this
vile commodity had never occurred to him.  "What's money got to do
with it?  We want out of here!"

"I know you do," said Kitchin coolly, "but you're not going to get
out unless you've got money enough to pay your fine."

"Fine?" Robert repeated stupidly.

"Well, that's what they call it, anyway.  Fine or graft, or
whatever the hell it is, you've got to pay it if you want to be let
out."

"How much is it?" said Robert.  "How much do they want?"

"Boys," said Kitchin, slowly and solemnly, "have you got seventy-
three dollars?"

"Seventy-three dollars!" Robert shouted.  "Kitchin, what are you
talking about?"

"Well, don't shout at me," said Kitchin.  "I can't help it!  I
didn't do it!  But if you get out of here that's what you've got to
pay."

"Seventy-three dollars!" Robert cried.  "Seventy-three dollars for
what?"

"Well, Robert," said Kitchin patiently, "you've got to pay fifty
dollars fine and one dollar costs.  That's because you were driving
the car.  That's fifty-one.  And Emmet and Eugene here have to pay
ten dollars apiece and one dollar costs--that's twenty-two dollars
more.  That figures up to seventy-three dollars.  Have you got it?"

"Why, the dirty grafting sons of bitches!" Blake now cried.
"Telling us that everything would be all right and that they had
put us in here so we wouldn't hurt ourselves! . . .  All right, you
cheap grafting bastards!" he shouted at the top of his lungs,
rattling the barred door furiously as he spoke.  "We'll give you
your dirty graft--but wait till I get out of here!" he cried
threateningly.  "Just wait till I get out!  George Blake will tend
to you!" he shouted.  "It'll be the worst day's work YOU'VE ever
done!"

But no one answered, although Blake and Robert cursed foully and
shouted insults at the men.  Meanwhile Kitchin waited patiently
before their cells until the furious tumult should subside a
little; when they were calmer he suggested that they pool their
resources to see if they had enough to pay the total of the fines.
But the sum of their combined funds was only a little more than
forty dollars, of which Blake and Robert contributed the greater
part and of which Eugene could contribute less than three dollars,
which was all he had.

When it was apparent that their total funds would not be adequate
to secure their release Blake, still furiously angry, began to talk
in a loud and drunken tone of bravado about his famous uncle,
scrawling out a cheque and instructing Kitchin to go at once to the
local agent for his uncle's motor cars and get the necessary money.

"Any Blake dealer in the country will cash my personal cheque for
fifty thousand dollars any time I need it!" he cried with
extravagant boast, as if he thought this threat of opulence would
strike terror to the hearts of the police.  "Yes, sir!" he said.
"All you got to do is to walk into any Blake agency in the country
and tell them George Blake's nephew needs money--and they'll give
you everything they've got!" he cried.  "Tell 'em you need ten
thousand dollars," he said, coming down in scale somewhat, "and
they'll have it for you in five minutes."

"Why, Emmet," said Kitchin quietly, and yet with a trace of mockery
and ridicule on his dark, handsome, and rather sly face.  "We don't
need fifty thousand dollars.  You know, we're not trying to buy the
whole damned jail.  Now, I thought," he went on quietly and
ironically, "that all we needed was about thirty or forty--say
fifty dollars--to make up the fine and get us out of town."

"Yes," said Robert in a quick excited tone of vigorous agreement.
"You're absolutely right!  That's all we need, all right!"

"All RIGHT!  All RIGHT!  Go to the Blake dealer!  Go to the Blake
dealer!  That's what I'm telling you," cried Blake with an arrogant
impatience.  "He'll give you anything you want.--What are you
waiting for?" he cried furiously.  "Go ON!  Go ON!"

"But Emmet," said Kitchin quietly and reasonably, in his dark low
voice, as he looked at the cheque which Blake had scrawled out for
him.  "This cheque you've given me is for five hundred dollars.
Hadn't you better make out another one for fifty?  You know, we
don't need five hundred dollars, Emmet.  And besides," he suggested
tactfully, "the man might not have that much on hand.  Hadn't you
better give me one just made out for what we need?"

"He'll have it!  He's got it!  He's GOT to have it!" said Blake
with a dogmatic and unreasoning arrogance.  "Tell him I sent you
and you'll get the money right away!"

Kitchin did not answer him: he thrust the cheque into his pocket
and turned to Eugene, saying quietly:

"Didn't you say your brother was waiting to meet you here at a
hotel?"

"Yes: he expected to meet me at four o'clock when that service car
came in."

"At what hotel?"

"The Blackstone--listen, Kitchin," he reached through the bar and
grabbed him by the arm, with a feeling of cold horror in his heart.
"For Christ's sake, don't drag my brother into this," he whispered.
"Kitchin--listen to me!  If you can get this money from the Blake
agent here, for God's sake, do it!  What's the use of bringing my
brother into it," he pleaded, "when it's all between the four of
us, and can stay that way?  I don't want my family to know I ever
got into any trouble like this.  Kitchin, look here--I can get the
money for my fine: I've got a little money in the bank, and I'll
pay Blake every cent I owe him if you get the money from the agent.
Now, promise me you won't go and tell my brother!"

He held him hard in the tension of desperation, and Kitchin
promised.  Then he went swiftly away, and they were left alone in
their cells again.  Robert, utterly cast down from his high
exaltation, now cursed bitterly and morosely against the police and
the injustice of his luck and destiny.

Meanwhile, Blake, whose final and chief resource, it had now become
pitifully evident, was nothing in himself but just the accident of
birth that had made him nephew to a powerful and wealthy man, kept
declaring in a loud voice of arrogant bravado that "any Blake agent
in the United States will cash my personal cheque for fifty
thousand dollars any time I ask for it!  Yes, sir, any of them--I
don't give a damn where it is!  He's on his way here now!  You'll
see!  We'll be out of here in five minutes now!"--a boastful
assurance that was hardly out of his mouth before they heard steps
approaching rapidly along the corridor and, even as Blake cried out
triumphantly, "What did I tell you?" and as Eugene leaped up and
ran to the door of his cell, clutching the bars with both hands,
and peering out with bloodshot eyes like a caged gorilla, Kitchin
entered the cell-room, followed by a policeman, and--Eugene's
brother!

Luke looked at him for a moment with a troubled expression and
said:  "Why, how did you get in here?  What's happened to you?" he
said, suddenly noticing his battered face.  "Are you hurt, Eugene?"

The boy made no reply but looked at him with sullen desperation and
jerked his head towards the cells where his two companions were
imprisoned--a gesture that pleaded savagely for silence.  And Luke,
instantly reading the meaning of that gesture, turned and called
out cheerfully:

"Now you boys just hold on a minute and I'll have you out of here."

Then he came up close to the barred door of the cell where his
younger brother stood and, his face stern with care, he said in a
low voice:  "What happened?  Who hit you?  Did any of these
bastards hit you?  I want to know."

A policeman was standing behind him looking at them with narrowed
eyes, and the boy said desperately:

"Get us out of here.  I'll tell you later."

Then Luke went away with the policeman to pay their fines.  When he
had gone, Eugene turned bitterly on Kitchin, who had remained with
the boys, accusing him of breaking his word by going to Luke.
Kitchin's dark evasive eyes shifted nervously in his head as he
answered:

"Well, what else could I do?  I went to the Blake agent here--"

"Did you get the money?" Blake said.  "Did he give it to you?"

"Give!" Kitchin said curtly, with a sneer.  "He gave me nothing--
not a damned cent!  He said he'd never heard of you!"

There was silence for a moment.

"Well, I can't understand that," Blake said at length, feebly, and
in a tone of dazed surprise.  "That's the first time anything like
that has ever happened."

At this moment Eugene's brother returned with two policemen, who
unlocked the cell doors and let them out.  The feeling of coming
from the cell into free space again was terrific in its physical
intensity: never before had Eugene known the physical sensations of
release as he knew them at that moment.  The very light and air in
the space outside the cell had a soaring buoyancy and freshness
which, by comparison, gave to that within the cell a material and
oppressive heaviness, a sense of walled and mortared space that had
pressed upon his heart and spirit with a crushing weight.  Now,
suddenly, as if a cord that bound him had been cut, or a brutal
hand that held his life in its compelling grip had been removed,
the sensations of release and escape filled his body with a sense
of aerial buoyancy and the power of wing-like flight.

With a desperate eagerness he had never felt before he wanted to
feel the free light and air again: even the shocked solicitude of
his companions when they saw his puffed lips and his blackened eye
was drearily oppressive.  He thrust past them, muttering, striding
towards the door.

It was the first time in his life that he had ever been arrested
and locked up, and for the first time now, he felt and understood
the meaning of an immense and brutal authority in life, which he
had seen before, but to which he had always believed himself to be
immune.  Until that day he had had all the pride and arrogance a
young man knows.  Since childhood no one had ever compelled him to
do anything by force, and although he had seen the million
evidences of force, privilege, and compulsion applied to the lives
of people around him, so that like every other native of the land
in which he lived, he had in his heart no belief in law whatever,
and knew that legal justice, where it was achieved, was achieved by
fortuitous accident rather than by intent, he had believed, as
every young man believes, that his own life and body were fiercely
immune to every indignity of force and compulsion.

Now this feeling was gone for ever.  And having lost it
irrecoverably, he had gained something of more value.

For now, he was conscious, even at the moment he came out of the
cell, of a more earthly, common, and familiar union with the lives
of other men than he had ever known.  And this experience was to
have another extraordinary effect upon his spirit and its
understanding and love of poetry, which may seem ludicrous, but
which certainly dated from these few hours of his first imprisonment.
Up to this time in his life, the poet who had stirred him by his
power and genius more than any other was the poet Shelley.

But in the years that followed, Shelley's poetry came to have so
little meaning for him that all the magic substance which his lines
once had was lost, and Eugene seemed to look indifferently at the
hollow shells and ghosts of words, from which all enchantment and
belief had vanished.  And he felt this way not because the words of
this great poet now seemed false to him, but because, more than any
other poet he had known, Shelley was the poet of that time of life
when men feel most strongly the sense of proud and lonely
inviolability, which is legible in everything he wrote, and when
their spirits, like his, are also "tameless and swift and proud."
And this is a time of life and magic that, once gone, is gone for
ever, and that may never be recaptured save by memory.

But in the years that followed, just as Eugene's physical body grew
coarser and more heavy, and his sensual appetites increased
enormously, so also did the energy of his spirit, which in
childhood had been wing-like, soaring, and direct in its aerial
buoyancy, grow darker, slower, heavier, smouldering and slow in its
beginning heat and densely woven and involved in all its web-like
convolutions.

And as all the strength and passion of his life turned more and
more away from its childhood thoughts of aerial flight and escape
into some magic and unvisited domain, it seemed to him that the
magic and unvisited domain was the earth itself, and all the life
around him--that he must escape not out of life but into it,
looking through walls he never had seen before, exploring the
palpable and golden substance of this earth as it had never been
explored, finding, somehow, the word, the key, the door, to the
glory of a life more fortunate and happy than any man has ever
known, and which yet incredibly, palpably, is his, even as the
earth beneath his feet is his, if he could only take it.

And as he discovered this, Eugene turned more and more for food and
comfort to those poets who have found it and who have left great
pieces of that golden earth behind them in their verse, as
deathless evidence that they were there:--those poets who wrote not
of the air but of the earth, and in whose verse the gold and glory
of the earth are treasured--their names are Shakespeare, Spenser,
Chaucer, Herrick, Donne, and Herbert.

Their names are Milton (whom fools have called glacial and austere,
and who wrote the most tremendous lines of earthly passion and
sensuous magic that have ever yet been written), Wordsworth,
Browning, Whitman, Keats, and Heine--their names are Job,
Ecclesiastes, Homer, and The Song of Solomon.

These are their names, and if any man should think the glory of the
earth has never been, let him live alone with them, as Eugene did,
a thousand nights of solitude and wonder, and they will reveal to
him again the golden glory of the earth, which is the only earth
that is, and is for ever, and is the only earth that lives, the
only one that will never die.



XLIV


When they got out into the street again, night had almost come.  It
was about six o'clock, the lights in the streets had gone on, and
in the figures of the people that went by, and the motor cars that
flashed past sparsely, there was something hurried, mournful, and
departing, like the breath of autumn and old leaves stirred by wind
and driven on.

Neither spoke for some time, nor dared look at the other: the boy
walked with lowered head, his hat pulled down across his eyes.  His
lips were puffed and swollen, and his left eye was now entirely
closed, a blind poached swelling of bruised blue.  They passed
below a street lamp, paused for a minute in the hard white glare,
turned as if impelled by sombre instinct, and regarded each other
with the stern defenceless eye of shame and sorrow.  Luke looked
earnestly at his brother for a second and then said gently:

"How's your eye, Eugene?"

The boy said nothing: sullenly, steadily, with his one good eye he
returned his brother's look.  Luke stared for a minute at the
nauseous, fatted purple where the bad eye was, suddenly cursed
bitterly, turned, and walked ahead.

"The d-d-dirty bastards!" he said.  "I've always fought they were a
f-f-fairly decent lot till now, but the nice, damned, d-d-d-dirty
South Car'lina--" he ground his teeth together, paused again, and
turned towards his younger brother:  "What d-d-did they do to you
while you were in there?  I w-w-w-want to know what happened."

"I guess I got what was coming to me," the boy muttered.  "We were
all drunk, and we were driving pretty fast.  So I want you to know
that I'm not making any excuses for that."

"Well," Luke said quietly, "that's all over now, and there's no use
to w-w-worry about it.  I guess you're not the f-f-f-first one that
it's happened to.  So let's f-f-forget about that."  He was silent
for a moment, and then he went on sternly:  "But if those b-b-
bastards beat you up while you were in there I w-w-w-want to know
about it."

"I'm not kicking about it," the boy muttered again, because he was
ashamed to tell him of the struggle he had had with the two
policemen.  "I guess I had it coming--but there was one thing!" he
said with a surge of bitter feeling as he remembered it.  "They did
one thing I don't believe they had any right to do.  If it had
happened in the North it would have been all right, but, by God, I
don't believe they have any right in this State to put a white man
in the same cell with a nigger!"

"Did they d-d-d-do that to you?" Luke cried in an excited voice,
stopping short and half turning as he spoke.

"Yes, they did, they tried to," and then he told him what had
happened.  Luke turned completely, and started back towards the
station, cursing bitterly.

"C-c-come on!" he said.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm g-g-g-going down there and tell those b-b-b-bastards what I
fink of them!"

"No, you're not!  Listen!"  Eugene seized his brother by the arm.
"We'll only get locked up again!  They've got us and we've got to
take it!  We're not going!  Let's get out of this damned town quick
as we can!  I never want to see the place again!"

Luke paused and stood, distractedly thrusting his fingers through
his hair.

"All right," he said at last.  "We'll go. . . .  But by G-g-god,"
his voice rose suddenly and he shook his fist in the direction of
the station, "I'll be back.  I've done business in this town for
years, I've got f-f-f-friends here who are going goddam well to
know the reason why a kid is beaten up and locked up with a n-n-
nigger by the Blackstone cops.  I'll see this f'ing through now if
it t-t-t-takes a lifetime!"  Then, turning to his brother, he said
shortly:  "All right, Gene.  C-c-come on.  We're g-g-getting out of
town."

Without further speech, they walked on down the street until they
came to the place where Luke's car was parked.

"W-w-w-what do you want to d-d-d-do, Gene?" he said quietly.  "Do
you want to go over to D-d-Daisy's tonight?"

The boy shook his head:  "No," he said thickly.  "Home.  Home.
Let's get out of here.  Got to go home now."

Luke said nothing for a moment, thrusting his fingers through his
hair.  "W-w-w-well," he muttered at length, "perhaps you're right."



XLV


They left town at once.

Luke drove savagely going out of town.  He kept his big clumsy
hands gripped hard upon the rim of the steering wheel, his brow
knit and furrowed by its ridge of wrinkles, his face taut and drawn
from the tension of his nerves.  From time to time he would thrust
his clumsy fingers strongly through his flashing mass of hair,
laugh a wild jeering "whah-whah" of rage and exasperation, and then
say in a voice so packed with sneering bitterness and contempt that
it was hard to keep from laughing at him:

"S--t!  Resisting an officer in the p-p-p-p-performance of his
duties!  Now ain't that nice?" he said in a voice of mincing
refinement and daintiness.  "W-w-w-wy the nice neat nigger-Baptist
God-damned sons of bitches!" he snarled.  "The cheap grafting South
Car'lina bastards!  D-d-d-d-disorderly conduct!  S--t!" he snarled
with a savage, dainty, mincing bitterness that was somehow wildly
and explosively funny.

Meanwhile they were speeding along through quiet streets that even
in the night-time had the worn and faded dustiness of autumn, past
withered lawns, by frame-houses which had the same faded dusty
look, and under trees on which the dry leaves hung and fluttered:
the mournful, worn, weary feeling told of departed summer, evoked
sadly the memory of a savage heat, and the sorrowful ghosts and
omens of the autumn were everywhere about them.  October was there
with its strange, brooding presences of sorrow and delight--its
sense of something lost and vanished, gone for ever, its still
impending prescience of something grand and wild to come.  Above
them the ragged cloudy sky had cleared: it was a night of blazing
and magnificent stars, set in the limitless velvet substance of the
sky, burning with faint brilliance and without light over the
immense, mysterious, and mournful-looking earth.

Twice, going out of town, his brother stopped, and both times with
a kind of sudden indecisive after-thought.  Once, when they had
passed a little corner drug-store, he jammed the brakes on
suddenly, bringing the car to such an abrupt and jolting halt that
Eugene was flung forward violently against the wind-screen.  He
turned to him with a nervous and distracted air of indecision,
saying:

"Do you f-f-f-fink you could go a dope?" (this was the word in
common use for Coca Cola)  "W-w-w-would you like a drink?" he said,
with a comical thrusting movement of the head, a wild look in his
eyes, a restless and stammering indecision and earnestness.  The
boy told him no, and after a worried and restless look of his
flickering grey eyes, in the direction of the drug-store, he thrust
his large flat foot into the clutch and started the car in motion
again, with the same violent and jarring movement as when he had
halted.

Again, on the very outposts of the town, where there was nothing
but the dusty road, a few cheap frame-houses, sparely, flimsily,
and carelessly built upon the breast of an immense and formless
land, which seemed indifferent to them and with which they seemed
to have no union, and with nothing but the road, the stars and the
huge mysteries of the earth before them, his brother had halted
with another jarring jolt, when they had flashed past a filling
station where, so read a sign, soft drinks and barbecued sandwiches
were for sale.

"How about a b-b-b-barbecued sandwich?" he demanded, looking at
Eugene with a wild and glaring suddenness.  "C-c-c-could you go
one?  Huh?"--he said, almost barking at him, with a comical
thrusting movement of the head.  But even before the boy could
answer, and he saw the sullen and exasperated scowl upon his face,
he thrust his fingers wildly through his hair, burst into a wild
rich "whah-whah" of crazy laughter--a laughter that was all the
more strange and astonishing because even as he laughed the taut
and drawn tension of his face and nerves, and the frenzied unrest
of his eyes, were terribly apparent--and then started the car in
motion again with a jarring, grinding and convulsive jolt.  And
Luke could not have said why he had halted at these last two
outposts of the town--the drug-store and the filling station--but
certainly the impulse that had made him halt had little to do with
food or drink, for neither of them was hungry, and they had no need
or desire for further nourishment.

But the impulse which had made his brother halt belonged to all the
dissonance and frenzied unrest of his whole life, and by thousands
of actions such as this, the course and pattern of his life were
shaped.  And finally, his brother had halted because those two
small flares of light--pitiful and shabby as they were--had wakened
in him a memory of the vast darkness of the huge and lonely earth
before them, and because he gave himself into this dark regretfully
and with some misgiving of his soul.

For his spirit was afraid of solitude and darkness and, like all
men in this land, his soul was drawn by the small hard blaze of
incandescence--even by those barren bulbous clusters of hard light
upon the wintry midnight pavements of a little town--which somehow
pitifully and terribly suggest the fear and loneliness in men's
souls, the small hard assurances of manufactured light which they
have gathered as some beacon of comfort and security against a dark
too vast and terrible, an earth too savage in its rudeness, space,
and emptiness, for the spirit and the strength of men.

And now his brother and he were given to this earth, this dark,
this loneliness again.  And as they rushed on into the darkness,
held, save for the throbbing motor of the little car, in the
immutable silence of the earth and darkness, the flickering
headlights of the car would suddenly pierce into the huge
surrounding mystery of night, lunging for an instant the flashing
finger of their light upon some fugitive and secret presence in the
vault of night, where all the million lives of men were held.
Sometimes the flashing light would blaze upon the boarding of a
little house at the bend of the road, and then the house would
flash behind and be engulfed in darkness.

Sometimes it would reveal the brown and dusty stubble of the
cotton-fields, a stretch of ragged pine, a lonely little wooden
church, a shack, a cabin, the swift and sinuous forking of another
road that spoked into their own, flashed past, and curved away--was
gone for ever--leaving an instant and intolerable pain and memory--
a searing recognition and discovery--a road once seen but never
followed and now for ever lost with all its promises of a life that
they had never known or explored, of faces they had never seen.

And again, out of this huge and mournful earth, out of the
limitless mystery of this continent of night, the lights upon his
brother's car would for an instant pick out faces, shapes, and
people, and they, too, would blaze there for a moment in their
vision with an intolerable and lonely briefness, and then be lost
for ever--and in that moment of instant parting and farewell was
written the history of man's destiny--his brother's life, and that
of all men living on the earth around him.

Once their lights picked out the figure of a country negro: his
weary plodding figure loomed up for an instant dustily--a mournful
image of bowed back, shapeless garments stained with red field
earth, and clumsy brogans coated with the red dust of the road,
plodding along against a terrific and desolate landscape of brown
cotton-fields, clay, and lonely pine, as much a part of it as the
earth he walked upon, fixed instantly into it in a vision of
labour, sorrow, and destiny, that was eternal.

And again they passed by negroes coming from a country church, and
for a moment saw their white eyes and their black and mournful
faces staring towards the light, and lost these, too, for ever, and
passed into a little town and out again, and saw far-off, and at
its edges, a pollen of bright light above a little travelling
carnival, and heard the sad wheeling music of the carousal, the
mixed and woven clamour of the barker's cries, the shouts, the
people's voices, and all far-faint and lost and mournful as a
dream; and then the earth again--the two back wheels, clay-caked
and rattling, of an ancient buggy, the lifting hooves of an old
bone-yard nag, that slowly turned away from the road's centre to
make way for them, the slow, staring, stupid looks of wonder and
astonishment of a young country fellow and his girl as they went by
them--and finally, always and for ever, nothing but the earth--that
mournful, desolate, and lonely earth of cotton-fields, and raw red
clay and lonely pine, wheeling past for ever in rude and formless
undulations, immemorable, everlasting, and terrific, above which
the great stars blazed their imperturbable and inscrutable messages
of deathless calm.

And as they rushed ahead into the dark, he thought of the hundreds
of times his brother had hurled himself along this road at night
alone, going furiously from nowhere into nowhere, rushing ahead
with starlight shining on his knit brows and his drawn face, with
nothing but the lonely, mournful, and desolate red clay earth about
him, the immense, the merciless emptiness and calm of the
imperturbable skies above him.  And he wondered if there was
anywhere on earth a goal for all his frenzy and unrest, some final
dwelling-place of certitude and love for all his wandering, or if
he must hurl furiously along in darkness beneath these stars for
ever--lost, unassuaged, and driven--until the immense and mournful
earth should take him once again.



The ride back up into the hills with Luke was cold, dark, bleak,
and desolate--the very painting of his own sick soul.  Black night
had come when they had reached the mountains.  The stars were out,
and around them the great bulk of the hills was barren, bleak, and
wintry-looking, and there was the distant roaring of demented winds
upon the hills, the lonely preludes of grim winter among the barren
trees.  Already, it seemed, the same landscape which only a day or
two before had flamed with all the blazing colours of October, and
with the enchantment which his hope and joy had given it, had been
sorrowfully transformed by the mournful desolation of coming
winter.  The earth was no longer beautiful and friendly: it had
become a waste, a desert, and a prison bleak and bare.

During the ride up the mountain into Old Catawba the two brothers
spoke seldom to each other.  Luke, who had made that dark journey
up into the hills a thousand times--for whom, in fact, this
ceaseless hurtling along dark roads had become the very pattern of
the unrest and fury that lashed his own life on for ever--drove
hard and raggedly, communicating perfectly to the machine he drove
the tension and dissonance of his own tormented spirit.  This
wordless instrument of steel and brass and leather seemed, in fact,
to start, halt, jolt, stammer, and lunge fiercely onward as if it
had a brain and spirit of its own that was in anguished sympathy
with the tortured nerves that governed it.  His brother drove, bent
forward tensely, his large clumsy hands gripped hard and nervously
upon the steering-wheel, as he peered out upon the ribbon of road
before him, which bent and twisted in a bewildering serpentine that
curved constantly upward along the slopes and flanks of the dark
mountain-side.  The boy sat cold and numb and sick at heart, hands
thrust in pockets, his hat pulled low across his eyes, his overcoat
turned up around his neck.  He glanced at his brother once or
twice.  He could see his face drawn and taut and furrowed in the
dim light, but when he tried to speak to him he could not.  The
sense of ruin, shame, and failure which filled his spirit seemed so
abysmal and complete that there was nothing left to say.  And he
faced the meeting with his mother and his sister with a sick heart
of dread.

Once going up the mountain-side his brother stopped, jamming his
huge flat foot so rudely on the brake that the car halted with a
jarring shuddering thud.  They had just passed a road of unpaved
clay which led off from the mountain road towards the right, and
towards a farmhouse and a light or two which were clearly visible.

Now, looking nervously and uncertainly toward this house, Luke
muttered, almost to himself, thrusting his hand through his hair
with a distracted movement as he spoke:  "Wy-wy-wy-I fink we could
g-g-g-get a drink in here wy--if you'd like one.  Wy-wy-I know the
old fellow who lives there . . . he's a moonshiner--wy-wy-I fink--
would you like to stop?" he said abruptly and then, getting no
answer from the younger one, he gave another worried and uncertain
look in the direction of the house, thrust his fingers through his
hair, and muttered to himself:  "W-w-w-well, perhaps you're right--
maybe it's j-j-j-just as well if we g-g-g-get home wy-wy-wy-I guess
that Mama will be waiting up for us."

When they reached town the hour was late, the streets had a wintry,
barren, and deserted look, and the lights burned dim: from time to
time another motor car would flash by them speedily, but they saw
few people.  As they drove across the Square it seemed almost to
have been frozen in a cataleptic silence, the bulbous clusters of
the street lamps around the Square burned with a hard and barren
radiance--a ghastly mocking of life, of metropolitan gaiety, in a
desert scene from which all life had by some pestilence or
catastrophe of nature been extinguished.  The fountain in the
Square pulsed with a cold breezeless jet, and behind the greasy
windows of a luncheon room he could see a man in a dim light seated
on a stool and drinking coffee, and the swart muscular Greek leaned
over the counter, his furrowed inch of brow painfully bent upon the
columns of a newspaper.

As they turned into the street where stood his mother's house, and
sloped swiftly down the hill toward home, his brother, in a tone
that tried in vain to be matter of fact and to conceal the concern
and pain which his own generous spirit felt because of the feeling
of defeat, failure, and desperation which was now legible in every
word and gesture of the younger one, began to speak to him in a
nervous, almost pleading voice:

"N-n-now I fink," he began, thrusting his big hand through his
hair,--"I--wy I fink when we get home wy--I just wouldn't say
anything to Mama about--wy-wy about that trouble--wy--that we had
in Blackstone--wy--at all!" he blurted out.  "Wy--f-f-f-frankly, I
mean it!" he continued earnestly, as he brought the car to a
jolting halt before the house.  "Wy-wy--if I were in your p-p-
place, Gene--wy I'd just forget it. . . .  It's all over now--and
it would only worry M-m-m-mama if you t-t-told her about it--Wy-wy--
the whole f'ing's over now . . . those--wy--those cheap nigger-
Baptist South Car'lina sons of bitches--wy-wy--just saw the chance
of m-m-making a martyr of you--so I'd j-j-just forget about it--
It's all over now--Wy-wy--f-f-f-forget it!" he cried earnestly.
"I--I--wy I wouldn't fink about it again!"

But the younger one, seeing the light that burned warmly behind the
drawn shades of the parlour, set his sick heart and his grim face
desperately towards the light, shook his head silently, and then
walked grimly towards the house.



He found his mother and his sister seated together in the parlour
before the fire.  In another moment, almost before their first
startled words of greeting were out of their mouths, he was
blurting out the story of his drunkenness, arrest, and imprisonment.
As he went on, he could see his mother's face, white, serious,
eagerly curious, fixed upon him, and her powerful, deliberate, and
curiously flexible mouth which she pursed constantly, darting her
eyes at him from time to time with the quick, startled attentiveness
of an animal or a bird, as she said sharply:  "Hah? . . .  What
say? . . .  The police, you say? . . .  Jail? . . .  Who was with
you--hah?  Emmet Blake? . . . Weaver? . . .  How much did they fine
you--hah?"

Meanwhile his sister sat listening quietly, with an absent yet
intent look in her eyes, stroking her large cleft chin in a
reflective manner with her big hand, smiling a little, and saying
from time to time:

"Ah-hah? . . .  And what did Blake say then? . . .  What did you
say to the nigger when you saw him in the cell? . . .  Ah-hah. . . .
They didn't abuse you, did they? . . .  Did they hurt you when
they hit you? . . .  Ah-hah. . . .  And what did Luke say when he
saw you looking through the bars?"  She snickered hoarsely, and
then, taking him by the hand, turned to her mother and in a kindly
yet derisive tone said:

"Here's your Harvard boy. . . .  What do you think of your baby
now?"  And seeing the gloomy and miserable look upon his face, she
laughed her high, husky, and derisive falsetto, prodding him in the
ribs with her big finger, saying:  "K-k-k-k! . . .  This is our
Harvard boy! . . .  Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi! . . .  Here's your baby
son, Miss Eliza!"  Then, releasing his hand and turning to her
mother, she said in a good-natured tone, in which yet a kind of
melancholy satisfaction was evident:  "Well, you see, don't
you? . . .  It just goes to show you, doesn't it? . . .  I knew it
all the time. . . .  It just goes to show that we're all the same
beneath the skin. . . .  We're all alike. . . .  We all like the
stuff . . . with all his book education and going off to Harvard,
he's no different from Papa, when you come down to it," she
concluded with a note of sombre brooding satisfaction in her voice.

"Wy-wy-wy--" he could see Luke teetering nervously from one huge
flat foot to another, thrusting his huge hand distractedly through
his flashing hair as he attempted to stammer out an earnest and
excited defence and justification for his disgrace:

"Wy-wy-wy I don't believe that Gene was drunk at all!" he
stammered.  "Wy I fink wy--that he j-j-j-just had the bad luck to
wy to f-f-f-fall in with that gang when they were drinking and and
and--wy I f'ink those wy those B-B-B-B-Blackstone bastards just saw
a chance wy of collecting a wy a little graft and and and wy j-j-
just made Gene the goat.  Wy f-f-f-frankly I don't believe he was
drunk at all. . . .  Wy I doubt it very much," he said, thrusting
his fingers through his hair.  "F-f-f-frankly, I do."

"I was drunk!" the boy muttered sullenly and miserably.  "Drunker
than any of them. . . .  I was the worst of the lot."

"You see, don't you?" his sister said again to her mother in a
weary, kindly, yet triumphant tone.  "You see what happens, don't
you? . . .  I've known it. . . .  I've known it all the time," she
said with sombre satisfaction.  ". . . No, sir," she shook her head
with a movement of emphatic conviction, as if someone had disputed
her argument, "you can't change them! . . .  You can't change the
leopard's spots. . . .  Murder will out. . . .  You can't tell me!"
she cried again, shaking her head in a movement of denial.  "Blood
is thicker than water.  But you see, don't you?" she said again
with this curiously kindly yet triumphant satisfaction; and then
added illogically:  "This is what comes of going to Harvard."

And his mother, who had been following this broken and almost
incoherent discourse of his brother and sister with the quick,
startled darting and attentive glances of an animal or a bird, now
said nothing.  Instead she just stood looking at him, her broad
worn hands held at the waist for a moment in a loose strong clasp,
her face white and stern, and her mouth pursed in a strong pucker
of reproach.  For a moment it seemed that she would speak, but
suddenly her worn brown eyes were hot with tears, she shook her
head at him in a strong, convulsive and almost imperceptible tremor
of grief and disappointment, and turning quickly with a rapid
awkward movement of her short figure, she went out of the room as
fast as she could, slamming the door behind her.

When she had gone there was silence for a minute, save for the
gaseous flare and crumble of the coal-fire in the grate and the
stertorous, nervous and uneasy labour of Luke's breath.  Then his
sister turned to him and looking at him with eyes which had grown
dead and lustreless, and in a tone that was full of the sombre and
weary resignation that was now frequent when she spoke, she said:
"Well, forget about it.  She'll get over it. . . .  You will,
too. . . .  It's done now, and it can't be helped . . . So forget
it. . . .  I know, I know," she said with a sombre, weary, and fatal
resignation as she shook her head.  "We all have these great dreams
and big ambitions when we're twenty. . . .  I know. . . .  I had
them, too. . . .  Don't break your heart about it, Gene. . . .
Life's not worth it. . . .  So forget it. . . .  Just forget about
it. . . .  You'll forget," she muttered, "like I did."

Later that night, when his sister had departed for her home and his
brother had gone to bed, he sat with his mother in the parlour
looking at the fire.  Blundering, stumbling incoherently, he tried
desperately to reassure her, to tell her of his resolution to
expiate his crime, to retrieve his failure, somehow to justify her
in the faith and support she had given him.  He spoke wildly,
foolishly, desperately, of a dozen plans in progress, promising
everything, swearing anything, and sure of nothing.  He told her he
was ready to go to work at once, to do any work that he could find--
like a drowning man he clutched wildly at a dozen straws--he would
get a job on the paper as a reporter; he would teach school; there
were great sums of money to be made from advertising, he had a
friend in that profession, he was sure he would succeed there; he
felt sure that Professor Hatcher could get him placed at some small
college teaching drama and play-writing courses; someone had told
him he could find employment editing the little magazine or "house
organ" of a department store in the city; a friend at college had
secured employment as librarian of an ocean liner; another made
large sums of money selling floor-mops and brushes to the
housewives of the Middle West--he blurted out the foolish and
futile projects feverishly, clutching at straw after straw, and
halted abruptly, baffled by her silence and by the sudden sickening
realization that he no longer had a straw to clutch at--how
foolish, futile, feeble all these projects were!

As for his mother, she sat staring straight into the fire and made
no answer.  Then, for a long time, he sat there melancholy, saying
nothing, while the woman looked straight ahead, hands clasped
across her waist, looking into the fire with a fixed stare of her
white face and puckered mouth.  At length she spoke:

. . . "I have brought them all into the world," she said quietly,
"and seen them all grow up . . . and some are dead now . . . and
some have done nothing with their lives. . . .  You were the
youngest, and the last . . . my only hope. . . .  Oh, to see them
all, all go the same way . . . to hope and pray year after year
that there would be one of them who would not fail--and now!" her
voice rose strongly, and she shook her head with the old convulsive
tremor, "to think that you--the one on whom my hope was set--the
one who has had the education and the opportunity that the others
never had--should go the way that the others went. . . .  It's too
bad to bear!" she cried, and suddenly burst into tears.  "Too much
to ask of me!" she whispered huskily, and suddenly drew the sleeve
of the old frayed sweater across her weak wet eyes, with the
pathetic gesture of a child--a gesture that tore him with a rending
anguish of pity, shame and inexpiable regret.  "Too hard . . . too
hard," she whispered.  "Surely there's a curse of God upon us if
after all the pain and sorrow all are lost."

And he sat there sick with shame, self-loathing and despair, unable
to reply.  And then he heard again the remote demented howling of
the wind, the creaking of bare boughs, the vast dark prowling of
the beast of night about his mother's house.  And again he heard,
as he had heard a thousand times in childhood, far, faint, and
broken by the wind, the wailing whistle of a distant train.  It
brought to him, as it had brought to him so many times, the old
immortal promises of flight and darkness, the golden promises of
morning, new lands and a shining city.  And to his sick and
desperate soul the cry of the great train now came with a sterner
and more desperate hope than he had ever known as a boy.  Suddenly
he knew that now there was one road, and only one before him--
flight from this defeat and failure which his life had come to,
redemption by stern labour and grim loneliness, the stern
challenge, the sharp peril and the grand reward--the magic and
undying image of the city.  And suddenly he knew that he would go.



The night before he went away he went out and prowled restlessly
about the streets of the town until the hour was very late.  A
letter from a friend had informed them that there was hope of a
teaching appointment at one of the city universities, later, when
the spring term began.  Meanwhile, a swift exchange of telegrams
had promised him temporary employment in New York, soliciting funds
from alumni of his university for a memorial building.  And
uncertain, specious, and disheartening as this employment seemed to
him, he had eagerly seized the offer when it came.  He was leaving
home the next day.

Now, sick of soul and driven by the unquiet heart, the furious
unrest, he prowled the barren night-time streets of his native
town.  The Square was bleak and lifeless and deserted, with its
hard glare of lights: along the main street of the town a few
belated citizens hurried past from time to time, faces and voices
he remembered from his childhood, driven by like ghosts.
Everything he saw and touched was strange and familiar as a dream--
a life which he had known utterly and which now vanished from his
grasp whenever he approached it--his for ever, buried in his blood
and memory, never to be made his own again.

When he returned home it was after midnight and his mother's old
gaunt house was dark.  He went quietly up the steps and into the
broad front hall, closing the heavy door quietly behind him.  For a
minute he stood there in that living dark, the ancient and
breathing darkness of that old house which seemed to speak to him
with all the thousand voices of its vanished lives--with all the
shapes and presences of things and people he had known, who had
been there, and who had passed or vanished, or had died.

Then quietly he groped his way along the dark old hall and towards
the kitchen and the little room beyond in which his mother slept.

When he got to the kitchen the room was dark save for the soft
flare and crumble of the fading ashes in the old coal range.  But
the kitchen was still warm, with a curious and recent currency of
warmth and silence, as if it were still filled with his mother's
life and as if she had just been there.

He turned on the light and for a minute stood looking at the
familiar old table with its sheathing of ragged battered zinc, and
at the ironing board with its great stack of freshly ironed and
neatly folded linen; and he knew that she had worked there late.

Suddenly, a desperate urge, an overmastering desire to see her,
speak to her, awoke in him.  He thought that if he could only see
her now he could reveal himself to her, explain the purpose of his
failure, the certainty of his success.  He was sure that now, if
ever, he could speak to her and say the things he had always wished
to say but never said--speak the unspeakable, find a tongue for the
unspoken language, make her understand his life, his purpose, and
his heart's desire, as he had never done before.  And filled with
this wild hope, this impossible conviction, he strode towards the
closed door of her little room to arouse her.

Then, abruptly, he paused.  Upon an old cupboard, in a glass half-
filled with water, he saw, as he had seen a thousand times,
grinning at him with a prognathous, a strangely human bleakness,
the false teeth she had put there when she went to bed.  And
suddenly he knew he could not speak to her.  For grotesque, ugly,
and absurd as they were, those grinning teeth evolved for him,
somehow, as nothing else on earth could do, the whole image of his
mother's life of grief and toil and labour--the intolerable
memories of the vanished and the irrevocable years, the strange and
bitter miracle of life.  And he knew then that he could not speak,
that there was nothing he could say to her.

He rapped gently at the door and in a moment heard her voice,
quick, sharp, and startled, roused from sleep, saying:  "Hah? . . .
what say? . . . who's there?"

He answered: in a moment she opened the door and stood there, her
face startled, curiously small and white and sunken, somehow like a
child's.  When he spoke to her she answered incoherently:  and then
she smiled in an apologetic and embarrassed manner, and covered her
mouth shyly with one hand, while she extended her other for the
glass that held her teeth.  He turned his head away: when he looked
again her face had taken on its familiar contour, and she was
saying in her usual tone:  "Hah? . . .  What is it, son?"

"Nothing, Mama," he said awkwardly.  "I--I didn't know you were
asleep . . . I--I--just came in to say good night, Mama."

"Good night, son," she said, and turned her white cheek up to him.
He kissed it briefly.

"Now go and get some sleep," she said.  "It's late and you've all
your packing to do yet when you get up tomorrow."

"Yes," he said awkwardly.  ". . . I guess you're right. . . .
Well, good night."  And he kissed her again.

"Good night," she said.  "Turn out the lights, won't you, before
you go to bed."

And as he turned the kitchen light out he heard her door close
quietly behind him, and the dark and lonely silence of the old
house was all around him as he went down the hall.  And a thousand
voices--his father's, his brothers', and of the child that he
himself had been, and all the lives and voices of the hundred
others, the lost, the vanished people--were whispering to him as he
went down the old dark hall there in his mother's house.  And the
remote demented wind was howling in the barren trees, as he had
heard it do so many times in childhood, and far off, far-faint and
broken by the wind he heard the wailing cry of the great train,
bringing to him again its wild and secret promises of flight and
darkness, new lands, and a shining city.  And there was something
wild and dark and secret in him that he could never utter.  The
strange and bitter miracle of life had filled him and he could not
speak, and all he knew was that he was leaving home for ever, that
the world, the future of dark time and of man's destiny lay before
him, and that he would never live here in his mother's house again.




BOOK IV



PROTEUS: THE CITY



XLVI


As the train was pounding north across New Jersey another train
upon the inside track began to race with it, and for a distance of
ten miles the two trains thundered down the tracks in an even,
thrilling, and tremendous contest of steel and smoke and pistoned
wheel that blotted out everything, the vision of the earth, the
thought of the journey, the memory of the city, for all who saw it.

The other train, which was bound from Philadelphia, appeared so
calmly and naturally that at first no one suspected that a race was
on.  It came banging up slowly, its big black snout swaying and
bucking with a clumsy movement as it came on, its shining pistons
swinging free and loose, and with short intermittent blasts of
smoke from its squat funnel.  It came up so slowly and naturally,
past their windows, that at first it was hard to understand at what
terrific speed the train was running, until one looked out of the
windows on the other side and saw the flat, formless and
uncharactered earth of New Jersey whipping by like pickets on a
fence.

The other train came slowly on with that huge banging movement of
the terrific locomotive, eating its way up past the windows, until
the engine cab was level with Eugene and he could look across two
or three scant feet of space and see the engineer.  He was a young
man cleanly jacketed in striped blue and wearing goggles.  He had a
ruddy colour and his strong pleasant face, which bore on it the
character of courage, dignity, and the immense and expert knowledge
these men have, was set in a good-natured and determined grin, as
with one gloved hand held steady on the throttle he leaned upon his
sill, with every energy and perception in him fixed with a focal
concentration on the rails.  Behind him his fireman, balanced on
the swaying floor, his face black and grinning, his eyes goggled
like a demon, and lit by the savage flare of his terrific furnace,
was shovelling coal with all his might.  Meanwhile, the train came
on, came on, eating its way past, foot by foot, until the engine
cab had disappeared from sight and the first coaches of the train
drew by.

And now a wonderful thing occurred.  As the heavy rust-red coaches
of the other train came up and began to pass them, the passengers
of both trains suddenly became aware that a race between the trains
was taking place.  A tremendous excitement surged up in them,
working its instant magic upon all these travellers, with their
grey hats, their grey, worn city faces, and their dull tired eyes,
which just the moment before had been fastened wearily on the pages
of a newspaper, as if, having been hurled along this way beneath
the lonely skies so many times, the desolate face of the earth had
long since grown too familiar to them, and they never looked out of
windows any more.

But now the faces that had been so grey and dead were flushed with
colour, the dull and lustreless eyes had begun to burn with joy and
interest.  The passengers of both trains crowded to the windows,
grinning like children for delight and jubilation.

Eugene's train, which for a space had been holding its rival even,
now began to fall behind.  The other train began to slide past the
windows with increasing speed, and when this happened the joy and
triumph of its passengers were almost unbelievable.  Meanwhile
their own faces had turned black and bitter with defeat.  They
cursed, they muttered, they scowled malevolently, they turned away
with an appearance of indifference, as if they had no further
interest in the thing, only to come back again with a fascinated
and bitter look as their accursed windows slid by them with the
inevitability of death and destiny.

Throughout, the crews of the two trains had shown as keen and
passionate an interest, as intense a rivalry, as had the
passengers.  The guards and porters were clustered at the windows
or against the door in the car-ends, and they grinned and jeered
just as the rest of them had done; but their interest was more
professional, their knowledge more intimate and exact.  The guard
on the train would say to the porter--"Whose train is that?  Did
you see John McIntyre aboard?"  And the negro would answer
positively, "No, sah!  Dat ain't Cap'n McIntyre.  Ole man Rigsby's
got her.  Dere he is now!" he cried, as another coach moved past
and the grizzled and grinning face of an old guard came in sight.

Then the guard would go away, shaking his head, and the negro would
mutter and chuckle to himself by turns.  He was a fat enormous
darkey, with an ink-black skin, a huge broad bottom, teeth of solid
grinning white, and with a big fatty growth on the back of his
thick neck.  He shook like jelly when he laughed.  Eugene had known
him for years, because he came from his native town, and the
Pullman car in which he rode, which was known as K 19, was the car
that always made the journey of 700 miles between his home town and
the city.  Now the negro sprawled upon the green upholstery of the
end seat in the Pullman and grinned and muttered at his fellows in
the other train.

"All right, boy.  All right, you ole slew-footed niggah!" he would
growl at a grinning darkey in the other train.  "Uh!  Uh!" he would
grunt ironically.  "Don't you think you's somp'n, dough!  You's
pullin' dat train yo'self, you is!" he would laugh sarcastically,
and then sullenly and impatiently conclude, "Go on, boy!  Go on!  I
sees you!  I don't care how soon I loses you!  Go on, niggah!  Go
on!  Git dat ugly ole livah-lipped face o' yo'n out o' my way!"

And that grinning and derisive face would also vanish and be gone,
until the whole train had passed them, pulled ahead of them, and
vanished from their sight.  And their porter sat there staring out
of the window, chuckling and shaking his head from time to time, as
he said to himself, with a tone of reproof and disbelief:

"Dey ain't got no right to do dat!  Dey ain't go no right to run
right by us like we wasn't here!" he chuckled.  "Dey ain't nothin'
but a little ole Philadelphia local!  Dey're not supposed to make
de time we is!  We's de Limited!  We got de outside rail!" he
bragged, but immediately, shaking his head, he said:  "But Lawd,
Lawd!  Dat didn't help us none today.  Dey've gone right on by us!
We'll never ketch dem now!" he said mournfully, and it seemed that
he was right.

Eugene's train was running in free light and open country now, and
the passengers, resigned finally to defeat, had settled back into
their former dozing apathy.  But suddenly the train seemed to start
and leap below them with a living energy, its speed increased
visibly, the earth began to rush by with an ever-faster stroke, the
passengers looked up and at one another with a question in their
eyes and an awakened interest.

And now their fortune was reversed, the train was running through
the country at terrific speed, and in a moment more they began to
come up on the rival train again.  And now, just as the other train
had slid by them, they began to walk by its windows with the calm
imperious stride of their awakened and irresistible power.  But
where, before, the passengers of both trains had mocked and jeered
at one another, they now smiled quietly and good-naturedly, with a
friendly, almost affectionate, interest.  For it seemed that they--
the people in the other train--now felt that their train had done
its best and made a manful showing against its mighty and
distinguished competitor, and that they were now cheerfully
resigned to let the Limited have its way.

And now their train walked up past the windows of the dining-car of
the other: they could see the smiling white-jacketed waiters, the
tables covered with their snowy-white linen and gleaming silver,
and the people eating, smiling and looking toward them in a
friendly manner as they ate.  And then they were abreast the heavy
parlour cars: a lovely girl, blonde-haired, with a red silk dress
and slender shapely legs crossed carelessly, holding an opened
magazine face downward in one hand and with the slender tapering
fingers of the other curved inward towards her belly where they
fumbled with a charm or locket hanging from a chain, was looking at
them for a moment with a tender and good-natured smile.  And
opposite her, with his chair turned towards her, an old man,
dressed elegantly in a thin, finely-woven and expensive-looking
suit of grey, and with a meagre, weary, and distinguished face that
had brown spots upon it, was sitting with his thin phthisical
shanks crossed, and for a moment Eugene could see his lean hands,
palsied, stiff, and folded on his lap, and the brown spots on them,
and he could see a corded, brittle-looking vein upon the back of
one old hand.

And outside there was the raw and desolate-looking country, there
were the great steel coaches, the terrific locomotives, the shining
rails, the sweep of the tracks, the vast indifferent dinginess and
rust of colours, the powerful mechanical expertness, and the huge
indifference to suave finish.  And inside there were the opulent
green and luxury of the Pullman cars, the soft glow of the lights,
and people fixed there for an instant in incomparably rich and
vivid little pictures of their life and destiny, as they were all
hurled onward, a thousand atoms, to their journey's end somewhere
upon the mighty continent, across the immense and lonely visage of
the everlasting earth.

And they looked at one another for a moment, they passed and
vanished and were gone for ever, yet it seemed to him that he had
known these people, that he knew them better than the people in his
own train, and that, having met them for an instant under immense
and timeless skies, as they were hurled across the continent to a
thousand destinations, they had met, passed, vanished, yet would
remember this for ever.  And he thought the people in the two
trains felt this, also: slowly they passed each other now, and
their mouths smiled and their eyes grew friendly, but he thought
there was some sorrow and regret in what they felt.  For, having
lived together as strangers in the immense and swarming city, they
now had met upon the everlasting earth, hurled past each other for
a moment between two points in time upon the shining rails, never
to meet, to speak, to know each other any more, and the briefness
of their days, the destiny of man, was in that instant greeting and
farewell.

Therefore, in this way, they passed and vanished, the coaches
slipped away from them until again they came up level with the cab
of the other locomotive.  And now the young engineer no longer sat
in his high window with a determined grin, and with his hard blue
eyes fixed on the rail.  Rather, he stood now in the door, his
engine banging away deliberately, slowed down, bucking and rocking
loosely as they passed.  His attitude was that of a man who has
just given up a race.  He had turned to shout something at his
fireman who stood there balanced, arms akimbo, black and grinning,
as they moved up by them.  The engineer had one gloved hand thrust
out against the cab to support him, he held the other on his hip
and he was grinning broadly at them, with solid teeth edged with
one molar of bright gold--a fine, free, generous, and good-humoured
smile, which said more plainly than any words could do:  "Well,
it's over, now!  You fellows win!  But you'll have to admit we gave
you a run for your money while it lasted!"

Then they drew away and lost the train for ever.  And presently
their own train came in to Newark, where it stopped.  And suddenly,
as Eugene was looking at some negroes working there with picks and
shovels on the track beside the train, one looked up and spoke
quietly to the fat porter, without surprise or any greeting, as
casually and naturally as a man could speak to someone who has been
in the same room with him for hours.

"When you comin' back dis way, boy?" he said.

"I'll be comin' back again on Tuesday," said the porter.

"Did you see dat ole long gal yet?  Did you tell huh what I said?"

"Not yet," the porter said, "but I'll be seein' huh fo' long!  I'll
tell yo' what she says."

"I'll be lookin' fo' you," said the other negro.

"Don't fo'git now," said the fat black porter, chuckling; and the
train started, the man calmly returned to work again; and this was
all.  What that astounding meeting of two black atoms underneath
the skies, that casual incredible conversation meant, he never
knew; but he did not forget it.



And the whole memory of this journey, of this race between the
trains, of the negroes, of the passengers who came to life like
magic, crowding and laughing at the windows, and particularly of
the girl and of the vein upon the old man's hand, was fixed in
Eugene's brain for ever.  And like everything he did or saw that
year, like every journey that he made, it became a part of his
whole memory of the city.

And the city would always be the same when he came back.  He would
rush through the immense and glorious stations, murmurous with
their million destinies and the everlasting sound of time, that was
caught up for ever in their roof--he would rush out into the
street, and instantly it would be the same as it had always been,
and yet for ever strange and new.

He felt as if by being gone from it an instant he had missed
something priceless and irrecoverable.  He felt instantly that
nothing had changed a bit, and yet it was changing furiously,
unbelievably, every second before his eyes.  It seemed stranger
than a dream, and more familiar than his mother's face.  He could
not believe in it--and he could not believe in anything else on
earth.  He hated it, he loved it, he was instantly engulfed and
overwhelmed by it.

He brought to it the whole packed glory of the earth--the
splendour, power, and beauty of the nation.  He brought back to it
a tremendous memory of space, and power, and of exultant distances;
a vision of trains that smashed and pounded at the rails, a memory
of people hurled past the window of his vision in another train, of
people eating sumptuously from gleaming silver in the dining cars,
of cities waking in the first light of the morning, and of a
thousand little sleeping towns built across the land, lonely and
small and silent in the night, huddled below the desolation of
immense and cruel skies.

He brought to it a memory of the loaded box-cars slatting past at
fifty miles an hour, of swift breaks like openings in a wall when
coal cars came between, and the sudden feeling of release and
freedom when the last caboose whipped past.  He remembered the dull
rusty red, like dried blood, of the freight cars, the lettering on
them, and their huge gaping emptiness and joy as they curved in
among raw piny land upon a rusty track, waiting for great destinies
in the old red light of evening upon the lonely, savage, and
indifferent earth; and he remembered the cindery look of road-beds
and the raw and barren spaces in the land that ended nowhere; the
red clay of railway cuts, and the small hard lights of semaphores--
green, red, and yellow--as in the heart of the enormous dark they
shone, for great trains smashing at the rails, their small and
passionate assurances.

He brought to it the heart, the eye, the vision of the everlasting
stranger, who had walked its stones, and breathed its air, and, as
a stranger, looked into its million dark and driven faces, and who
could never make the city's life his own.

And finally he brought to it the million memories of his fathers
who were great men and knew the wilderness, but who had never lived
in cities: three hundred of his blood and bone, who sowed their
blood and sperm across the continent, walked beneath its broad and
lonely lights, were frozen by its bitter cold, burned by the heat
of its fierce suns, withered, gnarled, and broken by its savage
weathers, and who fought like lions with its gigantic strength, its
wildness, its limitless savagery and beauty, until with one stroke
of its paw it broke their backs and killed them.

He brought to it the memory and inheritance of all these men and
women who had worked, fought, drunk, loved, whored, striven, lived
and died, letting their blood soak down like silence in the earth
again, letting their flesh rot quietly away into the stern, the
beautiful, the limitless substance of the everlasting earth from
which they came, from which they were compacted, on which they
worked and wrought and moved, and in whose immense and lonely
breast their bones were buried and now lay, pointing eighty ways
across the continent.

Above the pounding of the mighty wheels their voices had seemed to
well out of the everlasting earth, giving to him, the son whom they
had never seen, the dark inheritance of the earth and the
centuries, which was his, even as his blood and bone were his, but
which he could not fathom.  "Whoever builds a bridge across this
earth," they cried, "whoever lays a rail across this mouth, whoever
stirs the dust where these bones lie, let him go dig them up, and
say his Hamlet to the engineers.  Son, son," their voices said, "is
the earth richer where our own earth lay?  Must you untwist the
vine-root from the buried heart?  Have you unrooted mandrake from
our brains?  Or the rich flowers, the big rich flowers, the strange
unknown flowers?

"You must admit the grass is thicker here.  Hair grew like April on
our buried flesh.  These men were full of juice, you'll grow good
corn here, golden wheat.  The men are dead, you say?  They may be
dead, but you'll grow trees here; you'll grow an oak, but we were
richer than an oak: you'll grow a plum tree here that's bigger than
an oak, it will be all filled with plums as big as little apples.

"We were great men and mean men hated us," they said.  "We were all
men who cried out when we were hurt, wept when we were sad, drank,
ate, were strong, weak, full of fear, were loud and full of
clamour, yet grew quiet when dark came.  Fools laughed at us and
witlings sneered at us: how could they know our brains were subtler
than a snake's?  Because they were more small, were they more
delicate?  Did their pale sapless flesh sense things too fine for
our imagining?  How can you think it, child?  Our hearts were
wrought more strangely than a cat's, full of deep twistings, woven
sinews, flushing with dull and brilliant fires; and our marvellous
nerves, flame-tipped, crossed wires too intricate for their
fathoming.

"What could they see," the voices rose above the sound of the
wheels with their triumphant boast, "what could they know of men
like us, whose fathers hewed the stone above their graves, and now
lie under mountains, plains, and forests, hills of granite, drowned
by a flooding river, killed by the stroke of the everlasting earth?
Now only look where these men have been buried: they've heaved
their graves up in great laughing lights of flowers--do you see
other flowers so rich on other graves?

"Who sows the barren earth?" their voices cried.  "We sowed the
wilderness with blood and sperm.  Three hundred of your blood and
bone are recompacted with the native earth: we gave a tongue to
solitude, a pulse to the desert, the barren earth received us and
gave back our agony: we made the earth cry out.  One lies in
Oregon, and one, by a broken wheel and horse's skull, still grips a
gunstock on the Western trail.  Another one has helped to make
Virginia richer.  One died at Chancellorsville in Union blue, and
one at Shiloh walled with Yankee dead.  Another was ripped open in
a bar-room brawl and walked three blocks to find a doctor, holding
his entrails thoughtfully in his hands.

"One died in Pennsylvania reaching for a fork: her reach was
greater than her grasp; she fell, breaking her hip, cut off from
red rare beef and roasting-ears at ninety-six.  Another whored and
preached his way from Hatteras to the Golden Gate: he preached milk
and honey for the kidneys, sassafras for jaundice, sulphur for uric
acid, slippery-ellum for decaying gums, spinach for the goitre,
rhubarb for gnarled joints and all the twistings of rheumatism, and
pure spring water mixed with vinegar for that great ailment dear to
Venus, that makes the world and Frenchmen kin.  He preached the
brotherhood and love of man, the coming of Christ and Armageddon by
the end of 1886, and he founded the Sons of Abel, the Daughters of
Ruth, the Children of The Pentateuch, as well as twenty other
sects; and finally he died at eight-four, a son of the Lord, a
prophet, and a saint.

"Two hundred more are buried in the hills of home: these men got
land, fenced it, owned it, tilled it; they traded in wood, stone,
cotton, corn, tobacco; they built houses, roads, grew trees and
orchards.  Wherever these men went, they got land and worked it,
built upon it, farmed it, sold it, added to it.  These men were
hill-born and hill-haunted: all knew the mountains, but few knew
the sea.

"So there we are, child, lacking our thousand years and ruined
walls, perhaps, but with a glory of our own, laid out across three
thousand miles of earth.  There have been bird-calls for our flesh
within the wilderness.  So call, please, call!  Call the robin red-
breast and the wren, who in dark woods discover the friendless
bodies of unburied men!

"Immortal land, cruel and immense as God," they cried, "we shall go
wandering on your breast for ever!  Wherever great wheels carry us
is home--home for our hunger, home for all things except the
heart's small fence and dwelling-place of love.

"Who sows the barren earth?" they said.  "Who needs the land?
You'll make great engines yet, and taller towers.  And what's a
trough of bone against a tower?  You need the earth?  Whoever needs
the earth may have the earth.  Our dust, wrought in this land,
stirred by its million sounds, will stir and tremble to the passing
wheel.  Whoever needs the earth may use the earth.  Go dig us up
and there begin your bridge.  But whoever builds a bridge across
this earth, whoever lays a rail across this mouth, whoever needs
the trench where these bones lie, let him go dig them up and say
his Hamlet to the engineers."



So had their hundred voices welled up from the earth and called to
him, their son and brother, above the pounding of the mighty wheels
that roared above them.  And the memory of their words, their
triumphant tongue of deathless silence, and the full weight of the
inheritance they had given him, he brought back again out of the
earth into the swarming canyons and the million tongues of the
unceasing, the fabulous, the million-footed city.

And all that he had seen, all that he remembered of this earth he
brought to the city, and it seemed to be the city's complement--to
feed it, to sustain it, to belong to it.  And the image of the
city, written in his heart, was so unbelievable that it seemed to
be a fiction, a fable, some huge dream of his own dreaming, so
unbelievable that he did not think that he should find it when he
returned; yet it was just the same as he had remembered it.  He
found it, the instant he came out of the station: the tidal swarm
of faces, the brutal stupefaction of the street, the immense and
arrogant blaze and sweep of the great buildings.

It was fabulous and incredible, but there it was.  He saw again the
million faces--the faces dark, dingy, driven, harried, and corrupt,
the faces stamped with all the familiar markings of suspicion and
mistrust, cunning, contriving, and a hard and stupid cynicism.
There were the faces, thin and febrile, of the taxi-drivers, the
faces cunning, sly, and furtive, the hard twisted mouths and
rasping voices, the eyes glittering and toxic with unnatural fires.
And there were the faces, cruel, arrogant and knowing of the beak-
nosed Jews, the brutal heavy figures of the Irish cops, and their
red beefy faces, filled with the stupid, swift, and choleric
menaces of privilege and power, shining forth terribly with an
almost perverse and sanguinary vitality and strength among the
swarming tides of the grey-faced people.  They were all there as he
remembered them--a race mongrel, dark, and feverish, swarming along
for ever on the pavements, moving in tune to that vast central
energy, filled with the city's life, as with a general and dynamic
fluid.

And, incredibly, incredibly! these common, weary, driven, brutal
faces, these faces he had seen a million times, even the sterile
scrabble of harsh words they uttered, now seemed to be touched by
this magic of now and forever, this strange and legendary quality
that the city had, and to belong themselves to something fabulous
and enchanted.  The people, common, dull, cruel, and familiar-
looking as they were, seemed to be a part, to comprise, to be fixed
in something classic, and eternal, in the everlasting variousness
and fixity of time, in all the fabulous reality of the city's life:
they formed it, they were part of it, and they could have belonged
to nothing else on earth.

And as he saw them, as he heard them, as he listened to their words
again, as they streamed past, their stony gravel of harsh oaths and
rasping cries, the huge single anathema of their bitter and
strident tongues dedicated so completely, so constantly, to the
baseness, folly, or treachery of their fellows that it seemed that
speech had been given to them by some demon of everlasting hatred
only in order that they might express the infamy and vileness of
men, or the falseness of women--as he listened to this huge and
single tongue of hatred, evil, and of folly, it seemed incredible
that they could breathe the shining air without weariness, agony,
and labour--that they could live, breathe, move at all among the
huge encrusted taint, the poisonous congestion of their lives.

And yet live, breathe, and move they did with a savage and
indubitable violence, an unfathomed energy.  Hard-mouthed, hard-
eyed, and strident-tongued, with their million hard grey faces,
they streamed past upon the streets for ever, like a single animal,
with the sinuous and baleful convolutions of an enormous reptile.
And the magical and shining air--the strange, subtle and enchanted
weather, was above them, and the buried men were strewn through the
earth on which they trod, and a bracelet of great tides was
flashing round them, and the enfabled rock on which they swarmed
swung eastward in the marches of the sun into eternity, and was
masted like a ship with its terrific towers, and was flung with a
lion's port between its tides into the very maw of the infinite,
all-taking ocean.  And exultancy and joy rose with a cry of triumph
in his throat, because he found it wonderful.

Their voices seemed to form one general City-Voice, one strident
snarl, one twisted mouth of outrage and of slander bared for ever
to the imperturbable and immortal skies of time, one jeering tongue
and rumour of man's baseness, fixed on the visage of the earth, and
turned incredibly, and with an evil fortitude, toward depthless and
indifferent space against the calm and silence of eternity.

Filled with pugnacious recollection that Voice said, "'Dis guy,' I
says, 'dis friend of yoehs,'" it said, "'dis bastad who owes me
fawty bucks--dat yuh introduced me to--when's he goin' t' giv'it to
me?' I says."  And derisive, scornful, knowing, it would snarl:
"W'ICH guy?  W'ICH guy do yuh mean?  Duh guy dat used to come in
Louie's place?"  And bullying and harsh it would reply:  "YUH don't
know?  Watcha mean yuh don't know!" . . .  Defiant, "WHO don't
know? . . .  WHO says so? . . .  WHO told yuh so?"  And jeering,
"Oh DAT guy! . . .  Is DAT duh guy yuh mean?  An' wat t' hell do
_I_ care wat he t'inks, f'r Chris' sake! . . .  To hell wit' him!"
it said.

Recounting past triumphs with an epic brag, it said:  "'You're
comin' out of dere!' I said.  'Wat do you t'ink of dat?' . . .
'Oh, yeah,' he says, 'who's goin' t' make me?'  So I says, 'You
hoid me--yeah! . . .  You're goin' to take dat little tin crate of
yoehs right out of deh!  You'll take yoeh chance right on duh line
wit' all duh rest of us!' . . .  'Oh, yeah,' he says. . . .  'You
hoid me, misteh'--an' he went!"  In tones of ladylike refinement,
it recounted romance into ravished ears as follows:  "'Lissen,' I
says, 'as far as my boss is consoined it's bizness only. . . .  An'
as far as Mr. Ball is consoined it's my own bizness' (hah! hah!
hah!  Y'know that's wat I tol' him. . . .  Jeez: it handed him a
laugh, y'know!)--'An afteh five o'clock,' I says, 'I'm my own
boss. . . .  At duh same time,' I says, 'deh's duh psychological
side to be considehed.'"

And with the sweet accent of maternal tribulation, it admitted,
"Sure!  I hit her!  I did!  Oh, I hit her very hahd!  Jeez!  It was
an awful crack I gave her, honestleh!  My hand was boinin' f'r a
half-oueh aftehwads! . . .  I just blow up, y'know! . . .  Dat's my
on'y reason f'r dat!  I jus' blow up!  Dis fellah's in duh bathroom
callin' f'r his eggs, duh baby's yellin' f'r his bottle, an' I jus'
blow up! . . .  Dat's my on'y reason f'r DAT!  Dat's duh on'y
reason dat I hit her, see!  I'm afraid she'll hoit duh baby, see?
She bends its fingehs back.  So I says, 'F'r God's sake, please,
don't do dat! . . .  I gotta headache' . . . an' then, I jus' blow
up!  Sure!  I hit her hahd! . . .  Duh trouble is I can't stop wit'
one slap, see! . . .  Jeez!  I hit her!  My hand was boining f'r a
half-oueh aftehwads!"

Hot with its sense of outraged decency, it said, "I went upstairs
an' pounded on dat doeh! . . .  'Come out of dere, you s. of
a b.,' I says--Sure, I'm tellin' yuh!  Dat's what I said to her,
y'know! . . .  'Come out of dere,' I says, 'before I t'row you
out,'" and regretfully it added, "Sure!  I hate to do dese t'ings--
it makes me feel bad lateh--but I won't have dem in my place.
Dat's duh one t'ing I refuse t'do," it said.  And with a passionate
emotion, it asserted, "Sure! . . .  Dat's what I'm tellin'
yuh! . . .  Yuh know how dat was, don't cha?  Duh foist guy--her
husban'--was passin' out duh sugah an' duh otheh guy--duh boy-
friend--was layin' her. Can yuh ima-a-gine it?" it said.

Amazed, in tones of stupefaction, it would say "No kiddin'!  NO!"
And with solemn reprehension it would add, "Oh, yuh know I think
that's te-e-ri-bul!  I think that's aw-w-ful!"--the voice of
unbelieving horror would reply.

Finally, friendly and familiar, the great Voice of the city said,
"Well, so long, Eddy.  I'm goin' t' ketch some sleep," it said, and
answered, "Well, so long, Joe, I'll be seem' yuh."  "So long,
Grace," it added with an accent of soft tenderness and love, and
the huge Voice of the city murmured, "O.K. kid!  Eight o'clock--no
kiddin'--I'll be deh!"

Such were some of the million tongues of that huge single Voice, as
he had heard them speak a thousand times, and as now instantly,
incredibly, as soon as he came back to them, they spoke again.

And as he listened, as he heard them, their speech could not have
been more strange to him had they been people from the planet Mars.
He stared gape-mouthed, he listened, he saw the whole thing blazing
in his face again to the tone and movement of its own central,
unique, and incomparable energy.  It was so real that it was
magical, so real that all that men had always known was discovered
to them instantly, so real he felt as if he had known it for ever,
yet must be dreaming as he looked at it; therefore he looked at it
and his spirit cried:

"Incredible!  Oh, incredible!  It moves, it pulses like a single
living thing!  It lives, it lives, with all its million faces"--and
this is the way he always knew it was.



XLVII


That year--the first year that he lived there in the city--he was
twenty-three years old.  After these months of frenzy, drunkenness,
and arrest, he was at the last gasp of his resources, and the
eighteen hundred dollars a year, which was his salary at the
university that had employed him as an instructor, seemed to him a
wage of princely munificence--a stroke of incredible good fortune.

And although his position as instructor had been given to him in
one of the usual ways, through the recommendation of the teachers'
bureau at Harvard University, and the letters of some of the
professors there, he was tortured constantly by the thought of his
inadequacy and ignorance, and by the horrible fear that his
incompetence would be discovered and that one day he would be
suddenly, peremptorily, ruinously, and disgracefully discharged.

At night, when he went to bed in his little cell at the cheap
little hotel nearby where he lived, the thought of the class he had
to meet the next day fed at his heart and bowels with cold
poisonous mouths of fear, and as the hour for a class drew nigh he
would begin to shake and tremble as if he had an ague; the
successive stages of his journey from his room in the Leopold to
the class-room at the university a few hundred yards away--from
cell to elevator, from the tiled sterility of the hotel lobby to
the dusty beaten light and violence of the street outside, thence
to the brawling and ugly corridors of the university, which drowned
one, body and soul, with their swarming, shrieking, shouting tides
of dark amber Jewish flesh, and thence into the comparative
sanctuary of the class-room with its smaller horde of thirty or
forty Jews and Jewesses all laughing, shouting, screaming, thick
with their hot and swarthy body-smells, their strong female odours
of rut and crotch and arm-pit and cheap perfume, and their hard
male smells that were rancid, stale, and sour--the successive
stages of this journey were filled with such dazed numbness,
horror, fear, and nauseous stupefaction as a man might feel in the
successive stages of a journey to the gallows, the guillotine, or
the electric chair: the world swarmed blindly, nauseously,
drunkenly about him.  He looked at the faces in the hotel lobby,
the brawling, furious, and chaotic street, and the swarming and
rancid corridors, with dizzy swimming eyes and a constricted heart;
a thousand unutterable and horrible premonitions and imaginings of
ruin and shame swarmed through his mind--every day he felt the
impending menace of some new and fatal catastrophe, some
indefinable and crushing disgrace with which each hour was
ominously, murderously pregnant.

What these fears and forebodings were he could not have told, but
they occasionally found articulate expression in some scene of
frightful insubordination and rebellion, in which he found himself
faced with forty brawling, mocking, swarthily jeering faces who,
like savage and untamed horses that have sensed the fear and
incompetence of their driver, have now broken the last feeble
thread of restraint and are running free and wild before him.  The
terror and menace of such a disgrace were heightened by the
intrusion into the scene at the apex of such a moment of riot and
rebellion of one of his employers, the Dean, the head of the
department, or a creature with a wry lean face, a convulsive Adam's
apple, a habit of writhing his lean belly and loins erotically as
he spoke, and a mind of the most obscene Puritanism, who was
employed to oversee the work and methods of the instructors: he
could visualize the moment of their fatal entrance into the class-
room, and hear their words of stern, curt and immediate dismissal
as they drove him out and gathered the reins strongly into their
own parched and freckled hands.

A thousand such images of disgrace and terror swarmed through his
mind, and at the same time there began to smoulder in his heart a
dogged resentment and hatred of this nameless fear, this wordless
and sourceless shame, impalpable, causeless, maddening, which
pressed upon him from the sky, which hovered in the vast unrest and
dissonance of the air he breathed, and which at length crept
poisonously through all the rivers of life, corrupting the healthy
music of the blood, the sweet exultant music of the heart, curdling
men's bowels with fear and withering their loins with sterile
impotence.  What was this grey lipless shape of fear that stalked
their lives incessantly--that was everywhere, legible in the faces,
the movements, and the driven frenzied glances of the people who
swarmed on the streets?  What was this thing that duped men out of
joy, tricked them out of all the exultant and triumphant music of
the world, drove them at length into the dusty earth, cheated,
defrauded, tricked out of life by a nameless phantom, with all
their glory wasted?

Already, in the city, he had begun to see how life was duped and
menaced by this cheat: a thousand images of cruelty, violence,
cowardice and dishonour swarmed about him in the streets.  As the
sparkling and winy exultancy of October, with its grand and solemn
music of death and life, of departure and return, moved on into the
harsh, raw, green implacability of winter, one could observe the
death of joy and hope, the barometric rise of hate and fear and
venom in the city's life: it got into the faces of the people, it
wasted their flesh and corrupted their blood, it glittered in the
eyes of the instructors at the university, their flesh got green
and yellow with its poisons, the air about them was webbed, cross-
webbed, and counter-webbed with the dense fabric of their million
spites and hatreds.  They wasted and grew sick with hate and poison
because another man received promotion, because another man had got
his poem printed, because another man had eaten food and swallowed
drink and lain with women, and lived and would not die; they
sweltered with hate and fear against the professors who employed
them--they grew pale and trembled, and spoke obsequiously when
their employer passed, but when the man had gone, they whispered
with trembling lips:  "Has he spoken to you yet? . . .  Has he said
anything to you yet about next year? . . .  Are you coming back
next year? . . .  Did he say anything to you about ME next
year? . . ."  They greeted him with sly humility and a servile
glance, but they snickered obscenely at him when his back was
turned.  And they smiled and sneered at one another with eyes that
glittered with their hate: they never struck a blow but they spoke
lying words of barbed ambiguity, they lied, cheated, and betrayed,
and they sweltered in the poisons of their hate and fear, they
breathed the weary hatred-laden air about them into their poisoned
lungs.

Around him in the streets, again, as winter came, he heard a
million words of hate and death: a million words of snarl and sneer
and empty threat, of foul mistrust and lying slander: already he
had come to see the poisonous images of death and hatred at work in
the lives of a million people--he saw with what corrupt and
venomous joy they seized on every story of man's dishonour, defeat,
or sorrow, with what vicious jibe and jeer they greeted any
evidence of mercy, honesty, or love.

By night, the hard and sterile lights of their glittering, barren
and obscene streets fell lividly over the pale and swarthy faces of
a million rats of the flesh, and by day, in the weary and hatred-
laden air of the university, the harsh and merciless light shone on
the venomous faces of the rats of the spirit.

In his heart a dogged and furious resentment was beginning to glow
and moulder--a savage hate of hate, a fear of fear, a murderous
intensity of desire to strangle the shapes of death and barrenness--
a resistance, still passive, but growing in bitterness and
pugnacity with every passing day, as he saw how uselessly and
horribly men allowed themselves to be duped, cheated, and beaten by
the living rat and by the fraud of fear, and that was being
strengthened momently now by an implacable conviction, a dogged and
incontrovertible memory that, incredibly sharpened by his fury and
desire, awoke and netted out of the sea-depths of the past, the
shining fish of a million living moments.  The sound of forest
waters in the night, the rustling of cool corn-blades in the dark,
the goat-cries of a boy into the wind, the pounding of great wheels
upon a rail, the sound of quiet casual voices at a country station
in the night, and the thorn of delight, the tongueless cry of
ecstasy that trembles on the lips of the country kid as he lies
awake for the first time in the night in the top berth of a Pullman
car while the great wheels pound beneath him toward the city, and
he hears the good-looking woman in the berth below him stir
languorously and move, in a gesture of heavied and sensual
appeasement, her milky thighs.--These things had been upon the
earth, past all the mockery of the old scornmaker's pride, and
would endure for ever.  These facts, together with a thousand more--
the incredible magic of the peach bloom in the month of April, the
smell of rivers after rain, the wordless glory and first green of a
young tree seen in a city street at daybreak in the month of May,
the bird-song breaking into light once more, a cry, a leaf, the
passing of a cloud--these facts, as bright as herrings in a shining
water, as literal as nails to fix the hides of falsehood to the
wall, as real as April and all magic whatsoever, returned now under
the furious light of his awakened and incontrovertible memory.

A murderous hatred against the haters, the mockers, dupers,
cheaters, and all of the walking frauds of death rose up in him.
He resolved to kill the phantoms of this fear and shame which
pressed upon him namelessly; he swore that he should not starve in
the midst of plenty, batter his knuckles bloody on the four walls
of a little cell, break the great shoulder of his power and
strength against a barren wall, prowl ceaselessly and damnably a
million sterile streets, in which there was neither pause nor curve
nor stay, nor door, to enter: he knew there was earth for his feet,
food for his hunger, liquor for his thirst, the exultant reality of
strong golden joy for all the savage passion of his conviction and
desire, and he swore that he should come at length to doors and
harbours, he knew he would not starve and sicken in the wilderness,
and that the venomous rats of the flesh and of the spirit should
never gnaw his bones in triumph in the desert.

Yet, the sense of drowning daily in the man-swarm returned to him.
Each day there began anew one of the most ancient and fatal
struggles that was ever waged--the struggle of man against the
multitude: each day, like a man who is going into battle, he would
brace himself with savage resolution, and gird his spirit to the
sticking point each time he went out in the streets, and each day,
beaten, driven, trembling and inchoate, drowned in horror and
oblivion, he would at length retreat into the four walls of his
cell again, conscious only of having passed through a maelstrom of
sound, movement, violence, and living tissue--of living tissue from
which all of the radiant and succulent essences of individual
character and memory had been extracted--and which flowed
constantly back and forth along the beaten pavement in a lava-like
tide of tallowy flesh, dark dead eyes, and grey felt hats.  The
grey felt hats, in particular, those machine-made millions of neat
cheap cones of crisp grey felt, all worn in the same way, and
tilted at the same angle, and for the most part shading faces of
the same tallowy texture--those million points of changeless grey
that bobbed and moved incessantly through a thousand streets--
drowned him with their tidal flow of weariness and sterility: they
seemed to be the badge, the uniform, of a race of mechanical
creatures, who were as essential and inhuman a part of the city's
substance as stone and steel and brick, who had been made of one
essential substance and charged with one general and basic energy
along with the buildings, tunnels, streets, and a million
glittering projectiles of machinery, and who flowed by incessantly,
were poured into tunnels or driven through streets, were added to
here, and thinned out there, were portioned, doled, and celled out
in a million destinations, a thousand swarming heaven-daring hives,
the mindless and unwitting automatons of a gigantic and
incomprehensible pattern.

But if he retreated daily, out of this savage and unequal struggle
with the Herculean forces of the city, if he returned trembling,
beaten and exhausted to the hermitage of his own small cell, it was
with no sense of final defeat, no desire for ultimate escape.  His
pride and fury grew from every beating that they got, his faith
grew stubborn on adversity, his spirit fed upon humiliation, and
spat into the face of failure, his soul plunged darkly to the sea-
floor of blind horror, swarming desolation, and came up dripping
with a snarl of hatred and defiance: daily they beat him with their
blind appalling mass, daily they drove him livid, shaking, blind
with horror, back into his cell, so stunned and stricken by the
savage, obscene, and mindless fury of the streets that he could no
longer think, feel, or remember; and hour by hour his soul swam
upwards out of the jungles of the sea!  And every night, the
merciful anodyne of dark restored him; sunk deep, at length, in
midnight, beastwise aprowl in all the brooding silence of the
night, his spirit swept out through the fields of sleep, he heard
the heartbeats of six million men: within their million cells sleep
crossed the faces of six million sleepers and in the night-time, in
the dark, in all the living silence of the night, the sleeping
faces of Snodgrass, Weisberg, and O'Hare were strange and dark as
his.  He saw the city with the great giant webbing of its thousand
streets, he heard the long deep notes of warning and departure from
the great ships in the harbour; and then he saw the city as a
whole, six million sleepers celled in sleep and walled in night,
and girdled by the bracelet of two flashing sea-borne tides that
isled them round: he held them legible as minted gold within his
hand, he saw them plain as apples in the adyts of his brain.
Exultant certitude and joy welled up in him, and he knew that his
hunger could eat the earth, his eye and brain gulp down the vision
of ten thousand streets, ten million faces; he knew he should beat
and eat them all one day, and that a man was more than a million,
stronger than a wall, and greater than a door, and taller than a
ninety-storey tower.

They swept around him on the rootless pavements in drowning tides
of grey abomination, of numberless depth and horror, and like the
memory of a bird-song in the wood, the memory of all his people
who had lived and died alone for two hundred years within the
wilderness, and whose buried bones were pointing eighty ways across
the continent, returned to him in a rush of savage resolution, and
he swore that he would beat death and nothingness and all the
abominations of a sterile and nameless fear: he swore it with a
sick heart, a trembling lip, and a nauseous stomach in which the
rancid wash of a sour distressful coffee growled and rumbled
queasily--for in those months, this sense of nameless fear and
dread, impending ruin, disgrace and menace, was so great each time
he went to meet a class, its damnable victory over all the clean
and healthful music of the flesh, the exultant joy of thirst and
hunger, so complete and devastating, that he was unable to touch a
mouthful of food for hours in advance.

Thus, while a thousand such images of disgrace and terror swarmed
through his mind, he stood before each class on a small raised
platform three or four inches in height, trembling on limbs from
which every vital essence of blood and bone and marrow had been
drained, staring at the faces that seethed and swarmed below him,
with dead glazed eyes, nauseous, and sick, and palsied, left only
with something clear and small and shining at the bottom of his
mind, one pure small note of conviction and belief at the bottom of
this horrible sea-depth of phantasmagoric chaos, of desolation and
fury.  Then, in a voice that was remote, unreal, and hollow in his
throat and ears, he would attempt to silence them, he would begin
to speak to them, and one by one, each in his accustomed place, he
would see the dark, ugly, grinning faces in their seats below him
and become aware of the pale sweat-shop tailors sitting cross-
legged on their tables in the buildings just across the street--
buildings which the university was acquiring as class-rooms, year
by year, and one by one, as the numberless thousands of these dark
and brawling hordes, there by God knows what blind fantasticality
of purpose, increased.

And then, faint and far, sunken below the furious glare and clamour
of the city's life, fantastic and unreal at first in these machine
shops of the brain, the old words, the undying words, the deathless
bird-song in the city street returned, and he spoke to them again
out of the lips of Herrick, Donne, and Shakespeare, of all the
things that never change, of all the things that would abide for
ever.



"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up
remembrance of things past--" Clang--a-lang--a-lang--a-lang a-lang!
Hard and harsh with the violence of an unexpected blow, the bell
that marked the ending of the period rang pat upon the last word of
the sentence and as it died, all of his senses rudely shocked out
of the potent enchantments of the music, he gave a violent start,
as if he had been prodded from behind, stopped reading, and looked
up quickly from his book with an angry and bewildered face.  The
class, which had tittered, now burst into a roar of laughter: even
Mr. Abraham Jones from his accustomed seat on the third row to the
right smiled, wearily, cruelly, and contemptuously behind the
winking glitter of his glasses.  Eugene lost his temper completely,
lifted the heavy book above his head with both hands and banged it
down upon the table.  "Quiet!" he shouted, "I tell you to be
quiet!"  The command was unnecessary, for they had become instantly
and craftily silent in response to his violent gesture, they stared
at him meekly and dumbly, with a kind of stricken dullness, and
already ashamed of his outburst he picked up the heavy book again,
fumbled with trembling fingers for the poem, and said:  "You can go
after I've finished reading the poem: it won't take but a moment
more!"

The class stirred restlessly, there was a little mutter of protest,
Abe smiled bitterly, shaking his head with a slight sigh of weary
indifference.  He glanced up quickly and caught them in a series of
sly communications: at the back of the room Sadie Feinberg, her fat
neck half-turned to the right, was whispering out of the corner of
her mouth to Miss Bessie Weisman; to the left Mr. Sidney Osherofsky
was whispering rapidly and cynically behind his hand to Mr. Nathan
Shulemovitch; and on the right-hand side of the room Mr. Sol
Grebenschik was carrying on a guttural but animated conversation
with Mr. Sam Vucker.  Almost everyone in the class of thirty
people, in fact, was either engaged in conversation or preparing to
engage in conversation.  Only Abe Jones and Mr. Boris Gorewitz
remained faithful.  Mr. Boris Gorewitz always remained faithful.
He sat on the front row close, very close, ah, fragrantly,
odorously close, too, too close to his teacher!  He took notes.
When beauty was revealed he smiled murkily, showing large white
wet-looking teeth.  When passion was indicated he looked stern and
thoughtful: he was deeply stirred and polished his glasses.  When
some stupid question had been asked, or some opinion expressed with
which he did not agree, he smiled contemptuously, shook his head
violently from side to side, saying, "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah!"
quite loudly and thrust his short dirty fingers vigorously and
impatiently through the dry crinkly mass of hair that rushed back
sproutily from his bulbous forehead, while Abe turned and glanced
at him angrily, bitterly, mockingly, turning his cruel grinning
Yiddish face to Eugene with a soft "Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!" of contemptuous
laughter.

The class had now become so absorbed in its private conversations
that it was not for a moment aware of its instructor nor of the
fierce accusation of his glance.  His face would grow dark and
swollen with a rush of blood and passion, he would begin to tremble
with rage, veins stood out on his forehead.  Then in a very
extraordinary way, through a sort of comical intuition, silence
would come upon the class again: Mr. Osherofsky, who had turned in
his seat and was talking behind his hand to Mr. Shulemovitch,
gradually became aware that something was amiss from the expression
of Mr. Shulemovitch's face, which altered so subtly that almost
without changing a muscle, it indicated that it was no longer aware
of Mr. Osherofsky, that it was not listening to him, that it did
not know him, that it wished he would go away, and that it was
absorbed in its own meditation.  Abruptly Mr. Osherofsky ceased
talking, his small bright eyes shifted around rapidly at Eugene,
and immediately his gaze plunged intently into his book, while his
face took on an expression of sly humility.

Meanwhile, Miss Feinberg, who was now so completely absorbed in her
conversation with Miss Weisman that she had twisted around almost
completely to the back, received a sharp warning prod and a
meaningful frown from her companion, accompanied by a significant
lifting of the eyebrows.  Miss Feinberg at once flopped heavily
around in her seat, her heavy face fixed upon Eugene in an
expression of vacant and insolent meekness.  A loose smile faintly
touched the corners of her lax heavy mouth: her jaws ruminated
slightly at a wad of gum.  Mr. Gorewitz during this commotion had
turned in his seat and swept the faces of his comrades with a
glance full of scornful reproof.  Now he hissed loudly at them:
"Sh-h!  Sh-h!  Sh-h!"  Then, as a heavy silence fell upon the room,
he turned in his seat and looked up at Eugene with an expression of
understanding and commiseration.  He shook his head pityingly, with
a scornful smile, as he thought of these souls living in darkness
and unwilling to admit the light!  Then his own face darkened!  Let
them wallow in ignorance if they liked, but let them remember that
other people were seeking for truth and beauty!  Let them show some
consideration for others!  Then his gaze softened, a glow of
tenderness suffused his oily features, as he gazed upon Eugene's
infuriated face: he looked at him now with love, with reverence,
with adoration, and with the sympathy of a kindred spirit!  His
eloquent glance said:--"The poet, the prophet, the seer such as
you, has at every time in history been mocked and misunderstood by
the philistine mob.  Why should you suffer so, dear teacher?  You
are above them.  They can never know you or appreciate you as I do.
Despise them, beloved master.  Cast not your pearls before swine."

This devoted and tender message had been lost, however, on his
instructor: Eugene's face was set in a fixed glare of rage as he
regarded his class.  For a moment he was absolutely speechless.

"If anyone thinks," he began at length in a voice that was small
and choked with fury, "that I am here--" apparently someone did
think so, for at this moment, slowly, craftily, the knob of the
door began to move, slowly the door swung open as if propelled by a
ghostly hand.  He paused again, and this time murder sweltered in
his heart and was legible upon his face.  Softly with the tread of
a cat he stepped toward the door, and paused as if getting ready to
spring, while it opened: the class waited tensely with held breath.
Then, as slowly as the door had opened, a face was thrust in
through the opening: it was the face of one of the hall guards, the
face of an old man, a face of unutterable melancholy and of the
most dismal sourness: the old dull face with its dry sagging flesh
and its small watery eyes turned slowly on its scrawny neck,
surveying Eugene, the class, and the four walls of the room in a
glance full of dislike and suspicion.  Then slowly and craftily, as
it had come, as if it had been thrust forward on a stick by some
unseen hand, the face withdrew, and the door swung to silently once
again.

For a moment Eugene stared at the closing door with an expression
of stupefaction.  Then suddenly a surge of humour, powerful,
choking, explosive, and tongueless in its unutterable and wordless
implication, welled up in his throat.  He cast the book from him
with a roar of laughter in which the class joined.

"Get out of here," he shouted.  "I'm through!  That's enough.  Go
away!  Leave me alone!"



XLVIII


The Hotel Leopold, where he now lived, was situated on a short and
grimy street about two blocks from the university, northward, in
the direction of Union Square.

The Leopold, although one of the city's smaller hotels, was not a
single building, but a congeries of buildings which covered an
entire block.  The central and main building of the system was a
structure of twelve storeys, of that anomalous stone and brick
construction which seems to have enjoyed a vogue in the early
nineteen hundreds.  To the left was a building twenty or thirty
years older, known as "the old annex."  It was eight storeys high,
of old red brick, and the street floor was occupied by shops and a
restaurant.  To the right was a building of six storeys, which was
known as "the new annex."  This building, more simple in design
than the others, was constructed of basal stone of the rough,
porous, light-hued kind which was predominant in many of the new
architectures throughout the nation.  The building, neat, compact,
and for the most part unadorned by useless ornament, somehow gave
the effect of having been stamped out, with a million others of its
kind, by a gigantic biscuit-cutter of such buildings--and hence to
speak, how or in what way it was hard to say, yet instantly
apparent, the mechanic spirit of a "newer" or more "modern" scheme--
the scheme of "the 'twenties," of 1922 or 1924.

It was hard to know why one found fault with the building, but
somehow it left one without joy.  In many obvious ways this would
be apparent at once, not only to the architect, but to the layman--
it was superior to its companion structures.  Although not a
building which combined simple grace with use--as the old colonial
structures of New England do--it was at least a building lacking in
the clumsy and meaningless adornment which disfigured the surface
of its two companions.  Moreover, the rough, porous-looking brick
had a look of lean and homely integrity: it was hard to know why
one disliked the building, and yet one did--the other two, with all
their confusing and unreasoning decoration, were the warmer,
better, and more cheerful places.

What was it?  It was almost impossible to define the quality of
"the new annex" or its depressing effect upon the spectator, yet
its quality was unmistakable.  It belonged somehow to a new and
accursed substance which had come into the structure of life--a
substance barren, sterile, and inhuman--designed not for the use
of man, but for the blind proliferations of the man-swarm to
accommodate the greatest number in the smallest space--to shelter,
house, turn out, take in, all the nameless, faceless, mindless man-
swarm atoms of the earth.

The transient population of the Leopold, comparatively, was small.
The great tidal fluctuation of brief visitors--business men,
salesmen, newly wedded couples on their honeymoons, people from
small towns out for a spree or a week or two of bright-light
gaiety--which swarmed in unceasing movements in and out of the
city, had scarcely touched the life of the Leopold.  The hotel, set
in a quarter of the city that was a little remote from the great
business and pleasure districts, depended largely for its custom on
the patronage of a "permanent" clientele.  It was, in short, the
kind of place often referred to as "a quiet family hotel"--a phrase
which the management of the Leopold made use of in advertising the
merits of their establishment, on the hotel stationery.

But that phrase, with its soothing connotations of a tranquil,
felicitous and gentle domesticity, was misleading.  For the Leopold
was decidedly not "quiet" and although it contained within its
cell-like rooms almost every other kind of life, of "family life"
there was almost none and what there was, so desolate and barren,
that one felt himself to be looking at the museum relics of what
had once been a family rather than at the living and organic
reality.  And because of this, one felt constantly about the
Leopold the spirit of defeat--either of lives still searching,
restless and unfound, or of lives which, in the worst sense of the
word, had fallen upon evil days.

And curiously, in spite of the hotel's pious assurance of its
"quiet family life," its boast of permanency, there hovered about
the place continually, indefinably but certainly, a feeling of
naked insecurity, a terrifying transiency--not the frank transiency
of the great tourist hotels with their constant daily flux of
changing faces--but the horrible transiency of lives held here for
a period in the illusion of a brief and barren permanence, of lives
either on the wing or on the wane.

Here, for example, among the three or four hundred beings who
inhabited the motley structure of these conjoined walls, were a
number of young people who had only recently come from smaller
places and were still stunned and bewildered by the terrific impact
of the city upon their lives, or who, after a year or two of such
bewilderment, were just beginning to orient themselves, to adjust
their lives to the city's furious tempo, and to look around with a
bolder and more knowing calculation for some kind of residence a
little closer to their true desires.

To young people of this sort the Leopold had offered, when they
first came to the city, its spurious promise of warm asylum.  Many
of them had landed here--or rather popped in here like frightened
rabbits--after their first terrified immersion in the man-swarm
fury of the city's life, and the feeling of desolation, houseless
naked loneliness, bewilderment, and scrambling, scuttling terror
which the sudden impact of that ruthless, sudden revelation had
aroused in them.

For this reason, those barren walls, those terrible, hive-like
cells of the Hotel Leopold were not without a glory of their own.
For in those cell-like rooms there could be held all of the hope,
hunger, passion, bitter loneliness and earth-devouring fury that a
room could hold, or that this world can know, or that this little
racked and riven vessel of desire, this twisted tenement of man's
bitter brevity, can endure.

Here, in these desolate walls, on many a night long past and
desperately accomplished, many a young man had paced the confines
of his little cell like a maddened animal, had beat his knuckles
bloody on the stamped-out walls, had lashed about him, a creature
baffled and infuriated by the million illusions of warmth, love,
security and joy which the terrific city offered him and which,
tantalus-like, slipped from his fingers like a fume of painted
smoke the instant that he tried to get his grasp upon it.

Again, if the Hotel Leopold had housed all of the hope, joy, fury,
passion, anguish, and devouring hunger that the earth can know, and
that the wild and bitter tenement of youth can hold, it also housed
within its walls all of the barren and hopeless bitterness of a
desolate old age.  For here--unloved, friendless, and unwanted,
shunted off into the dreary asylum of hotel life--there lived many
old people who hated life, and yet who were afraid to die.

Most of them were old people with a pension, or a small income,
which was just meagrely sufficient to their slender needs.  Some of
them, widowed, withered, childless, and alone, were drearily
wearing out the end of their lives here in a barren solitude.  Some
had sons and daughters, married, living in the city, who came
dutifully to stamp the dreary tedium of waning Sunday afternoons
with the stale counterfeits of filial devotion.

The rest of the time the old people stayed in their rooms and
washed their stockings out and did embroidery, or descended to the
little restaurant to eat, or sat together in one corner of the
white-tiled lobby and talked.

Why could they never make it come to life?  Why was no great vine
growing from the hearts of all these old and dying people?  Why
were their flesh, their sagging, pouch-like jowls and faces so dry,
dead, and juiceless, their weary old eyes so dull and lustreless,
their tones so nasal, tedious and metallic?  Why was it that they
seemed never to have known any of the pain, joy, passion, evil,
glory of a dark and living past?  Why was it that their lives, on
which now the strange dark radiance of million-visaged time was
shining, seemed to have gained neither wisdom, mystery nor passion
from the great accumulation of the buried past--to have been
composed, in fact, of an infinite procession of dreary moments and
little mean adventures, each forgotten, lost, and buried, as day by
day the grey sand of their lives ran out its numberless grains of
barren tedium.

This, indeed, seemed to be the truth about them: as they sat
together in one corner of the lobby talking, all their conversation
seemed made up of dreary dialogues such as these:

"How do you do, Mrs. Grey?  I didn't see you in the restaurant
tonight."

"No--" the old woman spoke triumphantly, proudly conscious of a
sensational adventure--"I ate out tonight at a new place that my
son-in-law told me about!--Oh! I had the most DEE-licious meal--a
WON-derful meal--all anyone could eat and only sixty cents.  First
I had a dish of nice fruit salad--and then I had a bowl of soup--
oh-h! DEE-licious soup, Mrs. Martin--it was vegetable soup, but oh-
h! DEE-licious!--a whole meal in itself--and then--" with a
ruminant satisfaction she continued her arid catalogue--"I had some
nice lamb chops, and some DEE-licious green peas--and a nice baked
potato--and some salad--and some rolls and butter--and then I had a
nice cup of coffee--and a piece of apple-pie--oh-h! the apple-pie
was simply DEE-licious, Mrs. Martin, I had--"

"I'd think you'd be getting hungry by that time," said another of
the group, an old man, who was their humorist, with a wink around
him at the others.  They all laughed appreciatively, and he
continued:  "You're sure you didn't miss anything as you went
along--" he winked again and they all laughed dryly, with
appreciation.

"No, sir!"--firmly, positively, with an emphatic nod of the head--
"I ate every bite of it, Doctor Withers--oh-h, it was so DEE-
licious, I just couldn't bear to see ANYTHING go to waste--only,"
regretfully, "I did have to leave my apple-pie--I couldn't finish
it--"

"What!" the humorist exclaimed in mock astonishment.  "You mean you
left something behind!  Why, you hardly ate enough to feed an
elephant!  You'll be getting all run down if you starve yourself
this way!"--and the jester winked again, and the old women of his
audience cackled aridly with appreciative laughter.

"--Well, I know," the glutton said regretfully, "I just hated to
see that good apple-pie go to waste--oh-h! I wish you could have
tasted it, Mrs. Martin,--it was simply DEE-licious--'What's the
matter?' the girl says to me--the waitress, you know--'Don't you
like your pie?--I'll go get you something else if you don't like
it.'--Oh! yes--" with sudden recollection--"oh, yes! she says to
me, 'How'd you like some ice cream?--You can have ice cream instead
of pie,' she says, 'if you'd rather have it'--'Oh-h!' I said,"--
spoken with a kind of gasp, the withered old hand upon the meagre
stomach--"'Oh-h!' I says, 'I couldn't!'--She had to laugh, you
know, I guess the way I said it.  'Well, you got enough?' she said.
'Oh-h!' I said,"--again the faint protesting gasp, "'if I ate
another mouthful, I'd pop open!  Oh-h!"--Well, it made her laugh,
you know, the way I said it--'I'd POP open!' I said, 'I COULDN'T
eat another mouthful!'--'Well, just so long as you got enough!' she
says.  'We like to see everyone get enough.  We want you to be
satisfied,' she said.  'Oh-h!' I said," the faint protesting gasp
again, "'not another MOUTHFUL, my dear!  I COULDN'T!'--But, oh-h!
Mrs. Martin, if you could have seen that apple-pie!  It was DEE-
licious!  I was sorry to see it go to waste!"

"Well," said Mrs. Martin, rather tartly, obviously a little envious
of the other's rich adventure--"we had a good meal here at the
hotel, too.  We had some celery and olives to start off with and
then we had some good pea soup and after that we had roast beef and
mashed potatoes--wasn't the roast beef we had tonight delicious,
Doctor Withers?" she demanded of this arbiter of taste.

"Well," he said, smacking his dry lips together drolly, "the only
complaint I had to make was that they didn't bring me the whole
cow.  I had to ask George for a second helping. . . .  Yes, sir, if
I never fare any worse than that I'll have no kick--it was a very
good piece of beef--well-cooked, tender, very tasty," he said with
a dry, scientific precision, and again he smacked his leathery lips
together with an air of relish.

"--Well, I thought so, too," said Mrs. Martin, nodding her head
with satisfaction at this sign of his agreement "--I thought it was
delicious--and then," she went on reflectively, "we had a nice
lettuce and tomato salad, some biscuit tortoni and, of course," she
concluded elegantly, "the demy-tassy."

"Well, I didn't have any of the demy-tassy," said Doctor Withers,
the droll wit.  "None of your demy-tassy for me!  No, sir!  I had
COFFEE--two big cups of it, too," he went on with satisfaction.
"If I'm going to poison myself I'm going to do a good job of it--
none of your little demy-tassys for me!"

And the old women cackled aridly their dry appreciation of his wit.

"--Good evening, Mrs. Buckles," Doctor Withers continued, getting
up and bowing gallantly to a heavily built, arthritic-looking old
woman who now approached the group with a stiff and gouty movement.
"We missed you tonight.  Did you eat in the restaurant?"

"No," she panted in a wheezing tone, as, with a painful grunt, she
lowered her heavily corseted bulk into the chair he offered her.
"I didn't go down--I didn't have much appetite and I didn't want to
risk it.  I had them bring me something in my room--some tea and
toast and a little marmalade . . . I didn't intend to come down at
all," she went on in a discontented tone, "but I got tired of
staying up there all alone and I thought I'd just as well--I'd be
just as well off down here as I'd be up in my room," she concluded
morosely.

"And how IS your cold today, Mrs. Buckles?" one of the old women
now asked with a kind of lifeless sympathy.  "--Do you feel
better?"

"--Oh," the old woman said morosely, uncertainly, "I suppose
so. . . .  I think so. . . .  Yes, I think it's a little
better. . . .  Last night I was afraid it was getting down into
my chest, but today it feels better--seems to be more in my head
and throat--But I don't know," she muttered in a sullen and
embittered tone, "it's that room they've given me.  I'll always
have it as long as I've got to live there in that room.  I'll
never get any better till I get my old room back."

"Did you do what I told you to do?" asked Doctor Withers.  "Did you
go and dose yourself the way I told you?"

"--No--well," she said indefinitely, "I've been drinking lots of
water and trying a remedy a friend of mine down at the Hotel Gridly
told me about--it's a new thing called Inhalo; all you got to do is
put it up your nose and breathe it in--she said it did her more
good than anything she'd ever tried."

"I never heard of it," said Doctor Withers sourly.  "Whatever it
is, it won't cure your cold.  No, sir!"  He shook his head grimly.
"Now, I didn't practise medicine for forty years without finding
out SOMETHING about colds!  Now, I don't care anything about your
Inhalos or Breathos or Spray-Your-Throatos, or whatever they may
call 'em--any of these newfangled remedies.  The only way to get
rid of a cold is to have a thorough cleaning-out, and the only way
to get a thorough cleaning-out is to dose yourself with castor oil,
the way I told you to.--Now you can do as you please," he said
sourly, with a constricted pressure of his thin convex mouth, "it's
no business of mine what you do--if you want to run the risk of
coming down with pneumonia it's your own affair--but if you want to
get over that cold you'll take my advice."

"Well," the old woman muttered in her tone of sullen discontent.
"--It's that room I'm in.  That's the trouble.  I've hated that
room ever since they put me in there.  I know if I could get my old
room back I'd be all right again."

"Then why don't you ask Mr. Betts to give it back to you?" said
Mrs. Martin.  "I'm sure if you went to him and told him that you
wanted it, he'd let you have it."

"No, he wouldn't!" said Mrs. Buckles bitterly.  "I've been to him--
I've asked him.  He paid no attention to me--tried to tell me I was
better off where I was, that it was a better room, a better
bargain!--Here I've been living at this place for eight years now,
but do you think they show me any consideration?  No," she cried
bitterly, "they're all alike nowadays--out for everything they can
get--it's grab, grab, grab--and they don't care who you are or how
long they've known you--if they can get five cents more from
someone else, why, out you go! . . .  When I came back here from
Florida last spring I found my old room taken. . . .  I went to Mr.
Betts a dozen times and asked to have it back and he always put me
off--told me there were some people in there who were leaving soon
and I could have it just as soon as they moved out. . . .  That was
all a put-up job," she said resentfully.  "He didn't mean a word of
it.  I see now that he never had any intention of giving me my old
room. . . .  No!  They've just found that they can get a dollar or
two more a week for it from these fly-by-nights than I could afford
to pay--and so, of course, I'm the one that gets turned out!" she
said.  "That's the way it goes nowadays!"

"Well," said Mrs. Martin a trifle acidly, "I'm sure if you went to
Mr. Betts in the right way you could get your old room back.  He's
always done everything I ever asked him to do for ME.  But, of
course," she said pointedly, "you've got to approach him in the
right way."

"Oh-h!" said old Mrs. Grey rapturously, "I think Mr. Betts is the
NICEST manager they've ever had here--so pleasant, so good-NATURED!
so WILLING to oblige!  Now that other man they had here before he
came--what was his name?" she said impatiently.  "--Mason, or
Watson, or Clarkson--something like that--"

"Wilson," said Doctor Withers.

"--Oh, yes--Wilson!" said Mrs. Grey.  "That's it--Wilson!  I never
liked him at ALL," she said with an accent of scornful depreciation.
"You could NEVER get anything out of Wilson.  He never did anything
you wanted him to do.  But Mr. BETTS!--oh-h! I think Mr. Betts is a
lovely manager!"

"Well, I haven't found him so," said Mrs. Buckles grimly.  "I liked
Wilson better."

"Oh, I don't agree with you, Mrs. Buckles," Mrs. Grey said with a
stony and somewhat hostile emphasis.  "I don't ag-GREE with you at
ALL!  I think there's no COMPARISON!  I like Mr. Betts SO much
better than I like Wilson!"

"Well, I like Wilson better," said Mrs. Buckles grimly, and for a
moment the two old women glared at each other with bitter hostile
eyes.

"--Well," Doctor Withers broke the silence quickly in a diplomatic
effort to avert an impending clash, "--what are your plans for the
winter, Mrs. Buckles?  What have you decided to do?  Are you going
to Florida again this winter?"

"I don't know what I'll do," old Mrs. Buckles answered in a tone of
sullen dejection.  "I haven't decided yet. . . .  I had planned to
go down to Daytona Beach with Mrs. Wheelwright--that's my friend at
the Hotel Gridly--she had a daughter living in Daytona and we had
planned to spend the winter there in order to be near them.  But
now that's all fallen through," she said dejectedly.  "Here, at the
last moment, when all my plans were made, she decided not to go--
says she likes it at the Gridly and it will be cheaper to stay on
there than to make a trip to Florida and back. . . .  That's the
trouble with people nowadays," she said bitterly, "you can't depend
on them.  They never mean anything they say!"  And she lapsed again
into a sullen and dejected silence.

"Why aren't you going to St. Petersburg?" said Mrs. Martin
curiously after a brief pause.  "I thought that's where you always
spent the winter."

"It was," said Mrs. Buckles, "until last winter.  But I'll never go
back there again.  It's not the same place any more.  I've been
going to the same hotel down there for more than twenty years--it
used to be a lovely place; when I went back there last winter I
found the whole place changed.  They had ruined it," she bitterly
concluded.

"How was that?" said Doctor Withers curiously.  "What had they done
to it?"

Mrs. Buckles looked around cautiously and craftily to make sure
that in this sinister melting-pot of a million listening ears, she
would not be overheard, and then, bending forward painfully, with
one old arthritic hand held up beside her mouth, she muttered
confidingly to her listeners:

"--I'll tell you what it is.  It's the JEWS!  They get in
everywhere," she whispered ominously.  "They ruin EVERYTHING!  When
I got down there last winter the whole place was overrun with Jews!
They had ruined the place!" she hissed.  "The place was RUINED!"

At this moment another old woman joined the group.  She advanced
slowly, leaning on a cane, smiling, and with a movement of spacious
benevolence.  Everything about this old woman--her big frame, slow
movement, broad and tranquil brow, silvery hair parted in the
middle, and her sonorous and measured speech, which came
deliberately from her mouth in the periods of a cadenced rhetoric--
had an imposing and majestic quality.  As she approached, everyone
greeted her eagerly and with obvious respect, Doctor Withers got up
quickly and bent before her with almost obsequious courtesy, she
was herself addressed by everyone as "Doctor," and her position
among them seemed to be one of secure and tranquil authority.

This old woman was known to everyone in the hotel as Doctor
Thornton.  She had been one of the first women physicians in the
country and a few years before, after a long and, presumably,
successful practice, she had retired to spend the remaining years
of her life in the peaceful haven of the Leopold, and to bestow on
man, God, nature and the whole universe around her the cadenced and
benevolent reflections of her measured rhetoric.  She became, by
virtue of this tranquil and majestic authority that emanated from
her, the centre of every group, young and old, that she approached.
She was known to everyone in the hotel, everyone referred to her as
"a wonderful old woman," spoke of her brilliant mind, her ripe
philosophy, and her "beautiful English."

The respect and veneration in which she was held were now instantly
apparent as, with a benevolent smile, she slowly approached this
company of old people.  They greeted her with an eager and excited
scraping of chairs, the welcoming tumult of several old voices,
speaking eagerly at once: Doctor Withers himself scrambled to his
feet, pushed a large chair into the circle and stood by gallantly
as, with a slow and stately movement, she settled her large figure
into it, and for a moment looked about her over the top of her cane
with a tranquil, smiling and benevolent expression.

"WELL, Doctor!" said Mrs. Grey, almost breathlessly.  "Where have
you been keeping yourself all day long?  We've MISSED you."

The others murmured agreement to this utterance, and then leaned
forward with eager attentiveness so as not to miss any of the gems
of wisdom which would fall from this great woman's lips.

For a moment Doctor Thornton regarded her interlocutor with an
expression of tolerant and almost playful benevolence.  Presently
she spoke:

"What have I been doing all day long?" she repeated in a tone of
sonorous deliberation.  "Why, my dear, I have been READING--
reading," she pursued with rhythmical sonority, "in one of my
favourite and most cherished volumes."

And instantly there was for all her listeners a sense of some
transforming radiance in the universe: an event of universal
moment: the Doctor had been reading all day long.  They looked at
her with an awed stare.

"What," Mrs. Martin nervously began, with a little giggle, "--what
was it you were reading, Doctor?  It must have been a good book to
hold your interest all day long?"

"It was, my dear," said Doctor Thornton sonorously and
deliberately.  "It WAS a good book.  More than that, it was a GREAT
book--a magnificent work of genius to show us to what heights the
mind of man may soar when he is inspired by lofty and ennobling
sentiments."

"What was this, Doctor Thornton?" Doctor Withers now inquired.
"--Something of Tennyson's?"

"No, Doctor Withers," Doctor Thornton answered sonorously, "it was
not Tennyson--much as I admire the noble beauty of his poetry.  I
was not reading poetry, Doctor Withers," she continued, "I was
reading--PROSE," she said.  "I was reading--RUSKIN!"  As these
momentous words fell from her lips her voice lowered with such an
air of portentous significance that the last word was not so much
spoken as breathed forth like an incense of devotion.  "RUSKIN!"
she whispered solemnly again.

And although it is doubtful if this name conveyed any definite
meaning to her audience, its magical effect upon them was evident
from the looks of solemn awe with which they now regarded her.

"--RUSKIN!" she said again, this time strongly, in an accent of
rapturous sonority.  "The noble elevation of his thought, the
beautiful proportion and the ordered harmony of all the parts, the
rich yet simple style, and, above all, the sane and wholesome
beauty of his philosophy of art--what nobler monument to man's
higher genius was ever built, my friends, than he proportioned in
The Stones of Venice--itself a work of art entirely worthy of the
majestic sculptures that it consecrates?"

For a moment after the sonorous periods of that swelling rhetoric
had ceased, the old people stared at her with a kind of paralysis
of reverent wonder.  Then old Mrs. Grey, gasping with a kind of
awed astonishment, said:

"Oh-h, Doctor Thornton, I think it's the most WONDERFUL thing the
way you keep your mind occupied all the time with all these deep
and beautiful thoughts you have!  I don't see how you do it!  I
should think you'd get yourself all tired out just by the THINKING
that you do."

"Tired, my dear?" said Doctor Thornton sonorously, bestowing upon
her worshipper a smile of tolerant benevolence.  "How can anyone
grow tired who LIVES and MOVES and BREATHES in this great world of
ours?  No, no, my dear, do not say TIRED.  Rather say REFRESHED,
REJUVENATED, and INSPIRED by the glorious pageant that life offers
us in its unending beauty and profusion.  Wherever I look," she
continued, looking, "I see nothing but order and harmony in the
universe.  I lift my eyes unto the stars." she said majestically,
at the same time lifting her face in a movement of rapturous
contemplation toward the ceiling of the hotel lobby, "and feast my
soul upon the infinite beauties of God's heaven, the glorious
proportion of the sidereal universe.  I turn my gaze around me, and
everywhere I look I see the noble works that man has fashioned, the
unceasing progress he has made in his march upward from the brute,
the noble aspiration of his spirit, the eternal labour of his
mighty intellect towards a higher purpose, the radiant beauty of
his countenance in which all the highest ardours of his soul may be
discerned!"

And as she pronounced this sonorous eulogy her glance rested
benevolently on old Doctor Withers' soured and wizened features.
He lowered his head coyly, as becomes a modest man, and in a moment
the rhapsodist continued:

"'What a piece of work is man!  How noble in reason!  How infinite
in faculty!  In form, in moving, how express and admirable!  In
action, how like an angel!  In apprehension, how like a God!'"

And having sonorously pronounced Hamlet's mighty judgment, the
wonderful old woman, who had herself for thirty years been one of
the most prosperous abortionists in the nation, looked benevolently
about her at all the specimens of God's choice article who were
assembled in the lobby.

Over behind the cigar counter the vendor, a fat Czechish youth with
a pale flabby face and dull taffy-coloured hair, was industriously
engaged in picking his fat nose with a greasy thumb and forefinger.
Elsewhere, in another corner of the lobby, three permanent denizens
of the Leopold, familiarly and privately known to members of the
hotel staff as Crab-face Willy, Maggie the Dope, and Greasy Gertie,
were sitting where they always sat, in an unspeaking and unsmiling
silence.

And at this moment two more wonder-works of God came in from the
street and walked rapidly across the lobby, speaking the golden and
poetic language which their Maker had so marvellously bestowed on
them.

"Cheezus!" said one of them, a large man with a grey hat and a
huge, dead, massive face of tallowy grey which receded in an
indecipherable manner into the sagging flesh-folds of his flabby
neck--"Cheezus!" he eloquently continued with a protesting laugh
that emerged from his tallowy lips in a hoarse expletive mixed with
spittle--"Yuh may be right about him, Eddie, but Cheezus!"--again
the hoarse protesting laugh.  "Duh guy may be all right, but
Cheezus!--I don't know!  If he'd come in dere like duh rest of dem
an' let me know about it--but Cheezus!--duh guy may be all right
like you say!--but Cheezus!  Eddie, I don't know!"

Doctor Thornton bestowed on them the benevolent approval of her
glance as they went by and then, turning to her awed listeners
again, declared sonorously with a majestic and expressive gesture
of her hand:

"Tired?  How could one ever grow tired, my friends, in this great
world of ours?"



XLIX


At the end of his classes, the final end, when all had spoken, when
that hot wave of life and turbulence had withdrawn, the last
clattering footfalls had echoed away along the corridors, the last
loud aggressive voices had faded into silence, leaving, it seemed,
an odour of exhaustion, use, and weariness even in the walls,
boards and benches of the room, so that the empty class-room had a
tired but living presence of fatigue, the indefinable but sharply
felt character of a room with people absent from it, and seemed
somehow to relax, settle, and respire with relief and weariness--at
this final, fagged, and burned-out candle-end of day, Abraham
Jones, as relentless as destiny, would be there waiting for Eugene.
He waited there, grim, grey, unsmiling, tortured-looking behind an
ominous wink of glasses, a picture of Yiddish melancholy and
discontent, and as Eugene looked at him his heart went numb and
dead; he hated the sight of him.  He sat there now in the front
rows of the class like a nemesis of scorn, a merciless censor of
Eugene's ignorance and incompetence: the sight of his dreary
discontented face, with its vast grey acreage of a painful Jewish
and involuted intellectualism, was enough, even at the crest of a
passionate burst of inspiration, to curdle his blood, freeze his
heart, stun and deaden the fiery particle of his brain, and thicken
his tongue to a faltering, incoherent mumble.  Eugene did not know
what Abe wanted, what he expected, what kind of teaching he thought
worthy of him: he only knew that nothing he did suited him, that
the story of his inadequacy and incompetence was legible in every
line of that grey, dreary, censorious face.  He thought of it at
night with a kind of horror: the ghoulish head which craned out of
a vulture's body swept after him through all the fields of a
distressful sleep, a taloned fury filled with croakings of hoarse
doom.  Never before had Eugene been driven through desperation to
such exhausting intensities of work: night by night he sweated
blood over great stacks and sheaves of their dull, careless,
trivial papers--he read, re-read, and triple-read them, putting in
all commas, colons, periods, correcting all faults of spelling,
grammar, punctuation that he knew, writing long, laborious comments
and criticisms on the back and rising suddenly out of a haunted
tortured sleep to change a grade.  And at the end, the inexorable
end, he was always faced with the menace of Abe's weekly paper;
with dread and quaking he tackled it.  He wrote the best papers
that Eugene got: the grammar was flawless, the spelling impeccable,
the vocabulary precise and extensive, the sentences cleanly and
forcibly shaped.  The thought was sound, subtle, and coherent--by
every standard the work was of an extraordinary grade and quality,
its merit was unmistakable, and yet Eugene approached a four-page
paper with fear and trembling; before he had gone beyond the first
paragraph great sobs and groans of weariness and despair were wrung
from him; he stamped across the floor with it like a man maddened
by an aching tooth; he began again, he flung himself upon the bed,
got up and walked again, doused his head in basins of cold water--
but it was no use: to read the paper to the end, as he did and
must, was weariness and travail of the spirit--it was like eating
chalk or trying to suck sweetness out of paving brick, or being
drowned in an ocean of dish-water, or forced to gorge oneself on
boiled unseasoned spinach.  Abe wrote on a great range and variety
of subjects and everything he wrote was good: he wrote about the
plays of Pirandello, of "Six Characters in Search of an Author,"
and of "three planes of reality" therein: he estimated and analysed
those three planes with the power of a philosopher, the delicacy of
a subtle-souled psychologist, and all of this to Eugene was as
weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, because it was so good,
and he did not know what was wrong, and he could not endure to read
it.  He could not write upon his papers that he found them
intolerably dull unless he knew wherein the reason for that
dullness lay, and he did not know the reason: accordingly the
highest grade he ever gave to anyone--the grade of "A"--was week by
week wrung from trembling and reluctant fingers.  But no matter
what the grade was, or how flattering the comment, Abe protested.
Grey, dreary, tortured, discontented, Yiddish, he would be waiting
for Eugene at the end of every class, clutching his paper in his
impatient fingers, armed and eager for the combat of dispute that
was to follow.

The class met at night and they would walk rapidly away together
along the empty echoing corridors, and, turning, clatter down the
stairs that led to the main entrance.  The vast building was
deserted and full of weary echoes: they could hear the solitary
clang of an elevator door and the dynamic hum of its machinery as
it mounted.  Someone was walking in the big corridor downstairs:
they heard the echoing ring of his footsteps on the slick marble
flags, and the noisy rattle of a cleaner's bucket on the floor.
The whole building was charged with a weary electric quality--with
the quality of a light which has gone dim.  And the taste and the
smell of this weariness were in Eugene's mouth and nostrils; it was
as if he had stuck his tongue against a warm but burned-out storage
battery; it was like the smell that comes from the wheels of a
street car when they have ground around a curve, or like the odour
from a smoking hot-box on the fast express.  His body also had this
feeling of electric weariness, as if the vital currents were
exhausted: his flesh felt dry and juiceless, his back was tired,
his loins were sterile, the acrid burned-out flavour filled him.

The big ugly building breathed slowly with the fatigue of inanimate
objects which have been overcharged with human energy: it was
haunted with its tired emptiness, with the absence of the thousands
of people who had swarmed through its every part that day with such
a clamorous, hot and noisy life.  The lifeless air in its passages
had been breathed and rebreathed again and again: the walls, the
furniture, the floors--every part of the building--seemed to exude
this sense of nervous depletion.

As he hurried down the stairs on such an evening with his
unshakable companion, his implacable disputant, he hated the
building more than he had ever hated any building before: it seemed
to be soaked in all the memories of fruitless labour and harsh
strife, of fear and hate and weariness, of ragged nerves and
pounding heart and tired flesh: the building brooded there, charged
with its dreadful burden of human pain, encumbered with its grief;
and his hatred for the building was the hatred of a man for the
place where he has met some terrible humiliation of the flesh or
spirit, or for the room in which a man has seen his brother die, or
for the dwelling from which love and the beloved have departed.
The ghosts of pain and darkness sat in the empty chairs, the
spirits of venom and sterility brooded over the desks: dry hatred
and the poison of the brain were seated in the chairs of the
instructors; fear trembled in their seats, it made a hateful cold
around the heart, it made the bowels queasy, it made swallowing
hard, it slithered at the edges of the desk, it fell and crawled
and wobbled like a boneless thing.  And the grey-faced Jew beside
Eugene made the weary lights burn dim: he gave a tongue to
weariness, a colour to despair.

They hurried down the steps and left the building almost as if they
were in flight.  The heavy door clanged to behind them making
echoes in the halls, they reached the pavement of the Square, and
immediately they halted.  Here they were in another world, and
their weary bodies drank in a new vitality.  Sometimes, on a cold
still night in winter, the sky had the peculiarly frosty clarity
that comes from a still, biting cold.  Above the great vertical
radiance and cold Northern passion of New York, it was a-glitter
with magnificent stars, it was a-glitter with small pollens, with a
jewelled dust of stars that seemed to have been sown drunkenly
through heaven, and as Eugene looked his weariness was cleansed out
of him at once, he was filled with an overwhelming desire to
possess beauty and all things else, and to include all things in
him.  He would learn to be all things: he would be an artist and he
would find a way of living in the maelstrom.  The darkness filled
him with a sense of power and possession: his spirit soared out
over the city, and over the earth, he was no longer afraid of the
grey-faced Jew beside him, peace and power and certitude possessed
him.  He drank the air into his veins in great gulps, he saw the
huge walled cliff of the city ablaze with its jewellery of hard
sown lights, he knew he could possess it all, and a feeling of joy
and victory rushed through his senses.

Under the furious goad of desperation, a fear of failure and
disgrace, a sense of loneliness and desolation, and a grim
determination to go down into the dust of ruin only when he could
no longer lift a hand or draw a breath, he learned his job, and
found his life again, he did the labour of a titan, the flesh
wasted from his bones, he became a mad, driven zealot, but he was a
good teacher, and the day came when he knew he need no longer draw
his breath in fear or shame, that he had paid his way and earned
his wage and could meet them eye to eye.  He took those swarthy
swarming classes and looted his life clean for them: he bent over
them, prayed, sweated, and exhorted like a prophet, a poet, and a
priest--he poured upon them the whole deposit of his living,
feeling, reading, the whole store of poetry, passion and belief: he
went into the brain of a dullard like a surgeon, and he blew some
spark of fire into a glow in even the least and worst of them, but
that grey-faced Yiddish inquisitor hung doggedly to his heels; the
more he gave, the more Abe wanted; he fed on Eugene's life,
enriching his greyness with an insatiate and vampiric gluttony, and
yet he never had a word of praise, a sentence of thanks, a syllable
of commendation.

Instead he became daily more open in his surly discontent, his sour
depreciation; his insolence, unchecked, grew by leaps and bounds,
he exulted in a feeling of cruel crowing Jewish mastery over
Eugene's bent aching spirit, he walked away with him day by day and
his conversation now was one long surly indictment of his class,
his teaching, and his competence.  Why didn't Eugene give them
better topics for their themes?  Why didn't they use another volume
of essays instead of the one they had, which was no good?  Why, in
the list of poems, plays, biographies and novels which Eugene had
assigned, and which were no good, had he omitted the names of
Jewish writers such as Lewisohn and Sholem Asch?  Why did he not
give each student private "conferences" more frequently, although
he had conferred with them until his brain and heart were sick and
weary?  Why did they not write more expository, fewer descriptive
themes; more argument, less narration?  Why, in short, did he not
do everything in a different way?--the indictment, merciless,
insistent, unrelenting, piled up day by day and meanwhile
resentment, anger, resolution began to blaze and burn in Eugene, a
conviction grew that this could no longer be endured, that no life,
no age, no position was worth this thankless toil and trouble, and
that he must make an end of a situation which had become
intolerable.

One night, when Abe had accompanied Eugene from the class to the
entrance of the hotel, and as he was in the full course and tide of
his surly complaint, Eugene stopped him suddenly and curtly,
saying:  "You don't like my class, do you, Jones?  You don't think
much of the way I teach, do you?"

Abe was surprised at the question, because his complaint had always
had a kind of sour impersonality: it had never wholly dared a final
accusatory directness.

"Well," he said in a moment, with a surly and unwilling tone, "I
never said that.  I don't think we're getting as much out of the
class as we should.  I think we could get a lot more out of it than
we're getting.  That's all I said."

"And you have a few thousand suggestions to make that would improve
it?  Is that it?"

"Well, I had to tell you how I felt about it," Abe said doggedly.
"If you don't like it, I'm sorry.  You know we fellows down there
have got to pay tuition.  And they charge you plenty for it,
too! . . .  Don't let them kid you!" he said with a derisive and
scornful laugh.  "That place is a goldmine for someone!  The
trustees are getting rich on it!"

"Well, I'm not getting rich on it," Eugene said.  "I get $150 a
month out of it.  Apparently you think it's too much."

"Well, we've got a right to expect the best we can get," he said.
"That's what we're there for.  That's what we're paying out our
dough for.  You know, the fellows down there are not rich guys like
the fellows at Yale and Harvard.  A dollar means something to
them. . . .  We don't get everything handed to us on a silver
platter.  Most of us have got to work for everything we get, and if
some guy who's teaching us is not giving us the best he's got we
got a right to kick about it. . . .  That's the way I feel about
it."

"All right," Eugene said, "I know where you stand now.  Now, I'll
tell you where I stand.  I've been giving you the best I've got,
but you don't think it's good enough.  Well, it's all I've got and
it's all you're going to get from me.  Now, I tell you what you're
going to do, Jones.  You're going out of my class.  Do you
understand?" he shouted.  "You're going now.  I never want to see
you in my class again.  I'll get you transferred, I'll have you put
in some other instructor's class, but you'll never come into my
room again."

"You can't do that," Abe said.  "You've got no right to do that.
You've got no right to change a fellow to another class in the
middle of the term.  I've done my work," he said resentfully;
"you're not going to change me. . . .  I'll take it to the faculty
committee if you do."

Eugene could stand no more: in misery and despair he thought of all
he had endured because of Abe, and the whole choking wave of
resentment and fury which had been gathering in his heart for
months burst out upon him.

"Why, damn you!" he said.  "Go to the faculty committee or any
other damned place you please, but you'll never come back to any
room where I'm teaching again.  If they send you back, if they say
I've got to have you in my class, I quit.  Do you hear me, Jones?"
he shouted.  "I'll not have you!  If they try to force me, I'm
through!  To hell with such a life!  I'll get down and clean out
sewers before I have you in my class again. . . .  Now, you damned
rascal," his voice had grown so hoarse and thick he could hardly
speak, and the blind motes were swimming drunkenly before him.
". . . I've had all I can stand from you. . . .  Why, you damned
dull fellow. . . .  Sitting there and sneering at me day after day
with your damned Jew's face. . . .  What are you but a damned dull
fellow, anyway? . . .  Why, damn you, Jones, you didn't deserve
anyone like me. . . .  You should get down on your knees and thank
God you had a teacher half as good as me. . . .  You . . .
damned . . . FELLOW. . . .  You! . . .  To think I sweat blood
over you! . . .  Now, get away from here!" . . . he yelled.  "To
hell with you! . . .  I never want to see your face again!"

He turned and started toward the hotel entrance: he felt blind and
weak and dizzy, but he did not care what happened now: after all
these weeks of heavy misery a great wave of release and freedom was
coursing through his veins.  Before he had gone three steps Abe
Jones was at his side, clutching at his sleeve, beseeching,
begging, pleading:  "Say! . . .  You've got the wrong idea!  Honest
you have! . . .  Say!  I never knew you felt like that!  Don't send
me out of there," he begged earnestly, and suddenly Eugene saw that
his shining glasses had grown misty and that his dull weak eyes
blinked with tears.  "I don't want to leave your class," he said.
"Why, that's the best class that I've got! . . .  Honest it is!  No
kiddin'! . . .  All the fellows feel the same way about it."

He begged, beseeched, and almost wept: finally, when good will had
again been restored between them, he wrung Eugene's hand, laughed
painfully and shyly, and then took off his misted glasses and began
to shine and polish them with a handkerchief.  His grey ugly face
as he stood there polishing his glasses had that curiously naked,
inept, faded and tired wistful look that is common to people with
weak eyes when they remove their spectacles; it was a good and ugly
face, and suddenly Eugene began to like Abe very much.  He left him
and went up to his room with a feeling of such relief, ease and
happiness as he had not known for months; and that night,
unhaunted, unashamed, unpursued by fears and furies and visions of
his ruin and failure for the first time in many months, he sank
dreamlessly, sweetly, deliriously, into the depths of a profound
and soundless sleep.

And from that moment, through every change of fortune, all absence,
all return, all wandering, and through the whole progress of his
city life, through every event of triumph, ruin, or madness, this
Jew, Abe Jones, the first man-swarm atom he had come to know in all
the desolation of the million-footed city--had been his loyal
friend.

It was not the golden city he had visioned as a child, and the grey
reptilian face of that beak-nosed Jew did not belong among the
company of the handsome, beautiful and fortunate people that he had
dreamed about, but Abe was made of better stuff than most dreams
are made of.  His spirit was as steady as a rock, as enduring as
the earth, and like the flash of a light, the sight of his good,
grey ugly face could always evoke for Eugene the whole wrought
fabric of his life in the city, the whole design of wandering and
return, with a thousand memories of youth and hunger, of
loneliness, fear, despair, of glory, love, exultancy and joy.



L


Robert Weaver appeared suddenly one night about seven o'clock as
Eugene was sitting in the lobby at the Leopold: he had not seen
Robert since their arrest.  His visit to the hotel was the result
of a sudden impulse on Robert's part: immediately, without greeting
or any preliminary whatever, he began to ask all sorts of questions
about the Leopold--How long had Eugene been there?  Did he have a
good room and how big was it?  How well did he like living at the
hotel?  Then insisted that Eugene show him his room.  Eugene got
his key at the desk and took him up: at the sight of the small room
with its piles of books and stacks of student themes Robert burst
out laughing.  Then he began to ask all manner of questions in a
serious and earnest tone--Where was the bathroom?--Eugene showed
him--Did they give him plenty of towels?--Eugene told him--How much
did he pay?--Eugene said the rent was twelve dollars a week.

He received these answers with an air of astounded surprise, his
manner became even more earnest and excited, he began to say, "You
don't mean it!" "Well, I'll be damned!" "Well, what do you know
about that?"--as if the most astonishing revelations were being
made to him.  Eugene looked at him with misgiving, because he was
obviously caught in the full surge of one of his impulses and, sure
enough, all at once he said with an air of complete decision:
"Damned if I don't do it!  It's the very place I've been looking
for all along!  Why, look at all you get for the money!  Damnedest
bargain I ever heard of!  I've just been throwing my money away up
there!"--he had been living at the Yale Club--"Damned if I don't
get me a room and move in right away!"

This sudden prospect of having Robert as a neighbour did not
attract the other youth: he was working very hard with his classes
and trying to complete a play he had begun to write, and he had no
intention of becoming the companion or nurse of Robert's
drunkenness or the confessor of his fevered despair and unrest: he
told him he would not like the Leopold, that the people were old
and stodgy, and the rules of propriety very strict.  Further, he
made the mistake of emphasizing the difficulty of getting a room
there, although there really was no difficulty: he told him the
place was a quiet family hotel, that the management wanted regular
tenants of quiet habits who intended to live there permanently,
that the preference was given to middle-aged married couples, and
that there were no vacancies, anyway--that a long list of
applicants were waiting to get in.  All this merely whetted
Robert's eagerness: he now said that he fulfilled all the
requirements save marriage, and that this deficiency would soon be
remedied: he said he had completely reformed his old habits of
life, and that a quieter, steadier, more sober and industrious man
did not exist: he said he was determined to live there, and he
demanded that Eugene take him to the manager and plead for him
without delay.

When Eugene saw that he was really determined, he agreed: they went
downstairs to see the manager.  He came out of his office with the
habitual defensive look of caution and suspicion on his sour meagre
face, and listened with his usual unwilling and disparaging air,
not facing them or directly looking at them, but with his small
parsley face averted and his eyes turned downward, while Eugene
praised Robert up to the skies, said he had known him all his life,
that he was the scion of an ancient and distinguished family in the
South, a brilliant young attorney in a New York firm, and one of
the steadiest and most proper youths that ever lived.  Robert also
put in from time to time with his deep voice and impressive
manners, and at length Mr. Gibbs began to shake his head dubiously,
to say he didn't know, to tell how difficult it was to get admitted
to the Leopold--until Eugene almost laughed in his face--but that
in a case like this, because it was Eugene and he knew if he
recommended a man he must be all right, and so on--he would see
what he could do: he began to thumb over the pages of a meaningless
ledger, peering at it and squinting along his parched finger as it
moved across the page and chattering and mumbling like a monkey: at
length he straightened with an air of decision, took four or five
keys from their boxes and gave them to the negro captain with
instructions "to show this gentleman these rooms."  They all got
into the elevator and went upstairs again with Robert and the
negro: they looked at several rooms and at length, after great
indecision, appeals for advice and guidance, and innumerable
questions, Robert selected a room in the old annexe--a selection
for which the other youth was grateful, since his own room was in
the new one.



Robert moved in promptly the next day: they had dinner together; he
was in a state of jubilant elation.  Then no more was seen or heard
of him for a week; when Eugene did get news of him it was neither
welcome nor reassuring.  The phone in his room rang one morning as
he was dressing: a voice from the office asked him curtly to see
Mr. Gibbs when he came down.  He went downstairs with a sense of
ominous misgiving: Mr. Gibbs came toward him with a puckered and
protesting face as if he had just tasted something sour and
unexpected; he began to speak at once in a tone of shocked and
astounded indignation:  "In heaven's name!" he rasped; "who is this
man Weaver that you brought here?  What kind of man is here?  YOU
brought him here," he said accusingly.  "YOU recommended him.  We
thought he was all right.  We took YOUR word for it?  What's wrong
with the man?  Is he crazy?  Is he out of his head completely?"--
his face was soured and wrinkled like a persimmon, his small
pinched figure trembled with excitement and indignation, he looked
at the boy with an expression of horrified reproof--he was a
comical sight, but the boy was in no temper at the moment to
appreciate the humour of his appearance.

"What is it, Mr. Gibbs?  What's the matter?  What has he done?"

"Why," he said, trembling with anger at the very thought of it, "he
tried to burn us all up last night.  He came in here at three
o'clock in the morning, raving and carrying on like a crazy man.
Then he went upstairs and set his room on fire."

"On fire!"

"Why, yes!" said Gibbs.  "We had to call the fire brigade to put it
out.  Why, it's a wonder any of us are left alive--all of these
people sleeping in the hotel and this crazy man yelling and
screaming at five o'clock this morning that the place is on fire!
Why, we can't have anything like that in this hotel," he said with
the air of one who describes the desecration of a temple.  "We
can't have a man like that here.  Why, he'll drive the other people
out, we'll lose all our guests: people aren't going to stay in a
place with a crazy man.  There's no telling what a man like that is
liable to do.  Now!" he said with an air of abrupt and pugnacious
decision, "he's got to get out: I won't have him here!  I'm not
going to have a man like that in my hotel a moment longer"--his
small jaw hardened meanly, his face shrank, and his eyes narrowed,
as he turned away, "and someone's got to pay for all the damage
that was done!  Now, I don't care who pays it"--his face was
averted--"but it's not going to be us!  Now you can tell him," he
snapped curtly, and he left.

Eugene went upstairs at once to Robert's room in a state of choking
anger and resentment: he felt that Robert had tricked him and taken
advantage of him, that he was being held accountable for Robert's
misbehaviour, and that now his own standing in the hotel had been
jeopardized and he would be forced to leave this delightful and
charming establishment at which he had cursed and mocked so
bitterly many times, but which now, in his resentful spirit, took
on a peaceful and home-like glamour it had never had before.  He
walked into Robert's room without knocking: the room was a wreck, a
negro maid was mournfully and sullenly gathering up from the floor
the charred and blackened remnants of a pile of bed-linen and
blankets; the mirror had been smashed by a drinking-glass which
Robert had hurled at it, he said, when he saw his image reflected
in it, the remnants of a chair lay on the floor, the heavy glass
plate upon a writing table had been broken, there was a large
brownish stain upon one of the walls where he had hurled a whisky
bottle, and one end of his bed lay tilted on the floor where he had
stamped or kicked the slats and boards to splinters.  Robert was
standing in the midst of all the ruin he had made, with a nervous
and rueful expression on his face: when his friend came in he
looked at him uneasily and laughed in a feeble and foolish manner,
without conviction.

"Now, damn it, don't stand there laughing about it, Robert," the
other said.  "You may think it's funny as hell, but it's no joke
for me.  Of course," he went on bitterly, "I'm the goat.  I'm the
one who's got to suffer for it.  I'm the one they hold responsible.
Now you've just fixed it so that I can't stay here in the hotel any
longer: they're going to put me out!"

"You!" Robert said, in a protesting tone.  "Why, it's not your
fault.  You didn't have anything to do with it."

"You're damned well right, I didn't," he answered.  "And you're
going to tell them so.  Now, I was a fool once, but you won't catch
me that way again: I begged and pleaded to get you in here and you
go and play a dirty trick like this.  And you're going to pay for
it, too."

"I'll pay, I'll pay," Robert said hastily.  "I know it was my
fault.  I'll pay whatever they ask.  Have they said anything to you
about it?" he said nervously.  "What do they say?"

"They say you've got to pay for all the damage that you've done and
get out of the hotel at once."

"Oh, I'll pay!" he said earnestly, and with a pleading note in his
voice.  "I don't want to leave the hotel. . . .  I'll never act
like that again. . . .  Does Gibbs want to see me?" he said
nervously.

"You can just bet your bottom dollar he does!  And right now!"

"Come on!" said Robert coaxingly.  "You go with me. . . .  He'll
listen to you. . . .  Tell him how it was."

"Tell him how it was!  Why, he knows damn well how it was!  And so
do you!  You were lousy and crazy-drunk, that's how it was. . . .
No, I won't do it: I've been your goat long enough.  You'll have to
fight it out with him for yourself. . . .  And don't you bring my
name into it, either, Robert; this was a hell of a thing to do!"
Eugene yelled furiously.  "In God's name, what's got into you?
Have you gone mad?"

"Ah," he said in a brooding, sullen tone, "you know what it is. . . .
It's that woman. . . .  It's Martha!  I can't get her off my
mind, I think about her all the time. . . .  My God, Eugene, if
something doesn't happen soon, I will go crazy, sure enough."

"Happen!  What do you want to happen?"

He beat himself, suddenly and savagely, on his breast.

"Christ knows!" he said.  "Something's got to break loose . . .
here . . . here . . . here!"  His eyes were shot with tears and a
madness of desperation: in this baffled and infuriated gesture
there was something that was really painful, tortured, and deeply
moving: all at once Eugene felt sorry for him; he did not know why
Robert wanted to stay at the hotel any longer; he did not know what
he found there in that shabby and sterile life to attract or
interest him, and perhaps it was nothing except a sense in him that
he was disgraced, an outcast from the ranks of orderly society: he
wanted to stay in order to subdue the fear and shame he felt, and
to soothe, in whatever way he could, his lacerated pride.
Therefore Eugene resolved to help him.

"Robert," he said, "if you really want to stay here, why don't you
go and see old Gibbs and talk to him.  Tell him you're sorry for
all the trouble you made and the damage you did, and that you're
willing to pay whatever he says is fair.  Then let him rave.  He's
a sour old devil and he'll bawl you out, but let him rave.  He
enjoys it.  Then tell him if he'll let you stay, you'll never act
like this again.  And if I can help out any, I'll do it."

He agreed to this at once, and Eugene left him and went to his own
room: when he went downstairs a few minutes later on his way to his
first-class, Robert was standing at the desk, submissively
attentive to the tongue-lashing Gibbs was giving him.  The little
man was in a state of trembling denunciation, he squinted and
peered at Robert's face, and wagged an indignant finger at him; his
shrewd, sour, nasal voice carried to all parts of the room, and
Robert listened apologetically and sorrowfully, putting in a word
of penitent assent from time to time, in a deep, respectful voice:

"I quite agree with you. . . .  You are absolutely right, sir. . . .
It was a terrible thing to do. . . .  I'll never do it again as
long as I live . . . I'll pay you for every bit of damage that I
did"--and he took out his cheque-book and opened it upon the
counter.  Eugene went over and joined them: the old man was
beginning to simmer down somewhat into occasional howls and blasts
of fury, like a hurricane which has spent its fiercest violence and
is in process of abatement: Robert began to talk smoothly,
entreatingly, and charmingly--he swore to a complete and abject
repentance, spoke touchingly and mysteriously of great storms and
tragedies in his recent life which had driven him to this mad and
violent explosion, and gave his solemn oath never to repeat the
experience again if he was only allowed to remain in the hotel:
Eugene put in a word of agreement here and there when he thought it
might help--the upshot of it was that Gibbs finally began to speak
to Robert in a tone of almost paternal affection, a kind of
radiance was given off from his meagre soul, he bent towards Robert
intimately, he even laughed--and when they departed, to their
astonishment, he even gave the repentant sinner a warm squeeze of
the hand and a friendly pat upon the shoulder.



Within a period of three furious months Robert made trips to
Colorado seven times: he got on trains and was hurled 2000 miles
across the continent as casually as a man would make the subway
trip from Times Square to Brooklyn Heights.  Sometimes he would
leave New York on Friday night and be back within four or five
days, after spending ten hours with Martha Upshaw: sometimes he
would be gone a week, and once he did not return for three.  On
this occasion Eugene received a telegram from him when he had been
absent about five days: the message curtly bade Eugene to send all
his mail to a hotel in Colorado Springs until further notice, and
said he would explain on his return.

Eugene was sitting in the lobby one evening two weeks later when
Robert came in.  He walked with a limp and his face seemed to have
undergone a curious angular distortion: he came toward Eugene with
a kind of frozen grin and when he spoke to him he began to mutter
something incoherent between set teeth and to point with his finger
at his jaw.  In a few moments, Eugene was able to decipher his
jargon sufficiently to understand that his jaw and nose were
broken, that most of the teeth had been extracted, in order that
the jaw-bone might be wired together, and that he could not open
his mouth now, either to speak or eat, because of wires that bound
the fracture.  In addition, his nose, which had been strong and
straight, now curved sideways in a wide broken arc.

Robert was shockingly thin and wasted, he said he had bled a great
deal, and had been unable to eat any solid food since his injury:
it was obvious he had about reached the limit of his strength, the
whole contour of his skull was visible, his eyes were sunken and
burned with a more furious and fatal glow than ever before.

But he laughed at Eugene's look of stupefaction when he saw him,
and laughed again, morosely and indifferently, as he told him the
cause of his injuries: he said he had been driving with Martha
Upshaw the night he got to Colorado Springs, both had been to a
roadhouse and were drunk and neither, to use his description of
their feeling, "gave a damn."  The girl was driving, the hour was
late, they had come round a curve in a mountain road at great
speed, the car had left the road, plunged down a steep embankment,
and turned over three times before it smashed up against a tree.
The girl had been badly cut by broken glass and had several
stitches taken in wounds on her face and head, but she broke no
bones.  Robert had been hurled twenty feet from the car, he was
unconscious and bleeding horribly, and it had been thought at first
his injuries were fatal.

But here he was, at least a vital piece of him, smashed and broken,
but still fiercely living.  It was obvious, however, that this
final catastrophe had hardened his spirit in a resolute desperation:
the suicidal fatalism--that hunger for death which all men have in
them and which is perhaps as strong a driving-force in man as the
hunger for life--and which had been strongly marked in Robert only
when he was drunk--had now become the habit of his soul.  He no
longer cared whether he lived or died, in his inmost heart he had
grown amorous of death, and it was evident that living flesh and
bone could not much longer endure the cruel beating he had given it.
And this fact--this shocking, visible, physical fact--as much as
anything--sealed him in fatal desperation, confirmed him in his
belief that everything was lost.



LI


Man's youth is a wonderful thing: it is so full of anguish and of
magic and he never comes to know it as it is, until it has gone
from him for ever.  It is the thing he cannot bear to lose, it is
the thing whose passing he watches with infinite sorrow and regret,
it is the thing whose loss he must lament for ever, and it is the
thing whose loss he really welcomes with a sad and secret joy, the
thing he would never willingly re-live again, could it be restored
to him by any magic.

Why is this?  The reason is that the strange and bitter miracle of
life is nowhere else so evident as in our youth.  And what is the
essence of that strange and bitter miracle of life which we feel so
poignantly, so unutterably, with such a bitter pain and joy, when
we are young?  It is this: that being rich, we are so poor; that
being mighty, we can yet have nothing, that seeing, breathing,
smelling, tasting all around us the impossible wealth and glory of
this earth, feeling with an intolerable certitude that the whole
structure of the enchanted life--the most fortunate, wealthy, good,
and happy life that any man has ever known--is ours--is ours at
once, immediately and for ever, the moment that we choose to take a
step, or stretch a hand, or say a word--we yet know that we can
really keep, hold, take, and possess for ever--nothing.  All
passes; nothing lasts: the moment that we put our hand upon it it
melts away like smoke, is gone for ever, and the snake is eating at
our heart again; we see then what we are and what our lives must
come to.

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost.  He has
everything and he is able to use nothing.  He hurls the great
shoulder of his strength for ever against phantasmal barriers, he
is a wave whose power explodes in lost mid-oceans under timeless
skies, he reaches out to grip a fume of painted smoke; he wants
all, feels the thirst and power for everything, and finally gets
nothing.  In the end, he is destroyed by his own strength, devoured
by his own hunger, impoverished by his own wealth.  Thoughtless of
money or the accumulation of material possessions, he is none the
less defeated in the end by his own greed--a greed that makes the
avarice of King Midas seem paltry by comparison.

And that is the reason why, when youth is gone, every man will look
back upon that period of his life with infinite sorrow and regret.
It is the bitter sorrow and regret of a man who knows that once he
had a great talent and wasted it, of a man who knows that once he
had a great treasure and got nothing from it, of a man who knows
that he had strength enough for everything and never used it.

All youth is bound to be "misspent"; there is something in its very
nature that makes it so, and that is why all men regret it.  And
that regret becomes more poignant as the knowledge comes to us that
this great waste of youth was utterly unnecessary, as we discover,
with a bitter irony of mirth, that youth is something which only
young men have, and which only old men know how to use.  And for
that reason, in later years, we all look back upon our youth with
sorrow and regret--seeing what a wealth was ours if we had used it--
remembering Weisberg, Snodgrass, and O'Hare--finally remembering
with tenderness and joy the good bleak visage of the pavement
cipher who was the first friend we ever knew in the great city--in
whose grey face its million strange and secret mysteries were all
compact--and who was our friend, our brother, and this earth's
nameless man.  And so Eugene recalled Abraham Jones.

This ugly, good, and loyal creature had almost forgotten his real
name: the "Jones," of course, was one of those random acquisitions
which, bestowed in some blind, dateless moment of the past, evoked
a picture of those nameless hordes of driven and frightened people
who had poured into this country within the last half-century, and
whose whole lives had been determined for them by the turn of a
word, the bend of a street, the drift of the crowd, or a surly and
infuriated gesture by some ignorant tyrant of an official.  In such
a way, Abe Jones's father, a Polish Jew, without a word of Yankee
English in his throat, had come to Castle Garden forty years before
and, stunned and frightened by the moment's assault of some furious
little swine of a customs inspector, had stood dumbly while the man
snarled and menaced him:  "What's yer name? . . .  Huh? . . . Don't
yuh know what yer name is? . . .  Huh? . . .  Ain't yuh got a
name? . . .  Huh?"  To all this the poor Jew had no answer but a
stare of stupefaction and terror: at length a kind of frenzy seized
him--a torrent of Polish, Jewish, Yiddish speech poured from his
mouth, but never a word his snarling inquisitor could understand.
The Jew begged, swore, wept, pleaded, prayed, entreated--a thousand
tales of horror, brutal violence and tyranny swept through his
terror-stricken mind, the whole vast obscene chronicle of immigration
gleaned from the mouths of returned adventurers or from the letters
of those who had triumphantly passed the gates of wrath: he showed
his papers, he clasped his hands, he swore by all the oaths he knew
that all was as it should be, that he had done all he had been told
to do, that there was no trick or fraud or cheat in anything he did
or said, and all the time, the foul, swollen, snarling face kept
thrusting at him with the same maddening and indecipherable curse:
"Yer name! . . .  Yer name! . . .  Fer Christ's sake don't yuh know
yer own name? . . .  All right!" he shouted suddenly, furiously,
"If yuh ain't got a name I'll give yuh one! . . .  If yuh ain't got
sense enough to tell me what yer own name is, I'll find one for
yuh!"  The snarling face came closer:  "Yer name's Jones!  See!
J-o-n-e-s.  Jones!  That's a good Amurrican name.  See?  I'm giving
yuh a good honest Amurrican name that a lot of good decent
Amurricans have got.  Yuh've gotta try to live up to it and desoive
it!  See?  Yer in Amurrica now, Jones. . . .  See? . . .  Yuh've
gotta t'ink fer yerself, Jones.  In Amurrica we know our own name.
We've been trained to t'ink fer ourselves over here! . . .  See?
Yer not one of them foreign dummies any more! . . .  Yer Jones--
Jones--Jones!" he yelled.  "See!"--and in such a way, on the
impulsion of brutal authority and idiotic chance, Abe's father had
been given his new name.  Eugene did not know what Abe's real name
was: Abe had told him once, and he remembered it as something
pleasant, musical, and alien to our tongue, difficult for our
mouths to shape and utter.

Already, when he had first met Abe Jones in the first class he
taught, the process of mutation had carried so far that he was
trying to rid himself of the accursed "Abraham," reducing it to an
ambiguous initial, and signing his papers with a simple unrevealing
"A. Jones," as whales are said to have lost through atrophy the use
of legs with which they once walked across the land, but still to
carry upon their bodies the rudimentary stump.  Now, in the last
year, he had dared to make a final transformation, shocking,
comical, pitifully clumsy in its effort at concealment and
deception: when Eugene had tried to find his name and number in the
telephone directory a month before, among the great grey regiment
of Joneses, the familiar, quaint, and homely "Abe" had disappeared--
at length he found him coyly sheltered under the gentlemanly
obscurity of A. Alfred Jones.  The transformation, thus, had been
complete: he was now, in name at any rate, a member of the great
Gentile aristocracy of Jones; and just as "Jones" had been thrust
by violence upon his father, so had Abe taken violently, by theft
and rape, the "Alfred."  There was something mad and appalling in
the bravado, the effrontery, and the absurdity of the attempt: what
did he hope to do with such a name?  What reward did he expect to
win?  Was he engaged in some vast conspiracy in which all depended
on the SOUND and not the APPEARANCE of deception?  Was he using the
mails in some scheme to swindle or defraud?  Was he carrying on by
correspondence an impassioned courtship of some ancient Christian
maiden with one tooth and a million shining dollars?  Or was it
part of a gigantic satire on Gentile genteelness, country-club
Christianity, a bawdy joke perpetrated at the expense of sixty
thousand anguished and protesting Social Registerites?  That he
should hope actually to palm himself off as a Gentile was
unthinkable, because one look at him revealed instantly the whole
story of his race and origin: if all the Polish-Russian Jews that
ever swarmed along the ghettoes of the earth had been compacted in
a single frame the physical result might have been something
amazingly like Eugene's friend, Abraham Jones.

The whole flag and banner of his race was in the enormous
putty-coloured nose that bulged, flared and sprouted with the
disproportionate extravagance of a caricature or a dill-pickle over
his pale, slightly freckled and rather meagre face; he had a wide,
thin, somewhat cruel-looking mouth, dull weak eyes that stared,
blinked, and grew misty with a murky, somewhat slimily ropy feeling
behind his spectacles, a low, dull, and slanting forehead, almost
reptilian in its ugliness, that sloped painfully back an inch or
two into the fringes of unpleasantly greasy curls and coils of
dark, short, screwy hair.  He was about the middle height, and
neither thin nor fat: his figure was rather big-boned and angular,
and yet it gave an impression of meagreness, spareness, and
somewhat tallowy toughness which so many city people have, as if
their ten thousand days and nights upon the rootless pavement had
dried all juice and succulence out of them, as if asphalt and brick
and steel had got into the conduits of their blood and spirit,
leaving them with a quality that is tough, dry, meagre, tallowy,
and somewhat calloused.



What earth had nourished him?  Had he been born and grown there
among the asphalt lilies and the pavement wheat?  What corn was
growing from the cobble-stones?  Or was there never a cry of earth
up through the beaten and unyielding cement of the streets?  Had he
forgotten the immortal and attentive earth still waiting at the
roots of steel?

No.  Beneath that cone of neat grey felt, behind the dreary,
tallowed pigment of his face, which had that thickened, stunned,
and deadened look one often sees upon the faces of old bruisers, as
if the violent and furious assault of stone and steel, the million
harsh metallic clangours, the brutal stupefaction of the streets,
at length had dried the flesh and thickened the skin, and blunted,
numbed and calloused the aching tumult of the tortured and
tormented senses--there still flowed blood as red and wet as any
which ever swarmed into the earth below the laurel bush.  He was a
part, a drop, an indecipherable fraction of these grey tides of
swarming tissue that passed in ceaseless weft and counter-weft upon
the beaten pavements, at once a typical man-swarm atom and a living
man.  Indistinguishable in his speech, gait, dress, and tallowy
pigmentation from the typical cell-and-pavement article, at the
same time, although ugly, meagre, toughened, gnarled and half-
articulate, angular as brick and spare as steel webbing, with
little juice and succulence, he was honest, loyal, somehow good and
memorable, grained with the life and movement of a thousand
streets, seasoned and alert, a living character, a city man.  In
that horrible desperation of drowning and atomic desolation among
the numberless hordes that swept along the rootless pavements, in
Eugene's madness to know, own, intrude behind the million barriers
of brick, to root and entrench himself in the hive, he seized upon
that dreary, grey and hopeless-looking Jew.

This was his history:

Abraham Jones was one of the youngest members of a large family.
In addition to two brothers, younger than himself, there were three
older brothers and two sisters.  The family life was close,
complex, and passionate, torn by fierce dislikes and dissensions,
menaced by division among some of its members, held together by
equally fierce loyalties and loves among the others.  Abe disliked
his father and hated one of his older brothers.  He loved one of
his sisters and was attached to the other one by a kind of loyalty
of silence.

She, Sylvia, was a woman of perhaps thirty-five years when Eugene
first saw her; she had not lived at home for ten years, she was a
febrile, nervous, emaciated, highly enamelled city woman--a lover
of what was glittering and electric in life, caught up in the surge
of a furious and feverish life, and yet not content with it,
dissonant, irritable and impatient.  Like the rest of her family
she had been forced to shift for herself since childhood: she had
been first a salesgirl, then a worker in a millinery shop, and now,
through her own cleverness, smartness, and ability, she had
achieved a very considerable success in business.  She ran a hat
shop on Second Avenue, which Abe told him was the Broadway of the
lower East Side: she had a small, elegant, glittering jewel of a
shop there, blazing with hard electric light and smartly and
tastefully dressed with windows filled with a hundred jaunty styles
in women's hats.  She did a thriving business and employed several
assistants.

The first time Eugene met her, one day when Abe had taken him home
to the flat where he lived with his mother, two of his brothers,
and Sylvia's child, he thought she had the look and quality of an
actress much more than of a business woman.  There was a remarkably
electric glitter and unnaturalness about her: it seemed as if the
only light that had ever shone upon her had been electric light,
the only air she could breathe with any certitude and joy the
clamorous and electric air of Broadway.  Her face belonged, indeed,
among those swarms of livid, glittering, night-time faces that pour
along the street, with that mysterious fraternity of night-time
people who all seem to speak a common language and to be bound
together by some central interest and communication, who live
mysteriously and gaudily without discoverable employments, in a
world remote and alien.  Sylvia was a woman of middling height, but
of a dark and almost bird-like emaciation: all the flesh seemed to
have been starved, wasted, and consumed from her by this devil of
feverish and electric unrest and discontent that glittered with
almost a drugged brilliance in her large dark eyes.  Every visible
portion of her body--hair, eyebrows, lashes, lips, skin and nails--
was greased, waved, leaded, rouged, plucked, polished, enamelled
and varnished with the conventional extravagance of a ritualistic
mask until now it seemed that all of the familiar qualities of
living tissue had been consumed and were replaced by the painted
image, the varnished mask of a face, designed in its unreality to
catch, reflect, and realize effectively the thousand lurid shifting
lights and weathers of an electric, nocturnal, and inhuman world.
Moreover, she was dressed in the most extreme and sharpest
exaggeration of the latest style, her thin long hands, which were
unpleasantly and ominously veined with blue, and her fragile
wrists, which were so thin and white that light made a pink
transparency in them when she lifted them, were covered, loaded--
one vast encrusted jewelled glitter of diamond rings and bracelets:
a fortune in jewellery blazed heavily and shockingly on her bony
little hands.

Her life had been hard, painful, difficult, full of work and
sorrow.  Ten years before, when she was twenty-five years old, she
had had her first--and probably her last--love affair.  She had
fallen in love with an actor at the Settlement Guild--a little East
Side theatre maintained by the donations of two rich æsthetic
females.  She had left her family and become his mistress: within
less than a year the man deserted her, leaving her pregnant.

Her child was a boy: she had no maternal feeling and her son, now
nine years old, had been brought up by Abe's mother and by Abe.
Sylvia rarely saw her son: she had long ago deserted the orthodoxy
of Jewish family life; she had a new, impatient, driving, feverish
city life of her own, she visited her family every month or so, and
it was then, and only then, that she saw her child.  This boy,
Jimmy, was a bright, quick, attractive youngster, with a tousled
sheaf of taffy-coloured hair, and with the freckled, tough, puggish
face and the cocky mutilated pavement argot and assurance of the
city urchin: he was nevertheless excellently clothed, schooled, and
cared for, for the old woman, Abe's mother, watched and guarded
over him with the jealous brooding apprehension of an ancient hen,
and Sylvia herself was most generous in her expenditures and
benefactions, not only for the child, but also for the family.

The relation between Sylvia and her illegitimate child Jimmy was
remarkable.  He never called her "mother"; in fact, neither seemed
to have a name for the other, save an impersonal and rather awkward
"You."  Moreover, the attitude of both mother and child was
marked by a quality that was hard, knowing, and cynical in its
conversation: when she spoke to him her tone and manner were as
cold and impersonal as if the child had been a stranger or some
chance acquaintance, and this manner was also touched by a quality
that was resigned and somewhat mocking--with a mockery which seemed
to be directed toward herself more than toward anyone, as if in the
physical presence of the boy she saw the visible proof and living
evidence of her folly, the bitter fruit of the days of innocence,
love, and guileless belief, and as if she was conscious that a joke
had been played on both her and her child.  And the boy seemed to
understand and accept this feeling with a sharp correspondence of
feeling, almost incredible in a child.  And yet they did not hate
each other: their conversations were cynically wise and impersonal
and yet curiously honest and respectful.  She would look at him for
a moment with an air of cold and casual detachment, and that faint
smile of mockery when, on one of her visits home, he would come in,
panting and dishevelled, a tough and impish urchin, from the
street.

"Come here, you," she would say at length, quietly, harshly.
"Whatcha been doin' to yourself?" she would ask, in the same hard
tone, as deftly she straightened and re-knotted his tie, smoothed
out his rumpled sheaf of oaken-coloured hair.  "You look as if yuh
just crawled out of someone's ash-can."

"Ah!" he said in his tough, high city-urchin's voice, "a coupla
guys tried to get wise wit' me an' I socked one of 'em.  Dat's
all!"

"Oh-ho-ho-ho!"--Abe turned his grey grinning face prayerfully to
heaven and laughed softly, painfully.

"Fightin", huh?" said Sylvia.  "Do you remember what I told you
last time?" she said in a warning tone.  "If I catch yuh fightin'
again there's goin' to be no more ball games.  YOU'LL stay HOME
next time."

"Ah!" he cried again in a high protesting tone.  "What's a guy
gonna do?  Do you t'ink I'm gonna let a coupla mugs like dat get
away wit' moidah?"

"Oh-ho-ho-ho!" cried Abe, lifting his great nose prayerfully again;
then with a sudden shift to reproof and admonition, he said
sternly:  "What kind of talk do you call that?  Huh?  Didn't I tell
you not to say 'mugs'?"

"Ah, what's a guy gonna say?" cried Jimmy.  "I neveh could loin all
dem big woids, noway."

"My God!  I wish you'd listen to 'm," his mother said in a tone of
hard and weary resignation.  "I suppose that's what I'm sendin' him
to school for!  'LOIN, WOIDS, NOWAY, T'INK!  Is THAT the way to
talk?" she demanded harshly.  "Is THAT what they teach yuh?"

"Say THINK!" commanded Abe.

"I DID say it," the child answered evasively.

"Go on!  You DIDN'T!  You didn't say it right.  I'll bet you can't
say it right.  Come on!  Let's hear you: THINK!"

"T'ink," Jimmy answered immediately.

"Oh-ho-ho-ho!"--and Abe lifted his grinning face heavenward,
saying, "Say!  This is rich!"

"Can yuh beat it?" the woman asked.

And, for a moment she continued to look at her son with a glance
that was quizzical, tinged with a mocking resignation, and yet with
a cold, detached affection.  Then her long blue-veined hands
twitched nervously and impatiently until all the crusted jewels on
her wrists and fingers blazed with light: she sighed sharply and,
looking away, dismissed the child from her consideration.

Although the boy saw very little of his mother, Abe watched and
guarded over him as tenderly as if he had been his father.  If the
child were late in coming home from school, if he had not had his
lunch before going out to play, if he remained away too long Abe
showed his concern and distress very plainly, and he spoke very
sharply and sternly at times to the other members of the family if
he thought they had been lax in some matter pertaining to the boy.

"Did Jimmy get home from school yet?" he would ask sharply.  "Did
he eat before he went out again? . . .  Well, why did you let him
get away, then, before he had his lunch? . . .  For heaven's sake!
You're here all day long: you could at least do that much--I can't
be here to watch him all the time, you know--don't you know the kid
ought never to go out to play until he's had something to eat?"

Eugene saw the child for the first time one day when Abe had taken
him home for dinner: Abe, in his crisp neat shirt-sleeves, was
seated at the table devouring his food with a wolfish and prowling
absorption, and yet in a cleanly and fastidious way, when the child
entered.  The boy paused in surprise when he saw Eugene: his
wheaten sheaf of hair fell down across one eye, one trouser leg had
come unbanded at the knee and flapped down to his ankle, and for a
moment he looked at Eugene with a rude frank stare of his puggish
freckled face.

Abe, prowling upward from his food, glanced at the boy and grinned;
then, jerking his head sharply toward Eugene, he said roughly:

"Whatcha think of this guv?  Huh?"

"Who is he?" the boy asked in his high tough little voice, never
moving his curious gaze from Eugene.

"He's my teacher," Abe said.  "He's the guy that teaches me."

"Ah, g'wan!" the child answered in a protesting tone, still fixing
Eugene with his steady and puzzled stare.

"Whatcha handin' me?  He's NOT!"

"Sure he is!  No kiddin'!" Abe replied.  "He's the guy that teaches
me English."

"Ah, he's NOT!" the boy answered decisively.  "Yuh're bein' wise."

"What makes you think he's not?" Abe asked.

"If he's an English teacher," Jimmy said triumphantly, "w'y don't
he say somet'ing?  W'y don't he use some of dose woids?"

"Oh-ho-ho-ho!" cried Abe, lifting his great bleak nose aloft.
"Say! . . .  This is good! . . .  This is swell! . . .  Say, that's
some kid!" he said when the boy had departed.  "There's not much
gets by HIM!"  And lifting his grey face heavenward again, he
laughed softly, painfully, in gleeful and tender reminiscence.

Thus, the whole care and government of the boy had been entrusted
to Abe and his mother: Sylvia herself, although she paid liberally
all her child's expenses, took no other interest in him.  She was a
hard, feverish, bitter, and over-stimulated woman, and yet she had
a kind of harsh loyalty to her family: she was, in a fierce and
smouldering way, very ambitious for Abe, who seemed to be the most
promising of her brothers: she was determined that he should go to
college and become a lawyer, and his fees at the university, in
part at any rate, were paid by his sister--in part only, not
because Sylvia would not have paid all without complaint, but
because Abe insisted on paying as much as he could through his own
labour, for Abe, too, had embedded in him a strong granite of
independence, the almost surly dislike, of a strong and honest
character, of being beholden to anyone for favours.  On this score,
indeed, he had the most sensitive and tender pride of anyone Eugene
had ever known.



At home Abe had become, by unspoken consent, the head of a family
which now consisted only of his mother, two brothers, and his
sister's illegitimate child Jimmy.  Two of his older brothers, who
were in business together, had married and lived away from home, as
did Sylvia, and another sister, Rose, who had married a musician in
a theatre orchestra a year or two before; she was a dark, tortured
and sensitive Jewess with a big nose and one blind eye.  Her
physical resemblance to Abe was marked.  She was a very talented
pianist, and once or twice he took Eugene to visit her on Sunday
afternoons: she played for them in a studio room in which candles
were burning and she carried on very technical and knowing
conversations about the work of various composers with her brother.
Abe listened to the music when she played with an obscure and murky
smile: he seemed to know a great deal about music: it awakened a
thousand subtle echoes in his Jewish soul, but for Eugene, somehow,
the music, and something arrogant, scornful, and secretive in their
knowingness, together with the dreary consciousness of a winter's
Sunday afternoon outside, the barren streets, the harsh red waning
light of day, and a terrible sensation of thousands of other
knowing Jews--the men with little silken moustaches--who were
coming from concerts at that moment, awakened in him vague but
powerful emotions of nakedness, rootlessness, futility and misery,
which even the glorious memory of the power, exultancy and joy of
poetry could not conquer or subdue.  The scene evoked for him
suddenly a thousand images of a sterile and damnable incertitude,
in which man groped indefinitely along the smooth metallic sides of
a world in which there was neither warmth, nor depth, nor door to
enter, nor walls to shelter him: he got suddenly a vision of a
barren Sunday and a grey despair, of ugly streets and of lights
beginning to wink and flicker above cheap moving-picture houses and
chop-suey restaurants, and of a raucous world of cheap and flashy
people, as trashy as their foods, as trivial and infertile as their
accursed amusements, and finally of the Jews returning through a
thousand streets, in that waning and desolate light, from symphony
concerts, an image which, so far from giving a note of hope, life,
and passionate certitude and joy to the wordless horror of this
damned and blasted waste of Dead-Man's Land, seemed to enhance it
rather and to give it a conclusive note of futility and desolation.

Abe and his sister did not seem to feel this: instead the scene,
the time, the day, the waning light, the barren streets, the music,
awakened in them something familiar and obscure, a dark and painful
joy, a certitude Eugene did not feel.  They argued, jibed, and
sneered harshly and arrogantly at each other: their words were
sharp and cutting, impregnated with an aggressive and unpleasant
intellectualism; they called each other fools and sentimental
ignoramuses, and yet they did not seem to be wounded or offended by
this harsh intercourse: they seemed rather to derive a kind of
bitter satisfaction from it.

Already, the first year Eugene had known him he had discovered this
strange quality in these people: they seemed to delight in jeering
and jibing at one another; and at the same time their harsh mockery
had in it an element of obscure and disquieting affection.  At this
time Abe was carrying on, week by week, a savage correspondence
with another young Jew who had been graduated with him from the
same class in high school.  He always had in his pocket at least
one of the letters this boy had written him, and he was for ever
giving it to Eugene to read, and then insisting that he read
his answer.  In these letters they flew at each other with
undisciplined ferocity, they hurled denunciation, mockery, and
contempt at each other, and they seemed to exult in it.  The tone
of their letters was marked by an affectation of cold impersonality
and austerity, and yet this obviously was only a threadbare cloak
to the furious storm of personal insult and invective, the desire
to crow over the other man and humiliate him, which seemed to
delight them.  "In your last letter," one would write, "I see that
the long-expected débâcle has now occurred.  In our last year at
high school I saw occasional gleams of adult intelligence in your
otherwise infantile and adolescent intellect, and I had some hope
of saving you, but I now see my hopes were wasted--your puerile
remarks on Karl Marx, Anatole France, et al., show you up as the
fat-headed bourgeois you always were, and I accordingly wash my
hands of you.  You reveal plainly that your intellect is incapable
of grasping the issues involved in modern socialism: you are a
romantic individualist and you will find everything you say
elegantly embalmed in the works of the late Lord Byron, which is
where you belong also: your mother should dress you up in a cowboy
suit and give you a toy pistol to play with before you hurt
yourself playing around with great big rough grown-up men."

Abe would read Eugene one of these letters, grinning widely with
Kike delight, lifting his grinning face and laughing softly, "Oh-
ho-ho-ho-ho!" as he came to some particularly venomous insult.

"But who wrote you such a letter?" Eugene demanded.

"Oh, a guy I went to school with," he answered, "a friend of mine!"

"A friend of yours!  Is that the kind of letter that your friends
write you?"

"Sure," he said.  "Why not?  He's a good guy.  He doesn't mean
anything by it.  He's got bats in the belfry, that's all.  But wait
till you see what I wrote HIM!" he cried, grinning exultantly as he
took his own letter from his pocket.  "Wait till you see what I
call HIM!  Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!"--softly, painfully, he laughed.  "Say,
this is rich!" and gleefully he would read his answer: five closely
typed pages of bitter insult and vituperation.

Another astonishing and disquieting circumstance of this brutal
correspondence was now revealed: this extraordinary "friend" of
Abe's, who wrote him these insulting letters, had not gone abroad,
nor did he live in some remote and distant city.  When Eugene asked
Abe where this savage critic lived, he answered:  "Oh, a couple of
blocks from where I live."

"But do you ever see him?"

"Sure.  Why not?" he said, looking at Eugene in a puzzled way.  "We
grew up together.  I see him all the time."

"And yet you write this fellow letters and he writes you, when you
live only a block apart and see each other all the time?"

"Sure.  Why not?" said Abe.

He saw nothing curious or unusual in the circumstance, and yet
there was something disturbing and unpleasant about it: in all
these letters Eugene had observed, below the tirades of abuse, an
obscure, indefinable, and murky emotionalism that was somehow ugly.

Within a few months, however, this strange communication with his
Jewish comrade ceased abruptly: Eugene began to see Abe, in the
halls and corridors of the university, squiring various Jewish
girls around with a sheepish and melancholy look.  His lust for
letter-writing still raged with unabated violence, although now the
subjects of his correspondence were women.  His attitude towards
girls had always been cold and scornful: he regarded their
cajoleries and enticements with a fishy eye and with a vast Jewish
caution and suspiciousness, and he laughed scornfully at anyone who
allowed himself to be ensnared.  Like many people who feel deeply,
and who are powerfully affected by the slightest and remotest
changes in their emotions, he had convinced himself that he was a
creature whose every action was governed by the operations of cool
reason, and accordingly now that his feelings were powerfully and
romantically involved in thoughts about several of these warm and
luscious-looking Jewish wenches, he convinced himself that he
"cared only for their minds" and that what he really sought
from them was the stimulation of intellectual companionship.
Accordingly, the love-letters which this great-nosed innocent now
wrote to them, and read to Eugene, were extraordinary and unwitting
productions of defence and justification.

". . . I think I observe in your last letter," Abe would write,
"traces of that romantic sentimentality which we have both seen so
often in these childish lives around us but from which you and I
long ago freed ourselves.  As you know, Florence, we both agreed at
the beginning that we would not spoil our friendship by the
intrusion of a puerile and outmoded romanticism.  Sex can play no
part in our relations, Florence: it is at best a simple biological
necessity, the urge of the hungry animal which should be recognized
as such and satisfied without intruding on the higher faculties.
Have you read Havelock Ellis yet?  If not, you must read him
without further delay. . . .  So Myrtle Goldberg really thought I
was in earnest that night of the dance. . . .  Ye Gods!  It is to
laugh!  Ha-ha!  What fools these mortals be . . . I laugh, and yet
I do not laugh . . . I laugh and observe my laughter, and then
there is yet another level of reality which observes my laughter at
my laughter. . . .  I play the clown with an ironic heart and put
on the grinning mask these fools wish to see. . . .  O tempora!
O mores!"--etcetera.

And yet these same letters, in which he protested the cold
detachment of his spirit, his freedom from the romantic fleshliness
which degraded the lives of lesser men, were invariably tagged and
embellished by little verses of his own contriving, all of them
inspired by the emotion he pretended to despise.  He always had a
number of these little poems written down in a small note-book of
black leather which he carried with him, and in which, at this
time, with a precise and meticulous hand, he noted down his rarest
thoughts, excerpts from books he had been reading, and these brief
poems.  At this lime Abe was in a state of obscure and indefinable
evolution: it was impossible to say what he would become, or what
form his life would take, nor could he have told, himself.  He
walked along at a stooping loping gait, his face prowling around
mistrustfully and with a glance full of tortured discontent: he was
tormented by a dozen obscure desires and purposes and by a deep but
murky emotionalism: his flesh was ugly, bowed and meagre--conscious
of a dreary inferiority (thus, in later and more prosperous years,
he confessed to Eugene that he loved to abuse and "order around"
brusquely the waiters in restaurants, because of the feeling of
power and authority it gave him), but his spirit was sustained by
an immense and towering vanity, a gloomy egotism which told him he
was not as other men, that his thoughts and feelings were too
profound and rare to be understood and valued by the base world
about him.  At the same time he was secretly and fiercely
ambitious, although the energy of his ambition was scattered in a
half-dozen directions and could fasten on no purpose: by turn, he
wanted to be a teacher and a great investigator in the sciences--
and in this he might have succeeded, for he showed a brilliant
aptness in biology and physics--or an economist, a critic of
literature, an essayist, a historian, a poet, or a novelist.  His
desire was high: at this time he did not want to make money; he
regarded a life that was given up to money-making with contempt,
and although he sometimes spoke of the study of medicine, he looked
at the profession of law, which was the profession his sister and
his family wanted him to follow, with horror and revulsion: he
shrank with disgust from the prospect of joining the hordes of
beak-nosed crooks, poured out of the law school year by year and
who were adept in every dodge of dishonourable trickery, in working
every crooked wire, or squirming through each rat's hole of escape
and evasion the vast machinery of the law afforded them.

Such a man was Abe Jones when Eugene first knew him: dreary,
tortured, melancholy, dully intellectual and joylessly poetic, his
spirit gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of Yiddish murk, a grey
pavement cipher, an atom of the slums, a blind sea-crawl in the
drowning tides of the man-swarm, and yet, pitifully, tremendously,
with a million other dreary Hebrew yearners, convinced that he was
the Messiah for which the earth was groaning.  Such was he in the
state of becoming, an indefinable shape before necessity and his
better parts--the hard, savage, tough and honest city sinew,
hardened the mould--made a man of him,--this was Abe at this time,
an obscure and dreary chrysalis, and yet a dogged, loyal, and
faithful friend, the salt of the earth, a wonderfully good, rare,
and high person.



LII


"Where shall I go now?  What shall I do?"  A dozen times that year
he made these tormented journeys of desire.  Why did he make them?
What did he expect to find?  He did not know: he only knew that at
night he would feel again the huge and secret quickening of desire
to which all life in the city moved, that he would be drawn again,
past hope and past belief, to the huge glare, the swarming avenues
of night, with their great tides of livid night-time faces.  He
only knew that he would prowl again, again, each night, the
thronging passages of rats' alley where the dead men were; that the
million faces, forms and shapes of ungraspable desire would pass,
would weave and throng and vanish from his grasp like evil figures
in a dream, and that the old unanswered questions which have foiled
so many million lives lost there in the labyrinthine maze and fury
of the city's life, would come back again, and that he never found
an answer to them.

"What shall I do now?  Where shall I go?"  They returned to mock
his furious prowling of kaleidoscopic night with their unsearchable
enigmas and when this happened, instant, mad, and overwhelming the
desire to burst out of these canyoned walls that held him in, this
Tantalus mocker of a city that duped his hunger with a thousand
phantom shapes of impossible desire.  And when this blind and
furious impulse came to him, he knew only one desire--to escape, to
escape instantly from the great well and prison of the city; and he
had only one conviction--wild, mad, overmastering in its huge
unreason--that escape, fulfilment, a fortunate and impossibly happy
fruition lay somewhere out across the dark and lonely continent--
was somewhere there in any of its thousand silent sleeping little
towns--could be found anywhere, certainly, instantly, by the
divining rod of miraculous chance, upon the pounding wheels of a
great train, at any random halt made in the night.

Thus, by an ironic twist which at the time he did not see or
understand, this youth, who in his childhood, like a million other
boys, had dreamed and visioned in the darkness of the shining city,
and of the fortunate good and happy life that he would find there,
was now fleeing from it to find in unknown little towns the thing
that he had come to the great city to possess.

A dozen times that year he made these mad and sudden journeys: to
New England many times, to Pennsylvania, or Virginia; and more than
once at night up the great river towards the secret North.



One night that year, in the month of March, he was returning from
the wintry North--from one of those sudden and furious journeys of
caprice, which were decided on the impulse of the moment, towards
which he was driven by the goadings of desire, and from which he
would return, as now, weary, famished, unassuaged, and driven to
seek anew in the city's life for some appeasement.

Under an immense, stormy, and tempestuous sky the train was rushing
across the country with a powerful unperturbed movement; it seemed
in this dark and wintry firmament of earth and sky that the train
was the only fixed and timeless object--the land swept past the
windows of the train in a level and powerful tide of white fields,
clumped woodland, and the solid, dark, and warmly grouped buildings
of a farm, pierced scarcely by a light.  High up, in the immense
and tempestuous skies, the clouds were driving at furious speed, in
an inexhaustible processional, across the visage of a wild and
desolate moon, which broke through momently with a kind of savage
and beleaguered reprisal to cast upon the waste below a shattered,
lost and fiercely ragged light.  Here then, in this storm-lost
desolation of earth and sky, the train hung poised as the only
motionless and unchanging object, and all things else--the driving
and beleaguered moon, the fiercely scudding clouds, the immense
regimentation of heaven which stormed onward with the fury of a
gigantic and demoniacal cavalry, and the lonely and immortal earth
below sweeping past with a vast fan-shaped stroke of field and wood
and house--had in them a kind of unchanging changefulness, a spoke-
like recurrence which, sweeping past into oblivion, would return as
on the upstroke of a wheel to repeat itself with an immutable
precision, an unvarying repetition.

And under the spell of this lonely processional of white field,
dark wood and wild driven sky, he fell into a state of strange
waking-sleepfulness, a kind of comatose perceptiveness that the
motion of the train at night had always induced in him.  In this
weary world of sleep and wakefulness and all the flooding visions
of old time and memory, he was conscious of the grand enchantments
of the landscape which is at all times one of the most beautiful
and lovely on the continent, and which now, under this wild spell
of moon and scudding cloud and moving fields and wintry woods, for
ever stroking past the windows of the train, evoked that wild and
solemn joy--the sense of nameless hope, impossible desire, and
man's tragic brevity--which only the wildness, the cruel and savage
loveliness of the American earth can give.

Thus, as he lay in his berth, in this strange state of comatose
perceptiveness he was conscious first of the vast level snowclad
fields of the Canadian boundaries, the lights of farms, the
whipping past of darkened little stations; then of a wooded land,
the foothills of the Adirondacks, dark with their wintry foresting,
wild with snow; the haunting vistas of the Champlain country,
strange as time, the noble music of Ticonderoga, with its tread of
Indians and old wars, and then the pleasant swelling earth and
fields and woods and lonely little towns set darkly in the night
with a few spare lights; and pauses in the night at Saratoga, and
for a moment the casual and familiar voices of America, and people
crowding in the windows of the train, and old familiar words and
quiet greetings, the sudden thrum and starting of a motor car, and
then dark misty woods, white fields, a few spare lights and houses,
all sweeping past beneath the wild beleaguered moon with the fan-
like stroke of the immortal and imperturbable earth, with a wild
and haunting loneliness, with tragic brevity and strong joy.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he started up into sharp
wakefulness.  The train had slackened in its speed, it was slowing
for a halt at the outskirts of a town: in the distance upon the
flanks of low sweeping hills he could see a bracelet of hard bright
lights, and presently the outposts of the town appeared.  And now
he saw the spokes of empty wintry streets, and hard street lamps
that cast a barren light upon the grimy façades of old houses; and
now old grimy blocks of buildings of brown stone and brick, all
strange and close and near and as familiar as a dream.

And now the train was slowing to its halt; the old red brick of
station warehouses, the worn rust and grime of factory walls
abutting on the tracks with startling nearness, and all of it was
as it had always been, as he had always known it, and yet he had
not seen the place before.

And now the train had slowed to a full halt; he found himself
looking at a wall of old red brick at one of the station's corners.
It was one of the old brick buildings that one sees in the station
section of almost any town: in the wall beside the tracks there was
a dingy-looking door and above the door a red electric bulb was
burning with a dim but sinister invitation.  Even as he looked the
door opened, a man stepped quickly out, looked quickly to both
sides with the furtive and uneasy look men have when they come out
of a brothel, and then, turning up the collar of his overcoat, he
walked rapidly away.

And at the corner, in the first floor of the old brick building, he
could see a disreputable old bar-room, and this, too, had this
dreamlike, stage-like immediacy, it was so near to him that he
could almost have touched the building with his hand, a kind of
gigantic theatrical setting, overpowering in its immediacy, as
strange and as familiar as a dream.

Without moving in his berth he could look through the windows of
the bar, which were glazed or painted half-way up, and see
everything that was going on inside.  Despite the lateness of the
hour--the round visage of a clock above the bar told him it was
just four o'clock--there were several people in the place, and it
was doing an open thriving business.  Several men, who by their
look were probably railway workers, taxi-drivers, and night-time
prowlers of the station district--(one even wore black leather
leggings and had the fresh red complexion and healthy robust look
of a countryman)--were standing at the old dark walnut bar and
drinking beer.  The bartender stood behind the bar with his thick
hands stretched out and resting on the bar, and with a wet cloth in
one hand.  He wore an apron and was in his shirtsleeves; he had the
dead eyes and heavy sagging night-time face that some bartenders
have, but he could be seen talking to the men, responding to their
jests, with a ready professional cordiality that was nevertheless
warily ready for any situation that might come up.  And further
down the bar, another man was drinking beer and with him was a
woman.  She was one of the heavy coarsely friendly and experienced
prostitutes that one also finds in railway sections; she was
drinking beer, talking to the man amiably and with coarse
persuasiveness, and presently she took his arm with a rude
persuasive gesture and jerking her head towards the stairs pulled
him towards her.  Grinning rather sheepishly, with a pleased but
foolish look, he went along with her, and they could be seen going
upstairs.  When they were gone, the other men drinking at the bar
spoke quietly to the bartender, and in a moment he could see them
shaking with coarse guffawing laughter.  Behind the bar, in old
ornately carved walnut frames, there were big mirrors, and at the
top of the central mirror there was an American flag, fluted and
spread fan-wise, and below this there was a picture of the beetling
eyebrows and nobly Roman features of the President of the United
States, Warren G. Harding.  The whole place looked very old and
shabby, and yet somehow warm; dingy with old lights, and stained
with drink and worn with countless elbows, and weary and worn and
brutal with its memories of ten thousand nights of brawls and lust
and drunkenness--its immeasurable age and dateless weariness of
violence and desire.

Then the train moved slowly on, and left this scene for ever; it
passed the street, and there were lights here, taxis, rows of
silent buildings, and then the station, the sight of the baggage
room big with trunks, piled with mail sacks, crates and boxes, and
there were also a few people, a yardman with a lantern, a conductor
waiting with a small case in his hand, a few passengers, the brick
sides of the station, and the concrete quays.

Then the train stopped again, and this time it stopped across the
street at the other end of the station.  And again, from his dark
berth, he could see without moving this whole immense and immediate
theatre of human event, and again it gripped and held him with its
dream-like magic, its unbelievable familiarity.  At the corner, in
another old brick building, there was a little luncheon-room of the
kind he had seen ten thousand times before.  Several taxi-cabs were
drawn up along the curb, and from the luncheon-room he could hear
the hoarse wrangling voices of the taxi-drivers, joined in their
incessant and trivial debate, and through the misted window he
could see the counterman, young, thin, sallow, wearily attentive,
wearing a dirty apron, and in his shirt-sleeves, leaning back, his
thin white arms humbly folded as he listened.

And on the corner, just below the window of his berth, there stood
a boy of eighteen or twenty years.  The boy was tall, thin, and
rather fragile-looking, his face had the sullen, scowling almost
feverish intensity that boys have on such occasions; he stood there
indecisively, as if trying to make up his mind, resolve himself,
towards his next action; he put a cigarette into his mouth and
lighted it and as he did so his hands trembled.  He turned up the
collar of his overcoat impatiently, glanced grudgingly and
nervously about him and stood there smoking.

Meanwhile a young prostitute, still slender and good-looking, came
out of the back room, strolled over to the corner and stood there
indolently, looking round with an innocent and yet impudent look,
appearing not to look directly at the boy, or openly to invite him,
but plainly waiting for him to speak to her.

And all the time his efforts to make up his mind, to come to a
decision, were comically evident.  He kept puffing nervously and
rapidly at his cigarette, glancing at the girl out of the corner of
his eye from time to time, pretending not to notice her, and all
the time steeling himself to a decisive action.

But even as he stood there in this temper, trying to focus his
wavering decision on a conclusive act, another man came up and took
the girl away from him.  The other man was much older than the boy;
he was in his middle thirties, he was powerfully built and well,
though somewhat flashily dressed.  He wore a grey felt hat, set at
a smart angle on his head, a well-fitting and expensive-looking
overcoat cut in at the waist in the "snappy" Broadway fashion, and
he looked like a prosperous Greek; he had a strong, swarthy, brutal
face, full of sensual assurance; he came walking along the narrow
sidewalk beside the tracks, and when he saw the girl, he approached
her instantly, with a swaggering assurance, began to talk to her,
and in a moment walked away with her.

And again, the effect of this incident upon the boy was comically,
pathetically, apparent.  He did not appear to notice the girl and
the Greek as they walked off together, but when they had gone, his
lean young face hardened suddenly, the scowl deepened, and with a
sudden angry movement he flung his cigarette into the gutter,
turned, and with the sudden resolution of a man who is ashamed of
his cowardly procrastination and indecision, he began to walk
rapidly along the dark and narrow little sidewalk that ran down
beside the tracks and along a row of shabby station tenements.

And again, that strange and stage-like panorama of human comedy was
fantastically repeated: the train began to move, and the boy kept
pace with it, below the windows of the berth.  Immediately they
began to pass the row of shabby old wooden brothels that bordered
on the tracks; the windows were closely shuttered, but through the
shutters there flamed hot exciting bars of reddish light, and in
the doorway entrances the small red lights were burning.  At the
third house the boy paused, turned, ran swiftly up the wooden steps
and rang the bell; almost instantly a small slot-like peep-hole in
the door was opened, an inquiring beak-like nose, a wisp of
blondined hair peered out, the door was opened, the boy entered in
a glow of reddish light, the door was closed behind him, and the
train, gathering rapidly in speed now, went on, past the police
station where the night-time cops were sitting, past spokes of
brown streets, old buildings, warehouses, factories, station
tenements, the sudden barren glare of corner lamps--the grimy
façade of old rusty buildings--the single substance and the million
patterns of America!

And now the train had left the town, and now there was a vast and
distant flare, incredible in loveliness, the enormous train yards
of the night, great dings and knellings on the tracks, the flare
and sweep of mighty rails, the huge and sudden stirrings of the
terrific locomotives.

And then there was just loneliness and earth and night, and
presently the river, the great and silent river, the noble,
spacious, kingly river sweeping on for ever through the land at
night to wash the basal cliffs and ramparts of the terrific city,
to flow for ever round its million-celled and prisoned sleepers,
and in the night-time, in the dark, in all the sleeping silence of
our lives to go flowing by us, by us, by us, to the sea.

That vision haunted him.  He could not forget it.  That boy who
stood there on the corner in that lonely little town at night
became the image of his own desire, of the desire of every youth
that ever lived, of all the lonely, secret, and unsleeping desire
of America, that lives for ever in the little towns at night, that
wakes at times, a lively, small, and savage flame, while all the
sleepers sleep, that burns there, unimprisoned and alone, beneath
immense and timeless skies, upon the dark and secret visage of the
continent, that prowls for ever past the shuttered façades of the
night, and furious, famished, unassuaged and driven as it is, lives
alone in darkness and will not die.

That urge held and drew him with a magnetic power.  Eight times
that spring he made that wild journey of impulse and desire up the
river.  Eight times in darkness over pounding wheel and rod he saw
the wild and secret continent of night, the nocturnal sweep and
flow of the great river, and felt the swelling of the old,
impossible and savage joy within him.  That little town, seen first
with such a charm and dream-like casualness out of the windows of a
passing train, became part of the structure of his life, carved
upon the tablets of his brain indelibly.

Eight times that year he saw it in every light and weather: in
blown drifts of sleeting snow, in spouting rain, in bleak and
wintry darkness, and when the first grey light of day was breaking
haggardly against its ridge of eastern hills.  And its whole
design--each grimy brick and edge and corner of its shabby pattern--
became familiar to him as something he had known all his life.

He came to know its times, its movements, and its people--its
station workers, railwaymen, and porters; the night-time litter of
the station derelicts and vagabonds themselves, as he was blown
past this little town in darkness.

And he came to know all the prowlers of the night that walk and
wait and wear the slow grey ash of time away in little towns--and
this, too, was like something he had known for ever.  He came to
know them all by sight and word and name: the taxi-drivers,
luncheon-room countermen, the soiled and weary-looking night-time
Greeks, and all the others who inhabit the great shambles of the
night.

Finally, and as a consequence of these blind voyages, he came to
know all the prostitutes that lived there in that little row of
wooden tenements beside the tracks.  Eight times, at the end of
night, he came again into the last commerce of their fagged
embrace; eight times he left those shabby shuttered little houses
in grey haggard light; and eight times that year, as morning came,
he again made the journey down the river.

And later he could forget none of it.  It became part of a whole
design--all of its horror and its beauty, its grime and rustiness
of stark red brick, its dark and secret loneliness of earth, the
thrill and magic of his casual friendly voices, and the fagged yet
friendly commerce of the prostitutes, the haggard light of morning
at the ridges of the hills, and that great enchanted river greening
into May--all this was one and single, woven of the same pattern,
and coherent to the same design--and that design was somehow
beautiful.

That spring, along the noble sweep of the great river, he returned
at morning to the city many times.  He saw April come, with all its
sudden patches of shrewd green, and May, with all its bloom, its
lights of flowers, its purity of first light and the bird-song
waking in young feathered trees, its joy of morning-gold on the
great river's tide.

Eight times that spring, after all the fury, wildness and debauch
of night, he rode back at morning towards the city in a world of
waking men: they were for the most part railwaymen--engineers,
firemen, brakesmen, switchmen, and guards, on their way to work.
And their homely, seamed and pungent comradeship filled him with
the health of morning and with joy.

And his memory of these journeys of the night, and these wonderful
returns at morning, was haunted always by the vision of a single
house.  It was a great white house set delicate and gleaming in
frail morning light upon a noble hill that swept back from the
river, and it was shaded by the silent stature of great trees, and
vast swards of velvet lawn swept round it, and morning was always
there and the tender purity of light.

That house haunted his memory like a dream: he could not forget it.
But he did not know, he could not have foreseen, by what strange
and dreamlike chance he would later come to it.



LIII


Laughing, and breaking at once into the loud harsh accents of the
city, the class scrambled to its feet, and began to gather up its
books.  Eugene walked rapidly to his table, which stood upon a
little platform a few inches above the floor, and stationing
himself behind it he began feverishly and untidily to stuff away
into his brief-case text-books and themes and the pile of
examination papers in which were written out the results of the
short "quiz" he had given them that night.  But he knew without
looking what those results would be.  Miss Feinberg would tell him
that "Christabel" had been written by "Keiths," and that "it was
sort of an epic or narrative poem of a very romantic nature such as
they had in those days."  Mr. Katz would assure him that "The Eve
of St. Agnes" had been written by "Wadsworth," "and you might say
there is something very mysterious and peculiar about the
atmosphere of the poem."  Mr. Harry Fishbein would explain that a
sonnet "is a kind of poetry they have, usually of a short nature.
The first part of a sonnet is called the octrave.  Shakespeare
wrote some sonnets, as did also Wadsworth and Keiths!"  Only Abe--
Abe alone, the merciless and relentless and unfaltering Abe, Abe
with his dull, grey, scornful face--would make no errors.  As for
the others, what difference did it make?  Would these garbled
renderings of what their ears had dully heard make any change for
good or ill in the garbled chaos of their lives, the glare and fury
of the streets?  Would Herrick sing his sweet bird-song to Mr.
Shapiro as he roared down to work each morning in the Bronx
Express?  Would Miss Feinberg think of Crashaw as she ate her
noonday cream-cheese sandwich in the drug store?  Would it matter
much to Katz whether "Wadsworth" or "Keiths" had written "La Belle
Dame," so long as he "got by," so long as he "got his," so long as
he "got what was comin' to 'm"?--Eugene could not think it.  He had
heard all the reasons for this folly, and the words that had been
used were very fine--"a larger vision,"--"a sense of the larger
life," and so on--but the bewilderment of these turbulent and
raucous young people was scarcely greater than his own.

At the end of each class, jostling, thrusting, laughing, shouting,
and disputing, they would surge in upon him in a hot, clamorous,
and insistent swarm, and again, as Eugene backed wearily against
the wall and faced them, he had the maddening sense of having been
defeated and overcome.

For the weariness of flesh was like the weariness a man has after a
great burst of love with a potent and adored mistress--the back was
drawn in, half-broken, toward his trembling, wrung, depleted loins,
his limbs faltered and his fingers shook, his breath came heavily,
his body respired slowly in a state of languorous exhaustion, but
where the weariness of triumphant love brings to a man a sense of
completion, victory, and finality, the weariness of the class
brought to him only a feeling of sterility and despair, a damnable
and unresting exacerbation and weariness of the spirit, a sense of
having yielded up and lost irrevocably into the sponge-like and
withdrawing maws of their dark, oily and insatiate hunger, their
oriental and parasitic gluttony, all of the rare and priceless
energies of creation: he thought with a weary and impotent fury of
great plans and soaring ecstasies of hope and ambition--of poems,
stories, books which once had swarmed exultantly their cries of
glory, joy, and triumph through his brain--and now all this seemed
lost and wasted, flung riotously and fruitlessly away into the
blind maw of a headless sucking mouth, a dark brainless, obscene
and insatiate hunger.

As he looked at them, a horrible memory returned of the great fish
which once he had caught in deep-sea water outside Boston harbour:
he could feel again the sudden heavy living tug, the wriggling
vitality, at the end of 200 feet of line, and then the wet line
slipping harshly through his fingers as exultantly he drew the
great fish upward to the surface.  Then he remembered the sense of
loss and disgust and horror when he saw it: it swam upward,
wriggling heavily in a flail of heavy dying protest, through a
thickened murk of greenish water, and he saw that to its brain was
fastened some blind horror of the sea, a foul snake-like shape a
foot or more in length, a headless, brainless mouth, a blind suck
and sea-crawl, a mindless abomination, glued implacably, fastened
in fatal suck in one small rim of bloody foam against the brain-
cage of the great dying fish.  How often, in a mad fury of escape
and freedom, it had lashed its brain to bloody froth against some
razored edge, some coral types upon the swarming jungle of the sea,
he did not know; but the memory of it had returned a thousand times
in abominable waking-sleeping visions of the night to haunt him
with its blind and mouthless horror, and now he thought of it
again, as they drew in on him their sucking glut of dark insatiate
desire.

Their dark flesh had in it the quality of a merciless tide which
not only overwhelmed and devoured but withdrew with a powerful
sucking glut all rich deposits of the earth it fed upon: they had
the absorptive quality of a sponge, the power of a magnet, the end
of each class left him sapped, gutted, drained, and with a sense of
sterility, loss, and defeat, and in addition to this exhaustion of
the mind and spirit, there was added a terrible weariness and
frustration of the flesh: the potent young Jewesses, thick, hot,
and heavy with a female odour, swarmed around him in a sensual
tide, they leaned above him as he sat there at his table, pressing
deliberately the crisp nozzles of their melon-heavy breasts against
his shoulder; slowly, erotically, they moved their bellies in to
him, or rubbed the heavy contours of their thighs against his legs;
they looked at him with moist red lips through which their wet red
tongues lolled wickedly, and they sat upon the front rows of the
class in garments cut with too extreme a style of provocation and
indecency, staring up at him with eyes of round lewd innocence,
cocking their legs with a shameless and unwitting air, so that they
exposed the banded silken ruffle of their garters and the ripe
heavy flesh of their underlegs.

Thus, to all his weariness of mind, the terror and torment of his
spirit, a thousand erotic images of an aroused but baffled and
maddened sensuality were added: they swarmed around him like the
embodiment of all the frustrate hunger, desire, and fury he had
come to know in the city, with a terrible wordless evocation of men
starving in the heart of a great plantation, of men dying of thirst
within sight of a shining spring, with a damnable mockery, a
nightmare vision of proud, potent and hermetic flesh, of voluptuous
forms in hell, for ever near, for ever palpable, but never to be
known, owned, or touched.

The girls, the proud and potent Jewesses with their amber flesh,
schooled to a goal of marriage, skilled in all the teasings of
erotic trickery, with their lustful caution and their hot virginity
pressed in around him in a drowning sensual tide: with looks of
vacant innocence and with swift counter-glances of dark mockery,
they pressed upon him, breathing, soft and warm and full, as they
cajoled, teased, seduced with look or gesture, questioned
trivially, aggressively, uselessly--those with a body, and no mind,
intent alone upon seduction, spurred on perhaps by some belief that
promotion and reward in all the business of life could best be got
at in this way; and those with minds and bodies both intent upon
some painful mixture of sharp protest, struggle, and seduction
which made erotic musings in their soul:

"Oh, but I don't--ag-gree with you at aw-ull!  That's not the
meaning that I saw in it, at aw-ull!  I think you're being very
supe-er-fish-al.  I don't ag-gree with you at aw-ull!"--the rich
voices, aggrieved, injured, hen-like and sensual, omened with deep
undernotes of ripe hysteria, rose and fell with undulant duckings
of yolky protest--the rich sensual voices of the Jewesses
receiving, giving, returning and withdrawing, rose and fell in
curved undulance of yolky hen-clucking protest, with omens of a
ripe hysteria.  Receiving, clucking, and protesting with their warm
hen-feathered cries, they seemed to say, "Oh, come and take me,
break me, but I don't ag-ree with you at aw-ull; Cluck-cluck-cluck-
cluck-cluck!  Oh, do, oh, don't, we will, we won't, but we don't
ag-ree with you at aw-ull!"--the rich injured undulations of
aggrieved protest, the omened menace of impending hysteria awoke in
an alien spirit a powerful surge of desire and humour, a wave of
wild choking laughter mixed with love and lust as one listened to
the sensual, aggrieved, hen-clucking protest of their souls.



The Jewish women were as old as nature and as round as the earth:
they had a curve in them.  They had gone to the wailing walls of
death and love for seven thousand years, the strong convulsive
faces of the Jews were ripe with grief and wisdom, and the curve of
the soul of the Jewish women was still unbroken.  Female, fertile,
yolky, fruitful as the earth, and ready for the plough, they
offered to the famished wanderer, the alien, the exile, the baffled
and infuriated man, escape and surcease of the handsome barren
women, the hard varnished sawdust dolls, the arrogant and sterile
women, false in look and promise as a hot-house peach, who walked
the street and had no curves or fruitfulness in them.  The Jewish
women waited with rich yolky cries for him, and the news they
brought him; the wisdom that they gave to him was that he need not
strangle like a mad dog in a barren dark, nor perish, famished,
unassuaged, within the wilderness beside a rusted lance--but that
there was still good earth for the plough to cleave and furrow,
deep cellars for the grain, a sheath for the shining sword, rich
pockets of spiced fertility for all the maddened lunges of desire.

They pressed around him at his table with insistent surge, and he
looked at them and saw that they were young; and sometimes they
belonged to the whole vast family of the earth: they were like all
the young people who had ever lived--they seemed clumsy and noisy
and good, full of hope and loyalty and folly; and sometimes again,
it seemed to him that none of them had ever known youth or
innocence, that they had been born with old and weary souls, that
they were born instructed in the huge dark history of pain, the
thousand mad and tortured sicknesses of the soul, and that the only
thirst and hunger that they knew, the desire that drove them with
an insatiate lust, was for sorrow, grief, and human misery.  Had
they ever cried into the howling winds at night?  Had they ever
felt the sharp and tongueless ecstasy of spring or held their
breath at night when great wheels pounded at the rail, or trembled
with a vast dark wave of pain, a wordless cry of joy, when they
heard ships calling at the harbour's mouth and thought of new lands
in the morning?  Or had they always been so old and wise, so full
of grief and evil?

The girls pressed in on him their sensual wave, and the boys stood
farther off, behind them, waiting, and he saw the dark and furtive
glances of the men pass slyly, each to each, in swift final looks
of cynical communication.  They waited for the women to have done,
with a kind of hard and weary patience, an old and knowing
agreement, a sense of acceptance, as if they had known for
thousands of years that their women would betray them with a
Gentile lover, and yet with a kind of triumph, as if they also knew
they would regain them and be victorious in the end.

They seemed to have gained from life the terrible patience, the old
and crafty skill and caution that come from long enduring of pain:
as he looked at them he knew that they would never be wild and
drunken, or beat their knuckles bloody on a wall, or lie beaten and
senseless in the stews, but he knew that with smooth faces they
would decant the bottle for some man who did, and that they would
read him quietly to his desperate fate with their dark, mocking,
and insatiate eyes.  They had learned that a savage word would
break no bones and that the wound of betrayal or a misprized love
is less fatal than the stroke of the sword, the thrust of the
knife: in the years that followed he saw that physically they were,
for the most part, incorrupt, old and cautious, filled with skill
and safety--that they had lived so long and grown so wise and
crafty that their subtle, million-noted minds could do without and
hold in dark contempt the clumsy imperfections of a fleshly evil--
that they could evoke and live completely in a world of cruel and
subtle intuitions, unphrased and unutterable intensities of
cruelty, shame, and horror, without lifting a finger or turning a
hand.  Thus, in these years, as his own mind grew mad and twisted
with the insane fabrications of a poisonous jealousy--as if
immediately and without a bridge or break translated into terms of
literal physical actuality an insane picture of cruelty and horror:
of daughters who acted as procurers to their mothers, of sons and
husbands going unperturbed to sleep in houses where their sisters,
wives, and children lay quilted in the lust and evil abominations
of an adulterous love, of calm untelling faces, looks and glances
of a childlike purity, an air of goodness, faith and morning
innocence throughout, while the whole knowledge of an unspeakable
evil trembled in their hearts for ever with an obscene and
soundless laughter--these abominations of his fancy, this vile
progeny which his mad brain translated into literal fact, were
probably for the most part only images the cruel and subtle minds
of the old, wise, patient Jews had evoked and played with in their
complex fantasy; and as he looked at the swarm of dark insistent
faces round him at the table, an overwhelming sensation of defeat
and desolation drowned his spirit--their dark looks read, and ate,
and mocked at him, and yet were full of affection and tenderness as
if they loved the food they fed upon: it seemed to him that he
alone must die; that he must break his heart and smash his bones,
lie beaten, drunken, mashed and senseless in the dives, must wreck
his reason, lose his sanity, destroy his talent, and die a mad-dog
howling in the wilderness while they--they alone--these old, wise,
weary, patient, pain-devouring subtle-minded Jews--endured.



LIV


Robert's mistress had come to town, and Robert asked Eugene to dine
with them.  In spite of the fact that Robert had talked constantly
of his love for Martha, they snapped and snarled at each other
throughout the evening.  They went to a restaurant on Sixth Avenue
in Greenwich Village for dinner.  During the course of the meal
several people came in whom Robert knew; the moment he saw them he
would call sharply to them or jump up nervously and go to greet
them.  Then he would bring them back to the table and, in a tone of
dogged and sullen intensity, introduce them to Martha, saying:  "I
want you to meet my wife."  Martha's face would flush with anger
and sullen rage, but she would acknowledge the introduction and
mutter a few uncordial words of greeting.  As for the people to
whom he introduced her, they at first received the news that Martha
was his wife with a look of blank stupefaction, managing, at
length, to stammer:  "B-b-but we didn't know you were married,
Robert!  Why didn't you let someone know about it?  When did it
happen?"

"About two weeks ago," he said brusquely, obviously getting a
fierce and sullen satisfaction from this absurd lie.

"Where are you living?"

"At the Leopold."

"Will you be staying there?"

"No, we're moving out soon."

"Are you going to live in New York?"

"Yes," he said doggedly, "we've taken an apartment. . . .  Going to
move in Monday."

"Why, Robert!" they cried, having now recovered some fluency of
speech, "we're awfully glad to know about this."  And the women
with some pretence at cordiality would turn to Martha, saying, "You
must come to see us when you've settled down," and the men would
wring Robert by the hand, slap him on the back, and dig him in the
ribs.  It was obvious that Robert derived a fierce and perverse
pleasure from his stupid lie, but the girl was in a state of
smouldering rage which blazed out at him the moment his friends had
gone away.  "You damn fool," she snapped, "what do you mean by
telling a lie like that?"

"It's not a lie," he said, "it's the truth.  You're my wife in
everything but name!"

"You're a liar!  Take that back!  Don't you believe him." she said
to Eugene, "there's not a word of truth in what he says. . . .  You
damned fool!" she blazed out at him.  "What do you mean by telling
your friends a story like that?  Don't you know they're going to
find out that you lied to them?  And then," she added bitterly,
"what are they going to say about me?  You never thought of that,
did you?  Oh, no!  You don't care if you ruin me or not!  All you
think of is yourself!"

"I don't care," he said with a sullen fierceness, "you're my wife
and that's what I'm going to tell them all!"

"You're not!"

"I am!  I'll show you if I don't!"

"I'm not your wife, and you needn't be so sure I ever will be!  I
got married once to a sick man, and I'll think it over a good long
time, I assure you, before I get married again to a crazy man!
Now, you'd better not be too sure of yourself, Mr. Weaver!  You're
not married to me yet by a long shot!"

A bitter quarrel broke out between them: they snarled, snapped,
sneered, and wrangled--their voices rose until people at other
tables began to look at them and listen curiously, but they paid no
attention whatever to anyone but themselves.  Robert ended the
argument suddenly by pushing his chair back from the table, sighing
heavily, and saying feverishly and impatiently:

"All right, all right, all right!  You're right!  I'm wrong!  Only,
for God's sake, shut up and let me have a little peace!"  Then they
got into a taxi and went back to the hotel.  They had a bottle of
whisky and they all went up to Robert's room, telephoned for ice
and ginger ale, and began to drink.  It was a little before
midnight.



About two o'clock that night, as they sat there, a light, odd step,
approaching briskly, came down the corridor and paused outside
Robert's door; then someone rapped lightly and sharply at the door,
and with this same movement of an odd, light and exuberant
vitality.  They looked at one another with the sudden startled look
of people who feel the interruption of an intense silence around
them--for the Leopold for two hours had been steeped in this
silence of sleep, and they now experienced its living and animate
presence for the first time.  A good many sensations of guilt--all
but the real one--flashed through their minds: that they had been
drinking and making more noise than they should, and that a guest
had complained to the office about them; or that someone had
discovered that Robert had a woman in his room, and that, in the
interests of hotel decorum, she was to be commanded to leave and go
to her own quarters.  The rapping at the door was repeated, more
brisk and loud.  They were all very still, Robert looked at Eugene
nervously, remembering, perhaps, the sum of his past errors at the
hotel and his precarious standing there.

"You go see who it is," he said.

Eugene went to the door and opened it.  A man--or rather, the wisp,
the breath, the fume of what had been a man--stood there: it was a
small figure with nothing on its skeleton of fragile bone which was
recognizable as living flesh, with only the covering, it seemed, of
a parchment-like skin so tightly drawn over the contours of the
face and head that the skull widened and flared with an impression
of enormous dome-like width and depth above a face so wizened and
shrunken that one remembered it later only as a feverish glint of
teeth, an unshaved furze of beard, and two blazing flags of red,
darkened and shadowed by the sunken depth of the sockets of the
eye, where burned a stare of an incredible size and brilliance--
that and the whispering ghost of a voice, the final, dominant, and
unforgettable impression.

This wraith was clothed, or rather, engulfed, in garments which,
although of good cut and quality, it seemed never to have worn
before: they swathed it round and fell away in shapeless folds so
that the body was as indecipherable among them as a stick, and the
neck emerged from a collar through which it seemed the whole figure
of the man might have slipped as easily as through a hoop.

And yet the creature was burning with a savage energy which coursed
like an electric current through his withered body: it bore him
along at a light, odd step, capricious and buoyant as the bobbing
of a cork, and it foamed and bubbled in him now as he stood
impatiently rapping at the door, and it blazed in his eyes with a
corrupt and fatal glee, a mad flaming exuberance, a focal intensity
of triumph, joy, and hate.

He entered the room immediately as soon as Eugene opened the door:
he went in briskly at his light corky step and immediately said
briskly and jovially in his whispering thread of a voice:  "Good
evening!  Are we all here?  Is everyone well?  Did someone say
something?"--he looked round enquiringly, then, with a disappointed
air, continued:  "No?  I thought someone spoke.  Well, then, come
in, Mr. Upshaw.  Thank you, I will.  Won't you sit down?  Yes,
indeed!"  He seated himself.  "Will you have a drink?  I should be
delighted"--here he took the bottle, poured a stiff shot of whisky
into a glass, and drank it at one gulp.  When he had finished, he
looked round more quietly until his gaze rested with a kind of evil
temperance on his wife:  "Hello, Martha," he said casually and
quietly.  "How are you?"  She did not answer and in a minute he
repeated, still with his evil calm but with a more vicious
intensity of tone, "Listen, you God-damned bitch! . . .  When I ask
you a question, you answer.  How are you?"

"How did you get here?" she said.

"Oh!--Surprised to see me, is she?--Well, I tell you, darling, how
it was.  I was going to walk--I was going to walk, if necessary--
now that just shows you how anxious I was to see you--I was going
to walk the whole damned way from Denver, right over mountains and
prairies and rivers and everything--but I didn't have to.  I found
a train all ready to go, darling; it was waiting for me when I got
there, so 'Why walk?' I said.  When I got to Kansas City I found an
aeroplane waiting there, so I said, 'Why ride when flying's
faster?'  So that's the way I got here, darling."--He paused and
drank again.

"How did you know where to find me?" asked Martha sullenly.

"Oh!" said Upshaw, lightly and gaily, "that was no trouble at all.
Where should I find you, my dear?  Where did I expect to find you?
Why, right in the bedroom of my dear old pal, Mr. Robert Weaver, of
course, I knew he'd look after you.  I knew he wouldn't leave an
innocent young girl like you to wander around all alone in the
city. . . .  Hi, there, Robert," he said cordially, lifting his
hand in a salute of friendly greeting, as if noting Robert's
presence for the first time.

"How are you, boy?  I'm glad to see you.  You've been looking after
my wife, haven't you, Robert?  You took care of her, didn't you?
I'm much obliged to you. . . .  You son of a bitch," he added
quietly and slowly, and with an accent of infinite loathing.

No one spoke, and after gazing at his wife a moment longer with
this same air of evil quietness, he said, in a tone of mock
surprise:  "Why, what's the matter?  You don't look a bit glad to
see me, darling.  Most men's wives would be wild about a husband
who flew across the country in an aeroplane to see them, most women
would be crazy about that."

"I wish," the girl said bitterly, "that you had fallen into a river
and drowned."

"Now, is THAT nice?  Is THAT kind?" said Upshaw in a tone of
grieved reproach.

He turned toward Eugene and spoke to him for the first time. . . .
"Now, I leave it to you, Mr.--" he hesitated, "I didn't catch your
name, sir, but is it all right if I call you Mr. Whipple?"

"Yes," Eugene said.  "It's all right."

"Good!" he cried.  "I knew it would be.  The reason I say that is I
used to have a friend out in Cleveland named Charley Whipple, who
was just the same type of fellow that you are--YOU know," he said
quietly and sneeringly, "a fine clean-cut fellow, eyes glowing with
health, beautiful complexion, broad-shouldered, both feet on the
ground, good to his mother.--Oh! he was a prince!--Just the same
sort of looking fellow you are--so you won't mind if I call you by
his name, will you?  You remind me so much of him.  Well, now, Mr.
Whipple, I ask you if you think it's nice for a man's wife to talk
to him like this?  Is it kind?  Is it fair?"

"She's not your wife," said Robert.  "She's my wife."

For the first time Upshaw turned and faced his enemy squarely: he
surveyed him slowly, up and down, with eyes which burned and
glittered with their hatred.  "Did you say something?" he asked.

"You heard me," said Robert.

"Did anyone speak to you?  Did anyone say anything to you?" Upshaw
whispered.  He was silent a moment; then he leaned forward slightly
over the table.  "Let me give you some advice," he said.  "The only
pity about this is that you're not going to be able to use it.--But
I'm going to give it to you, anyway: here it is--Don't fool with a
dying man, Robert.  If you're going to play around with anyone,
play around with the living, and not with the dead.  Dead men are
bad people to play around with."

"All right!  All right!" cried Robert in a hoarse, excited tone.
"That constitutes a threat! . . .  Martha, Eugene. . . .  I call on
you to bear witness that he threatened me!  We'll just see how that
sounds in a court of law."

"Courts!  Law!" said Upshaw; and even as he spoke they all felt
instantly how preposterous was Robert's threat and how meaningless
such terms had become for this wisp of a man.

"Do you think I care one good God-damn now for all the courts and
laws that ever were? . . .  Do you think there has been a time for
the last two years when I gave a damn whether I lived or died?"

"Except to spite Martha and me," said Robert bitterly.  "You cared
about that, all right!"

"Yes," said Upshaw quietly.  "You're right.  I would have hung on
to life as long as I could gasp a breath of air into what was left
of my lung, and I would have lived on without a lung to breathe
with in order to spoil your filthy game--that was the way I hated
the two of you.  You don't understand that, do you, Robert?  You
don't understand a man being able to hate so hard he can keep alive
on it, he can use it instead of a lung to breathe with, he can use
it instead of air.  You don't know anything about that, do you?"

"Yes, I do," said Robert.  "I knew you hated me all along!"

"Hated you!" Upshaw snarled.  "Why, damn you, I hated the earth you
walked upon, the air you breathed, the house you lived in, the
places you went to; I hated all the people who saw you or spoke to
you or had ever spent an hour in your company--you polluted the
atmosphere for me if I even heard the sound of your voice."

"I know you did," said Robert, nodding.  "What did I tell you?" he
cried to Martha, with a note of triumphant conviction.

"You KNOW!  You KNOW!" cried Upshaw fiercely.  "Why, damn you, you
poor cheap imitation of a contriving rascal, you damned little
drugstore Casanova, you dirty little swine of a country-club snob,
you village fortune-teller, you know nothing! . . .  For two years
I stayed alive with not enough sound lung left in me to cover the
size of a silver dollar--and do you think it was because I was
afraid to die, or wanted to live?  No!  No!" he whispered, and his
face, or rather that eloquence of eye and tooth, grew passionate
with the bitterest disgust and loathing he had ever seen.  "I've
had more than thirty years of it, and Christ! it's been enough!
I've had my bellyful of it. . . .  I'm fed up all the way to here!"
he whispered, and he struck himself fiercely at the base of the
throat.  He coughed, suddenly, briefly, terribly, and with a swift
impatient movement of his hot corded fingers he snatched a towel
from the rack beside the water-basin, pressed his lowered face into
it and then stared for a moment with an expression of intent and
fascinated disgust into its folds, then he flung the bloodied rag
away impatiently.

"You know," he said again more calmly, and for the first time now
with a touch of weariness, as if the fierce flame of this
incredible energy of passion which had thus far upheld him had now
been spent.  "Why, you know nothing.  It took a MAN to hate like
that," he said. . . .  "--a better man than you could ever be--
yes! . . . with no more lung than a rabbit, I'm still a better man
than you could ever be, for you are nothing but a thing without the
courage even of your own rotten convictions--

"God!" he looked with weary disgust from one to the other as they
sat sullen, dumbly sodden, saying nothing.  "The two of you!  What
a pair! . . .  And to think of the time I wasted hating you . . .
to think of all the time when I might have been pushing daisies in
some quiet spot . . . keeping myself alive by thinking of this
moment."  His body was shaken again by a horrible soundless
laughter.  "Christ! . . .  To think that I should ever have wanted
to kill either of you."

"To kill us!" said Robert hoarsely, not with fear but accusingly,
as if he were collecting damning evidence in a trial.

"Yes," Upshaw answered with the same weary tranquillity, "to kill
you! . . .  I've breathed and drunk and thought it for two years.
I've lived just for this moment.  I came two thousand miles across
the continent to blow your brains out. . . ."

"Did you hear him?" cried Robert, jumping up from the table.  "Did
you hear what he said, Martha?  Did you hear him threaten me?"

"Sit down!" said Upshaw quietly.  "I've seen you now and I'm
satisfied.  I wouldn't touch you.  Why, God-damn you, you're not
worth it, either of you."  Again he surveyed them with slow
loathing, and broke into his soundless laughter.  "Kill you!  Why,
I wouldn't do either of you so big a favour.  You don't deserve
such luck!  I'll let you live and rot together. . . .  Take
her! . . .  Take her!" he cried, more strongly, his eyes burning into
fury.  "Take her! . . .  But before you do"--with a swift movement
he withdrew from his pocket a small and crumpled wad of dollar
bills--"here!  I want to give you something!"  And he flung them
straight at Robert's face, "Take that . . . and go and get yourself
a GOOD prostitute while you're at it!"

Robert sat perfectly still for a moment; then he got up slowly,
went over to the door, and flung it open and walked back to the
table. . . .  "Get out of here," he said.  Upshaw did not move: he
sat regarding him silently, with an intent, contemptuous, catlike
stare.

"Did you hear me?" said Robert. . . .  "Get out of my room!"

"Sit down," said Upshaw.  "You're going to annoy me."

"Annoy you!  I'll annoy you, you damned rascal," Robert cried
furiously, and suddenly he slapped Upshaw in the face, shouting,
"You're going out of here this minute, do you hear? . . .  I'll
show you if you can insult me in my own place," and he lunged
viciously towards him.

What happened then was so sudden and swift that Eugene could never
thereafter remember clearly the order in which all of the events
occurred: as Robert plunged towards the little man, Martha spoke
sharply to him, commanding him to be still, at the same moment the
table and two chairs overturned with a crash of glassware . . . and
Upshaw, somehow, with an incredible speed of movement, was on his
feet and moving backward out of the way of Robert's lunging fist.
Eugene had a brief and terribly clear sensation of a gesture of
catlike speed as Upshaw thrust his hand into the pocket of his coat
and then the bright wicked wink of steel.  Then Martha was on top
of him, clinging frantically to his arm, wrestling him into the
wall, and in a moment wrenching the weapon from his grasp.

For a moment there was no sound in the room whatever save the sound
of three excited people breathing rapidly and heavily, and another
sound, the terrible sound of Upshaw's breathing, hoarse, rattling,
painful, breaking suddenly and sharply into a torn gasping cough
that was thick with blood.  The first words spoken came from
Martha:

"Close that door!" she commanded curtly.

Robert, instead of obliging her, turned to Eugene with an awed and
quieted light in his eye.

"Did you see that?" he whispered to Eugene.--"Did you see him pull
that gun on me? . . .  Why!" he cried with a kind of sudden
astonishment, "it was assault with a deadly weapon!  That's what it
was!  He tried to murder me!"  He was beside himself with
astonishment and excitement.  "I'm going to get the police," and he
rushed out into the hall.

"Go get that damned fool and bring him back here," she said to
Eugene.  "AND CLOSE THAT DOOR!"

Eugene ran out into the corridor just in time to see Robert
disappearing at his long stiff stride around the corner that led to
the lifts in the main building.  When Eugene got there Robert was
pressing buttons feverishly, but unfortunately, because the hour
was so late and the lift-man was asleep below, his call had not yet
been answered.  Eugene seized him by the arm and began to pull him
along back towards his room.

"Let go of me!" he said.

"You damned fool! . . .  Do you want to ruin us all?"

He seemed to sober up and grew calmer after a moment or two of
excited prayer and protest.  They went back to the room quietly
enough.  When they got there Martha was supporting Upshaw's body
against the basin of the washstand.  The man, by this time, was
either unconscious or semi-conscious: all the savage and unholy
energy which had burned for a space so incredibly that it had the
power to hurl this diseased and near-dead mite across a continent
had now flared utterly out and the creature which the girl
supported in her arms, with a kind of dark and sullen tenderness,
seemed to have died and dwindled with it; the body was no longer
discernible, it seemed to have faded, a fabric of rotten sticks,
into a shapeless heap of clothing; it dangled shapelessly and
grotesquely like some deflated figure, and yet from the head, from
that death's-head of skull and tooth and blazing eyes, there were
spurting unbelievable, incredible fountains of blood: it burst
simultaneously from the mouth and nostrils in a steady torrent
until his skin was laced with it; it filled the basin, it was
incredible that such fountains of bright blood should pour out of
this withered squirrel of a man.

Robert sat down sullenly in a chair by the table after saying,
"Now, this is your last chance. . . .  I've had as much as I can
stand.  You've got to decide between us here and now!"  She did not
answer him, and he said no more, relapsing into a sullen and half-
drunken stupor.

The girl washed the blood away from Upshaw's face with a towel: in
a moment more she asked Eugene if he would help her carry him to
the bed.  Eugene picked him up and put him on the bed; his body
felt like a handful of light dry sticks, he weighed no more than a
child of ten; already his figure seemed, under the strange and
terrible chemistry of death, to shrink and wither visibly from one
moment to another, but his head rested above that shapeless and
grotesque bundle of clothing as if it had been severed from the
body--with an immense austerity of line and light, a cold,
stiffening, and upthrust calm.

Eugene went down to the office and told them what had happened.
The night clerk, a fat, shuffling old man with a mild, pasty face,
and the black African negro who was at the telephone-board,
received the news with astonishing calmness and matter of factness,
and then acted with admirable coolness, speed and quiet precision,
of which Eugene often thought in the months that followed, because
it revealed to him a kind of secret knowledge, a hidden seriousness
in the hotel's working, and it showed, moreover, how much
knowledge, ability, and decision may be stored behind the faces of
inept and foolish-looking men.

Eugene looked at the clock above the office desk: it was now ten
minutes after three o'clock in the morning.  Within twenty minutes
they had an ambulance, a doctor, and two stretcher-bearers at the
hotel; the doctor, a young Jew with a little moustache, walked
quietly and casually into the room, with the ends of a stethoscope
fastened in his ears.  Eugene thought that Upshaw was already dead!
His face had the upthrust marble rigidity of death, but after a
moment's examination the doctor spoke quietly to the two men with
him, they put the stretcher on the floor and laid the withered
little figure on it.  As they started to move out of the room
Upshaw's arms began to flop and jerk stiffly and grotesquely with
every step they took: at another word from the doctor they put
their burden on the floor again, the doctor knelt swiftly,
unknotted the cravat in Upshaw's collar and loosely tied his wrists
together.  Then they all went out, and Martha followed, holding
Upshaw's hat.  She rode over in the ambulance to the hospital,
which was only a few blocks away in Fifteenth Street.  Robert and
Eugene followed in a taxi; there was no one on the streets, the
buildings and the pavements had the hard, bare angularity they have
early in the morning: they waited downstairs in a little room until
shortly after five o'clock in the morning, when Martha came down to
see them and to tell them that Upshaw had just died.

Then Eugene left Robert and Martha there together and walked back
towards the hotel.  The streets were still bare, but in the east
there was the first width of morning light, cold steel-grey, harsh
and sharply clean: day was beginning to break, and he could hear
the rumbling jingle of a milk-wagon and the sound of hoof and wheel
behind him in the lonely street.



LV


If the hard and rugged lineaments of Abe's character had not at
this time emerged out of the glutinous paste of obscure yearnings,
there was no such indecision and uncertainty in the character of
his mother.  It was as legible as gold, as solid as a rock.

Abe's mother was an old woman, with the powerful and primitive
features of the aged Jewess: she was almost toothless, a solitary
blackened tooth stood mournfully in the centre of her strong ruined
mouth; she had a craggy worn face, seamed and furrowed by a
countless sorrow, a powerful beaked nose, and a strong convulsive
mouth, a mask which was like a destiny, since it seemed to have
been carved and fashioned for the dirge-like wailing of eternal
grief.  The face of the old woman might have served not only as the
painting of the whole history of her race, but as the painting of
the female everywhere--not the female with her ephemeral youth, her
brief snares of hair and hide, her succulent burst of rose-lips and
flowing curve--but the female timeless, ageless, fixed in sorrow
and fertility, as savage, as enduring, and as fecund as the earth.
The old woman's face was like a worn rock at which all the waves of
life had smashed and beaten: it was unmistakably the face of an old
Jewess and yet the powerful and craggy features bore an astonishing
resemblance to the face of a pioneer woman or of an old Indian
chief.

Her life, moreover, had the agelessness of the earth, the
timelessness of her race and destiny: she had not been touched at
all by the furious and savage life of the city with its sensational
brevities, its hard, special, temporal qualities of speech,
fashion, and belief, its million ephemeral enthusiasms, briefly
held and forgotten, the stunned oblivion of its memory, which, in
the brutal stupefaction of a thousand days, can hold to nothing, so
that even the memory of love and death cannot endure there and a
man may forget his dead brother ere his flesh grow rotten in the
grave.

The old woman did not forget: for her, as for the God she
worshipped, the passing of seven thousand years was like the
passing of a single day; yesterday, tomorrow, and for ever, a
moment at the heart of love and memory.  Thus, once when Eugene had
called Abe upon the telephone, a full year after the death of his
oldest brother, Jacob, the old woman had answered: the old voice
came feebly, brokenly, indecipherably, and was like a wail.  He
asked for Abe, she could not understand, she began to talk in an
excited, toothless mumble--a torrent of Yiddish broken here and
there by a few mangled words and scraps of English--all she knew.
At length Eugene made her understand he wanted to speak to Abe:
suddenly she recognized his voice and remembered him.  Then,
instantly, as if it had happened only the day before and as if he
had been a friend of her dead son, although he had never known him,
the old woman began to wail, faintly and rhythmically, across the
wire:  "Jakie! . . .  My Jakie! . . .  Mein Sohn Jakie! . . .  He
is dead."

A few days later Eugene had gone home with Abe for dinner: he lived
with his mother, two brothers, and Jimmy, his sister's illegitimate
child, in a flat which occupied the second floor of an old four-
storey red-brick house in Twelfth Street, near Second Avenue, on
the East Side.  The old woman had prepared a good meal for them: a
thick rich soup, chopped chicken livers, chicken, cake, and a
strong sweet wine: she served them but would not sit and eat with
them: she came in briefly and shook hands shyly and awkwardly,
mumbling incoherently a mangled jargon of Yiddish and English.
Suddenly, however, as if she had briefly mastered herself by a
strong effort, her old and sorrowful face was twisted by a
convulsion of powerful and incurable grief, and a long, terrible,
savagely wailing cry was torn from her throat: she turned blindly,
and with a movement of natural and primitive sorrow, she suddenly
seized the edges of her apron in her gnarled and worn hands and
flung it up over her head and rushed toward the door at a blind,
lunging, reeling step.  She was like one demented by sorrow: the
old woman began to beat her withered breasts and pull at her wispy
grey hair, meanwhile running and stumbling blindly round her
kitchen in a horrible and savage dementia and drunkenness of grief.
Abe followed her out, and Eugene could hear his voice, low, urgent,
and tender, as he spoke to her persuasively in Yiddish, and her
long wailing cries subsided and he returned.  His face was sad and
weary-looking and in a moment he said:  "Mama's breaking up fast.
She's never been able to get over my brother's death.  She thinks
about it all the time: she can't get it off her mind."

"How long has he been dead, Abe?"

"He died over a year ago," Abe said.  "But that doesn't matter: I
know her--she'll never forget it now as long as she lives.  She'll
always feel the same about it."

This terrible and savage picture of grief was carved upon Eugene's
memory unforgettably: it became a tremendous and formidable fact, a
fact as ancient, timeless, and savage as the earth, a fact which
neither the stupefying oblivion of the city's life, the furious
chaos of the streets, nor the savage glare of ten thousand blind
and dusty days could touch.  The old woman's grief was taller than
their tallest towers, and more enduring than all their steel and
stone: it would last for ever when all the city's bones were dust,
and it was like the grief of all the women who had ever beat their
breasts and flung their aprons across their heads and run, wailing,
with a demented and drunken step: it filled him with horror, anger,
a sense of cruelty, disgust, and pity.

She was the fertile and enduring earth from which they sprang, and
all of them, transformed so sharply and so curiously by the city's
tone and life, drew in to her with devotion and respect: Abe, with
his dreary grey face of the man-swarm cipher; Sylvia, with her
feverish, electric night-time glitter; all of the brothers and
sisters, with all that was new, sharp, alien, flashy, trivial, or
material in speech, dress, manner, and belief--all of them returned
to her with love, loyalty, and reverence as to some great brood-hen
of the earth.  The old woman's life was rooted in the soil of two
devotions: the synagogue and the home, and all that happened beyond
the limits of this devotion was phantom and remote: this soil was
ageless, placeless, everlasting.

Abe loved his mother dearly: whenever he spoke of her, even
casually, his voice was touched with a hush of respect and
affection.  But he disliked his father: the few times Eugene heard
him mention him he spoke of him in a hard and bitter voice,
referring to him as "that guy" or "that fellow," as if he were a
stranger.  Eugene never saw the father: the children all felt
bitterly towards him and had sent him away to live alone.  Abe told
Eugene that the man was a shoemaker, and apparently improvident and
thriftless.  He had never been able to earn enough to support his
family, and in addition, Abe said, he was a petty family tyrant.
Abe's childhood had been scarred by memories of privation, tyranny
and poverty--the mother and the children had had a bitter struggle
for existence, and Abe had worked since his eighth year at a
variety of hard, grey, shabby and joyless employments: he had been
a newsboy, a grocer's delivery boy, an office boy in a broker's
office, a typist in a collection agency endlessly writing out form
letters, the office man and secretary for the head-professor of the
architectural school, and one of these pallid, swarthy, greasily
sweating youths of the fur and garment house districts who
ceaselessly propel through swarming and kaleidoscopic streets of
trade small wheel-trucks piled high with dresses, garments, furs,
and clothes or with the thousand travelling varieties of all that
horrible nondescript junk known under the indecisive name of
"novelties."  Once, also, he had spent part of a summer in New
Jersey unloading freight cars filled with Georgia water-melons, and
for a considerable time he had driven a truck for his two oldest
brothers, who had a zinc business in the "gas-house district" of
the East Side, between Avenue A and the river and North of
Fourteenth Street.

Here, once, Eugene had accompanied him at noon of a flashing day in
spring, a glitter of light and flashing waters, a sparkle of gold
and blue: in a large bare space near factories they had seen a ring
of young thugs throwing dice, and near the river were the immense
and ugly turrets of the gas tanks, and then the wharves, the great
odorous piers, and the flashing waters--the vast exultant play and
traffic of the river life, the powerful little tugs, the ships, and
the barges laden with their strings of rusty freight cars.

As they walked away through the powerful ugliness and devastation
of that district, with its wasteland rusts and rubbish, its slum-
like streets of rickety tenement and shabby brick, its vast raw
thrust of tank, glazed glass and factory building, and at length
its clean, cold, flashing strength and joy of waters--a district
scarred by that horror of unutterable desolation and ugliness and
at the same time lifted by a powerful rude exultancy of light and
sky and sweep and water, such as is found only in America, and for
which there is yet no language--as they walked away along a street,
the blue wicked shells of empty bottles began to explode on the
pavements all round them: when they looked round to see from what
quarter this attack was coming, the street was empty save for a
young thug who leaned against the rotting edge of a closed door,
hands thrust in pockets, and a look of pustulate and evil innocence
upon his thin tough Irish face.  The street was evil and silent and
empty, but when they turned and went on again, the exploding
bottles began to drop around them on the pavement in splinters of
sinister blue.

Abe grinned toughly: he did not seem at all surprised or perturbed
by the murderous stealth and secrecy of the attack, its obscene and
cowardly uselessness.  He explained that the district had been one
of the worst in the city and the headquarters for one of the most
criminal gangs: time and again the gangsters had broken into his
brother's zinc shop and robbed it, and Abe and all his brothers,
being Jews, had had to fight it out since childhood, foot and fist
and tooth and nail, and club and stone, with the young Irish toughs
and gangsters who infested the district.  Such had been his
childhood: he told Eugene many stories of bloody fights waged back
and forth across these pavements, of young boys maimed, crippled,
or blinded in these savage fights, of one boy who had his eye torn
out of his head by his enemy's gouging thumb in a fight to a finish
on one of the piers, and of another whose brains had been smashed
out on the pavement below the elevated structure by a rock hurled
by an enemy's hand in a fight of the neighbourhood gangs.  Thus, in
pier and alley, on street and roof, children had learned the arts
of murder, the smell of blood, the odour of brains upon the
pavement.  Abe told how one of his older brothers, Barney--a
thickly set, powerful-looking man with short thick hands and a
tough meaty-looking fighter's face, grey, square, and good-
humoured--had to fight it out step by step with the gangsters, who
had come to his shop, again and again, with demands for money--
money which the merchants of the district paid them meekly and
regularly for "protection"--a euphemism for graft and menace, a
bribe for being left alone and for the assurance that one's shop
would not be entered and one's stock smashed or stolen in the
night.  Barney had met all these menaces with a hard cold eye and
two rock-like fists with which time and again he had beaten into a
pulp the thugs who came to threaten him: he was a good man and a
savage fighter and he had learned the arts of combat in the
sternest and most brutal arena on earth--the city streets.

"And--oh-ho-ho-ho!"--softly, painfully, Abe lifted his widely
grinning face and laughed, "how that guy loves it!  Say! they
picked the wrong one when they picked on him!  Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!  CAN
he fight!  DOES he love it!  Say! do you know what I saw him do to
two of them one time--oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!  Gee! it was rich!  They
came in there to shake him down and--Oh!  Ho-ho!--ho!  You shoulda
seen it!  He picks up a keg of zinc that weighs 200 pounds and he
BREAKS it--oh-ho-ho-ho!--over the first guy's head."

"And what became of the second guy?"

"Oh-ho-ho-ho! . . .  Gee it was rich!  You shoulda seen that other
guy get out of there!  Say!  He almost tore the door down in his
hurry--oh-ho-ho-ho!"

Such were the various members of this family as Eugene came to know
about them: each of them in his own way was marked by a decisive
individuality and independence of spirit which told of their lives
of combat, toil and struggle in the city streets, and yet, although
indelibly marked, scarred and hardened by his life, none of them
had been brutalized by it.  In fact, as Eugene thought of all these
people later, an extraordinary quality in them became evident.  It
was this: here was a family of poor East Side Jews, the children of
an immigrant and thriftless shoemaker and an old orthodox Jewish
woman.  These children had all had to make their own way, to fight
and struggle bitterly for a living: now some of them were tough,
rugged and unlettered merchants, traders and mechanics, some were
successful milliners and designers, and some were talented
musicians, students of science, people of extraordinary intelligence
and ability.  And all of them, even the most unlettered, seemed to
have a completely natural unaffected interest and respect for the
arts or for scholarly and intellectual attainment.  This
circumstance--this remarkable fusion in one poor Jewish family of
elements which would have seemed almost incredible in the families
of poor labouring or country people Eugene had known before--this
combination of the manual, the commercial, the artistic and the
scholarly in one poor family--seemed so natural both to him and to
them that Eugene never found it strange or wonderful until years
later.



LVI


June had brought with it a blessed respite from his classes at the
university.  Now the summer drew on towards its close--the brutal
and weary New York summer with its swelter of dead wet heats, its
death of hope, its sorrow of a timeless memory.  And yet, in the
city's summer nights there was a kind of solemn joy, a hush of
peace and light and human resignation that was so different from
the wild and nameless joy and pain of spring, the sorrow of autumn,
the winter's grim and stern protraction of the soul.  THEN--in
these nights of waning summer--more than at any other season of the
year, the immense and murmurous sound of time was audible.  It was
above one and around one, it was near and far, it was immense and
omnipresent, and it was indefinable.  It seemed to hover somewhere
in the upper air, above the city's steep canyons, the giant
explosions of her thousand towers, the swarming millions of her
tortured and uneasy life for ever waging their desperate, ugly and
unprofitable strife in all her hot and tangled mazes.  And that
voice of time, above the ugly clamour of that tormented life, was
imperturbable; immense, remote and murmurous, it seemed to have
resumed into itself all of the rumours of the earth, and to
comprise, out of the bitter briefness of man's days, the essence of
his own eternity, and to be itself eternal, fixed, and everlasting,
no matter what men lived or died.

The people of the city heard this sound of time, and on these
evenings of the waning summer their lives were subject to its
spell.  For the first time in many months one heard the sounds of
quiet laughter in the streets at night, the voices of the people as
they passed were strangely hushed, the sounds of life were immense,
all murmurous as time itself.

This sense of peace, of resignation, of a quiet and tranquil sorrow
and joy was everywhere; it may have been some quality of the summer
air that imposed on all the violence of the city's life a kind of
muted harmony, but the spirit of this peace seemed to have entered
the very flesh and spirit of the city, somehow to have tranquillized
the feverish blood and nervous and exacerbated bodies of its people.
For the first time in months their eyes were quiet and thoughtful
and had lost their look of hatred and suspicion, hostility and
mistrust.  Their faces had lost their strained, hard, and hurried
look, even their tongues had lost some of their strident, rasping,
and abusive violence.

That immense and murmurous hush of time and sorrowful acceptance
had touched even the life of youth.  At night one still saw groups
of young men walking through the streets, but even they had somehow
been subdued and chastened by this spell of time.  And in these
bands of youth--these straggling bands of young men who struggle
through the city streets at night in groups of six or eight, and
who have become so much a part of our familiar experience and the
city's life that they no longer seem curious to us--the change that
this great spell of time had wrought was perhaps more evident than
anywhere else.

Where were the songs of youth upon those city streets?  Where the
laughter, the wild spontaneous mirth, the passion, warmth and
golden poetry of youth?  Where was the great boy Jason looking for
brothers in the fellowship of that inspired adventure of man's
youth--the proud, deathless image of what all of us desire when
young: where was it?  Where were the noble thoughts and ardours of
young men, the fierce and bitter desperation and the proud and
foolish hopes, the grand dreams and the music of the fleeting and
impossible reveries--all that makes youth lovely and desirable, and
that keeps man's faith--where was it among these young men on the
city streets?

It was not there.  Poor sallow, dark, swarthy creatures that they
were, with rasping tongues, loose mouths and ugly jeering eyes,
this infamous band of youth was death-in-life itself.  It had been
brought still-born from its mother's womb into a world of city
streets and corners, into all the waning violence of the tenement,
bitterly to try to root its meagre life into the rootless rock,
meagrely to struggle in its infamous small phlegm along the
pavements, feebly to imitate the feeble objects of its base
idolatry--of which the most heroic was a gangster, the most
sagacious was a pimp, the most witty was some Broadway clown.

How often, have we seen them, heard them, turned away from them
with weariness and disgust, as they straggled along at night, a
meagre shirt-sleeved band of gangling sizes, each fearful and
uneasy in the other's eye, kicking the ash-cans over as feats of
derring-do, trying for approbation with a hoarse call and a
pitiable and mirthless striving after repartee, of which the more
glittering fragments ran like this:

"Hey-y . . . Eddy! . . .  Holy Jeez! . . .  Hey-y, youse guys! . . .
Cuh-mahn!"

"Ah-h, what's yer hurry? . . .  Hey-y!  Youse udah guys! . . .
Joe's in a hurry . . . Who's goin' t' pay duh taxi-ride?"

"Holy JEEZ!  What's keepin' yuh! . . .  Youse guys, cuh-mahn!"

"Ah-h, guh-wahn. . . .  What's t' hurry?  Where's duh fire?"

Now in these nights of waning summer, even these raucous voices,
the pitiable sterility of these feeble jests, that meagre and
constricted speech consisting almost wholly of a few harsh cries
and raucous imprecations that recurred intolerably, incredibly
through all the repercussions of an idiotic monotony--all of the
rootless, fearful, and horrible desolation of these young pavement
lives--was somehow caught up in this great and tragic hush and
spell of time, transmuted by it, until even their vast unloveliness
of youth was given a sorrowful quality of pity and regret.

August came, and with it already a faint and troubling premonition
of the autumn--a breath, a fragrance, and an odour--that somehow
spoke of summer's ending, the premonitory thrill and promise of the
voyage.  What was it?  It was one of those very strange and
troubling odours known here in America, of which our lives are all
compact, which we have lived and breathed and known with our blood,
and for which we have no language.  It is, somehow--the odour of
cities, cities, cities--at the hour of evening, the scorched end of
every expiring day--the smell of evening hush and peace and of the
sea in harbours.  It is the smell of old worn woods, warm,
resinous, sultry, getting into our very entrails somehow with its
strange and nameless fragrance of sorrow and delight; the smell of
the wooden baseball bleachers, of the old worn plankings of an
amusement park, passed over by a million feet since morning; and it
is the smell of street-cars, car-barns, the faded day-coach plush
of trains, the smell of bridges and of old wharves and piers, of
hot tarred roofing, and of tar out in the streets, of summer's
fatigue, quietness, and summer's ending, the quiet and tranquil
sorrow of memory as we remember youth, our father's voice upon the
nighttime summer porch, the smell of the grape-vines and the
ripened grapes, the grinding screech and halt of a street-car on
the hill above our father's house, and the knowledge that all this
is lost, our father dead, our childhood gone, another year, our
first in the great man-swarm of the city, ended--and this, the
knowledge of the bitter briefness of out days, is somehow mixed
with the smell of the sea in harbours, the freshening breeze of
evening, the call of ships, and, somehow, God knows how, with the
intolerable thrill and promise of the unknown voyage.

And with this breath of autumn and the promise of the voyage there
came to Eugene the news that Starwick was at that moment in the
city--would stop there briefly on his way to Europe.  At this time,
also, Joel Pierce turned up and Eugene renewed an acquaintance that
had begun in Cambridge and lapsed during the interim.



LVII


He had never met any of Joel Pierce's family, but one night towards
seven o'clock when he had just returned to his room from the
university, Joel telephoned him, and, saying that his father was in
town, asked him if he would go to dinner and to the theatre with
them.  He found Joel and his father waiting for him in the lobby.
Mr. Pierce was a man of fifty years, comfortably dressed for the
hot weather in a black mohair suit, and with a kind of stately yet
spacious dignity of linen that was agreeably old-fashioned and that
evoked a picture of an older and more leisurely generation.  He was
quite deaf--so deaf, in fact, that he made use of a small ear-
phone--but his speech and manners, like his dress, were easy,
friendly, and yet touched with an air of distinguished authority.

He took the two boys to the Lafayette for dinner, and ordered
generously and with the easy and comforting assurance of a man of
the world who gives everyone around him a happy feeling of security
and well-being.  For Eugene, it was a memorable experience.

The fine restaurant--it was perhaps the finest he had yet seen--the
French waiters, the delicious food, the beautiful women, the well-
dressed, prosperous and worldly-looking men and the pleasant weary
languor of fading day, the huge nameless thrill and prophecy of
oncoming night touched him with a feeling of joy and nameless
anticipation.  He felt, as he had never felt before, that strange,
seductive promise which the city has at evening, at the end of a
day of terrible summer's heat, and which is so strangely mixed of
sorrow and delight, of desolation and the promise of a wild and
nameless joy.

And suddenly, all the horror, heat and desolation of the day were
forgotten.  He forgot the blind horror of the man-swarm thrusting
through the mazes of the furious streets.  He forgot the drowning
flood of humid flesh, the pale, wet, suffering faces that thrust
from nowhere out of sweltering heat, that were engulfed again into
the heat-hazed distances of swarming streets in which man's life
seemed more uncountable than the sands of the sea, and more blind,
lost and horribly forsaken than the lives of those eyeless crawls
and gropes that scuttle blindly and for ever through murky ooze
upon the sea's vast floor.

The old red light of evening filled his heart again with its wild
prophecy, its huge and secret joy, and the great stride of oncoming
night revived again, in all their magic, his childhood dreams of
the enchanted city, the city of great men and glorious women, the
city of unceasing joy, of power, triumph and success, and of the
fortunate, good, and happy life.

As Mr. Pierce sat there with his air of quiet and urbane authority,
studying the menu with a little frowning smile through the lenses
of a pince-nez that dangled fashionably and casually from a black
silk cord when he was not using it, the boy felt an indescribable
sense of wealth and power and prosperous ease.  It seemed to him
that everything in the world was his for the asking, and the suave
service of the waiter, hovering over Mr. Pierce with poised pencil
and an attitude of devoted respect, the rich designs of snowy
linen, the heavy silver, the thick carpets, the handsome women and
distinguished-looking men, all added to this feeling of wealth and
happiness.

Mr. Pierce kept studying the menu with an air of good-natured
seriousness, quizzing his son from time to time with gruff but
genial banter:

"Joel," he would say, "what do you want?  Have you any preference
of your own or will you leave it to me to decide?"

"Gosh!" Joel answered in his soft, eager tone.  "I don't care,
Pups.  Whatever you say goes with me!  You know, it's all the same
to me, anyway.  I can eat anything you order.  Only," he added
laughing, "I'd prefer it if there's no meat.  I'd like it much
better if you ordered vegetables."

Mr. Pierce knocked the pince-nez from his nose, and turning to
Eugene with an air of agreeable confidence, said:

"What's wrong with a boy who takes no more interest in his food
than that?  Can you make it out?  It strikes me as the most
astonishing thing," he went on in a gruff, distinguished way, "to
see a healthy young man who has no interest in his belly.  Really
Joel," he went on, turning to his son and regarding him with a kind
of quizzical but good-humoured sarcasm, "I'd feel so much better
about you if you only liked food more.  It's really tragic to see a
boy of your age deliberately throwing away one of the greatest
pleasures in life.  Don't you think so?" he demanded, turning to
the other boy again with his air of friendly confidence.  "Or have
you turned vegetarian, too?"

"Gosh, no!" Joel said, laughing his hushed eager, immensely
agreeable laugh.  "He'll agree with every word you say, Pups.  He
likes food even more than you do."

"Then I'm glad to hear it!" said Mr. Pierce approvingly.  "I had
begun to fear that this younger generation had gone utterly to
hell.  But if the symptoms are only local--" he frowned humorously
at his son for a moment--"perhaps it's not as bad as I thought."

"You and Pups should get along together beautifully," said Joel to
Eugene.  "He loves to eat--he's a wonderful cook--you should come
up to Rhinekill sometime and let him cook one of his meals for
you."

The ordering of the meal proceeded in this agreeable fashion.  Mr.
Pierce ordered liberally: small pink-fleshed clams, cold, pungent
and exciting in their perfect shells, a thick pea soup with little
squares of toast-crust floating in it, young chicken, plump and
tender, grilled so succulently that it seemed to melt away the
moment that one put it in his mouth, asparagus and potatoes, and a
salad of crisp lettuce, beautifully mixed, "fatigued," in a big
salad bowl, iced coffee, and a dessert of ripe Camembert and salted
crackers.  Mr. Pierce and Eugene ate heartily and with obvious
relish, but Joel, in spite of all their protests and his father's
bantering ridicule, which he took with the beautiful laughing good-
nature which was one of the finest traits of his character, stuck
to his vegetable diet with the gentle doggedness that was also
characteristic of him.



Later, when they had finished dinner, they drove uptown in a taxi-
cab and went to one of the summer musical shows near Broadway,
where an English revue was appearing.  The comic actress, Beatrice
Lillie, was the star of the performance.  Eugene had never heard of
her before, but it was evident from the fashionable and "smart"
look of the audience, and the way in which Joel and other people
greeted every word and gesture, that the actress was "all the
rage," one of those persons who, in addition to their native
talent, have some special quality that for a time makes them the
darling of the cult-adepts of the world of fashion.

The revue was a clever and amusing one, but it also had a stylish
quality of fashionable smartness that was more and more beginning
to mark the productions of the theatre and the responses of the
audience.  Thus, in later years, when one had almost completely
forgotten the scenes of the revue and its songs and jokes, one
could still remember it for the brilliant picture of the life it
evoked.  And the image of that life was implied rather than
portrayed.  The revue was one of those productions which people
were beginning to "wear" as they "wore" books or plays or a dress:
people went to the revue more because it was "the thing to do," the
thing that everyone was talking about, than because they had a
genuine desire to go, more because they had been told that it was
"amusing" than from any deep conviction that they would find it so.

Thus, not only in the jokes and songs and scenes of the revue, but
in the laughter and applause with which the fashionable audience
greeted them, there was a quality that was somewhat strained and
metallic--a new and disagreeable mirth that was coming into man's
life, which seemed to have its sources not in the warm human earth
and blood of humour, but to proceed from something sterile, sour
and acrid in his soul.  In this hard and essentially lifeless
merriment there was evident the desire to wound and mock and
injure.  And this desire came more from fear, a need to divert
attention from one's own nakedness and insecurity by an attack upon
a common target, than from any real cruelty or scornful hardihood
of the soul.

This fear and insecurity were evident even in the fashionable and
sophisticated audience which had come to this theatre to see the
smart revue.  In the interval between the acts, the people streamed
up the gangways and out into the lobby, and everywhere one looked,
the hostile fear and insecurity of the people were apparent.  For
the most part the audience was fashionably dressed, the men in
evening dress, the women in expensive evening gowns, that revealed
their long white arms, the velvet perfection of their breasts and
long backs.  It would have been difficult to find a more assured,
sophisticated and wealthy-looking group of people, but in spite of
this air of complete worldly assurance, their unhappiness and fear
were painfully evident.  Their bodies seemed to throw off and to
fill the air with a feverish electric tension, the texture of their
thousand voices rising all together in a braided clamour was almost
hysterically high, and remembering suddenly the quiet murmurous
drone of voices in a theatre twenty years before, the glamorous
spell of enchantment and happiness that surrounded even the
performances of some travelling company in its one-night appearance
in a little town, one felt poignantly again that something old and
pleasant had gone out of life, that something dissonant, painful
and unwholesome had changed man's rhythm, spread a poisonous
infection through the human chemistries.

One also saw, or rather powerfully felt, among these fashionable
and worldly-looking men of the great city, something jaded, puny,
sterile, horribly weary; a quality as if their vital energies had
been depleted in an unnatural way, as if they were emptied out,
dried up, sapped of their juice, and could keep going now only by a
kind of lifeless dynamism, a dry electric energy which paced them
to the tempo of the city's furious life, which would not let them
go until it had burned them hollow to a dry grey shell.

By contrast, the vivid loveliness of the women was astonishing.
The differences that distinguished these women from these men, in
colouring, in the velvety texture of the skin, in the sparkling
eyes, red mouths, voluptuously seductive bodies and general
healthiness and glowing elasticity of figure, were so great that
one was reminded of those insect species whose females are
wonderfully and fatally superior in strength and beauty to their
drab mates, and who finally devour them.  And yet, even in the
faces and figures of these lovely women, the mutilation of that
hard, metallic, blunted-out stamp was also evident: one noticed
that the general quality of the tone of all these mixed and
intermingled voices was feminine rather than masculine, and that
the feminine voice was even more assertive, arrogant and incisive
in its naked penetration than the voices of the men.

In fact, even as the two young men stood in one corner of the
lobby, surveying the keyed pulsations of this brilliant scene, a
woman's voice could be heard, speaking with an arrogant and
dogmatic assertiveness that instantly quenched denial and left no
room for disagreement, however mild:

"YES!  I think she is VERY charming, and VERY clever, and TERRIBLY,
TERRIBLY amusing.  The dancing is VERY bad; they simply DON'T KNOW
HOW to train a chorus.  As for the songs, I thought that one she
sings about Queen Mary's hats was AWFULLY funny; the rest are only
fair.  Of course, the decor is ABOMINABLE--but what can you expect?
That man who sings the song with her is rather good--the other one,
the awful little Cockney thing, is SIMPLY HORRIBLE!  Where do they
ever find these people, anyway? . . .  No!  No!" she said harshly
and arrogantly at this point as one of the men put in a mild, low-
voiced, and apologetic interjection of his own, "I do NOT agree
with you!  I ABSOLUTELY do NOT agree with you: you are ABSOLUTELY
wrong!  The nursemaid scene is DECIDEDLY the best thing in the
show!  The restaurant scene is VERY dull, and VERY cheap, and
TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY vulgar!  And it is VERY stupid of you not to see
it!"--And having delivered herself with womanly modesty of these
tolerant and generous observations, the lady turned, saw Joel, and
instantly addressed him, speaking to him in the same arrogant and
assertive tones she had used before, and blurting her words out
through lips that she kept perfectly straight and that scarcely
seemed to move or open as she spoke.

"JOEL!" she cried.  "What on earth are you doing here? . . .  I
thought you were at Rhinekill or in Maine? . . .  And where's your
mother? . . .  Did she come down too? . . .  No?  Too bad!" she
said harshly.  "I want VERY much to see her. . . .  Yes, I shall be
in Newport the week-end after next. . . .  Yes, yes," she went on
with metallic harshness, "--with Alice Mortimer. . . .  Is she
going, too? . . .  Good; then I shall see her!--My GOD, no! . . .
We're not staying here. . . .  We motored in to see the show. . . .
No, no. . . .  I've been staying at Sands Point. . . .  Jerry's at
Southampton. . . .  But GOD, no! . . .  A whole summer in this
hell-hole! . . .  The man's MAD! . . .  How d'ya do?" she said
curtly and harshly, throwing a cold look and a curt nod towards
Eugene as Joel whispered at his name, and instantly dismissing
him. . . .  "But do you seriously mean you're going to spend the
whole summer here? . . .  Not REALLY! . . .  But, my dear child,
what in heaven's name ever prompted you to do an idiotic thing like
that? . . .  Oh!  I see!" she said coldly.  "Painting, eh . . ."

But now the bell for the curtain sounded, and after a few
conventional words of parting they returned to their seats.



LVIII


The Hudson River joins the harbour.  And then the harbour joins the
sea.  Always the rivers run.

The Hudson River drinks from out the inland slowly; it is like vats
that well with purple and rich wine.  The Hudson River is like
purple depths of evening; it is like the flames of colour on the
Palisades, elves' echoes and old Dutch and Hallowe'en.  It is like
the Phantom Horseman, the tossed boughs, and the demented winds,
and it is like the headed cider and great fires of the Dutchmen in
the winter time.

The Hudson River is like old October and tawny Indians in their
camping places long ago; it is like long pipes and old tobacco; it
is like cool depths and opulence; it is like the shimmer of liquid
green on summer days.

The Hudson River takes the thunder of fast trains and throws a
handful of lost echoes at the hills.  It is like the calls of lost
men in the mountains; and it is like the country boy who is coming
to the city with a feeling of glory in him.  It is like the green
plush smell of the Pullman cars and snowy linen; it is like the kid
in upper four and the good-looking woman down below who stirs her
legs slowly in starched sheets: it is the magic river.  It is like
coming to the city to make money, to find glory, fame and love, and
a life more fortunate and happy than any we have ever known.  It is
like the Knickerbockers and early autumn; it is like the Rich
Folks, and the River People, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the
Roosevelts; it is like Robert W. Chambers and the Society Folks; it
is like the younger set and Hilary, and Monica, and Garth; it is
like The Story Thus Far:


The lovely Monica Delavere the beautiful but spoiled daughter of
one of the richest men in the world meets at a party given at her
father's Mount Kisco estate in honour of her approaching marriage
to a young architect Hilary Chedester his friend Garth Montgomery a
young artist just returned from years of study abroad fascinated
yet repelled by his dark passionate face and his slender hands with
the longer tapering fingers of the artist and goaded by something
enigmatic and mocking in his eyes in a moment of mad recklessness
spurred on by a twinge of jealousy at the undue attention which she
thinks Hilary is bestowing on Rita Daventry an old flame she
accepts a challenge from Garth to go for a mad dash across the
night in his speedster their objective being his hunting lodge in
the hills and a return before dawn arrived at the lodge however
Garth coolly announces that his car is out of petrol and that he
must phone for assistance to the nearest town somewhat disturbed
and reflecting for the first time now on the possible scandal her
reckless exploit may cause she enters the lodge now go on with the
story:


"Monica's red lips curved in a smile of mocking reproof.  She made
a moue.

"'Hardly a place I should have chosen to spend the evening, my dear
man,' she said.  'But then, perhaps it is the latest Paris fashion
to take ladies to deserted places and inform them you are stranded.
C'est comme ça à Paris, hein?'"

Yes, all these things were like the Hudson River.



And above all else, the Hudson River was like the light--oh, more
than anything it was the light, the light, the tone, the texture of
the magic light in which he had seen the city as a child, that made
the Hudson River wonderful.

The light was golden, deep and full with all rich golden lights of
harvest; the light was golden like the flesh of women, lavish as
their limbs, true, depthless, tender as their glorious eyes, fine-
spun and maddening as their hair, as unutterable with desire as
their fragrant nests of spicery, their deep melon-heavy breasts.
The light was golden like a golden morning light that shines
through ancient glass into a room of old dark brown.  The light was
brown, dark lavish brown hued with rich lights of gold; the light
was rich brown shot with gold like the sultry and exultant
fragrance of ground coffee; the light was lavish brown like old
stone houses gulched in morning on a city street, brown like
exultant breakfast smells that come from basement areas in the
brownstone houses where the rich men lived; the light was blue,
steep frontal blue, like morning underneath the frontal cliff of
buildings, the light was vertical cool blue, hazed with thin
morning mist, the light was blue, cold flowing harbour blue of
clean cool waters rimed brightly with a dancing morning gold,
fresh, half-rotten with the musty river stench, blue with the blue-
black of the morning gulch and canyon of the city, blue-black with
cool morning shadow as the ferry packed with its thousand small
white staring faces turned one way, drove bluntly toward the rusty
weathered slips.

The light was amber-brown in vast dark chambers shuttered from
young light where in great walnut beds the glorious women stirred
in sensual warmth their lavish limbs.  The light was brown-gold
like ground coffee, merchants and the walnut houses where they
lived, brown-gold like old brick buildings grimed with money and
the smell of trade, brown-gold like morning in great gleaming bars
of swart mahogany, the fresh wet beer-wash, lemon-rind and the
smell of angostura bitters.  Then full golden in the evening in the
theatres, shining with full golden warmth and body on full golden
figures of the women, on fat, red plush, and on rich, faded,
slightly stale smell, and on the gilt sheaves and cupids and the
cornucopias, on the fleshly, potent softly-golden smell of all the
people; and in great restaurants the light was brighter gold, but
full and round like warm onyx columns, smooth warmly tinted marble,
old wine in dark rounded age-encrusted bottles, and the great blond
figures of naked women on rose-clouded ceilings.  Then the light
was full and rich, brown-golden like great fields in autumn; it was
full swelling golden light like mown fields, bronze-red picketed
with fat rusty golden sheaves of corn, and governed by huge barns
of red and the mellow winy fragrance of the apples.--Yes, all of
this had been the tone and texture of the lights that qualified his
vision of the city and the river when he was a child.



Proud, cruel, ever-changing and ephemeral city, to whom we came
once when our hearts were high, our blood passionate and hot, our
brain a particle of fire: infinite and mutable city, mercurial
city, strange citadel of million-visaged time--Oh! endless river
and eternal rock, in which the forms of life came, passed and
changed intolerably before us, and to which we came, as every youth
has come, with such enormous madness, and with so mad a hope--for
what?

To eat you, branch and root and tree; to devour you, golden fruit
of power and love and happiness; to consume you to your sources,
river and spire and rock, down to your iron roots; to entomb within
our flesh for ever the huge substance of your billion-footed
pavements, the intolerable web and memory of dark million-visaged
time.

And what is left now of all our madness, hunger, and desire?  What
have you given, incredible mirage of all our million shining hopes,
to those who wanted to possess you wholly to your ultimate designs,
your final sources, from whom you took the strength, the passion,
and the innocence of youth?

What have we taken from you, protean and phantasmal shape of time?
What have we remembered of your million images, of your billion
weavings out of accident and number, of the mindless fury of your
dateless days, the brutal stupefaction of your thousand streets and
pavements?  What have we seen and known that is ours for ever?

Gigantic city, we have taken nothing--not even a handful of your
trampled dust--we have made no image on your iron breast and left
not even the print of a heel upon your stony-hearted pavements.
The possession of all things, even the air we breathed, was held
from us, and the river of life and time flowed through the grasp of
our hands for ever, and we held nothing for our hunger and desire
except the proud and trembling moments, one by one.  Over the
trodden and forgotten words, the rust and dusty burials of
yesterday, we were born again into a thousand lives and deaths, and
we were left for ever with only the substance of our waning flesh,
and the hauntings of an accidental memory, with all its various
freight of great and little things which passed and vanished
instantly and could never be forgotten, and of those unbidden and
unfathomed wisps and fumes of memory that share the mind with all
the proud dark images of love and death.

The tugging of a leaf upon a bough in late October, a skirl of
blown papers in the street, a cloud that came and went and made its
shadow in the lights of April.  And the forgotten laughter of lost
people in dark streets, a face that passed us in another train, the
house our mistress lived in as a child, a whipping of flame at a
slum's cold corner, the corded veins on an old man's hand, the
feathery green of a tree, a daybreak in a city street in the month
of May, a voice that cried out sharply and was silent in the night,
and a song that a woman sang, a word that she spoke at dusk before
she went away,--the memory of a ruined wall, the ancient empty
visage of a half-demolished house in which love lay, the mark of a
young man's fist in crumbling plaster, a lost relic, brief and
temporal, in all the everlasting variousness of your life, as the
madness, pain and anguish in the heart that caused it--these are
all that we have taken from you, iron-breasted city, and they are
ours and gone for ever from us, even as things are lost and broken
in the wind, and as the ghosts of time are lost, and as the
everlasting river that flowed past us in darkness to the sea.

The river is a tide of moving waters: by night it floods the
pockets of the earth.  By night it drinks strange time, dark time.
By night the river drinks proud potent tides of strange dark time.
By night the river drains the tides, proud potent tides of time's
dark waters that, with champ and lift of teeth, with lapse and
reluctation of their breath, fill with a kissing glut the pockets
of the earth.  Sired by the horses of the sea, maned with the dark,
they come.

They come!  Ships call!  The hooves of night, the horses of the
sea, come on below their manes of darkness.  And for ever the river
runs.  Deep as the tides of time and memory, deep as the tides of
sleep, the river runs.

And there are ships there!  Have we not heard the ships there?
(Have we not heard the great ships going down the river?  Have we
not heard the great ships putting out to sea?)

Great whistles blow there.  Have we not heard the whistles blow
there?  Have we not heard the whistles blowing in the river?  (A
harness of bright ships is on the water.  A thunder of faint hooves
is on the land.)

And there is time there.  (Have we not heard strange time, dark
time, strange tragic time there?  Have we not heard dark time,
strange time, the dark, the moving tide of time as it flows down
the river?)

And in the night-time, in the dark there, in all the sleeping
silence of the earth have we not heard the river, the rich immortal
river, full of its strange dark time?

Full with the pulse of time it flows there, full with the pulse of
all men living, sleeping, dying, waking, it will flow there, full
with the billion dark and secret moments of our lives it flows
there.  Filled with all the hope, the madness and the passion of
our youth it flows there, in the daytime, in the dark, drinking
with ceaseless glut the land, mining into its tides the earth as it
mines the hours and moments of our life into its tides, moving
against the sides of ships, foaming about piled crustings of old
wharves, sliding like time and silence by the vast cliff of the
city, girdling the stony isle of life with moving waters--thick
with the wastes of earth, dark with our stains, and heavied with
our dumpings, rich, rank, beautiful, and unending as all life, all
living, as it flows by us, by us, by us, to the sea!



LIX


Full night had come when he got off the train at the town where
Joel was to meet him.  After the heavy rains of the afternoon, and
the stormy sunset, the sky had cleared completely: a great moon
blazed in the cloudless bowl of a depthless sky; after the rain,
and the sultry swelter of the city streets, the tainted furnace-
fumes of city breath, the air was clean and fresh, and marvellously
sweet, and the great earth waited, and was still enormously, and
one always knew that it was there.

The engine panted for a moment with a hoarse, metallic resonance,
in the baggage-car someone threw mail-bags and thick bundles of
evening papers off onto the platform, there was the swinging signal
of a brakesman's lantern, the tolling of the engine bell, thick,
hose-like jets of steam blew out of her, the terrific pistons moved
like elbows, caught, bore down, the terrific flanges spun for a
moment, the short, squat funnel belched explosive thunders of hot
smoke, the train rolled past with a slow, protesting creak of ties,
a hard-pressed rumble of the heavy coaches, and was on her way
again.

Then the train was gone, and there was nothing but the rails, the
earth, the moon, the river, and strong silence--and the haunting
and immortal visage of America by night.  It was there, and it was
there for ever, and he had always known it, and it abode there and
was still, and there was something in his heart he could not utter.
The rails swept northward towards the dark, and in the moon the
rails were like two living strands of burning silver, and between
the rails the heavy ballast rock was white as lunar marble, and the
brown wooden ties were resinous and dry and very still.

Sheer beside the tracks, the low banks of the ballast-fill sloped
to the edges of the mighty river.  And the river blazed there in
the great blank radiance of the moon, cool waters gently lapped
small gluts and pockets of the shore, and in the great wink of the
moon the river blazed more brightly than elves' gold.  And farther
off, where darkness met it, the light was broken into scallop-
shells of gold; it swam and shimmered in a billion winks of fire
like a school of herrings on the water, and beyond all that there
was just the dark, the cool-flowing mystery of velvet-hearted
night, the silent, soundless surge and coolness of the strange, the
grand, the haunting, the unceasing river.

Far, far away in darkness, on the other shore--more than a mile
away--the river met the fringes of the land, but where the river
ended, or the land began, was hard to say.  There was just THERE a
greater darkness, perhaps just by a shade, a deeper, dark intensity
of night--a dark, perhaps, a shade less lucent, smooth, and fluid,
by an indefinable degree more solid.

Yet there were lights there--there were lights--a bracelet of a
few, hard lights along the river, a gem-like incandescence, few and
hard and bright, and so poignantly lost and lonely in enormous
darkness as are all lights in America, sown sparsely on the
enormous viewless mantle of the night, and by that pattern so
defining it--a scheme of sparse, few lights, hard, bright and
small, sown there upon night's enormous darkness, the great earth's
secret and attentive loneliness, its huge, abiding mystery.

And for ever, beyond the mysterious river's farthest shore, the
great earth waited in the darkness, and was still.  It waited there
with the huge, attentive secrecy of night and of America, and of
the wilderness of this everlasting earth on which we live; and its
dark visage that we cannot see was more cruel, strange and lonely
than the visage of dark death, and its rude strength more savage
and destructive than a tiger's paw, and its wild, mysterious
loveliness more delicate than magic, more desireful than a woman's
flesh, and more thrilling, secret and seductive than a woman's
love.

As he stood there, tranced in that powerful spell of silence and of
night, he heard swift footsteps running down the station stairs, he
turned and saw Joel Pierce approaching.  He ran forward quickly,
his tall, thin figure clad in a blue coat and white flannels, alive
with the swift boyish eagerness that was one of his engaging
qualities.

"Gosh!" he said, in his eager whispered tone, panting a little as
he came up, "--I'm sorry that I'm late: we have people staying at
the house; I had to drive a woman who's been staying with us to
Poughkeepsie--I tried to get you there, but your train had already
gone.  I drove like hell getting here.--It's good to see you!" he
burst out in his eager whispering way--at once so gentle, and so
friendly and spontaneous--"It's SWELL that you could come!" he
whispered enthusiastically.  "Come on!  They're all waiting for
you!"

And picking up his friend's valise, he walked swiftly across the
platform and began to climb the stairs.

Although Joel Pierce would have spoken in this way to any friend--
to anyone for whom he had a friendly feeling, however casual--and
although the other youth knew that he would have spoken this way to
many other people--the words filled him with happiness, with an
instinctive warmth and affection for the person who had spoken
them.  Indeed, the very fact that there was in Joel's words--in all
his human relationships--this curious impersonality, gave what he
said an enhanced value.  For in this way Joel revealed instinctively
what everyone who knew him well felt about him--an enormous decency
and radiance in his soul and character, a wonderfully generous and
instinctive friendliness towards humanity--that became finer and
more beautiful because of its very impersonality.

This warm, instinctive humanity was evident in all he did, it came
out somehow in the most casual words and relationships with people.
For example, when they went upstairs into the station waiting-room,
which was completely empty, Joel paused for a moment at the
booking-office window and spoke to a man in shirt-sleeves inside.

"Joe," he said casually yet in his eager, whispering way, "if Will
comes down will you tell him not to wait?  I've got everyone:
there'll be no one else tonight."

"All right, Mr. Pierce," the man said quietly.  "If I see him, I'll
tell him."



Joel's car, a small, cheap one of a popular make, was backed up
against the station curb: he opened the door and put his friend's
suitcase in the back, then they both got in and drove away.

About two miles back from town upon the crest of a hill that gave a
good view of the great moon-wink of the noble and haunting river
far below, Joel suddenly, and without slackening his reckless
speed, swerved from the concrete highway into a dusty and gravel
road that went off to the left.  And now they were really in the
heart of the deep country: on each side of them the moon-drenched
fields and dreaming woods of a noble, grand and spacious land slept
in the steep, white silence of the moon.  From time to time they
would pass corn-fields, the high and silent stature, the cool
figure of the corn at night, and see a great barn, or small lights
burning in some farmer's house.  Then there would be only the deep,
dark mystery of sleeping woods beside the road and once, in a
field, a herd of cows, all faced one way, bedded down upon their
forequarters, the mottled colours of their hides showing plainly in
the blazing radiance of the moon.  When they had gone about a mile
their road swept into another one that joined it at right angles:
between these roads, in the angle that they formed, there was a
pleasant house--a wooden structure of eight or ten rooms, white and
graceful in the moon, and surrounded by a trim, well-kept lawn and
well laid-out flower-plots and gardens.

A swift and pleasurable conviction told the youth that this was
Joel's house: he was therefore surprised when the car shot past
without slackening its speed and then turned left upon the other
road.  He turned to Joel and, almost with a note of protest in his
voice, said:

"Don't you live there?  Isn't that your house?"

"What?" Joel whispered quickly, startled from the focal concentration
of his driving.  He turned to his companion with a surprised
inquiring look.  "Oh, THAT house?" he went on at once. "No," he
said softly.  "That's not our house.--That is, it is our house," he
corrected himself, "it belongs to us, but a friend of ours--Margaret
Telfair--lives there now.  You'll meet her tonight," he went on
casually.  "She's at the house now.--You'll LIKE her," he whispered
with soft conviction, "--she's grand!  An INCREDIBLE person!" he
whispered enthusiastically.

They drove on in silence for some time: more moon-drenched fields,
great barns and little farmhouses, and herds of crouching cattle,
more dreaming and mysterious woods, the mysterious shadows of great
trees against the road, and secrecy, and sweet balsamic scents and
cool-enfolding night.--They were now driving back in the direction
of the river: the new road led that way.

"When do we come to your place, Joel?" the other youth asked, when
they had driven on in silence for a time.  "How far is it?"

"What?" Joel whispered quickly, again turning his radiant and
inquiring face.  "OUR place?  Oh!" he said.  "We're on our place
now."

"ON it?" the other stammered, after a moment's bewildered pause.
"But--but--where--I didn't see a gate or anything--when?--"

"Oh," Joel whispered, with an enlightened air.  "THAT!  We passed
it."

"PASSED it?  Where?"

"When we turned in from the main road," Joel whispered.  "Do you
remember?"

"The--the MAIN road?" the other stammered.  "You--you mean--that
concrete highway way back there?"

"Yes," Joel whispered.  "That was the entrance to our place--one of
them.  It's not much of an entrance," he whispered apologetically.
"I don't wonder that you couldn't see it."

"Then--then--everything since then--all we passed--all this--?" the
other stammered.

"Yes," Joel whispered, with his radiant, eager look, "that's it.
That's our place.  It's really grand country," he went on matter-
of-factly.  "I want to show you around tomorrow."

They swept suddenly around a curve of the gravelled road, bordered
with fragrant shrubs.  Before them stretched out an immense sward
of velvet lawn, darkened by the grand and silent stature of great
trees.  The car swept forward; through the tree-barred vista of the
lawn, the outline of a house appeared.  It was a dream-house, a
house such as one sees only in a dream--the moonlight slept upon
its soaring wings, its white purity, and gave the whole enormous
structure an aerial delicacy, a fragile loveliness like some
enchanted structure that one sees in dreams.  And yet, for all this
quality of dream-enchantment, there was something hauntingly
familiar about it too.  The car swept around the drive and halted
before the moonlit façade of the house.  A back porch level with
the ground was flanked by tall, square columns of graceful, slender
wood.  To one side, far below, beyond the house, and the great
moon-sweep of velvet, he could see the wink and glimmer of the
Hudson River.

And suddenly that haunting sense of familiarity fused to a blind
flash of recognition.  The house was the house he had passed a
dozen times in darkness, had seen a dozen times at morning from the
windows of a speeding train along the river, as he hurtled
citywards again from those blind night passages of desire and fury
in a town called Troy.

They got out of the car.  Joel took his valise, and like a person
walking in a dream, he followed him across the porch, into a large
and dimly lit entrance-hall.  Joel put his valise down in the hall,
and turning, whispered:

"Look.  I'll show you your room later.  Mums and some other people
are waiting for us on the terrace.  Let's go and say hello to them
first."

He nodded, unable to speak, and in silence followed his guide down
the hall and through the house.  Joel opened a door: the blazing
moonlight fell upon the vast, swarded lawn and sleeping woods of
that magic domain known as Far Field Farm.  And that haunting and
unearthly radiance fell as well upon the white wings of that magic
house and on a group of its fortunate inhabitants who were sitting
on the terrace.

The two young men went out: forms rose to greet them.



LX


A group of eight or ten people were gathered on the terrace.  Joel
introduced Eugene swiftly, quietly, in an eager, whispering voice,
as always, with his fine, kind intuition, mindful of another
person's embarrassment and confusion: the moonlit figures rose,
looked toward him, passed and swam and mixed around him in a blur
of names and moon-white faces and politely murmured words.  Then
all the figures resolved themselves again into their former
positions; he was standing beside Joel's mother, looking at her
with a helpless and bewildered face; she put one hand swiftly,
lightly on his arm, and in a kind and quiet voice said to him:
"You sit down here, next to me."

Then she sat down again in her chair--a big, wicker chair with a
vast, fan-shaped back, he sat down beside her, and sank gratefully
into oblivion while the other people resumed their interrupted
conversation.

"No, but--POLLY!  SURELY not!  You know, she actually did not go
through with it?" said a strong, protesting voice, in which yet an
eager curiosity was evident.  "You know, they stopped the thing
before she went the whole way?"

"My dear," said Polly firmly--she had evidently been well named: in
the moonlight her face showed sharp and pointed, with a big nose,
and the shrewd, witty, and rather malicious features of a parrot--
"my dear, I KNOW she DID.  I was visiting Alice Bellamy at Newport
when it happened: I got the whole story straight from her.  The
family were perfectly frantic--they were calling Hugh Bellamy up or
running in to see him a dozen times a day to find out if something
could be done--how to get it annulled--But I tell you," Polly
cried, shaking her head obstinately and speaking in a tone of
unmistakable conviction, "--I know what I'm talking about!  There's
no doubt about it whatever--she MARRIED him--the ceremony was
ACTUALLY performed--"

"And she really LIVED with him--with this--this STABLE-BOY?"

"LIVED with him!" Polly cried.  "My dear, they'd been living
together for almost two weeks before old Dick Rossiter found them.
Now, of course," she said piously, but with a faint, malicious
smirk, "--I don't know what they'd been doing all that time--
perhaps the whole affair had been quite idyllic, but--well, my
dear, you can use your own imagination.  My own experience with
ostlers is rather limited, but I shouldn't think they were
particularly renowned for their platonic virtues."

"No," said Mrs. Pierce quietly, but with an unmistakable note of
level and obdurate cynicism in her voice, "--nor Ellen Rossiter
either--not if I know the breed! . . .  After all," she went on in
a moment, in a voice that was characterized by its grimly quiet
conviction, "what else could you expect out of that crowd? . . .
There's bad blood there!  Bad blood in the whole lot of them," her
voice rose on a formidable and powerful note of unrelenting
judgment.  "--Everyone in Society knows that old Steve Buchanan,
that girl's grandfather, was a thorough-going rotter," she bit the
word off almost viciously.  "His reputation was so bad that most
people wouldn't even have him in their house--that was the reason
he spent the last twenty years of his life in France: he had become
an outcast over here, no one would speak to him--he had to get
out!--But!  Heavens!  A STABLE-BOY!" she laughed again, and this
time her laugh was almost hard and ugly.  "What a blow to Myra--
after all her years of scheming and contriving to get Timmy Wilson
and his millions into the family! . . .  I knew it!  I knew it!"
she shook her head with formidable, obstinate conviction.  "I could
have told them long ago they'd have trouble with that girl before
they were done with her!  There's bad blood there!  Of course, it
was BOUND to happen, sooner or later, anyway--Myra's a fool of the
first water: she never had the brains of a rabbit.  But to think!--
Heavens! what a let-down after all her scheming: a stable-boy!  I
bet she had a fit!"

"Still," suggested a young man named Howard, at this propitious
moment, in his mincing, lisping, and effeminately mannered tone,
"--as Irene Cartwright said, it was the only original thing that
Ellen Rossiter ever did, and it was rather a pity to break the
romance off. . . .  I thought," he went on casually, "that the
story they told about the ostler was rather touching--asking her to
send his letters back, you know!"

"No!" cried Mrs. Pierce in an astounded tone.  "Did he? . . .
Well!" she went on eagerly.  "And did she send them? . . .  Go on,
Howard!"

"But, of course," said Howard.  "And the wedding-ring, and
everything else that he had given her. . . .  I read the letter
that he wrote her: it was really TOO pathetic--he said he was going
with another girl--a housemaid, I believe--and he didn't want it to
get out that he had paid attentions to someone else. . . .  'I have
spoke it all over with my mother,' he said," Howard quoted drolly,
"'and she thinks the same as me, you ought to let me have them
back'"--

"Oh, HOWARD!" Mrs. Pierce shrieked faintly.  "You KNOW he didn't!
Simply PRICELESS!"

For a moment her splendid, even teeth flashed brilliantly in the
moonlight: she lifted the long cigarette-holder in her hand and
took a long, deliberate puff: the fragrant, acrid smoke of Turkish
tobacco coiled upward in the moonlight air like filings of light
steel.  Turning to the young man beside her, she addressed him with
the somewhat patient and dutiful kindliness of a person receiving a
strange guest in her home for the first time.

"Well," she said, "and how did you find the trip up?  Did Joel
frighten you out of your wits by his driving?  He does everyone
else."

"Well, he did go pretty fast," the youth admitted.  "He had me
hanging on once or twice--when we left the main road we took the
curve on two wheels, but he seemed to know what he was doing."

"I assure you," said Mrs. Pierce, with a stern laugh, "that he does
not.  I wish I could share your confidence, but I can't.  I don't
think he has the faintest notion what he's doing."

"But, after all," the very quiet, pleasant, almost toneless voice
of a young man whose name was George Thornton now took up the
thread of the discussion--"after all, I should think that any
reasonable man would be content with a speed of thirty-five or
forty miles an hour.  After all," he said very quietly again,
"perhaps the most important things in life are not to be got at
through speed--perhaps all the things that are most worth living
for are not to be had if we always go a mile a minute."

"That's just it, George!" Mrs. Pierce put in with decisive
satisfaction.  "That's just it!  Any reasonable man WOULD be
content with thirty-five or forty miles an hour--but Joel is not
reasonable.  When he gets in a car he's like a child that's been
given a new toy to play with for the first time."

"The greatest things in life, the highest values," George Thornton
went on in his quiet, pleasant, almost toneless voice, which now,
despite the air of telling reasonableness with which he spoke--
the air of temperance, moderation and control--was, somehow,
indefinably tinged by a sombre fatality: the tone of a man whose
extreme reasonableness comes from a fear of madness, whose
temperance from some fatal impulse to insane excess--"the greatest
things in life," he went on in his quiet, toneless voice, almost as
if he were talking to himself and had not heard what Mrs. Pierce
had said--"are not to be got from machinery or speed, or any
material object in the world whatever. . . .  Christ," he continued
with his quiet, utterly reasonable, and implacable finality, "said
that the greatest thing in life is love.  Buddha said that the
greatest thing in life is the illumination of the human spirit.
Socrates found that man's highest duty was obedience to his
country's laws.  And Confucius, after weighing life and death
against each other, found man's only reason for living in keeping
as many of the conventions of society as he could. . . .  And that,
Joel, perhaps is the real reason, the only reason, why you should
not drive your car at reckless speed. . . .  You break your
country's law by doing so . . . and you cause pain and worry and
anxiety to other people who may love you.  For that reason, if for
nothing else, you ought not to do it."

He delivered this judgment in his quiet and toneless voice, without
vanity or arrogance, but with a finality that was almost prophetic
and that left no room for argument.  When he was done speaking
there was a deep, impersonal silence for a moment, and then the
voice of Joel's sister, Rosalind--a voice that was still the voice
of a girl, but that was also sweet and low and womanly, full of
noble tenderness and warmth--could be heard in all its affectionate
young impulsiveness:

"Oh, but, George!--you're an ANGEL about everything!  If everyone
were like you, life would be heaven!"  She took his hand between
her strong, warm hands and squeezed it--an impulsive and natural
gesture with her that revealed, as much as anything else, the deep
and true affection of her nature.  "--Darling," she said, "--you
make all of us--everyone else--feel so mean--and small--and--so
petty. . . .  I mean," she went on with the earnest and naïve
sincerity, the spontaneous admiration, of a generous and warm-
spirited girl--"the way you live--the way you have spent your whole
life, George, in helping other people--the way you have found out
all these wonderful things about--about--Buddha and Confucius and
Socrates--you KNOW so much, George!" she cried enthusiastically--
"you have learned so much, while the rest of us were just leading
an idle, stupid, empty kind of life--and the way you give it all
away to others--the way you give your money away to anyone who
needs it--the--the--way," she faltered suddenly, and her voice was
choked with tears--"the way you have looked after poor Dick all
these years"--she blurted out.

"Rosalind!" Mrs. Pierce cried out sharply and warningly, yet not
with reproof so much as with apprehension.

"I don't care!" cried Rosalind impulsively--"I--I think he's
wonderful!  George, you're a SAINT!" she said, and clasped his hand
again.

No one spoke for a moment: George sat quietly on the terrace step,
his fine and small bronzed head, his very still eyes, in whose
steady, quiet depths the fatal madness which would destroy him was
already legible, turned out across the great sward of moon-drenched
lawn towards the shine and wink and velvet mystery of the noble
river far below.  In the quality of silence that held all these
people, there was a sense of profound emotion--the reference to
"poor Dick" had touched some sorrowful fact that all of them knew
about, and one could sense this deep feeling now in the stony
silence that held all of them.  It was broken in a moment by Mrs.
Pierce, who betrayed, by the studied matter-of-factness of her
tone, the emotion which she, too, had felt.

"But it IS an extraordinary thing, George--a simply astonishing
thing--to find a young man of your age who has read and studied--
and--and--PREPARED himself for life the way you have.  It's SIMPLY
astonishing!" she concluded, and then did what was perhaps an
astonishing thing for her--quickly and vigorously she blew her
nose.  "But SIMPLY astonishing!" she said again, as she thrust the
handkerchief away and put a cigarette into her eight-inch holder.

"No, I think not," he said quietly, and without a trace of vanity
or false modesty.  "It would have been astonishing if I had not
done it.  After all, my debt to society for all that it has done
for me is great enough as it is: I could not with any decency look
the world in the face if I knew that I had not made some effort to
repay it."

"How few rich young men feel that way about it," said Mrs. Pierce
quietly.  "I wish more did!"

The conversation was now turned to other, lighter channels of
discussion: gossip, spirited but light debate.  Mrs. Pierce renewed
her conversation with Howard and Polly; farther away upon the steps
Rosalind, Seaholm, a dark girl named Ruth, and George Thornton
talked, gossiped and laughed together with the charming intimacy of
youth, and Joel and Miss Telfair were engaged in eager and excited
debate--Joel, for the most part, listening with the eager,
respectful, bent-forward attentiveness, the devoted courtesy of
reverence, that marked all of his relations with women, and Miss
Telfair doing most of the talking.  She talked the way she looked
and dressed and acted, the way she was: a speech fragile, empty,
nervous, brittle, artificial and incisive as one of the precious
bits of china, the costly, rare, enamelled little trinkets that
filled up her house, her life, her interest.

"No, Joel!" she was saying with a voice that had a curious, shell-
like penetration--a positive, brittle, but incisively certain
voice--"you are absolutely wrong!  You are COMPLETELY mistaken
about that!  The thing cannot by any stretch of the imagination be
called Sienese!  It is PURE Ravenna--PERFECT Ravenna--ABSOLUTELY!"
she cried, shaking her enamelled face with obdurate conviction.
"It's nothing else on earth but the PUREST and MOST PERFECT
Ravenna--and Fourteenth Century Ravenna at that! . . .  No!  No!"
she cried incisively, cutting him off shortly, and shaking her head
stubbornly as he tried to put in a smiling, whispered word of
courteous doubt.  "My dear child, you are dead wrong!  You don't
know what you're talking about! . . .  I was an authority on these
things before you were born. . . .  I've forgotten more about
Ravenna than you'll ever know! . . .  No! . . .  No! . . .
Absolutely NOT! . . .  You're ALL wrong!"

He received this stubborn, arrogant and almost insulting rebuttal
as he always did--with the whispered, gracious humility of his
beautiful good nature: laughing softly and enthusiastically over
her arrogant and contemptuous denial, as if he were merely the
victim of the most tender and high-spirited raillery.



At this moment, however, when, with a sense of resentment and
displeasure he was listening to the naked and arrogant penetrations
of Miss Telfair's voice, Rosalind Pierce rose from her seat on the
terrace step, left the other young people there, came swiftly to
where Eugene was seated, and sat down beside him.

"Why are you sitting here all by yourself--so quiet and so alone?"
she said in her warm, sweet, lovely, and affectionate young voice.
"Can I sit here and talk to you?" she said, and even as she spoke
these words, she slipped her arm through his and clasped him by the
hand.  The whole life and character of this beautiful, fine and
lovely girl were in that simple, natural and spontaneous gesture.
That gesture did what words could never do, explained what years of
living with many people could not explain: in an instant she
communicated to him the whole quality of her life, told him the
kind of person she was.  And the kind of person she was was
unbelievably good and beautiful.

"What have you been thinking of all the time you have been sitting
here?" she whispered in her low, sweet voice.  "I could see you
sitting here, listening, looking at us, and all the time it was
just as if you were a million miles away.  What were you thinking?--
that we are all an idle, shallow lot, with nothing to do except to
chatter and gossip about other useless people like ourselves?"

"Why--no--no," he stammered.  "Why--not at all--"  He looked at her
with a red embarrassed face, but there was no guile or mockery in
her.  She was not clever enough for sarcasm or malice, not witty
enough for irony: she was a creature full of innocence and ardour,
without profound intelligence, but with a nature full of warmth,
generous enthusiasm, and affection.

"I--I--think you're all fine," he blurted out.  "I think you're
great."

"Do you, darling?" she said softly.  "Well, we're not."  She pulled
him towards her with a gesture of friendly intimacy, and said:
"Come on: let's leave them all for a few minutes.  I want to talk
to you."

They got up, and still with her warm hand clasped in his, they
walked along the terrace and around the great, moon-whitened wings
of the house on to the road that swept in an oval before it.

"Do you really like us?" she said, as they walked on down the road
away from the house under a deep, nocturnal mystery of great trees
through which the moonlight shone and swarmed upon the earth in
mottles of light.  "Don't you like Joel?  Don't you think he's
grand?"

"I--I think he's the best fellow in the world," he said.  "He's--
he's just TOO good!"

"Oh, he's a saint," she said in her quiet, sweet voice.  "There
was never anyone like him: he's the loveliest person I've ever
known. . . .  Aren't people wonderful?" she said, and turned and
paused in the moonlit road and looked at him.  "I mean, there are
a lot of mean ones . . . and useless ones . . . and sort of shabby
ones like . . . like--well, like some of those people there tonight
. . . but there's something good in all of them--even poor little
Howard Martin has something sweet and good in him: he has a kind
heart--he really has--he wants to be amusing and to entertain people,
he wants everyone to be happy and have a good time. . . .  And when
you meet someone like Joel, it makes up for everything else,
doesn't it? . . .  Or George Thornton--don't you like him?  Don't
you think he's a grand person, too?"

"He--seems fine," he answered with some difficulty.  "I--I never
met him till tonight."

"Oh, you'll LOVE him when you get to know him," the girl said
earnestly.  "--Everybody does. . . .  He's another saint, just like
Joel . . . and he's so brave, and kind, and good--and his life has
been so terrible."

"Terrible?  I--I thought he said--"

"Oh, he IS, darling--he DOES have everything THAT way--money, I
mean.  He's terribly rich: one of the richest young men in the
world. . . .  Only he doesn't spend it on himself, he gives it all
away and then . . . you see, darling, George has had an unhappy
life of it from the beginning. . . .  His father died a raving
madman, there's been insanity in his family for generations back,
his mother was a horrible woman who deserted him when he was a
child and ran off with a man, and he was brought up by an aunt--his
father's sister--who was half cracked herself. . . .  Now he lives
all alone on this big place that he's inherited--he has one
brother, Dick, who is two years older than he is--and he has spent
practically his whole life in looking after Dick."

"Looking after him?"

"Yes," the girl said quietly, "--Dick is insane too--a raving
maniac; they have guards for him, they have to watch him every
minute of the time--when George comes to see him, Dick tries to
kill him. . . .  And George loves him, he'd give his life for him,
he does everything he can to make Dick happy--and Dick hates him so
that he'd kill him if he could. . . .  And George has this thing
hanging over him all the time, he can't forget about it for a
moment, it's made his whole life wretched, and yet you'd never know
it when you talk to him: he never mentions it, he's always the same
to people,--always kind and good and gentle, never thinking of
himself."

"I see.  And is that the reason why he studies all these different
philosophies--Christ and Socrates and Confucius?--"

"Yes," she said quietly.  "--And Buddha.  I think so. . . .  He
would never admit it . . . he has never said so . . . and of course
no one COULD ask him. . . .  But I think that's the reason. . . .
There's something . . . something desperate . . . lost . . . in his
eyes sometimes," she said slowly, after a pause.  ". . . It's . . .
it's not good to look at . . . it's . . . I imagine it's like the
look you would see in the eyes of a drowning man."

"And you think that he may be afraid of . . . of insanity?"

She was silent for a moment, and did not answer him directly.

"He's been studying Buddhism for the last two years," she said.
"He's had all kinds of people at the house to teach him. . . .
Hindus, mystics, scholars--learned people . . . he's . . . he's
become more and more . . . I don't know," she said in a puzzled
tone.  "--I don't know what you'd call it--sort of mystical."
Again she was silent, and presently added matter-of-factly:  "He's
going to India next year."

"To study?"

"Yes, I think so," the girl said, and again was silent.  "Somehow--
it's a dreadful thought, isn't it?" she said in a low tone after a
moment--"But sometimes I have wondered if George would ever come
back. . . .  Perhaps," she concluded quietly, ". . . perhaps that
is why we all love him so much . . . it's like loving someone who
is brave and good and gentle that you know has got to die."

For some time they walked on slowly down the moon-white road
without further speech.

"I want you to know Carl, too," she said.  "He seems very cold and
strange at first--but that is just his foreign way.  He is really
one of the loveliest, sweetest people that ever lived. . . .  You
know," she said presently, "we are going to be married in October."

"Yes, I know.  Joel told me. . . .  Will you live here--in this
country?"

"No.  I'm afraid not. . . .  You see, Carl is in the diplomatic
service, and they get moved around a great deal.  They have to go
where they get sent."

"And where will you go first?  Do you know?"

"Yes, I think they are sending him to Paris next."

"Will you like that?  Do you think you'll like living in Paris?"

"Of COURSE," she said with her rich, warm, easy laugh.  "I'm
awfully easy to please--I like everything--I'm happy anywhere--
wherever I am.  Is that very bad of me?" she said with a kind and
gently teasing smile.

"No, that's very good of you. . . .  Have you ever been to Paris?"

"Yes," she cried in a rich, enthusiastic tone, "and I love it.  I
adore it.  I studied music there.  Mother and I lived there for two
years before I came out."

"But now you'll have to learn Swedish and German and Italian and
Spanish and Russian--all those languages--now that you're getting
married to a diplomat.  Won't you?"

"Yes," she said with her sweet and careless laugh--"Everything!
One must become a regular little walking Berlitz school of
languages--only I shan't mind very much: I'm very stupid, but my
husband is so kind and clever I'm sure I'll learn in spite of
everything."

"And you'll live in Paris and Rome and London and Berlin--all those
places?  Won't you?"

"Yes, darling," she said in her warm, sweet tone that always had
something maternal and tolerantly amused in its humour, "--and in
Copenhagen and Stockholm and Bucharest and Madrid--even in Pogo
Pogo or in China or Peru--wherever they choose to send us.  We'll
be two international hoboes, darling--that's the kind of life we'll
have to lead."

"God!" he said bluntly.  "It sounds wonderful!  What a thing to
happen to anyone!--and to happen to you at your age! . . .  But
won't if make all this--this place here--seem awfully far away, and
very strange--when you think back on it?"

"Yes," the girl said quietly, and added so softly that she seemed
to breathe the words--so softly that he could scarcely hear her,
"--and quite impossibly lovely!"

He stared at her in blank astonishment for a minute: she had
clasped her hands against her breast in a natural and simple
gesture, the moon had made an aureole of magic around the silken
strands of her brown hair, and suddenly he noticed that her eyes
were bright with tears.

"Very, very far away," she said in a low tone, "and enormously
beautiful. . . .  You see," she said simply, "this is my home. . . .
I was born here, and I love it."  She was silent for a moment
longer, and then she said quietly but in a more matter-of-fact way:

"Don't you think our place--this country here--is beautiful?"

He did not answer her for a moment: at first he was not even
conscious that he had heard her.  He kept staring at her with a
comical expression of gape-jawed and hypnotic fascination.  He was
conscious of a queer, bewildered and inappropriate feeling of
surprise--a kind of numb, absurd wonder that if he had read all the
books and poems in the world, and then tried to imagine for himself
something as impossibly lovely as this girl and the whole scene
around her, he could never, by any soaring stretch of the
imagination, have come within a million miles of it.

Behind her head the moon was making its spun aura of enchanted
light, the dress she was wearing was of some sweet gossamer stuff
of light moon-blue that seemed spun out of the very substance of
the moon itself--to float, to move like some aerial fume of magic
smoke, but the girl herself was lovely, sweet and strong as the
whole earth around her.  She was herself no creature of elves'
fantasy, she was not lithe and slender, fleeting as a nymph: she
was a warm, strong-bodied girl, wide in the hips for children, a
nature warm and soft and gentle as a cow, but radiant and lovely
with fair girlhood, too, and full of sweetness, strength, and
tender, jolly humour.

She stood there in the middle of the white, empty road with the
enchanted radiance of the moon upon her, and he stared at her
unbelievingly, like a man who meets some vision in a dream and does
not know if he is dreaming or awake, and yet knows all the time
that it is real.  Then he would take his fascinated gaze away from
her, and look down at the moon-white road, and stamp it with his
foot, and kick and scurf the ground of the moon-white road to see
if it was real, and then lift his head and look at her again, and
turn and see the great, sweet fields and meadows dreaming in the
moonlight, and cows down upon their knees, facing toward him with
their strange and silent stare, or faced one way and grazing
towards him through the moon pastures with sweet, wrenching pull of
teeth; and then he would see the dark and sleeping woods of night,
with all their mystery and loveliness and wild and solemn joy, and
secret terror, and all the grand and casual folds and convolutions
of the sleeping, moon-enchanted earth, and far away the moon-blaze
and wink, the herring glamour, and the dancing scallop fires and
all the darkness, coolness, and the velvet-breasted mystery of the
strange and silent river, the haunted river, the great Hudson
River, drawing on for ever from the dark and secret earth the
sources of its depthless tides, and in the night-time, in the dark,
with soundless movings of its tide, drawing on for ever like time
and silence past the strange and secret land, the mysterious earth,
the sleeping cities and the lost and lonely little towns of dark
America.

It was all so strange, so impossibly lovely, so hauntingly
familiar--the grand and casual landscape of America--and it seemed
past words and past belief, to be so much a part of this girl's
life, and she a part of it, that all the haunting mystery of the
secret earth, the silent river, and all its sweetness, fragrance
and fertility, its casual homeliness, and its unuttered loveliness
had entered into her, had fed her life, had shaped her to its
special quality, and like a solemn music was mixed into the
conduits of her blood and life and soul for ever, so that now he
could not bear to see her taken from it, he felt a cruel and
ruinous loss and waste in this destructive separation--a loss that
touched not only this girl's life, but the life of the great earth
and all America as well--a loss as if a rare and glorious flower
were brutally uprooted from the only earth that could produce or
nurture it and which would henceforth be, by reason of its
treasured loss, bereft.  And feeling so, a blind and bitter
resentment surged up in his heart, his whole life and spirit were
set against her going, and in his soul an unforgiving and
protesting voice kept saying doggedly:

"Why has she got to go?  Why must she be lost?  Why does she have
to go and marry that damned Swede?"

In the great moon-drenched field beside the road, the cows were
moving towards them slowly, grazing, pulling the fragrant meadow
grass of night with sweet, cool wrenching, with rustling stir, and
with whisking of dry tails.

The girl walked over to the wire fence, and one of the cows, after
regarding her with its grave, gentle stare, moved slowly towards
her, rattling the fence wires as it thrust its gentle, bending head
across the fence and nuzzled her soft palm.

"She seems to know you," said the youth.

"Yes," the girl answered.  "I know them all by name, they all know
me.  I gave them all their names: this one's Brindle.  Aren't they
lovely creatures?" she said quietly, as she stroked the cow.
"Such--such--gentle pets," she said, "with their kind looks and
great, soft eyes.  They all know me, and will come to me when I
call their names."

The other cows, indeed, were now standing still, faced toward her,
looking at her with slow, gaunt and gentle heads.  Now, slowly,
they started to move toward her, making a cool, sweet rustling
through night grasses as they came.  The moonlight burst upon their
short, curved horns, it burst upon the rich bright patches of their
mottled hides, upon their stringy, dung-bespattered rumps, their
soft eyes, and the slow, gentle wonder of their long, gaunt heads.

And it was all so wonderful--the sleeping woods, the moon-enchanted
fields, the slow, light grazings of the moonlit cows, and all the
fragrance of the night, the grass, the clover and the meadow
spells, and the magic warmth and loveliness of the girl, and her
sweet, low voice beside him in the moonlight--that it seemed to him
that all his life had been a prelude and a preparation to this
wonder.  He did not know what he could say, it came swelling up in
a wild flood of tenderness and passion, he felt that he must tell
her somehow, and he had no words for saying it; he seized her hands
and stammered:

"Look here--if I live to be a million years I'll never--the way the
river was tonight, the moon, and the way Joel met me and then
finding you and your mother and your friends there in the
moonlight--and the river down below--and now this walk with you--
this road--the field--and all these cows there in the field--and
you here--why, by God!" he cried thickly, incoherently, "you are
the finest girl I ever saw in all my life!--this place--tonight
here--the most wonderful--"

"Come on," she said quietly, with her warm, young laugh, and took
him by the arm again.  "We must be going back:--the others will be
waiting for us--but it HAS been lovely, hasn't it?"

"Why," he muttered thickly and seized her hand again, "--why!  By
God!  By God!"



When they got back to the house the guests had risen for departure,
but were standing in an interested group around George Thornton,
who was showing them gymnastics.

"Another thing," he was saying, in his very quiet, pleasant,
toneless voice, "--another thing that you can try is this."  With
these words he stretched his slight and graceful figure--which was
as tough as hickory and as flexible as a whip--flat out upon the
bricked floor of the terrace.

"Try this some time," he continued in his quiet, even tone that had
a curiously hushed, still and almost sombre penetration in the deep
moon-silence of the night.  "Try lying flat out on your back some
time--like this."  And he lay there, small, graceful, beautifully
lithe, completely relaxed.

"And then what?" said Mrs. Pierce in an interested tone.  "What do
you do then, George?"

"Nothing," he said with toneless quiet.  "You just lie there--it
relaxes you: a Hindu showed me how to do it."

"Oh, but anyone could do that!" Howard Martin protested, in his
mannered and rather effeminate voice.  "Even I could do that,
George."

"It's not as easy as you think," George said.  "You see," he went
on quietly, "it's really a greater effort to be relaxed than most
of us realize.  Most of us are all tied up in a knot--so much more
tense than we know we are.  The thing you've got to do," he went on
with his quiet and fatal tonelessness, "is to relax--utterly relax--
just let everything relax.  You've got to lie so that everything--
the back of your head, your shoulders, your spinal column--the
whole thing--lies flat upon the floor.  Like this," he said, and
just lay there, small, fragile, beautifully lithe and strong, and
utterly, quietly, "relaxed"--his voice coming with a quiet and
strange penetration from a figure that seemed inanimate.  "--It's
not easy to do, but you can master it if you try."

"Oh, let me see!  I'm going to try!" little Howard Martin cried
with the good-natured and unselfconscious eagerness that was really
one of his attractive and appealing qualities.  And completely
unruffled by the laughter of the group, he immediately lay down and
stretched himself out beside George, his dapper little figure
looking indescribably comical as he tried to follow George's
instructions and imitate his posture:

"How's that, George?" he said presently, without moving.  "Have I
got it?"

George turned and observed him keenly for a moment.

"No," he said quietly, "you haven't got it yet, Howard.  You see,
you've got to flatten out completely.  You've just got to let
everything go limp--relax--so that your whole back is flat upon the
ground."

"But I AM flat!  I AM flat!" little Howard protested in such a
mincing and comical tone of protest that everyone burst out in
hearty laughter, and even George smiled his fine, rare, and grave
smile.  "My GOD!" Howard said in an agonized tone when the laughter
had subsided, "if I was any flatter I'd feel like a pancake."

"No, Howard," George Thornton said quietly after another moment of
observant silence.  "You haven't got it yet.  You see, your back is
really arched--you're not RELAXED--your back is not upon the floor--
the thing is to make yourself lie out as flat as a board--like
this," and with the fingers of his strong, small, bronzed hand he
gently but firmly pushed Howard's stomach down towards the floor.
Howard grunted protestingly, but lay there after George had taken
his hand away, and George, after looking at him closely for a
moment, nodded approvingly and said:

"Yes, that's better.  You're getting it now.  But you've really got
to practise every day.  It looks easy, but it's hard to do."

"But, George," Mrs. Pierce broke in, as Howard scrambled to his
feet, "--what I'm interested in knowing is how you keep that
beautiful, strong athlete's figure that you've got!  And that
dancer's WAIST!  My dear sir, that is the curse of a woman's life:
so if you can tell me what to do to take it off around the waist
and hips I'll be eternally grateful to you."--She was, as a matter
of fact, herself as lean and well-conditioned as a race-horse, but
George, still lying flat upon the floor, answered quietly:

"Did you ever try this, Ida?  I think you'll find it very useful
for keeping the waist down.--You lie flat on your back--like this.
You keep your arms flat at your sides--you mustn't raise them or
lift your head.  You keep your legs straight--you mustn't bend them
at the knees--and then," slowly, and with a sense of infinite,
hard-muscled power and lean endurance, he suited the action to the
words, "you raise your legs to right angles with your body--
straighten out again--raise--straighten--raise--straighten--raise--
straighten--if you do that a hundred times a day, when you get up
and when you go to bed, I don't think you'll ever be troubled by
fat around the waist," he concluded quietly.

"I know," Joel whispered, nodding with vigorous agreement.  "I've
tried that.  That's a good one.  But a hundred times is a lot!
It's more than most people can do at first."

"Yes," said George quietly.  "But you get used to it if you do it
every day!  I can do it a hundred times with no difficulty
whatever," he concluded quietly.

"Oh, of COURSE!" Joel whispered instantly.  "But then, you're hard
as a rock, George.  You can do anything."

"But that doesn't look hard," Howard said again with blithe
confidence.  "Oh, I just KNOW that I can do THAT one," he said
mincingly.  And without further ado, while everyone laughed, he
stretched himself out again, extended his dapper flannelled legs as
George instructed him, and then slowly raised them, lowered them,
raised them again with such a painful grunt that everyone burst out
again in hearty laughter.  After the fourth effort he was through,
admitting defeat with a painful "Gosh!  If I had to do that for a
hundred times I'd be ready for the undertaker," and scrambled to
his feet again.

"Then," said George in his quiet, pleasant tone, "I think you'll
find this one good, Ida, for strengthening the muscles of the back
and stomach.  You ARCH," he said, "you arch with the neck and feet--
like this," and instantly his strong, frail, beautifully
proportioned figure was arched as lithely and gracefully as a bow,
"--you come down slow like this," he said, and sank slowly toward
the ground, "you arch again like this"--again the light and
graceful human bow.

"Oh, but that looks terribly hard to do, George!" Mrs. Pierce
protested.  "I could never learn to do that: it's a regular circus
stunt."

"No," he said in his quiet and toneless fashion, "you could do it,
Ida.  Of course, it IS hard at first, but it would come with
practice. . . .  It makes you very strong," he went on with a
completely detached matter-of-factness.  "Do you see that?"  He
arched his whip-cord body again and held it in that posture--"I
could keep that up indefinitely--it makes you hard as nails," he
went on quietly, and without an atom of vanity or self-consciousness.
"I could support the whole weight of a man's body there without
any difficulty--and LIFT him, too."

"Not REALLY!" Joel whispered in an astounded tone.  "Simply
incredible!"

"But not at all," said George quietly.  "It's the easiest thing on
earth if you're used to it.  Come here, Howard," he said quietly,
without moving from his arched position.  "Sit down on me."

"Sit DOWN on you?" said Howard, in a comically bewildered tone.
"WHERE, George?"

"On my stomach," George replied.  "Go on," he said, smiling his
fine, grave smile at sight of Howard's hesitation.  "It's all
right.  You won't hurt me at all.  Sit down."

"Like--like this?" said Howard, and squatted gingerly and gently,
settling down finally upon George's arched stomach and looking
about with such a comically troubled and inquiring expression that
everyone burst out in hearty laughter again.  "Is that all right?"
he said, turning anxiously and looking down at his supporter.

"Yes, perfectly," said George.  "Now draw your knees up and hold
them with your arms so that your whole weight is on me. . . .
Good! . . .  Now!  Are you ready? . . .  One, two . . . One, two
. . . One, two," his lithe, whip-cord figure rose and fell, arched
and straightened, with little Howard sitting on top of him, and
looking around with the expression of a frightened, huddled
mannikin.  When the demonstration was finished, both young men got
to their feet, and Joel's face could be seen raised in an
expression of radiant admiration, his voice could be heard in an
astounded whisper, saying:

"SIMPLY incredible!"

And Mrs. Pierce, her voice stronger, more powerful, and penetrating,
in slow, decisive declaration:

"GEORGE!  I--think--that--is--the--MOST--ASTONISHING--I think--
that--is--the--MOST--"

Words failed her, and as she looked at him, standing quietly
composed before her, with all his beautiful, lithe grace and
stillness, he smiled his grave, rare smile, and displayed his only
playful raillery of the evening:

"But really, Ida," he said quietly, as he smiled his fine, slow
smile at her, "if you're worried about that girlish figure you
ought to try THIS some time."  With these words he bent over
backward, as lithe and limber as a whip, and with his fingers
arched upon the floor, suddenly, with effortless grace and speed,
and without moving an inch from his position, whirled off a dozen
brilliant cartwheels that would have done credit to a circus
tumbler.

He came gracefully, unweariedly erect again, to standing posture,
amid an ovation of breathlessly uttered wonder, frank applause.

But now the time had come for parting: there was the sound of a
motor in the drive before the house, in a moment a maid-servant
came quietly out upon the terrace and informed Miss Telfair that
her car had come.  She gathered her evening cloak about her
fragile, ivory shoulders--that were somehow like a piece of her own
rare porcelain--thrust her hand out towards Mrs. Pierce in swift
and firm farewell, and turned, saying in her crisp, incisive voice:
"Well, children, I'm departing. . . .  Joel," she said, pausing a
moment as she went, "I shall expect you and your young friend at my
house for tea tomorrow."

"And are you coming to the pool tomorrow morning, Margaret?" Mrs.
Pierce called after her.

"That, my dear, I couldn't tell you," she said, going.  "If I do
not get a call from town.  We shall see what we shall see--good
night, all," and she went through the moonlit door into the house.



LXI


Mrs. Pierce stood at the foot of the stairs surveying this young
stranger from the outside world with a tolerant but glacially
detached smile of impersonal curiosity:

". . . . Joel tells me that you like to stay up all night and prowl
around.  What do you do on these prowling expeditions?"

He wanted to answer her with simple eloquence and grace and warmth,
he wanted to paint a picture of his midnight wanderings that would
hold her there in fascinated interest, but the glacial impersonality
of the woman's smile, the proud and haughty magnificence of her
person, froze all the ardours of enthusiasm and conviction with
which, he felt, he might have spoken; it even seemed to numb and
thicken the muscles of his tongue, and he stood there gaping at her
awkwardly, cutting a sorry figure, and flushing crimson with anger
and vexation at his lame, stupid, halting tongue, and stammered out,
replying:

"I--I walk," he mumbled.  "I--I take walks."

"You--WHAT?" she said kindly enough, but sharply, with a kind of
peremptory authority that told him that she must already be growing
weary and impatient of his stammering, incoherent speech, his
mumbling awkwardness.

"Oh--WALK!" she cried, with an air of swift enlightenment, as if
her puzzled mind had just succeeded in translating his jargon.
"Oh," she said quietly, and looked at him for a moment steadily
with her fixed and glacial smile, "you do."

It seemed to him that those brief words were already pregnant with
a cold indifferent dismissal: in them he seemed to feel the
impregnable indifference of her cold detachment--the yawning gulf
that separated her life from his.  Already it seemed to him that
she had turned away from him, dismissing him as not worthy even of
such amused attention as she had given him.  But after a moment, as
she continued to look at him with her brilliant, glacial, detached,
yet not unkindly smile, she continued:

"And what do you do on these walks?  Where do you go?"

--Where?  Where?  Where indeed?  His mind groped desperately over
the whole nocturnal pattern of the city--over the lean, gaunt
webbing of Manhattan with the barren angularity of its streets, the
splintered, glacial soar of its terrific buildings, and the silent,
frozen harshness of its streets of old brown houses, grimy brick
and rusty, age-encrusted stone.

Oh, he thought that he could tell her all that could be told, that
youth could know, that any man had ever known about night and time
and darkness, and about the city's dark and secret heart, and what
lay buried in the dark and secret heart of all America.  He thought
that he could tell her all that any man could ever know about the
huge, attentive secrecy of night, and of man's silent heart of
buried, waiting, and intolerable desire, about the thing that waits
there in the night-time in America, that lies buried at the city's
secret heart of night, the mute and single tongue of man's
intolerable desire, the silence of his single heart in all its
overwhelming eloquence, the great tide flowing in the hearts of
men, as dark and as mysterious as the great, unceasing river, the
thing that waits and does not speak and is for ever silent and that
knows for ever, and that has no words to say, no tongue to speak,
and that unites six million celled and lonely sleepers at the heart
of night and silence, in the great dark tide of the unceasing
river, and of all our buried songs of hope and joy and wild desire
that live for ever in the heart of night and of America.

Yes, he thought that he could tell her all of this, but when he
spoke, with thickened tongue, a numb and desperate constraint, all
that he could mutter thickly was:  "I--I walk."

"But WHERE?" she said, a trifle more sharply, still looking at him
with her glacial, curious smile.  "That's what I'd like to know.
Where do you go?  What do you see that's so interesting?  What do
you find that's worth staying up all night for?  Where do you go
when you make these expeditions?" she again demanded.  "Up to
Broadway?"

"Yes," he mumbled thickly, "--sometimes--and--and sometimes--I go
down town."

"Down town?" the cool incisive inflection of the voice, the glacial
grey-green of the eye bored through him like a steel-blue drill.
"Downtown WHERE?  To the Battery?"

"Y-y-yes--sometimes. . . .  And--and along the East Side, too," he
mumbled.

"WHERE?" she cried sharply, smiling, but manifestly impatient with
his mumbled, tongue-tied answers.  "OH--the East Side!" she cried
again, with the air of glacial enlightenment.  "--In the tenement
section!"

"Yes--yes," he stumbled on desperately, "--and along Fourteenth
Street and Second Avenue--and Grand Street--and--and Delancey--and--
and the Bowery--and all the docks and piers and all," he blurted
out, conscious of Joel's eager, radiant smile of hopeful kindness,
and the miserable clown he was making of himself.

"But I should think you would find all that dreadfully boring."
Mrs. Pierce's voice was now tinged with cool and mild surprise.
"And awfully ugly, isn't it? . . .  I mean, if you've got to prowl
around at night, you might hunt for something a little more
attractive than the East Side, couldn't you? . . .  After all, we
still have Riverside Drive--I suppose even that has changed a great
deal, but in my childhood it was quite a lovely place.  Or the
Park?" she said, a little more kindly and persuasively.  "If you
want to take a walk before going to bed, why, wouldn't it be better
to take it in the Park--where you could see an occasional tree or a
little grass? . . .  Or even Fifth Avenue and around Washington
Square--that used to be quite pleasant?  But the East SIDE!
Heavens!  My dear boy, what on earth do you ever find in a place
like that to interest you?"

He was absolutely speechless, congealed, actually terrified by the
haughty magnificence, the glacial and almost inhuman detachment, of
her person.  His mouth gaped, he gulped, his lips quivered and made
soundless efforts for a moment, and then he stammered:

"You--you find--you find--p-p-p-people there," he said.

"PEOPLE?"  Again her thin eyebrows arched in fine surprise.  "But
of course you find people there!  You find people everywhere you
go. . . .  Only," she added, "I shouldn't think you'd find many
people anywhere at two o'clock in the morning.  I should think most
of them would be in bed--even on the East Side."

"They--they stay up late over there."

"But why?" she now cried with a good-natured but frank impatience.
"That's just what I'm trying to find out! . . .  What's it all
about?  What's all the SHOOTING for?" she said humorously,
repeating a phrase which was in current use at that time.
"--What's the big attraction?  What do they find to do that's so
interesting that it can keep them out of bed half through the
night? . . .  Really," she cried, "if it's so amusing as all that,
I think I'll go and have a look myself.  What do they DO?" she
again insisted.  "That's what I want to know."

"They--they sit around and talk."

"But WHERE?  WHERE?" she now cried with frank despair.  "My dear
boy, that's what I want you to tell me."

"Oh, in--in lunch-rooms--and restaurants--and speak-easies--and--
and places like that."

"Yes," she nodded with an air of satisfaction.  "Good.  At least,
we have THAT settled.  And you go to these places, too--and sit
around--and watch--and listen to them.  Is that it?"

"Yes," he said helplessly, nodding, her words suddenly making all
this restless and unceasing explanation of the night seem
reasonless, foolish, pitifully absurd, "sometimes."

"And what kind of people do you find in those places?" she said
curiously.  "I've often wondered what kind of people go there."

Kind?  He stared at her foolishly with gaping jaw, and gaped and
muttered wordlessly, and could not find a word to say to her.
Kind?  Great God! what word could ever shape them, what phrase
could ever utter the huge swarm and impact of just one moment, out
of all those million swarming memories of kaleidoscopic night!
Kind?  Great God! the kind of all the earth, the kind of the whole
world, the unnumbered, nameless, swarming, and illimitable kind
that make all living!  Kind?  The mongrel compost of a hundred
races--the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, and the niggers, the
Swedes, the Germans, the Lithuanians and the Poles, the Russians,
Czechs, and Greeks, the Syrians, Turks and Armenians, the nameless
hodge-podge of the Balkans, as well as Chinese, Japs, and dapper
little Filipinos--a hundred tongues, a thousand tribes, unnumbered
colonies of life, all poured in through the lean gateways of the
sea, all poured in upon that rock of life, to join the countless
freightage of that ship of living stone, all nurtured and sustained
upon the city's strong breast,--a thousand kinds, a single
substance, all fused and joined there at the heart of the night,
all moving with that central, secret and dynamic energy, all
wrought and woven in, with all their swarming variousness, into the
great web of America--with all its clamour, naked struggle, blind
and brutal strife, with all its violence, ignorance, and cruelty,
and with its terror, joy, and mystery, its undying hope, its
everlasting life.

All he could do was gape and mumble foolishly again, and stammer
finally:  "There--there are all kinds, I guess," and plunge on
desperately, "and then--and then--there are the wharves and piers
and docks--the Battery and the City Hall--and then--and then," he
stumbled on, "--the Bridge--the Bridge is good."

"The Bridge?"  Again the pencilled brows of arched surprise, the
glacial curiosity.  "What bridge?"

What bridge?  Great God! the only bridge, the bridge of power, life
and joy, the bridge that was a span, a cry, an ecstasy--that was
America.  What bridge?  The bridge whose wing-like sweep that was
like space and joy and ecstasy was mixed like music in his blood,
would beat like flight and joy and triumph through the conduits of
his life for ever.  What bridge?  The bridge whereon at night he
had walked and stood and watched a thousand times, until every
fabric of its soaring web was inwrought in his memory, and every
stone of its twin terrific arches was in his heart, and every
living sinew of its million cabled nerves had throbbed and pulsed
in his own spirit like his soul's anatomy.

"The--the Brooklyn Bridge," he mumbled.  "The--the Bridge is good."

"Good?  How do you mean--good?"  The glacial and amused inquiry
pierced his consciousness again with confusion, numb paralysis of
speech, and incoherence.  And at this moment Joel, seeing his
agonizing embarrassment, came to his rescue with the exquisite,
radiant kindliness that was the constant evidence of his fine
character.

"Um.  Yes," he could hear Joel whispering in a thoughtful and
convinced way.  "He's dead right about it, Mums.  I've gone with
him once or twice--and the Bridge IS good! . . .  And the East Side
has good things in it, too," he whispered generously.  "I saw some
good bits there--street corners, a store front, alleys--there's
good colour--I'd like to go back some time and paint it."

For the first time Mrs. Pierce broke into a robust, free and hearty
laugh.

"Joel!" she cried.  "You can get the most insane notions in your
head of any boy I ever knew!  If I didn't watch you, I believe
you'd be painting ash-cans! . . .  My dear boy," she said,
laughing, "you'd better stick to what you're doing.  I don't think
you've had much experience with low-life--if that's what you want
I'll find plenty of it for you right here in Rhinekill or on the
farm. . . .  If you want low-life," here she paused and laughed
heartily again, "go down to Granny's tomorrow and paint the
expression of those nine maids of hers when she tells them she's
decided to bob their hair because it fits in so nicely with the new
decoration--Hah!  Hah!  Hah!  Hah!  Hah!"--Mrs. Pierce cast back
her head and laughed again, a full free hearty laugh of robust
humour in which Joel joined enthusiastically, almost suddenly, with
a face radiant with glee--"I'd just like to be there when she tells
them, that'll be low-life enough," she said.

"SIMPLY incredible!" Joel whispered, his face still radiant with
its gleeful merriment.

"But no," his mother went on more casually, and with humorous
tolerance.  "--You finish what you're doing first--finish those
screens you're doing for Madge Telfair--then we'll talk about low-
life. . . .  But I hardly think your talent lies in that
direction," she said good-humouredly but with an ironically knowing
smile.  "I haven't seen your mother all these years without finding
out something about your abilities--and I hardly think they lie in
that direction.  So you must stick to what you're doing for the
present--and if there's any low-life to be done, just let ME do the
choosing. . . .  Well, then, good night," she said quietly, kindly,
and good-naturedly to the young man, as she turned to go upstairs.
"Joel has told me so much about your nocturnal habits that I was
curious to meet you and find out what you did.  I'm glad to get the
mystery cleared up. . . .  I suppose," she said, with an idle and
detached curiosity, "that when one is all alone and knows no one in
the city, he is driven to do almost anything for amusement. . . .
Where are you from?" she said curiously.

"From--from the South," he answered.

"Oh," she stared at him a moment longer with her cold, fixed smile.
"Yes," she said.  "I can see you are.  I thought so. . . .  Well,
children," she said with an air of finality, "you can burn the
candle at both ends if that's what you want to do--go out and bay
the moon if you like--but not too near the house," she said good-
naturedly.  "Your MOTHER'S going to bed. . . .  Joel," she said
quietly, "you'll be in to see me, of course, before you turn in."

"Yes, Mums," he whispered, eager, radiant, his tall, thin figure
bent forward reverentially as he looked up at her, his eyebrows
arching with their characteristic expression of fine surprise.--
"But of course!" he said.

"Very well," she said quietly.  "And now good night to all of you."

Turning, she went swiftly up the stairs, a tall, magnificently
haughty figure of a woman, holding rustling and luxurious skirts.

"And now," Joel whispered, when his mother had departed, "I'll show
you your room--and how to find the kitchen--and tell you anything
you want to know--and after THAT," he whispered, laughing and
stroking his head, "you can do as you please, stay up as long as
you like--but I'M going to bed."

With these words he took his guest's valise and started up the
stairs.  The young man followed him: he had been given a room on
the second floor on the river side of the house.  It was a
magnificent spacious room so richly, softly carpeted that the foot
sank down with velvety firmness to a noiseless tread.  The quality
of the room was the quality of the whole house--a kind of château-
like grandeur and solidity, combined with the warmth, comfort and
simplicity of a country house.  Joel pressed buttons, flooding the
great room with light.  The wide and snowy covers of the great bed
had been drawn back for the night.  It was a bed fit for a king,
and long and spacious enough for a man of seven feet: it waited
there with a kind of still embrace, a silent and yet animate
invitation that was eloquent with the promise of a strange and
sweet repose.

Joel opened the door of the bathroom--it was a miracle of shining
tile and creamy porcelain and gleaming silver and heavy, robe-like
towels.  Then Joel raised the shades, drew the curtains apart and
opened the window: the fragrance of the night came in slowly,
sustaining gauzy curtains on its breath of coolness like a cloud of
gossamer.  And through the opened window was revealed anew the
haunting loneliness of that enchanted landscape: the vast sweep of
velvet-rounded lawn that slept in moonlight, and the sleeping and
moon-haunted woods below and to each side, and down below them in
the distance the great wink and scallop-dance and dark unceasing
mystery of the lovely and immortal river--a landscape such as one
might see in dreams, in dreams for ever haunted by the thought of
home.

The feeling of happiness that filled the youth was so grand, so
wonderful and so overpowering that he could not speak.  It seemed
that all his life he had dreamed of one day finding such a life as
this, and now that he had found it, it seemed to him that all he
had dreamed was but a poor and shabby counterfeit of this reality--
all he had imaged as a boy in his unceasing visions of the shining
city, and of the glamorous men and women, the fortunate, good, and
happy life that he would find there, seemed nothing but a shadowy
and dim prefigurement of the radiant miracle of this actuality.

It was not merely the wealth, the luxury and the comfort of the
scene that filled his heart with a sense of joy and victory.  Far
more than this, it was the feeling that this life of wealth, and
luxury and comfort was so beautiful and right and good.  At the
moment it seemed to him to be the life for which all men on the
earth are seeking, about which all men living dream, toward which
all the myriads of the earth aspire; and the thing, above all,
which made this life seem so beautiful and good was the conviction
that filled him at that moment of its essential incorruptible
righteousness.  It seemed to him to be the most wonderful and
beautiful life on earth, not only because it existed for the
comfort and the soul-enrichment of its choice few, but because it
stood there as a beacon and a legend in the hearts of all men
living--a symbol of what all life on earth should be, a promise of
what every man on earth should have.

In that blind surge of youth and joy, the magic of that unbelievable
discovery, he could not estimate the strange and bitter chance of
destiny, nor ravel out that grievous web, that dense perplexity.  He
could not see how men had groped and toiled and mined, and grown
blind and bent and grey, deep in the dark bowels of the earth, to
wreak this moonlight loveliness upon a hill; nor know how men had
sweated and women worked, how youth had struck its fire and grown
old, how hope and faith and even love had died, how many nameless
lives had laboured, grieved, and come to nought in order that this
fragile image of compacted night, this priceless distillation of its
rare and chosen loveliness, should blossom to a flower of moonlight
beauty on a hill.

Joel took him downstairs to the kitchen before saying good night.
They crossed the hall and passed through the great dining-room.  It
was also a noble gleaming room of white, as grand and spacious as a
room in a château, but warm, and familiar, comforting as home.
Then they passed through a service corridor that connected the
kitchen and the pantry with the dining-room, and instantly he found
himself in another part of this enchanted world--the part that
cooked and served and with viewless grace, and magic stealth and
instancy--performed the labours of this enchanted house.

It was such a kitchen as he had never seen before--a kitchen such
as he had never dreamed possible.  In its space, its order, its
astounding cleanliness, it had the beauty of a great machine--a
machine of tremendous power, fabulous richness and complexity--
which in its ordered magnificence, its vast readiness, had the
clear and glittering precision of a geometric pattern.  Even the
stove--a vast hooded range as large as those in a great restaurant--
glittered with the groomed perfection of a racing motor.  There
was, as well, an enormous electric stove that was polished like a
silver ornament, the pots and pans were hung in gleaming rows, in
vast but orderly profusion ranging from great copper kettles big
enough to roast an ox to little pans and skillets just large enough
to poach an egg, but all hung there in regimented order, instant
readiness, shining like mirrors, scrubbed and polished into
gleaming discs, the battered cleanliness of well-used copper,
seasoned iron and heavy steel.

The great cupboards were crowded with huge stacks of gleaming china
ware and crockery, enough to serve the needs of a hotel.  And the
long kitchen table, as well as the chairs and woodwork of the
rooms, was white and shining as a surgeon's table: the sinks and
drains were blocks of creamy porcelain, clean scrubbed copper,
shining steel.

It would be impossible to describe in detail the lavish variety,
the orderly complexity, the gleaming cleanliness of that great
room, but the effect it wrought upon his senses was instant and
overwhelming.  It was one of the most beautiful, spacious,
thrilling, and magnificently serviceable rooms that he had ever
seen: everything in it was designed for use, and edged with instant
readiness; there was not a single thing in the room that was not
needed, and yet its total effect was to give one a feeling of
power, space, comfort, rightness and abundant joy.

The pantry shelves were crowded to the ceiling with the growing
treasure of a lavish victualling--an astounding variety and
abundance of delicious foods, enough to stock a grocery store or to
supply an Arctic expedition--but the like of which he had never
seen, or dreamed of, in a country house before.

Everything was there, from the familiar staples of a cook's
necessities to every rare and toothsome dainty that the climates
and the markets of the earth produce.  There was food in cans, and
food in tins, and food in crocks, and food in bottles.  There were--
in addition to such staple products of the canning art as corn,
tomatoes, beans and peas, pears, plums and peaches--such rarer
relishes, as herrings, sardines, olives, pickles, mustard,
relishes, anchovies.  There were boxes of glacéd crystalline fruits
from California, and little wickered jars of sharp-spiced ginger
fruit from China: there were expensive jellies green as emerald,
red as rubies, smoother than whipped cream; there were fine oils
and vinegars in bottles, and jars of pungent relishes of every sort
and boxes of assorted spices.  There was everything that one could
think of, and everywhere there was evident the same scrubbed and
gleaming cleanliness with which the kitchen shone, but here there
was as well that pungent, haunting, spicy odour that pervades the
atmosphere of pantries--a haunting and nostalgic fusion of
delicious smells whose exact quality it is impossible to define,
but which has in it the odours of cinnamon, pepper, cheese, smoked
ham, and cloves.

When they got into the kitchen they found Rosalind there: she was
standing by the long white table drinking a glass of milk.  Joel,
in the swift and correct manner with which he gave instructions, at
once eager, gentle and decisive, began to show his guest round.

"And look," he whispered with his soft and yet incisive slowness,
as he opened the heavy shining doors of the refrigerator--"here's
the ice-box: if you find anything there you like, just help
yourself--"

Food!  Food, indeed!  The great ice-box was crowded with such an
assortment of delicious foods as he had not seen in many years:
just to look at it made the mouth begin to water, and aroused the
pangs of a hunger so ravenous and insatiate that it was almost more
painful than the pangs of bitter want.  One was so torn with desire
and greedy gluttony as he looked at the maddening plenty of that
feast that his will was rendered almost impotent.  Even as the eye
glistened and the mouth began to water at the sight of a noble
roast of beef, all crisp and crackly in its cold brown succulence,
the attention was diverted to a plump broiled chicken, whose brown
and crackly tenderness fairly seemed to beg for the sweet and
savage pillage of the tooth.  But now a pungent and exciting
fragrance would assail the nostrils: it was the smoked pink slices
of an Austrian ham--should it be brawny bully beef, now, or the
juicy breast of a white tender pullet, or should it be the smoky
pungency, the half-nostalgic savour of the Austrian ham?  Or that
noble dish of green lima beans, now already beautifully congealed
in their pervading film of melted butter; or that dish of tender
stewed young cucumbers; or those tomato slices, red and thick and
ripe, and heavy as a chop; or that dish of cold asparagus, say; or
that dish of corn; or, say, one of those musty fragrant, deep-
ribbed cantaloups, chilled to the heart, now, in all their pink-
fleshed taste and ripeness; or a round thick slab cut from the red
ripe heart of that great water-melon; or a bowl of those red
raspberries, most luscious and most rich with sugar, and a bottle
of that thick rich cream which filled one whole compartment of that
treasure-chest of gluttony, or--

What shall it be now?  What shall it be?  A snack!  A snack!--
Before we prowl the meadows of the moon tonight and soak our hearts
in the moonlight's magic and the visions of our youth--what shall
it be before we prowl the meadows of the moon?  Oh, it shall be a
snack, a snack--hah! hah!--it shall be nothing but a snack because--
hah! hah!--you understand, we are not hungry and it is not well to
eat too much before retiring--so we'll just investigate the ice-box
as we have done so oft at midnight in America--and we are the
moon's man, boys--and all that it will be, I do assure you, will be
something swift and quick and ready, something instant and
felicitous, and quite delicate and dainty--just a snack!

I think--now let me see--h'm, now!--well, perhaps I'll have a slice
or two of that pink Austrian ham that smells so sweet and pungent
and looks so pretty and so delicate there in the crisp garlands of
the parsley leaf!--and yes, perhaps, I'll have a slice of this
roast beef, as well--h'm now!--yes, I think that's what I'm going
to do--say a slice of red rare meat there at the centre--ah-h!
there you are! yes, that's the stuff, that does quite nicely, thank
you--with just a trifle of that crisp brown crackling there to oil
the lips and make its passage easy, and a little of that cold but
brown and, oh!--most--brawny gravy--and, yes, sir! I think I WILL,
now that it occurs to me, a slice of that plump chicken--some white
meat, thank you, at the breast--ah, there it is!--how sweetly doth
the noble fowl submit to the swift and keen persuasion of the
knife--and now, perhaps, just for our diet's healthy balance, a
spoonful of those lima beans, as gay as April and as sweet as
butter, a tomato slice or two, a speared forkful of those thin-
sliced cucumbers--ah! what a delicate and toothsome pickle they do
make--what sorcerer invented them--a little corn perhaps, a bottle
of this milk, a pound of butter and that crusty loaf of bread--and
even this moon-haunted wilderness were paradise enow--with just a
snack--a snack--a snack--

He was aroused from this voluptuous and hypnotic reverie by the
sound of Rosalind's warm sweet laugh, her tender and caressing
touch upon his arm, and Joel's soundless and astonished mouth, the
eager incandescence of his gleeful smile, his whole face uplifted
in its fine and gentle smile, his voice cast in its frequent tone
of whispering astonishment:

"SIMPLY incredible!" he was whispering to his sister.  "I've never
seen such an expression on ANY one's face in all my life!  It's
simply diabolical!  When he sees food, he looks as if he's just
getting ready to rape a woman!"

"Do you, darling?" said the girl, with her warm, sweet tolerance of
humour.  "I'm so glad to know that someone else likes food.  I like
it, too," she said with a warm plainness; "when I am married and
start having babies I shall eat and eat and eat to my heart's
content--as much as I want to, all the things I ever wanted, till
I'm satisfied. . . .  It's so wonderful to find someone who will
eat!  You don't know how hard it is to have a brother who's a
vegetarian--and who tells me that I'm getting disgustingly fat--and
what a horrible thing it is to eat dead animals--like eating
corpses. . . .  Wouldn't Joel be wonderful if he ate roast beef,"
she added with her warm and gentle humour, as she put her arm
around her brother's waist--"he looks so thin and starved, poor
thing--like a religious ascetic--doesn't he?--But then, he's such a
saint as he is--isn't he?--if he liked food, as well, he'd just
have everything--he'd be too perfect."

"No, sir," Joel whispered, shaking his head and laughing with his
curiously boyish, almost clumsily naïve, but beautifully engaging
good nature--"Not I! . . .  The rest of you can eat all the dead
animals you like--but you don't catch me doing it! . . .  I'll
stick to spinach," he whispered radiantly.  "That's good enough for
me."

"I know, darling," she said with a gentle and tolerant sarcasm.
"You and Bernard Shaw: if he said baled hay was good for you, you'd
believe him, wouldn't you?"

He laughed in his soundless, enthusiastic and beautifully generous
way, his gaunt starved face lighting up with the gleeful, almost
diabolically brilliant radiance of his wonderful selfless good-
nature.

Then, turning swiftly to his firmer manner of incisive severity--
the direct and earnest concision with which he whispered his
instructions--he said abruptly:

"And look, Gene . . . when you finish eating put the lights out:
the switch is on the right hand by the door as you go out. . . .
And stay up as long as you like, go wherever you like, do as you
please--you'll bother no one," he whispered, ". . . and a good
walk," he continued abruptly after a moment's pause, "--is down the
road--the way you went with Ros' tonight--except that you keep on--"

"Past the cows, darling," said Rosalind gently.  "Past all the
lovely cows and barns and meadows of the moon."



LXII


The two young people stopped talking instantly as Eugene came in,
Joel got up and shut the door behind him, indicated an easy leather
chair, where the author could read his play most comfortably, and
sitting down again beside his sister, waited for the play to begin.

Eugene began to read haltingly, with the difficulty and embarrassed
constraint of a young man just beginning to test his powers,
exhibiting his talents to the public for the first time, and torn
by all the anguish, hope, and fear, the proud incertitude of youth.

It was a play called "Mannerhouse," a title which itself might
reveal the whole nature of his error--and its subject was the
decline and fall and ultimate extinction of a proud old family of
the Southern aristocracy in the years that followed the Civil War,
the ultimate decay of all its fortunes and the final acquisition of
its proud estate, the grand old columned house that gave the play
its name, by a vulgar, coarse and mean, but immensely able member
of the rising "lower class."

This theme--which, in its general form and implications, was
probably influenced a good deal by The Cherry Orchard of Chekhov--
was written in a somewhat mixed mood of romantic sentiment, Byronic
irony, and sardonic realism.  The hero was a rather Byronic
character, a fellow who concealed his dark and tender poetry under
the mask of a sardonic humour; the love story was coloured by
defeat and error and departure, and the hero's final return "years
later," a lonely and nameless wanderer, battered by the world and
the wreckage of his life, to the old ruined house in which already
the rasping note of the wrecker's crew was audible, was tempered by
the romantic gallantry of Cyrano.  The final meeting with the girl--
the woman that he loved--their ultimate gallant resignation to
fate and age and destiny--was wholly Cyranoic; and the final scene,
in which the gigantic faithful negro slave--now an old man, almost
blind, but with the savage loyalty and majesty of a race of African
kings from whom he is descended--wraps his great arms around the
rotting central column of the old ruined house, snaps it in two
with a last convulsion of his dying strength, and brings the whole
ruined temple thundering down to bury his beloved master, his hated
"poor white" enemy the new owner, and himself, beneath its ruins--
was obviously a product of the Samson legend.

In spite of this, there was good stuff in the play, dramatic
conflict, moving pageantry.  The character of the hard, grasping
but immensely able materialist of "the lower class," the newer
South, was well realized--and had been derived from the character
of the youth's own uncle, William Pentland.  The scenes between the
hero and his father--the leonine and magnificently heroic
"General"--were also good; as were those between the hero and
Porter, the poor-white capitalist.  Even in these romantic,
grandly-mannered scenes he had already begun to use some of the
powerful and inimitable materials of life itself and of his own
experience: the speech of Porter was the plain, rich, pungent,
earthly, strongly coloured speech of his mother, of his uncle
William Pentland, and of the Pentland tribe.

But the scenes between the hero and the girl were less successful:
the character of the girl was shadowy and uncertain--a kind of
phantasmal combination of the characters of Roxane in Cyrano, and
Ophelia--and her sweet romantic loveliness, the yearning tenderness
of her pure love, did not provide a convincing foil and balance for
the sardonic humour, the bad and almost brutal volume of wit, with
which the hero marked his pain and love and bitterness and repulsed
her advances.  (This scene, by the way, was undoubtedly influenced
a great deal by the Hamlet and Ophelia situation.)

Likewise--in various and interesting ways, what he had read and
seen and actually experienced had shaped the tone and temper of his
play: the character of the pompous and banal old "Major"--the
"General's" contemporary and friend and the father of the heroine--
and his conversations with the hero, in which his conventional and
pompous character is made the butt for the biting and sardonic
gibes of the latter, were also evidently strongly coloured with the
influence of Polonius and Hamlet.  But there was good stuff in
these scenes as well; considerable originality and naturalness were
shown in the characterization of the old "Major": he was, for
example, trying to support the tottering fortune of a small
military school which his family had established several
generations before, and whose gigantic futility, amid this decline
of a ruined order and a vanquished system was, in the years after
the war, ironically apparent.  There was, in fact, much telling
satire in this situation, and on the whole it was well managed.
Moreover, its "modern" implications were evident: it suggested, for
example, the Southerner's pitiable devotion to a gaudy uniform and
military trappings, the profusion of ugly, trivial, cheap and
brutal little "military schools" that cover the whole South, even
to the present day, like an ugly rash, and whose "You furnish the
boy--we send back the man" philosophy is nauseous in its hypocrisy,
dishonesty, and cheap pretence.

There was much more that was good and pungent and original in these
scenes between the "Major" and the hero: a great deal of the
falseness, hypocrisy and sentimentality of the South was polished
off in these episodes, and "the war"--the Civil War--was used
effectively as a stalking-horse to satirize the great World War of
modern times.  There was, for example, a good, and original--on the
whole, a very true--variation of the Youth-and-Age, Old Man-Young
Man conflict that was evident at that period, and that provided the
material of so many books and plays and poems of the time.

In these scenes, it was very forcefully and amusingly shown that
the conflict between youth and age had in it an element of mutual
hypocrisy, a kind of mutual acceptance of a literary game about
youth and age which both young and old knew in their hearts was
false, but which both played.

Thus when the old "Major" would heave a melancholy sigh, and
shaking his beard with a doleful and hypocritical regret would say:

"Ah yes, my boy! . . .  We old men have made a sad mess of this
world. . . .  We have betrayed our trust, and shown ourselves
unworthy of the confidence you young men have reposed in us. . . .
We were given the opportunity of making the world a better place in
which to live and we have left nothing but ruin, poverty, and
misery wherever we went--we have left the world in ashes. . . .
Now it is for you young men of the world--for youth--glorious,
brave and noble-hearted youth--"

"Ah, youth, youth," the hero would murmur at this point with a
sardonic humour that of course went unnoticed by the pompous old
fool to whom it was uttered--and the Major would nod his head in
agreement and go on--

"Yes, youth--brave, generous and devoted youth--it remains for
youth to repair the damage that we old men have done, to bind up
the nation's broken wounds, to see to it that the world be made
into a fit place for their children to live in, to see that--"

"Government of the people, by the people and for the people," the
hero would sardonically supply.

"Yes," the old Major would agree, "--and that the children of the
coming generation may not look at you, as you can look at us, and
say--'What have you done, old men, with your inheritance?  What
kind of world are you leaving behind you for us YOUNG men to
inherit?  How can you look us in the eyes, old men, when you know
that you have been unworthy of your sacred trust--that the young
men of the world have been foully tricked, betrayed, dishonoured by
you old men'--"

"Why, Major!" the hero would now cry, in mock astonishment, as he
ironically applauded.  "--This is eloquence!  Hear hear! . . .
And you are right!  Major, you are right!  The young men of the
world have been betrayed and tricked!  Not only tricked--but
tr-r-ricked! . . .  And by whom?" he would inquire with sardonic
rhetoric.  "Why, by these false, lying, greedy, hypocritical old men
who have had the whole world in their keeping and who have reduced
it to a shambles for our inheritance! . . .  Major, who made the war?
Who SENT us forth to war? . . .  Why, these old, false, lying, greedy
men, of course! . . .  And who fought the war? . . .  Why, these
brave, gallant, devoted, noble-spirited young men, of course! . . .
And why did you old men send us forth to war, Major? . . .  Why, to
further your own rapacity, to protect your own ill-gotten wealth,
to conquer, ravage, and invade for your own enrichment. . . .  And
how did we go to war, Major?  Why, with faith and trust and the
purity of a high conviction. . . .  And how did we come back from
war?  With hell in our eyes. . . .  We young men always go to war
with faith and trust and the purity of a high conviction. . . .
And we always come back with hell in our eyes!  Why, Major? . . .
Why, because you false, lying, greedy, selfish, and hypocritical
old men of the world have lied to us. . . .  You always lie to us.
And how, Major, in what way do you lie to us? . . .  Why, Major,"
he said solemnly, "you tell us that war is beautiful, ideal, and
heroic--that we are going forth to fight for pure ideals, noble
faith. . . .  And what do we find, Major?  Why," he said, as his
voice sank to an ironically solemn whisper--"we find that war is
really UGLY--is really cruel--horrible--base. . . .  Why, Major, do
you know what we young men find when we go to war?  We find that
men in war actually KILL one another. . . .  Yes, sir," he would
whisper solemnly, ". . . they SHOOT one another--they blow one
another's brains out--THAT'S what they do--why, it's murder, Major--
sheer cold-blooded murder--it's not what you said it was at all--
and all of it because you old greedy, lying, selfish men who make
the wars have lied to us and tr-r-ricked us all along!"

"Ah, my boy," the old "Major" would answer sorrowfully--"it is a
grievous charge you make against us--but I fear--I fear," here his
voice would sink to a dejected whisper--"I fear that it is just."

In this way, a telling and satiric irony was derived from this
scene, which was well handled and might have been effective on the
stage.

But the most effective scene of all, perhaps, was in the prologue
of this play: here the scene was really splendid, thrilling in its
dramatic pageantry, and undoubtedly would have been a very good and
moving one upon a stage.  The scene was on a hill and showed the
building of the great white house--really the founding of a whole
society.  Before the unfinished house, a gun held cocked and ready
in his hands, was standing the stern and silent figure of its
founder.  And before him, up and down the hill, and in and out of
the unfinished house, and past its great unfinished columns, were
moving two silent and unceasing files of slaves, powerful black men
stripped naked to the waist, bearing upon their heads the heavy
burdens of material that would go into the house.  And from the
house there comes a sound of constant hammering, and night comes,
there are the flares of watchfires and the swift and cat-like
passing of the great black forms.  A moment's flare of insurrection,
the spring of a great negro at the stern and lonely figure of the
man, the flash of a knife, and the rebel falls, knocked senseless by
a blow from the stock of the master's gun.

Then, another white man from the neighbouring town--the minister:
the minister's low persuasive voice urging the man to see the crime
of slavery, quoting the Scriptures with a telling aptness, urging
him to repent, to join the life of town and church, to "come to
God" . . .  And the quiet and inflexible answer of the master:  "I
must build my home."

And nothing finally but night and dullness; the great figures of
the slaves pad past in darkness, as noiseless as cats, and from the
mystery of night there rises now the wailing chant of all the
jungle, the lamentation of man's life of toil and grief and bitter
labour, the chant of the slave.

This was a fine scene, and should have been beautiful and moving on
a stage.



From this description it will be seen how the young man's play was
made up both of good and bad, how strongly it was marked by the
varied influence of his reading and idolatry--by Shakespeare,
Chekhov, Shaw, Rostand, the Bible--and how he had also already
begun to use some of the materials of his own life and feeling and
experience, how even in this groping and uncertain play, some of
the real grandeur, beauty, terror, and unuttered loneliness of
America was apparent.

Thus the play, with all its faults and imitations, really did
illustrate, as few things else could do, the confused incertitude
and the flashes of blind but powerful intuition, which mark the
artist's early life here in America, and for this reason chiefly
the play was interesting.

And feeling this incertitude as he sat down to read the play--that
feeling mixed of hope, of fear, of quivering apprehension which the
artist feels when for the first time he releases his work from the
lonely prison of creation and lets it go then, irrevocably, to
stand upon its own feet, meet the naked eye of the great world
without protection, and stand or fall upon its own merits--feeling
this fatality of release, this irrevocable finality of action, he
began to read the play in a halting, embarrassed, and almost
inaudible tone, full of the proud and desperate hope, the trembling
apprehension, the almost truculent hostility towards imaginary
detractors which every young man feels at such a time.

He sensed quickly that his fears were groundless.  No man ever had
a more generous, enthusiastic and devoted following than he had
that morning in the presence of these two fine young people--Joel
Pierce and his sister Rosalind.

He saw--or rather FELT at once--their rapt and fascinated
attentiveness.  Joel sat, his gaunt figure hinged forward on his
knees, in an attitude of tense, motionless and utterly silent
interest: from time to time as the young dramatist glanced up from
his great sheaf of written manuscript he could see Joel's lean
gaunt face fixed on him, uplifted, with its strangely pure and
radiant eagerness, and Rosalind, her warm and strong young hands
clasped quietly, folded in her lap, her warm and lovely face
flushed with excitement, her eyes luminous, vague and tender, as if
she were really in a theatre seeing the figures in the play pass
before her invested in all the magic that the stage could give to
them, displayed an interest that was more relaxed and more
abstracted than her brother's, but none the less absorbed.

The sense and sight and assurance of these things acted like a
powerful and gloriously intoxicating liquor on his heart and mind
and spirit.  He felt an overpowering surge of warm affection, proud
and tender gratefulness towards Joel and his sister.  It seemed to
him that they were the finest people he had ever known--the most
generous, the truest, highest, and the loyalest--and the knowledge
that they liked his play--were in fact conquered and possessed,
brought out of themselves and laid under the play's power and
magic--his OWN power and magic--overwhelmed him for a moment with a
feeling of the purest, highest, and most glorious happiness that
life can yield--the happiness that is at once the most selfish and
the most selfless--the happiness of the artist when he sees that
his work has been found good, has for itself a place of honour,
glory, and proud esteem in the hearts of men, and has wrought upon
their lives the spell of its enchantment.  At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the
reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward
he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which
there is nothing.  It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of
magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the
vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own
experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images
that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence
all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.  This is the
reason that the artist lives and works and has his being: that from
life's clay and his own nature, and from his father's common earth
of toil and sweat and violence and error and bitter anguish, he may
distil the beauty of an everlasting form, enslave and conquer man
by his enchantment, cast his spell across the generations, beat
death down upon his knees, kill death utterly, and fix eternity
with the grappling-hooks of his own art.  His life is soul-
hydroptic with a quenchless thirst for glory, and his spirit
tortured by the anguish of possession--the intolerable desire to
fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single
moment of man's living, a single moment of life's beauty, passion,
and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames and goes, slipping
for ever through our fingers with time's sanded drop, flowing for
ever from our desperate grasp even as a river flows and never can
be held.  This is the artist, then--life's hungry man, the glutton
of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave--and to do these things,
to get the reward for which he thirsts, with his own immortality to
beat and conquer life, enslave mankind, utterly to possess and
capture beauty he will do anything, use anything, destroy anything--
be ruthless, murderous and destructive, cold and cruel and
merciless as hell to get the thing he wants, achieve the thing he
values and must do or die.

He is at once life's monstrous outcast and life's beauty-drunken
lover, man's bloody, ruthless, pitiless and utterly relentless
enemy, and the best friend that mankind ever had: a creature
compact of the most selfish, base, ignoble, vicious, cruel and
unrighteous passions that man's life can fathom or the world
contain, and a creature whose life with all its toil and sweat and
bitter anguish is the highest, grandest, noblest, and the most
unselfish, the most superbly happy, good and fortunate life that
men can know, or any man attain.  He is the tongue of his unuttered
brothers, he is the language of man's buried heart, he is man's
music and life's great discoverer, the eye that sees, the key that
can unlock, the tongue that will express the buried treasure in the
hearts of men, that all men know and that no man has a language
for--and at the end he is his father's son, shaped from his
father's earth of blood and sweat and toil and bitter agony: he is
at once, therefore, the parent and the son of life, and in him life
and all man's nature are compact; he is most like man in his very
differences, he is what all men are and what not one man in a
million ever is; and he has all, knows all, sees all that any man
on earth can see and hear and know.

This knowledge came to him that morning as he read the play that he
had written to his two friends: as he went on with his reading, and
felt with a proud triumphant joy and happiness the sense of their
devotion, his voice grew strong and confident, the scenes and words
and people of the play began to flame and pulse and live with his
own passion--the whole play moved across his vision in flaming
images of beauty, truth and loveliness, his spirit rose on the
powerful wings of a jubilant conviction, a tremendous happiness,
his heart beat like a hammer-stroke and seemed to ring against his
ribs with every blow the music of this certitude.



It took him about two hours to read the play: when he finished he
felt a sense of triumphant finality, an immense and joyful peace
within him, and he waited for them to speak.  For a moment there
was utter stillness: Joel sat bent forward in the same position,
his head supported by his lean hand; Rosalind sat quietly; neither
moved an inch.  In a moment Joel spoke, nodding his head and
speaking with a kind of matter-of-fact assertiveness that was far
more wonderful and thrilling than any idolatrous warmth of praise
could have been:

"Yes," he whispered, nodding his head thoughtfully,--"it's as good
as The Cherry Orchard--I like it better, myself--but it's as good."
His manner now did take on an electric energy: he straightened
sharply, and speaking almost sternly, with a blazing earnestness
of conviction, he looked his friend in the eyes, and cried:
"Eugene! . . .  It's simply magnificent! . . .  It's EASILY the
greatest play anyone in this country ever wrote. . . .  There's
nothing else to touch it . . . it's MILES ahead of O'Neill . . .
it's . . . it's as good as Cyrano, and you've got to admit," he said,
nodding his head decisively, ". . . that's pretty great. . . .
Cyrano's pretty swell," he whispered, ". . . And those scenes
between the boy and the old 'Major' . . . they're simply grand," he
whispered.  "I mean, I didn't know you had it in you . . . that kind
of writing, the satiric kind. . . .  But it's . . . it's," his face
flushed, he nodded his head doggedly, and almost grimly, as if
willing to stand up for his conviction against the whole world,
"it's . . . it's as good as SHAW!"  And he laughed suddenly his
radiant, soundless laugh and whispered drolly, ". . . And when I say
anything's as good as Shaw . . . you've got to admit that's going
pretty far for me. . . .  Ros'," he said quietly, turning to the
girl, "what do you think? . . .  Don't you think it's pretty grand?"

For a moment she did not answer; her eyes were luminous as stars
and far away.

"Oh," she said presently in her low and sweet and lovely young
voice, "it's wonderful. . . .  It's the most gloriously beautiful
thing I ever heard. . . .  Darling," she said, and took his hand
between her strong, warm and living hands, as she had done the
night before, ". . . you are a great man . . . a great writer. . . .
I am so proud and happy to have known you . . . to be allowed to
hear your play."

He felt the overpowering, thrilling happiness and joy, the
blind speechless gratefulness, and the helpless and agonizing
embarrassment that a young man feels at a moment like this.  He did
not know what to say, what to do, how to express the gratefulness,
the affection, the tenderness that he felt towards them; he turned
to Joel, his mouth moving wordlessly and helplessly, and could say
nothing, he made a baffled and inarticulate movement of the hands,
and ended up by putting his arms around Rosalind and hugging her in
a clumsy, helpless fashion, which was perhaps as good a thing as he
could do, and said all he wished to say.

It was not what these two young people had said to him that gave
the moment a strange imperishable loveliness.  Even in the blind
surge of joy and happiness that swept over him and made him
passionately want to believe that his play was as good as Joel and
his sister said it was, that he was really the great man, the great
writer they had called him, a grain of judgment remained and saved
him from an utter self-deception.  And curiously, for that very
reason, his joy was somehow greater, his feeling of triumphant
happiness sweeter than if what they had said were true.  For in the
very idolatry of their devotion, the enthusiastic exaggeration of
their praise, there was all the blind but noble loyalty of youth,
the beautiful and generous admiration of youth, that is so fine, so
good, so high, so proud with faith and confidence and loyalty, and
because of this, so right.  It was for this reason that, even after
years had passed and he had perhaps accomplished better work,
earned more valid praise, he would yet remember that morning with a
peculiar sense of proud and tender gratefulness.  It brought back
to him, as nothing else on earth could do, the beauty and the
innocence of youth, the extravagance of its blind devotion that is
so mistaken and so wonderful, the generous enthusiasm of its loyal
faith that is so wrong and yet so right, its noble sincerity that
burns brightly even in its grievous error, and that is somehow more
true than fact, more real than glory, and more lasting and more
precious than man's fame.



LXIII


When they came out on the verandah, Joel's mother, Howard Martin,
and Joel's cousin, Ruth, had just driven up before the entrance and
were getting out.  They had been to the swimming pool--a small but
delightful one a half-mile away in a green hollow, tree-embowered--
and all three were in bathing costume.  Howard Martin trod gingerly
across the drive and on to the warm brick flooring of the porch, on
white, wincing, well-kept feet; Mrs. Pierce and the girl wore light
bathing-robes and walked firmly, with assurance.  Mrs. Pierce's
figure was as slender and as well-conditioned as the girl's--her
ankles and her legs were wonderfully graceful, strong and slender--
but in comparison to her niece's black and white voluptuousness--
her dark and sullen, almost brooding, face and her swelling creamy
thighs, her lavish belly and her melon-heavy breasts--the figure of
Mrs. Pierce was lacking in seduction: it had the strength and
slenderness of youth without youth's warmth and freshness; it had,
like everything about her, a chilled and glacial perfection that
spoke of stern regimen, grim watchfulness, and unflagging effort--
"keeping fit."

As the two young men came up, Mrs. Pierce turned gracefully, her
hand upon the screen-door, and with a smile awaited them.  Her
teeth were so solid, white, and perfect in their alignment that it
was difficult to see where they joined together, and they sometimes
suggested twin rows of solid gleaming ivory more than individual
teeth: this circumstance also contributed to the glacial, detached
and almost inhuman quality of her smile.  She greeted her son's
friend with a kindly but detached "Good morning," and without
altering the rigid brilliance of her smile a jot, turned to her son
and said:

"I thought you were coming to the pool.  What happened to you and
Ros'?"

These words were spoken quietly and matter-of-factly: nevertheless,
the suggestion of strong displeasure and annoyance was somehow
unmistakable.

Joel answered quickly, whispering a swift concerned explanation,
his thin figure slightly bent forward, his gaunt face lifted,
eagerly, radiantly concerned, in that attitude of devoted and
solicitous respect that characterized his relations with every
woman, but that was extremely marked when he spoke or listened to
his mother:

"I know, Mums," he whispered swiftly, apologetically,--"I'm
TERRIBLY sorry--but he promised to read his play to us and that
took all morning. . . .  MUMS!" he went on in his astounded and
enthusiastic whisper, "it's SIMPLY magnificent--I wish you could
have been there to hear it."

"Oh," said Mrs. Pierce quietly, and turning, for a moment she
regarded her son's friend with that glacially brilliant smile of
her thin and faintly carmined lips that never changed or altered in
expression by an atom.  "Oh," she said, "I should like to--perhaps
you will read it to me some time."

"SIMPLY superb," Joel whispered, "it really is."

"And now you boys had better get ready for lunch," she said in a
more warm and friendly tone.  "You know how Granny hates it if
people get there late."

With these words she went into the house and mounted the stairs.
The young men followed her: at the foot of the stairs Joel turned
and said to his visitor:

"Look--I'd hurry as much as I could! . . .  We've only twenty
minutes: you've just got time to bathe and dress."

Bathe and dress!  The youth looked at his young host with a
bewildered, uncomprehending face, and with a sinking feeling in his
heart.  What did they expect him to do--what, according to the
formula of these strange rare people, was one supposed to do when
one was invited out to lunch?  He had bathed that morning when he
got up, it seemed to him that he must still be very clean, and as
for dressing, he had just one suit of clothes in all the world, and
that was the suit he was wearing at that moment.  And just one day
before, when he had left New York to come to this magical,
unbelievably glorious place, he had thought, in his miserable naïve
ignorance, that this one suit of clothes, three shirts, three pairs
of socks, and a change of underwear were abundantly sufficient to
all the demands that fashion and a week-end visit could possibly
make on him.  At that moment, as he stared at his friend with a
gaping mouth, unable to reply, the terrific impact of this new
world which had stunned him the night before with its magnificence
and beauty exploded in his brain in a flare of stars and rockets.
And for a moment now he felt a lost, sickening desperate terror,
and curiously, a feeling of blind resentment against his friend.
For a moment he felt tricked and deceived--deceived by Joel's
modesty, his exquisite humility, by the frayed and shabby clothes
he had worn in Cambridge and New York, by the over-refinement of
his breeding, which had caused him to conceal utterly his true
state of life, never to suggest by a word or reference the kind of
life that he came from, the wealth, the luxury, the magnificence of
the world in which he had been born and lived.

"D-d-dress! . . .  But . . . how--," his face reddened, he craned
his neck doggedly, and suddenly blurted out:

"Dress?  In what?  This is the only suit I've got!"

"But of COURSE!" Joel whispered, arching his eyebrows in astounded
surprise.  "What's wrong with that? . . .  You can wear a dark coat
anywhere--all that I meant was that you could wear white flannels
with it."

"Flannels!" the other said, "I have no flannels, Joel. . . .  This
suit is all I've got to wear; if I can't wear this, I can't go."

"But of course you can wear it!" Joel cried, concealing any
surprise he may have felt with the instant impatient agreement of
his tone.  "It's PERFECTLY all right--only," his eyes were
thoughtful for a moment, he considered swiftly--"Look here!" he
said abruptly, "would you like to wear a pair of mine?  I'm not as
tall as you are, but perhaps you can make them fit. . . .  And if
you can't," he said quickly, "it's PERFECTLY all right--it doesn't
matter in the slightest--it's only," and his eyes for an instant
had a faintly perturbed expression, "--it's only that Grandfather
belongs to the old school--oh, he's SWELL, SIMPLY magnificent;
you'll like him the moment you see him--the only reason I dress
when going there is that he's got old-fashioned standards--and he's
so GRAND--I do everything I can to please him--But come on!" he
whispered quickly, "I'll give you a pair of mine, and you can wear
them if they fit--and if they don't--it doesn't matter in the
slightest."

They went upstairs then to Joel's room; he gave his friend a pair
of striped flannel trousers, and the other departed dutifully to
bathe, put on a clean shirt and collar and the flannel trousers--
which proved, indeed, a very tight precarious fit, but which were
made to do--and thus correctly garmented, he joined the family and
the other guests, and they drove away to Mr. Joel's house.

The great rambling old house which had been so lovely in the moon-
enchantment of the night before was no less beautiful by day.  It
sat there in the hollow of the hill, embowered in rich green and
shaded by the leafy spread of its great maples, with the homely,
pure, and casual loveliness that the old houses of New England
have.



Old Mr. Joel himself was just as grand and imposing a personality
as Joel had indicated.  He was, indeed, in Joel's word,
"stupendous"; a figure of leonine magnificence and gallant
gentility, who might have stepped forth from a page of Thackeray.
He was already past his seventieth year, but his body was still
strongly, vigorously set: he was somewhat above the middle height,
but his neck and shoulders had a kind of massive strength that
suggested he had been a powerfully built man in his prime.  His
white mane of hair was soft as silk and gave his wide brow and
ruddy, pleated old man's face a kind of noble lion-like fierceness,
and this impression was enhanced by his grizzled moustache and his
old, rather growling voice, which had in it nothing surly or ill-
tempered, but rather a kind of old and noble masculinity, an
aristocratic kind of growl that seemed perfectly adjusted to a kind
of Pendennis-like language, a "Dammit-all,-sir,-it's-not-the-
fellow's-drinking-that-I-mind,-it's-only-that-he's-proved-himself-
incapable-of-holding-his-liquor-like-a-gentleman" kind of voice.

The inference was warranted: even as they stood there in a
spacious, airy big room, the guests standing and talking in groups,
drinking small glasses of a fine dry sherry, the youth could hear
Joel's eager whispering voice engaged in earnest, but respectful,
debate, with his leonine grand-sire, and Mr. Joel's nobly growled
out answers.  The conversation was about books--about the artist's
right to use the materials of his own experience and conversation--
and it hinged particularly upon a certain book in which the writer
had apparently made use of personal letters and private documents
that people he knew, a woman chiefly, had written him.

"No, sir," Mr. Joel growled, "I do not care what the circumstances
may be or what the nature of the work.  If I had a friend, sir, who
would deliberately make public letters which a woman had written
him, why, sir, I should drop him from my acquaintance--I should be
forced to conclude, sir,"--here the old growling voice fell to an
ominous whisper of irrevocable judgment, and he looked out at his
grandson with a fierce glint of his old eyes under bushy brows--"I
should be forced to conclude, sir, that he was nothing but a cad,"
old Mr. Joel whispered, and with a suddenly fierce glint of his old
eyes, a sudden movement of his leonine head, he growled out in a
low and savage tone:  "And I should tell him so, sir.  I should be
compelled to tell him that he was nothing but a cad!"

"Yes, grandfather," Joel whispered eagerly, his thin figure bent
forward in an attitude of devoted and attentive reverence--"But
after ALL, some pretty great people have done it--Rousseau did it,
and The Confessions are pretty great, you know--You've got to admit
that.--And Byron did it in his poems--at least, everyone knew whom
he was talking about, and then there was De Musset and George
Sand."

"It makes no difference, sir," growled Mr. Joel implacably, "it
makes no difference who they were or how great they may be
considered in the realm of art, or how great the work they did may
be--if I knew a man who did a thing like that, I should be forced
to consider him a low cad--no matter how great a poet or a writer,
or how great his work might be--I should consider him a cad,--and"--
his old growling voice fell to a whisper of boding and implacable
judgment--"I should tell him so, sir.  I should let him know that I
considered him a cad."

Such was Joel's grandsire, Mr. Joel, and surely he was a specimen
of which any group or class could well be proud: of all that Hudson
River aristocracy he was justly venerated and esteemed as one of
its noblest and proudest adornments.  He had lived a long,
honourable, and successful life; and now in his old age he had
retired to the bosom of his paternal earth to spend his last years
in dignity and simple ease and in calm but fruitful reflection on
his rich experience.  He was writing a book, and in advance it
could be solemnly averred that he would make no use in it of any
letters that a woman ever wrote to him.

What man, therefore, could speak with greater weight about the
duties, codes and principles of man?  What man was better qualified
to know the rules of honour and the standards of a gentleman--and
to assert a truth that might have gone unnoticed by a person of a
baser spirit and a lower quality--that Rousseau was a scoundrel and
De Musset and Lord Byron a couple of low cads--"because, sir, they
made public letters that a woman wrote them."

It was indeed delightful to find such Thackerayan gallantry, such
Olympian scorn for knavish genius and for the lives of mighty poets
dead and gone who illuminated mankind with their radiance but had
their own light put out--must dwell for evermore "a couple of low
cads," in outer darkness, never again to be received, acknowledged,
given gracious pardon by the chivalric flower of the Hudson River
rich.  How wretched that stern judgment must have made Rousseau!
What bitter news for Byron!  What misery for De Musset!

But now a woman servant entered and announced that lunch was
served.  The chattering groups of people turned and formed
instinctively, and by a kind of native respect, into files of
deferential waiting, until Mr. Joel had passed.  He led the way, a
grand and leonine old man, superbly garmented in a coat of soft,
rich blue, wide loose white flannels, wound at the waist by a great
sash of yellow silk--an adornment that seemed in no way
inappropriate but superbly fitting the noble dignity of the old
man.

At the door he paused and stood aside, with a grizzled majesty of
courtesy, for his wife and the other ladies of the group to pass.
Then he entered the dining-room, followed by his grandson and the
other young men.  The dining-room was another light, spacious, and
graciously beautiful room in the old New England style: through the
open windows one saw the deep green and gold of trees and flowers
in the embowered magic of the setting, and the fragrance of sweet
drowsy air breathed on the curtains and flowed through the room.

The snowy table had a great bowl of fresh-cut wood flowers in the
centre: the food was also native, plain old American, and superbly
cooked: there was a thick pea-soup, fried chicken, plump and
tender, done superbly to a juicy, delicately encrusted brown: there
were candied sweet potatoes, string beans, cooked the Southern way
with the succulent sweet seasoning of pork, stewed golden corn, and
creamy mashed potatoes, a deep smooth gravy, rich and brown and
thick, sliced tomatoes and sliced cucumbers, no alcoholic
beverages, but iced tea, cold and tall and fragrant in high
tinkling glasses rimed with ice, flaky biscuits, smoking hot, and
for dessert, fresh apple-pie, hot and crusty, hued with cinnamon
and flanked by thick fresh squares of pungent yellow cheese.

It was, in short, a plain but wholesome and most appetizing meal,
completely American in its flavour and abundance, and superbly
cooked, most fitting to this house; the simple green and natural,
casual beauty of the place, the life, the people, the homely
gracious hospitality of democracy.

It is true, the meal was also rather Southern in its cooking and
its quality--a fact that was not surprising, however, when one
remembered that Mr. Joel's present wife had been a famous Southern
belle from the blue-grass region of Kentucky.

One not only remembered this fact, it was difficult for one not to
remember it; Mrs. Joel herself made her romantic origins evident.
Although she was a woman in her early sixties with white hair, she
was still remarkably preserved, and her manners, graces, dimpled
smiles, her roguish glances and her languishing soft drawl were
still the familiar stock-in-trade of the Dixieland coquette.

She was certainly what is called "a fine figure of a woman"; her
figure was tall, spacious, amply proportioned, her face, although
beginning to show the signs of age--a slightly wrinkled plumpness
like the skin of a full but slightly withered apple--was still
almost as soft and white and tender as a child's: she had almost
all her natural teeth and they were white and pearly, her hands
were white and plump and fine, her voice had the refined and
throaty burble that is familiar in the majestic American female of
the upper crust, and she dimpled beautifully when she smiled.

It was rather uncomfortably evident at once that there was a
strong, if suppressed, hostility between Mrs. Joel and her step-
daughter, Joel's mother.

The struggle between the two was for the possession of something
that neither of them any longer had--youth.  Both were obviously
enamoured of youth--of the freshness of youth, the warmth, the
charm, the grace, the vitality of youth.  Both hated the idea of
growing old: both bitterly and desperately refused to admit the
possibility of growing old.  Mrs. Joel was able to cast over her
soul a spell of hypnotic deception, and by absurdly flaunting
around the graces, airs and manners of a coquette, to convince
herself that she was young and beautiful, able to enslave every man
she met under the domination of her captivating charm.

And Mrs. Pierce felt bitterly that the older woman had had her day,
that she should be willing to admit her years, gracefully submit,
and take a back seat.  This ugly rivalry was now apparent in almost
everything they said, and gave everyone at the table a feeling of
tension, embarrassment and discomfort.  Thus, Mrs. Joel, speaking
to her step-daughter, and including the whole company, in a
reference to Mrs. Pierce's strenuous pursuit of youth, her grim
devotion to youth's figure and its vigorous gymnastics, now
remarked in a tone of sugared venom, a malicious gaiety of fine
surprise:

"But really, I do, I think it's the most astonishing thing to see a
woman of your age take part in all these sports and games that only
the YOUNG people of my generation played. . . .  After all, if you
were twenty--the age of Joel or this young man--I could understand
it better--but at YOUR age, my dear,"--she drew a fine breath of
astonishment, "--really, I marvel that you don't collapse."

"Do you?" said Mrs. Pierce, smiling her glacial and inflexible
smile, and in a tone of cold, impassive irony--"I confess, Mother,
I see nothing at all to marvel at. . . .  Please set your mind at
rest--I assure you I'm not in the slightest danger of collapse. . . .
I can do everything," she went on grandly, "that I could do at
twenty--and I can do it better now, with less fatigue and greater
skill. . . .  I can hold my own with any of these young people
around here, no matter what it is--whether swimming, golfing,
playing tennis, or going for a walk.  So you can save your
sympathy, Mother," she concluded with a laugh which seemed
casual and friendly enough, but which showed plainly the hard
inflexibility of her antagonism, "--when I need your condolences
I'll let you know."

"But, my DEAR," said Mrs. Joel with sweet gushing malice--"I think
it's ma-a-rvellous!  I only wonder how you do it at your age! . . .
Why, no girl of my time and generation would have THOUGHT of doing
all the things you do every day without turning a hair--Why!" she
breathed, looking around her with an air of fine amazement, "I hear
Ida plays FIVE sets before breakfast every morning and thinks
nothing of it--but in MY day and time, if a girl--a YOUNG girl,
mind you--played a SINGLE set--she'd be positively exhausted--done
up for a week."

"Perhaps, Mother," Mrs. Pierce coolly suggested, "that is why the
young girls of your time were such a soft and grubby lot--and why
they turned out to be such dowdy frumps later on."

Mrs. Joel's dimpled smile did not lose a single atom of its
saccharine benevolence, nor did her voice alter by a shade its
honeyed drip, but for a moment something bright and adder-like
passed across her eyes, and she gave her step-daughter a swift and
poisonous glance that would have done credit to a snake.  "--And
then, of course," she went on sweetly, taking the young men at the
table into her confidence with her dimpled smile--"we had such old-
fashioned notions in those days, too--you boys, I know, would be
amused if you could know what some of our quaint notions were--but--
hah! hah! hah!"--she laughed a gay and silvery little laugh of
envenomed hatred, "--my dear," she said to Joel, "--you'll have to
laugh when I tell you--but do you know it was actually considered
IMMODEST--UNWOMANLY--for a young girl of my time to take part in
sports--COMPETE in sports--against men--and as for a woman of Ida's
age doing it--why, it was UNTHINKABLE! UNHEARD of!--a middle-aged
woman," she pronounced the words with obvious relish and for a
moment there was a swift hard flexion of the muscles in Mrs.
Pierce's jaw--"but a middle-aged woman in MY day who had attempted
such a thing would have been OSTRACIZED--an OUTCAST--decent people
would have had nothing to do with her!"

"Yes, I know, Mother," Mrs. Pierce said with a swift and glacial
urbanity.  "We've all heard about that--I think it's generally
conceded now by most intelligent people that women of that
generation were a pretty worthless, dull and barbarous lot."

"Ah-hah-hah!" Mrs. Joel laughed sweetly, and dimpled at her best--
"TERRIBLY old-fashioned, of course--but," she turned graciously to
her grandson's young guest and lavished on him her most dimpled
smile,--"FRIGHTFULLY amusing, don't you think?"

He reddened like a beet, looked helplessly at the two contesting
women, craned his neck nervously along the edges of his collar, and
finally said nothing.

Joel relieved the painful situation with his swift whispering grace
of tact and kindliness.  "But really, Granny," he whispered
courteously and eagerly, "--Mums is awfully good at it, she really
is. . . .  She can beat me two sets out of three in tennis, and
give me ten strokes in golf--and when it comes to SWIMMING--"

"Oh," said little Howard Martin in his mincing, languishing, and
effeminate tone--"she's ma-a-rvellous! . . .  Ida," he gushed, in a
kind of over-ripe ecstasy--"your diving is simply divine! . . .  If
you could only show me--oh-h," he said, with gushing effeminacy--
"if you could only teach ME how you do it--but it's SIMPLY perfect--
MARVELLOUS--"



The meal now proceeded more smoothly.  Mr. Joel seemed to take
small notice of the feud between the two women--his daughter and
his wife--he talked to Joel, Rosalind, and to the other young men
in his grand growling way, expressed his opinion on the candidacies
of Davis and Coolidge, and said he would vote for Davis.

"If John Davis gets in," said Mrs. Pierce with that positive
worldly assurance that characterized her opinions, "Charles Dana
Gibson will get the ambassadorship to England--oh, but THAT'S
settled!" she said positively, "I happen to know that Dana Gibson
can have the ambassadorship any time he wants it--"

"Providing Davis gets elected," Joel whispered, laughing.  Turning
to his grandfather, he whispered respectfully, "What do you think,
Grandfather?  Do you think that Davis will get in?"

"No, sir," Mr. Joel growled, "I do not.  I think his chances of
getting elected are VERY slight--unless some sudden upheaval turns
the tide in his direction before election day."

"And whom will you vote for, sir?" Joel whispered.

"I shall vote for Davis, sir," growled Mr. Joel.  "I have known him
for many years, he is a very able lawyer, a very ABLE man--but,
sir,"--his old growling voice sank to a whisper, and he peered out
fiercely from under his grizzled eyebrows at his grandson--"his
chances of election are very slight indeed.  I should not be
surprised to see Coolidge win by a land-slide."

"Did you hear what Alice Longworth said about him?" said Mrs.
Pierce laughing, "--that he looked as if he had been weaned upon a
pickle."

Everyone laughed, even Mr. Joel joining with a kind of growling
chuckle.  As for Joel, he bent double, radiantly, gleefully
convulsed with soundless laughter, snapping his fingers softly as
he did so.  His own humorous invention was not fertile, but his
love of a good story--particularly when his mother or one of his
friends told it, or quoted one of their own group--was enthusiastic.
Now for a moment he bent double with this convulsed, whispering
laughter: when he recovered somewhat he said softly and slowly:

"SIMPLY swell . . .  Gosh!" he whispered admiringly.  "What a wit
she's got!  It's a swell story," he whispered.

"By the way, Ida," Mr. Joel growled, tugging at his short and
grizzled moustache, "how is Frank?  Have you been over to see them,
lately?"

"Yes, Father," she answered, "we drove over last Tuesday and spent
the evening with them. . . .  He looks very well," she added, in
answer to his question, "but, of COURSE," she said decisively,
"he's NEVER going to be any better--they all say as much--"

"Hm," old Mr. Joel growled, tugged reflectively at his short and
grizzled moustache for a moment longer, and then said:  "Has he
been taking any part in the campaign this summer?"

"Very little," she answered--"of course, the man has gone through
hell these last few years--he's suffered agonies!  He seems a
little better now, but"--her voice rose again on its tone of
booming finality as she shook her head--"he'll never get back the
use of his legs again--the man is a PERMANENT cripple," she said
positively--"there's no getting around it--and he himself is
reconciled to it."

"Hm," growled old Mr. Joel again, as he tugged at his short
moustache--"Pity!  Nice fellow, Frank!  Always liked him! . . .  A
little on the flashy order, maybe--like all his family . . . too
easy-going, too agreeable . . . but great ability! . . .  Pity!"

"Yes, isn't it!" Joel whispered with soft eager sympathy.  "And,
Grandfather," he went on with an eager enthusiasm, "--his charm is
SIMPLY stupendous! . . .  I've never known anything like it! . . .
The moment that he speaks to you he makes you his friend for ever--
and he KNOWS so much--he has such interesting things to say--
really, the amount he knows is SIMPLY stupendous!"

"Hm, yes," old Mr. Joel agreed with a consenting growl, as he
tugged thoughtfully at his grizzled grey moustache, "--but a little
superficial, too. . . .  The whole lot is like that . . . go hell-
for-leather at everything for three weeks at a time--and then
forget it. . . .  Still," he muttered, ". . . an able fellow--very
able. . . .  Pity this thing had to happen to him just at the start
of his career."

"Still, Father," Mrs. Pierce put in, "--don't you think he'd gone
about as far as he was going when this thing hit him? . . .  I
mean, of course, he IS a charming person--everyone agrees on that.
I never knew a man with more native charm than Frank--But for all
his charm, don't you think there's something rather weak in his
character? . . .  Do you think he would have had the stamina and
determination to go much further if this disease hadn't forced him
to retire?"

"Um," Mr. Joel growled, as he tugged thoughtfully at his short
cropped moustache.  ". . . Hard to say. . . .  Hard to tell what
would have happened to him. . . .  A little soft, perhaps, but
great ability . . . great charm . . . and great opportunists,
everyone of them. . . .  Have instinctive genius for seizing on the
moment when it comes. . . .  Never know what's going to happen to a
man like that--"

"Well," said Mrs. Pierce, politely, but with an accent of
conviction--"he might have kept on going--but I think he was
through--that he'd gone as far as he could--I don't think he could
have stood the gaff--I don't believe he had it in him."

"Um," Mr. Joel growled, "perhaps you're right. . . .  But great
pity just the same. . . .  Always liked Frank. . . .  Very able
fellow--"



The conversation proceeded in these channels for some time, the
guests discussing politics, ambassadorships, using the names of the
great and celebrated people of the earth with the casual and
familiar intimacy of people talking about lifelong friends whom
they had last seen at dinner Tuesday evening.  It was the "inside"
of the great world of wealth and fame and fashion--the world that
the youth had read and heard about all his life--but that he had
thought about, had visioned, as Olympus, mantled in celestial
clouds, and for ever remote from the intruding gaze of common men.
Now, to hear these great names, these celestial personages, bandied
about on the tip of the tongue just as familiarly as one spoke of
one's own friends--to hear these people speak of the habits, the
health, the conversation, and the personal home-life of this august
parliament in just the same way that people spoke of their friends,
acquaintances and familiars the whole world over, gave the youth a
sense of living in a dream, of hearing incredible things--things
incredible because of their very casual familiarity--of being the
witness of an incredible event.

In this way, the meal drew to its close: Mrs. Pierce and her step-
mother managed to avoid further friction, although once it
threatened, when Mrs. Pierce, observing the retreating figure of
one of the maid-servants--a robust and plain-featured countrywoman
of middle age--noticed from the cropped and unnaturally white
texture of her neck and skull that her hair had been cut, "bobbed"
in the fashion that was to grow so popular and that was just then
coming into style, and turned and questioned her step-mother about
it:

"What has happened to that woman's hair, Mother?" she said.  "What
did she do to it?"

"Why," cried Mrs. Joel eagerly, beginning to beam and dimple around
at her guests with an air of delighted satisfaction--"I had it cut
off."

"YOU had it cut off?" cried Mrs. Pierce in an astounded tone.

"Why, yes, my dear," chirped Mrs. Joel eagerly, "I sent all the
girls into the village one morning last week and had the barber cut
their hair."

"WHAT!" Mrs. Pierce boomed out in an astounded tone, and then sank
back against her chair, and for a moment returned her son's stare
incredulously, "you mean you herded all these girls together and
WHACKED their hair off at one stroke?"

"Why, of course, my dear," said Mrs. Joel eagerly, in a rather
excited and disturbed tone, "--or rather, I told them that they'd
have to do it--that that was what I wanted."

"What YOU wanted?" Mrs. Pierce boomed out in the same astounded and
incredulous tone.

"Why, yes"--Mrs. Joel rushed on eagerly, excitedly, taking the
whole table in now with a look of beaming explanation.  "--You see,
I had the whole house done over this spring--redecorated--I told
the decorator the EFFECT I wanted," she said gushingly--"I told
him everything must be done for--for--LIGHTNESS!" she said
triumphantly, "--COOLNESS! . . . to do everything in light cool
colours . . . get THAT effect. . . .  So last week," she went on
happily, "when we had that spell of FRIGHTFUL hot weather, I
noticed suddenly how--how HOT--and disagreeable all the girls
looked with their long hair--how--how OUT OF PLACE," she said
triumphantly, "they looked in this new scheme of things. . . .
Ugh," she shuddered with a little gesture of discomfort and
distaste, "--the very SIGHT of them made me uncomfortable--I
couldn't BEAR them!  So all of a sudden it occurred to me how nice
it would be--how much it would improve the--the--the general
ATMOSPHERE of the whole house if I made them bob their hair. . . .
So," she concluded, beaming around at everyone with dimpled
satisfaction--"that's how I came to do it--I called them all
together one morning last week--Friday, I think it was--and told
them what I wanted--and then sent them all into the village to get
it done."

There was a moment's pause while Mrs. Joel beamed at her guests
with a dimpled smile of triumphant finality that seemed to say--
"There!  Behold my work and marvel at it!  That is the way the
thing was done."  Her obvious satisfaction was suddenly disturbed,
however, by Mrs. Pierce, who, after staring at her in astounded
silence for a moment, boomed out incredulously:

"MOTHER!  You KNOW you didn't do a thing like THAT!"

"But--but, of course I did it, Ida," Mrs. Joel returned in a
surprised and nettled tone of voice--"That's what I'm telling
you. . . .  What's the matter with it? . . .  Don't you think the
girls look nice?"

"I--think," said Mrs. Pierce slowly, after a moment's stunned
reflection--"I--think--that--is--the--most--preposterous--the--
most--highhanded--the--most--GOD!" she cried, and throwing her head
back she fairly made the room ring with her hearty, booming, and
astonished laughter:  "I've heard of Catherine the Great and Marie
Antoinette and the days of the Medicis--and the things they did--
but I never thought I'd live to see the day their methods were
adopted here in free America--Why! hah! hah! hah! hah! hah!" she
fell back in her chair and fairly rocked with booming and
incredulous laughter--"WHACKING the hair off those eight girls at
one fell stroke because--because--" her voice choked speechlessly--
"because it made you HOT to look at them . . . because--because,"
her voice rose to a rich choked scream and presently she said
in an almost inaudible squeak--"because she's had the house--
REDECORATED," she panted--"Why, MOTHER!" she cried strongly at
last, her shoulders shaking, and her face still red with laughter,
"--the King of Siam is not in it compared to you--you make absolute
tyranny look like free democracy--hah! hah! hah! hah! hah!--Strike
off their heads!" cried Mrs. Pierce, "--the very SIGHT of them
makes me perspire!"  And leaning back again she surrendered herself
to free, ringing, and whole-hearted laughter, in which everyone
save Mrs. Joel joined.  When the laughter had somewhat subsided,
Mrs. Joel, her plump white cheeks red with open anger, cried out in
a furious voice:

"I don't agree with you! . . .  I don't agree with you at all. . . .
And I must say it seems very stupid of you, Ida, to take such a
childish point of view."

"Childish!" Mrs. Pierce cried in a challenging tone, "you're the
one who's childish! . . .  If I did a thing like that to MY girls--
if I for one moment thought I had a right to take such liberties as
that with other people, I'd feel like a fool! . . .  Why, Mother,"
she cried in a strong protesting tone, "wake up! . . .  What kind
of a world do you live in, anyway? . . .  Whatever gave you the
notion that you have a right to do things like that to other
people--and all because you're fortunate enough to be able to keep
servants and pay them wages. . . .  Wake up!  Wake up!" she cried
in a tone of almost furious indignation, "--You're not living in
the Dark Ages, Mother. . . .  Slavery has been abolished! . . .
This is the twentieth century! . . .  Why, it's absurd!" she cried
scornfully, and with two spots of angry colour in her cheeks--"the
most arrogant and high-handed thing I ever heard in all my life--
The whole thing's preposterous--I only hope that no one hears about
it."

"If you feel that way about it," Mrs. Joel began in a voice choked
with fury--and at this moment Joel came to the rescue and saved
what really threatened to develop into an ugly, open, painful
quarrel between the two women--

"Oh, but Granny," he whispered--"I'm sure the girls don't mind a
bit! . . .  And they look MUCH nicer--and MUCH cooler--without
their hair than when they had it--I'm sure they feel that way about
it, too."

"Well," Mrs. Joel began, still very angry but somewhat placated by
her grandson's tactful intervention--"I'm glad to see that someone
still has a little common sense."

And in this way the trouble was finally smoothed out by Joel's
quick diplomacy, and the guests, eager to avert another painful
scene between the two women, rose to go.  And it was in this way
that they departed, not without a final explosion of booming and
astounded laughter from Mrs. Pierce as she walked out towards her
car, a final hilarious reference to "redecoration," and the King of
Siam, and the modern prototype of Catherine the Great.



LXIV


Joel and his friend did not return immediately to the house with
Joel's mother and her other guests.  Instead, leaving old Mr.
Joel's house, they turned left, and struck out for a walk through
the fields and slopes and wooded country of the great estate.  The
day was hot, the broad fields brooded in the powerful and fragrant-
clovered scent of afternoon, the woods were dense with tangled
mystery, immensely still and green, yet dark incredibly, and filled
with drowsy silence, brooding calm, ringing with the lovely music
of unnumbered birds, alive with the swift and sudden bullet-thrum
of wings, and haunted with the cool and magical incantation of
their hidden waters.

It was the wild, sweet, casual, savage, and incredibly lovely earth
of America, and of the wilderness, and it haunted them like
legends, and pierced them like a sword, and filled them with a wild
and swelling prescience of joy that was like sorrow and delight.

They toiled upward through the tangled forest-jungle of a wooded
slope, and down again into the cool green-gladed secrecies of a
hollow, and up through the wild still music of the woods again and
out into the great rude swell of unmown fields, alive with all
their brooding potency, their powerful and silent energy of the hot
and fragrant earth of three o'clock, the drowsy and tremulous
ululation of afternoon.

Their feet trod pathways in the hot and fragrant grasses; where
they trod, a million little singing things leaped up to life, and
hot dry stalks brushed crudely at their knees: the earth beneath
their feet gave back a firm and unsmooth evenness, a lumpy
resiliency.

Once in a field before them they saw a tree dense-leaved and
burnished by hot light: the sun shone on its leaves with a naked
and un-green opacity, and Joel, looking towards it, whispered
thoughtfully:

". . . Hm . . .  It's nice, that--I mean the way the light falls on
it--It would be hard to paint: I'd like to come out here and try
it."

And the other assented, not, however, without a certain nameless
desolation in his heart that broad and naked lights, the white and
glacial opacity of brutal day aroused in him--and wanting more the
wooded grove, the green-gold magic of a wooded grass, the woodland
dark and thrum and tingled mystery, and the sheer sheeting silence
of the hidden water.

It was a swelling, casual, nobly lavish earth, for ever haunted by
a drowsy spell of time, and the unfathomed mystery of an elfin
enchantment, the huge dream-sorcery of the mysterious and immortal
river.

It was what he had always known it to be in his visions as a child,
and he came to it with a sense of wonder and of glorious discovery,
but without surprise, as one who for the first time comes into his
father's country, finding it the same as he had always known it
would be, and knowing always that it would be there.

And finally the whole design of that earth, with the casual and
powerful surveys of its great fields, its dense still woods of
moveless silence ringing with the music of the birds, its far-off
hills receding into time as haunting as a dream, and the central
sorcery of its shining river--that enchanted thread which ran
through all, from which all swept away, and towards which all
inclined--was unutterably the language of all he had ever thought
or felt or known of America: the great plantation of the earth
abundant to the sustenance of mighty men, and enriching all its
glamorous women with the full provender of its huge compacted
sweetness, an America that was so casual and rich and limitless and
free, and so haunted by dark time and magic, so aching in its joy
with all the bitter briefness of our days, so young, so old, so
everlasting, and so triumphantly the place of man's good earth, his
ripe fulfilment and of the most fortunate, good, and happy life
that any man alive had ever known.

It changed, it passed, it swept around him in all its limitless
surge and sweep and fold and passionate variety, and it was more
strange in all its haunting loveliness than magic or a dream, and
yet more near than morning and more actual than noon.

It was a hot day: the two young men walked along with their coats
flung back across their shoulders: towards five o'clock as they
were coming home again, and coming down into the wooded hollow
where Mr. Joel lived, Joel turned, and with a slight flush of
embarrassment on his gaunt face, said:

"Look--do you mind wearing your coat when we go by Grandfather's
house?--you can take it off again when we get out of sight."

He said nothing, but silently did as his friend requested, and thus
correctly garmented they passed the old man's great white house and
crossed the little wooden bridge and stared up again out of the
hollow, taking a foot-path through the woods that would lead them
out into the road near Miss Telfair's house: she had invited them
to tea.

And curiously, inexplicably, of all that they had said and talked
about together on that walk, these two things were later all he
could remember:--his friend's eyes narrowed with professional
appraisal as he looked at the hot opacity of the sun-burnished tree
and said, "--hm . . . It's nice that--the light is interesting--I'd
like to do it;" and the embarrassed but almost stubbornly definite
way in which Joel had asked him to put on his coat as he went past
"Grandfather's place."  He did not know why, but that simple
request aroused in him a feeling of quick and hot resentment, a
desire to say:

"Good God!  What kind of idol-worship is this, anyway?  Surely that
old man has been made of the same earth as all the rest of us--
surely he's not so grand and rare and fine that he can't stand the
sight of two young men in shirt-sleeves going by his house! . . .
Surely there is something false, inhuman, barren in this kind of
reverence--no real respect, no decent human admiration, but
something cruel, empty, worthless and untrue, and against the real
warmth and worth and friendliness of man!"

For a moment hot resentful words rose to his lips: that act of
empty reverence seemed to him, somehow, to be arrogant and
disdainful of humanity; he felt a sudden blind resentment, a
choking anger against old Mr. Joel and his grand manners and his
growling and magnificent old age: he wanted to bring back again the
conversation he had overheard at lunch, to ask Joel bitterly who
the hell he thought this old man was that he could grandly dispose
of man according to his judgment as "low cads," as "gentlemen"--to
inquire savagely who the hell this damned contriving, cunning old
custodian of the treasures of the rich thought he was that he could
arrogate unto himself the power to pronounce banishment on his
betters--to call Rousseau a rascal, and De Musset and Lord Byron "a
couple of low cads."

And childish, foolish as this anger was in all its blind unreason,
he was to remember these two trifling episodes in later years with
a feeling of regret and nameless loss.  These two acts on Joel's
part--the one an act of barren interest--a joyless empty interest
in the blind opacity of light--and the other an act of barren
joyless reverence to old age and an inhuman state--seemed to mark
for him the beginning of his gradual separation from his friend, a
dumb, inexplicable and sorrowful acceptation of their fatal
severance.  It seemed to him that here began that slow, and somehow
desperately painful recognition that the enchanted world of wealth
and love and beauty, of living fulfilment and of fruitful power,
which he had visioned as a child in all his dreams about the fabled
rich along the Hudson River--did not exist; and that he must look
for that grand life in ways stranger, darker, and more painful in
their labyrinthine complications than any he had ever dreamed of as
a child; and that, like Moses, he must strike water from the common
stone of life, and like Samson, take honey from the savage lion's
maw of the great world, find all the joy of living that he lusted
for in the blind swarm, the brutal stupefaction of the streets;
goodness and truth in the mean hearts of common men; and beauty in
the only place where it can ever be found--inextricably meshed,
inwrought, and interwoven in that great web of horror, pain and
sweat and bitter anguish, that great woven fabric of blind cruelty,
hatred, filth and lust and tyranny and injustice, of joy, of faith,
of love, of courage and devotion--that makes up life and that
resumes the world.

It was a desolating loss, a hideous acknowledgment, a cruel
discovery--to know that all the haunted glory of this enchanted
world, which he thought he had discovered the night before, had
been just what it now seemed to him to be--moon-magic--and to know
that it was gone from him for ever.  It was a bitter pill to know
that what had seemed so grand, so strong, so right, and so
inevitable at the moment of discovery was now lost to him--that
some blind chemistry of man's common earth, and of his father's
clay, and of genial nature, had taken from him what he seemed to
possess, and that he could never make this enchanted life his own
again, or ever again believe in its reality.  It was a desperate
and soul-sickening discovery to know that not alone through
moonlight, magic, and the radiant images of their heart's desire
could men find America, but that somewhere there, and far darklier
and strangelier than the river, lay the thing they sought, in all
the blind and brutal complications of its destiny--buried there in
the grimy and illimitable jungles of its savage cities--a-prowl and
raging in the desert and half mad with hunger in the barren land,
befouled and smutted with the rust and grime of its vast works and
factories, warped and scarred and twisted, stunned, bewildered by
the huge multitude of all its errors and blind gropings, yet still
fierce with life, still savage with its hunger, still broken, slain
and devoured by its terrific earth, its savage wilderness--and
still, somehow, God knows how, the thing of which he was a part,
that beat in every atom of his blood and brain and life, and was
indestructible and everlasting, and that was America!



Miss Telfair's house, which they now entered, was just the sort of
house that one would expect a woman like Miss Telfair to live
in.  Everywhere one looked, one saw the image of the woman's
personality--and that personality was fragile, exquisite, elegant,
and elaborately minute.  In spite of its graceful, plain
proportions, that house was not wholly a comfortable place to be
in.  It was filled with ten thousand little things--ten thousand
little, fragile, costly, lovely and completely useless little
things, and their profusion was so great, their arrangement so
exquisitely right, their proximity so immediate and overwhelming
that one instantly felt cramped, uneasy, and uncomfortable,
fearfully apprehensive lest a sudden free and spacious movement
should send a thousand rare and terribly costly little things
crashing into shattered bits, the treasure of a lifetime
irretrievably lost, and one's own life and work and future
irretrievably mortgaged, blighted, wrecked, in one shattering
instant of blind ruin.  In short, in Miss Telfair's lovely,
exquisite and toy-becluttered house, one felt very much like a
delicate, sensitive, intelligent and highly organized bull in a
horribly expensive china-shop, and this feeling was cruelly
enhanced if one was twenty-three years old and six and a half feet
tall, and large of hand and foot, and long of arm and leg in just
proportion, and painfully embarrassed, and given to sudden and
convulsive movements, and keyed and strung on the same wires as a
racehorse.

It was an astonishing place, about as exquisitely feminine a place
as one could imagine.  One had only to take a look round to feel
that no man had ever lived here, that the only man who ever came
here had come as a visitor; and somehow one felt at once he knew
the reason why Miss Telfair had not married--she simply did not
want to have "a man about the place," a disgusting, clumsy brute of
a man who would go plunging round like a wild bull, sending her
vases crashing to the floor, upsetting her fragile little tables
and all the precious little bric-à-brac that crowded them,
sprawling out upon the voluptuously soft but elegantly arrayed
cushions of the sofa, reaching for matches on the mantel and
sweeping it clear of a half-dozen dainty eighteenth-century clocks
and plates and china shepherds with one swinging blow, barging into
dainty little stools of painted china and sending it a-teeter while
Miss Telfair watched and prayed and waited with a smile of frozen
apprehension, raising hell with the Wedgwood plates, the vases of
Dresden and of Delft, and making the buried kings of the old Ming
dynasty turn over in their graves with groans of anguish every time
some brute of a bull of a man came lumbering near the dearest and
most priceless treasures of their epoch.

Miss Telfair, herself the most dainty, fragile, and exquisitely
inviolable ornament of the collection, was waiting for them at the
centre of this fabulous clutter.  She gave each of the young men a
quick cool clasp of her small, frail, nail-bevarnished hand, a few
crisp words of greeting, and a quick light smile, as brittle,
frail, and painted as a bit of china--a smile curiously like that
of Mrs. Pierce in its glacial rigidity but, like everything else
about the woman, more fragile, delicate, and shell-like.

Then she turned and led the way through the house out into the sun-
porch.  The two young men picked their way carefully between the
frail and crowded complications of a thousand costly relics and
around great bowls and vases filled with flowers--great bouquets of
roses, lilies and carnations, which were everywhere--and which
filled the air with the clinging, dense, and overpowering sweetness
of their perfumes.

The sun-parlour was a great, light place, alive and golden with
bright sunlight--a magnificent room with comfortably padded wicker
chairs and tables and settees, but here, as elsewhere in the house,
the fabulous complication of small useless ornaments was
overwhelming, and one walked with care.  This room also was filled
with great bowls of roses, lilies and carnations, the air was dense
and heavy with their scent, and through the windows of the place
one could see the smooth velvet of the lawns, trimly patterned with
designs of flowers aflame with all their glorious polychrome of
colour, and at the end the flower-garden, which was alive with many
rich and costly blooms growing in geometric designs.  It was just
the kind of flower-garden, just the kind of flowers, that a woman
like Miss Telfair would have: their orderly, exotic and unnatural
profusion suggested the cultivation of a hot-house; even the wild
and lyric growth of sweet unordered nature had been made to conform
to the elegant and fragile pattern of Miss Telfair's life.

She led the way to a wicker table where there were easy chairs and
a comfortable settee and great flaming fragrant lights of flowers.
They seated themselves and tea was brought in by a maid-servant.
The service of the tea was fragile, costly, elegant, like
everything else about the woman; but it was also wonderful, rich,
and generous in its abundance, and this was probably like her, too.
There were delicate little pastries, cubes, and crusts of things
that were so flaky, rich and succulent that they melted away in the
mouth; and there were little cubes and squares of sandwiches as
well, all dainty, elegant, and small, but wonderfully good.  She
asked them if they wanted hot-tea or iced-tea or some whisky: the
day was hot and Joel took iced-tea, refusing whisky; the other
youth took iced-tea too--she poured it for them in marvellous tall
frail glasses filled with slivers of bright ice, and put in mint
and lemon, doing all things deftly, beautifully, with her small,
swift, china-lovely hands, and then turning to Joel's guest, with
her light cool smile, her crisp incisive inquiry, in which there
was somehow something good and generous, she said:

"And won't you have some whisky, too?" and as he hesitated, and
looked dubious yet consenting, added:  "In your iced-tea--if you
like it that way?"

He looked at her, perplexed, and said uncertainly:

"I--don't know. . . .  Does it go that way?"

Miss Telfair bent back her head--her cheeks had the delicate colour
of rose-tinted china, and she was pretty in the rose-tinted-china
way--and laughed a thin, metallic, and yet musical and friendly
laugh.

"Oh, yes!" she cried briskly and gaily, "it goes that way! . . .
It goes very well that way."  More seriously, she added:  "Yes,
it's really very good that way"--and crisply, yet encouragingly,
with her fire-bright china-smile--"why don't you try it?"

He looked at Joel dubiously, not certain what to do, and not
wishing to embarrass his friend, and Joel looked back, with his
radiant eager smile, shaking his head in droll refusal, whispering:

"Not for me.  But go on if you like.  Do as you like--"

"Well, then--" he said consentingly--and Miss Telfair, smiling
lightly, took a bottle of Scotch whisky off the tray, uncorked it,
and poured a drink into the tea--a good stiff shot it was, too--and
when he had finished the drink, she poured him out another, adding
another liberal potation of the Scotch.

Thus animated and released, he felt more at ease: they talked
together quickly and easily; he had a good time.  She was a bright,
quick, cool, inquiring kind of woman, at once detached yet
friendly, coolly amused yet curious: she asked him about his work
at the university, the kind of classes that he taught and the kind
of people that attended them, the kind of life he had in the city,
and about the play that he was writing.  The detached coolness of
her curiosity was much like that of Mrs. Pierce, and suggested the
curiosity of a woman of a separate and privileged world hearing
about the creatures who lived in the great nameless world of dust
and noise and strife and swelter "down below"--and yet it was also
a more friendly and eager curiosity than Mrs. Pierce had shown: it
had a certain warmth of human interest in it, too.

She was obviously very fond of Joel: her relation to him was that
of an old-maid friend of the family, who is so intimate and close
to all the family's history that she is practically a part of it
herself, and who feels for the children and all their lives and
actions as much affection and interest as she could feel for her
own blood.  Now she turned to Joel, and began to talk to him about
some decorative screens which he was painting for her: as one might
expect, she knew all about decorative screens and their respective
merits; she spoke of them with the exact authority, the assured
conviction of the expert, she spoke her mind about them crisply,
plainly, incisively, and Joel listened to her eagerly, his gaunt
face lifted, turned towards her in an attitude of rapt attention
and respect, while she was talking.

"The central one is excellent, Joel--really first-rate, the best
one you've ever done--and DECIDEDLY the best of the lot.  The one
on the right is also good--not as good as the first, it swings off-
balance in the foreground.  I'll show you what I mean tomorrow--but
it is good, and will do."

"What about the other one--the one on the left?" he whispered
eagerly.  "What did you think of that?"

"I think it's very, very bad," she said coolly and incisively.  "I
think you've fallen down on it, and that you're going to have to do
the whole thing over again."

For a moment his gaunt face winced, but not with pain and
disappointment, rather with swift, concerned interest, eager
attentiveness: he hitched his long thin figure forward unconsciously,
his large well-boned hands splayed out upon his knees, and he
whispered eagerly:

"But why, Madge? . . .  Tell me.  Where do you think I've fallen
down?"

"Well," said Miss Telfair, "in the first place, Joel, you've lost
out on your design--It falls all to pieces now, you've let the
whole thing get away from you: you were trying to follow it out
from the one in the middle and bring it to an end, but you didn't
know how to finish it--and so you put in that pavilion or summer-
house or whatever it is--because you didn't know what else to do."

"Don't you like that?" he whispered, smiling.

"I think it's perfectly god-awful," she answered quietly, "utterly
meaningless--simply terrible!  It has no relation to anything else
in the whole design--it stands out like a sore thumb--and the
colour is atrocious. . . .  No, Joel, the whole thing is out of
key, it upsets the whole design, it has no place there."

"And what about the background?" he whispered.  "What did you think
of that?"

"I think that's bad, too," she replied without a moment's
hesitation.  "You've used FAR, FAR too much gold--almost twice as
much as you did in the other two--the proportion is very bad."

"Hm," he muttered, stroking his chin thoughtfully.  "Yes," he
whispered, "I see what you mean. . . .  I hadn't thought about the
pavilion being out of key--perhaps you're right. . . .  But," he
whispered, smiling his radiantly gentle and good-natured smile, "I
DON'T agree with you about the background being bad, nor that I
have used too much gold on it.  But I will argue with you about
that."

"All right," she answered crisply and good-naturedly.  "I'll come
over tomorrow and we'll have it out. . . .  But," she shook her
head, and spoke with a crisp but obstinate conviction, "Joel, I
KNOW I'm right! . . .  That whole screen is out of proportion.  It
WON'T do. . . .  You'll have to do the whole thing over again."

They debated in this fashion of art-talk for some time, and
presently the young men rose to go.  As they departed, Miss Telfair
returned to her former tone of crisp and casual friendliness,
saying:

"What is Ida doing tonight?  Is she going to the Pastons' for the
fireworks?"

"Yes," Joel whispered.  "We're all going; can't you come along?"

"No, thank you," she said, smiling.  "Not this time.  They're very
lovely--and very awe-inspiring--and all that--but about once every
five years is my limit.  I would NOT get into that mob tonight, as
hot as it is, for a million dollars. . . .  Tell Ida I expect her
here for lunch tomorrow: Irene will be here. . . .  And now, good-
bye," she said, turning to the other young man, and giving him a
bright china smile, a swift cool pressure of her little china
hand. . . .  "Come up again to see us, won't you? . . .  And
bring your play along.  And try going to bed some night at ten
o'clock. . . .  Really!" she said with a crisp cool irony, "--you
miss very little by doing so."

As they walked away along the road towards Joel's house, Joel
whispered with his radiant and admiring astonishment:

"She's SIMP-LY incredible! . . .  Don't you THINK so? . . .  She
KNOWS everything," he went on, without defining more exactly that
large specification.  "It's simply STUPENDOUS the things she
knows! . . .  And she's SUCH a nice person," he said quietly.  "One
of the NICEST people that I ever knew--just what an old maid ought
to be--don't you think so?"

"Yes.  But why is she an old maid?  Why did she never get married?"

"Hm," said Joel thoughtfully, looking down the road with a
detached, abstracted stare.  "I can't say. . . .  She's AWFULLY
rich," he whispered.  "ENORMOUSLY rich--she has loads of money--
she's been able to do JUST as she pleased all her life--she's BEEN
everywhere--all over the world--and I suppose that's the reason
that she never married.  She never found anyone that she liked well
enough to give up the kind of life she had. . . .  But she's an
amazing person. . . .  Don't you think so?"

"Yes," the other said.

They walked on down the road, and presently they saw the great
white shape of Joel's house, framed in the trees before them, and
below them in the light and distance of a westering sun, the shine
and wink of the great river.  They entered the house.



LXV


The Paston estate, like the Pierce estate, was situated upon the
river, but several miles farther north.  To reach it, they drove
through the eastern entrance of the Pierce place and through the
little Dutch Colonial village of Leydensberg, of which Joel's
father was the mayor and which the Pierce family largely owned.

"It's a pity Pups never went into politics," Joel whispered, as
they drove through the old leafy village, with its pleasant houses
among which a few of the lonely white houses of the Colonial period
still remained.  "The people around here worship him: he could have
anything he wanted if he ran for office."

It was the first time he had spoken of his father: with a feeling
of sharp surprise, the other youth now remembered that he had not
seen Mr. Pierce since his arrival: he wondered where he was, but
did not ask.  He also now remembered that Joel's references to his
father had often been marked by a note of resignation and regret--
the tone a person uses when he speaks of someone who has possessed
talents and wasted opportunities, and whose life has come to
nothing.

Their road led northward from the village: they sped swiftly along
a paved highway bordered by trees and fields and woods, by houses
here and there, and presently by the solid masonry of a wall that
marked the boundaries of another great estate.  It was the Paston
place, and presently they turned in to an entrance flanked by
stone-markers, and began to drive along a road arched by tall leafy
trees.  Night had come, the moon was not yet well up, but from time
to time there was beside the road the gleam of steel, and at times
as they passed a cleared space he could plainly see the rail
pattern of a tiny railway, complete in all respects--with roadbed,
rock-ballast, grades, and cuts, embankments, even tunnels, but all
so small in scale that it suggested a gigantic toy more than
anything else.  He asked what it was and Joel answered:

"It's Hunter's railway."

"HUNTER'S railway?" he asked in a puzzled tone.  "But why does he
need a railway here?  What does he use it for?"

"Oh, he really doesn't need it for anything," Joel whispered.
"It's of no use to anyone.  He just likes to play with it."

"Play with it?  But--but what is it? . . .  Isn't it a real
railway?"

"Yes, of course," Joel answered, laughing at his astonishment.
"It's really quite marvellous--complete in every way--with tunnels,
stations, bridges, signals, round-houses, and everything else a
regular railway has.  Only everything is on a very small scale--
like a toy."

"But the engine--the locomotive? . . .  How does that run?  Do you
wind it up, as you do a toy, or run it by electricity, or how?"

"Oh, no," Joel answered.  "It's a regular locomotive--not over two
or three feet high, I should say--but runs by steam, just like a
real locomotive. . . .  It's really quite a fascinating thing," he
whispered.  "You ought to see it some time."

"But--but how does he run it?  Is he able to get into anything as
small as that?"

"He can, yes," said Joel, laughing again.  "But usually he just
runs along by the side.  It's pretty cramped quarters for a grown
man."

"A grown MAN! . . .  Do you mean that Mr. Paston built this little
railway for himself?"

"But, of COURSE!"  Joel turned, and looked at his friend with a
surprised stare.  "Whom did you think I was talking about?"

"Why, I--I thought when you said--'Hunter' you meant one of his
children--a boy--some child in his family who--"

"No, not at all," Joel whispered, laughing again at the astonished
and bewildered look upon his companion's face.  "It may be for a
child, but the child is Hunter Paston himself. . . .  You see," he
said more quietly and seriously after a brief pause, "he's crazy
about all kinds of machinery--locomotives, aeroplanes, motor-boats,
motor-cars, steam-yachts--he loves anything that has an engine in
it--he always has been that way since he was a boy--and it's such a
pity, too," he whispered, in the same regretful tone he had used
when speaking of his father--"It's a shame he was never able to do
anything with it. . . .  If he hadn't had all this money, he would
have made a SWELL mechanic--he really would."

But now there was a row of lights through the trees, the murmurous
hum of many voices, the glittering shapes of parked machinery.
They were approaching the Paston house: it was a rather gloomy-
looking mansion of old brown stone, square in shape and immensely
solid and imposing in its grimy magnificence, and of that style of
architecture which was borrowed from France, but which went through
curious and indefinable transformations on the way, so that any
native grace and lightness which the style may once have had was
lost: it was lumpish, ugly and involved, and somehow looked like
one of the children of the New York Post Office.

A broad veranda ran around the house on all four sides, and on the
side that faced the river, a large number of the friends and guests
of the Paston family were now assembled.  Seated on the great lawns
that swept away before the house on the riverside there was another
larger audience composed of the people of the near-by town, and
people employed on the Paston estate and the other great estates in
the vicinity.

But over both groups, not only the wealthier and smaller group upon
the porch, but the larger one spread out upon the lawn, there was
evident a spirit of gay, happy, eager and child-like elation and
expectancy that united everyone in a curiously moving and high-
hearted way.  From the dark sweep and mystery of the lawn there
rose the murmur of hundreds of excited and happy voices, all
talking at once, and little bursts of laughter, sudden stirs and
flurries of eager and mysterious interest.

The same spirit, the same feeling--a spirit and a feeling of plain
democracy, warm friendliness, simple, eager hope and expectancy--
animated the people on the porch.  They were, as a group, fine-
looking people: many of the young men were tall, handsome, strong
and comely-looking, the girls were lovely, and many of the women
were beautiful.  Most of them also had a look of dignity,
assurance, and character.  They represented, he knew, that small
group of the fabulously wealthy whose names were household words
throughout the nation--and yet, whether it was due to the innate
democracy of the occasion, the almost childish pleasure and
anticipation which the Fourth of July and its fireworks renewed in
them, and the grand and natural warmth and spaciousness of the
scene--their native earth, or whether the quality of their lives
was really warm and free and friendly, there was nothing at all
arrogant, haughty, cold or insolently "societyfied" about these
people.  Their gathering together here upon the front porch of this
gloomy old Victorian house had exactly the same quality that these
summer front-porch gatherings had always had for him everywhere in
little towns; with a feeling of incredulous recognition he found
that the scene was instantly familiar to him, and he almost
expected to hear old familiar voices--his father's voice among
them, as he had heard it on the porch at home so many times, and
now so long ago.

Everyone in the crowd knew the Pierce family and instantly welcomed
them in an eager, laughing, and excited babel of affectionate
greeting.  Rosalind and Joel and Mrs. Pierce went about among the
crowd shaking hands and greeting people all about them, and when
the greetings were over, simply and naturally found their place
among those persons to whom each was most akin by virtue of
friendship, age, or temperament--Mrs. Pierce among men and women of
her own generation and among the older people, and Joel, Rosalind,
George Thornton, and Carl Seaholm among the younger people of the
gathering.

Joel introduced him quickly, casually, with his infinite grace and
consideration, to several people--to several of his younger friends
and to certain of the older ones who were obviously among the best-
liked and most respected people there.  He was introduced to Mrs.
Paston, a tall and beautiful young woman, very slender, blond, and
lovely-looking: a kind of exquisite blond icicle, and with no more
human warmth or passion than an icicle of any sort would have.  She
gave him a few cool words of greeting, a swift cool clasp of her
swift cool hand, a swift, glacial, yet not unfriendly smile, and so
dismissed him, not unkindly, turning with the same cool, smiling
and glacial detachment to her other guests.

Suddenly the fireworks started.  Far away, at the end of the great
lawn, in the obscuring darkness of the night, and among the
obscuring shadows of the shrubs and trees above the hill that swept
down towards the river, there was a terrific detonation--the
deafening bang and flare of a gigantic rocket that whizzed up into
the air in a small hurtling point of light, and exploded,
illuminating heaven with a constellation of enchanted falling
stars.  There was a long-drawn "Oh-h!" of excitement, eagerness,
and expectant joy from the crowd gathered on the lawn, the same
from the people gathered on the porch, who quickly scrambled into
chairs; and instantly from all the people there was utter silence,
a thrilled and fascinated attentiveness, broken now and then by
gasps of wonder, joy, surprise and rapture, as one giant rocket
followed another in unending series, in constantly growing
magnificence, until the whole universe of night was blooming with
flowers of fire, alive with constellations of enchanted stars--
green, red, and yellow, blue and violet and gold--that burst softly
in the night with spreading glory, falling slowly to the earth like
some great parachuted blossom, and cracking, puffing, bursting
softly, to flower, spread, again develop in great blooms of star-
enchanted fire.

Everything had the same familiar quality of America that he had
always remembered and known as a child.  It brought back to him
again the quiet voices of people on their summer porches, the
street-car grinding to a halt on the corner of the hill above his
father's house, his father's voice in darkness on the porch, and
the red lifted flare of his cigar, and those Thursday nights in
summer when his father took him on the street-car to the little
park along the river three miles away, where there were outdoor
moving-pictures on an island; later, fireworks and across the river
the great flare, the receding thunder of a train.  Now, curiously,
that whole memory came back to him with all its vivid and
unutterable poignancy: he could remember the little artificial lake
there at the park--that lake just three feet deep that had seemed
so vast and thrilling to him, and the boat-house with lake-water
lapping at the piers, the clank of oarlocks and the dull bump and
dry knocking of the boats together as they collided in the
darkness, and the people, gathered there in darkness, with their
dim faces upturned to the great silver dance and flicker of the
moving-picture screen which was set on a little island on the lake--
an island that was dense with trees and foliage, and that had
seemed to him as mysterious and illimitable as the jungle.  And
opposite the island, on the shore, looking over the heads of the
people in the boats, the greater part of the audience sat on wooden
benches, all thirsty, silent, and insatiate, the petals of five
hundred dim white faces all lifted to the flickering magic of the
screen.

It all came back to him now as he sat there on the porch of this
splendid mansion with Mrs. Pierce and Joel and the other guests,
and though the place was splendid, wealthy and luxurious beyond
dreams, the happy, warm, and friendly gaiety of the people, their
eager looking-forward to fireworks and the Fourth of July,
something free and warm and simple in their relation, recalled
again those glorious expeditions of his youth to the little park
upon the river, and the crowded streetcars going home, and friendly
voices, laughter, and the slamming of a door, and then his father's
voice upon the porch and sleep and silence--it all came back now in
tones of unutterable brightness, and the Hudson River lay below him
in the great fall and hush of evening light that fell across
America, and even as he thought these things, a train rushed by
below them on the bank of the river, was hurled instantly past in a
projectile flight--a thunderbolted speed, was hurled past them
citywards, and was gone at once, leaving nothing behind it but the
sound of its departure, a handful of lost echoes in the hills, and
the river, the mysterious river, the Hudson River in the great fall
and hush of evening light, and all somehow was just as it had
always been, and just as he had known he would find it, as it would
always be.



LXVI


Later that night, when the other people in the house had gone
upstairs to bed, and as he was in the quiet library, making a
final, longing, hungrily regretful survey of the treasure-hoard of
noble books that walled the great room in their rich and mellow
hues from floor to ceiling, Joel came in.

"Look," he whispered, in his abrupt and casual way, "I'm going to
bed now: stay up as long as you please and sleep as late as you
like tomorrow morning. . . .  And look," he whispered casually--and
quickly again--"what are you going to do?  Do you think you have to
go back to the city tomorrow?"

"Yes, Joel: I think I'll have to--I have an early class the first
thing Monday morning, and if I'm going to meet it, I ought to be
back by tomorrow night: I think that will be best."

"It's been nice having you," Joel whispered.  "It was swell that
you could come.  And if you really like the place," he said simply,
"I'm glad. . . .  I think it's a grand place, too. . . .  And
look!" he whispered quickly, casually, looking away "--I meant what
I said yesterday--about that house, the gatekeeper's lodge, I mean--
If you like the place, and think you'd care to live there, or come
up whenever you feel like it, I wish you'd take it," he whispered.
"I really do--It's no use to anyone the way it stands, and we'd all
be delighted if you'd come and live in it. . . .  Just let me know
when you are coming, just say the word, and I'll have everything
ready for you--And we WISH you would," he whispered earnestly, with
his radiant smile, as if asking the other youth to do him a favour--
"it would be swell."

"It's--it's pretty fine of you, Joel, too--"

"All right, sir," Joel whispered quickly, hastily, with a smile,
avoiding skilfully the embarrassment of thanks:  "And look, Eugene--
of course I'll see you Tuesday when I get back to town--I'll be
right there at the hotel the rest of the summer--except for week-
ends when I come up here--but I wanted to ask you if you had made
up your mind yet about going to Europe?"

"Yes, I have, Joel.  At least, that's what I want to do--what I'd
like to do.  If I can manage it, I intend to set sail--" the two
words had a glorious magic sound to him, and his pulse beat hot and
hard with joy and hope as he spoke them--"to set sail in September
when my work at the university is over!"

"Gosh!  That's swell!" Joel whispered enthusiastically, his face
lighting with radiant eagerness as if the news had given him some
great and unexpected happiness--"And Frank Starwick will be glad go
hear it, too.  You know, he's going over at the end of August; I
had a letter from him just the other day."

"Yes, I know: he wrote me too."

"And he'll want to see you when he comes to town: we must all try
to get together before he goes. . . .  And look," he said quickly,
abruptly, casually again--"if you go, how long will you be gone?
How long do you intend to stay away?"

"I don't know, Joel.  I'd like to go for a whole year, but I don't
know if I can manage it.  They've offered me an appointment for
another year at the university.  They want me to come back for the
new term that begins in February, and maybe that's what I'll have
to do.  But I'd like to stay away a year!"

"I hope you can," Joel whispered.  "You ought to spend a whole year
over there!  It would be a swell thing if you could."

"Yes; I think so, too.  But I don't know how I'm going to manage
it: at the present time I don't quite see how I can. . . .  You
see, all I've got to live on at the present time is what I earn as
an instructor at the university--they pay me eighteen hundred
dollars a year--"

"Gosh!" Joel whispered, arching his eyebrows in polite astonishment--
"That's a lot, isn't it?"

"It's not much, Joel: it amounts to $150 a month; you can get along
on that, but you're not going to paint New York red on it, the way
things are today, especially if you've got a healthy appetite and
love to eat, the way I do."

"Yes," Joel whispered, laughing his beautiful, radiant, and almost
soundless laugh.  "I can see that--that belly of yours is going to
cost you a lot of money before you get through with it.  A man who
loves food the way you do ought to be a millionaire.  But you see,
don't you," he said, with a flash of his rare and gentle malice--
"that's what you get for not being a vegetarian like Bernard Shaw
and me. . . .  Eugene," he cried softly, laughing, after a moment's
brief reflection, "--you'll love France--the food is wonderful--but
Lord!" and he laughed again his radiant soundless laugh "--how
you're going to hate England!"

"Why?  Is the food bad?"

"It's unspeakable!" Joel whispered--"that is for anyone who loves
food the way you do: they go through the tortures of the damned . . .
of course, for me it doesn't matter.  I can eat anything--anything,
that is, so long as it's vegetables--it all tastes alike to me--
but YOU'LL hate it . . . of course," he whispered earnestly,
"you really won't: you'll love the country and you'll like the
English.  They're swell."

"Have you been there much, Joel?"

"Only once," he whispered.  "When Mums and Rosalind were there.  We
had a house out in the country and we stayed there for fifteen
months.  And it was grand!  You'll love it. . . .  Gosh!  I hope
you can stay over there a whole year!" he went on eagerly.  "Don't
you think you can?"

"I don't think so: you see, as I was telling you, I have only $150
a month; when I finish up in September I'll have about five pay-
cheques coming to me: that's only $750.  So I figure I can get over
there on that and live for several months, but unless I can get
money from my mother--I think perhaps she'll help me--I don't see
how I can get along for a whole year."

"Then look," said Joel, speaking swiftly, and casually, and looking
away as if he were making the most matter-of-fact proposal in the
world--"Why don't you let me help you? . . .  I mean," he went on
hastily, and showing his embarrassment only by two spots of colour
in his gaunt face--"I'd love to do it if you'd let me--it'd be no
trouble at all--and you could pay it back whenever you like--just
as soon as your play goes on: you'll have plenty of money then, so
I wish you'd take it now when you need it. . . .  You see," he
whispered quickly, with a smile, "I have loads of money--more than
I can ever POSSIBLY use--I have no need for it--I was twenty-one
this spring, you know,--and now I'm AWFULLY rich," he whispered
humorously, and then concluded in a quickly apologetic whisper--
"not REALLY, of course--not compared to most people--but rich, for
ME," he whispered, smiling.  "--I've got MUCH more than I need--so
I really wish you'd let me help you if you need it--Frank said he'd
let me know if he needed anything and I wish you'd do the same. . . .
I think you ought to go for a whole year since you're going--
it's your first trip, and GOSH!" he whispered enthusiastically,
"how I envy you!  How I wish _I_ were going for the first time!
It's going to be a swell thing for you, you're going to have a
grand time--and you've simply GOT to stay for a whole year--so I
wish you'd let me help you if I can."

He had made this astoundingly generous proposal with a quick,
hurried matter-of-factness that seemed to be eagerly begging for a
favour, instead of magnificently and nobly giving it.  And for a
moment the other could not answer, and when he did he did not know
the reason for his reply, for his refusal.  It was as generous, as
selfless, and spontaneous an act of liberal and noble friendship as
he had ever known or experienced, and for a moment, as he thought
of his longed-for trip, his dire need of money, it all seemed so
magically easy, good, and wonderfully right to him that there
seemed nothing to do except instantly, gratefully and jubilantly to
accept.  Yet, when he opened his mouth to speak, he found himself,
to his surprise, refusing this miraculous and generous good
fortune.  And he never knew exactly the reason why: there was,
perhaps, the growing sense of something alien and irreconcilable in
the design and purpose of their separate lives, a growing feeling
of regret, a conviction enhanced by his conversation with Joel in
the studio that morning that their lives would be lived out in
separate worlds, wrought to separate purposes, and shaped by
separate beliefs, and with that knowledge a feeling--a feeling of
loneliness and finality and farewell--as if a great door had swung
for ever closed between them, as if there was something secret,
buried, and essential in the soul of each which now could never be
revealed.  And, to his surprise, he heard himself saying:

"Thanks, Joel--it's mighty fine of you--about as fine as anything I
ever heard--but I don't need help now.  If I need it later--"

"If you do," said Joel very quickly, "I wish you'd let me know--I'd
like it if you would. . . .  And gosh! it's great to know that you
are going," he whispered again with radiant enthusiasm.  "I envy
you!"

"Then I wish to God you'd come along! . . .  Joel," the other burst
out excitedly, with a sudden surge of eager warm conviction.  "Why
can't you?  We'd have a great time of it--go everywhere--see
everything!  It would be a wonderful thing--a great experience--for
you and me both.  You've never seen Europe that way before, have
you?--the way that you and I could see it?--you've always been with
your family, your mother, haven't you?--Come on!" he cried, seizing
his friend by the arm, as if they were ready to go that instant.
"Let's go!  We'll have the grandest trip you ever heard about!"

But Joel, laughing his radiant soundless laugh, and shaking his
head with gentle but inflexible denial, said:

"No, Eugene! . . .  Not for me! . . .  I can't do it!  I'm going to
stay right here and keep on with the work I'm doing . . .
Besides," he added gravely, "Mums needs me.  No one knows what's
going to happen here in the family," he said quietly--"I mean--that
thing tonight--you saw--about Mums and Pups"--he said with painful
difficulty.  The other nodded, and Joel concluded simply:  "I've
got to stay."  For a moment he was silent, and suddenly the other
youth noticed something starved and lonely, and almost desperately
forsaken and resigned, that he had never observed in the boy's
gaunt face and eyes before, and when Joel spoke again, although
there was a faint smile on his face, there was something old and
sad and weary in his voice that the other youth had never heard
before.  He said quietly:

"Perhaps you're right. . . .  Perhaps you and I do belong in
different worlds . . . must go different ways. . . .  If that is
true," Joel turned and looked directly at his friend and in his
eyes there was an infinite quiet depth of regret and acceptance 
"--if that is true, I'm sorry. . . .  At any rate, it was good to
have known you. . . .  And now, good-bye, Eugene--Good night, I
mean," he hastily concluded, in his former whispered, quick and
casual tones, "I'll see you in the morning."

With these words he turned quickly and left him.

He stayed there long into the night in that rich room, while the
great house sank to sleep and silence all around him.  And at first
he moved there quietly like a man living in an enchanted dream,
almost afraid to draw a breath lest he dispel the glory and the
magic of enchantment, and all the time the voices of the living
books around him seemed to speak to him, to say to him:  "Now it is
night and silence and the sleep-time of the earth, the all-exultant
time of youth and loneliness, and of your spirit's proud accession.
Now take us, plunder us, and take us, for you are alone and living
in the world tonight while all the sleepers sleep, immortal
knowledge will be yours tonight, the secrets of an everlasting and
triumphal wisdom; the huge compacted treasure of the earth speaks
to you from these storeyed shelves, and it is yours, you are the
richest man in all the earth if you will take us, only take us, we
have waited for you long, dear friend, tonight the world is yours,
and will be yours for ever, if you will only take us, take us, take
us."

And like a man drunk with joy, half through the night he plundered
the living treasure of those shelves.  They were all there--the
great chroniclers and recorders, the marvellous and enchanted lies
of old Herodotus, and Sir Thomas Malory, and the voyages of Hakluyt
and of Purchas, the histories of Mandeville and Hume.  There was
Burton's marvellous Anatomy, his staggering erudition never
smelling of the dust or of the lamp, his lusty, pungent ever-
rushing-onward style, and the annihilating irony of Gibbon's
latinized sonority, and the savage, burning, somehow magic
plainness of Swift's style.  There was the dark tremendous music of
Sir Thomas Browne, and Hooker's sounding and tremendous passion
made great by genius and made true by faith, and there was the
giant dance, the vast storm-rounding cadence, now demented and now
strong as light, of great Carlyle; and beside the haunting cadences
of this tremendous piece, there was the pungent worldliness of
life-loving men; the keen diaries of John Evelyn, the lusty tang
and calculation and sensual rumination of old Pepys, the writing
bright as noon, natural as morning, and the plain and middle-magic
of the eighteenth century, the flawless grace and faultless
clearness of Addison and Steele, and then all the pageantry of
living character, the pages crowded with the immortal flesh of
Sterne, Defoe, and Smollett, the huge comic universe of Fielding,
the little one of Austen, and the immortal and extravagant one of
Charles Dickens, the magnificent proliferation of Sir Walter
Scott's tremendous gallery--and Thackeray's sentimental gallantry
and magic, and all the single magics of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of
Meredith, and Melville, of Landor, Peacock, Lamb, and of De
Quincey, of Hazlitt, and of Poe.

There were, as well, the works of all the poets, the Kelmscott
Chaucers, the Dove editions, the doe-skin bindings, white and soft
and velvet to the touch, the splendid bodies in all their royal
pageantry of blue and gold and dense rich green--the Greek
anthologies, and all the poets of antiquity, and the singing voices
of the great Elizabethans--of Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, and of
Spenser, Webster, Ford and Massinger, of Kyd and Greene and
Marlowe, of Beaumont, Lyly, Nash and Dekker, of Jonson, Shakespeare,
Herrick, Herbert, Donne.

They were all there, from thundering Æschylus to the sweet small
voice of perfect-singing Herrick, from grand plain Homer to
poignant Catullus, from acid and tart-humoured Horace, from the
lusty, vulgar and sweet-singing voice of Geoffrey Chaucer, the
great bronze ring and clangorous sonority of John Dryden, to the
massy gold, the choked-in richness, the haunting fall and faery, of
John Keats.

They were all there--each stored there in his little niche upon the
living shelves, and at first he looted them, he plundered through
their golden leaves as a man who first discovers a buried and
inestimable treasure, and at first is dumb with joy at his
discovery, and can only plunge his hands in it with drunken joy,
scoop handfuls up and pour it over him and let the massy gold leak
out again in golden ruin through his spread hands; or as a man who
discovers some enchanted spring of ageless youth, of ever-long
immortality, and drinks of it, and can never drink enough, and
drinks and feels with every drink the huge summation of earth's
glory in his own enrichment, the ageless fires of its magic youth.

Then, as the night wore on, another feeling crept across his heart,
the living voices of the books spoke to him with another tone.
From those great tongues of life and power and soaring immortality
there had now departed all the sonorous conviction of their
overwhelming, all-triumphant chant.  The grand and ringing tongue
and joy now spoke the language of a quiet and illimitable despair,
confided the legend of an inevitable defeat, an inexorable
fatality.

From those high-storeyed shelves of dense rich bindings the great
voices of eternity, the tongues of mighty poets dead and gone, now
seemed to speak to him out of the living and animate silence of the
room.  But in that living silence, in the vast and quiet spirit of
sleep which filled the great house, out of the grand and
overwhelming stillness of that proud power of wealth and the
impregnable security of its position, even the voices of those
mighty poets dead and gone now seemed somehow lonely, small, lost,
and pitiful.  Each in his little niche of shelf securely stored--
all of the genius, richness, and whole compacted treasure of a
poet's life within a foot of space, within the limits of six small
dense richly-garnished volumes--all of the great poets of the earth
were there, unread, unopened, and forgotten, and were somehow,
terribly, the mute small symbols of a rich man's power, of the
power of wealth to own everything, to take everything, to triumph
over everything--even over the power and genius of the mightiest
poet--to keep him there upon his little foot of shelf, unopened and
forgotten, but possessed.

Thus, for the first time in his life, even the voices of the mighty
poets seemed lost and small and pitifully defeated.  Their great
voices, which had given to the heart of youth the added fire of
their triumphant magic, had borne his spirit high upon the wings of
the soaring and invincible belief that no might on earth was equal
to the might of poetry, no immortality could equal the immortality
of a poet's life and fame, no glory touch his glory, or no strength
his strength--now seemed to speak to him the mute and small and
lonely judgment of defeat.

"Child, child," they said to him, "look at us and reflect: what
shall it profit you to feed upon the roots of all-engulfing night,
desiring glory?  Do not the rats of death and age and dark oblivion
feed so for ever at the roots of sleep, and can you tell us where a
man lies buried now, whose substance they have not devoured?  Oh,
child, for ever in the dark old house of life to go alone, to prowl
the barren avenues of night, and listen while doors swing and creak
in the old house of life, and ponder on the lids of night, and
ruminate the vast heart of sleep and silence and the dark, and so
consume yourself--desiring what?  Poor child, you son of an
unlettered race, you nameless atom of the nameless wilderness, how
have you let us dupe you with our fictive glories?  What power is
there on earth, in sea or heaven, what power have you in yourself,
you son of your unuttered fathers, to find a tongue for your
unuttered brothers, and to make a frame, a shape, a magic and
eternal form out of the jungle of the great unuttered wilderness
from which you came, of which you are a nameless and unuttered
atom?  What can you hope to do, poor nameless child, and would-be
chronicler of the huge unhistoried morass of the dark wilderness of
America, when we, who were the children of a hundred gold-recorded
centuries and the heirs of all the rich accumulations of tradition,
have really done so little--and have come to this?  What profit do
you hope to gain--what reward could you achieve that would repay
you for all the anguish, hunger, and the desperate effort of your
life?  At its rare infrequent best, out of your blind and famished
gropings in the jungle-depths, you may pluck out a shining word--
achieve a moment's flash of grace and intuition--a half-heard
whisper of the vast unuttered language that you seek--perhaps a
moment's taste of fame, a brief hour's flash of the imagined glory
that you thirst for.  For just a moment, you, like other men, will
play the lion, will feed upon the older lion's blood, will triumph
for a moment through his defeat, will taste joy for a moment
through the blood of his despair--and then, like him, you too will
be thrown to the mercy of the coming lion, the wilderness will rise
again to engulf you, your little hour of glory for which your soul
thirsts and your life is panting will be over before it has well
begun, and the myriad horde of all your thousand mongrel races will
rise with snarl and jeer and curse and lie and mocking to do your
life to death, with all the hatred of their mongrel rancour and
their own self-loathing, to kill the lion they have crowned for
just a day, to hurl you back into a nameless and dishonourable
oblivion, drowned down beneath the huge mock and jibe of the old
scornmaker's pride.  Therefore, short-lived, your life will soon be
ended; your youth, but just begun, will shortly be consumed, and
all the labour of your anguish and your hunger will be mocked to
scorn by the same mongrel fools who praised it, and forgotten by
the very knaves who gave it fame.  Such is the infrequent good, the
flash of brief fame, to which you may aspire, the huge oblivion of
failure, misery and dishonour which will follow.  But if, by
miraculous good chance, you should escape from this--be not
devoured and slain and drowned out and forgotten in the brutal
swarming shades of jungle time--what greater glory is there that
you can achieve?  Some such as ours, perhaps--then look at us, and
see the state to which we've come.  To lie forgotten on the rich
shelves of a rich man's library--to be a portion of his idle
wealth--the evidence of his arrogant possession--to rise, as all
the earth must rise--these dreaming hills and haunted woods, the
mighty river and this great moon-haunted hill where stands this
house--shout the tributes of a rich man's glory--to bow before him--
to lie bought, owned, forgotten and possessed--the greatest poets
that ever walked the earth or built, like you, great dreams of
glory--to be obsequious tributes to a rich man's fame.  Yes, you,
even you--poor naked child--may come to this--to reach this state,
to be entombed here, bought and idle among the forgotten huge
encumbrance of a rich man's arrogant possession--and to know at
last that all the glory, genius, and magic of a poet's life may lie
condensed in six rich bindings, forgotten, purchased and unread--
and finally defeated by the only thing in life that lusts and will
triumph for ever--the all-causing tyranny of wealth that makes a
slave of its great poets--that makes us the barren prostitutes of
fame, the pimps of wealth--unused and empty on a rich man's shelf."

So did that great treasure of unread, purchased, and forgotten
books speak to him in the silent watches of the night, as they
stood there, lonely, small and bought, on a rich man's shelf.



Towards morning, as he sat there with a great book propped upon his
knees, his mind filled with the thought of those dead, forgotten,
and still-living voices and of his rich young friend and the
strange and bitter enigma of the fatal severance which had seemed
that day to close a great door between their lives for ever, he
turned the pages of the book idly, and suddenly the blurred
characters on the page before him swam legibly to view.  And what
those words upon the page before him said was this:


"The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my
youth up: what lack I yet?

"Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that
thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven: and come and follow me.

"But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful:
for he had great possessions."



LXVII


As he and Joel drove to the station it seemed to Eugene that he was
returning to a world from which he had been absent for years.  And
the return was not a pleasant one.  As they entered the little
town, and began to drive swiftly down a street that led to the
station, the little frame houses with their new architectures--
their faded little strips of "front-yard" grass, cement walks, and
cement-yard walls, looked cheap, flimsy, new and dreary--the image
of a life that was itself as rootless, insecure, and drearily
pretentious as the little painted frames it lived in.

It was Sunday, and as they drove up to the station he saw before a
Greek confectionery and newspaper store a group of the town sports.
They were dressed up in their cheap Sunday finery, and their faces
wore a smirk.  As Joel got out of the car, the sports tried to look
nonchalant and easy in their relations with one another, but a kind
of uneasy constraint had fallen upon them and held them until he
had gone.  And yet he had not noticed them or done anything that
might have caused them this discomfort.

In the gravelled parking space before the station several cars were
drawn up.  Their shining bodies glittered in the hot sunlight like
great beetles of machinery, and in the look of these great beetles,
powerful and luxurious as most of them were, there was a stamped-
out quality, a kind of metallic and inhuman repetition that filled
his spirit, he could not say why, with a vague sense of weariness
and desolation.  The feeling returned to him--the feeling that had
come to him so often in recent years with a troubling and haunting
insistence--that "something" had come into life, "something new"
which he could not define, but something that was disturbing and
sinister, and which was somehow represented by the powerful, weary,
and inhuman precision of these great, glittering, stamped-out
beetles of machinery.  And consonant to this feeling was another
concerning people themselves: it seemed to him that they, too, had
changed, that "something new" had come into their faces, and
although he could not define it, he felt with a powerful and
unmistakable intuition that it was there--that "something" had come
into life that had changed the lives and faces of the people, too.
And the reason this discovery was so disturbing--almost terrifying,
in fact--was first of all because it was at once evident and yet
indefinable; and then because he knew it had happened within the
years of his own life, few and brief as they were--had happened,
indeed, within "the last few years," had happened all around him
while he lived and breathed and worked among these very people to
whom it had happened, and that he had not observed it at the
"instant" when it came.  For, with an intensely literal, an almost
fanatically concrete quality of imagination, it seemed to him that
there must have been an "instant"--a moment of crisis, a literal
fragment of recorded time in which the transition of this change
came.  And it was just for this reason that he now felt a nameless
and disturbing sense of desolation--almost of terror; it seemed to
him that this change in people's lives and faces had occurred right
under his nose, while he was looking on, and that he had not seen
it when it came, and that now it was here, the accumulation of his
knowledge had burst suddenly in this moment of perception--he saw
plainly that people had worn this look for several years, and that
he did not know the manner of its coming.

They were, in short, the faces of people who had been hurled ten
thousand times through the roaring darkness of a subway tunnel, who
had breathed foul air, and been assailed by smashing roar and
grinding vibrance, until their ears were deafened, their tongues
rasped and their voices made metallic, their skins and nerve-ends
thickened, calloused, mercifully deprived of aching life, moulded
to a stunned consonance with the crashing uproar of the world in
which they lived.  These were the dead, the dull, lack-lustre eyes
of men who had been hurled too far, too often, in the smashing
projectiles of great trains, who, in their shining beetles of
machinery, had hurtled down the harsh and brutal ribbons of their
concrete roads at such a savage speed that now the earth was lost
for ever, and they never saw the earth again: whose weary,
desperate ever-seeking eyes had sought so often, seeking MAN, amid
the blind horror and proliferation, the everlasting shock and flock
and flooding of the million-footed crowd, that all the life and
lustre and fire of youth had gone from them; and seeking so for
ever in the man-swarm for man's face, now saw the blind blank wall
of faces, and so would never see man's living, loving, radiant, and
merciful face again.

Such were the faces that he now saw waiting on the station platform
of this little Hudson River town--two dozen faces from the mongrel
and anonymous compost of like faces that made up America--and with
a sudden blinding flash of horror and of recognition, it now came
to him that they were just the faces he had seen everywhere, at a
thousand times and places in "the last few years."

He had seen them in their last and greatest colony--the huge
encampment of the innumerable submerged, the last and largest
colony of the great mongrel and anonymous compost that makes up
America: he had seen them there, hurtling for ever, from the
roaring arch of the great bridge, with their unceasing flight,
projectile roar, unnumbered flood, in their great and desolate
beetles of glittering machinery--boring for ever through the huge
and labyrinthine horror of that trackless jungle of uncounted ways,
beneath the grime and rust and swarm and violence and horror of
Fulton Street, past all the vast convergences, the threat and
menace of the empty naked corners, the swarming and concentric
chaos of Borough Hall, and with beetling and unceasing flight
through Clinton Street, on Henry Street, through the Bedford
section, out through the flat and limitless swelter known as "the
Flatbush section," beneath the broad and humid light of solid
skies, through ten thousand rusty, grimy, nameless streets that
make up that huge and trackless swelter--and most horrible of all,
a flood of nameless faces, rootless and unnumbered lives, hurtling
blindly past for ever in hot beetles of machinery along those
broad, wide, and splendidly desolate "avenues," that were flanked
upon each side by the cheap raw brick, the gaudy splendour, of
unnumbered new apartment houses, the brick and stucco atrocities of
unnumbered new cheap houses, and that cut straight and brutal as a
spoke across the labyrinthine chaos of the Brooklyn jungle--and
that led to God knows where--to Coney Island, to the beaches, to
the outer districts of that trackless web, the unknown continent of
Long Island--but that, no matter where or how they led, were always
crowded with the blind horror of those unnumbered, hurtling faces,
the blind horror of those great glittering beetles of machinery
drilling past for ever in projectile flight, unceasing movement and
unending change, the blind horror of these unknown nameless lives
hurtling on for ever, lost for ever, going God knows where!

Yes, this was the thing--blindly, desperately, unutterably though
he felt it--this was the thing that had put this look--the "new
look"--the horrible, indefinable, and abominably desolate and
anonymous look into the face of people.  This was the thing that
had taken all the play and flash of passion, joy, and instant,
lovely and mercurial life out of their living faces, and that gave
their faces the look of something blunted, deadened, stunned, and
calloused.

This was the thing that had given people "the new look"--that had
made man what he had become--that had made all these people waiting
on the platform for the train what they were--and now that he had
to face this thing again, now that he had to be thrust back in it,
now that, after these three days of magic and enchantment, he must
leave this glorious world that he had just discovered--and be
thrust brutally back again into the blind and brutal stupefaction,
the nameless agony and swelter of that life from which he came--it
seemed to him he could not face it, he could not go back to it
again, it was too hard, too full of pain and sweat and agony and
terror, too ugly, cruel, futile, and horrible, to be endured.

No more!  No more!  And not to be endured!  To discover for three
days--three magic swift-winged days--that enchanted life that had
held all his visions as a child in fee--to be for just three brief
and magic days a lord of life, the valued friend, the respected and
well-loved companion of great men and glorious women, to discover
and to possess for three haunting and intolerable lovely days the
magic domain of his boyhood's "America"--the most fortunate, good
and happy life that men had ever known--the most true and
beautiful, the most RIGHT--and now to have it torn from him at the
very instant of possession--and to come to this:--a nameless cipher
hurtled citywards in the huge projectile of a train, with all his
fellow-ciphers, towards this blind and brutal stupefaction.  A
voice sounded far off, thundering in his ears through the battle-
roar and rock of that stunned universe, as he cried:

"Joel!  Joel!  It was good to be here with you--Joel--"

And suddenly he saw his friend's tall form recoil, shrink back, the
look of something instant, startled, closed and final in his face
and eye, and heard the swift incisive whisper saying quickly--

"Yes! . . .  It was good that you could come! . . .  And now, good-
bye! . . .  I shall see you--"

And so heard no more, and knew that that good-bye was final and
irrevocable and could not be altered, no matter now how much or how
often they should "see" each other in the future.

And at the same moment, as that door swung shut between them, and
he saw that it never could be opened any more, he felt, with the
knowledge of that irrevocable loss, a moment's swift and rending
pity for his friend.  For he saw somehow that he was lost--that
there was nothing for him now but shadows on the wall--Circean
make-believe--that world of moonlight, magic and painted smoke that
"the river people" knew.  For three days he himself had breathed
the poppied fumes of all its glorious unreality, and in those three
short days the world from which he came--his father's earth of
blood and sweat and stinking day and bitter agony--this world of
violence and toil and strife and cruelty and terror, this swarming
world of nameless lives and mongrel faces, with all its ugliness--
had become phantasmal as an evil dream, until now he could scarcely
endure the hot and savage swelter, the savage fury, of the
unceasing city.  To grope and sweat and thrust and curse his way
again among the unceasing flood-tides of the grimy swarming
pavements; to be buffeted, stunned, bewildered, deadened, and
exhausted by the blind turmoil, the quenchless thirst and
searching, the insatiate hunger and the black despair of all that
bleak and fruitless struggle, that futile and unceasing strife--and
to come to this!  To come to this!

It was too hard, too painful, too much to be endured, he could not
go!--and even as his life shrank back in all the shuddering
revulsion and loathing of his desolate discovery--he heard the
great train thunder on the rails--and he knew that he MUST go!



For a moment, as the train pulled out, he stood looking out of the
window, waved good-bye to Joel standing on the platform, and for a
moment watched his tall retreating form.  Then the train gained
speed, was running swiftly now along the river's edge, swept round
a bend, the station and the town were left behind him, and
presently, just for a few brief moments as it swept along below the
magic and familiar hill, he caught a vision of the great white
house set proudly far away up on the hill and screened with noble
trees.  Then this was gone: he looked about him, up and down the
grimy coach, which was dense with smoke and pungent with the smell
of cheap cigars and strong tobacco.

They were all there, and instantly he knew that he had seen each
one of them a million times, and had known all of them for ever;
the Greek from Cleveland with his cheap tan suit, his loud tan
shoes, his striped tan socks, his cheap cardboard suitcase with its
tan shirts and collars and its extra pair of pants, and with his
hairy, seamed and pitted nighttime face, his swarthy eyes, his
lowering finger-breadth of forehead bent with painful, patient,
furrowed rumination into the sensational mysteries of tabloid
print.  They were all there--two deaf-mutes talking on their
fingers; a young Harlem negro and his saffron wench, togged to the
nines in tan and lavender; two young Brooklyn Jews and their two
girl friends grouped on turned seats; a little chorus girl from the
burlesque with dyed hair of straw-blade falseness, a false, meagre,
empty, painted little prostitute's face, and a costume of ratty
finery false as all the rest of her; a young Italian with grease-
black hair sleeked back in faultless patent-leather pompadour, who
talked to her, eyes leering and half-lidded, with thick pale lips
fixed in a slow thick smile of sensual assurance, the jaws slow-
working on a wad of gum; a man with the strong, common, gaunt-jawed
and anonymous visage of the working man, wearing neat, cheap,
nameless clothing, and with a brown-paper parcel on the rack above
him; and a young dark Irishman, his tough face fierce with drink
and truculence, his eyes glittering with red points of fire, his
tongue snarling curses, threats, and invitations to the fight that
rasped and cut with naked menace through the smoke-blue air.

The young Jews slouched with laughter, filled the car with noisy
clamour, sparred glibly, swiftly, with quick, eager, and praise-
asking repartee, with knowing smirk and cynic jest, with acrid
cynic wit that did not hit the mark.  The little blondined
prostitute listened to the hypnotic, slit-eyed, thick-lipped
seductions of the young Italian with a small coy-bawdy smirk upon
her painted face: she did not know what he meant, she had no idea
what he was talking about, and with coy-bawdy smirk she rose, edged
past his slow withdrawn knees and minced down the corridor towards
the little cupboard at the end that housed the women's toilet,
while with lidded sly eyes and thick, slow-chewing and slow-smiling
lips his calculating glance pursued her.  The lady entered, closed
the door upon a stale reek, and was gone some time.  When she
emerged she arranged her clothing daintily, smoothed out her
rumpled dress across her hips and came mincing down the corridor
again with faint coy-bawdy smirk, and was greeted again by her
gallant suitor, who welcomed her in the same manner, with lidded
eyes, thick, pallid and slow-chewing lips and slow withdrawn knees.
The two deaf-mutes surveyed the scene with loathing: one was large
and heavy, with the powerful shoulders of the cripple, a brutal
face, a wide and cruel mouth; the other small and dark and ferret-
faced--but both surveyed the scene with loathing.  They looked at
each and all the passengers and they dismissed each in turn upon
their fingers.  As they did so their faces writhed in vicious
snarls, in sneering smiles, in convulsions of disgust and hatred;
they looked upon the objects of their hate and jerked cruel thumbs
towards earth in gestures eloquent of annihilation and destructive
sudden death, and they drew swift fingers meaningly across their
gullets with the deadly move of men who slit a throat--and all was
as he had known it would be.

The working man with the strong and common face, the cheap, neat
clothes, sat quietly, and looked quietly out of the window, with
seamed face and quiet worn eyes, and the young Irishman sweltered
in strong drink and murder; the taste of blood was thick in him,
his little eyes glittered with red points of fire, and ever as the
train rushed on he sowed that smoke-blue air with rasping curse and
snarling threat, with all the idiotic stupefaction of a foul and
idiotic profanity, an obscene but limited complaint:--

"Yuh ----- Kikes! . . .  Yuh ----- Jews! . . .  I'll kick duh -----
s--t outa duh ----- lot of yuh, yuh ----- bastards, you. . . .
Hey-y!  You! . . .  Yuh ----- dummies up deh talkin' on yer -----
fingers all duh time. . . .  Hey-y!  You!  Inches!  You -----
bastard, I don't give a s--t for duh whole ----- lot of yuh."

It was all as it had always been, as he had known it would be, as
he never could have foreseen it: the young dark Irishman sowed the
air with threats and foulness, he finished up his bottle, and the
foulness and the old red light of murder grew.  And the mongrel
compost laughed and snickered as they always did, and at length
grew silent when he lurched with drunken measure towards them, and
the old guard with the sour, seamed face then stopped the Irishman,
and he cursed him.

And the slant light steepened in the skies, the old red light of
waning day made magic fire upon the river, and the train made on
for ever its tremendous monotone that was like silence and for
ever--and now there was nothing but that tremendous monotone of
time and silence and the river, the haunted river, the enchanted
river that drank for ever its great soundless tides from out the
inland slowly, and that moved through all man's lives the magic
thread of its huge haunting spell, and that linked his life to
magic kingdoms and to lotus-land and to all the vision of the magic
earth that he had dreamed of as a child, and that bore him on for
ever out of magic to all the grime and sweat and violence of the
city, the unceasing city, the million-footed city, and into
America.

The great river burned there in his vision in that light of fading
day and it was hung there in that spell of silence and for ever,
and it was flowing on for ever, and it was stranger than a legend,
and as dark as time.




BOOK V



JASON'S VOYAGE



LXVIII


Smoke-gold by day, the numb exultant secrecies of fog, a fog-numb
air filled with the solemn joy of nameless and impending prophecy,
an ancient yellow light, the old smoke-ochre of the morning, never
coming to an open brightness--such was October in England that
year.  Sometimes by night in stormy skies there was the wild, the
driven moon, sometimes the naked time-far loneliness, the most-oh!-
most familiar blazing of the stars that shine on men for ever,
their nameless, passionate dilemma of strong joy and empty
desolation, hope and terror, home and hunger, the huge twin tyranny
of their bitter governance--wandering for ever and the earth again.

They are still-burning, homely particles of night, that light the
huge tent of the dark with their remembered fire, recalling the
familiar hill, the native earth from which we came, from which we
could have laid our finger on them, and making the great earth and
home seem near, most near, to wanderers; and filling them with
naked desolations of doorless, houseless, timeless, and unmeasured
vacancy.

And everywhere that year there was something secret, lonely, and
immense that waited, that impended, that was still.  Something that
promised numbly, hugely, in the fog-numb air, and that never broke
to any open sharpness, and that was almost keen and frosty October
in remembered hills--oh, there was something there incredibly near
and most familiar, only a word, a stride, a room, a door away--only
a door away and never opened, only a door away and never found.

At night, in the lounging rooms of the old inn, crackling fires
were blazing cheerfully, and people sat together drinking small
cups of the black bitter liquid mud that they called coffee.

The people were mostly family groups who had come to visit their
son or brother in the university.  They were the most extraordinary,
ugly, and distinguished-looking people Eugene had ever seen.  There
was the father, often the best-looking of the lot: a man with a
ruddy weathered face, a cropped white moustache, iron-grey hair--an
open, driving, bull-dog look of the country carried with tremendous
style.  The mother was very ugly with a long horse-face and grimly
weathered cheek-flanks that seemed to have the tough consistency of
well-tanned leather.  Her grim bare smile shone in her weathered
face and was nailed for ever round the gauntness of her grinning
teeth.  She had a neighing voice, a shapeless figure, distinguished
by the bony and angular width of the hip structure, clothed with
fantastic dowdiness--fantastic because the men were dressed so well,
and because everything they wore, no matter how old and used it
might be, seemed beautiful and right.

The daughter had the mother's look: a tall gawky girl with a bony,
weathered face and a toothy mouth; she wore an ill-fitting evening
or party dress of a light unpleasant blue, with a big meaningless
rosette of ruffles at the waist.  She had big feet, bony legs and
arms, and she was wearing pumps of dreary grey and grey silk
stockings.

The son was a little fellow with ruddy apple-cheeks, crisp, fair,
curly hair, and baggy grey trousers; and there was another youth,
one of his college friends, of the same cut and quality, who paid a
dutiful but cold attention to the daughter, which she repaid in
kind, and with which everyone was completely satisfied.

They had to be seen to be believed, but even then, one could only
say, like the man who saw the giraffe:  "I don't believe it."  The
young men sat stiffly on the edges of their chairs, holding their
little cups of coffee in their hands, bent forward in an attitude
of cold but respectful attentiveness, and the conversation that
went on among them was incredible.  For their manner was
impregnable; they were cold, remote, and formal almost to the point
of military curtness, and yet Eugene felt among them constantly an
utter familiarity of affection, a strange secret warmth, past words
or spoken vows, that burned in them like glacial fire.

When you got ten or fifteen feet away from them their language
could not have been more indecipherable if they had spoken in
Chinese; but it was fascinating just to listen to the sounds.  For
there would be long mounting horse-like neighs, and then there
would be reedy flute-like notes, and incisive cold finalities and
clipped ejaculations and sometimes a lovely and most musical
speech.  But the horse-like neighs and clipped ejaculations would
predominate; and suddenly Eugene understood how strange these
people seemed to other races, and why Frenchmen, Germans, and
Italians would sometimes stare at them with gape-mouthed
stupefaction when they heard them talking.

Once when he passed by them they had the family vicar or some
clergyman of their acquaintance with them.  He was a mountain of a
man, and he too, was hardly credible: the huge creature was at
least six and a half feet tall, and he must have weighed three
hundred pounds.  He had a flaming moon of face and jowl, at once
most animal and delicate, and he peered out keenly with luminous
smoke-grey eyes beneath a bushy hedge-growth of grey brows.  He was
dressed in the clerical garb and his bulging grossly sensual calves
were encased in buttoned gaiters.  As Eugene went by, he was
leaning forward with his little cup of muddy coffee held delicately
in the huge mutton of his hand, peering keenly out beneath his
beetling bush of brow.  And what he said was this:

"Did you ever read--that is, in recent yöhs--the concluding
chaptahs in 'The Vicah of Wakefield'?"  Carefully he set the little
cup down in its saucer.  "I was reading it just the other day.
It's an extraordinary thing!" he said.

It is impossible to reproduce the sound of these simple words, or
the effect they wrought upon Eugene's senses.

For, first, the words "Did you ever" were delivered in a delicate
rising-and-falling neigh, the word "read" really came out with a
long reedy sound, the words "that is, in recent yöhs," in a
parenthesis of sweetly gentle benevolence, the phrase "the
concluding chaptahs in 'The Vicah of Wakefield'" in full,
deliberate, satisfied tones of titular respect, the phrase "I was
reading it just the other day," thoughtfully, reedily, with a
subdued, gentle, and mellow reminiscence, and the final decisive
phrase, "It's an extraordinary thing," with passionate conviction
and sincerity that passed at the end into such an unction of
worshipful admiration that the words "extraordinary thing" were not
spoken but breathed out passionately, and had the sound
"'STRAWD'N'RY thing!"

"Ow!" the young man answered distantly, and in a rather surprised
tone, with an air of coldly startled interest, "Now!  I can't say
that I have--not since my nursery days, at any rate!"  He laughed
metallically.

"You should read it again," the mountainous creature breathed
unctuously.  "A 'STRAWD'N'RY thing!  A 'STRAWD'N'RY thing."
Delicately he lifted the little cup of muddy black in his huge hand
again and put it to his lips.

"But FRIGHTFULLY sentimental, down't you think?" the girl neighed
sharply at this point.  "I mean all the lovely-woman-stoops-to-
folly sawt of thing, you know.  After all, it is a bit thick to
expect people to swallow THAT nowadays," she neighed, "particularly
after all that's happened in the last twenty yöhs.  I suppose it
mattuhed in the eighteenth centureh, but after all," she neighed
with an impatient scorn, "who cares today?  Who cares," she went on
recklessly, "WHAT lovely woman stoops to?  I cawn't see that it
makes the SLIGHTEST difference.  It's not as if it mattuhed any
longah!  No one cares!"

"Ow!" the young man said with his air of coldly startled interest.
"Yes, I think I follow you, but I don't entirely agree.  How can we
be certain what IS sentimental and what's not?"

"But it seems to me that he misses the whole point!" the girl
exclaimed with one full, mouth-like rush.  "After all," she went on
scornfully, "no one is interested in woman's folly any longah--the
ruined-maiden broken-vows sawt of thing.  If that was what she got
she should have jolly well known what she wanted to begin with!
I'LL not waste any pity on her," she said grimly.  "The greatest
folly is not knowin' what you want to do!  The whole point today is
to live as cleveleh as possible!  That's the only thing that
mattahs!  If you know what you want and go about it cleveleh, the
rest of it will take care of itself."

"Um," the mother now remarked, her gaunt bare smile set grimly,
formidably, on her weathered face.  "That takes a bit of doin',
DOESN'T it?"  And as she spoke these quiet words her grim smile
never faltered for an instant and there was a hard, an obdurate, an
almost savage irony in her intonation, which left them all
completely unperturbed.

"Oh, a 'STRAWD'N'RY thing!  A 'STRAWD'N'RY thing!" the huge
clerical creature whispered dreamily at this point, as if he had
not heard them.  And delicately he set his little cup back on the
saucer.

Eugene's first impulse when he saw and heard them was to shout with
an astounded laughter--and yet, somehow, one never laughed.  They
had a formidable and impregnable quality that silenced laughter:
a quality that was so assured in its own sense of inevitable
rightness that it saw no other way except its own, and was so
invincibly sure in its own way that it was indifferent to all
others.  It could be taken among strange lands and alien faces, and
to the farthest and most savage colonies on earth, and would never
change or alter by a jot.

Yes, they had found a way, a door, a room to enter, and there were
walls about them now, and the way was theirs.  The mark of dark
time and the architecture of unnumbered centuries of years were on
them, and had made them what they were; and what they were, they
were, and would not change.

Eugene did not know if their way was a good way, but he knew it was
not his.  Their door was one he could not enter.  And suddenly the
naked empty desolation filled his life again, and he was walking on
beneath the timeless sky, and had no wall at which to hurl his
strength, no door to enter by, and no purpose for the furious
unemployment of his soul.  And now the worm was eating at his heart
again.  He felt the slow interminable waste and wear of grey time
all about him and his life was passing in the darkness, and all the
time a voice kept saying:  "Why?  Why am I here now?  And where
shall I go?"



When Eugene got out into the High Street after dinner, the dark air
would be thronging with the music of great bells, and there would
be a smell of fog and smoke and old October in the air, the
premonitory thrill and menace of some intolerable and nameless joy.
Often at night, the visage of the sky would by some magic be
released from the thick greyness that had covered it by day, and
would shine forth barely, blazing with flashing and magnificent
stars.

And, as the old bells thronged through the smoky air, the students
would be passing along the street, singly or in groups of two or
three, briskly, and with the eager haste that told of meetings to
come, appointments to be kept, the expectation of some good
fortune, happiness, or pleasure toward which they hurried on.

The soft glow of lights would shine from the ancient windows of the
colleges, and one could hear the faint sounds of voices, laughter,
sometimes music.

Then Eugene would go to different pubs and drink until the closing
time.  Sometimes the proctors would come into a pub where he was
drinking, speak amicably to everyone, and in a moment more go out
again.

Somehow he always hoped that they would take him for a student.  He
could see them stepping up to him, as he stood there at the bar,
saying courteously, yet gravely and sternly:

"Your name and college, sir?"

Then he could see the look of astonished disbelief on their grim
red faces when he told them he was not a student, and at last, when
he had convinced them, he could hear their crestfallen muttered-out
apologies, and would graciously excuse them.

But the proctors never spoke to him, and the bar-man, seeing him
look at them as they went out one night, misunderstood the look and
laughed with cheerful reassurance:

"You've nothing at all to worry about, sir.  They won't bother you.
It's only the gentlemen at the university they're after."

"How do they know I'm not there?"

"That I couldn't tell you, sir," he answered cheerfully, "but they
'ave a way of knowin'!  Ah, yes!" he said with satisfaction,
slapping a wet cloth down upon the bar.  "They 'ave a way of
knowin', right enough!  They're a clever lot, those chaps.  A very
clever lot, sir, and they always 'ave a way of knowin' when you're
not."  And smiling cheerfully, he made a vigorous parting swipe
across the wood, and put the cloth away below the counter.

Eugene's glass was almost empty and he looked at it, and wondered
if he ought to have another.  He thought they made them very small,
and kept thinking of the governors of North and South Carolina.  It
was a fine, warm, open sort of pub, and there was a big fire-place
just behind him, crackling smartly with a fire of blazing coals: he
could feel the warmth upon his back.  Outside, in the fog-numb air,
people came by with lonely rapid footsteps and were lost in fog-
numb air again.

At this moment the bar-maid, who had bronze-red hair and the shrewd
witty visage of a parrot, turned and called out in a cheerful,
crisply peremptory tone:  "Time, please, gentlemen.  Closing time."

Eugene put the glass down empty on the bar again.  He wondered what
the way of knowing was.



It was October, about the middle of the month, at the opening of
the Michaelmas term.  Everywhere there was the exultant thrill and
bustle of returning, of a new life, a new adventure beginning in an
ancient and beautiful place that was itself enriched by the
countless lives and adventures of hundreds of years which had come
and gone.  In the morning there was the smoky old-gold yellow of
the sun, the numb excitement of the foggy air, a smell of good
tobacco, beer, grilled kidneys, ham and sausages, and grilled
tomatoes, a faint nostalgic smell of tea, and incredibly, somehow,
in that foggy old-gold light, a smell of coffee--an intolerable,
maddening, false, delusive smell, for when one went to find the
coffee it would not be there: the coffee was black liquid mud,
bitter, lifeless, and undrinkable.

Everything was very expensive and yet it made you feel rich
yourself just to look at it.  The little shops, the wine shops with
their bay windows of small leaded glass, and the crusty opulence of
the bottles of old port and sherry and the burgundies, the mellow
homely warmth and quietness of the interior, the tailor shops, the
tobacco shops with their selected grades of fine tobacco stored in
ancient crocks, the little bell that tinkled thinly as you went in
from the street, the decorous, courteous, yet suavely good-natured
proprietor behind the counter, who had the ruddy cheeks, the
flowing brown moustache and the wing-collar of the shopkeeper of
solid substance, and who would hold the crock below your nose to
let you smell the moist fragrance of a rare tobacco before you
bought, and would offer you one of his best cigarettes before you
left--all of this gave somehow to the simplest acts of life and
business a ritualistic warmth and sanctity, and made you feel
wealthy and secure.

And everywhere around Eugene in the morning there was the feeling
of an imminent recovery, a recapture of a life that had always been
his own.  The buildings seemed to come from some essence of reality
he had always known, but had never seen, and could scarcely believe
in now, even when he put his hand upon the weathered surface of the
stone.

And this look kept shining at him through the faces of the people.
Sometimes it was in the faces of the college boys, but more often
he saw it in the people of the town.  It was in the faces of
tradesmen--people in butcher shops, wine shops, clothing stores--
and sometimes it was in the faces of women, at once common, fine,
familiar, curiously delicate and serene, going to the markets, in
the foggy old-bronze light of morning, and of men who passed by
wearing derby hats and with wing collars.  It was in the faces of a
man and his son, good-humoured little red-faced bullocks, packed
with life, who ran a pub in the Cowley Road near the house where,
later, he went to live.

It was a look round, full, ruddy, and serene in its good nature and
had more openness and mellow humour in it than Eugene had found in
the faces of the people in New England.  It was more like the look
of country people and small-town people in the South.  Sometimes it
had the open tranquil ruddiness, the bovine and self-satisfied good
humour of his uncle, Crockett Pentland, and sometimes it was like
Mr. Bailey, the policeman, whom the negro killed one winter's
night, when snow was on the ground and all the bells began to ring.
And then it was full and hearty like the face of Mr. Ernest Pegram,
who was the City Plumber and lived next door to Eugene's father, or
it was plump, common, kindly, invincibly provincial, ignorant and
domestic, like the face of Mrs. Higginson, who lived across the
street, and had herself been born in England, who had a family of
eight children and three baking days a week, and was a playing,
singing, and fanatic Baptist; yet on her common kindly face was the
same animal, gentle, smoke-like delicacy of expression round the
mouth that some of these men and women had.

It was a life that seemed so near to Eugene that he could lay his
hand on it and make it his at any moment.  He seemed to have
returned to a room he had always known, and to have paused for a
moment, without any doubt or perturbation of the soul, outside the
door.

But he never found the door, or turned the knob, or stepped into
the room.  When he got there he couldn't find it.  It was as near
as his hand if he could only reach it, only as high as his heart
and yet he could not reach it, only a hand's breadth off if he
would span it, a word away if he would speak it.  Only a stride, a
move, a step away was all the peace, the certitude, the joy--and
home for ever--for which his life was panting, and he was drowning
in the darkness.

He never found it.  The old smoke-gold of morning would be full of
hope and joy and imminent discovery but afternoon would come and
the soft grey humid skies pressed down on him with their huge numb
waste and weight and weariness of intolerable time, and the empty
naked desolation filled his body.

He would walk that legendary street past all those visible and
enchanted substances of time and see the students passing through
the college gates, the unbelievable velvet green of college quads,
and see the huge dark room of peace and joy that time had made, and
he had no way of getting into it.

Each day he walked about the town and breathed the accursed languid
softness of grey foreign air, that had no bite or sparkle in it,
and went by all their fabulous age-encrusted walls of Gothic time,
and wondered what in the name of God he had to do with all their
walls or towers, or how he could feed his hunger on the portraits
of the Spanish king, and why he was there, why he had come!

Sometimes it was just a word, the intonation of a phrase--the way
they would say "VERY" or "AMERican," which chilled and withered all
the ardours of the heart, or the way they would say "Thank YOU!"
when you paid for something, crisply, courteously, yet with a
quick, cautious, and obdurate finality, as if someone had swiftly
and firmly closed a door lest you should try to enter it.  Eugene
could listen to them talk and hear all the words, the moods and
tones of life and humour that he had known all his life, until it
seemed that he could foresee the very stories they were going to
tell, the very situations they were going to describe--and then in
an instant all the familiar pattern of their speech would vanish,
and their words could not have been stranger to him had they spoken
in a foreign tongue.

Thus, as Eugene looked at the young undergraduates playing in the
fields below the house, their shouts and cries, the boyish
roughness of their play, their strong scurfed knees, and panting
breath, evoked the image of a life so familiar to him that he felt
all he had to do to enter it again was to walk across the velvet
width of lawn that separated him from it.  But if he passed these
same people two hours later in the High Street, their lives, their
words were stranger than in a dream, or they seemed to have an
incredible fictitious quality that made everything they did or said
seem false, mannered, and affected, so that when he listened to
them he had a feeling of resentment and contempt for them as if
they spoke and moved with the palpable falseness of actors.

Eugene would see two young fellows before a college gate, and one,
fragile of structure, with a small lean head, a sheaf of straight
blond hair and thin sensitive features which were yet sharply and
strongly marked, would be talking to another youth, his hands
thrust jauntily into the pockets of his baggy grey trousers as he
talked and the worn elegance of his baggy coat falling across his
hands in folds of jaunty well-worn smartness.

"I say!" the youth would be saying in his crisp, rapid, sharply
blurred inflections that seemed to come out of lips that barely
moved.  "Where WERE you last night?  We missed you at the party in
old Lambert's rooms, you know.  Everyone wondered why you didn't
turn up."

"Oh," the other said (but the way he said this word sounded almost
like "Ow" to Eugene).  "Did they?  I'm frightfully sorry to have
missed it, but I simply couldn't get thöh.  Had dinner with a chap
I know at Magdalen.  His sister's down for a day or so, and later
on I simply couldn't break away.--How was the party?"

"Ow!" the other cried, casting his head back with a strong quick
movement and an exultant little laugh.  "Ripping!  Simply ripping!
What a shame you had to miss it!  Old Fenton got quite squiffy
about ten o'clock," he went on affectionately and with his exultant
little laugh, "and really it was priceless!  He insisted on doing
an imitation of Queen Victoria sitting down to read The Times--Ow!"
he cried exultantly again, casting his head up with a sharp strong
movement, "the whole thing was convulsing!--To see old Fenton
SETTLE down!" he cried, "to see him LOOK round SUSPICIOUSLY," he
whispered, still maintaining the perfect dramatic sharpness of his
inflection as he looked round with a descriptive gesture, "to see
him wait UNEASILY to see what's going to happen--finally to see the
look of BLISSFUL satisfaction and contentment gradually STEALING
over his face," he whispered rapturously, "as he settles back to
read The Times in peace--OW!" he cried again, as he cast back his
small head with an exultant laugh, "--the whole thing was really
TOO superb!--it really was, you know!  Lambert was quite convulsed!
We had to lift him up and stretch him out upon the bed before he
got his breath again."

In conversations such as these, in the choice and accent of the
words, the sharp crisp and yet blurred inflections of the speech,
even in the jaunty nonchalance of hands in pockets, the hang and
fold of the coat, in the exultant little laugh and the sharp strong
upward movement of the small lean head, there was something alien,
suave, and old.  To Eugene it seemed to be the style of a life that
was far older, more suavely knowing and mature, than any he had
ever known, so that at such a time as this, these young boys who on
the playing fields had almost the appearance of tousled overgrown
urchins, now seemed far more assured and sophisticated than he
could ever be.

At the same time, the sound and inflection of their words--their
assured exercise of a style of language that knew exactly where to
use and how to inflect such words as "very," "quite," "superb,"
"priceless," "terribly," "marvellous," and so on--this style and
use seemed to Eugene almost false, fictional, affected, and
theatrical.

He felt this way chiefly because he had read about such people all
his life in books and for the most part had heard them speak in
this manner only in smart plays upon the stage.  He was always
connecting these young Englishmen with actors in the theatre, and
for a moment his mind would resentfully accuse them of being
nothing but cheap and affected actors themselves and, bitterly, of
"trying to talk with an English accent"--a phrase which obviously
had no meaning, since they were only speaking their own language in
the way they had been taught to speak it.

But then, at tea-time, Eugene would see these youths again in
Buol's, flirting, with the clumsy naïveté of a grubby schoolboy,
with a leering rawboned hag of a waitress, and obviously getting
the thrill of their lives from the spurious grins which this
dilapidated strumpet flashed at them through her artificial teeth.
Or, as he went up the road towards his house at night, he would
pass them standing in the dark shadows of the stormy trees, with
their arms clumsily clasped around the buttocks of a servant girl,
and their lives seemed unbelievably young, naked, and innocent
again.



Around Eugene was the whole structure of an enchanted life--a life
hauntingly familiar and just the way he had always known it would
be--and now that he was there, he had no way of getting into it.
The inn itself was ancient, legendary, beautiful, elfin, like all
the inns he had ever read about, and yet all of the cheer, the
warmth, the joy and comfort he had dreamed of finding in an inn was
lacking.

Upstairs the halls went crazily up and down at different levels,
one mounted steps, went down again, got lost and turned around in
the bewildering design of the ancient added-on-to structure--and
this was the way he had always known it would be.  But the rooms
were small, cold, dark, and dreary, the lights were dim and dismal,
you stayed out of your room as much as possible and when you went
to bed at night you crawled in trembling between clammy sheets, and
huddled there until the bed was warm.  When you got up in the
morning there was a small jug of warm water at your door with which
to shave, but the jug was too small, you poured it out into the
bowl and shaved yourself and added cold water from the pitcher,
then, in order to get enough to wash your face and hands.  Then you
got out of the room and went downstairs as quickly as you could.

Downstairs it would be fine.  There would be a brisk fire crackling
in the hearth, the old smoke-gold of morning and the smell of fog,
the crisp cheerful voices of the people and their ruddy competent
morning look, and the cheerful smells of breakfast, which was
always liberal and good, the best meal that they had: kidneys and
ham and eggs and sausages and toast and marmalade and tea.

But at night there would come the huge boiled-flannel splendour of
the dinner, the magnificent and prayerful service of the waiter,
who served you with such reverent grace from heavy silver platters
that you felt the food must be as good as everything looked.  But
it never was.

Eugene ate at a large table, in the centre of the dining-room,
provided by a thoughtful management for such isolated waifs and
strays as himself.  The food looked very good, and was, according
to the genius of the nation, tasteless.  How they ever did it he
could never tell: everything was of the highest quality and you
chewed upon it mournfully, wearily, swallowing it with the dreary
patience of a man who has been condemned for ever to an exclusive
diet of boiled unseasoned spinach.  There was a kind of evil
sorcery, a desolate and fathomless mystery in the way they could
take the choicest meats and vegetables and extract all the
succulence and native flavour from them, and then serve them up to
you magnificently with every atom of their former life reduced to
the general character of stewed hay or well-boiled flannel.

There would be a thick heavy soup of dark mahogany, a piece of
boiled fish covered with a nameless, tasteless sauce of glutinous
white, roast beef that had been done to death in dish-water, and
solid, perfect, lovely brussels sprouts for whose taste there was
no name whatever.  It might have been the taste of boiled wet
ashes, or the taste of stewed green leaves, with all the bitterness
left out, pressed almost dry of moisture, or simply the taste of
boiled clouds and rain and fog.  For dessert, there would be a
pudding of some quivery yellow substance, beautifully moulded,
which was surrounded by a thin sweetish fluid of a sticky pink.
And at the end there would be a cup of black, bitter, liquid mud.

Eugene felt as if these dreary ghosts of food would also come to
life at any moment, if he could only do some single simple thing--
make the gesture of an incantation, or say a prayer, or speak a
magic word, a word he almost had, but couldn't quite remember.

The food plagued his soul with misery, bitter disappointment, and
bewilderment.  For Eugene liked to eat, and they had written about
food better than anyone on earth.  Since his childhood there had
burned in his mind a memory of the food they wrote about.  It was a
memory drawn from a thousand books (of which Quentin Durward,
curiously, was one), but most of all it came from that tremendous
scene in Tom Brown at Rugby, which described the boy's ride with
his father through the frosty darkness, in an English stage-coach,
the pause for breakfast at an inn, and the appearance of the host,
jolly, red-faced, hospitable, who had rushed out to welcome them.

Eugene could remember with a gluttonous delight the breakfast which
that hungry boy had devoured.  It was a memory so touched with the
magic relish of frost and darkness, smoking horses, the thrill, the
ecstasy of the journey and a great adventure, the cheer, the
warmth, the bustle of the inn, and the delicious abundance of the
food they gave the boy, that the whole thing was evoked with
blazing vividness, and now it would almost drive Eugene mad with
hunger when he thought of it.

Now it seemed to him that these people had written so magnificently
about good food not because they always had it, but because they
had it rarely and therefore made great dreams and fantasies about
it, and it seemed to him that this same quality--the quality of
LACK rather than of POSSESSION, of desire rather than fulfilment--
had got into everything they did, and made them dream great dreams,
and do heroic acts, and had enriched their lives immeasurably.

They had been the greatest poets in the world because the love and
substance of great poetry were so rare among them.  Their poems
were so full of the essential quality of sunlight because their
lives had known sunlight briefly, and so shot through with the
massy substance of essential gold (a matchless triumph of light and
colour and material in which they have beaten the whole world by
every standard of comparison) because their lives had known so much
fog and rain, so little gold.  And they had spoken best of April
because April was so brief with them.

Thus from the grim grey of their skies they had alchemied gold, and
from their hunger, glorious food, and from the raw bleakness of
their lives and weathers they had drawn magic.  And what was good
among them had been won sternly, sparely, bitterly, from all that
was ugly, dull, and painful in their lives, and, when it came, was
more rare and beautiful than anything on earth.

But that also was theirs: it was another door Eugene could not
enter.



LXIX


Later, Eugene could remember everything except the way he found the
house and came to live there.  But a man named Morison, who was
staying at the "Mitre" when Eugene got there, found the house and
gave him the address.  He was a man of twenty-eight or thirty
years, but he constantly seemed younger, much younger, no older
than the average college youth, an illusion that was never
permanent, however, and never for a moment convincing, because one
felt constantly that everything about the man was spurious.

He had been, he said, a lieutenant in the flying corps, and had
just the month before resigned his commission.  And he said he had
resigned his commission because he had received an appointment from
the government in the African colonial service, and had been sent
up to the university to take a special six months' course in
Colonial Administration, after which he would be "sent out" to
assume his new duties in the Colonies.  Finally, he was, he said,
by birth, an Edinburgh Scotsman, although his family were by blood
more English than Scotch, and he had lived most of his life in
England.  His references to his family were casual, easy, and
indefinite, but carried with them, somehow, the connotations of
aristocratic distinction.

He referred to his father often, but always in this casual and easy
manner, as "the governor," and to his mother as "the mater,"
flinging in parenthetically with his easy nonchalance such a
statement as "of course, my whole crowd came from Devonshire"--a
statement which was unadorned and meaningless enough but that
somehow--God knows how--carried with it a wonderful evocation of an
ancestral seat, an ancient and distinguished name, the quiet but
impregnable position of one of the "old county families."

And yet, God knows how he did it: the man said nothing about his
people that might not be said of any modest little family, and
probably everything he said was true.  He made no open pretences to
great name or wealth or ancient lineage, but in these swift,
casual, half-blurted-out references to "the governor," "the mater,"
and so on, he projected perfectly a legend of prestige and family
that was most engaging in its sense of style and dash and
recklessness.

The design of this legend was perfectly familiar to everyone:
Eugene had read it a thousand times in the pages of books, but he
had never known anyone who could evoke it so perfectly, so
tellingly, and with such a non-committal economy of means, as
Morison.  In this casual, charming, almost nakedly simple picture
of his life which he could suggest in a blurted-out phrase without
giving a shred of real information about himself, or making a
single admission of fact, the characters were few in number, their
lineaments broadly and forcibly outlined, and their setting a
familiar one.

In this setting Morison himself played the part of the dashing
young aristocrat, wild, reckless, and impetuous, always ready for
fun, fight, or frolic, a bottle of Scotch, or a pretty woman, a
roaring drunk, or a hot seduction--a mad hare-brained sort of
fellow who plunged impetuously forward into everything, but who was
somehow always saved from the odium that attaches itself to a baser
sort of drunkard, brawler, or seducer, because he had in him those
mysterious qualities of blood and character that made of him "a
gentleman," and therefore gave his acts a faultless style, a whole
immunity.

And the figure that he stroked in of his father was also a pleasant
one.  For "the governor," although he existed chiefly for the
purpose of admonishment and reproof, as a curb upon the wild
spirits of his son, was neither a sour Puritan nor a grim-visaged
household tyrant, but really a very good and understanding sort of
fellow, and, within reasonable limits, as tolerant as anyone could
ask.  The old boy, in fact, had been "a bit of a buck himself" in
his younger days, and had seen his share of the flesh and the
devil, and was quite willing to make allowances for the wilder
escapades of youth, so long as a reasonable decorum and moderation
were observed.

But there, alas! was the rub--as Morison himself would ruefully
admit.  He was himself such a mad, scapegrace sort of fellow that
his acts sometimes passed all the bounds of decorum and propriety,
and for that reason "the governor" was always "having him in upon
the carpet."

There, in fact, was the whole setting.  The governor existed for
the sole purpose of "having him in upon the carpet"--one never saw
them in any other way, but when Morison spoke about it one saw them
in THIS way with blazing vividness.  And this picture--the picture
of Morison going in "upon the carpet"--was a very splendid one.

First, one saw Morison pacing nervously up and down in a noble and
ancient hall, puffing distractedly on a cigarette and pausing from
time to time in an apprehensive manner before the grim, closed
barrier of an enormous seventeenth-century door which was tall and
wide enough for a knight in armour to ride through without
difficulty, and before whose gloomy and overwhelming front Morison
looked very small and full of guilt.  Then, one saw him take a last
puff at his cigarette, brace his shoulders in a determined manner,
knock on the panels of the mighty door, and in answer to a low
growl within, open the door and advance desperately into the
shadowed depths of a room so immense and magnificent that Morison
looked like a single little sinner walking forlornly down the nave
of a cathedral.

At the end of this terrific room, across an enormous space of
carpet, sat "the governor."  He was sitting behind a magnificent
flat desk of ancient carved mahogany, in the vast shadowed depths
behind him storeyed rows of old bound volumes climbed dizzily up
into the upper darkness and were lost.  And men in armour were
standing grimly all around, and the portraits of the ancestors
shone faintly in the gloom, and the old worn mellow colours of the
tempered light came softly through the coloured glass of narrow
Gothic windows which were set far away in recessed depths of the
impregnable mortared walls.

Meanwhile "the governor" was waiting in grim silence as Morison
advanced across the carpet.  The governor was a man with beetling
bushy eyebrows, silver hair, the lean, bitten and incisive face,
the cropped moustache of a man who has seen service in old wars and
commanded garrisons in India, and after clearing his throat with a
low menacing growl, he would peer fiercely out at Morison beneath
his bushy brows, and say:  "Well, young man?"--to which Morison
would be able to make no answer, but would just stand there in a
state of guilty dejection.

And the talk that then passed between the outraged father and the
prodigal son was, from Morison's own account, astonishing.  It was
a talk that was no talk, a talk that was almost incoherent but that
each understood perfectly, another language, not merely an economy
of words so spare that one word was made to do the work of a
hundred, but a series of grunts, blurts, oaths and ejaculations, in
which almost nothing was said that was recognizable as ordered
thought, but in which the meaning of everything was perfectly
conveyed.

The last outrageous episode that had brought Morison in to his
present position of guilt "upon the carpet" was rarely named by
name or given a description.  Rather, as if affronted decency
and aristocratic delicacy could not endure discussion of an
unmentionable offence, his fault was indicated briefly as "that
sort of thing" (or simply "sort of thing," spoken fast and
slurringly)--and all the other passions and emotions of anger,
contrition, stern condemnation and reproof, and, at length, of
exhausted relief and escape, were conveyed in a series of broken
and jerky exclamations, such as:  "After ALL!"  "It's not as if it
were the first time you had played the bloody fool!"  "What I mean
to say is!"  "Damn it all, it's not that I mind the wine-woman-song
sort of thing--young myself once--no plaster saint--never pretended
that I was--man's own business if he keeps it to himself--never
interfered--only when you do a thing like this and make a bloody
show of yourself--you idiot!--sort of thing men can understand but
women!--it's your mother I'm thinking of!" and so on.

Morison's own speech, in fact, was largely composed of phrases such
as these: he blurted them out so rapidly, scarcely moving his lips
and slurring his words over in such a broken and explosive way that
when one first met him it was hard to understand what he was
saying:--his speech seemed to be largely a series of blurted-out
phrases, such as "sort of thing," "after ALL!" "what I mean to say
is!" and so on.  And yet this incoherent and exclamatory style was
curiously effective, for it seemed to take the listener into its
confidence in rather an engaging manner which said:  "Of course,
there's no need to go into detail about all this, because I can see
you are a man of the world and the same kind of fellow as I am.  I
know we understand each other perfectly, and the truth of what I am
saying must be so self-evident that there's no point in discussing
it."

In stature, he was a little below the middle height, and rather
fleshy.  In fact, although his jaunty and impetuous manners gave
him an air of boyishness, he was already getting fat around the
waist, and his neck was fat and there was a fold of flesh beneath
his chin.  His face was very ruddy, smooth, a little alcoholic, and
he had a small blond moustache with waxed ends.  Finally, his hair
was thick, sleek, of a dark taffy-coloured blond which shaded off
into roots of fine silken blondish white at the edges of his
temples.

He could almost have passed for the average Oxford youth if it had
not been for the roll of fat beneath his chin and the blurred,
veinous, and yellowed look of his eyes, and he could almost have
passed for the dashing gentleman whose lineaments he could so
deftly and cleverly sketch in a few boldly casual strokes had it
not been that there was something spurious in his character that
gave him away in everything he did or said.

And yet Eugene never knew just what this spurious quality was.  He
felt at once that the man was fraudulent and unfortunate, and that
all he told about himself was fraudulent, and yet everything he
told was not only natural and credible enough but even plausible.
All he said was that he had been a lieutenant in the flying corps,
and had recently resigned, and had been given an appointment in the
Colonies and been sent to Oxford for a course in Colonial
Administration, and that later he would be sent to Africa.

Later on, Eugene understood that all of this was probably true, but
at the time it sounded like a lie.  Or, if it was not a lie, he
thought that there was something discreditable and shameful behind
it.  He thought that if Morison had been in the army flying
service, as he said, he had resigned not from choice but because he
had to--because he had been caught cheating at cards, or had not
paid his debts, or had been mixed up in some unwholesome mess with
a woman.  And he thought that if Morison were now going out to
Africa it was not so much from choice as by compulsion--because he
had to go.  In the years that followed Eugene saw that these
suspicions were probably unfounded and unjust, but that was the way
Morison made him feel.

There was about him, somehow, the look of the ruined adventurer--
shabby and run-down--the face of the actor shining through its mask
of deft gentility, the face of the charlatan looking through its
visage of sincerity, and the old veined yellow eyes of ruin,
hopelessness, and loss looking through all his attitudes of youth,
infectious spontaneity, and grace.  And for this reason, somehow,
the man seemed pitiably gallant, and Eugene liked him.



He and Morison would go to different pubs and drink until the
closing time.  Morison was using him vilely, and Eugene knew it and
did not care.  Not only was he paying for three drinks of every
four they drank, but he knew that Morison also sought his
companionship because he thought it gave him some immunity from the
college proctors when they made their visits to a pub.  And this,
in fact, he admitted very frankly and with a disarming gleefulness.

"You see," he said, "if I came in here by myself I'd get progged,
but as long as I'm with you I'm probably all right."

"Why?"

"Oh," he said, with an exultant little chuckle, "because they don't
know what to make of it!  They've got their eye on ME, all right,"
he laughed.  "They've been giving me some very fishy looks--but
when they see YOU here, they can't be sure--they don't know what to
make of it!"

"Why don't they?"

"Oh," he said, "they're puzzled about me, but they KNOW about you--
they don't dare to bother you because they know you're not in the
university."

"How do they know it?" he said resentfully.  "I look as much like a
student as these Rhodes scholars that you see--yes, and a damned
sight more than most of them!"

"Yes, I know," he said tolerantly.  "Still, they know you're not.
They've got a way of telling."

"A way of telling!  Good God, Morison, how have they got a way of
telling?  Do you mean to say they memorize the names and faces of
all the students here, the day the term commences?"

"No, it isn't that.  You see, old boy, you don't BELONG to them--I
don't know what it is, but they have a way of their own of
knowing."

"Do you mean that there's some damned mystery about it?--that
they've got some supernatural gift of intuition that tells them
when you're a student and when you're not?"

"Quite!" he said.  "That's just it.  That's just the way they do
it!"  And he looked at Eugene for a moment with his blurred,
veinous eyes, and laughed softly, good-naturedly, a little
mockingly.  "Curious, isn't it?"

"It's more than curious.  It's a miracle!"

But it seemed that he was right.  For sometimes the proctors would
come into a pub where they were drinking, speak amicably to
everyone, and in a moment more go out again, but Morison would grow
very quiet while they were there, and lean upon the bar, and look
down at his drink until they left.  And as they left they would
look curiously at both men again, and their eye would pass Eugene
swiftly and indifferently, and for a moment fix on Morison with a
fishy and suspicious look.  When they were gone he would look up
again at the grinning bar-tender and, his ruddy face suffused with
laughter, say exultantly:

"Oh, PRICELESS!  Did you see him when he looked at me?"

"I did," the man behind the counter said.  "He didn't half know
what to make of it, did he?  The other gentleman is not a student,
IS he?"

"No!" Morison fairly shouted, his face crimson, as he pounded on
the bar.  "That's just the point!  And they don't know what to make
of it when they see me with him!  They can't be sure!" he choked.
"They can't be sure!"

And it was Morison who found the house out on the Ventnor road,
took lodgings there himself, and gave Eugene the address.



LXX


In the autumn of that year, Eugene lived about a mile out from town
in a house set back from the Ventnor Road.  The house was called a
"farm"--Hill-top Farm, or Far-end Farm, or some such name as that--
but it was really no farm at all.  It was a magnificent house of
the weathered grey stone they have in that country, as if in the
very quality of the wet heavy air there is the soft thick grey of
time itself, sternly yet beautifully soaking down for ever on you--
and enriching everything it touches--grass, foliage, brick, ivy,
the fresh moist colour of the people's faces, and old grey stone,
with the incomparable weathering of time.

The house was set back off the road at a distance of several
hundred yards, possibly a quarter of a mile, and one reached it by
means of a road bordered by rows of tall trees which arched above
the road, and which made Eugene think of home, at night when the
stormy wind howled in their tossed branches.  On each side of the
road were the Rugby fields of two of the colleges and in the
afternoon he could look out and down and see the fresh moist green
of the playing fields and watch young college fellows, dressed in
their shorts and jerseys, and with their bare knees scurfed with
grass and turf as they twisted, struggled, swayed, and scrambled
for a moment in the scrimmage-circle, and then broke free, running,
dodging, passing the ball as they were tackled, filling the moist
air with their sharp cries of sport.  They did not have the
desperate, the grimly determined, the almost professional
earnestness that the college teams at home have; their scurfed and
muddy knees, their swaying scrambling scrimmages, the swift
breaking away and running, their panting breath and crisp clear
voices gave them the appearance of grown-up boys.

Once when Eugene had come up the road in the afternoon while they
were playing, the ball got away from them and came bounding out
into the road before him, and he ran after it to retrieve it, as he
used to do when passing a field where boys were playing baseball.
One of the players came over to the edge of the field and stood
there waiting with his hands upon his hips while Eugene got the
ball: he was panting hard, his face was flushed, and his blond hair
tousled, but when Eugene threw the ball to him, he said "Thanks
very much!" crisply and courteously--getting the same sound into
the word "VERY" that they got in "AMERican," a sound that always
repelled Eugene a little because it seemed to have some scornful
aloofness and patronage in it.

For a moment Eugene watched him as he trotted briskly away on to
the field again: the players stood there waiting, panting, casual,
their hands upon their hips; he passed the ball into the scrimmage,
the pattern swayed, rocked, scrambled, and broke sharply out in
open play again, and everything looked incredibly strange, near,
and familiar.

Eugene felt that he had always known it, that it had always been
his, and that it was as familiar to him as everything he had seen
or known in his childhood.  Even the texture of the earth looked
familiar, and felt moist and firm and springy when he stepped on
it, and the stormy howling of the wind in that avenue of great
trees at night was wild and desolate and demented as it had been
when he was eight years old and would lie in his bed at night and
hear the great oaks howling on the hill above his father's house.

The name of the people in the house was Coulson: he made
arrangements with the woman at once to come and live there: she was
a tall, weathered-looking woman of middle age, they talked together
in the hall.  The hall was made of marble flags and went directly
out on to a gravelled walk.

The woman was crisp, cheerful, and worldly-looking.  She was still
quite handsome.  She wore a well-cut skirt of woollen plaid and a
silk blouse: when she talked she kept her arms folded because the
air in the hall was chilly, and she held a cigarette in the fingers
of one hand.  A shaggy brown dog came out and nosed upward toward
her hand as she was talking and she put her hand upon its head and
scratched it gently.  When Eugene told her he wanted to move in the
next day, she said briskly and cheerfully:

"Right you are!  You'll find everything ready when you get here!"
Then she asked if he was at the university.  He said no, and added,
with a feeling of difficulty and naked desolation, that he was a
"writer," and was coming there to work.  He was twenty-four years
old.

"Then I am sure that what you do will be VERY, VERY good!" she said
cheerfully and decisively.  "We have had several Americans in the
house before and all of them were very clever!  All the Americans
we have had here were very clever people," said the woman.  "I'm
sure that you will like it."  Then she walked to the door with him
to say good-bye.  As they stood there, there was the sound of a
small motorcar coming to a halt and in a moment a girl came swiftly
across the gravel space outside and entered the hall.  She was
tall, slender, very lovely, but she had the same bright hard look
in her eye that the woman had, the same faint, hard smile round the
edges of her mouth.

"Edith," the woman said in her crisp curiously incisive tone, "this
young man is an American--he is coming here tomorrow."  The girl
looked at Eugene for a moment with her hard bright glance, thrust
out a small gloved hand, and shook hands briefly, a swift firm
greeting.

"Oh!  How d'ye do?" she said.  "I hope you will like it here."
Then she went on down the hall, entered a room on the left, and
closed the door behind her.

Her voice had been crisp and certain like her mother's, but it was
also cool, young, and sweet, with music in it, and later as Eugene
went down the road, he could still hear it.

That was a wonderful house, and the people there were wonderful
people.  Later, he could not forget them.  He seemed to have known
them all his life, and to know all about their lives.  They seemed
as familiar to him as his own blood and he knew them with a
knowledge that went deep below the roots of thought or memory.
They did not talk together often, or tell any of their lives to one
another.  It is very hard to tell about it--the way they felt and
lived together in that house--because it was one of those simple
and profound experiences of life which people seem always to have
known when it happens to them, but for which there is no language.

And yet, like a child's half-captured vision of some magic country
he has known, and which haunts his days with strangeness and the
sense of imminent, glorious rediscovery, the word that would unlock
it all seemed constantly to be almost on their lips, waiting, just
outside the gateway of their memory, just a shape, a phrase, a
sound away, the moment that they chose to utter it--but when they
tried to say the thing, something faded within their minds like
fading light, and something melted within their grasp like painted
smoke, and something went for ever when they tried to touch it.

The nearest Eugene could come to it was this:  In that house he
sometimes felt the greatest peace and solitude that he had ever
known.  But he always knew the other people in the house were
there.  He could sit in his sitting-room at night and hear nothing
but the stormy moaning of the wind outside in the great trees, the
small gaseous flare and jet from time to time of the coal fire
burning in the grate--and silence, strong living lonely silence
that moved and waited in the house at night--and he would always
know that they were there.

He did not have to hear them enter or go past his door, nor did he
have to hear doors close or open in the house, or listen to their
voices: if he had never seen them, heard them, spoken to them, it
would have been the same--he would have known they were there.

It was something he had always known, and he had known it would
happen to him, and now it was there with all the strangeness and
dark mystery of an awaited thing.  He knew them, felt them, lived
among them with a familiarity that had no need of sight or word or
speech.  And the memory of that house and of his silent fellowship
with all the people there was somehow mixed with an image of dark
time.  It was one of those sorrowful and unchanging images which,
among all the blazing stream of images that passed constantly their
stream of fire across his mind, was somehow fixed, detached, and
everlasting, full of a sorrow, certitude, and mystery that he could
not fathom, but that wore for ever on it the old sad light of
waning day--a light from which all the heat, the violence, and the
substance of furious dusty day had vanished and which was itself
like time, unearthly-of-the-earth, remote, detached, and
everlasting.

And that fixed and changeless image of dark time was this:  In an
old house of time Eugene lived alone, and yet had other people all
around him, and they never spoke to him or he to them.  They came
and went, like silence in the house, but he always knew that they
were there.  He would be sitting by a window in a room, and he
would know then that they were moving in the house, and darkness,
sorrow, and strong silence dwelt within them, and their eyes were
quiet, full of sorrow, peace, and knowledge, and their faces dark,
their tongues silent, and they never spoke.  Eugene could not
remember how their faces looked, but they were all familiar to him
as his father's face, and they had known one another for ever, and
they lived together in the ancient house of time, dark time; and
silence, sorrow, certitude, and peace were in them.  Such was the
image of dark time that was to haunt his life thereafter, and into
which, somehow, his life among the people in that house had passed.



In the house that year there lived, besides Eugene and Morison, the
Coulsons, father and mother and their daughter, and three men who
had taken rooms together and who were employed in a factory where
motor-cars were made, two miles from town.

Perhaps the reason that Eugene could never forget these people
later and seemed to know them all so well was that there was in all
of them something ruined, lost, or broken--some precious and
irretrievable quality which had gone out of them and which they
could never get back again.  Perhaps that was the reason that he
liked them all so much, because with ruined people it is either
love or hate: there is no middle way.  The ruined people that we
like are those who desperately have died, and lost their lives
because they loved life dearly, and had that grandeur that makes
such people spend prodigally the thing they love the best, and risk
and lose their lives because life is so precious to them, and die
at length because the seeds of life are in them.  It is only the
people that love life who die in this way--and these are the ruined
people that we like.

The people in the house were people who had lost their lives
because they loved the earth too well, and somehow had been slain
by their hunger.  And for this reason Eugene liked them all, and
could not forget them later: there seemed to have been some magic
which had drawn them all together to that house, as if the house
itself were a magnetic centre for lost people.

Certainly, the three men who worked at the motor-car factory had
been drawn together for this reason.  Two were still young men in
their early twenties.  The third man was much older.  He was a man
past forty, his name was Nicholl, he had served in the army during
the war and had attained the rank of captain.

He had the spare, alert, and jaunty figure that one often finds in
army men, an almost professional military quality that somehow
seemed to set his figure upon a horse as if he had grown there, or
had spent a lifetime in the cavalry.  His face, also, had the same
lean, bitten, professional military quality: his speech, although
good-natured and very friendly, was clipped, incisive, jerky, and
sporadic, his lean weather-beaten face was deeply, sharply scarred
and sunken in the flanks, and he wore a small cropped moustache,
and displayed long frontal teeth when he smiled--a spare, gaunt,
toothy, yet attractive smile.

His left arm was withered, shrunken, almost useless, part of his
hand and two of the fingers had been torn away by the blast or
explosion which had destroyed his arm, but it was not this
mutilation of the flesh that gave one the sense of a life that had
been ruined, lost, and broken irretrievably.  In fact, one quickly
forgot his physical injury: his figure looked so spare, lean,
jaunty, well-conditioned in its energetic fitness that one never
thought of him as a cripple, nor pitied him for any disability.
No: the ruin that one felt in him was never of the flesh, but of
the spirit.  Something seemed to have been torn away from his life--
it was not the nerve-centres of his arm, but of his soul, that had
been destroyed.  There was in the man somewhere a terrible dead
vacancy and emptiness, and the spare, lean figure that he carried
so well seemed only to surround this vacancy like a kind of shell.

He was always smartly dressed in clothes that sat well on his trim
spruce figure.  He was always in good spirits, immensely friendly
in his clipped spare way, and he laughed frequently--a rather
metallic cackle which came suddenly and ended as swiftly as it had
begun.  He seemed, somehow, to have locked the door upon dark care
and worry, and to have flung the key away--to have lost, at the
same time that he lost more precious things, all the fretful doubts
and perturbations of conscience than most men know.

Now, in fact, he seemed to have only one serious project in his
life.  This was to keep himself amused, to keep himself constantly
amused, to get from his life somehow the last atom of entertainment
it could possibly yield, and in this project the two young men who
lived with him joined in with an energy and earnestness which
suggested that their employment in the motor-car factory was just a
necessary evil which most be borne patiently because it yielded
them the means with which to carry on a more important business,
the only one in which their lives were interested--the pursuit of
pleasure.

And in the way in which they conducted this pursuit there was an
element of deliberate calculation, concentrated earnestness, and
focal intensity of purpose that was astounding, grotesque, and
unbelievable, and that left in the mind of one who saw it a
formidable and disquieting memory because there was in it almost
the madness of desperation, the deliberate intent to seek oblivion,
at any cost of effort, from some hideous emptiness of the soul.

Captain Nicholl and his two young companions had a little motorcar
so small that it scuttled up the road, shot around and stopped in
the gravel by the door with the abruptness of a wound-up toy.  It
was astonishing that three men could wedge themselves into this
midget of a car, but wedge themselves they did, and used it to the
end of its capacity, scuttling away to work in it in the morning,
and scuttling back again when work was done, and scuttling away to
London every Saturday, as if they were determined to wrest from
this small motor, too, the last ounce of pleasure to be got from
it.

Finally, Captain Nicholl and his two companions had made up an
orchestra among them, and this they played in every night when they
got home.  One of the young men, who was a tall fellow with blond
hair which went back in even corrugated waves across his head as if
it had been marcelled, played the piano; the other, who was slight
and dark, and had black hair, performed upon a saxophone, and
Captain Nicholl himself took turns at thrumming furiously on a
banjo, or rattling a tattoo upon the complex arrangement of trap
drums, bass drums, and clashing cymbals that surrounded him.

They played nothing but American jazz music or sobbing crooner's
rhapsodies or nigger blues.  Their performance was astonishing.
Although it was contrived solely for their own amusement, they
hurled themselves into it with all the industrious earnestness of
professional musicians employed by a night-club or dance hall to
furnish dance music for the patrons.  The little dark fellow who
played the saxophone would bend and weave prayerfully with his
grotesque instrument, as the fat gloating notes came from its
unctuous throat, and from time to time he would sway in a half-
circle or get up and prance forward and back in rhythm to the
music, as the saxophone players in dance orchestras sometimes do.

Meanwhile the tall blond fellow at the piano would sway and bend
above the keys, glancing around from time to time with little nods
and smiles as if he were encouraging an orchestra of forty pieces
or beaming happily at a dance floor crowded with paying customers.

While this was going on, Captain Nicholl would be thrumming madly
on the strings of a banjo.  He kept the instrument gripped somehow
below his withered arm, fingering the end strings with his two good
fingers, knocking the tune out with his good right hand, and
keeping time with a beating foot.  Then with a sudden violent
movement he would put the banjo down, snatch up the sticks of the
trap drum, and begin to rattle out a furious accompaniment, beating
the bass drum with his foot meanwhile, and reaching over to smash
cymbals, chimes, and metal rings from time to time.  He played with
a kind of desperate fury, his mouth fixed in a strange set grin,
his bright eyes burning with a sharp wild glint of madness.

They sang as they played, bursting suddenly into the refrain of
some popular song with the same calculated spontaneity and spurious
enthusiasm of the professional orchestra, mouthing the words of
negro blues and jazz with an obvious satisfaction, with an accent
which was remarkably good, and yet which had something foreign and
inept in it that made the familiar phrases of American music sound
almost as strange in their mouths as if an orchestra of skilful
patient Japanese were singing them.

They sang:


     "Yes, sir!  That's my baby
      Yes, sir!  Don't mean maybe
      Yes, sir!  That's my baby now!"


or:


     "Oh, it ain't gonna rain no more, no more
      It ain't gonna rain no more"


or:


     "I got dose blu-u-ues"--


the young fellow at the piano rolling his eyes round in a
ridiculous fashion, and mouthing out the word "blues" extravagantly
as he sang it, the little dark fellow bending forward in an
unctuous sweep as the note came gloating fatly from the horn, and
Captain Nicholl swaying sideways in his chair as he strummed upon
the banjo strings, and improvising a mournful accompaniment of his
own, somewhat as follows:  "I got dose blu-u-ues!  Yes, suh!  Oh! I
got dose blues!  Yes, suh!  I sure have got 'em--dose blu-u-ues--
blu-u-ues--blu-u-ues!--" his mouth never relaxing from its strange
fixed grin, nor his eyes from their bright set stare of madness as
he swayed and strummed and sang the words that came so strangely
from his lips.

It was a weird scene, an incredible performance, and somehow it
pierced the heart with a wild nameless pity, an infinite sorrow and
regret.

Something precious, irrecoverable, had gone out of them, and they
knew it.  They fought the emptiness in them with this deliberate,
formidable, and mad intensity of a calculated gaiety, a terrifying
mimicry of mirth, and the storm-wind howled around them in dark
trees, and Eugene felt that he had known them for ever, and had no
words to say to them--and no door.



LXXI


Once or twice a week Eugene went into town and had tea in the rooms
of a boyhood friend whom he had known at school and who was now a
Rhodes scholar at Merton College.  The name of this youth was
Johnny Park: he was a good-natured, industrious, and rather
plodding boy, and thus far that patient, diligent and well-ordered
plan of life which he had followed since his childhood had
brilliantly succeeded.  Formed in a native air, and followed out
beneath familiar skies, that plan had never been interrupted by any
doubt or strangeness, by any serious difficulty or dark confusion
of the soul, or by any of the unforeseen surprises, shocks, or
bewilderments of chance which break upon our lives with storm-like
fury and twist our precious plans awry.

Therefore, when he had been awarded the Rhodes scholarship a few
months before, during his last year at the university, it seemed
that Johnny's plan of life was marching onto its inevitable
fulfilment.  Everyone had known he would be appointed; it came to
pass with an ordained precision, and Johnny had announced, just as
he should, that he would study "International Law," and everything
was right and proper as it ought to be, and now he was here to
march onward toward his shining goal, as he had always done.

But, for the first time in his life, something had gone wrong,
something had gone terribly, appallingly amiss, and Johnny did not
yet know what it was.  Perhaps he never would, but now he was in
the greatest trouble and confusion of his life, and he knew it.
His voice was still slow, drawling, and good-natured, he was full
of kindly warmth and friendliness as he had always been, he had
responded quickly, dutifully, to all the customs and observances of
the new life--had had grey baggy trousers and tweed coats made at
the tailor's shop, had made arrangements for trips and walking-
tours upon the Continent with his fellows in vacation time, had met
his tutors, found out about the proctors and the penalties, learned
the system of the college bills and battels, joined the Union and
learned to go out dutifully for sports in the afternoon--he had
even learned the mysterious ceremonial of tea and had it in his
rooms each afternoon--all this he had learned and done with a
punctilious thoroughness; but something had gone wrong.

Everything about Johnny was just as it had always been--his smile,
his slow, good-natured voice, his amiable warmth and modesty and
friendliness--all was the same with him except his eyes.  But the
quiet, thoughtful, tranquilly assured expression of his eyes had
changed: he had in them the stunned, bewildered look, full of pain
and a groping confusion, of a man who has been brutally slugged at
the base of the brain and is not yet certain what has happened to
him.

His was an impossible situation, a tragic ordeal of loneliness,
strangeness, and bewilderment among all the complex and alien forms
of a new life for which nothing in the old had prepared him.  Born
in a small town in the South, going to school there and at his own
State University, he had all his life breathed and lived in a
familiar air, heard the familiar words of well-known voices all
round him, known and seen nothing but assurance, certitude and
success in everything he planned.

And now all this, even the earth beneath his feet, had melted from
him like a wisp of smoke, and he was wandering blindly about in a
life as strange to him as Asia, as far as the moon, and knew
nowhere to turn, nothing to grasp, no door to enter.  In his whole
life he had never seen or visited a great city, and then had seen
New York just for a day or two, and then for seven days had known
for the first time the mystery of the sea and a great ship, and now
was here in the green English country, in an ancient town, hurled
cruelly, suddenly, naked and unprepared for it as he was, into a
life more subtle, complex and confusing than his placid soul had
ever dreamed a life could be.

When Eugene asked him if he had stopped in London on his way to
Oxford, the look of pain and bewilderment in his eyes had deepened,
and he had answered in a slow confused voice:

"We stopped there overnight but we never got to see much of it.  We
came on out here the next morning."

The boy was silent a moment, then he laughed good-naturedly with a
troubled and uncertain note.

"It sure looked big enough from what I could see of it.  I want to
get down there some time to see what it is like.  I guess I've got
a lot to learn," he said.

He could remember London like a man who is whirled blindly at night
through a huge, limitless, smoky kaleidoscope of sound and sight
and moving objects, and this memory of that enormous terrifying
age-encrusted web of life--that web without end or measure, which
seems blackened, soaked, and saturated not only in the grey light
that falls upon it with its weight of eight million lives, but also
by the grey light of compacted centuries and all the countless men
who lived there and have died--that great grey web appropriately
known to seafaring men as "The Smoke" had added measurably to the
sense of bewilderment, terror, and naked desolation in him.

And it was pitifully the same with all the rest of them--the little
group of Rhodes scholars that gathered together in Johnny's rooms
every afternoon, and who seemed to huddle and cling together
desperately as if they would try to shape, to resurrect, or to
create some little pattern of familiar life, some small oasis of
warmth and friendliness and familiar things to which they turned
with desperate relief from all the alien and hostile loneliness of
a life which they had never entered, which they could never make
their own, which stood against them like a wall they could not
pass, closed against them like a door they could not open.

Curiously, among this group of five or six Rhodes scholars, which
formed the nucleus of the group which met in Johnny's rooms, only
two--Johnny and his room-mate, a youth named Price--were first-year
men.  The others were either in the second or the final year of
their appointments, but they seemed to have made no friendships
with anyone save with a few of the other Rhodes men, to have no
other place to go, and to welcome the hospitality of these two boys
with a desperate unspoken gratefulness.

There were, besides Johnny and his room-mate Price, three others
who came there every day.  One was a chunky, red-faced fellow, with
coarse undistinguished features, who parted his short crinkly hair
in the middle and had come there from Brown University, where he
had been a member of the football team.  He was in his second year
abroad, and no longer wore his little golden football, but a good
deal of his self-satisfied complacency was intact: he was thicker
of hide and sense than any of the others, and evidently felt that
his three years at Oxford were going to give him a kind of pick-
and-choose freedom with any kind of employment when he got back
home.

He asked Eugene how much he had been paid by the university in New
York City where he had been employed as an instructor, and when
Eugene told him, smiled tolerantly, saying that he wouldn't mind
"trying it for a year after I get back until I have a chance to
look round."  He then informed Eugene graciously that he was open
to an offer, and would even be willing to work for no more than
they paid HIM, while he "looked round."  He added with a little
smile:

"I don't imagine that I'll have much trouble: a man with an Oxford
degree gets snapped up pretty quick over there, doesn't he?
Still," he went on magnanimously, "I wouldn't mind living in New
York a year or two until I settle down--so you can give my name to
them, if you don't mind."

The other two in the group that came to Johnny's rooms were both
third-year men.  One was a frail, sensitive, and æsthetic-looking
youth named Sterling.  Although he came from one of the Western
states--Arizona or New Mexico--there was nothing in him to suggest
the wildness, openness, and grandeur of his native scenery.
Rather, he was a most precious, a most subtle, elegantly sad,
quietly bitter and disdainful fellow: he was quietly, fervently,
subtly a devoted follower of Mr. T. S. Eliot, and although he
revealed his theories sparely, cautiously, and by evasive
indirectness, there was in all he said a quiet air of more-in-this-
than-meets-the-eye, as if he were saying:  "If you want to follow
me you've got to learn to read between the lines and get my meaning
by what is implied rather than by what is said--since there's no
language that can say exactly what my meaning--which is too subtle
and exact for any language--is."

He wore about him always this air of elegant, cold, and slightly
disdainful restraint, and he had a habit of looking across his thin
arched hands with a faint disdainful smile, and listening coldly,
saying nothing, while the others talked, as if the waste-land
chatter of their tongues, the waste-land vacancy of their lost
waste-land souls was something that he knew he must endure, but
would endure with his cold faint disdainful smile, his soul steeped
in cold and patient weariness till death should mercifully release
him.

The other man was a Jew named Fried, and that man Eugene could
never forget.  Eugene didn't know where he came from, how he got
there, who made him a Rhodes scholar, but he knew that of them all,
save Johnny, he was the only one who had maintained his integrity,
the only one who did not have a spurious, fearful, uneasily evasive
quality, the only one who came out with it, the whole packed load
of bitterness and hate within him, the only one who had remained
himself.

Perhaps it was a bad self to remain: it was certainly a self that
was lacking in charm, that had the aggressive, abusive, curiously
unrighteous quality of his race--but there he was, terrifically
himself and unashamed of it--with a naked formidable integrity of
self that blazed with a hard and naked light of a cut jewel, and
that Eugene could never forget even when the characters of the rest
of them had grown blurred and shapeless and obscure.

Eugene didn't know where he came from, but he was sure it was from
one of the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard--from New York,
Boston, Baltimore or Philadelphia.  He had seen his face, his
figure, and his kind a million times upon the pavements of those
cities and incredibly now, that dark unhappy face which never
before had seemed to him to be a face at all, nothing but a tidal
flood of nameless faces, that strident and abusive tongue which had
never before seemed to him to be a single tongue, but just a
common, nameless, and unnumbered ugliness of rasping voices, an
anathema of bitter cries and harsh derisions--a constant phrase, a
dissonance, a weather of the city's life--all that had been
nameless, faceless, characterless and obscure--the look, the sound,
the smell of the man-swarm ciphers of the city as dark-eyed, dark-
faced, and bitter-tongued they swarmed along the pavements of the
cities--all this, in that strange place, was suddenly, weirdly,
resumed into a single character--a character that was hard, bitter,
unforgettably itself, and that no change of sky or land or custom,
nor the huge impact of all the alien and formidable pageantry of
the earth, could ever alter by a jot.

Theirs was a wretched, hopeless, lonely life, a futile, feeble,
barren life, an impossible, groping, wretched insecure life--and
Fried was the only one of them to meet it, to admit it, to denounce
it with all the bitterness of his bitter soul, and to remain
himself against it.  The rest were frightened, bitter, lonely,
homesick, and afraid--afraid of everything, afraid of their own
loneliness and their own dismal unsuccess, afraid to confess the
desolation of their souls, the bitter disappointment of their
hopes, afraid to laugh too loud, to show too much exuberance or
enthusiasm for anything, lest someone should consider them a
"hearty," and pin that feared and hated label on them.

They were afraid to express any native extravagance in dress,
speech or manner lest they be branded as "bounders," afraid to talk
their natural speech in their own manner lest they seem too
crudely, raucously and offensively American, and afraid to imitate
too studiously the language of the nation for fear that their own
fellows would sneer at them for servile snobbishness, for "speaking
with an English accent."  Thus, caught in the web of a thousand
fears, the meshes of a thousand impossible restraints, trying to
maintain their lives, their characters, their native dignities even
while they tried to subdue them by a thousand small half-mimicries,
to be themselves even while they tried to shape themselves to
something else, their characters finally, strained through the
impossible weavings of this mad design, teetering frantically to
maintain a crazy balance on a thousand wires, were reduced at last
to the consistency of blubber--and trying to be everything, they
succeeded finally in being nothing.

Oh, it was a wretched, futile, hopeless kind of life, and in their
hearts they knew it, but could only speak casually, smile feebly,
speak falsely, yet never lay their hearts bare boldly and admit the
truth.  None of them liked Fried; they were ashamed of him, they
turned on him at times in force, argued with him, denounced him,
jeered at him, but at the bottom of their hearts they had a
strange, secret, and unwilling respect for him, and finally grew
silent and listened when he talked.

It was astonishing to watch the effect of that man's bitter tirades
on that forlorn group.  For where at first they would protest,
remonstrate, sharply caution him, laugh uneasily and look fearfully
toward the door as his harsh rasping voice mounted and grew high
and snarling with its packed anathema of bitterness and hate, they
would at length grow silent and look at him with fascinated eyes,
and listen to that snarling and savage indictment with a kind of
feeding gluttony of satisfaction, as if into that single naked and
abusive tongue had been packed the whole huge weight of misery that
had sweltered in their hearts, but to which they had never dared,
themselves, to give utterance.

Eugene had asked Sterling how much longer he would remain abroad
and he had answered:

"Just ten months more.  This is my last year.  I am going home next
August."  He was silent for a moment, then he added with a faint,
regretful smile:  "In another year I suppose, I'll be wondering if
all this has ever happened.  It will seem strange and beautiful,"
he said softly, "like some impossible dream!"

"Yeah!" snarled Fried, with a harsh interruption at this point.
"An impossible dream!  Jesus!  An impossible nightmare!--that's
what you'd better say!"

Sterling looked at him silently for a moment over his thin arched
hands.  He smiled faintly, disdainfully, and made no answer.  In a
moment he turned quietly to Eugene again, and dismissing the other
man with the cold contempt of silence, continued:

"Sometimes it's hard for me to realize I ever lived there.  Can
there be such a place as America, I wonder?" he said with a sad
faint smile.  "After all this," he gestured slightly, pausing, "it
will seem so strange to be a part of"--he paused carefully "--THAT
again. . . .  Skyscrapers, subways, elevated trains--" he paused
again, with a faint smile--"Tell me," he said, turning toward
Eugene, "do such things REALLY exist?"

"Do they REALLY exist!" Fried now snarled with a jeering laugh.
"Do they REALLY exist!  I'll tell the cock-eyed world that they
exist!" he rasped.  "You can bet your ----- that they exist! . . .
Do they exist!" he snorted to himself derisively.  "Jesus!"

Sterling stared coldly at him and said nothing.  For a moment
Fried's hard, dark, embittered face, the feverish eyes, stared
balefully at the fragile and sensitive face of the other youth, set
disdainfully against him over his arched hands.

"Where do you get that stuff?" Fried said at length with harsh
contempt.  "You may kid these guys who never saw the place until a
week ago, but you don't kid me, Sterling.  Christ!  I know what
kind of a dream it's been--and so do you!"

Sterling did not deign to answer, but continued to look at him with
cold faint disdain, and after another baleful and disgusted stare,
Fried rasped out bitterly again:

"I suppose it was a dream your first term here when you tried to
suck around those English guys and you thought they were going to
take you right into the family, didn't you?" he sneered.  "You
thought you were sittin' pretty, didn't you?  You were goin' to pal
around with the Duke of What's-His-Name and get invited home wit'
him for the Christmas holidays and make a big play for his sister,
weren't you?  Yes, you were!"  He jeered, "You saw how far it got
you, didn't you?  Those guys took you for a ride and played you for
a sucker, an' when they'd had all the fun wit' you they could, they
dropped you like a ton of bricks!  You thought that you were pretty
wise, didn't you?" he snarled bitterly.  "You thought that you were
goin' places, didn't you?  You were goin' to do something big, you
were!  Well, I'll tell you what you did!  You handed them a laugh--
see?  You handed those guys a great big laugh--yes! a laugh!" he
shouted violently.  "And, I'll tell you something else!  They're
still laughin' at you!  I saw you, Sterling.  I know what you did.
But you didn't see me, did you?  Couldn't see me in those days,
could you?"

"I can't see you now," said Sterling coldly.  "I never could see
you!"

"Is that so?" the Jew said bitterly.  "Now, isn't that too bad! . . .
Well, I'll tell you one time that you saw me, Sterling. . . .
That's when those guys had left you flat. . . .  You could see me
then, couldn't you?  You don't remember, do you?" he jeered.
"Well, I'll tell you when it was. . . .  It was when you came back
here that year for the spring term and you found they didn't know
you when you went around.  It was when your tail was dragging the
ground and you didn't have a friend in the world--you could see me
then, all right.  Couldn't you? . . .  I wasn't good enough before
when you were trying to break into High Society--but I was good
enough to see after they gave you the big go-by, wasn't I? . . .
Sure!  Sure!" he said with an air of derision, addressing himself
more quietly now to the rest of the group.  "I usta go by this guy
when he was running around wit' his English friends--and did he see
me?" he jibed savagely.  "Not so you could notice it! . . .  'Who
is that common person who just spoke to you, Mr. Sterling?'  'O,
THAT!  O, I cannot say, old chap--some low fellow that was on the
boat wit' me when I came ovah! . . .  Really cawn't recall his
name!  A beastly boundah, I believe!' . . .  Sure!  Sure!" he
nodded.  "That was it!  High-hattin' me, you know!  I wasn't good
enough!  And all the time these English guys were laughin' up their
sleeve at him!"

They had been stunned by the snarling fury of his assault, silenced
by the hypnotic compulsion of his dark, hard face, his feverish
eyes, the rasping bitterness of his voice that at the end grew
strident, high, and gasping from his effort to release in one
explosive tirade the whole packed weight of misery, disappointment,
and defeat that sweltered poisonously in his heart.  Now, however,
as he paused there, dark and hard and full of bitterness, surveying
them balefully with toxic eyes, silenced by lack of breath rather
than by lack of further curses, they gathered themselves together
and went for him in a mass.

In another moment the last vestige of restraint, gentlemanly
decorum, urbane and tolerant sophistication with which they had
clothed themselves had vanished, and they were yelping, snarling,
shouting, accusing and denying, inextricably mixed-up in one
general and inglorious dogfight; taunts, curses, insults, and
indictments filled the air, all of them were shouting at the same
time, and out of that roaring brawl all one could decipher were the
ragged barbs and ends of their abuse--a tumult of bitter and
strident voices characterized by such phrases as--"You never
belonged here in the first place!"  "It's fellows like you who give
all the rest of us a bad name!"  "Why the hell should the rest of
us have to suffer for it because you talk and act like an East Side
gangster?"  "They think all Americans are a bunch of roughnecks
because they meet a few like you."  "Ah, g'wan! youse guys!  You
give me a pain.  You all feel the same way as I do but none of you
has guts enough to say so!"  "You're just sore because these
English boys never had anything to do with you--that's all you're
sore about!"  "Yeah?  They had a hell of a lot to do wit' you,
didn't they?--even if you did try to talk wit' an English accent."
"You're a damned liar!  I never tried to talk with an English
accent!"  "Sure you did!  Everybody hoid you!  You coulda cut yoeh
accent wit' a hatchet!  You were tryin' to suck aroun' that gang at
Christ's the first year you were here!"  "Who says I was?"  "I say
so--that's who!  You an' Tommy Woodson both--"  "Don't mix my name
with Tommy Woodson, now!  You're not going to include me with that
horse's neck!"  "Oh, yeah?  Since when did you staht callin' him a
horse's neck?"  "I always called him one!  He IS one!"  "Sure he
is--but you didn't think so, did you, that first year that you was
heah?  You was pallin' around wit' him an' wouldn't have anything
to do wit' the rest of us!  You thought it was goin' to get you
somewhere, didn't you?  You saw how quick he dropped you after he
got in wit' those guys at Christ's!  He gave you the big go-by
then, didn't he?  That's when you stahted callin' him a horse's
neck!"  "It's a lie!  I didn't!"  "Sure you did!"

The snarling medley of bitter tongues rose, mounted; they vented
their weight of insult, misery, and reproach on one another and at
length subsided, checked by exhaustion rather than by some more
charitable cause.  And as the tumult died away Sterling, two spots
of colour burning on his pallid face, goaded completely from his
former affectation of coldly elegant disdain, could be heard saying
to Fried in a high, excited, almost hysterical tone:

"The kind of attack you make is simply stupid!  It doesn't get you
anywhere!  And it's so crude!  So raucous!  After all, there's no
reason why you've always got to be so raucous!"--the way he said
the word was "raw-kus," his thin hands were trembling, and the two
spots of colour burned fiercely in his thin pale face; in this and
the bitter way in which he said "raucous" there was finally
something pitiable and futile.

And at the end, when all their strident cries had died away, the
dark embittered visage of the Jew surveyed them wearily, and held
them in its sway again.  For as if conceding now what was most
evident--that his savage, disappointed spirit had a hard integrity,
an unashamed conviction, an ugly, snarling but most open courage
which they lacked, they sat there, and looked at him in silence,
somehow conveying by that silence a sense of bitter and unwilling
respect for him, a final admission of agreement and defeat.

And he, too, when he spoke now, spoke wearily, with a bitter
resignation, as if he realized the futility of his victory over
them, the futility of hurling further insults, oaths, and
accusations at people who knew the bitter truth of his complaint as
well as he.

"Nah!" he said quietly in a moment, with this same note of bitter,
weary resignation in his voice.  "To hell wit' it!  Wat t' hell's
the use of tryin' to pretend it isn't so?  You guys all know the
way things are!  You come over here and you think you're sittin'
pretty right on top of the world!  You think these guys are goin'
to throw their ahms around your neck and kiss you, because they
love Americans so much!  And what happens?"  He laughed bitterly.
"Are you telling ME?  Christ!  You can stay here for three years
and none of them will ever give a tumble to you!  You can eat your
heart out for all they care, and when you leave here you'll know no
more about them than when you came.  And what does it getcha?
What's it all about?  Wat t' hell do you get out of it that's so
wonderful?"

"I thought," one of the first-year men suggested mildly, and a
trifle piously, as if he were quoting one of the articles of faith,
"that you were supposed to get out of it a better understanding of
the relations between the two great English-speaking nations."

"The two great English-speaking nations!" Fried answered harshly
with a jeering laugh.  "Jesus!  That's a good one!  WHAT two
English-speaking nations do you mean?" he went on belligerently.
"England and what other country?" he demanded.  "You don't think WE
speak the same language as THEY do, do you?  Christ!  The first
year I was here they might have been talkin' Siamese so far as
I was concerned!  It wasn't any language that I'd evah hoid
before. . . .  Yeah, I know," he went on wearily in a moment, "they
fed me all that bunk, too, before I came over. . . .  English-
speakin' nations! . . .  Goin' back to your old home! our old home!
For Christ's sake!" he said bitterly.  "Christ!  It never was a
home to me!  I'd have felt more at home if they had sent me to
Siberia! . . .  Home!  The rest of you guys can make believe it's
home if you want to! . . .  I know what you'll do," he muttered.
"You'll stick it out and hate it like the rest of them. . . .  Then
you'll go back home an' high-hat everyone and tell them all how
wonderful it was, and what a fine time you had when you were here,
and how you hated to leave it! . . .  Not for me!  I'm goin' home
where I can see someone that I know some time who's not too good to
talk to me. . . and talk to someone who understands what I'm tryin'
to say once in a while . . . and pay my little nickel for the big
ride in the subway . . . and listen to the kids playin' in the
street . . . an' go to sleep wit' the old elevated bangin' in my
ears! . . .  That's home!" he cried.  "That's home enough for me."

"A hell of a home," said someone quietly.

"Don't I know it!" snarled the man.  "But it's the only home I got!
It's better than no home at all!"

And for a moment he smoked darkly, bitterly, in silence.

"Nah!  To hell wit' it!" he muttered.  "To hell wit' it!  I'll be
glad when it's all over!  I'm sorry that I ever came!"

And he was silent then, and the others looked at him, and had no
more to say, and were silent.



LXXII


There were four in the Coulson family: the father, a man of fifty
years, the mother, somewhere in the middle forties, a son, and a
daughter, Edith, a girl of twenty-two who lived in the house with
her parents.  Eugene never met the son: he had completed his course
at Oxford a year or two before, and had gone down to London where
he was now employed.  During the time Eugene lived there the son
did not come home.

They were a ruined family.  How that ruin had fallen on them, what
it was, Eugene never knew, for no one ever spoke to him about them.
But the sense of their disgrace, of a shameful inexpiable
dishonour, for which there was no pardon, from which there could
never be redemption, was overwhelming.  In the most astonishing way
Eugene found out about it right away, and yet he did not know what
they had done, and no one ever spoke a word against them.

Rather, the mention of their name brought silence, and in that
silence there was something merciless and final, something that
belonged to the temper of the country, and that was far more
terrible than any open word of scorn, contempt, or bitter judgment
could have been, more savage than a million strident, whispering,
or abusive tongues could be, because the silence was unarguable,
irrevocable, complete, as if a great door had been shut against
their lives for ever.

Everywhere Eugene went in town the people knew about them, and said
nothing--saying everything--when he spoke their names.  He found
this final, closed, relentless silence everywhere--in tobacco,
wine, and tailor shops, in book stores, food stores, haberdashery
stores--wherever he bought anything and gave the clerk the address
to which it was to be delivered, they responded instantly with this
shut finality of silence, writing the name down gravely, sometimes
saying briefly, "Oh!  Coulson's!" when he gave them the address,
but more often saying nothing.

But whether they spoke or simply wrote the name down without a
word, there was always this quality of instant recognition, this
obdurate, contemptuous finality of silence, as if a door had been
shut--a door that could never again be opened.  Somehow Eugene
disliked them more for this silence than if they had spoken evilly:
there was in it something ugly, knowing, and triumphant that was
far more evil than any slyly whispering confidence of slander, or
any open vituperation of abuse, could be.  It seemed somehow to
come from all the vile and uncountable small maggotry of the earth,
the cautious little hatreds of a million nameless ciphers, each
puny, pallid, trivial in himself, but formidable because he added
his tiny beetle's ball of dung to the mountainous accumulation of
ten million others of his breed.

It was uncanny how these clerk-like faces, grave and quiet, that
never spoke a word, or gave a sign, or altered their expression by
a jot, when Eugene gave them the address, could suddenly be alive
with something secret, foul, and sly, could be more closed and
secret than a door, and yet instantly reveal the naked, shameful,
and iniquitous filth that welled up from some depthless source.  He
could not phrase it, give a name to it, or even see a certain sign
that it was there, any more than he could put his hand upon a wisp
of fading smoke, but he always knew when it was there, and somehow
when he saw it his heart went hard and cold against the people who
revealed it, and turned with warmth and strong affection towards
the Coulson family.

There was, finally, among these grave clerk-like faces, one face
that Eugene could never forget thereafter, a face that seemed to
resume into its sly suave surfaces all of the nameless abomination
of evil in the world, for which he had no name, for which there was
no handle he could grasp, no familiar places or edges he could get
his hands upon, which slid phantasmally, oilily, and smokily away
whenever he tried to get his hands upon it.  But it was to haunt
his life for years in dreams of hatred, madness, and despair that
found no frontal wall for their attack, no word for their
vituperation, no door for the shoulder of his hate--an evil world
of phantoms, shapes, and whispers that was yet as real as death, as
ever-present as man's treachery, but that slid away from him like
smoke whenever he tried to meet, or curse, or strangle it.

This face was the face of a man in a tailor shop, a fitter there,
and Eugene could have battered that foul face into a bloody pulp,
distilled the filthy refuse of that ugly life out of the fat
swelling neck and through the murderous grip of his fingers if he
could only have found a cause, a logic, and a provocation for doing
it.  And yet he never saw the man but twice, and briefly, and there
had been nothing in his suave, sly, careful speech to give offence.

Edith Coulson had sent Eugene to the tailor's shop: he needed a
suit and when he asked her where to go to have it made, she had
sent him to this place because her brother had his suits made there
and liked it.  The fitter was a heavy shambling man in his late
thirties: he had receding hair, which he brushed back flat in a
thick pompadour; yellowish, somewhat bulging eyes; a coarse heavy
face, loose-featured, red, and sensual; a sloping meaty jaw, and
large discoloured buck-teeth which showed unpleasantly in a mouth
that was always half open.  It was, in fact, the mouth that gave
his face its sensual, sly, and ugly look, for a loose and vulgar
smile seemed constantly to hover about its thick coarse edges, to
be deliberately, slyly restrained, but about to burst at any moment
into an open, evil, foully sensual laugh.  There was always about
his mouth this ugly suggestion of a loose, corrupt, and evilly
jubilant mirth, and yet he never laughed or smiled.

The man's speech had this same quality.  It was suave and
courteous, but even in its most urbane assurances there was
something non-committal, sly, and jeering, something that slid away
from you, and was never to be grasped, a quality that was
faithless, tricky and unwholesome.  When Eugene came for the final
fitting it was obvious that he had done as cheap and shoddy a job
as he could do; the suit was vilely botched and skimped, sufficient
cloth had not been put into it, and now it was too late to remedy
the defect.

Yet the fitter gravely pulled the vest down till it met the
trousers, tugged at the coat, and pulled the thing together where
it stayed until Eugene took a breath or moved a muscle, when it
would all come apart again, the collar bulging outward from the
shoulder, the skimpy coat and vest crawling backward from the
trousers, leaving a hiatus of shirt and belly that could not now be
remedied by any means.

Then, gravely he would pull the thing together again, and in his
suave, yet oily, sly, and non-committal phrases say:

"Um!  Seems to fit you very well."

Eugene was choking with exasperation, and knew that he had been
done, because he had foolishly paid them half the bill already, and
now knew no way out of it except to lose what he had paid and get
nothing for it or take the thing and pay the balance.  He was
caught in a trap, but even as he jerked at the coat and vest
speechlessly, seized his shirt and thrust the gaping collar in the
fitter's face, the man said smoothly:

"Um!  Yes!  The collar.  Should think all that will be all right.
Still needs a little alteration."  He made some chalk-marks on
Eugene.  "Should think you'll find it fits you very well when the
tailor makes the alterations."

"When will the suit be ready?"

"Um.  Should think you ought to have it by next Tuesday.  Yes.  I
think you'll find it ready by Tuesday."

The sly words slid away from the boy like oil: there was nothing to
pin him to or grasp him by, the yellowed eyes looked casually away
and would not look at Eugene, the sensual face was suavely grave,
the discoloured buck-teeth shone obscenely through the coarse loose
mouth, and the suggestion of the foul loose smile was so pronounced
now that it seemed that at any moment the man would have to turn
away with heavy trembling shoulders and stifle the evil jeering
laugh that was welling up in him.  But he remained suavely grave
and non-committal to the end, and when Eugene asked him if he
should come again to try it on, he said, in the same oily tone,
never looking at him:

"Um.  Shouldn't think that would be necessary.  Could have it
delivered to you when it's ready.  What is your address?"

"The Far End Farm--it's on the Ventnor Road."

"Oh!  Coulson's!"  He never altered his expression, but the
suggestion of the obscene smile was so pronounced that now it
seemed he would have to come out with it.  Instead, he only said:

"Um.  Yes.  Should think it could be delivered to you there on
Tuesday.  If you'll just wait a moment I'll ask the tailor."

Gravely, suavely, he took the coat from Eugene and walked back
towards the tailor's room with the coat across his arm.  In a
moment, the boy heard sly voices whispering, laughing slyly, then
the tailor saying:

"Where does he live?"

"Coulson's!" said the fitter chokingly, and now the foul awaited
laugh did come--high, wet, slimy, it came out of that loose mouth,
and choked and whispered wordlessly, and choked again, and mingled
then with the tailor's voice in sly, choking, whispering intimacy,
and then gasped faintly and was silent.  When the man came out
again his coarse face was red and swollen with foul secret
merriment, his heavy shoulders trembled slightly, he took out his
handkerchief and wiped it once across his loose half-opened mouth,
and with that gesture wiped the slime of laughter from his lips.
Then he came toward Eugene, suave, grave, and courteous, evilly
composed, as he said smoothly:

"Should think we'll have that for you by next Tuesday, sir."

"Can the tailor fix it so it's going to fit?"

"Um.  Should think you'll find that everything's all right.  You
ought to have it Tuesday afternoon."

He was not looking at Eugene: the yellowish bulging eyes were
staring casually, indefinitely, away, and his words again had slid
away from the boy like oil.  He could not be touched, approached,
or handled: there was nothing to hold him by, he had the
impregnability of smoke or a ball of mercury.

As Eugene went out of the door the tailor began to speak to someone
in the shop, Eugene heard low words and whispered voices, then,
gasping, the word "Coulson's!" and the slimy, choking, smothered
laughter as the street-door closed behind him.  He never saw the
man again.  He never forget his face.



That was a fine house: the people in it were exiled, lost, and
ruined people, and Eugene liked them all.  Later, he never knew why
he felt so close to them or remembered them with such warmth and
strong affection.

He did not see the Coulsons often and rarely talked to them.  Yet
he felt as familiar and friendly with them all as if he had known
them all his life.  The house was wonderful as no other house he
had ever known, because they all seemed to be living in it together
with this strange speechless knowledge, warmth, and familiarity,
and yet each was as private, secret, and secure in his own room as
if he occupied the house alone.

Coulson himself Eugene saw least of all: they sometimes passed each
other going in or out the door, or in the hall; Coulson would grunt
"Morning," or "Good Day," in a curt blunt manner, and go on, and
yet he always left Eugene with a curious sense of warmth and
friendliness.  He was a stocky well-set man with iron-grey hair,
bushy eyebrows, and a red weathered face which wore the open colour
of the country on it, but also had the hard dull flush of the
steady heavy drinker.

Eugene never saw him drunk, and yet he was never sober: he was
one of those men who have drunk themselves past any hope of
drunkenness, who are soaked through to the bone with alcohol,
saturated, tanned, weathered in it so completely that it could
never be distilled out of their blood again.  Yet, even in this
terrible excess one felt a kind of grim control--the control of a
man who is enslaved by the very thing that he controls, the control
of the opium-eater who cannot leave his drug but measures out his
dose with a cold calculation, and finds the limit of his capacity,
and stops there, day by day.

But somehow this very sense of control, this blunt ruddy style
of the country gentleman which distinguished his speech, his
manner, and his dress, made the ruin of his life, the desperate
intemperance of drink that smouldered in him like a slow fire,
steadily, nakedly apparent.  It was as if, having lost everything,
he still held grimly to the outer forms of a lost standard, a
ruined state, when the inner substance was destroyed.

And it was this way with all of them--with Mrs. Coulson and the
girl as well: their crisp, clipped friendly speech never deviated
into intimacy, and never hinted at any melting into confidence and
admission.  Upon the woman's weathered face there hovered, when she
talked, the same faint set grin that Captain Nicholl had, and her
eyes were bright and hard, a little mad, impenetrable, as were his.
And the girl, although young and very lovely, sometimes had this
same look when she greeted anyone or paused to talk.  In that look
there was nothing truculent, bitter, or defiant: it was just the
look of three people who had gone down together, and who felt for
one another neither bitterness nor hate, but that strange
companionship of a common disgrace, from which love has vanished,
but which is more secret, silent, and impassively resigned to its
fatal unity than love itself could be.

And that hard bright look also said this plainly to the world:  "We
ask for nothing from you now, we want nothing that you offer us.
What is ours is ours, what we are we are, you'll not intrude nor
come closer than we let you see!"

Coulson might have been a man who had been dishonoured and
destroyed by his women, and who took it stolidly, saying nothing,
and drank steadily from morning until night, and had nothing for it
now but drink and silence and acceptance.  Yet Eugene never knew
for certain that this was so; it just seemed inescapable, and was
somehow legible not only in the slow smouldering fire that burned
out through his rugged weathered face, but also in the hard bright
armour of the women's eyes, the fixed set grin around their lips
when they were talking--a grin that was like armour, too.  And
Morison, who had referred to Coulson, chuckling, as a real "bottle-
a-day-man," had added quietly, casually, in his brief, indefinite
but blurted-out suggestiveness of speech:

"I think the old girl's been a bit of a bitch in her day. . . .
Don't know, of course, but has the look, hasn't she?"  In a moment
he said quietly, "Have you talked to the daughter yet?"

"Once or twice.  Not for long."

"Ran into a chap at Magdalen the other day who knows her," he said
casually.  "He used to come out here to see her."  He glanced
swiftly, slyly at Eugene, his face reddening a little with
laughter.  "Pretty hot, I gather," he said quietly, smiling, and
looked away.  It was night: the fire burned cheerfully in the
grate, the hot coals spurting in small gaseous flares from time to
time.  The house was very quiet all around them.  Outside they
could hear the stormy wind in the trees along the road.  Morison
flicked his cigarette into the fire, poured out a drink of whisky
into a glass, saying as he did so:  "I say, old chap, you don't
mind if I take a spot of this before I go to bed, do you?"  Then he
shot some seltzer in the glass and drank.  And Eugene sat there,
without a word, staring sullenly into the fire, dumbly conscious of
the flood of sick pain and horror which the casual foulness of the
man's suggestion had aroused, stubbornly trying to deny now that he
was thinking of the girl all the time.



LXXIII


One night, as Eugene was corning home along the dark road that went
up past the playing field to the house, and that was bordered on
each side by grand trees whose branches seemed to hold at night all
the mysterious and demented cadences of storm, he came upon her
suddenly standing in the shadow of a tree.  It was one of the grand
wild nights that seemed to come so often in the autumn of that
year: the air was full of a fine stinging moisture, not quite rain,
and above the stormy branches of the trees he could see the sky,
wild, broken, full of scudding clouds through which at times the
moon drove in and out with a kind of haggard loneliness.  By that
faint, wild, and broken light, he could see the small white oval of
the girl's face--somehow even more lovely now just because he could
not see it plainly.  And he could see as well the rough gleaming
bark of the tree against which she leaned.

As he approached, he saw her thrust her hand into the pocket of her
overcoat, a match flared, and for a moment he saw Edith plainly,
the small flower of her face framed in the wavering light as she
lowered her head to light her cigarette.

The light went out, he saw the small respiring glow of her
cigarette before the white blur of her face, he passed her swiftly,
head bent, without speaking, his heart filled with the sense of
strangeness and wonder which the family had roused in him.

Then he walked on up the road, muttering to himself.  The house was
dark when he got there, but when he entered his sitting-room the
place was still warmly and softly luminous with the glow of hot
coals in the grate.  He turned the lights on, shut the door behind
him, and hurled several lumps of coal upon the bedded coals.  In a
moment the fire was blazing and crackling cheerfully, and getting a
kind of comfort and satisfaction from this activity, he flung off
his coat, went over to the sideboard, poured out a stiff drink of
Scotch from a bottle there, and coming back to the fire, flung
himself into a chair and began to stare sullenly into the dancing
flames.

How long he sat there in this stupor of sullen and nameless fury he
did not know, but he was sharply roused at length by footsteps
light and rapid on the gravel, shocked into a start of surprise by
a figure that appeared suddenly at one of the French windows that
opened directly from his sitting-room on to the level sward of
velvet lawn before the house.

He peered through the glass for a moment with an astonished stare
before he recognized the face of Edith Coulson.  He opened the
doors at once, she came in quickly, smiling at his surprise and at
the glass which he was holding foolishly, half-raised, in his hand.

He continued to look at her with an expression of gape-mouthed
astonishment and in a moment became conscious of her smiling
glance, the cool sweet assurance of her young voice.

"I say!" she was saying cheerfully, "what a lucky thing to find you
up!  I came away without any key--I should have had to wake the
whole house up--so when I saw your light!" she concluded briskly,
"--what luck!  I hope you don't mind."

"Why no-o, no," Eugene stammered foolishly, still staring dumbly at
her.  "No--no-o--not at all," he blundered on.  Then suddenly
coming to himself with a burst of galvanic energy, he shut the
windows, pushed another chair before the fire, and said:

"Won't you sit down and have a drink before you go?"

"Thanks," she said crisply.  "I will--yes.  What a jolly fire you
have."  As she talked she took off her coat and hat swiftly and put
them on a chair.  Her face was flushed and rosy, beaded with small
particles of rain, and for a moment she stood before the mirror
arranging her hair, which had been tousled by the wind.

The girl was slender, tall, and very lovely with the kind of beauty
they have when they are beautiful--a beauty so fresh, fair, and
delicate that it seems to be given to just a few of them to
compensate for all the grimly weathered ugliness of the rest.  Her
voice was also lovely, sweet, and musical, and when she talked all
the notes of tenderness and love were in it.  But she had the same
hard bright look in her eye that her mother had, the faint set
smile around her mouth: as they stood there talking she was
standing very close to him, and he could smell the fragrance of her
hair, and felt an intolerable desire to put his hand upon hers and
was almost certain she would not draw away.  But the hard bright
look was in her eye, the faint set smile around her mouth, and he
did nothing.

"What'll you have?" Eugene said.  "Whisky?"

"Yes, thank you," she said with the same sweet crisp assurance with
which she always spoke, "and a splash of soda."  He struck a match
and held it for her while she lit the cigarette she was holding in
her hand, and in a moment returned to her with the drink.  Then she
sat down, crossed her legs, and for a moment puffed thoughtfully at
her cigarette as she stared into the fire.  The storm wind moaned
in the great trees along the road and near the house, and suddenly
a swirl of rain and wind struck the windows with a rattling blast.
The girl stirred a little in her chair, restlessly, shivered.

"Listen!" she said.  "What a night!  Horrible weather we have here,
isn't it?"

"I don't know.  I don't like the fog and rain so well.  But this--
the way it is tonight--" he nodded toward the window--"I like it."

She looked at him for a moment.

"Oh," she said non-committally.  "You do."  Then, as she sipped her
drink, she looked curiously about the room, her reflective glance
finally resting on his table, where there was a great stack of the
ledgers in which he wrote.

"I say," she cried again, "what are you doing with all those big
books there?"

"I write in them."

"Really?" she said, in a surprised tone.  "I should think it'd be
an awful bother carrying them around when you travel?"

"It is.  But it's the best way I've found of keeping what I do
together."

"Oh," she said, as before, and continued to stare curiously at him
with her fair, lovely young face, the curiously hard, bright, and
unrevealing glance of her eye.  "I see. . . .  But why do you come
to such a place as this to write?" she said presently.  "Do you
like it here?"

"I do.  As well as any place I've ever known."

"Oh! . . .  I should think a writer would want a different kind of
place."

"What kind?"

"Oh--I don't know--Paris--London--some place like that, where there
are lots of life--people--fun--I should think you'd work better in
a place like that."

"I work better here."

"But don't you get awfully fed up sitting in here all day long and
writing in these enormous books?"

"I do, yes."

"I should think you would . . . I should think you'd want to get
away from it sometimes."

"Yes.  I do want to--every day--almost all the time."

"Then why don't you?" she said crisply.  "Why don't you go off some
week-end for a little spree?  I should think it'd buck you up no
end."

"It would--yes.  Where should I go?"

"Oh, Paris, I suppose. . . .  Or London!  London!" she cried.
"London is quite jolly if you know it."

"I'm afraid I don't know it."

"But you've BEEN to London," she said in a surprised tone.

"Oh, yes.  I lived there for several months."

"Then you know London," she said impatiently.  "Of course you do."

"I'm afraid I don't know it very well.  I don't know many people
there--and after all, that's the thing that counts, isn't it?"

She looked at Eugene curiously for a moment, with the faint hard
smile around the edges of her lovely mouth.

"--Should think that might be arranged," she said with a quiet, an
enigmatic humour.  Then, more directly, she added:  "That shouldn't
be difficult at all.  Perhaps I could introduce you to some
people."

"That would be fine.  Do you know many people there?"

"Not many," she said.  "I go there--whenever I can."  She got up
with a swift decisive movement, put her glass down on the
mantelpiece and cast her cigarette into the fire.  Then she faced
Eugene, looking at him with a curiously bold, an almost defiant
directness, and she fixed him with this glance for a full moment
before she spoke.

"Good night," she said.  "Thanks awfully for letting me in--and for
the drink."

"Good night," Eugene said, and she was gone before he could say
more, and he had closed the door behind her, and he could hear her
light swift footsteps going down the hall and up the steps.  And
then there was nothing in the house but sleep and silence, and
storm and darkness in the world around him.

Mrs. Coulson came into Eugene's room just once or twice while he
was there.  One morning she came in, spoke crisply and cheerfully,
and walked over to the window, looking out upon the velvet lawn and
at the dreary, impenetrable grey of foggy air.  Although the room
was warm and there was a good fire burning in the grate, she
clasped her arms together as she looked, and shivered a little.

"Wretched weather, isn't it?" she said in her crisp tones, her
gaunt weathered face and toothy mouth touched by the faint fixed
grin as she looked out with her bright hard stare.  "Don't you find
it frightfully depressing?  Most Americans do," she said, getting a
sharp disquieting sound into the word.

"Yes.  I do, a little.  We don't have this kind of weather very
often.  But this is the time of year you get it here, isn't it?  I
suppose you're used to it by now?"

"Used to it?" she said crisply, turning her gaze upon him.  "Not at
all.  I've known it all my life, but I'll never get used to it.  It
is a wretched climate."

"Still, you wouldn't feel at home anywhere else, would you?  You
wouldn't want to live outside of England?"

"No?" she said, staring at him with the faint set grin around her
toothy mouth.  "Why do you think so?"

"Because your home is here."

"My home?  My home is where they have fine days and where the sun
is always shining."

"I wouldn't like that.  I'd get tired of sunlight all the time.
I'd want some grey days and some fog and snow."

"Yes, I suppose you would.  But then, you've been used to having
fine days all your life, haven't you?  With us, it's different.
I'm so fed up with fog and rain that I could do without them
nicely, thank you, if I never saw them again. . . .  I don't think
you could ever understand how much the sunlight means to us," she
said slowly.  She turned, and for a moment looked out of the
window.  "Sunlight--warmth--fine days for ever!  Warmth everywhere--
in the earth, the sky, in the lives of the people all around you,
nothing but warmth and sunlight and fine days!"

"And where would you go to find all that?  Does it exist?"

"Oh, of course!" she said crisply and good-naturedly, turning to
him again.  "There's only one place to live--only one country where
I want to live."

"Where is that?"

"Italy," she said.  "That's my real home. . . .  I'd live the rest
of my life there if I could."  For a moment longer she looked out
of the window, then turned briskly, saying:

"Why don't you run over to Paris some week-end?  After all, it's
only seven hours from London: if you left here in the morning you'd
be there in time for dinner.  It would be a good change for you.  I
should think a little trip like that would buck you up tremendously."

Her words gave him a wonderful feeling of confidence and hope: she
had travelled a great deal, and she had the casual, assured way of
speaking of a voyage that made it seem very easy and filled one
with a sense of joy and adventure when she spoke about it.  When
Eugene tried to think of Paris by himself it had seemed very far
away and hard to reach: London stood between it and him, and when
he thought of the huge smoky web of London, the soft grey skies
above him, and the enormous weight of lives that were hidden
somewhere in that impenetrable fog, a grey desolation and weariness
of the spirit filled him.  It seemed to him that he must draw each
breath of that soft grey air with heavy weary effort, and that
every mile of his journey would be a ghastly struggle through some
viscous and material substance, that weighted down his steps and
filled his heart with desolation.

But when Mrs. Coulson spoke to him about it, suddenly it all seemed
wonderfully easy and good.  England was magically small, the
Channel to be taken in a stride, and all the thrill, the joy, the
mystery of Paris his again--the moment that he chose to make it
his.

He looked at her gaunt weathered face, the hard bright armour of
her eyes, and wondered how anything so clear, so sharp, so crisp,
and so incisive could have been shaped and grown underneath these
soft and humid skies that numbed him, mind and heart and body, with
their thick dull substance of grey weariness and desolation.



A day or two before he left, Edith came into his room one afternoon
bearing a tray with tea and jam and buttered bread.  He was sitting
in his chair before the fire, and had his coat off: when she came
in he scrambled to his feet, reached for the coat and started to
put it on.  In her young crisp voice she told him not to, and put
the tray down on the table, saying that the maid was having her
afternoon off.

Then for a moment she stood looking at him with her faint and
enigmatic smile.

"So you're leaving us?" she said presently.

"Yes.  Tomorrow."

"And where will you go from here?" she said.

"To Germany, I think.  Just for a short time--two or three weeks."

"And after that?"

"I'm going home."

"Home?"

"Back to America."

"Oh," she said slowly.  "I see."  In a moment, she added, "We shall
miss you."

He wanted to talk to her more than he had ever wanted to talk to
anyone in his life, but when he spoke all that he could say,
lamely, muttering, was:

"I'll miss you, too."

"Will you?"  She spoke so quietly that he could scarcely hear her.
"I wonder for how long?" she said.

"For ever," he said, flushing miserably at the sound of the word,
and yet not knowing any other word to say.

The faint hard smile about her mouth was a little deeper when she
spoke again.

"For ever?  That's a long time, when one is young as you," she
said.

"I mean it.  I'll never forget you as long as I live."

"We shall remember you," she said quietly.  "And I hope you think
of us some time--back here, buried, lost, in all the fog and rain
and ruin of England.  How good it must be to know that you are
young in a young country--where nothing that you did yesterday
matters very much.  How wonderful it must be to know that none of
the failure of the past can pull you down--that there will always
be another day for you--a new beginning.  I wonder if you Americans
will ever know how fortunate you are," the girl said.

"And yet you couldn't leave all this?" Eugene said with a kind of
desperate hope.  "This old country you've lived in, known all your
life.  A girl like you could never leave a place like this to live
the kind of life we have in America."

"COULDN'T I?" she said with a quiet but unmistakable passion of
conviction.  "There's nothing I'd like better."

Eugene stared at her blindly, dumbly for a moment; suddenly all
that he wanted to say, and had not been able to say, found release
in a movement of his hands.  He gripped her by the shoulders and
pulled her to him, and began to plead with her:

"Then why don't you?  I'll take you there!--Look here--" his words
were crazy and he knew it, but as he spoke them he believed all he
said--"Look here!  I haven't got much money--but in America you can
make it if you want to!  I'm going back there.  You come too--I'll
take you when I go!"

She had not tried to free herself; she just stood there passive,
unresisting, as he poured that frenzied proposal in her ears.  Now,
with the same passive and unyielding movement, the bright armour of
her young eyes, she stepped away, and stood looking at him silently
for a moment.  Then slowly, with an almost imperceptible movement,
she shook her head.  "Oh, you'll forget all about us," she said
quietly.  "You'll forget about our lives here--buried in fog--and
rain--and failure--and defeat."

"Failure and defeat won't last for ever."

"Sometimes they do," she said with a quiet finality that froze his
heart.

"Not for you--they won't!" Eugene said, and took her by the hand
again with desperate entreaty.  "Listen to me--" he blundered on
incoherently, with the old feeling of nameless shame and horror.
"You don't need to tell me what it is--I don't want to know--but
whatever it is--for you, it doesn't matter--you can get the best of
it."

She said nothing, but just looked at him through that hard bright
armour of her eyes, the obdurate finality of her smile.

"Good-bye," she said, "I'll not forget you either."  She looked at
him for a moment curiously before she spoke again.  "I wonder," she
said slowly, "if you'll ever understand just what it was you did
for me by coming here?"

"What was it?"

"You opened a door that I thought had been closed for ever," she
said, "a door that let me look in on a world I thought I should
never see again--a new bright world, a new life and a new
beginning--for us all.  And I thought that was something which
would never happen to anyone in this house again."

"It will to you," Eugene said, and took her hand again with
desperate eagerness.  "It can happen to you whenever you want it
to.  It's yours, I'll swear it to you, if you'll only speak."

She looked at him, with an almost imperceptible movement of her
head.

"I tell you I know what I'm talking about."

Again she shook her head.

"You don't know," she said.  "You're young.  You're an American.
There are some things you'll never be old enough to know.--For some
of us there's no return.--Go back," she said, "go back to the life
you know--the life you understand--where there can always be a new
beginning--a new life."

"And you--" Eugene said dumbly, miserably.

"Good-bye, my dear," she said so low and gently he could scarcely
hear her.  "Think of me sometimes, won't you?--I'll not forget
you."  And before he could speak she kissed him once and was gone,
so light and swift that he did not know it, until the door had
closed behind her.  And for some time, like a man in a stupor, he
stood there looking out of the window at the grey wet light of
England.

The next day he went away, and never saw any of them again, but he
could not forget them.  Although he had never passed beyond the
armour of their hard bright eyes, or breached the wall of their
crisp, friendly, and impersonal speech, or found out anything about
them, he always thought of them with warmth, with a deep and tender
affection, as if he had always known them--as if, somehow, he could
have lived with them or made their lives his own had he only said a
word or turned the handle of a door--a word he never knew, a door
he never found.



LXXIV


The day before he went away, the Rhodes scholars invited Eugene to
lunch.  That was a fine meal: they ate together in their rooms in
college, they had opened their purses to the college chef, and had
told him not to spare himself but to go the limit.  Before the meal
they drank together a bottle of good sherry wine, and as they ate
they drank the college ale, strong, brown, and mellow, and when
they came to coffee, they all finished off on a bottle of port
apiece.

There was a fine thick seasonable soup, of the colour of mahogany,
and then a huge platter piled high with delicate brown-golden
portions of filet of sole, and a roast of mutton, tender, fragrant,
juicy and delicious as no other mutton that Eugene had ever eaten,
with red currant jelly, well-seasoned sprouts, and boiled potatoes,
to go with it, and at the end a fine apple-tart, thick cream, sharp
cheese, and crackers.

It was a fine meal, and when they finished with it they were all
happy and exultant.  They were beautifully drunk and happy, with
that golden, warm, full-bodied and most lovely drunkenness that can
come only from good rich wine and mellow ale and glorious and
abundant food--a state that we recognize instantly when it comes to
us as one of the rare, the priceless, the unarguable joys of
living, something stronger than philosophy, a treasure on which no
price can be set, a sufficient reward for all the anguish,
weariness, and disappointment of living, and a far better teacher
than Aquinas ever was.

They were all young men and when they had finished they were drunk,
glorious, and triumphant as only young men can be.  It seemed to
them now that they could do no wrong, or make no error, and that
the whole earth was a pageantry of delight which had been shaped
solely for their happiness, possession, and success.  The Rhodes
scholars no longer felt the old fear, confusion, loneliness, bitter
inferiority and desolation of the soul which they had felt since
coming there.

The beauty, age, and grandeur of the life about them were revealed
as they had never been before, their own fortune in living in such
a place seemed impossibly good and happy, nothing in this life
around them now seemed strange or alien, and they all felt that
they were going to win, and make their own, a life among the
highest and most fortunate people on the earth.

As for Eugene, he now thought of his departure exultantly, and with
intolerable desire, not from some joy of release, but because
everything around him now seemed happy, glorious, and beautiful,
and a token of unspeakable joys that were to come, a thousand
images of trains, of the small rich-coloured joy and comfort and
precision of their trains, of England, lost in fog, and swarming
with its forty million lives, but suddenly not dreary, but
impossibly small, and beautiful and near, to be taken at a stride,
to be compassed at a bound, to enrich him, fill him, be his for
ever in all its joy and mystery and magic smallness.

And he thought of the huge smoky web of London with this same joy:
of the suave potent ale he could get in one place there, of its
squares, and ancient courts, and age-grimed mysteries, and of the
fog-numb strangeness of ten million passing men and women.  He
thought of the swift rich projectile of the channel train, the
quays, the Channel boats, and darkness, night, the sudden onslaught
of the savage choppy seas outside the harbour walls, and England
fading, and the flashing beacon lights of France, the quays again,
the little swarming figures, the excited tongues, the strange dark
faces of the Frenchmen, the always-alien, magic, time-enchanted
strangeness of the land, the people, and the faces; and then Paris,
the nostalgic, subtle and incomparably exciting fabric of its life,
its flavour, and its smell, the strange opiate of its time, the
rediscovery of its food, its drink, the white, carnal, and
luxurious bodies of the ladies of easy virtue.

They were all exultant, wild, full of joy and hope and invincible
belief as they thought of all these things and all the glory and
the mystery that the world held treasured for their taking in the
depths of its illimitable resources; and they shouted, sang, shook
hands and roared with laughter, and had no doubts, or fears, or
dark confusions, as they had done in other, younger, and more
certain times.

Then they started out across the fields behind the colleges, and
the fields were wet and green, the trees smoky-grey and blurred in
magic veils of bluish mist, and the worn path felt, looked, and
seemed incredibly familiar, like a field they had crossed, a path
they had trod, a million times.  And at length they came to their
little creek-wise river, their full, flowing little river of dark
time and treasured history, their quiet, narrow, deeply flowing
little river, uncanny in the small perfection of its size, as it
went past soundlessly among the wet fresh green of the fields that
hemmed it with a sweet, kept neatness of perfection.

Then, having crossed, they went up along the river path until they
came to where the crews were waiting--the Merton crew before,
another college crew behind, and the students of both colleges
clustered eagerly on the path beside their boats, exhorting their
comrades in the shell, waiting for the signal that would start the
race.

Then, even as the Rhodes scholars pounded on Eugene's back and
roared at him with an exuberant affection that "You've got to run
with us!  You've got to root for us!  You belong to Merton now!"
the starting-gun cracked out, the crews bent furiously to their
work, the long blades bit frantically the cold grey water, and the
race was on.  And they were racing lightly, nimbly now, two packs
of young men running on the path, each yelping cries of sharp
encouragement to his crew as he ran on beside it.

At first, as Eugene ran, he felt strong and lithe and eager.  He
was aware of an aerial buoyancy: his step was light, his stride was
long and easy, his breath came softly, without labour, and the
swift feet of the running boys thudded before, behind, around him,
on the hard path, pleasantly, and he was secure in his strength and
certitude again, and thought that he was one of them and could run
with them to the end of the world and back and never feel it.

He thought he had recovered all the lean sinew and endurance of a
boy, that the storm-swift flight, the speed, the hard condition,
and resilient effort of a boy were his again, that he had never
lost them, that they had never changed.  Then a leaden heaviness
began to steal along his limbs, he felt the weariness of effort for
the first time, a thickening slowness in the muscles of his legs, a
numb weight-like heaviness tingling at his finger-tips, and now he
no longer looked so sharply and so smartly at the swinging crew
below him, the nimbly running boys around him.

He began to pound ahead with dogged and deliberate effort, and his
heart was pounding like a hammer at his ribs, his breath was
labouring hoarsely in his throat and his tongue felt numb and thick
and swollen in his mouth, and blind motes were swimming drunkenly
before his eyes.  He could hear his voice, unfamiliar and detached,
weirdly unreal, as if someone else were speaking in him, as it
panted hoarsely:

"Come on, Merton! . . .  Come on, Merton! . . .  Come on, Merton!"

And now the nimbler running footsteps all around him had passed,
had gone ahead of him, had vanished.  He could no longer see the
crews nor know if they were there.  He ran on blindly, desperately,
hearing, seeing, saying nothing any longer, an anguished leaden
creature, weighted down with a million leaden hours and weary
efforts, pounding heavily, blindly, mindlessly along, beneath grey
timeless skies of an immortal weariness, across the grey barren
earth of some huge planetary vacancy--where there was neither shade
nor stay nor shelter, where there would never be a resting-place, a
room, nor any door which he could enter, and where he must pound
blindly, wearily along, alone, through that huge vacancy for ever.

Then voices swarmed around him once again and he could feel strong
hands on him.  They seized him, stopped him, and familiar faces
swarmed forward at him through those swimming motes of blind grey
vacancy.  He could hear again the hoarse ghost-unreality of his own
voice panting:  "Come on, Merton!" and see his friends again, now
grinning, laughing, shouting, as they shook him.  "Stop!  The race
is over!  Merton won!"



LXXV


Their names were Octave Feuillet, Alfred Capus, and Maurice Donnay;
their names were Hermant, Courteline, and René Bazin; their names
were Jules Renard, Marcelle Tinayre, and André Theuriet; and
Clarétie, and Frapié and Tristan Bernard; and de Régnier and Paul
Reboux, and Lavedan; their names were Rosny, Gyp, Boylesve, and
Richepin; their names were Bordeaux, Prévost, Margueritte, and
Duvernois--their names, Great God! their names were countless as
the sands upon the shore--and in the end, their names were only
names and names and names--and nothing more.

Or, if their names were something more than names--if they
sometimes shaped themselves in his mind as personalities--these
personalities were faded, graceful, and phantasmal ones--each
talented and secure in his position and curiously alike--each brave
and good and gentle in his trade, like lesser-known knights of the
Round Table.  He knew that few of them had been the hero of a
generation, the leader of a century; he knew that none of them had
rivalled Balzac, surpassed Stendhal, outdone Flaubert.  And for
this reason, their vague, phantasmal company became more haunting-
strange to him than if they had.

He knew, as well, that there must be among them great differences
of talent, great differences of style.  His reason told him that
some were good, and some were fair, and some were only cheap; even
his meagre understanding of their tongue showed him that there was
a great range, every kind of difference in their choice and
treatment of a subject--a range that swept from the gracefully
ironic sentiment of Les Vacances d'un Jeune Homme Sage to the stern
earth-and-peasant austerity of Le Blé qui lève; from the dream
nostalgia of Le Passé Vivant to the salty and difficult drolleries
of Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir or Le Train de 8 heures 47.

He knew that each of these men must have had his own style, his
special quality which would instantly be discerned and appraised by
a French reader; he knew that some had written of the quiet life of
the provinces, and that others wrote of the intrigue, the love
affairs, the worldly and sophisticated gentry of Paris; he knew
that some were writers of a graceful sentiment, some delicately
ironic, some drolly comic, some savagely satiric, and some grimly
tragic.

But all of them seemed to come from the same place, to have the
same quality, to evoke the same perfume.  They were the vague and
shadowy figures of a charming, beautiful, and legendary kind of
life--a life that was all the more legendary to him because he was
constantly groping with half-meanings, filling in his faulty
understanding of the language with painful intuitions, tearing
desperately at the contents of unnumbered volumes, with a tortured
hunger of frustration, an aching brain, a dictionary in one hand
and one of these slick and flimsy little volumes in another.

And for this reason, perhaps, as much as any other--because of this
savage struggle with an alien tongue, this agonizing, half-
intuitive effort by which he groped his way to understanding
through a book--the books themselves, and these graceful and
shadowy figures who produced them, took on a quality that was as
strange as the whole experience of these first weeks in Paris had
become.  Indeed, in later years, the legendary quality of his
savage conflict with this world of print became indistinguishably
mixed with the legendary quality of the life around him.  Perhaps,
even the swift, graceful, and fascinating little drawings and
illustrations which dotted the pages of these books were in some
measure responsible for this illusion: the pictures gave to the
hard and difficult pages of a thousand fictions the illusion of an
actual reality: in these little pictures he could see and recognize
a thousand things that had already grown familiar to him--the
narrow sidewalks and the tall and ancient houses of the Latin
Quarter, the bridges of the Seine, the interior of a railway
compartment, the great grilled gate of a château, people sitting at
the tables in a café or on the terrace, the walls, the roofs, the
chimney-pots of Paris which, no matter what changes had come about
in human costume, feminine fashions, top-hats, frock-coats, or
facial whiskerage had themselves changed very little.

The most extraordinary and vividly imagined phenomenon of his
desperate struggle to understand these innumerable fictions was
this:  Although his reason told him that all these men--all these
phantasmal and haunting names--Feuillet, Capus, Donnay, Tinayre,
Boylesve, Bazin, Theuriet--and all the rest of them--must have
known all the sweat and anguish of hard labour, the solicitude, the
grinding effort, and the desperate patience, that every artist
knows, he became obsessed, haunted with the idea that the works of
all this graceful, strange, and fortunate company were written
without effort, with the most superb casualness and ease.  It was
his strange delusion that all of them were not only of an equal
talent--could do all kinds of writing equally well and with equal
ease--but that the reason for this marvellous endowment lay somehow
in the fact that they were "French"--that by the fortunate accident
of race and birth each one had somehow been constituted an artist
who could do all things gracefully and well, and could do nothing
wrong.  Favoured at birth by the great inheritance of their
language, blood, and temperament, they grew up as children of a
beautiful, strange, and legendary civilization whose very tongue
was a guarantee of style, whose very tradition an assurance of
form.  These men could write nothing badly because it was not
within the blood and nature of their race to do so: they must do
everything gracefully, easily, and with an impeccable sense of
form, because grace and ease and form were innate to them.

Finally, the, most extraordinary fact of this curious obsession was
his belief that all these books had been written by their authors
not in the stern and lonely solitude of some midnight room, but
swiftly, casually, and easily, as one might write a letter at the
table of a café.

The obsession was so strong that he could see them writing at such
a place--Feuillet, Capus, Donnay, Bazin--all the rest of them, each
seated in the afternoon at his own inviolable table in his
favourite café, each with a writing pad, a pen and ink before him,
a half-emptied bock or glass of wine beside him, an adoring and
devoted old waiter hovering anxiously near him--each writing
steadily, rapidly, and gracefully the pages of some new and
faultless story, some graceful, perfect book, filling up page after
page of manuscript in their elegant, fine handwriting, without
erasures or deletions, pausing thoughtfully from time to time to
stare dreamily away, stroking their lank, disordered hair, their
elegant French whiskers with a thin white hand, and so far from
being distracted by the gaiety, the noise and clatter of the café
crowd around them, deriving a renewed vitality from its sparkling
stimulation, and returning to fill up page after page again.

And he could see them meeting every afternoon--that band of
Bohemian immortality, that fortunate and favoured company of art
that could do no wrong--in some café on the Boulevards, or in some
quiet, gracious old place hallowed by their patronage, in the Latin
Quarter, in Montparnasse, or on the Boulevard St. Michel or in
Montmartre.

He saw the whole scene with a blazing imagery, an exact detail, as
if he had himself been present and seen and heard it all.  He could
hear the spirited light clamour of their conversation--like
everything they did, gracious, faultless, full of ease--could see
them rise to greet their famous comrades--whoever they might be--
Feuillet, Capus, or Donnay, all the rest of them--could see them
shake hands with the swift, firm greeting, so graceful, worldly,
and so French, and hear them saying:

"Ah, my dear Maurice--how goes it with you?  But--I see that I
disturb you--pardon, my friend!--I see that you are busy with
another of your admirable tales--Ah-h, my old one, not for the
world would I disturb the flow of your so admirable genius.
Parbleu!  Do I wish my wretched name to become infamous to all
posterity, to be heard with execration--ah, the devil!  Non!  The
black forgetfulness of the grave is better!  Eh, well, then, old
comrade, till tomorrow--THEN I hope--"

"Ah, but no, but no, but no, but no, but no!  My dear Octave, you
shall remain!  These pages here!--Pouf! it is nothing!  I am
already done--Attend!"  Swiftly he scrawls a line or two, and then
triumphantly:  "Voilà!  C'est fini, old cock!  A trifle I was
finishing for my scoundrel of a publisher, who demands it for
tomorrow.--But, tell me, my dear boy--what the devil kept you in
the provinces for so long a time--so long away from this dear Pa-
ree?  Ah, how we have missed you: my dear fellow; Paris really
never is the same unless you are here to give it grace!  Tiens!
Tiens!  Poor Courteline has been quite inconsolable!  Capus has
sworn daily he would go and fetch you back!  Tinayre is grouchy as
a bear!  My dear fellow, we have all lamented you!  De Régnier was
certain you had got another mistress!  Boylesve insisted that she
was at least a duchess--Bazin, a milkmaid--"

"And you, my old one?"

"I?  My dear fellow--I knew it must be chicken-pox or measles: I
was certain you would not have to stir a foot out of Pa-ree to find
a wench."

"But tell me, Octave, how are all our friends?  I am starved for
news, I have read nothing.  First of all--René--?"

"Has published another admirable work--an excellent study of life
in the provinces."

"Ah, good.  And Duvernois?"

"His latest comedy has been produced and is un succès fou--a
charming thing--witty, naughty, quiet in his best vein, my dear
boy."

"Renard?"

"A comedy, a book of stories, a romance--all excellent, all doing
well."

"And Courteline?"

"Une chose incomparable, my boy: a book of dialogues in his
drollest vein--the public is convulsed: the police are in a
towering rage about Le Gendarme est sans Pitié--"

"And Abel?"

"A formidable book, my lad--just what you would expect, a powerful
tragedy, exact psychology, brilliant--but here he comes, all
smiles--ah-h!  I thought so!  He sees you--My dear Abel, welcome:
behold, our prodigal has come home again--"

Yes, it was so that it was done, without anguish, error, or
maddening of the soul.

And far, far away from all this certain grace, this ease of form,
this assured attaining of expression--there lay America--and all
the dumb hunger of its hundred million tongues, its unfound form,
its unborn art.  Far, far away from this enchanted legend of a
city--there lay America and the brutal stupefaction of its million
streets, its unquiet heart, its vast incertitude, the huge sprawled
welter of its life--its formless and illimitable distances.

And Great God!  Great God! but it was farther, stranger than a
dream--he noted its cruelty, savagery, horror, error, loss and
waste of life, its murderous criminality, and its hypocritic mask
of virtue, its lies, its horrible falseness, and its murderous
closure of a telling tongue--and Great God!  Great God! with every
pulse and fibre in him, with the huge, sick ache of an intolerable
homelessness, he was longing with every beating of his anguished
heart for just one thing--RETURN!



Day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute, the blind hunger
tore at his naked entrails with a vulture's beak.  He prowled the
streets of Paris like a maddened animal, he hurled himself at the
protean complexities of its million-footed life like a soldier who
hurls himself into a battle: he was baffled, sick with despair,
wrung, trembling and depleted, finally exhausted, caught in the
toils of that insatiate desire, that terrible devouring hunger that
grew constantly from what it fed upon and that drove him blindly to
madness.  The hopeless and unprofitable struggle of the Faustian
life had never been so horribly evident as it now was--the futility
of his insane efforts to memorize every stone and paving brick in
Paris, to burn the vision of his eyes through walls and straight
into the lives and hearts of a million people, to read all the
books, eat all the food, drink all the wine, to hold the whole
gigantic panorama of the universe within his memory, and somehow to
make "one small globe of all his being," to compact the accumulated
experience of eternity into the little prism of his flesh, the
small tenement of his brain, and somehow to use it all for one
final, perfect, all-inclusive work--his life's purpose, his heart's
last pulse and anguish, and his soul's desire.

As a result of all this anguished and frustrated struggle he began
now to go about with a small notebook in his pocket, the worn stub
of a chewed pencil in his hands.

And because everything went into this mad mélange, because by every
one of these scrawls of notes and sometimes incoherent words--even
by the thousands of crude drawings, swift designs which he scrawled
down in a thousand towns and places, to get the texture of a wall,
the design of a door, the shape of a table, even the sword-cut on a
man's scarred face--because in all of these shells and splinters
that were thrown off from his tormented and uneasy brain the
terrible Faustian fever of his tortured spirit was evident--no
better image of his life--the life of a young man of that period--
of modern man caught in the Faustian serpent-toils of modern life--
can be given than the splintered jottings in these battered little
books afford.

Here, then, picked out at random from the ferment of ten thousand
pages and a million words--put down just as they were written, in
fragments, jots, or splintered flashes, without order or coherence--
here, with all its vanity, faith, despair, joy, and anguish, with
all its falseness, error and pretension, and with all its desperate
sincerity, its incredible hope, its insane desire, is a picture of
a man's soul and heart--the image of his infuriate desire--caught
hot and instant, drawn flaming from the forge of his soul's agony.


Monday, November 17, 1924:  Worked over 5 hours up to present
(9.40)  Cigarettes and coffee--Very tired.


Tuesday:  Worked 4 hours yesterday.  Very tired today only an hour--
more tonight--


Wednesday:  Good week's work last week--Four or five hours' ACTUAL
writing every day--I may succeed ultimately because I'm not content
with what I do.

I was born in 1900--I am now 24 years old.  During that period I
think the best writing in English has been done by James Joyce in
"Ulysses"--I think the best writing in the ballad has been done by
G. K. Chesterton in "Lepanto."  The best writing in sustained
narrative verse by John Masefield--particularly in "The Dauber,"
"The River" and "The Widow in The Bye Street."  Who produce
copiously--Arnold Bennett--The best practitioners of the Essay--
Belloc--the most gigantically thorough realist--Theodore Dreiser--
The most sparing selection and unfailingly competent--Galsworthy--
The best play for Poetry--"The Playboy of Western World"--The best
journalist--Sinclair Lewis.

The critic with the greatest subtlety--T. S. Eliot--The critic with
the greatest range and power--H. L. Mencken--The best woman writer--
May Sinclair--The next best--Virginia Woolf--The next best--Willa
Cather.


Wednesday Night--November 26, 1924:  At midnight eating at Chez
Marianne--First day I have not worked for two weeks but am going
home to work after eating.  Up at 12.30 today after last night felt
sick--walked to bank--found no mail--wrote and sent letters to Mama
and to University.  Talked to young fellow in bank about
Switzerland--had lunch at Taverne Royale--Took taxi to Place des
Vosges--Went to Victor Hugo Museum--Walked around Square--then back
to Carnavalet--at National Archives--The narrow streets, the narrow
sidewalks, the great buses, taxis, autos, bicycles, trucks and the
catty people jabbering and squalling got me in a stew--Looked over
distressing tons of books at a bookshop, and went on feeling
crushed--Bought two books--Then got taxi Rue du Temple and so home
through the jam of Rue de Rivoli--Women outside pawing cheap
articles at Samaritaine.  Then home to hotel where bathed went out
to Deux Magots two aperitifs then to Apollo Revue!--Not as bad as
some--one or two good songs--but of course, on whole quite stupid.


Thursday--November 27, 1924:  At one, after working till five this
morning.  Dining at Drouant's--very rich, red restaurant filled
with business men talking of les Anglais, les Américains, et cinq
cent mille francs--at Drouant's--a cold consommé, a rumpsteak
grille--avec des pommes soufflées--a fond d'artichaut Mornay (a
cheese and cream dressing and the ends of artichokes--delicious) a
coffee and a half bottle of Nuit St. Georges couvert 4 fr. total 44
fr.

At one table three Frenchmen of 50 or more--one of 40--one with
black beard--coal-black, neatly trimmed, naked around jaws--another
a heavy distinguished man--grey beard pompadoured--grey close-
cropped moustache--high-coloured--nervous grey eyes shot with red--
hands white, taut and tapping constantly, while the face smiles--
talks politely--another a red gnarled satanic face--fierce with
rich foods and wines--smooth-shaven--and the youngest--black hair,
a black moustache--a quiet smiling, well-fleshed type.  He had rich
colour--red shot with richness, the satanic yet not unpleasant cast
of face--the cropped brown moustache and such pompadoured brownish
hair--a Gallic type.

LATER:  Seated at the café in front of Magasin du Louvre and Palais
Royal--Heard a high even monotone that tickles the ear like a
dynamo--It made me think of a great locomotive in the yards at
Altamont--steam shut off (perhaps) and the high small ear-tickling
dynamic noise they make.


Tuesday--December 2, 1924:

                     MOCK LITERARY ANECDOTES:

Young mannered voice of Harvard johnny:  "Oh!  Simply PRICELESS!
Don't you L-O-O-VE that?

. . . MARVELLOUS!" etc.--telling what Oscar said to Whistler, and
what Whistler answered him.

A certain kind of mind collects these--pale, feeble, rootless,
arty, hopeless, lost--Joel Pierce tells them, too.  First time I
heard them at Harvard what sophisticated raconteurs I thought
them!--God, how green I was!  "You will, Oscar, you will," and all
the rest of it!--Today, sitting on terrace at Taverne Royale, I
made some of my own.  Here they are:

One day as Whistler was standing before a window in St. James's
Street observing some prints of Battersea Bridge, he was accosted
by Oscar Wilde coming in the opposite direction.  "You will, James,
you will," said Wilde with generous impulsiveness.

"Gad," remarked the inimitable James, imperturbably adjusting his
monocle, "I wish I had said that!"

One day in June, Anatole France went to Rodin's studio for
luncheon.  The talk having turned to early Greek primitives, Rodin
remarked:

"Some writers have a great deal to say and an atrocious style.  But
you, dear Master, have a delicious style."

"And you, Master?" queried France ironically, allowing his eyes to
rest upon the torso of The Thinker, "since when did you become a
critic?"

In the burst of laughter that followed the thrust, Rodin had to
admit himself floored for once.

A young actor who had, it must be confessed, more ambition than
talent, one day rushed excitedly up to Sir Henry Irving during the
rehearsal of "Hamlet":

"It seems to me, sir," he burst out without preliminaries, "that
some actors ruin their parts by overplaying them."

"And some," remarked Sir Henry, after an awful pause, "don't."

One day Sir James Barrie discovered Bernard Shaw while he was
lunching at the Athenæum, staring somewhat disconsolately at an
unsavoury mess of vegetables that adorned his plate.

"I hear you are working on a new play," remarked Barrie,
whimsically eyeing the contents of the platter.

For once G. B. S. had no answer ready.

Why won't these do?

(Suggestion to Young American writing Book Reviews for New York
Times in classical, simple, god-like manner of Anatole France.)

"The new book of Monsieur Henry Spriggins, which lies before me on
my desk, fills me with misgivings.  The author is young and
intolerant of simple things.  He is full of talent, but he is
proud, and has not a simple heart.  What a pity!" (etc.)


Wednesday--December 3, 1924:  Comédie Francaise tonight "Les
Plaideurs"--and "Phèdre"--Respect for play grew and for actors
diminished and went on--The French applauded loudly when Madame
Weber ended a long declamation on a screech.

LATER:  To Régence and Harry's--Bought some books along the quays--
Saw Mrs. Martin at hotel today--Story of how she had been robbed--
The picture galleries and antique shops of Rue des Saints-Pères.


Saturday--December 6:

Young Icarus lies drowned, God knows where.

Oxford in pursuit of a woman--one of the most dreary spectacles God
hath given--Buol's in the afternoon--

Foolish Question:  Why are the Tories so eager to say Democracy has
failed?

Hair like a copper cloud--feather and flame come back again.

The gutted plums bee-burrowed.

The poisoned inch around the heart.

The cancerous inch.

The burning inch of tongue.

The hairy grass.

The long sea-locks.

The hairy seas.

The other gate of ivory--

Ida--Cadmus--blunt drummed woodenly with blunt fingers.  Sir
Leoline the baron rich--Thunder-cuffing Zeus--Erasmus fed on rotten
eggs--what a breath--Has an angel local motion or "The goose-soft
snow."

Feathery snow--The feather-quilted snow.

Freckled eyes.

Wild Ceres through the wheat.

The slow dance of dancers.

The gull swerves seaward like hope--September full of departing
leaves and wings.

He sat alone four thousand miles from home--the lonely death of
seas at dawn.

The decent and untainted eyes that look on spattered death--Myself
dreaming of old battles--For a child the spear goes clearly
through--The musical horns beg and the battles press--The phantasy
of bloody death:  The cloven brain-pan--the one lost second near
enough to touch its brother life, but infinitely far.

The wind-blown lights of the town.

A branch of stars.

A hen and a pig.

Quills--frills.

Mired--feathers.

The vast low stammer of the night.

By the rim--the geese go waddling to the Fair.

The minute-whirring flies buzz home to death.

"Old England will muddle through, my lads"--

She has muddled and she's through: but she's not through muddling.

Gull-cry and gull are gone.

Shadow and hawk are gone.

Shadow and hawk are gone.

Shadow and hawk are--


Friday Night--December 12, 1924:  The Fratellini Brothers:  How in
his rich robe I saw him--the younger brother--waiting for the act--
the waiting is all over--The burlesque musical act--They were
great, sad, epic--what clowns should be.


Salle Rubens with all the MEAT--All the people clustered about--
dull.

Mona Ugly Lisa.

The Virgin with Saint Anne--a great picture.

Guido Reni--the sainted and sugared faces.

The Italians--Veronese--The Cana--The Gigantic three-storey
canvases.

Zurberan--Goya and the Grey--Picture of a Gentleman on horseback--
Nicolas Maes--Rembrandt's picture of his brother.

Sam's--The man from San Francisco with the loud, dark, debauched
face.

"We had ham and eggs for lunch across at Ciro's, Anne"--the two
barkeepers in Harry's, "Chip" and Bob--names of dogs and horses.


Velasquez in the Louvre.


Vetzel's again 12.30 Apéritif (X365)  The arch of the opera I have
never seen before, things sit like this.

[Here follows drawing]

Remember "Faust" at The Opéra.

The Promenoirs--The vast stage--click-clack of feet in the music.

I awoke this morning in a crucifixion of fear and nervousness--What
if they hadn't written?  What?  What?  What?

My agony as I approached the place--My distrust of Paris in peril--
City of light disloyalties.  Sun never shines more than two days
(for me) here--Went to American Express--Harry's Bar--The men at
Vetzel's eating--

The French are not bad but children--old men too wise and kind for
hatred--but French French French and Suspicious.

How beautiful the Fratellini are!  How fine a thing is a French
circus!  Their enormous interest in children--The lion-taming act--
by far the best and finest I have ever seen--and I felt sorry for
the lions--Savoir is right in this.


Monday--December 15, 1924:  I am getting a new sense of control--
millions of books don't annoy me so much--went along the Seine
today after Louvre--most of it worthless old rubbish I must begin
to put up my fences now--I can't take the world or this city with
me.

Things in Paris I must see at once--Père Lachaise--ALSO investigate
old quarter again around Place des Vosges--Go THERE first thing
tomorrow--Go to Cluny Musée again--And up and down Rue de la Seine--
Also Ile St. Louis.

Books I want:  Julien Benda--New one by Soupault (?) Charles
Derennes--L'Education Sexuelle.  Read one of the Vautel things.

Get for inspection--and at random Le Petit Livre--Mon Livre Favori--
Bibl. Nationale--Livre Epatant--go into Court of Palais Royal--
Investigate there--

Louvre today--Mantegna's picture of St. Sebastian C.

Giotto's great picture of St. Francis d'Assisi receiving stigma
from Christ--

Gros--Pictures of Napoleon at war--The one of the leper's house at
Jaffa a good one--Huge naked leper held in kneeling position--
Weight of body.

Books I want--Go to bookstalls in Seine for books on Paris twenty
or thirty years ago with naughty illustrations.


Tuesday--December 16, 1924:  Along Seine again--Looked at thousands
of books and bought one--a critique on Julien Benda--Miles and
miles of books--but also, miles and miles of repetitions--

The pictures--cavaliers seducing pretty ladies; one of women half
naked embracing pillow--called Le Rêve--People in old French stage-
comedies--Then 1000's of La Chimie, La Physique, La Géologie,
L'Algèbre, La Géométrie--

Letters--Morceaux Choisis of XVIII S.  All the authors I have never
heard of--but THAT is the same at home.


Wednesday--December 17, 1924:  Today bought books--Bookshop on Rue
St. Honoré--Stock's.

Bought Benda there--Along the river--Tons of Trash--L'Univers--The
Miracle of France--4 mos. in the United States, etc. etc.--Les
Cicéron, Ovide, Sénèque, etc.

Bought Confessions of Alfred Musset--Stall at Pont Neuf with dirty
books--Journal d'une Masseuse.

Sadie Blackeyes--Lovers of The Whip--The Pleasures of Married Life--
The Galleries of The Palais Royal where the bookshops are--Whole
series edited by Guillaume Apollinaire--

Pictures, stamps, coins--Daumier-like picture of man having tooth
pulled--Then the near dirty ones of ladies with silver wings--
Silhouette-like--Then the near XVIII Century ones.

Old Books--Seem to be millions of these too--Essais de l'Abbé Chose
sur la Morale, etc.

The Faustian hell again!


At la Régence: Semaine de Noël, 1924:

The people who say they "read nothing but the best" are not, as
some people call them, snobs.  They are fools.  The battle of the
Spirit is not to read and to know the best--it is to find it--The
thing that has caused me so much toil and trouble has come from a
deep-rooted mistrust in me of all cultured authority.  I hunger for
the treasure that I fancy lies buried in a million forgotten books,
and yet my reason tells me that the treasure that lies buried there
is so small that it is not worth the pain of disinterment.

And yet nearly everything in the world of books that has touched my
life most deeply has come from authority.  I have not always agreed
with authority that all the books called great ARE great, but
nearly all the books that have seemed great to me have come from
among this number.

I have not discovered for myself any obscure writer who is as great
a novelist as Dostoievsky, nor any obscure poet with the genius of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

But I have mentioned Coleridge, and although my use of his name
will not, I believe, cause any protest, it may cause surprise.  Why
not Shelley, or Spenser, or Milton?--It is here that my war with
Authority--to which I owe everything--begins again.

There are in the world of my spirit certain gigantic figures who,
although great as well in the world of authority, are yet
overshadowed, and in some places, loom as enormous half-ghosts--
hovering upon the cloudy borderland between obscurity and living
remembrance.

Such a man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  To me, he is not one of the
great English poets.  He is The Poet.  To me he has not to make
obeisance at the throne of any other monarch--he is there by
Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser.


At La Régence:  Remembering the prostitute with rotten teeth that I
talked to last night on Rue Lafayette:

My dirt is not as dirty as your dirt.  My cleanness is cleaner than
your cleanness.

If I have a hole in my sock that is cunning.

If you have a hole in your stocking love flies out of the window.
Why are we like this?  Boredom is the bedfellow of all the Latin
peoples--the English, in spite of the phrase "bored Englishman,"
are not bored.

The Germans are eager and noisy about everything they are told they
should be interested in.

The Americans are interested in everything for a week--a week at a
time--except Sensation: they are interested in that all the time.

I have heard a great deal of the "smiling Latins," the "gay
Latins," etc.  I have seen few indications that the Latins are gay.
They are noisy--they are really a sombre and passionate people--the
Italian face when silent is rather sullen.

In New York the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture
that shall not come out of the ruins, but belong to life, are
probably greater than anywhere else in the world.

This is because America is young and rich and comparatively
unencumbered by bad things.

Tradition, which saves what is good and great in Europe, also saves
what is poor, so that one wades through miles of junk to come to a
great thing.

In New York books are plentiful and easy to get.  The music and the
theatre are the best in the world.

The great trouble with New York is that one feels uncomfortable
while enjoying these things--In the daytime a man should be making
money.  The time to read is at night before one goes to bed.  The
time to hear music or go to the theatre is also at night.  The time
to look at a picture is on Sunday.

Another fault comes from our lack of independence.  I am sure some
of the most knowing people in the world, about the arts, are in
America.  I cannot read a magazine like The Dial, or The Nation and
The New Republic without getting frightened.  One man wrote a book
called Studies in Ten Literatures--which, of course, is foolish.
We want to seem knowing about all these things because we have not
enough confidence in ourselves.

We have had niggers for 300 years living all over the place--but
all we did about it was to write minstrel shows, and 'coon stories,
until two or three years ago when the French discovered for us how
interesting they are.  We let Paul Morand, and the man who wrote
Batouala, and Soupault do it for us--Then we began to write stories
about Harlem, etc.

Instead of whining that we have no traditions, or that we must
learn by keeping constantly in touch with European models, or by
keeping away from them, we should get busy telling some of the
stories about America that have never been told.

A book like Main Street, which made such a stir, is like Main
Street.  It is like "I've seen all Europe" tourists, who have spent
two days in each country in a round-the-town bus.

In a magazine like The American Mercury the stones are also too
much of a pattern--they're all about how the "Deacon Screwed the
Methodist Minister's Wife," and how the "Town Prostitute Was Put in
Jail for Coming to Church on Sunday and Mixing with the Good
Folks."

When you hear people saying about Babbitt--that it is not the whole
story and that much more can be said--you agree with them.  Then
they begin to talk about "the other side" and you lose hope.  You
see they mean, by "other side," Dr. Crane and Booth Tarkington.

So far from these being "the other side," there are a million other
sides.  And so far from Babbitt being too strong, the stories that
may be written about America will make Babbitt an innocent little
child's book to be read at the Christmas School entertainment along
with The Christmas Carol and "Excelsior."  The man who suggests the
strangeness and variety of this life most is Sherwood Anderson.  Or
was.  I think he's got too fancy since he wrote Winesburg, Ohio.


A French writer who said there was no real variety in the life of
the French because they all had red wine on the table, sat at
little tables in cafés to gossip, and had mistresses, would be
called a fool.  Yet an American will criticize his country for
standardization on no better grounds--namely, that most of them are
Methodists or Baptists, Democrats or Republicans, Rotarians or
Kiwanians.

Babbitt is a very interesting book.  But I believe it would be
possible for a German writer with a talent similar to Sinclair
Lewis to write a book called Schmidt or Bauer which would be just
as sweeping a portrait.

Do you want to know what the gentleman looks like?  He is much
easier to describe than Babbitt.


Tuesday--December 23, 1924:  The mystery explained!  Today, at
American Library, found out what it is:

"Time--that dimension of the world which we express in terms of
before and after--the temporal sequence pervades mind and matter
alike."

Time the form of the internal sense, and space the form of the
external sense.

Theory of Relativity--the time-units of both time and space are
neither points nor moments--but moments in the history of a point.

W. James--Within a definite limited interval of duration known as
the specious present there is the direct perception of the temporal
relations.

After an event has passed beyond the specious present it can only
enter into consciousness by reproductive memory.

James--"The Object of Memory is only an object imagined in the past
to which the emotion of belief adheres."

Temporal experience divided into three qualitatively distinct
intervals: the remembered past, the perceived specious present, and
the anticipated future--By means of the tripartite division we are
able to inject our present selves into the temporal stream of our
own experience.

By arrangement of temporal orders of past with temporal orders of
future--we can construct a temporal order of our specious presents
and their contents.

Thus time has its roots in experience and yet appears to be a
dimension in which experiences and their contents are to be
arranged.

Thus the stuff from which time is made is of the nature of
experienced data.

The Zenonian paradoxes:  Achilles cannot catch up with the almost
here save by occupying an infinity of positions.

A flying arrow cannot remain where it is, nor be where it is not.

These things do not deal with space or time but with the properties
of infinite assemblages and dense series (Americana).


Weber's at midnight:  The waiters in Weber's standing in a group in
their black coats and white boiled shirts--

All around the great mirrors reflecting there--for a moment a
STRANGE picture I thought of TIME!

The horrible monotony of the French--Weber's at midnight some
Frenchmen in evening dress--the heavy eyelids--the dangling legs--
the look of weary vitality--

Then in come some "Parisiennes"--God!  God!  All sizes and shapes
and all the same--Unfit for anything else in the world, and not
good for what they are--The texture of enamelled tinted skin, the
hard avaricious noses, the chic style of coats, hair, eyebrows,
etc.


The great myth that the Latins are romantic people.  The Latins
have qualities and standards that we do not possess--Hence we
overvalue them.

There are many places in the world where life attains a greater
variety, interest or profundity than in Paris (viz., New York,
London, Vienna, Munich).  Yet a great many Americans make their
homes in Paris because they are sure it is the centre of the
world's intellectual and cultural reputations.


It is easier for a writer to secure a reputation in France than in
any other country.  Many French writers have very respectable
reputations who would be laughed at in other countries.  For
example, Henri Bordeaux--Some Americans who study French literature
think he is a distinguished writer.  His name has a solid,
respectable sound to it.  On the cover of all his books is printed
"Member of the French Academy."  But you could hardly find an
intellectual in America who would say a kind word for Harold Bell
Wright.  Yet Harold Bell Wright--poor as he may be--is a better
writer than Henri Bordeaux.  If you don't believe it, read them.
Americans are very unfair about this.


The way things go:  At 6.10 A.M. the street lights of Paris go off.
I sit at a little all-night café in Grand Boulevard opposite Rue
Faubourg de Montmartre and watch light widen across the sky behind
Montmartre.  At first a wide strip of blue-grey--a strip of violet
light.  You see the line of the two clear and sharp.  The paper
trucks of Hachette, Le Petit Parisien, etc., go by.

In the bar a rattling of leaden, holey coins--the five-, ten- and
twenty-five-centime pieces.  Taxi-drivers drinking café rhum,
debating loudly in hoarse sanguinary voices.  A prostitute, the
blonde all-night antiquity of the Quarter streets, drinking rich
hot chocolate, crunching crusty croissants at the bar.  The veteran
of a million loves, well known and benevolently misprized, hoarse
with iniquity and wisdom.  A pox upon you, Marianne:  You have made
Monsieur le Président très triste; the third leg of the Foreign
Legion wears a sling because of you!

A swart-eyed fellow, oiled and amorous, sweetly licks with nozzly
tongue his prostitute's rouge-varnished face: with choking secret
laughter and with kissy, wetty talkie he cajoles her; she answers
in swart choked whisperings with her sudden shrill prostitute's
scream of merriment.

A morning rattle of cans and ashes on the pavements.  With rich
jingle-jangle and hollow clitter-clatter a Paris milk wagon passes.
Suddenly, a screak of brakes: all over the world the moaning screak
of brakes, and racing, starting motors.

Across the street in faint grey-bluish light the news kiosk is
opening up.

"Est-ce que vous avez Le New York 'Erald?"

"Non, monsieur.  Ce n'est pas encore arrivé."

"Et Le Tchicago Treebune?"

"Ça pas plus, monsieur.  C'est aussi en retard ce matin."

"Merci.  Alors:  Le Matin."

"Bien, monsieur."

Passage of leaden sous: the smell of ink-worn paper, dear to
morning throughout the world.  A big Hachette truck swerves up, an
instant halt, the flat heavy smack of fresh-corded ink-warm paper
on the pavement, a hoarse cry and instant loud departure!

Ça aussi, monsieur.  Sing ye bi-i-i-rds, sing!  Light up your
heart, O son of man!

Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, with charm of
earliest birds!

Some things will never change: some things will always be the same:
brother we cannot die, we must be saved; we are united at the heart
of night and morning.

A good time now, just before dawn and morning.  Surfeit of sterile
riches: harvests of stale bought love: the burnt-out candle-end of
night, the jaded blaze of crimson light, in shattered bars; numb
weary lust--which one? which one?

The prostitutes at daybreak, the dead brilliance of electric
smiles.

Tired, tired, tired.


Tuesday:  Woman who sang tonight at Concert Mayol--She was near 50--
magnificent teeth--so good they made me uneasy--Those things in
her head--but how?  They keep them so.  This comes to me--that they
spend all their time looking after them: there is something filthy
about this.

On the Boulevards--3.20 du matin.  Reading the Sourire for
strumpet-house items--I want to find me a Ballon of Champagne--
First of all--préservatif right to my left around corner Rue
Faubourg de Montmartre; all-night pharmacy.


Along the quais again this afternoon to the bookstalls--Made afraid
by the junk--Bought a dozen books or so, but no "prints" or
"etchings"--Countless old-fashioned prints--pictures of Versailles--
the Palais Royal, the Revolution--Sentimental and cheap pictures--
Florid ones--"La Courtisane Passionnée," etc.  Stage-coach
pictures, etc.  Works of Eugène Scribe--The little books bound or
tied, so you can't look--nothing in them--Vie à la Campagne--
countless cheap books--ah, I have a little of it all!--Strasbourg.


Christmas Week--Colmar, Alsace-Lorraine--Written on the Spot.

The Isenheimer Altar of Mathias Grünewald in the Cloisters of the
Unterlinden Museum at Colmar:

There is nothing like it in the world.  I have spent over 4 months
getting here--it is much more wonderful than one imagines it will
be.  The altar is set up NOT IN ONE PIECE but in three sections in
a big room with groined ceilings, a long groined room like a
Dominikaner Cloister.

The first two "volets" of the altar--Everything is distorted and
out of perspective.  The figure of the Christ is twice as big as
the other figures--the pointing finger of Saint Antoine is much too
big for his body--but everything in this figure points along the
joints and elbows of that arm and ends in the pointing finger.

The Lamb with its straight brisk feet, its dainty right foreleg
bent delicately about the Cross and red blood spouting from its
imperturbable heart into a goblet of rich gold, is a masterpiece of
symbolic emotion that strikes far beyond intelligence.

The body of Christ, and its agony, are indescribable.  The hands
and the feet are enlarged to meet the agony--the hands are tendons
of agony, the feet are not feet but lengths of twisted tendons
driven through by a bolt and ending in bent, broken, bleeding toes.
A supernatural light falls upon the immense twisted length of the
body (a grey-white-green) and yet COMPLETELY SOLID LIGHT--you can
count the ribs, the muscles (the head falling to the right), full
of brutal agony--it is crowned with long thorns and rusty blood--it
droops over, it is too big, Christ is dead.

The great figure of the woman in white comes up and breaks backward
at the middle and is caught in the red arms of the pitiful Saint.
The fingers of the Magdalen are bent in eloquent supplication.

The blackness of hell's night behind--the unearthly greenish
supernatural light upon the figures--on Christ's dead, sinewed,
twisted, riven gigantic body and on the living flesh of the other
figures.

The sly face of the Virgin in the wing of the Annunciation--the
eyes slanting up under lowered lids in a sly leer--the fat loose
sensual mouth half open, with the tongue visible--a look of sly
bawdiness over all.

The enormous and demoniac intelligence that illuminates the piece
in Grünewald's Altar--the angels playing instruments in "La Vierge
Glorifiée par les Anges"--the faces have a SINISTER GOLDEN LIGHT--
an almost unholy glee.  You can hear MAD HEAVENLY MUSIC.  This is
not true with Italians--syrup and sugar.

This is the greatest and also the most "modern" picture I have ever
seen.


Christmas Week--1924:  Returning to Paris from Strasbourg:  The
approach to Paris through the Valley of the Marne--Winter--The very
magnificent rainbow--the rocking clacketing train.

The suburbs of Paris--Dark--The little double-deckers rattling past
loaded with people--The weary approaches to a great city--Endless
repetition--monotonous endlessness--The sadness of seeing people
pass you in a lighted train or subway.  Why is this?


PARIS:  There is nothing that I do not know about Paris--That
sounds like the foolishest boast but that is true--I am sitting on
the terrace of the Taverne Royale--Rue Royale--It is winter--it is
cold--but it is the same--to one hand the Madeleine--to the other
the Place de la Concorde--to the right that of the Champs-Elysées--
the Arc--the Bois--the fashionable quarters--the strumpet-houses of
that district--the rue--the Troc--the Tower--the Champs-de-Mars--
the Montparnasse section--the Latin Quarter--the bookshops--the
cafés--the Ecole--the Institut--the St. Mich--the Ile--the Notre
Dame--The Old Houses--the Rue de Rivoli--the Tour St. Jacques--the
Carnavalet--the Hugo--Vosges--the Bastille--the Gare de Lyon--the
Gare de l'Est--du Nord--the Montmartre--the Butte--the cafés--
houses--the Rue Lepic--the Port Clignancourt--the La Villette--The
Parc Monceau--the Bois--Great circle, unending universe of life,
huge legend of dark time!

But unannealed by water the gaunt days sloped into the grots of
time.


Paris, Saturday Night:  Today has been a horrible one--I was able
to sleep only the most diseased and distressed sleep (the worst
sort of American-in-Europe sleep) last night after leaving Mrs.
Morton.  I was sick with my loss (the loss of the picture and
several letters Helen sent me) and I got up sick and with the
SHAKES this morning--I came to the Abiga bar--I went to the Am. Ex.
Co.--I went to Wepler's in Montmartre--At each place, as I knew
they would, with mean and servile regret cut by mocking, they were
sorry, sorry, sorry.

The day was of the most horrible European sort--Something that
passes understanding--the wet heavy air, that deadens the soul,
puts a lump of indigestible lead in the solar plexus, depresses and
fatigues the flesh until one seems to lift himself leadenly through
the thick wet steaming air with a kind of terrible fear--an
excitement that is without hope, that awaits only the news of some
further grief, failure, humiliation, and torture.  There is a
lassitude that enters the folds and lappings of the brain, that
makes one hope for better things and better work tomorrow, but hope
without belief or conviction.

The grey depression of the wet buildings--the horrible nervous
pettiness of the French, swarming, honking, tooting along the
narrow streets and the two-foot sidewalks, while the heavy buses
beetle past--


A chapter called PARIS or So You're Going to "Paris"?  (Perhaps a
piece for a magazine in This.)

The fear always of the corners--you are coming out into the open,
there will be waiting to thrust at you, the heavy grinding buses,
the irritation of the horns, etc.


A chapter to be called "The Arithmetic of the Soul."


The music deepened like a passion.

All of our hearts are fulfilled of you, all of our souls are
growing warm with you, all of our lives are beating out their
breath for you, and the strange feel of our pulses is playing
through our blood for you, immortal and unending living.


Sunday--Up at noon, bathed, etc.  Lunch at Casenave's--Went to
Delacroix and Louvre--Something over-rich and bloody about it.--
Note how French love to paint blood (Delacroix)--then along Seine
bookstalls--found only junk--then to Lipp's for beer and cervelas--
then back to hotel where worked from 6.30-10.30--Then out to eat at
Taverne Royale--Walk back through Vendôme and Rue St. Honoré--Read
a little and worked from ONE to 3.00--6 hours today.


Sunday Night:  I feel low--discouraged by the mass of things again
tonight.  I must make some decisive action--the new web of streets
behind the dome has depressed me.

The mind grows weary with such a problem as mine, by constantly
retracing his steps, by constantly feeling around the same cylinder
from which there seems AT PRESENT to be no escape.


The European temper is one that has learned control--that is, it
has learned indifference--Each man writes his own book without
worrying very much about what the other has written--he reads
little or if he reads much, it is only a trifle--a spoonful of the
ocean of print that inundates everything--Picture Anatole France--
with a reputation for omniscience--picking daintily here and there
among the bookstalls of the Seine.  To go by them affects me with
horror and weariness--as it does Paul Valéry--but I lack his power
to resist.  I must go by there--and if I do again and again I
cannot keep away from them.


More and more I am convinced that to be a great writer a man must
be something of an ass.  I read of Tolstoi that he read no
newspapers, that he went away and lived among peasants for 7 years
at a time, and that for six years he read nothing except the novels
of Dumas.  Yet such a man could write great books.  I almost think
it is because of this that he did.


Bernard Shaw, one of our prophets at the present time, is
worshipped past idolatry by many people who consider that he knows
everything or practically everything.

From what I have been able to discover of his reading from his
writing, I can be sure that he has read Shakespeare--not very
carefully, Ibsen very carefully, a book by Karl Marx, which made a
deep impression on him, the tracts of the Fabian Society, and the
writings of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb.


There is always the moment when we must begin to write.  There are
always the hundreds, the thousands, of struggle, of getting up, of
pacing about, of sitting down, of laborious uneven accomplishment.
During the time of actual work, what else besides ourselves can
help us?  Can we call to mind then the contents of 20,000 books?
Can we depend on anything other than ourselves for help?


At La Régence:

How certain trivial words and phrases haunt the brain--cannot be
forgotten--come back again even when years have passed.  Today,
have been hearing old voices, old songs, fleeting forgotten words
of twenty years ago--my mother's--my father's--the voices of the
summer boarders on the porches--most of all, Dinwood Bland, sitting
in pleasant backyard of his house in Norfolk, a drink in his hand,
his blind eyes blindly fixed upon the flashing sparkling waters of
Hampton Roads, blindly on a white ship passing--his thin, senile,
evil, strangely attractive face touched with bitterness, revulsion,
and his weary disgust with life as he said:

"My father was an educated loafer."

And now, all day long, "the sound of these words rings and echoes
in my mind until I can listen to nothing else."  And sitting here I
feel like Coleridge when the rhyme for Youth and Age came to him
(10 Sept. 1823 Wed. morning 10 o'clock)--"An Air," he says, "that
whizzed dia engkefalou" (right across the diameter of my brain)
exactly like a Hummel Bee--etc.

So too, with me, all afternoon--and Dinwood Bland's haunting phrase
about his father has now become:


     "My father was an educated loafer,
      My mother was an alcoholic bum,
      My sister's name was Nelly, she had a lovely belly,
      Aside from that she was a lousy scum.

     "My brother Pete, he went and joined the Navy,
      My brother Hank, he went and caught the clap,
      My little sister Anny, fell down and bruised her fanny--
      Because we had an educated Pap,"--etc.


Obscure, ridiculous--but old words, old phrases, and forgotten
sayings--why do they come back to haunt our meaning?


At La Régence:

On quotations--The practice of nineteenth-century "good" writers
was to decorate their compositions with neat little patterns of
quotations.  That practice still persists in a great deal of the
correct writing of the present--viz., the essays and leading
articles of The Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, Harper's, The
Century, The London Mercury, etc.--The quotation habit is generally
a vicious one, often it has not even so worthy a design as to
borrow from stronger and greater people an energy and clearness
that we do not have, but rather serves as a sort of diploma to
certify culture--said culture consisting in our ability to quote
scraps from Lamb, Dickens, John Keats, Browning, Doctor Johnson,
and Matthew Arnold.  The distortion this works upon the original
sinew of the mind is incalculable--writing becomes a meeting of
pseudo-courtliness neatly designed to arrive before Lamb with a bow
and to be handed by Dickens to Lord Tennyson with a graceful
flourish.  The phrase "apt quotation" is one of the most misleading
phrases ever invented.  Most quotations, so far from being apt to
any purpose, are distinguished by all the ineptitude a politician
displays when, having spoken for twenty minutes on the Nicaraguan
question, he says:  "That reminds me of a little story I heard the
other day.  It seems there were two Irishmen whose names were Pat
and Mike"--then proceeds to a discussion of the Prohibition issue,
after his convulsed audience is somewhat recovered.

Europe and America are still too far apart--the "interminable" day
is far too long--six days are far too long--for the intense
impression--to compare and observe their essential difference--

Results:  We must have them closer together--as the English and the
French--as Dover and Calais--things that matter in our life cannot
be recalled so easily.  I have lived deeply, intensely, vividly, on
the whole unhappily, for six months.  Some people say that is all
that matters.  I do not think it is.  But things cannot be called
up so easily.


I am wondering in a vast vague about her.  I love her, I think of
seeing her again with a sense of strangeness and wonder; but I have
no sort of idea what it will be like, or what has happened.  Why
can we not remember the faces of those we love?  This is true:
Their faces melt into a thousand shades and shapes and images of
faces the moment that we try to fix them in our memory.  It is only
the face of a stranger we remember there.  Why?


Never have the many-ness and the much-ness of things caused me such
trouble as in the past six months.  But never have I had so firm a
conviction that our lives can live upon only a few things, that we
must find them, and begin to build our fences.

All creation is the building of a fence.

But deeper study always, sharper senses, profounder living; NEVER
an end to curiosity!

The fruit of all this comes later.  I must think.  I must mix it
all with myself and with America.  I have caught much of it on
paper.  But infinitely the greater part is in the wash of my brain
and blood.


Shaw makes a fool of himself when he writes of Napoleon, because he
hates Napoleon and wants to make him ridiculous.  But Shaw makes a
hero of himself when he writes of Cæsar; Shaw's Cæsar is the best
Cæsar I know of.  It beats Shakespeare.  It is as Cæsar looks
(Naples Museum), I am sure.  I am sure Cæsar was like this.

But it is a mistake to suppose that Napoleon got his hair in the
soup.


Dirge:  Why are we unhappy?--I have no need to envy this man's
fame--nor skill to cloak myself in that man's manner--I am as naked
now as sorrow--and all I ask is:  Why are we so unhappy?

Why are we unhappy?

In my father's country there are yet men with quiet eyes and slow,
fond, kindly faces.



LXXVI


About four o'clock on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, 1924, as
Eugene was entering the Louvre, he met Starwick.  Starwick was
elegantly dressed, as always, in casual, beautifully tailored,
brown tweed garments.  He still carried a cane and twirled it
indolently as he came down the steps.  He was the same old picture
of bored, languorous, almost feminine grace, but instead of a shirt
he was wearing a Russian blouse of soft blue wool which snuggled
around his neck in voluptuous folds and had a kind of diamond-
shaped design of crimson threads along the band.

For a moment, half-way down the grey stone steps, worn and hollowed
as ancient European steps are worn and hollowed by the soft
incessant eternity of feet, as the other people thronged past him,
he paused, his pleasant ruddy face and cleft chin turned vaguely up
towards those soft skies of time, already fading swiftly with the
early wintry light.

As always, Frank looked magnificent, and with his Russian blouse,
and the expression of inscrutable sorrow on his face, more
mysterious and romantic than ever.  Even in this foreign scene he
seemed to take possession of his surroundings with a lordly air.
So far from looking like an alien, a foreigner, or a common
tourist, Frank seemed to belong to the scene more than anybody
there.  It was as if something very frail and rare and exquisite
and weary of the world--Alfred de Musset or George Moore, or the
young Oscar, or Verlaine--had just come out of the Louvre, and it
all seemed to belong to him.

The enormous central court of the Louvre, the soaring wings of that
tremendous and graceful monument, the planned vistas of the
Tuileries before him, fading into the mist-hazed air and the soft
greying light--the whole tremendous scene, with all its space and
strength and hauntingly aerial grace--at once as strong as ancient
battlemented time, and as delicate and haunting as music on a
spinet--swept together in a harmonious movement of spaciousness and
majesty and graceful loveliness to form a background for the
glamorous personality of Francis Starwick.

Even as he stood there, the rare and solitary distinction of his
person was evident as it had never been before.  People were
streaming out of the museum and down the steps past him--for
already it was the closing hour--and as they went by they all
looked common, shabby and drearily prosaic by comparison.  A
middle-aged Frenchman of the middle-class, a chubby, ruddy figure
of a man, dressed in cloth of the hard, ugly ill-cut black that
this class of Frenchmen wear, came by quickly with his wife, his
daughter and his son.  The man was driven along by the incessant,
hot sugar of that energy which drives the race and which, with its
unvaried repetition of oaths, ejaculations, denials, affirmations,
and exactitudes, lavished at every minute upon the most trivial
episodes of life, can become more drearily tedious than the most
banal monotone.  Compared with Starwick, his figure was thick,
blunt, common in its clumsy shapelessness, and his wife had the
same common, swarthy, blunted look.  An American came down the
steps with his wife: he was neatly dressed in the ugly light-
greyish clothes that so many Americans wear, his wife was also
neatly turned out with the tedious and metallic stylishness of
American apparel.  They had the naked, inept and uneasy look of
tourists; everything about them seemed troubled and alien to the
scene, even to the breezy quality of the air and the soft thick
skies about them.  When they had descended the steps they paused a
moment in a worried and undecided way, the man pulled at his watch
and peered at it with his meagre prognathous face, and then said
nasally:

"Well, we told them we'd be there at four-thirty.  It's about that
now."

All of these people, young and old, French, American, or of
whatever nationality, looked dreary, dull and common, and uneasily
out of place when compared with Starwick.

After a moment's shock of stunned surprise, a drunken surge of
impossible joy, Eugene ran towards him shouting, "Frank!"

Starwick turned, with a startled look upon his face: in a moment
the two young men were shaking hands frantically, almost hugging
each other in their excitement, both blurting out at once a torrent
of words which neither heard.  Finally, when they had grown
quieter, Eugene found himself saying:

"But where the hell have you been, Frank?  I wrote you twice:
didn't you get any of my letters?--what happened to you?--where
were you?--did you go down to the South of France to stay with
Egan, as you said you would?"

"Ace," said Starwick--his voice had the same, strangely mannered,
unearthly quality it had always had, only it was more mysterious
and secretive than ever before--"Ace, I have been there."

"But why?--" the other began, "why aren't you?--"  He paused,
looking at Starwick with a startled glance.  "What happened,
Frank?"

For, by his few quiet and non-committal words Starwick had managed
to convey perfectly the sense of sorrow and tragedy--of a grief so
great it could not be spoken, a hurt so deep it could not be told.
His whole personality was now pervaded mysteriously by this air of
quiet, speechless and incommunicable sorrow; he looked at the other
youth with the eyes of Lazarus returned from the tomb, and that
glance said more eloquently than any words could ever do that he
now knew and understood things which no other mortal man could ever
know or understand.

"I should prefer not to talk about it," he said very quietly, and
by these words Eugene understood that some tragic and unutterable
event had now irrevocably sundered Starwick from Egan--though what
that event might be, he saw it was not given him to know.

Immediately, however, in his old, casual, and engaging fashion,
speaking between lips that barely moved, Starwick said:

"Look!  What are you doing now?  Is there any place you have to
go?"

"No.  I was just going in here.  But I suppose it's too late now,
anyway."

At this moment, indeed, they could hear the bells ringing in the
museum, and the voices of the guards, crying impatiently:

"On ferme!  On ferme, messieurs!"--and the people began to pour out
in streams.

"Ace," said Starwick, "they're closing now.  Besides," he added
wearily, "I shouldn't think it would matter to you, anyway. . . .
God!" he cried suddenly, in a high, almost womanish accent of
passionate conviction, "what junk!  What mountains and oceans of
junk!  And so bad!" he cried passionately, in his strange,
unearthly tone.  "So incredibly and impossibly bad.  In that whole
place there are just three things worth seeing--but THEY!"--his
voice was high again with passionate excitement--"THEY are
UNSPEAKABLY beautiful, Eugene!  God!" he cried, high and passionate
again, "how BEAUTIFUL they are!  How utterly, impossibly
beautiful!"  Then with a resumption of his quiet, matter-of-fact
tone he said, "You must come here with me some time.  I will show
them to you. . . .  Look!" he said, in his casual tone again, "will
you come to the Régence with me and have a drink?"

The whole earth seemed to come to life at once.  Now that Starwick
was here, this unfamiliar world, in whose alien life he had
struggled like a drowning swimmer, became in a moment wonderful and
good.  The feeling of numb, nameless terror, rootless desolation,
the intolerable sick anguish of homelessness, insecurity, and
homesickness, against which he had fought since coming to Paris,
and which he had been ashamed and afraid to admit, was now
instantly banished.  Even the strange dark faces of the French as
they streamed past no longer seemed strange, but friendly and
familiar, and the moist and languorous air, the soft thick greyness
of the skies which had seemed to press down on his naked sides, to
permeate his houseless soul like a palpable and viscous substance
of numb terror and despair, were now impregnated with all the vital
energies of living, with the intoxication of an unspeakable,
nameless, infinitely strange and various joy.  As they walked
across the vast court of the Louvre towards the great arched
gateway and all the brilliant traffic of the streets, the enormous
dynamic murmur of the mysterious city came to him and stirred his
entrails with the sensual premonitions of unknown, glamorous and
seductive pleasure.  Even the little taxis, boring past with wasp-
like speed across the great space of the Louvre and through the
sounding arches, now contributed to this sense of excitement,
luxury and joy.  The shrill and irritating horns sounded constantly
through the humid air, and filled his heart with thoughts of New
Year: already the whole city seemed astir, alive now with the great
carnival of New Year's Eve.

At the Régence they found a table on the terrace of the old café
where Napoleon had played dominoes, and among the gay clatter of
the crowd of waning afternoon they drank brandy, talked
passionately and with almost delirious happiness, drank brandy
again, and watched the swarming and beautiful life upon the
pavements and at the crowded tables all around them.

The streams of traffic up and down the whole Avenue de l'Opéra and
the Place de la Comédie Française, the delicate, plain, and
beautiful façade of the Comédie across the Square from them, the
statue of frail De Musset, half-fainting backwards in the arms of
his restoring muse--all this seemed not only part of him, but now
that Starwick was here, to gain an enormous enhancement and
enchantment, to be the total perfume of an incredibly good and
lovely and seductive life, the whole of which, in all its infinite
ramifications, seemed to be distilled into his blood like a rare
liquor and to belong to him.  And so they drank and talked and
drank until full dark had come, and tears stood in their eyes, and
the brandy saucers were racked up eight deep upon their table.

Then, gloriously sad and happy and exultantly triumphant, and full
of nameless joys and evil, they stepped into one of the shrill,
exciting little taxis and were charioted swiftly up that thronging
noble street, until the great soaring masses of the Opéra stood
before them and the Café de la Paix was at one side.

And they were young, all-conquering and exultant, and all the magic
life of strange million-footed Paris belonged to them, and all its
strange and evil fragrance burned fierce and secret in their veins,
and they knew that they were young and that they would never die,
that it was New Year's Eve in Paris, and that that magic city had
been created for them.  By this time they had between them about
400 francs.

Then followed the huge kaleidoscope of night: at one o'clock,
leaving a café, they got into a taxi, and vociferously demanded of
the ruddy driver, in French made eloquently confident by alcohol
and joy, that they be taken to the resorts most frequented by "nos
frères--vous comprenez?--les honnêtes hommes--les ouvriers."

He smilingly assented, and from that time on until dawn they made a
madman's round of little vile cafés, so mazed, so numerous, so
inextricably confused in the vast web-like slum and jungle of
nocturnal Paris, that later they could never thread their way back
through that labyrinth of crooked alley-ways, and drunkenness and
confusion.  Their driver took them to a region which they later
thought was somewhere in that ancient, foul and tangled quarter
between the Boulevard de Sébastopol and Les Halles.  And all that
night, from one o'clock to dawn, they threaded noxious alleys,
beside the shuttered façades of ancient, evil, crone-like houses,
and stopped at every blaze of garish light to enter dirty little
dives, where sullen evil-visaged men surveyed them sullenly over
bistro bars, and gave them with a slimy hand cheap vile cognac in
greasy little glasses.  In these places there was always the evil,
swelling, fatly unctuous and seductive music of accordions, the
hoarse bravos of applause.  Here one bought metal slugs, a dozen
for five francs, and gave them to sluttish sirens with no upper
teeth for the favour of a dance; and here also there were many
soldiers: Colonial negroes, black as ebony, were most in favour;
and here were men with caps and scarves and evil, furtive eyes, who
watched them steadily.

From place to place, from dive to dive, all through that huge and
noxious labyrinth of night, their wild debauch wore on.  And
presently they noticed that, wherever they went, two gendarmes
followed them, stood quietly at the bar, and courteously and
genially took the drinks they always bought for them, and were
always there when they entered the next place.  And the ruddy and
good-natured taxi-man was always there as well, and he too always
drank with them, and always said, with robust satisfaction:  "Mais
oui!  Parbleu!  A votre santé, messieurs!"

The grey haggard light of daybreak showed the cold grey waters of
the Seine, ancient, narrowed, flowing on between huge stone walls,
the haggard steep façades of the old shuttered houses in the Latin
Quarter, the narrow angularity of the silent streets.  In
Montparnasse they got out at the corner of the Boulevard Edgar
Quinet and demanded the reckoning.  All that remained to them was
less than fifty francs; they took it all, the soiled and nibbled
little five-franc notes, the coppery one and two-franc pieces, the
ten- and twenty-five- and fifty-centime pieces, and poured it into
his hands, and stood there, guilty, silent and ashamed, before his
astonished and reproachful face, because he had stood by them well
and loyally all through that blind kaleidoscope of night, and it
was New Year's Eve, and they were drunk and gay, and, he had
thought, rich Americans, and he had hired for, earned, expected,
more.

"It's all we have," they said.

That ruddy robust man then did something that is perhaps rare in
the annals of French taxidom, and which they never forgot.

After an astonished moment, while he looked at the little wad of
bills and coins in his broad palm, he suddenly laughed loud and
cheerfully, tossed the little wad of money in the air and caught it
as it fell, stripped off a five-franc note and pocketed the rest,
handed the five-franc note to Starwick, and said cheerfully--

"It's all right!  You two boys take this and buy yourselves some
breakfast to sober up on.  Happy New Year!"--and with a friendly
farewell wave of the hand, drove off.

They had delicious morning crescent rolls, fresh-baked and crusty,
and thick rich chocolate, at a little bakery in the Boulevard Edgar
Quinet, next to Starwick's quarters.  He was living in a studio,
loaned to him, he said, by "two friends," whom he did not name, and
who were "out of town for the holidays."

The studio was one of a row of similar buildings all fronting on a
little enclosed alley-way.  One entered from a street through a
gate set in the wall: one rang a bell, and presently la concierge
pressed a button which released the door.  Inside, it was very
quiet and still and grey with the grey morning light of New Year's
Day.  And all the city was shut out.  Then they entered Starwick's
studio: in the grey light a big room with a slanting roof of grey
glazed glass emerged: around the walls were paintings, the limbs
and fragments of unfinished sculptures, a few chairs and tables,
and a couch bed.  At the back there was a balcony, and steps
ascending to it: here too there was a cot, and Starwick told Eugene
he could sleep up there.

Both young men were groggy with weariness and the night's debauch:
in the cold grey light, life looked black and ugly; they were
exhausted and ashamed.  Starwick lay down upon the couch and went
to sleep; Eugene ascended to the balcony, pulled off his clothes
and tossed them in a heap, and fell into the deep drugged sleep of
drunkenness and exhaustion.

He slept till noon; and was awakened by the sound of steps below,
the opening and closing of the door, and suddenly a woman's voice,
light, gay, authoritative, and incisive:

"Darling, we're back again!" the gay, light voice cried out.
"Welcome to our city!  Happy New Year," she went on more quietly,
and with a note of tender intimacy.  "How have you been?"

He heard Starwick's quiet voice as it answered her, and presently
the low, brief, and almost sullen tones of another woman.  Starwick
called sleepily up to Eugene, telling him to dress at once and come
down: when he got downstairs, Starwick and the two women were
waiting for him.

The one with the light, gay, incisive voice greeted him warmly and
cordially, and made him feel instantly at home.  She seemed to be
the older of the two, and yet there was not much difference in
their age.  The other woman shook hands with him almost curtly, and
muttered a few words of greeting.  She was a big dark-haired New
England sort of girl; she wore dark, drab, rusty-looking clothes,
and her face had a sullen, almost heavy cast to it.  While
Starwick, and the other woman, whose name was Elinor, rattled gaily
on together, the dark girl sat sullenly and awkwardly in her chair
and said nothing.  Once or twice they spoke to her: she had a way
of answering with a few curt sullen words and a short angry laugh,
which went as quickly as it came, and left her face heavy and
sullen again.  But the moment she laughed, Eugene noticed that her
mouth was very red and sweet, her teeth beautifully white, and for
a moment the girl's sullen face was illuminated by a radiant tender
loveliness.  He heard Frank call her Ann: Starwick seemed to want
to tease her, and when he spoke to her there was a little burble of
malicious laughter in his voice.  Turning to Eugene, his pleasant
face reddening and the burble of malicious laughter playing in his
throat, Frank said:

"She is VERY beautiful.  You'd never think it, but she really IS,
you know."

Ann muttered something short and angry, and her face flushing, she
laughed her short sudden laugh of anger and exasperation.  And as
she did so, her face came alive at once with its radiant
loveliness, and he saw that what Starwick said of her was true.



LXXVII


That was a fine life that he had that year.  He lived in a little
hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts.  He had a good room there which
cost him twelve francs a day.  It was a good hotel, and was the
place where Oscar Wilde had died.  When anyone wanted to see the
celebrated death-room, he would ask to see "la chambre de Monsieur
Veeld," and Monsieur Gely, the proprietor, or one of his buxom
daughters, would willingly show it.

At nine o'clock in the morning the maid would come in with
chocolate or coffee, bread and jam and butter, which was included
in the price of the room.  She put it down on a little cabinet
beside his bed, which had a door and a chamber pot inside.  After
she went out he would get up and move it to the table, and drink
the chocolate and eat some bread and jam.  Then he would go back to
bed and sleep until noon and sometimes later: at one o'clock,
Starwick and the two women would come to take him to lunch.  If
they did not come, they would send him a pneumatique telling him
where to meet them.  They went to a great many different places,
but the lunch was always good.  Sometimes they would send a
pneumatique telling him to meet them at the Dome or the Rotonde.
When he got there they would be sitting at a table on the terrace,
and already very gay.  Starwick would have a stack of saucers
racked up before him on the table.  On each saucer would be a
numeral which said 3.50, or 5.00, or 6.00, or 7.50 francs,
depending on what he had been drinking.

Usually it was cognac, but sometimes Starwick would greet him with
a burble of laughter, saying in his sensuous and voluptuous voice:
"Did you ever drink Amer Picon?"

"No," he would say.

"Well," said Starwick.  "You ought to try it.  You really ought,
you know."  And the soft burble would come welling up out of his
throat again, and Elinor, looking at him tenderly, smiling, would
say:

"Francis!  You idiot!  Leave the child alone!"

Then they would go to lunch.  Sometimes they went to a place near
by called Henriettes which Elinor had known about when she was an
ambulance driver in the war.  Again they would cross the river and
eat at Prunier's, Weber's, the Café Régence, Fouquet's, or at a
place halfway up the hill in Montmartre, which was in a square
called the Place des Martyrs, and which was called L'Ecrevisse,
probably because of a little shell-fish which they sold there, and
which was a specialty.  That was a fine place: they always ate out
on the terrace, where they could see everything that was going on
in the little square, and Elinor, who had known the place for
years, said how lovely it would be in spring.

Often they would eat at little places, which were not very
expensive and which Elinor also knew about.  She knew about
everything: there was nothing about Paris she did not know.  Elinor
did the talking, rattling off her French like a native--or, anyway,
like a native of Boston who speaks French well--trippingly off the
tongue, getting the same intonations and gestures the French got,
when she argued with them, saying:

"Mais non--mais non mais non mais non mais non mais non!" so
rapidly that we could hardly follow her, and she could say:  "Oui.
C'est ça!--Mais parfaitement!--Entendu! . . .  Formidable!" etc.,
in the same way as a Frenchman could.

Yet there was a trace of gaiety and humour in everything she said
and did.  She had "the light touch" about everything, and
understood just how it was with the French.  Her attitude toward
them was very much the manner of a mature and sophisticated person
with a race of clamouring children.  She never grew tired of
observing and pointing out their quaint and curious ways: if the
jolly proprietor of a restaurant came to the table and proudly
tried to speak to them his garbled English, she would shake her
head sharply, with a little smile, biting her lower lip as she did
so, and saying with a light and tender humour:

"Oh, NICE! . . .  He wants to speak his English! . . .  ISN'T he a
dear? . . .  No, no," she would say quickly if anyone attempted to
answer him in French.  "Please let him go ahead--poor dear!  He's
so proud of it!"

And again she would shake her head, biting her lower lip, with a
tender, wondering little smile, as she said so, and "Yes!" Francis
would say enthusiastically and with a look of direct, serious, and
almost sorrowful earnestness.  "And how GRAND the man is about it--
how SIMPLE and GRAND in the way he does it! . . .  Did you notice
the way he used his hand?--I mean like someone in a painting by
Cimabue--it really is, you know," he said earnestly.  "The
centuries of living and tradition that have gone into a single
gesture--and he's quite unconscious of it.  It's grand--I mean like
someone in a painting by Cimabue--it really is, you know," he said
with the sad, serious look of utter earnestness.  "It's really
QUITE incredible."

"Quite," said Elinor, who with a whimsical little smile had been
looking at a waiter with sprouting moustaches, as he bent with
prayerful reverence, stirring the ingredients in a salad bowl--"Oh,
Francis, darling, look--" she whispered, nodding toward the man.
"Don't you LOVE it? . . .  Don't you simply ADORE the way they do
it? . . .  I MEAN, you know!  Now where?  Where?" she cried, with a
gesture of complete surrender--"WHERE could you find anything like
that in America? . . .  I mean, you simply couldn't find it--that's
all."

"QUITE!" said Francis concisely.  And turning to Eugene, he would
say with that impressive air of absolute sad earnestness, "And it's
really MOST important.  It really is, you know.  It's astonishing
to see what they can put into a single gesture.  I mean--the Whole
Thing's there.  It really is."

"Francis!" Elinor would say, looking at him with her gay and tender
little smile, and biting her lip as she did so--"You KID, you!  I
MEAN!--"

Suddenly she put her hand strongly before her eyes, bent her head,
and was rigid in a moment of powerful and secret emotion.  In a
moment, however, she would look up, wet-eyed, suddenly thrust her
arm across the table at Eugene, and putting her hand on his arm
with a slight gallant movement, say quietly:

"O, I'm sorry--you poor child! . . .  After all, there's no reason
why you should have to go through all this. . . .  I mean,
darling," she explained gently, "I have an adorable kid at home
just four years old--sometimes something happens to make me think
of him--you understand, don't you?"

"Yes," he said.

"Good," she said briskly and decisively, with a swift and gallant
smile, as she patted his arm again.  "I knew you would!"

She had left her husband and child in Boston, she had come here to
join Francis, fatality was in the air, but she was always brave and
gallant about it.  As Francis would say to Eugene as they sat
drinking alone in a café:

"It's MAD--Boston! . . .  Perfectly MAD--Boston! . . .  I mean, the
kind of thing they do when they ride a horse up the steps of the
State House. . . .  I mean, perfectly GRAND, you know," he cried
with high enthusiasm.  "They stop at nothing.  It's simply SWELL--
it really is, you know."

Everyone was being very brave and gallant and stopping at nothing,
and the French were charming, charming, and Paris gave them just
the background that they needed.  It was a fine life.



Elinor took charge of everything.  She took charge of the money,
the making of plans, the driving of bargains with avaricious and
shrewd-witted Frenchmen, and the ordering of food in restaurants.

"It's really astonishing, you know," said Starwick--"the way she
walks in everywhere and has the whole place at her feet in four
minutes. . . .  Really, Gene, you should have been with us this
afternoon when she made arrangements with the man at the motor
agency in the Champs-Elysées for renting the car. . . .  Really, I
felt quite sorry for him before the thing was over. . . .  He kept
casting those knowing and rather BITTER glances of reproach at me,"
said Starwick, with his burble of soft laughter, "as if he thought
I had betrayed him by not coming to his assistance. . . .  There
was something VERY cruel about it . . . like a great cat playing
with a mouse . . . there really was, you know," said Starwick
earnestly.  "She can be completely without pity when she gets that
way," he added.  "She really can, you know . . . which makes it all
the more astonishing--I mean, when you consider what she really is--
the way she let me go to sleep on her shoulder the night we were
coming back from Rheims, and I was so horribly drunk and got so
disgustingly sick," he said with a simple, touching earnestness.
"I mean, the COMPASSION of it--it was QUITE like that Chinese
goddess of the Infinite Compassion they have in Boston--it REALLY
was, you know.  It's quite astonishing," he said earnestly, "when
you consider her background, the kind of people that she came from--
it really IS, you know . . . she's a grand person, simply terrific
. . . it's utterly MAD--Boston . . . it really is."

Certainly it was very pleasant to be in the hands of such a
captain.  Elinor got things done with a beautiful, serene assurance
that made everything seem easy.  There was no difficulty of custom
or language, no weird mystery and complication of traffic, trade,
and commerce, so maddening and incomprehensible to most Americans,
that Elinor did not understand perfectly.  Sometimes she would just
shake her head and bite her lip, smiling.  Sometimes she would
laugh with rich astonishment, and say: "PERFECTLY insane, of
course--but then, that's the way the poor dears are, and you can't
change them. . . .  I KNOW!  I KNOW! . . .  It's quite incredible,
but they'll ALWAYS be that way, and we've simply got to make the
best of it."

She was a heavily built woman about thirty years old who seemed
older than she was.  She dressed very plainly and wore a rather old
hat with a cockade, which gave her a look of eighteenth-century
gallantry.  And the impression of maturity was increased by her
heavy and unyouthful figure, and the strong authority of her face
which, in spite of her good-humoured, gay, and whimsical smile, her
light Bostonian air of raillery, indicated the controlled tension
and restraint of nerves of a person of stubborn and resolute will
who is resolved always to act with aristocratic grace and courage.

In spite of her heavy figure, her rough and rather unhealthy-
looking skin, she was a distinguished-looking woman, and in
her smile, her tone, her play of wit, and even in the swift
spitefulness and violence which could flash out and strike and be
gone before its victim had a chance to retort or defend himself,
she was thoroughly feminine.  And yet the woman made no appeal at
all to sensual desire: although she had left her husband and child
to follow Starwick to France, and was thought by her own family to
have become his mistress, it was impossible to imagine her in such
a rôle.  And for this reason, perhaps, there was something ugly,
dark, and sinister in their relation, which Eugene felt strongly
but could not define.  He felt that Elinor was lacking in the
attraction or desire of the sensual woman as Starwick seemed to be
lacking in the lust of the sensual man, and there was therefore
something in their relation that came from the dark, the murky
swamp-fires of emotion, something poisonous, perverse and evil, and
full of death.

Just the same, it was fine to be with Elinor when she was gay and
deft and charming, and enormously assured, and taking charge of
things.  At these times everything in life seemed simple, smooth,
and easy; there were no dreary complications, the whole world
became an enormous oyster ready to be opened, Paris an enormous
treasure-hoard of unceasing pleasure and delight.  It was good to
be with her in a restaurant and to let her do the ordering.

"Now, children," she would say in her crisp, gay, and yet
authoritative tone, staring at the menu with a little frowning
smile of studious yet whimsical concentration--"The rest of you can
order what you like, but Mother's going to start with fish and a
bottle of Vouvray--I seem to remember that it's very good here--Le
Vouvray est bon ici, n'est-ce pas?" she said turning to the waiter.

"Mais oui, madame!" he said with just the right kind of earnest
enthusiasm, "c'est une spécialité."

"Bon," she said crisply.  "Alors, une bouteille du Vouvray pour
commencer--does that go for the rest of you, mes enfants?" she
said, looking around her.  They nodded their agreement.

"Bon--bon, madame," the waiter said, nodding his vigorous approval,
as he put the order down.  "Vous serez bien content avec le
Vouvray--et puis?"--He looked at her with suave respectful inquiry.
"Pour manger?"

"Pour moi," said Elinor, "le poisson--le filet de sole--n'est-ce
pas--Marguery?"

"Bon, bon," he said with enthusiastic approval, writing it down.
"Un filet de sole--Marguery--pour madame--et pour monsieur?" he
said turning suavely to Eugene.

"La même chose," said that linguist recklessly and even as the
waiter was nodding enthusiastically, and saying:

"Bon.  Bon--parfaitement!  La même chose pour monsieur," and
writing it down, the others had begun to laugh at him.  Starwick
with his bubbling laugh, Elinor with her gay little smile of
raillery and even Ann, the dark and sullen beauty of her face
suddenly luminous with a short and almost angry laugh as she said:

"He hasn't said his other word yet--why don't you tell him that you
want some 'mawndiawnts'"--ironically she imitated his pronunciation
of the word.

"What's wrong with 'mendiants'?" he said, scowling at her.  "What's
the joke?"

"Nothing," said Starwick, bubbling with laughter.  "They're very
good.  They really are, you know," he said earnestly.  "Only we've
been wondering if you wouldn't learn another word some day and
order something else."

"I know lots of other words," he said angrily.  "Only, how am I
ever going to get a chance to use them when the rest of you make
fun of me every time I open my mouth?--I don't see what the great
joke is," he said resentfully.  "These French people understand
what I want to say," he said.  "Ecoute, garçon," he said
appealingly to the attentive and smiling waiter.--"Vous pouvez
comprendre--"

"Cawmprawndre," said Ann mockingly.

"Vous pouvez comprendre--ce-que-je-veux-dire," he blundered on
painfully.

"Mais oui, monsieur!" the waiter cried with a beautiful reassuring
smile.  "Parfaitement.  Vous parlez très bien.  Vous êtes ici à
Paris depuis longtemps?"

"Depuis six semaines," he said proudly.

The waiter lifted arms and eyebrows eloquent with astounded
disbelief.

"Mais c'est merveilleux!" the waiter cried, and as the others
jeered Eugene said with bitter sarcasm:

"Everyone can't be a fine old French scholar the way you are; after
all, I'm not travelled like the rest of you--I've never had your
opportunities.  And even after six weeks here there are still a few
words in the French language that I don't know. . . .  But I'm
going to speak the ones I do know," he said defiantly, "and no
one's going to stop me."

"Of course you are, darling!" Elinor said quickly and smoothly,
putting her hand out on his arm with a swift movement.  "Don't let
them tease you! . . .  I think it's mean of you," she said
reproachfully.  "Let the poor dear speak his French if he wants to--
I think it's sweet."

He looked at her with a flushed and angry face while Starwick
bubbled with laughter, tried to think of something to say in reply,
but, as always, she was too quick for him, and before he could
think of something apt and telling, she had flashed off as light
and quick as a rapier blade:

"--Now, children," she was studying the card again--"what shall it
be after the fish--who wants meat--?"--

"No fish for me," said Ann, looking sullenly at the menu.  "I'll
take--" suddenly her dark, sullen, and nobly beautiful face was
transfigured by her short and almost angry laugh again--"I'll take
an 'awmlet,'" she said sarcastically, looking at Eugene.

"Well, take your 'awmlet,'" he muttered.  "Only I don't say it that
way."

"Pas de poisson," she said quietly to the waiter.  "I want an
omelette."

"Bon, bon," he nodded vigorously and wrote.  "Une omelette pour
madame.  Et puis après--?" he said inquiringly.

"Rien," she said.

He looked slightly surprised and hurt, but in a moment, turning to
Eugene, said:

"Et pour monsieur?--Après le poisson?"

"Donnez-moi un Chateaubriand garni," he said.

And again Ann, whose head had been turned sullenly down towards the
card, looked up suddenly and laughed, with that short and almost
angry laugh that seemed to illuminate with accumulating but instant
radiance all of the dark and noble beauty of her face.

"God!" she said.  "I knew it!--If it's not mendiants, it's
Chateaubriand garni."

"Don't forget the Nuits St. Georges," said Starwick with his
bubbling laugh, "that's still to come."

"When he gets through," she said, "there won't be a steak or raisin
left in France."

And she looked at Eugene for a moment, her face of noble and tender
beauty transfigured by its radiant smile.  But almost immediately,
she dropped her head again in its customary expression that was
heavy and almost sullen, and that suggested something dumb,
furious, and silent locked up in her, for which she could find no
release.

He looked at her for a moment with scowling, half-resentful eyes,
and all of a sudden, flesh, blood, and brain, and heart, and
spirit, his life went numb with love for her.

"And now, my children," Elinor was saying gaily, as she looked at
the menu--"what kind of salad is it going--"she looked up swiftly
and caught Starwick's eye, and instantly their gaze turned upon
their two companions.  The young woman was still staring down with
her sullen, dark, and dumbly silent look, and the boy was devouring
her with a look from which the world was lost, and which had no
place in it for time or memory.

Dark Helen in my heart for ever burning.

"L'écrevisse," Eugene said, staring at the menu.  "What does that
mean, Elinor?"

"Well, darling, I'll tell you," she said with a grave light gaiety
of tone.  "An écrevisse is a kind of crayfish they have over here--
a delicious little crab--but MUCH, MUCH better than anything we
have."

"Then the name of the place really means The Crab?" he asked.

"STOP him!" she shrieked faintly.  "You barbarian, you!" she went
on with mild reproach.  "It's not at ALL the same."

"It's really not, you know," said Starwick, turning to him
seriously.  "The whole quality of the thing is different.  It
really is. . . .  Isn't it astonishing," he went on with an air of
quiet frankness, "the genius they have for names?  I mean, even in
the simplest words they manage to get the whole spirit of the race.
I mean, this square here, even," he gestured briefly, "La Place des
Martyrs.  The whole thing's there.  It's really quite incredible,
when you think of it," he said somewhat mysteriously.  "It really
is."

"Quite!" said Elinor.  "And, oh, my children, if it were only
spring and I could take you down the Seine to an adorable place
called La Pêche Miraculeuse."

"What does that mean, Elinor?" Eugene asked again.

"Well, darling," she said with an air of patient resignation, "if
you MUST have a translation I suppose you'd call it The Miraculous
Catch--a fishing catch, you know.  Only it DOESN'T mean that.  It
would be sacrilege to call it that.  It means La Pêche Miraculeuse
and nothing else--it's QUITE untranslatable--it really is."

"YES," cried Starwick enthusiastically, "and even their simplest
names--their names of streets and towns and places: L'Etoile, for
example--how grand and simple that is!" he said quietly, "and how
perfect--the whole design and spatial grandeur of the thing is in
it," he concluded earnestly.  "It really is, you know."

"Oh, absolutely!" Elinor agreed.  "You couldn't call it The Star,
you know.  That means nothing.  But L'Etoile is perfect--it simply
COULDN'T be anything else."

"QUITE!" Starwick said concisely, and then, turning to Eugene with
his air of sad instructive earnestness, he continued:  "--And that
woman at Le Jockey Club last night--the one who sang the songs--you
know?" he said with grave malicious inquiry, his voice trembling a
little and his face flushing as he spoke--"the one you kept wanting
to find out about--what she was saying?--"  Quiet ruddy laughter
shook him.

"PERFECTLY vile, of course!" cried Elinor with gay horror.  "And
all the time, poor dear, he kept wanting to know what it meant. . . .
I was going to throw something at you if you kept on--if I'd had
to translate THAT I think I should simply have passed out on the
spot--"

"I know," said Starwick, burbling with laughter--"I caught the look
in your eye--it was really QUITE murderous!  And TERRIBLY amusing!"
he added.  Turning to his friend, he went on seriously:  "But
really, Gene, it IS rather stupid to keep asking for the meaning of
everything.  It IS, you know.  And it's so extraordinary," he said
protestingly, "that a person of your quality--your KIND of
understanding--should be so dull about it!  It really is."

"Why?" the other said bluntly, and rather sullenly.  "What's wrong
with wanting to find out what's being said when you don't
understand the language?  If I don't ask, how am I going to find
out?"

"But not at ALL!" Starwick protested impatiently.  "That's not the
point at all: you can find out nothing that way.  Really you
can't," he said reproachfully.  "The whole point about that song
last night was not the words--the meaning of the thing.  If you
tried to translate it into English, you'd lose the spirit of the
whole thing.  Don't you see," he went on earnestly, "--it's not the
MEANING of the thing--you can't translate a thing like that, you
really can't--if you tried to translate it, you'd have nothing but
a filthy and disgusting jingle--"

"But so long as it's French it's beautiful?" the other said
sarcastically.

"But QUITE!" said Starwick impatiently.  "And it's very stupid of
you not to understand that, Gene.  It really is.  The whole spirit
and quality of the thing are SO French--so UTTERLY French!" he said
in a high and rather womanish tone--"that the moment you translate
it you lose everything. . . .  There's nothing disgusting about the
song in French--the words mean nothing, you pay no attention to the
words; the extraordinary thing is that you forget the words. . . .
It's the whole design of the thing, the TONE, the QUALITY. . . .
In a way," he added deeply, "the thing has an ENORMOUS innocence--
it really has, you know. . . .  And it's so disappointing that you
fail to see this. . . .  Really, Gene, these questions you keep
asking about names and meanings are becoming tiresome.  They really
are. . . .  And all these books you keep buying and trying to
translate with the help of a dictionary . . . as if you're ever
going to understand anything--I mean, REALLY understand," he said
profoundly, "in that way."

"You may get to understand the language that way," the other said.

"But not at ALL!" cried Starwick.  "That's just the point--you
really find out nothing: you miss the whole spirit of the thing--
just as you missed the spirit of that song, and just as you missed
the point when you asked Elinor to translate La Pêche Miraculeuse
for you. . . .  It's extraordinary that you fail to see this. . . .
The next thing you know," he concluded sarcastically, a burble of
malicious laughter appearing as he spoke, "you will have enrolled
for a course of lessons--" he choked suddenly, his ruddy face
flushing deeply with his merriment--"for a course of lectures at
the Berlitz language school."

"Oh, but he's entirely capable of it!" cried Elinor, with gay
conviction.  "I wouldn't put it past him for a moment. . . .  My
DEAR," she said drolly, turning toward him, "I have never known
such a glutton for knowledge.  It's simply amazing. . . .  Why, the
child wants to know the meaning of everything!" she said with an
astonished look about her--"the confidence he has in my knowledge
is rather touching--it really is--and I'm so unworthy of it,
darling," she said, a trifle maliciously.  "I don't deserve it at
all!"

"I'm sorry if I've bored you with a lot of questions, Elinor," he
said.

"But you HAVEN'T!" she protested.  "Darling, you HAVEN'T for a
moment!  I LOVE to answer them!  It's only that I feel SO--so
INCOMPETENT. . . .  But listen, Gene," she went on coaxingly,
"couldn't you try to forget it for a while--just sort of forget all
about these words and meanings and enter into the spirit of the
thing? . . .  Couldn't you, dear?" she said gently, and even as he
looked at her with a flushed face, unable to find a ready answer to
her deft irony, she put her hand out swiftly, patted him on the
arm, and nodding her head with an air of swift satisfied finality,
said:

"Good!  I knew you would! . . .  He's really a darling when he
wants to be, isn't he?"

Starwick burbled with malicious laughter at sight of Eugene's
glowering and resentful face; then went on seriously:

"--But their genius for names is quite astonishing!--I mean, even
in the names of their towns you get the whole thing. . . .  What
could be more like Paris," he said quietly, "than the name of
Paris? . . .  The whole quality of the place is in the name.  Or
Dijon, for example.  Or Rheims.  Or Carcassonne.  The whole spirit
of Provence is in the word: what name could more perfectly express
Aries than the name it has--it gives you the whole place, its life,
its people, its peculiar fragrance. . . .  And how different we are
from them in that respect. . . .  I mean," his voice rose on a note
of passionate conviction, "you could almost say that the whole
difference between us--the thing we lack, the thing they have--the
whole thing that is wrong with us, is evident in our names. . . .
It really is, you know," he said earnestly, turning toward his
friend again.  "The whole thing's most important. . . .  How harsh
and meaningless most names in America are, Eugene," he went on
quietly.  "Like addresses printed on a thousand envelopes at once
by a stamping machine--labels by which a place may be identified
but without meaning. . . .  Tell me," he said quietly, after a
brief pause, "what was the name of that little village your father
came from?  You told me one time--I remember, because the whole
thing I'm talking about--the thing that's wrong with us--was in
that name.  What was it?"

"Brant's Mill," the other young man answered.

"Quite!" said Starwick with weary concision.  "A man named Brant
had a mill, and so they called the place Brant's Mill."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Oh, nothing, I suppose," said Starwick quietly.  "The whole
thing's quite perfect. . . .  BRANT'S Mill," there was a note of
bitterness in his voice and he made the name almost deliberately
rasping as he pronounced it.  "It's a name--something to call a
place by--if you write it on a letter it will get there. . . .  I
suppose that's what a name is for. . . .  Gettysburg--I suppose a
man named Gettys had a house or a farm, and so they named the town
after him. . . .  And your mother?  What was the name of the place
she came from?"

"It was a place called Yancey County."

"Quite," said Starwick as before--"and the name of the town?"

"There wasn't any town, Frank.  It was a kind of cross-roads
settlement called The Forks of Ivy."

"No!" Elinor's light Bostonian accent of astounded merriment rang
gaily forth.  "Not REALLY!  You KNOW it wasn't!"

"But not at ALL!" said Starwick in a tone of mild and serious
disagreement.  "The Forks of Ivy is not bad.  It's really
surprisingly good, when you consider most of the other names.
It even has," he paused, and considered carefully, "a kind of
quality. . . .  But Yancey," he paused again, the burble of sudden
laughter came welling up, and for a moment his pleasant ruddy face
was flushed with laughter--"YA-A-ANCEY County"--with deliberate
malice he brought the word out in a rasping countrified tone--"God!"
he said frankly, turning to the other boy, "isn't it awful! . . .
How harsh!  How stupid!  How banal! . . .  And what are some of the
names, where you come from, Gene?" he went on quietly after a brief
pause.  "I'm sure you haven't yet done your worst," he said.
"There must be others just as sweet as Ya-a-ancey."

"Well, yes," the boy said grinning, "we've got some good ones:
there's Sandy Mush, and Hooper's Bald, and Little Hominy.  And we
have names like Beaverdam and Balsam, and Chimney Rock and Craggy
and Pisgah and The Rat.  We have names like Old Fort, Hickory, and
Bryson City; we have Clingman's Dome and Little Switzerland; we
have Paint Rock and Saluda Mountain and the Frying Pan Gap--"

"Stop!" shrieked Elinor, covering her ears with her shocked
fingers--"The Frying Pan Gap!  Oh, but that's HORRIBLE!"

"But how perfect!" Starwick quietly replied.  "The whole thing's
there.  And in the great and noble region where I come from--" the
note of weary bitterness in his tone grew deeper--"out where the
tall caw-r-n grows we have Keokuk and Cairo and Peoria."  He
paused, his grave eyes fixed in a serious and reflective stare: for
a moment his pleasant ruddy face was contorted by the old bestial
grimace of anguish and confusion.  When he spoke again, his voice
was weary with a quiet bitterness of scorn.  "I was born," he said,
"in the great and noble town of Bloomington, but--" the note of
savage irony deepened--"at a very tender age I was taken to Moline.
And now, thank God, I am in Paris"; he was silent a moment longer,
and then continued in a quiet and almost lifeless tone:  "Paris,
Dijon, Provence, Aries . . . Yancey, Brant's Mill, Bloomington."
He turned his quiet eyes upon the other boy.  "You see what I mean,
don't you?  The whole thing's there."

"Yes," the boy replied, "I guess you're right."



LXXVIII


They were sitting at a table in one of the night places of
Montmartre.  The place was close and hot, full of gilt and glitter,
heavy with that unwholesome and seductive fragrance of the night
that comes from perfumery, wine, brandy and the erotic intoxication
of a night-time pleasure place.  Over everything there was a bright
yet golden blaze of light that wrought on all it touched--gilt,
tinsel, table linen, the natural hue and colouring of the people,
the faces of men, and the flesh of the women--an evil but strangely
thrilling transformation.

The orchestra had just finished playing a piece that everyone in
Paris was singing that year.  It was a gay jigging little tune that
Mistinguette had made famous; its name was "Ca, c'est Paris," and
one heard it everywhere.  One heard lonely wayfarers whistling it
as they walked home late at night through the silent narrow streets
of the Latin Quarter, and one heard it hummed by taxi-drivers,
waiters, and by women in cafés.  It was played constantly to the
tune of flutes and violins by dance orchestras in the night-clubs
of Montmartre and Montparnasse.  And, accompanied by the swelling
rhythms of the accordion, one heard it at big dance-halls like the
Bal Bullier, and in the little dives and stews and café-brothel-
dancing places along noisome alleyways near the markets and the
Boulevard de Sébastopol.

In spite of its gay jigging lilt, that tune had a kind of mournful
fatality.  It was one of those songs which seem to evoke perfectly--
it is impossible to know why--the whole colour, life, and
fragrance of a place and time as nothing else on earth can do.  For
the boy, that song would haunt him ever after with the image of
Paris and of his life that year, with the memory of Starwick,
Elinor, and Ann.

The song had for him the fatality of something priceless,
irrecoverably lost, full of that bitter joy and anguish we can feel
at twenty-four, when the knowledge of man's brevity first comes to
us, when we first know ruin and defeat, when we first understand
what we have never known before: that for us, as for every other
man alive, all passes, all is lost, all melts before our grasp like
smoke; when we know that the moment of beauty carries in it the
seeds of its own instant death, that love is gone almost before we
have it, that youth is gone before we know it, and that, like every
other man, we must grow old and die.

The orchestra had finished playing this tune and the dancers were
going to their tables from the polished little square of floor; in
a moment Starwick called the leader of the orchestra over to the
table and asked him to play Starwick's favourite song.  This was a
piece called "My Chile Bon Bon"; it was not new, Starwick had first
heard it several years before in Boston, but like the other piece
this tune was pregnant with the mournful fatality of a place and
period; in its grotesque words and haunting melody there was the
sense of something irrevocable, an utter surrender and a deliberate
loss, a consciousness of doom.  These two pieces together evoked
the whole image and quality of that year, and of the life of these
four people: for Starwick, in fact, this "Chile Bon Bon" song
somehow perfectly expressed the complete fatality that had now
seized his life, the sensual inertia of his will.

The orchestra leader nodded smilingly when Starwick asked him to
play the song, went back and conferred with his musicians for a
moment, and, himself taking up a violin, began to play.  As the
orchestra played, the leader walked toward their table, and,
bending and swaying with the infinite ductile grace which a violin
seems to give to all its performers, he stood facing the two women,
seeming to offer up the wailing, hauntingly mournful and exciting
music as a kind of devotion to their loveliness.

Elinor, tapping the tune out with her fingers on the table-cloth,
hummed the words lightly, absently, under her breath; Ann sat
quietly, darkly, sullenly attentive; Starwick, at one end of the
table, sat turned away, his legs indolently crossed, his ruddy face
flushed with emotion, his eyes fixed in a blind stare, and a little
wet.

Once, while the piece was being played, Starwick's pleasant ruddy
face was contorted again by the old bestial grimace of nameless
anguish and bewilderment which Eugene had seen so many times
before, and in which the sense of tragic defeat, frustration, the
premonition of impending ruin was legible.

When the orchestra leader had finished with the tune, Starwick
turned wearily, thrust his arm indolently across the table towards
Ann and wiggling his fingers languidly and a trifle impatiently,
said quietly:

"Give me some money."

She flushed a little, opened her purse, and said sullenly:

"How much do you want?"

The weary impatience of his manner became more evident, he wiggled
his languid fingers in a more peremptory command, and, burbling a
little with laughter at sight of her sullen face, he said in a low
tone of avaricious humour:

"Give, give, give. . . .  Money, money, money," he said in a low
gloating tone, and burbled again, with a rich welling of humour, as
he looked at her.

Red in the face, she flung a wad of banknotes down upon the table
with almost vicious force; he accepted them languidly, stripped off
300 franc notes and handed them indolently to the orchestra leader,
who responded with a bow eloquent with adoration; and then, without
pausing to count them, Starwick thrust the remainder carelessly in
his pocket.

"Ann!" he said reproachfully.  "I am VERY hurt!"  He paused a
moment; the flow and burble of soft laughter came quickly, flushing
his ruddy face, and he continued as before, with a mock gravity of
reproachful humour.

"I had hoped--" his shoulders trembled slightly--"that by this time
your FINER nature--" he trembled again with secret merriment--"your
FINER nature would be ready to reveal itself."

"My finer nature be damned!" Ann said angrily.  "Whether you like
it or not, I think it's disgraceful the way you fling money around!
Three hundred francs to a man for playing that damned song!  And
you've done the same thing at least a dozen times!  God, I'm sick
of hearing about your 'Chile Bon Bon'!" she concluded bitterly.  "I
wish the damned thing had never been written."

"Ann!" again the soft mockery of sounded reproach.  "And this is
the way you repay us, after all we've done for you!  It's not that
I'm angry but I'm VERY, VERY hurt," he said gently.  "I really am,
you know."

"Ah-h!"  She made a sudden exasperated movement as if she was going
to push the table away from her and get up, and then said with
angry warning:  "Now, look here, Frank, don't you start that again
about how much you've done for me.  Done for me!" she said
furiously.  "Done for me!"  She laughed, short and hard, with angry
exasperation, and was unable to find words to continue.

Starwick's burble of soft laughter answered her:

"I KNOW!" he said, his face reddening a little as he spoke--"But,
after all, you ARE a little TIGHT, Ann"--his shoulders trembled
slightly, and his ruddy face grew deeper with its hue of humour.
"I think," he said gently, and paused again, trembling with quiet
laughter--"I think it may be what is known as the Beacon Hill
influence.  And really," he continued seriously, looking at her
with grave eyes, "you really ought to try to get it out of you."

"Now, Frank," cried Ann angrily, half rising from the table, "if
you start that again about my being stingy--"  She sat down again
abruptly, and burst out with bitter resentment, "I'm not stingy and
you know it! . . .  It's not that I mind spending the money, giving
it to you when I've got it. . . .  It's only that I think everyone
ought to try to bear his own share. . . .  If you think that's my
New England stinginess you're welcome to your opinion. . . .  But
I've always felt that way and always will! . . .  Stingy!" she
muttered, "I'm not. . . .  I'm just tired of being the goat all the
time. . . .  It seems to me the rest of you ought to share in the
expense some time!"

"But not at ALL!" cried Starwick in a tone of astonished protest.
"I can't see that that makes the SLIGHTEST difference," he went on
gently.  "After all, Ann, it's not as if we were four old maids
from Boston doing the grand tour and putting down every cent we
spend in a mutual account-book," he said a trifle sarcastically.
"It's not that kind of thing at all.  When four people know each
other the way we do, the last thing in the world that could
POSSIBLY be of value is money.  What belongs to one belongs to all.
Really," he said a trifle impatiently, "I should think you'd
understand that.  It's QUITE astonishing to see a person of your
quality with such a material--rather GRASPING--view of money.  I
shouldn't think it would make the SLIGHTEST difference to you.  You
really ought to get it out of your system, Ann," he said quietly.
"You really must.  Because you ARE a GRAND person--you really are,
you know."

She flushed, and then muttered sullenly:

"Ah!  Grand person my eye!  I've heard all that before!  You can't
get around it that way!"

"But you ARE!" he said, with earnest insistence.  "You are a VERY
grand person--that's what makes the whole thing such a pity."

She flushed again, and then sat staring at the table in sullen
embarrassment.

"And, Ann," said Starwick gently, beginning to burble with his soft
flow of wicked laughter, "you are really VERY beautiful in that red
dress--" his sensuous mannered tone trembled again with its burble
of wicked humour--"and VERY seductive--and VERY," his shoulders
trembled and his face trembled as he spoke--"You are really QUITE
voluptuous," he said with sensual relish, and suddenly choked with
laughter.  When he had composed himself, he turned his still
laughter-reddened face towards Eugene, and said earnestly:  "It's
QUITE astonishing!  She really is, you know!  She's GLORIOUSLY
beautiful!"

"Frank!" she looked at him for a moment with an expression of
baffled exasperation.  Then, suddenly she laughed her short and
angry laugh:  "God!" she cried sarcastically.  "It's a high price
to pay for compliments, isn't it?"

But that laugh, short and angry as it was, had made radiant, as it
always did, her dark and noble beauty.  Instantly her face had been
lifted, transfigured from its customary expression of dark and
almost heavy sullenness, her cheeks, which in repose had the
pendulous sagging quality of a plump child, were suffused with
rose, her sweet red mouth and white teeth suddenly shone with a
radiant and lovely smile, and Eugene noticed now, as he had begun
to notice, that her grey eyes when she looked at Starwick were no
longer hard and angry, but smoky, luminous with a depthless
tenderness.

"You ARE," Starwick concluded quietly, seriously, his pleasant face
still a trifle flushed with laughter.  "You are one of the most
GLORIOUSLY beautiful creatures that ever lived."

What he said was the simple truth.  The girl's beauty that night
was almost unbelievable.  She had put on a new evening dress which
had been made for her by a famous designer.  The dress was a
glorious red, that seemed almost to float with an aerial buoyancy
of filmy gauze; no dress in the world could have suited her dark
beauty or revealed the noble proportions of her figure half so
well.  Her hair, which was black, coarse, and fragrant, was parted
simply in the middle: Eugene noted that there were already a few
streaks of coarse grey in it, but her face had the dignity of her
grand and honest character--the sullen plumpness of a child and the
radiant sudden sweetness and happiness of her smile, combined.

And in every other respect Ann showed this strange and lovely union
of delicacy and grandeur, of the child and the woman.  Her hands
were long, brown, and narrow, the fingers long and delicate, the
bones as fine and small as a bird's, and yet they were strong,
sensitive, able-looking hands as well.  Her arms were long and
slender, as firm and delicate as a young girl's, but Eugene noted
that her breasts were not round and firm, but the long heavy
sloping breasts of a big woman.  When she got up to dance with
Starwick she topped him by a head, and yet, radiant with a joy and
happiness she had never known before, she seemed to float there in
his arms, an Amazonian figure, great of thigh and limb and breast,
and a creature of a loveliness as delicate and radiant as a
child's.

They danced superbly together: in deference to Starwick, the
orchestra played his "Chile Bon Bon" song again; when they returned
to the table Starwick's ruddy face was flushed with the emotion the
song always aroused in him, his eyes looked wet, and in a high,
passionate, almost womanish tone, he cried to Eugene:

"God!  Isn't it grand!  Isn't it simply superb!  It's one of the
great songs of the world; it really is, you know!  The thing has
the same quality as a great primitive--the same quality as a
primitive Apollo or Cimabue's Madonna, in the Louvre.  Christ!" he
cried in a high womanish tone, "the whole thing's there--it really
is!  I think it's the greatest song that was ever written!"

He poured out a glass of champagne, cold and sparkling, and drank
it thirstily, his eyes wet, his face flushed deeply with his
feeling.



LXXIX


In the dull grey light of the short and swiftly waning winter's
day, the two young men were leaving the museum, to spend the rest
of the afternoon until the time of their appointed meeting with the
women, in drink and talk at one of the innumerable and seductive
cafés of the magic city.  Outside the Louvre, they hailed a taxi
and were driven swiftly over one of the bridges of the Seine,
through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, and at length
stopped and got out before La Closerie des Lilas, where they were
to meet the two women later on.

They spent the remainder of the afternoon in the chill wintry air
of the terrace, warm with drink, with argument or discussion, and
with the gaiety of life and voices of people all around them, the
pageant of life that passed for ever on the street before them--all
that priceless, rare, and uncostly pleasure and excitement of café
life which seemed unbelievable and magical to these two young
Americans.  The dull grey air, which was at once chill and wintry,
and yet languorous, filled them with the sense of some powerful,
strange, and inhuman excitement that was impending for them.

And the bright gaiety of the colours, the constant flash and play
of life about them and along the pavements, the smell and potent
intoxication of the cognac, gave them the sensation of a whole
world given over without reserve or shame to pleasure.  All these
elements, together with that incomparable fusion of odours--at once
corrupt and sensual, subtle and obscene--which exudes from the very
texture of the Paris life--odours which it is impossible to define
exactly but which seem in the dull wintry air to be compacted of
the smells of costly perfumes, of wine, beer, brandy, and of the
acrid and nostalgic fumes of French tobacco, of roasted chestnuts,
black French coffee, mysterious liquors of a hundred brilliant and
intoxicating colours, and the luxurious flesh of scented women--
smote the two young men instantly with the sensual impact of this
strange and fascinating world.

But in spite of all the magic of the scene, and the assurance and
security which Starwick's presence always gave to him, the ghost of
the old unquiet doubt would not wholly be laid at rest, the ache of
the old hunger stirred in Eugene.  Why was he here now?  Why had he
come?  The lack of purpose in this present life, the dozing
indolence of this existence in which no one worked, in which they
sat constantly at tables in a café, and ate and drank and talked,
and moved on to sit at other tables, other cafés--and, most of all,
the strange dull faces of the Frenchmen, the strange and alien life
of this magic city which was so seductive but so unalterably
foreign to all that he had ever known--all this had now begun to
weigh inexplicably upon a troubled spirit, to revive again the old
feelings of naked homelessness, to stir in him the nameless sense
of shame and guilt which an American feels at a life of indolence
and pleasure, which is part of the very chemistry of his blood, and
which he can never root out of him.  And feeling the obscure but
powerful insistence of these troubled thoughts within his mind, he
turned suddenly to Starwick, and without a word of explanation
said:

"But do you really feel at home here?"

"What do you mean by 'feeling at home'?"

"Well, I mean don't you ever feel out of place here?  Don't you
ever feel as if you didn't belong to this life--that you are a
foreigner?"

"But not at all!" said Starwick a trifle impatiently.  "On the
contrary, I think it is the first time in my life that I have NOT
felt like a foreigner.  I never felt at home in the Middle-West
where I was born; I hated the place from my earliest childhood, I
always felt out of place there, and wanted to get away from it.
But I felt instantly at home in Paris from the moment I got here:--
I am far closer to this life than to any other life I've ever
known, for the first time in my life I feel thoroughly at home."

"And you don't mind being a foreigner?"

"But of course not!" Starwick said curtly.  "Besides, I am NOT a
foreigner.  You can only be foreign in a place that is foreign to
you.  This place is not."

"But, after all, Frank, you are not a Frenchman.  You are an
American."

"Not at all," Starwick answered concisely.  "I am an American only
by the accident of birth; by spirit, temperament, inclination, I
have always been a European."

"And you mean you could continue to lead this kind of life without
ever growing tired of it?"

"What do you mean by 'this kind of life'?" said Starwick.

His friend nodded towards the crowded and noisy terrace of the
café.

"I mean sitting around at cafés all day long, going to night-clubs--
eating, drinking, sitting,--moving on from one place to another--
spending your life that way."

"Do you think it's such a bad way to spend your life?" said
Starwick quietly.  He turned, regarding his friend with serious
eyes.  "Don't you find it very amusing?"

"Yes, Frank, for a time.  But after a while, don't you think you'd
get tired of it?"

"No more tired," said Starwick, "than I would of going to an office
day after day at nine o'clock and coming away at five, doing
useless and dreary work that someone else could do as well.  On the
contrary, this kind of life--" he nodded towards the crowded
tables--"seems to me much more interesting and amusing."

"But how can you feel that you belong to it?" the other said.  "I
should think that would make a difference to you.  It does to me--
the feeling that I am a stranger here, that this is not my life,
that I know none of these people."

"Are you getting ready to tell me now that an American never really
gets to know any French people?" said Starwick, repeating the banal
phrase with a quiet sarcasm that brought a flush to the other's
face.

"Well, it's not likely that he will, from what I've heard."

Starwick cast a weary look around him at the chattering group of
people at the other tables.

"God!" he said quietly.  "I shouldn't think he'd want to.  I
imagine most of them are about as dull a lot as you could find."

"If you feel that way about them, what is the great attraction
Paris holds for you?  How can you possibly feel that way about the
people and still say you feel at home here?"

"Because Paris belongs to the world--to Europe--more than it
belongs to France.  One does not come here because he wants to know
the French: he comes because he can find here the most pleasant,
graceful and civilized life on earth."

"Yes, but there are other things that may be more important than
leading a graceful and pleasant life."

"What, for instance?" said Starwick, looking at him.

"Getting your work done is one of them.  For you, I should think
that would be a great deal more important."

Starwick was again silent; the old bestial grimace, image of an
unutterable anguish and confusion in his soul, for a moment
contorted his pleasant ruddy face, developed, passed, was gone; he
said quietly and with the infinite weariness of despair that had
now become the image of his life:

"Getting my work done!  My God! as if it mattered."

"There was a time when you thought it did, Frank."

"Yes, there was a time when I did think so," he said lifelessly.

"And now you no longer feel that way about it?"

Starwick was silent; when he spoke again, it was not to answer
directly.

--"Always the old unquiet heart," he said wearily and sadly; he
turned and looked silently at his friend for a moment.  "Why?
Since I first knew you, you have been like that, Eugene--wanting to
devour the earth, lashing your soul to frenzy in this useless,
hopeless and impossible search for knowledge."

"Why useless or hopeless, Frank?"

"Because it is a kind of madness in you that grows worse all the
time; because you cannot cure it or ever satisfy this hunger of
yours while you have it; because it will exhaust you, break your
heart, and drive you mad; and because, even if you could gratify
this impossible desire to absorb the whole sum of recorded
knowledge and experience in the world, you would gain nothing by
it."

"There I can't agree with you."

"Do you really think," said Starwick wearily, "that if you could
achieve this hopeless ambition of reading all the books that were
ever printed--of knowing all the people--seeing all the places--
that you would be any better off than you now are?  Now, day after
day, you go prowling up and down along the book-stalls on the
Seine, pawing through tons of junk and rubbish until your very
heart is sick with weariness and confusion.  When you are not with
us, you sit alone in a café with a dictionary beside you trying to
decipher the meaning of some useless and meaningless book.  You no
longer enjoy what you read, because you are tortured by a
consciousness of the vast number of books you have not read; you go
to the museums--to the Louvre--and you no longer enjoy the
pictures, because you torture your brain and exhaust your energy in
a foolish effort to see and remember all of them.  You no longer
enjoy the crowd, you go out on the streets of Paris, you sit here
in this crowded café--and instead of taking pleasure in all this
gaiety and life about you, you are tortured by the thought that you
know none of these people, that you know nothing about their lives,
that there are four million people here in Paris and you do not
know a dozen of them. . . .  Eugene, Eugene," he said sadly, "this
thing in you is growing worse all the time; if you do not master
it, it is a disease that will some day drive you mad and destroy
you."

"And yet, Frank, many people on this earth have had the same
disease.  Because of it, in order to get knowledge, Doctor Faust
sold his soul to the devil."

"Alas," said Starwick, "where is the devil?"  In a moment he
continued quietly, as before:  "Do you think that you will really
gain in wisdom if you read a million books?  Do you think you will
find out more about life if you know a million people rather than
yourself?  Do you think you will get more pleasure from a thousand
women than from two or three--see more if you go to a hundred
countries instead of six?  And finally, do you think you'll get
more happiness from life by 'getting your work done' than by doing
nothing?  My God! Eugene--" his voice was weary with the resigned
fatality of despair that had now corrupted him--"you still feel
that it is important that you 'do your work,' as you call it, but
what will it matter if you do or don't?  You want to lead the
artist's life, to do the artist's work, to create out of the
artist's materials--what will it matter in the end if you do this,
or nothing?"

"You did not always feel so, Frank."

"No," said Starwick wearily, "there was a time when I felt
differently.  There was a time when I felt that the artist's life
was the finest life on earth--the only life I would care to lead."

"And now?"

"Now--nothing--nothing," he spoke so quietly that his words were
scarcely audible.  "It no longer matters. . . .  I go to the Louvre
and look at that colossal mountain of junk--up and down those
endless corridors hung with the dull or worthless work of thousands
of dead men who once felt as I did--that they must create, express
the image of their soul--that art and the artist's life were all
that mattered.  Now they are dead, their dreary works have been
left behind as a kind of useless relic of their agony: in that
whole gigantic storage-plant of worthless art--there are just three
pictures I should have cared to paint--and I know it's not in me to
paint any of them.  I thought I wanted to write plays, but now I
feel the same about that, too; among all the thousands of plays I
have read or seen, I doubt that there are a dozen which I should
have cared to write--and I know now that I could have written none
of them. . . .  What does it matter?  Why do you goad your spirit
and exhaust your mind with these frantic efforts, these useless
desires to add another book or play to the mountains of books and
plays that have already been written?  Why should we break our
hearts to add to that immense accumulation of dull, fair, or
trivial work that has already been done?"  He was silent a moment
longer, and then the colour in his ruddy face deepening with
excitement, he said in a high, passionate tone:  "What is great--
what is priceless--what we would give our lives to do--is so
impossible--so utterly, damnably impossible!  And if we can never
do the best--then why do anything?"

For a moment, there returned to the other a memory of the moonlit
streets of Cambridge, and of a night when Starwick, drunk with wine
and the generous and extravagant enthusiasm of youth, had turned to
him and in a voice that rung along the sleeping street, had called
him a mighty poet.  And he remembered how his own heart had beat
hot with hope and joy at the sound of those proud and foolish
words, and how he had grasped Starwick's hand and wrung it with a
hard grip of passionate conviction, and told Frank what he believed
at that moment with all the ardour of his heart--that Starwick was
the greatest young man of his time and generation.

And remembering now those two drunk and happy boys who stood there
in the moon-still streets, and spoke to each other the compact of
their devotion and belief, he wanted to ask Frank if this weary
acquiescence in defeat, that had now become the very colour of his
life, was a better thing than the proud and foolish vision of a
boy.

But he said nothing, and after a moment's silence, Starwick looked
at his watch and called the waiter, saying that it was already time
for their meeting with the two women at a café in Montparnasse.
Therefore, they paid the bill and departed; but what Frank had said
to him that day would live in his memory in years to come.  For in
Frank's words were implicit every element of the resignation,
despair, and growing inertia and apathy of his will.



LXXX


The relations between these four people had now been strained to
the breaking-point.  That month of debauch had exacted a stern
tribute from them.  Their exhausted bodies and frayed nerves cried
out for rest, a period of curative repose when the well of their
drained energy could be filled up again.  But like creatures
hopelessly addicted to a drug, they could not break the bonds of
this tyranny of pleasure which held them.  Starwick seemed to be
completely enslaved by this senseless and furious quest, this
frantic seeking after new sensations, this hopeless pursuit of a
happiness, a fulfilment, that they never found.  He seemed unable
or unwilling to break the evil spell.  Rather, as if a poisonous
hunger was feeding on his vitals--a hunger that grew constantly
from the food it fed upon, and that could not be assuaged by any
means--the evil inertia of his will, the ugly impassivity of his
resignation became every day more marked.

Of all of them, he alone preserved the appearance of calm.  And
that cold, impassive calm was maddening: he met the storms of
anger, protests, reproaches, and persuasions of the others with an
air of sad humility, a kind of sorrowful acceptance, a quiet
agreement to every accusation or indictment, a grand manner of
sweet, sorrowful contrition that was more hateful than any
deliberate insult could have been.  For behind this impenetrable
armour of humility, this air of mysterious fatality, there was
evident a hateful arrogance which said that words were useless
because no words could express the fatal wisdom of his soul, and
which, with a stubborn and abominable perversity, seemed
deliberately resolved on ruin.

His conduct became daily more absurd, extravagant, ridiculous.  He
was acting like a melodramatic fool, but it was impossible to laugh
at his folly because of the desperate fatality that attended it.
He did unbelievable things, contrived unbelievable situations that
seemed fitting only in a world of opera but were shamefully unreal
and unnecessary in the real one.  What was really shameful and
unworthy in his conduct was this--his fatality served no purpose,
his reckless and deliberate pursuit of danger did no good except to
dignify the melodramatic unreality of a comic opera situation with
the realities of blood and death.

He was constantly and deliberately involving himself and others in
these ridiculous but perilous situations.  One night, in one of the
Montmartre resorts, he had a quarrel with a man that would have
been farcical save for the ugly consequences it produced, the
painful and shameful memory it would later evoke.  The man, an
unpleasant, wizened-looking little Frenchman, a creature of the
night, with obscene eyes, a yellowed skin, and a pointed beard half
covering the features of a rodent, had not been able to keep his
ugly eyes off Ann, had measured the noble proportions of her beauty
with a kind of foul leering appraisal that had in it something
almost as palpable and sensual as a naked touch, and now, as the
orchestra struck up another tune, he approached the table, bowed,
and asked her, courteously enough, for a dance.

Ann reddened furiously in the face, looked down sullenly at the
tablecloth and, before she was able to think of a reply, Starwick
said:

"Mademoiselle does not care to dance.  Please go away."

The cold arrogance of Starwick's tone, and his curt dismissal,
enraged the Frenchman.  When he replied, his lips were bared in an
ugly smile that showed unpleasant fangs of yellowed teeth; he said:

"Is the lady not allowed to speak for herself?  Is Monsieur perhaps
her guardian?"

"Will you please go away now?" Starwick said again, with a cold and
weary impassivity.  "You are boring us."

"But, it's marvellous!"  The little Frenchman cast back his
yellowed face and bared his fangs in a laugh of envenomed mockery.
"It's Monsieur D'Artagnan come to life again, and a lady so shy and
modest that she can't speak for herself!  But, it's superb!" he
cried again, and with an ironic bow, concluded:  "Monsieur, with
all my heart I thank you for this wonderful diversion!  You are
very droll!"

Starwick's reply to this was to pick up the seltzer bottle on
the table and, without for a moment altering his air of cold
impassivity, to squirt the siphon straight in the little
Frenchman's yellow face.

In a moment, the place was a seething maelstrom of excitement.
People all over sprang up from their tables, the dancers stopped
dancing, the orchestra stopped with a crash, and the proprietor and
the waiter came towards them on the run.

They were at once surrounded by an excited group of gesticulating,
chattering people, all trying to talk at once.  Starwick was
standing up now, facing his antagonist, cold and impassive save for
a deeper flush of excitement on his ruddy face.  As for the little
Frenchman, the look of murderous hatred on his face was horrible.
Without stopping to dry his dripping face with the napkin which an
excited and persuasive waiter was offering him, he thrust aside the
manager, who was trying to restrain him, and coming close to
Starwick, snarled:

"Your name, monsieur?  I demand to know your name.  My 
representatives will call upon you in the morning."

"Good," said Starwick coldly.  "I shall wait for them.  Monsieur
shall have whatever satisfaction he desires."

And taking a card from his purse, he wrote the studio address below
his name and gave it to the man.

"Ah, good!" the Frenchman cried harshly, glancing at it.  "Until
tomorrow!"

And calling for his bill, and silent to all the apologies and
cajoleries of the proprietor, he departed.

"But Frank, darling!" Elinor cried, when they had seated themselves
again.  "What do you intend to do?  Surely you're not going to--"
She did sot finish, but stared at him with a troubled and
astonished face.

"Yes," said Starwick coldly and quietly.  "He has asked me to fight
a duel, and if he wants it, I shall meet him."

"Oh, but don't be absurd!" cried Elinor with an impatient laugh.
"What on earth do you know about fighting duels?  My poor child,
how can you be so ridiculous!  This is the twentieth century,
darling.  Don't you know that people don't act that way any
longer?"

"Quite!" said Starwick, with a stony calm.  "Nevertheless, I shall
meet him if he wants me to."  He looked at her with quiet eyes for
a moment, and then said gravely:  "I've GOT to do that.  I really
have, you know."

"Got to!" Elinor cried impatiently.  "Why, the child is MAD!"  Her
tone immediately became crisp, incisive, authoritative: she began
to speak to him quietly, kindly, but in a peremptory tone, as one
might speak to a child:

"Francis," she said quietly.  "Listen to me!  Don't be an idiot!
What does it matter about that wretched little man?  It's all over
now!  A duel!  Good heavens!  Don't be such a child!  Whoever heard
of such a thing?"

His face reddened a little from her ridicule, but he answered, in a
cold impassive tone:

"Quite!  Nevertheless, I shall meet him if he wants it!"

"Meet him!" Elinor cried again.  "Oh, Francis, how can you be so
stupid!  Meet him with what?"

"With whatever weapon he wants to use," Starwick replied.  "Pistols
or swords--it doesn't matter!"

"Pistols or swords!" Elinor shrieked faintly, and began to laugh.
"Why, you idiot, what do you know about pistols or swords?  You've
never had a sword in your hand in your life--and as for pistols,
you wouldn't even know how to point the thing and press the
trigger!"

"It doesn't matter," he said in a very quiet and fatal way.  "I
shall fire into the air."

In spite of the ridiculous and melodramatic quality of these
foolish words, no one laughed.  They saw suddenly what fatal
consequences this farcical situation might have, and having felt
the desperation of his soul--that terrible despair which now seemed
to be driving him on to seek ruin everywhere--they knew he would do
exactly as he said, if given the opportunity.

Elinor started to go: she beckoned to a waiter and called for the
bill, and said persuasively:

"Come on!  Let's get out of this place!  You've had too much to
drink!  I think your head needs clearing--a little fresh air will
do you good.  You'll feel different about all this tomorrow!"

"But not at all!" he said patiently, and then, as she started to
get up:  "Will you please sit down.  We're not going yet."

"But why, darling?  Aren't you ready?  Haven't you raised enough
hell for one evening--or do you want to fight a duel with someone
else?  Besides, I do think you might think of Ann.  I know she's
wanted to go for some time."

"But WHY?" he said, turning to Ann with an air of fine surprise.
"Aren't you enjoying yourself?  It's a VERY good place, and the
music is awfully good--it really is, you know."

"Oh, charming, charming!" she muttered sarcastically.  She had been
staring at the table-cloth sullenly, with a flaming face, ever
since the quarrel had begun, and now looking up suddenly, with a
short and angry laugh, she said:

"God!  I don't know whether to walk out of here or CRAWL!  I feel
all--UNDRESSED!"

At these words, his face really did flush crimson with
embarrassment.  He looked at her for a moment, and then said
sharply, with a note of stern reproof and anger in his voice:

"Ann!  It's VERY bad and VERY wrong--and--and--very MEAN of you to
talk like that."

"That's how I feel," she muttered.

"Then," he said quietly but with two deep and angry spots of colour
flaming in his cheeks, "I'm THOROUGHLY ashamed of you.  It's QUITE
unworthy of you.  At a time like this, a person of your quality has
got to show more--" he paused, choosing the word carefully, "more
FIBRE.  You really must, you know!"

"Oh, fibre my eye!" she flared up, looking at him with flushed,
lovely and angry eyes.  "You don't lack fibre simply because you
don't want to be made a fool of!  Frank, you make me tired, the way
you talk!  Everywhere we go now someone's always showing 'fibre'--
and everyone is having a rotten, awful time.  For God's sake, let's
not talk so much about showing fibre and let's try to enjoy
ourselves and get some pleasure and some happiness from life, and
act like decent, natural people for a change.  I had looked forward
so much to coming on this trip with Elinor--and now--"  Tears of
anger and disappointment glittered in her eyes, she looked down at
the table sullenly in an effort to conceal them, and then muttered:
"Playing the fool and making scenes and starting rows everywhere we
go!  Getting into trouble everywhere, making people hate us, never
having any fun!  Squirting siphons at some wretched little man--"
she made a sudden impulsive gesture of disgust and turned away.
"God!  It makes me sick!"

"I'm sorry to know you feel that way," he said quietly.  "I'll try
to see it doesn't happen again--but, after all, Ann--the reason it
did happen is because I like you so VERY much, and have so much
respect for you and won't stand for anyone insulting you!"

"Ah-h!  Insulting me!" she said angrily.  "Good heavens, Francis,
do you think I need protection from a wretched little man like
that?  When I've been a nurse, and had to go alone to every rotten
slum in Boston, and learned to handle people twice his size!
Protect me!" she said bitterly.  "Thank you for nothing!  I didn't
come over here to be protected--I don't need it.  I can take care
of myself.  Just try to act and feel like a decent human being--
let's try to be friends together and to show some consideration for
each other--and don't worry about protecting me!"



LXXXI


He slept little that night.  The quarrel in the night-club and its
consequences seemed fantastic, incredible, like a nightmare.  At
daybreak he got up and went to the window and stared out at the
grey light just breaking on the roofs and chimney-pots of Paris.
The old buildings emerged haggard, pale, lemony, with all the
wonderful, homely practicality of dawn and morning, and looking at
them, Montmartre, the blaze of lights, the music and the drunken
voices, and the quarrel with the Frenchman--the whole strange and
evil chemistry of night--seemed farther away, more unreal and
dream-like than ever.  Could it have happened?  Had Starwick really
been challenged to a duel?  Was he going through with it?

He got up and dressed, and with dry lips and a strange, numb
lightness in his limbs, descended to the street and hailed a
passing taxi in the Rue Bonaparte.  The sounds of morning, shutters
being rolled up, scrubwomen and maids down on their knees at
entrances, shops being opened--all this made the night before seem
more unreal than ever.

When he got to the studio he found everybody up.  Ann was already
at work making coffee, scrambling eggs for breakfast.  Elinor was
just combing up her hair, Starwick was in the balcony and had not
yet come down.  Elinor kept talking as she arranged her hair, and
from the balcony Starwick answered her.

"But Frank!" she was saying, "you know you wouldn't be fool enough
to do such a thing!  Surely you don't mean you intend to go through
with it?"

"Ace," he said coldly from above, "I do mean to.  Quite!"

"But--oh!  Don't be an ass!" she cried impatiently.  Turning to
Ann, with a little, frowning smile, she bit her lips, and shaking
her head slightly, cried in an astounded tone:

"Isn't it INCREDIBLE!  Did you ever hear of such an INSANE thing in
all your life?"

But in the set of her jaw, the faint smile around the corner of her
mouth, there was the look of grim decision they had all seen
before.

As Eugene entered, Ann turned from the stove, and, spoon in hand,
stood looking at him sullenly for a moment.  Suddenly she laughed
her short and angry laugh and turned away toward Elinor, saying:

"God!  Here's the second!  Don't they make a pair!"

"But my DEAR!" cried Elinor with a light, gay malice.  "Where is
the top-hat?  Where are the striped trousers and the morning coat?
Where is the duelling case with the revolvers? . . .  All right,
Monsieur D'Artagnan," she called up towards the balcony ironically.
"Your friend Monsieur Porthos has arrived . . . and breakfast is
ready, darling!  What's that they say about an army?" she
innocently inquired, "--that it ought not to fight on an empty
stomach? . . .  Ahem!" she cleared her throat.  "Will Monsieur
D'Artagnan condescend to have the company of two frail women for
breakfast on the morning of the great affair . . . or does Monsieur
prefer to be left alone with his devoted second to discuss--ahem!
ahem! . . . the final arrangements?"

Starwick made no reply, until he had come down the steps.

"You can stay, if you want to," he said indifferently.  "I shall
have nothing to say to them, anyway."  Turning to Eugene, he said
with magnificent, bored weariness:  "Find out what they want.  Let
me know what they want to do."

"B--but, what do you want me to say to them, Frank?  What shall I
tell them?"

"Anything," said Starwick indifferently.  "Anything you like.  Say
that I will meet him anywhere--on any terms--whatever they like.
Let them settle it their own way."

He picked up a spoon and started to eat his orange.

"Oh, Frank, you idiot!" cried Elinor, seizing him by the hair and
shaking his head.  "Don't be stupid!  You know you're not going on
with this farce!"

He lifted quiet, wearily patient eyes and looked at her.

"Sorry!" he said.  "But I've GOT to.  If that's what he wants, I
really must, I owe the man that much--I really do, you know!"

Breakfast then proceeded in a painful and uneasy silence, broken
only by Elinor's malicious thrusts, and maintained by Starwick's
weary and impassive calm.

At ten o'clock there were steps along the alley-way outside,
someone mounted the veranda, and the studio bell jangled.  The two
women exchanged uneasy looks, Starwick got up quietly and turned
away, and in a moment Elinor called out sharply:  "Entrez."

The door opened and a man entered the room.  He wore striped
trousers that were in need of pressing, a frayed and worn-looking
frock-coat, and he carried a brief-case under his arm.  He was
bald, sallow, about forty-five years old, and had a little
moustache and furtive eyes.  He looked at each person in the room
quickly, sharply, and then said inquiringly:

"Monsieur Star-WEEK?"

"Ace," said Starwick quietly, and turned.

"Ah, bon!" the little Frenchman said briskly, and smiled, showing
yellow fangs of teeth.  He had been bent slightly forward, holding
his brief-case with thin, eager fingers, as he waited.  Now he came
forward swiftly, took a card out of his wallet, and presenting it
to Starwick with something of a flourish, said:

"Monsieur, permettez-moi.  Ma carte."

Starwick glanced at the card indifferently, and was about to put it
down upon the table when the little Frenchman interrupted him.
Stretching out his thin and rather grimy hand, he said courteously
yet eagerly:

"S'il vous plaît, monsieur!"--took the card again, and put it back
into his wallet.

Starwick indicated a chair and said:

"Won't you sit down?"

From that time on, the conversation proceeded in mutilated French
and English.  The little Frenchman sat down, hitched up his striped
trousers carefully and with his arched fingers poised upon his bony
knees, bent forward and, with another ingratiating and somewhat
repulsive smile, said:

"Monsieur Star-week ees Américain, n'est-ce pas?"

"Ace," said Starwick.

"And was at Le Rat Mort last night?"

"Ace," said Starwick again.

"Et Monsieur?"  He nodded enquiringly toward Eugene, "vas also
zere?"

"Ace," Starwick answered.

"Et Mademoiselle . . . et Mademoiselle," he turned with courteous
inquiry towards the two young women--"zey vere also zere?"

"Ace," said Starwick as before.

"Ah, bon!" the little Frenchman cried, nodding his head vigorously,
and with an air of complete satisfaction.  Then, rubbing his bony,
little hands together dryly and briskly, he took up his thin and
battered old brief-case, which he had been holding firmly between
his knees, swiftly unfastened the straps and unlatched it, and took
out a few sheets of flaming, yellow paper covered with notations in
a fine, minute hand:

"Monsieur--" he began, clearing his throat, and rattling the flimsy
sheets impressively--"Monsieur, I s'ink"--he looked up at Starwick
ingratiatingly, but with an air of sly insinuation, "--Monsieur, I
s'ink, perhaps, vas"--he shrugged his shoulders slightly, with an
air of deprecation--"Monsieur vas--drink-ING?"

Starwick made no answer for a moment: his face reddened, he
inclined his head, and said coldly, but unconcedingly:

"Oui!  C'est ça, monsieur!"

"Ah-h!" the little Frenchman cried again with a dry little cackle
of satisfaction--"--an' ven one drink--espeecialEE, monsieur, ven
ve are yong," he laughed ingratiatingly again, "--he sometime do
an' say some t'ings zat he regret--eh?"

"But of course!" cried Elinor at this point, quickly, impatiently,
eagerly.  "That's just the point!  Frank was drinking--the whole
thing happened like a flash--it's all over now--we're sorry--
everyone is sorry:--it was a regrettable mistake--we're sorry for
it--we apologize!"

"But not at all!" cried Starwick, reddening angrily, and looking
resentfully towards Elinor.  "Not at all!  I do NOT agree with
you!"

"Oh, Frank, you idiot, be quiet!  Let me handle this," she cried.
Turning to the little Frenchman, she said swiftly, smoothly, with
all her coaxing and formidable persuasiveness:

"Monsieur, what can we do to remedy this regrettable mistake?"

"Comment?" said the Frenchman, in a puzzled tone.

"Monsieur Starwick," Elinor went on with coaxing persuasion, 
"--Monsieur Starwick--comme vous voyez, monsieur--est très jeune.
Il a toutes les fautes de la jeunesse.  Mais il est aussi un homme
de grand esprit; de grand talent.  Il a le tempérament d'un artiste:
d'un homme de génie.  Comme un Français, monsieur, vous," she went
on flatteringly "--VOUS connaissez cette espèce d'hommes.  Vous
savez qu'ils ne sont pas toujours responsables de leurs actes.
C'est comme ça avec Monsieur Starwick.  Il est de bonne coeur, de
bonne volonté: il est honnête, généreux et sincère, mais il est
aussi plein de tempérament--impulsif:--il manque de jugement.  Hier
soir nous avons tous--comme on dit--fait la noce ensemble.
Monsieur Starwick a bu beaucoup--a bu trop--et il a été coupable
d'une chose regrettable.  Mais aujourd'hui il se repent très
sincèrement de sa conduite.

"Il vous offre ses apologies les plus profondes.  Il a déjà
souffert assez.  Dans ces circonstances, monsieur," she concluded,
with an air of charming persuasiveness, "on peut excuser le jeune
homme, n'est-ce pas?--on peut pardonner une faute si honnêtement et
sincèrement regrettée."

And she paused, smiling at him with an air of hopeful finality, as
if to say:  "There!  You agree with me, don't you?  I knew you
would!"

But the Frenchman was not to be so easily persuaded.  Waving thin
fingers sideways in the air, and shaking his head without
conviction, he laughed a dry, dubious laugh, and said:

"Ah-h!  I don't know--mademoiselle!  Zese apologies!--"--again he
waved thin dubious fingers--"eet ees all ver-ree well to meck
apologies bot ze--vat you say?--ze dom-mage!--ze dom-mage is
done. . . .  Monsieur," he said gravely, turning to Starwick, "you
have been coupable of a ver-ree gret offence.  Ze--ze--vat you
say?--ZE ASSAULT, monsieur--ze assault ees 'ere in France--une chose
très sérieuse!  Vous comprenez?"

"Ace," said Starwick coldly.

"Mon client," the little Frenchman cleared his throat portentously--
"--mon client, Monsieur Reynal, 'as been terriblement blessé--
insulté! monsieur!" he cried sharply.  "Eeet ees necessaree zu meck
des réparations, n'est-ce pas?"

"Ace," said Starwick coldly.  "Whatever reparation you desire."

The Frenchman stared at him a moment in an astonished way and then,
in an excited and eager tone, cried:

"Ah, bon!  Zen you agree?"

"Perfectly," said Starwick.

"Bon!  Bon!" the little man said eagerly, rubbing his hands
together with greedy satisfaction.  "Monsieur est sage--ees, vat
you say?--ees ver-ree wise.  Monsieur est Américain--n'est-ce pas?--
un étranger--comme vous, mademoiselle . . . et vous, monsieur . . .
et vous, mademoiselle--you are 'ere zu meck ze tour--zu be libre--
free--n'est-ce pas--zu avoid ze complications--"

"But," said Elinor, in a bewildered tone, "--what is--I don't
understand--"

"Alors," the Frenchman said, "eet ees bettaire to avoid ze
complications--oui!  Ah," he said, with an arching glance at
Starwick, "mais Monsieur est sage . . . est très, très sage!  C'est
toujours mieux de faire des réparations . . . et éviter les
conséquences plus sérieuses."

"But!" cried Elinor again, her astonishment growing, "I don't
understand.  What reparations are you talking about?"

"Zese, madame!" the Frenchman said, and coughing portentously, he
rattled the flimsy sheets of paper in his hand, held them up before
his eyes, and began to read:

"Pour l'endommagement d'un veston du soir--trois cents francs!"

"What?  WHAT?" said Elinor in a small, chilled tone.  "For--WHAT?"

"Mais oui, madame!" the Frenchman now cried passionately, for the
first time rising to the heights of moral indignation, "--un
veston du soir complet--ruiné, madame!--COMPLÈTEMENT, ABSOLUMENT
ruiné! . . .  Trois cents francs, monsieur," he said cunningly,
turning to Starwick, "--c'est pas cher! . . .  Pour moi, oui!--c'est
cher--mais pour vous--ah-h!" he waved his dirty fingers and laughed
with scornful deprecation, "--c'est rien!  Rien du tout."  He rattled
the flimsy paper in his hands, cleared his throat, and went on:

"Pour l'endommagement d'une chemise--une chemise, n'est-ce pas, du
soir?" he looked up inquiringly, "--cinquante francs"--

"But this," gasped Elinor, "this is--"  She looked at Starwick with
an astounded face.  Starwick said nothing.

"Pour l'angoisse mentale," the Frenchman continued.

"What?" Elinor gasped and looked at Ann.  "What did he say?"

"Mental anguish," Ann answered curtly.  "All right," she turned to
the Frenchman, "how much is the mental anguish?"

"C'est cinq cents francs, mademoiselle."

"But this man?" cried Elinor, turning to Ann with an air of
astounded enlightenment--"this man is--"

"He's a shyster lawyer, yes!" Ann said bitterly.  "Couldn't you see
it from the first?"

"Ah, mademoiselle,"--the Frenchman began with a reproachful
grimace, and a little, deprecating movement of his fingers, "--you
are--"

"How much?" Ann answered in her level, toneless French.  "How much
do you want?"

"Vous comprenez, mademoiselle--"

"How much?" she said harshly.  "How much do you want?"

His furtive eyes gleamed with a sudden fox-glint of eager greed.

"Mille francs!" he said eagerly.  "Mille francs pour tout
ensemble! . . . Pour vous, mademoiselle"--he laughed again with
scornful deprecation as he waved his grimy angers--"c'est rien--
pour moi--"

She got up abruptly, went over to the shelf that ran around the
wall and got her purse.  She opened it, took out a roll of bills,
and coming back tossed them on the table before him.

"But mademoiselle"--he stammered, unable to believe his good luck,
his eyes glued upon the roll of bills in a stare of hypnotic
fascination.

"Give me a receipt," she said.

"Comment?" he looked puzzled for a moment, then cried, "Ah-h!  Un
reçu!  Mais oui, mais oui, mademoiselle!  Tout de suite!"

Trembling with frantic haste he scrawled out a receipt on a sheet
of yellow paper, gave it to her, clutched the banknotes with a
trembling claw, and stuffed them in his wallet.

"Now get out," said Ann.

"Mademoiselle?" he scrambled hastily to his feet, clutched his
briefcase and his hat, and looked nervously at her--"vous dites?"

"Get out of here," she said, and began to move slowly towards him.

He scrambled for the door like a frightened cat, stammering:

"Mais oui . . . mais parfaitement . . . mais"--he almost stumbled
going down the steps, glancing back with nervous apprehension as he
went.  She shut the door behind him, came back, sat down in her
chair, and stared sullenly at her plate, saying nothing.  Starwick
was crimson in the face, but did not look at anyone and did not
speak.  Elinor was busy with her napkin: she had lifted it to her
face and was holding it firmly across her mouth.  From time to time
her breast and stomach and her heavy shoulders trembled in a kind
of shuddering convulsion, smothered and explosive snorts and gasps
came from her.

It got too much for her: they heard a faint, choked shriek, she
rose and rushed blindly across the room, entered the bathroom and
slammed the door behind her.  And then they heard peal after peal
of laughter, shrieks and whoops and yells of it, and finally a dead
silence, broken at times by exhausted gasps.  Ann continued to look
sullenly and miserably at her plate.  As for Starwick, he sat there
wearily detached, impassive, magnificent as always, but his face
had the hue and colour of boiled lobster.



LXXXII


One night, in a small bar or bistro upon the hill of Montmartre,
Starwick met a young Frenchman who was to become the companion of
his adventures in many strange and devious ways thereafter.  It was
about four o'clock in the morning: after the usual nightly circuit
of the gilded pleasure resorts, cafés and more unsavoury dives and
stews of the district, Starwick had become very drunk and unruly,
had quarrelled with Elinor and Ann when they tried to take him
home, and since that time had been wandering aimlessly through the
district, going from one cheap bar to another.

The women hung on doggedly; Starwick had refused to let them
accompany him, and they had asked Eugene to stay with him and try
to keep him out of trouble.  Eugene, in fact, was only less drunk
than his companion, but fortified by that sense of pride and duty
which a trust imposed by two lovely women can give a young man, he
hung on, keeping pace with Starwick, drink for drink, until the
whole night fused into a drunken blur, a rout of evil faces, the
whole to be remembered later as jags of splintered light upon a
chain of darkness, as flying images, fixed, instant, and
intolerably bright, in the great blank of memory.  And out of all
these blazing pictures of the night and the wild reel of their
debauch, one would remain for ever after to haunt his vision
mournfully.  It was the memory--or rather the CONSCIOUSNESS--of the
two women, Ann and Elinor, waiting in the dark, following the blind
weave of their drunken path, all through the mad kaleidoscope of
night, never approaching them, but always there.  He had not seemed
to look at them, to notice them, and yet later he had always known
that they were there.  And the memory fused to one final mournful
image that was to return a thousand times to haunt him in the years
to come.  He and Starwick had come out of one of the bars that
broke the darkness of the long steep hill, and were reeling down
past shuttered stores and old dark houses towards the invitation of
another blaze of light.

Suddenly he knew that Ann and Elinor were behind them.  For a
moment he turned, and saw the two women pacing slowly after them,
alone, patient, curiously enduring.  The image of that long silent
street of night, walled steeply with old houses and shuttered
shops, and of the figures of these two women pacing slowly behind
them, in the darkness, seemed in later years to bear the sorrowful
legend of what their lives--of what so much of life--was to become.
And for this reason it burned for ever in his memory with a
mournful, dark and haunting radiance, became, in fact, detached
from names and personalities and identic histories--became
something essential, everlasting and immutable in life.  It was an
image of fruitless love and lost devotion, of a love that would
never come to anything, and of beautiful life that must be
ruinously consumed in barren adoration of a lost soul, a cold and
unresponding heart.  And it was all wrought mournfully there into
the scheme of night, made legible in the quiet and gracious
loveliness of these two women, so strong, so patient, and so
infinitely loyal, pacing slowly down behind two drunken boys in the
slant steep street and emptiness of night.

Suddenly the image blazed to the structure of hard actuality:
another bar, and all around hoarse laughter, high sanguinary
voices, a sudden scheme of faces scarred with night, and vivid with
night's radiance--prostitutes, taxi-drivers, negroes, and those
other nameless unmistakable ones--who come from somewhere--God
knows where--and who live somehow--God knows how--and who recede
again at morning into unknown cells--but who live here only, brief
as moths, and balefully as a serpent's eye, in the unwholesome
chemistry of night.

He found himself leaning heavily on the zinc counter of the bar,
staring at a pair of whited, flabby-looking arms, the soiled apron
and shirt, the soiled night-time face and dark, mistrustful eyes of
night's soiled barman.  The blur of hoarse voices, shouts and oaths
and laughter fused around him, and suddenly beside him he heard
Starwick's voice, drunken, quiet, and immensely still.

"Monsieur," it said--its very stillness cut like a knife through
all the fog of sound about him--"monsieur, du feu, s'il vous
plaît."

"But sairtainlee, monsieur," a droll and pleasant-sounding voice
said quietly.  "W'y not?"

He turned and saw Starwick, a cigarette between his lips, bending
awkwardly to get the light from a proffered cigarette which a young
Frenchman was holding carefully for him.  At last he got it;
puffing awkwardly, and straightening, he slightly raised his hat in
salutation, and said with drunken gravity:

"Merci.  Vous êtes bien gentil."

"But," said the young Frenchman again, drolly, and with a slight
shrug of his shoulder, "not at all!  Eet ees noz-zing!"

And as Starwick started to look at him with grave drunken eyes, the
Frenchman returned his look with a glance that was perfectly
composed, friendly, good-humoured, and drolly inquiring.

"Monsieur?" he said courteously, as Starwick continued to look at
him.

"I think," said Starwick slowly, with the strangely mannered and
almost womanish intonation in his voice, "I think I like you VERY
much.  You are VERY kind, and VERY generous, and altogether a VERY
grand person.  I am ENORMOUSLY grateful to you."

"But," the Frenchman said, with droll surprise, and a slight
astonished movement of his shoulders, "I 'ave done noz-zing!  You
ask for du feu--a light--and I geev to you.  I am glad eef you
like--bot--" again he shrugged his shoulders with a cynical but
immensely engaging humour--"eet ees not so ver-ree grand."

He was a young man, not more than thirty years old, somewhat above
middle height, with a thin, nervously active figure, and thin,
pointedly Gallic features.  It was a pleasant, most engaging face,
full of a sharply cynical intelligence; the thin mouth was alive
with humour--with the witty and politely cynical disbelief of his
race, and his tone, his manner--everything about him--was eloquent
with this racial quality of disbelief, a quality that was perfectly
courteous, that would raise its pointed eyebrows and say politely,
"You s'ink so"--but that accepted without assent, was politely non-
committal without agreement.

He was dressed as many young Frenchmen of that period dressed:--a
style that served to combine the sinister toughness of the Apache
with a rather gaudy and cheap enhancement of the current fashions.
His clothes were neat but cheaply made; he wore a felt hat with a
wide brim, creased, French fashion, up the sides, an overcoat with
padded shoulders, cut in sharply at the waist, his trousers had a
short and skimpy look, and barely covered the tops of his shoes.
He wore spats, and a rather loud-coloured scarf which he knotted
loosely, cravat-fashion, and which thus concealed his collar and
his shirt.  Finally, when he smoked a cigarette, he drew the smoke
in slowly, languorously, knowingly, with lidded eyes, and a cruel
and bitter convulsion of his thin lips that gave his sharp face a
sinister Apache expression.

Starwick was now crying out in a high drunken tone of passionate
assurance:

"But yes!  Yes!  Yes!--You are a GRAND person--a SWELL person--I
like you ENORMOUSLY. . . ."

"I am glad," said the Frenchman politely, with another almost
imperceptible movement of the shoulders.

"But yes!  You are my friend!" Starwick cried in a high passionate
tone.  "I like you--you must drink with me."

"Eef you like--of course!" the Frenchman politely agreed.  Turning
to the soiled barman who continued to look at them with dark
mistrustful eyes, he said, in a hard, sharp voice, "Une fine. . . .
And you, monsieur?" he turned inquiringly toward Eugene, "I s'ink
you have another drink?"

"No, not now"--his glass was not yet empty.  "We--we have both
already had something to drink."

"I can see," the Frenchman said politely, but with a swift flicker
of cynical mirth across his thin mouth, that needed no translation.
Raising his glass, he said courteously:

"A votre santé, messieurs," and drank.

"Look!" cried Starwick.  "You are our friend now, and you must call
us by our names.  My name is Frank; his is Eugene--what is yours?"

"My name ees Alec," said the young Frenchman smiling.  "Zat ees
w'at zey call me."

"But it's perfect!" Starwick cried enthusiastically.  "It's a SWELL
name--a WONDERFUL name!  Alec!--Ecoute!" he said to the soiled
barman with the ugly eye, "Juh pawnse qu'il faut--encore du
cognac," he said drunkenly, making a confused and maudlin gesture
with his arm.  "Encore du cognac, s'il vous plaît!"  And as the
barman silently and sullenly filled the three glasses from a bottle
on the bar, Starwick turned to Alec, shouting with dangerous
hilarity:  "Cognac for ever, Alec, Alec!--Cognac for you and me and
all of us for ever!--Nothing but drunkenness--glorious drunkenness--
divine poetic drunkenness for ever!"

"Eef you like," said Alec, with a polite and acquiescent shrug.  He
raised his glass and drank.

It was four o'clock when they left the place.  Arm in arm they
reeled out into the street, Starwick holding on to Alec for support
and shouting drunkenly:

"Nous sommes des amis!--Nous sommes des amis éternels!  Mais oui!
Mais oui!"

The whole dark and silent street rang and echoed with his drunken
outcry.  "Alec et moi--nous sommes des frères--nous sommes des
artistes!  Nothing shall part us!  Non--jamais!  Jamais!"

A taxi, which had been waiting in the darkness several doors away,
now drove up swiftly and stopped before them at the kerb.  Ann and
Elinor were inside: Elinor opened the door and spoke gently:

"Frank, get in the taxi now, we're going home."

"Mais jamais!  Jamais!" Starwick yelled hysterically.  "I go
nowhere without Alec!--We are brothers--friends--he has a poet's
soul."

"Frank, don't be an idiot!" Elinor spoke quietly, but with crisp
authority.  "You're drunk; get in the taxi; we're going home."

"Mais oui!" he shouted.  "Je suis ivre!  I am drunk!  I will always
be drunk--nothing but drunkenness for ever for Alec and me!"

"Listen!" Elinor spoke quietly, pleasantly to the Frenchman.
"Won't you go away, please, and leave him now?  He is drunk, he
does not know what he is doing; he really must go home now."

"But, of course, madame," said Alec courteously, "I go now."  He
turned to Starwick and spoke quietly, with his thin, engaging
smile:  "I s'ink, Frank, eet ees bettaire eef you go home now,
non?"

"But no!  But no!" cried Starwick passionately.  "I will go nowhere
without Alec. . . .  Alec!" he cried, clutching him with drunken
desperation.  "You cannot go!  You must not go!  You cannot leave
me!"

"Tomorrow, perhaps," said Alec, smiling.  "Ees eet not bettaire eef
we go to-gezzer tomorrow?--I s'ink zen you feel motch bettaire."

"No!  No!" Starwick cried obstinately.  "Now!  Now!  Alec, you
cannot leave me!  We are brothers, we must tell each other
everything. . . .  You must show me all you know, all you have
seen--you must teach me to smoke opium--take me where the opium-
smokers go--Alec!  Alec!  J'ai la nostalgic pour la boue. . . ."

"Oh, Frank, quit talking like a drunken idiot!  Get in the car,
we're going home. . . ."

"But no!  But no!" Starwick raved on in his high drunken voice.
"Alec and I are going on together--he has promised to take me to
the places that he knows--to show me the dark mysteries--the lower
depths. . . ."

"Oh, Frank, for God's sake get in the car; you're making a damned
fool of yourself!"

"--But no!  I will not go without Alec--he must come with us--he is
going to show me. . . ."

"But I show you, Frank," said Alec smoothly.  "Tonight, non!"  He
spoke firmly, waved a hand.  "Eet ees impossible.  I wet 'ere for
someone.  I must meet, I 'ave engagement--yes.  Tomorrow, eef you
like, I meet you 'ere!  Tonight, non!"  His voice was harsh, sharp
with irrevocable refusal.  "I cannot.  Eet ees impossible."

By dint of infinite prayers and persuasions, and by Alec's promises
that he would meet him next day to take him on a tour of "the lower
depths," they finally got Starwick into the taxi.  All the way down
the hill, however, as the taxi sped across Paris, through the
darkened silent streets, and across the Seine into the Latin
Quarter, Starwick raved on madly about his eternal friendship with
Alec, from whom he could never more be parted.  The taxi turned
swiftly into the dark and empty little Rue des Beaux-Arts and
halted before Eugene's hotel.  The two women waited in nervous and
impatient haste for Eugene to get out, Elinor giving his arm a
swift squeeze and saying:

"Good night, darling.  We'll see you tomorrow morning.  Don't
forget our trip to Rheims."

When he got out, however, Starwick followed him, and began to run
drunkenly towards the corner, smashing at the shutters of the shops
with his cane and screaming at the top of his voice:

"Alec!  Alec!  Où est Alec?  Alec!  Alec!  Mon ami Alec!  Où êtes-
vous?"

Eugene ran after Starwick and caught him just as he was
disappearing round the corner into the Rue Bonaparte, headed for
the Seine.  By main strength and pleading he brought him back, and
managed to get him into the taxi again, which had followed his
pursuit in swift watchful reverse.  He slammed the door upon that
raving madman, and as the taxi drove off he heard, through a fog of
drunkenness, Elinor's swift "Thank you, darling.  You behaved
magnificently--tomorrow--" and Starwick raving:

"Alec!  Alec!  Where is Alec?"

They sped off up the silent empty street, a narrow ribbon lit
sparsely by a few lamps, and walled steeply with its high old
shuttered houses.  Eugene walked back to his hotel, rang the night
bell, and was let in.  As he stumbled up the circuitous and
perilous ascent of five flights, he caught a moment's glimpse of
the little concierge and his wife, startled from their distressful
sleep, clutching each other together in a protective embrace, as
they peered out at him from the miserable little alcove where they
slept--a moment's vision of their pale, meagre faces and frightened
eyes.

He climbed the winding flights of stairs, and let himself into his
room, switching on the light, and flinging himself down upon the
bed immediately in a stupor of drunken exhaustion.

It seemed to him he had not lain there five minutes before he heard
Starwick smashing at the street door below, and shouting drunkenly
his own name and that of Alec.  In another minute he heard Starwick
stumbling up the stairs; he went to the door, opened it, and caught
him just as he came stumbling in.  Starwick was raving, demented,
no longer conscious of his acts: he began to smash and beat at the
bed with his stick, crying:

"There!--And there!--And there!--Out, out, damned spot, and make an
end to you. . . .  The stranger--the one I never knew--the stranger
you have become--out!  Out!  Out!"

Turning to Eugene then, he peered at him with drunken bloodshot
eyes, and said:

"Who are you?--Are you the stranger?--Are you the one I never
knew?--Or are you . . . ?"  His voice trailed off feebly, and he
sank down into a chair, sobbing drunkenly.

And getting to his feet at length he looked about him wildly, smote
the bed again with his stick, and cried out loudly:

"Where is Eugene?  Where is the Eugene that I knew?--Where?--
Where?--Where?"  He staggered to the door and flung it open,
screaming:  "Alec!  Where are you?"

He reeled out into the hall, and for a moment hung dangerously
against the stair rail, peering drunkenly down into the dizzy pit
five flights below.  Eugene ran after him, seized him by the arm
and, together, they fell or reeled to the bottom.  It was a journey
as distorted and demented as a dream--a descent to be remembered
later as a kind of corkscrew nightmare, broken by blind lurchings
into a creaking rail, by the rattling of Starwick's stick upon the
banisters, by blind sprawls, and stumblings, and by blobs and blurs
of frightened faces at each landing, where Monsieur Gely's more
sober patrons waited in breath-caught silence at their open doors.
They reached the bottom finally amid such universal thanksgiving,
such prayers for their safety, as Gely's hotel had never known
before.

A vast sigh, a huge and single respiration of relief rustled up the
steep dark pit of the winding stairs.  But another peril lay before
them.  At the foot of the stairs there stood a monstrous five-foot
vase which, by its lustre and the loving care with which it was
polished every day by Marie, the maid, must have been the pride of
the establishment.  Starwick reeled blindly against it as he went
past, the thing rocked sickeningly, and even as it tottered slowly
over, Eugene heard Madame Gely's gasp of terror, heard her low "Mon
Dieu!  Ca tombe, ça tombe!" and a loud united "Ah-h-h!" of
thankfulness as he caught it in his hands, and gently, safely, with
such inner triumph as a man may feel who leaps through space and
lands safely hanging to a flying trapeze, restored it to its former
position.  As he looked up he saw old Gely and his wife peering
from their quarters with fat perturbed faces, and the little
concierge and his wife still clutched together, peering through
their curtains in a covert of bright frightened eyes.

They got out into the street at last.  In the Rue Bonaparte they
stopped a taxi drilling through.  When they reached Montmartre
again the night was breaking in grey light behind the Church of
Sacré-Cœur.  After further drinks of strong bad cognac, they piled
out of the place into another taxi, and went hurtling back through
Paris.  By the time they arrived at the studio full light had come.

The women were waiting up for them.  Starwick mumbled something
and, holding his hand over his mouth, rushed across the room into
the bathroom and vomited.  When he was empty, he staggered out,
reeled towards the couch where Ann slept, and toppled on it, and
was instantly sunk in senseless sleep.

Elinor regarded him for a while with an air at once contemplative
and amused.  "And now," she said cheerfully, "to awake the Sleeping
Beauty from his nap."  She smiled her fine bright smile, but the
lines about her mouth were grimly set, and her eyes were hard.  She
approached the couch, and looking down upon Starwick's prostrate
and bedraggled form, she said sweetly:  "Get up, darling.  It's
breakfast-time."

He groaned feebly and rolled over on his side.

"Up, up, up, my lamb!"  Her tone was dulcet, but the hand that
grasped his collar and pulled him to a sitting position was by no
means gentle.  "We are waiting for you, darling.  The day's at
morn, the hour draws close, it's almost time.  Remember, dear,
we're starting out for Rheims at nine o'clock."

"Oh, God!" groaned Starwick wretchedly.  "Don't ask me to do that!
Anything, anything but that.  I can't!  I'll go anywhere with you
if you just leave me alone until tomorrow."  He flopped back on the
bed again.

"Sorry, precious," she said in a light and cheerful tone, as hard
as granite, "but it's too late now!  You should have thought of
that before.  Our plans are made, we're going--and YOU," suddenly
her voice hardened formidably, "YOU'RE coming with us."  She looked
at him a moment longer with hard eyes, bent and grasped him by the
collar, and roughly jerked him up to a sitting position again.

"Francis," she said sternly, "pull yourself together now and get
up!  We're going to have no more of this nonsense!"

He groaned feebly and staggered to his feet.  He seemed to be on
the verge of collapse, his appearance was so pitiable that Ann,
coming from the bathroom at this moment, flushed with hot sympathy
as she saw him, and cried out angrily, accusingly, to Elinor:

"Oh, leave him alone!  Let him sleep if he wants to.  Can't you see
he is half dead?  Why should we drag him along to Rheims if he
doesn't feel like going?  We can put the trip off until tomorrow,
anyway.  What does it matter when we go?"

Elinor smiled firmly and shook her head with a short inflexible
movement.  "No, sir," she said quietly.  "Nothing is going to be
put off.  We are going today, as we planned.  And Mr. Starwick is
going with us!  He may go willingly or against his will, he may be
conscious or unconscious when he gets there, but, alive or dead,
he's going!"

At these unhappy tidings, Starwick groaned miserably again.  She
turned to him and, her voice deepening to the authority of
indignation, she said:

"Frank!  You've GOT to see this through!  There's no getting out of
it now!  If you don't feel well, that's just too bad--but you've
got to see this thing through, anyway!  You've known about this
trip for the past week--if you chose to spend last night making the
rounds of every joint in Montmartre you've no one to blame for it
but yourself!  But you've GOT to go.  You're not going to let us
down this time!"

And steeled and wakened by the challenge of her tone--that
challenge which one meets so often in people who have let their
whole life go to hell, and lacking stamina for life's larger
consequences insist on it for trivialities--he raised his head,
looked at her with angry, bloodshot eyes, and said quietly:

"Very well, I'll go.  But I resent your asking it VERY much!"

"All right, my dear," she said quietly.  "If you resent it, you
resent it--and that's that!  Only, when you make a promise to your
friends they expect you to live up to it."

"Ace," said Starwick coldly.  "Quite."

"And now," she spoke more kindly, "why don't you go into the
bathroom, Frank, and straighten up a bit?  A little cold water
across your head and shoulders would do you no end of good."  She
turned to Ann and said quietly:  "Did you finish in there?"

"Yes," said Ann curtly, "it's all right now.  I've cleaned it up."
For a minute she stared sullenly at the older woman, and suddenly
burst into her short and angry laugh:

"God!" she said, with a rich, abrupt, and beautifully coarse
humanity.  "I never saw the like of it in my life!  I don't see
where he put it all!"  Her voice trembled with a full, rich,
infuriated kind of humour.  "Everything was there!" she cried,
"except the kitchen sink!"

Starwick flushed deeply, and looking at her, said, quietly,
gravely:  "I'm sorry, Ann.  I'm TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY sorry!"

"Oh, it's all right," she said shortly, yet with a kind of
tenderness.  "I'm used to it.  Don't forget that I served three
years' training in a hospital once.  You get so you don't notice
those things."

"You are a VERY swell person," he said slowly and distinctly.  "I'm
TERRIBLY grateful."

She flushed and turned away, saying curtly:  "Sit down, Frank.
You'll feel better when you have some coffee.  I'm making it now."
And in her silent and competent way she set to work.

In these few commonplace words all that was strong, grand, and
tender in Ann's soul and character was somehow made evident.
Brusque and matter of fact as her words had been when she referred
to the disgusting task just performed, their very curtness, and the
rich and coarse humanity of her sudden angry laugh, had revealed a
spirit of noble tenderness and strength, a spirit so strong and
sweet and full of love that it had risen triumphant not only over
the stale, dead and snobbish little world from which she came, but
also over the squeamishness which such a task would have aroused in
most of the people who made up that world.

To Starwick, she symbolized certain divinities known to his art and
his experience: Maya, or one of the great Earth-Mothers of the
ancients, or the goddess of Compassionate Mercy of the Chinese, to
whom he often likened her.

But to the other youth, her divinity was less mythical, more racial
and mundane.  She seemed to fulfil in part his vision of the grand
America, to make palpable the female quality of that fortunate,
good, and happy life of which he had dreamed since childhood--to
evoke the structure of that enchanted life of which every American
has dreamed as a child.  It is a life that seems for ever just a
hand's-breadth off and instantly to be grasped and made our own,
the moment that we find the word to utter it, the key to open it.
It is a world distilled of our own blood and earth, and qualified
by all our million lights and weathers, and we know that it will be
noble, intolerably strange and lovely, when we find it.  Finally,
she was the incarnation of all the secret beauty of New England,
the other side of man's dark heart, the buried loveliness that all
men long for.



LXXXIII


The car which they had chartered for a four months' tour was
brought round from a garage at nine o'clock.  A few minutes later
they were on their way to Rheims.

Elinor drove; Eugene sat beside her; Ann and Starwick were in the
rear seat.  The car was a good one--a Panhard--and Elinor drove
swiftly, beautifully, with magnificent competence, as she did all
things, getting ahead of everybody else, besting even the swerve of
the taxi-drivers in their wasp-like flight, and doing it all with
such smooth ease that no one noticed it.

They seemed to get through the great dense web, the monumental
complication of central Paris by a kind of magic.  As always,
Elinor communicated to everyone and everything the superb
confidence of her authority.  In her presence, and under her
governance, the strange and alien world about them became instantly
familiar as the Main Street of one's native town, making even the
bewildering and intricate confusion of its swarming mass
wonderfully natural and easy to be grasped.  Paris, in fact, under
the transforming magic of this woman's touch, became curiously
American, the enchantment beautifully like Eugene's own far-off
visions as a child.

It was astounding.  The whole city had suddenly taken on the clear
and unperplexing proportions of a map--of one of those beautifully
simple and comforting maps which are sold to tourists, in which
everything is charming, colourful, and cosy as a toy, and where
everything that need be known--all the celebrated "points of
interest"--the Eiffel Tower, the Madeleine, and Notre Dame, the
Trocadéro, and the Arc de Triomphe, are pictured charmingly, in
vivid colours.

Paris, in fact, had this morning become a brilliant, lovely,
flashing toy.  It was a toy which had been miraculously created for
the enjoyment of brilliant, knowing and sophisticated Americans
like Elinor and himself.  It was a toy which could be instantly
understood, preserved and enjoyed, a toy that they could play with
to their hearts' content, a toy which need confuse and puzzle none
of them for a moment, particularly since Elinor was there to
explain the toy and make it go.

It was incredible.  Gone was all the blind confusion, the sick
despair, the empty desolation of his first month in Paris.  Gone
was the old blind and baffled struggle against the staggering mass
and number of a world too infinitely complex to be comprehended,
too strange and alien to be understood.  Gone were all the old
sensations of the drowning horror, the feeling of atomic desolation
as he blindly prowled the streets among alien and uncountable
hordes of strange dark faces, the sensation of being an eyeless
grope-thing that crawled and scuttled blindly on the sea-depths of
some terrible oceanic world of whose dimensions, structure, quality
and purpose it could know nothing.  Gone were all those feelings of
strife, profitless, strange and impotent futility--those struggles
that wracked the living sinews of man's life and soul with
quivering exhaustion and with sick despair, the hideous feeling of
being emptied out in planetary vacancy, of losing all the high hope
of the spirit's purpose, the heart's integrity--of being exploded,
emptied out and dissipated into hideous, hopeless nothingness where
all the spirit of man's courage turned dead and rotten as a last
year's apple, and all his sounding plans of work and greatness
seemed feebler than the scratchings of a dog upon a wall--a horror
that can seize a man in the great jungle of an unknown city and a
swarming street and that is far more terrible than the unknown
mystery of any Amazonian jungle of the earth could be.

It was all gone now--the devouring hunger, and the drowning horror,
and the blind confusion of the old, swarm-haunted mind of man--the
fruitless struggle of the Faustian life--and in its place he had
the glittering toy, the toy of legend and enchantment and of quick
possession.

The French, they were a charming race--so gay, so light, and so
incorrigible--so childlike and so like a race of charming toys.

Elinor made their relation to all these good people swarming in the
streets around them wonderfully easy, dear, and agreeable.  There
was nothing strange about them, their ways were unpredictable,
since they were French, but they were perfectly understandable.
Her attitude, expressed in a rapid, gay and half-abstracted
chatter--a kind of running commentary on the life around her as she
drove--made the whole thing plain.  They were a quaint lot, a droll
lot, an incomparable lot--they were charming, amazing, irresponsible,
a race of toys and children--they were "French."

"All right, my dear," she would murmur to herself as a fat taxi-
driver snaked recklessly in ahead of her and came to a triumphant
stop--"have it your own way, my darling--have it your own way--I
shan't argue with you--God!" she would cry, throwing her head back
with a sudden rich burst of laughter--"look at the old boy with the
whiskers over there at the table--did you see him twirl his gay
moustachios and roll his roguish eyes at that girl as she went by?
SIMPLY incredible!" she cried with another laugh, and bit her lips,
and shook her head in fine astonishment.  "Thank you!" she murmured
politely, as the gendarme shrilled upon his whistle and beckoned
with his small white club.  "Monsieur l'Agent, vous êtes bien
gentil"--as she smoothly shifted gears and shot past him.

In this wonderful and intoxicating way all of Paris defiled past
them like a great glittering toy, a splendid map of rich, luxurious
shops and great cafés, an animated and beautiful design of a
million gay and fascinating people, all bent on pleasure, all
filled with joy, all with something so vivid, bright, particular
and incomparable about them that the whole vast pattern resolved
itself into a thousand charming and brilliant pictures, each
wonderful and unforgettable, and all fitting instantly into the
single structure, the simple and magnificent clarity of the whole
design.

They swept through the huge central web of Paris, and were passing
through the great shabby complication of the Eastern Quarters, the
ragged, ugly sprawl of the suburbs.

And now, swift as dreams, it seemed, they were out in open country,
speeding along roads shaded by tall rows of poplars, under a sky of
humid grey, whitened with a milky and soul-troubling light.

Elinor was very gay, mercurial, full of sudden spontaneous
laughter, snatches of song, deep gravity, swift inexplicable
delight.  Ann maintained a sullen silence.  As for Starwick, he
seemed on the verge of collapse all the time.  At Château-Thierry
he announced that he could go no farther: they stopped, got him
into a little café, and fortified him with some brandy.  He sank
into a stupor of exhaustion, from which they could not rouse him.
To all their persuasions and entreaties he just shook his head and
mumbled wearily:

"I can't!--Leave me here!--I can't go on!"

Three hours passed in this way before they succeeded in reviving
him, getting him out of the café--or estaminet--and into the car
again.  Ann's face was flushed with resentful anger.  She burst out
furiously:

"You had no right to make him come along on this trip!  You knew he
couldn't make it; he's dead on his feet.  I think we ought to take
him back to Paris now."

"Sorry, my dear," said Elinor crisply, with a fine bright smile,
"but there'll be no turning back!  We're going on!"

"Frank can't go on!" Ann cried angrily.  "You know he can't!  I
think it's a rotten shame for you to insist on this when you see
what shape he's in."

"Nevertheless, we're going on," said Elinor with grim cheerfulness.
"And Mr. Starwick is going with us.  He'll see it through now to
the bitter end.  And if he dies upon the way, we'll give him a
soldier's burial here upon the field of honour. . . .  Allons, mes
enfants!  Avancez!"  And humming gaily and lightly the tune of
Malbrouck, she shifted gears and sent the car smoothly, swiftly
forward again.

It was a horrible journey: one of those experiences which, by the
grim and hopeless protraction of their suffering, leave their
nightmare image indelibly upon the memories of everyone who has
experienced them.  The grey light of the short winter's day was
already waning rapidly when they drove out of Château-Thierry.  As
they approached Rheims dark had almost come, the lights of the town
had begun to twinkle, sparsely, with provincial dismalness, in the
distance.  No one knew the purpose of their visit; no one knew what
the trip was for, what they were coming to see--no one had
enquired.

It was almost dark when they entered the town.  Elinor drove
immediately to the cathedral, halted the car, and got out.

"Voilà, mes amis!" she said ironically.  "We are here!"

And she made a magnificent flourishing gesture towards the great
ruined mass, which, in the last faint grey light of day, was dimly
visible as a gigantic soaring monument of shattering arches and
demolished buttresses, a lacework of terrific stone looped ruggedly
with splinters of faint light, the demolished façades of old saints
and kings and shell-torn towers--the twilight ruins of a twilight
world.

"Magnificent!" cried Elinor enthusiastically.  "Superb!--Frank!
Frank!  You must get out and feast your eyes upon this noble
monument!  I have heard you speak so often of its beauty. . . .
But, my dear, you MUST!" she said, answering with fine persuasion
his feeble and dispirited groan.  "You'd never forgive yourself, or
me either, if you knew you'd come the whole way to Rheims without a
single look at its cathedral."

And, despite his wearily mumbled protests, she took him by the arm
and pulled him from the car.  Then, for a moment, as he stared
drunkenly, with blind, unseeing eyes, at the great grey twilit
shape, she propped him up and held him between herself and Eugene.

Then they all got back into the car, and she drove them to the best
café, the best hotel in town.  Starwick almost collapsed getting
out of the car.  His knees buckled under him, and he would have
fallen if Ann had not caught him, put her arm round him and held
him up.  His condition was pitiable.  He could no longer hold his
head up; it lolled and wobbled drunkenly on his neck like a flower
too heavy for its heavy stalk.  His eyes were glazed and leaden,
and as they started into the café, he had to be held up.  He lifted
his feet and dragged them after him like leaden weights.  The café
was a large and splendid one.  They found a table to one side.
Starwick staggered towards the cushioned seat against the wall and
immediately collapsed.  From that time on, he was never wholly
conscious.  Ann sat down beside him, put her arm round him and
supported him.  He sank against her shoulder like a child.  The
girl's face was flushed with anger, she stared at Elinor with
resentful eyes, but by no word or gesture did Elinor show that she
noticed anything amiss either in Ann's or Starwick's behaviour.

Rather, she chatted gaily to Eugene, she kept up a witty and high-
spirited discourse with everyone around her, she had never been
more mercurial, quick, gay and charming than she was that evening.
And announcing gaily that she was the hostess that was "giving the
party," she ordered lavishly--a delicious meal, with champagne from
the celebrated cellars of the establishment.  And everyone, spurred
to hunger by the cold air and their long journey, ate heartily--
everyone save Ann, who ate little and sat in angry silence, with
one arm round Starwick's shoulders, and Starwick, who could not be
roused from his deep stupor to eat anything.

It was after nine o'clock before they got up to go.  Elinor paid
the bill, and still chatting as gaily and as lightly as if the
whole wretched expedition had brought nothing but unqualified joy
to all her guests, started for the door.  Starwick had to be half-
carried, half-dragged out by Ann and Eugene, under the prayerful
guidance of several deeply troubled waiters.  They put him in the
car and got in themselves.  Elinor, looking round lightly and
crying out cheerfully, "Are we ready, children?" started the motor
for the long drive back to Paris.



That was a hideous and unforgettable journey.  Before they were
done with it, they thought that it would never end.  Under the
protraction of its ghastly horror, time lengthened out interminably,
unbelievably, into centuries.  It seemed to them at last that they
would never arrive, that they were rolling through a spaceless
vacancy without progression, that they were hung there in the
horrible ethers of some planetary emptiness where their wheels spun
futilely and for ever in moveless movement, unsilent silence,
changeless change.

From the very beginning they did not know where they were going.
By the time they got out of Rheims they were completely lost.  It
was a cold night, late in February; a thick fog-like mist that grew
steadily more impenetrable as the night wore on, had come down and
blanketed the earth in white invisibility.  And through this mist
there were diffused two elements: the weird radiance of a submerged
moon which gave to the sea of fog through which they groped the
appearance of an endless sea of milk, and the bitter clutch of a
stealthy, raw, and cruelly penetrating cold which crept into man's
flesh and numbed him to the bone of misery.

All through that ghastly and interminable night they groped their
way across France in the milky ocean of antarctic fog.  It seemed
to them that they had travelled hundreds of miles, that Paris had
long since been passed, lost, forgotten in the fog, that they were
approaching the outer suburbs of Lyons or Bordeaux, that presently
they would see the comforting lights of the English Channel or that
they had turned northwards, had crossed Belgium, and soon would
strike the Rhine.

From time to time the road wound through the ghostly street of some
old village; the white walls of village houses rose sheer and blank
beside the road, sheeted in phantasmal mist like ghosts, and with
no sound within.  Then they would be groping their way out through
the open countryside again--but where or in what country, no one
knew, none dared to say--and suddenly, low and level, beside them
to the left, they would see the moon.  It would suddenly emerge in
some blind hole that opened in that wall of fog, and it was such a
moon as no man living ever saw before.  It was an old, mad, ruined
crater of a moon, an ancient, worn, and demented thing that
smouldered red like an expiring coal, and that was like the old
ruined moon of a fantastic dream.  It hung there on their left,
just at the edge of a low ridge of hills, and it was so low, so
level, and so ghostly-near, it seemed to them that they could touch
it.

Towards midnight they groped their way into a whited ghostly
phantom of a town which Elinor at length, with the sudden
recognition of a person who revisits some old scene of childhood,
discovered to be Soissons.  She had known the town well during the
War: the ambulance unit, in which she had been for eighteen months
a driver, had been stationed here.  Starwick was half conscious,
huddled into Ann's shoulder on the dark rear seat.  He groaned
pitiably and said that he could go no farther, that they must stop.
They found a hotel café that was still open and half-carried, half-
dragged him in.  They got brandy for him, they tried to revive
him; he looked like a dead man and said that he could go no farther,
that they must leave him there.  And for the first time Elinor's
grave tone showed concern and sharp anxiety, for the first time her
hard eye softened into care.  She remained firm; gently, obdurately,
she refused him.  He collapsed again into unconsciousness; she
turned her worried eyes upon the others and said quietly:

"We can't leave him here.  We've got to get him back to Paris
somehow."

After two ghastly hours in which they tried to revive him, persuade
him to gird up his fainting limbs for final effort, they got him
back into the car.  Ann covered him with blankets and held him to
her for the remainder of the night, as a mother might hold a child.
In the faint ghost-gleam of light her face shone dark and sombre,
her eyes were dark, moveless, looking straight ahead.

Armed with instructions from an anxious waiter, they set out again
on the presumptive road to Paris.  The interminable night wore on;
the white blanket of the fog grew thicker, they passed through more
ghost-villages, sheer and sudden as a dream, sheeted in the strange
numb silence of that ghostly nightmare of a fog.  The old red
crater of the moon vanished in a ruined helve at length behind a
rise of earth.  They could no longer see anything, the road before
was utterly blotted out, the car-lights burned against an
impenetrable white wall, they groped their way in utter blindness,
they crawled at a snail's pace.

Finally, they felt their way along, inch by inch and foot by foot.
Eugene stood on the running-board of the car, peering blindly into
that blank wall of fog, trying only to define the edges of the
road.  The bitter penetration of raw cold struck through the fog
and pierced them like a nail.  From time to time Elinor stopped the
car, while he stepped down and stamped numb feet upon the road,
swung frozen arms and lustily blew warmth back into numb fingers.
Then that infinite groping patience of snail's progress would begin
again.

Somewhere, somehow, through that blind sea of fog, there was a
sense of morning in the air.  The ghosts of towns and villages grew
more frequent--the towns were larger now, occasionally Elinor
bumped over phantom curbs before the warning shouts of her look-out
could prevent her.  Twice they banged into trees along unknown
pavements.  There was a car-track now, the bump of cobbles, the
sense of greater complications in the world about them.

Suddenly they heard the most thrilling and evocative of all earth's
sounds at morning--the lonely clopping of shod hooves upon the
cobbles.  In the dim and ghostly sheeting of that light they saw
the horse, the market cart balanced between its two high creaking
wheels, laden with sweet clean green-and-gold of carrot bunches,
each neatly trimmed as a bouquet.

They could discern the faint ghost-glimmer of the driver's face,
the big slow-footed animal, dappled grey, and clopping steadily
towards the central markets.

They were entering Paris and the fog was lifting.  In its huge
shroud of mist dispersing, the old buildings of the city emerged
ghostly haggard, pallidly nascent in the dim grey light.  A man was
walking rapidly along a terraced pavement, with bent head, hands
thrust in pockets--the figure of the worker since the world began.
They saw at morning, in grey waking light, a waiter, his apron-ends
tucked up, lifting racked chairs from the tables of a café, and on
light mapled fronts of bars and shops, the signs Bière--Pâtisserie--
Tabac.  Suddenly, the huge winged masses of the Louvre swept upon
them, and it was grey light now, and Eugene heard Elinor's low,
fervent "Thank God!"

And now the bridge, the Seine again, the frontal blank of the old
buildings on the quays, faced haggardly towards light, the narrow
lane of the Rue Bonaparte, and in the silent empty street at
length, his own hotel.

They said good-bye quickly, hurriedly, abstractedly, as he got out;
and drove away.  The women were thinking of nothing, no one now,
but Starwick, life's fortunate darling, the rare, the precious, the
all-favoured one.  In the grey light, unconscious, completely
swaddled in the heavy rugs, Starwick still lay pillowed on Ann's
shoulder.



LXXXIV


All day Eugene slept the dreamless, soundless sleep of a man who
has been drugged.  When he awoke, night had come again.  And this
concatenation of night to night, of dreamless and exhausted sleep
upon the strange terrific nightmare of the night before, the swift
kaleidoscope of moving action which had filled his life for the
past two days, now gave to that recent period a haunting and
disturbing distance, and to the events that had gone before the sad
finality of irrevocable time.  Suddenly he felt as if his life with
Ann, Elinor, and Starwick was finished, done; for some strangely
troubling reason he could not define, he felt that he would never
see them again.

He got up, dressed, and went downstairs.  He saw old Gely and his
wife, his daughters, Marie the maid, and the little concierge: it
seemed to him that they looked at him strangely, curiously, with
some sorrowful sad knowledge in their eyes, and a nameless numb
excitement gripped him, dulled his heart.  He felt the nameless
apprehension that he always felt--that perhaps all men feel--when
they have been away a day or two.  It was a premonition of bad
news, of some unknown misfortune: he wanted to ask them if someone
had come for him--without knowing who could come--if they had a
message for him--not knowing who might send him one--an almost
feverish energy to demand that they tell him at once what unknown
calamity had befallen him in his absence.  But he said nothing, but
still haunted by what he thought was the strange and troubling look
in their eyes--a look he had often thought he observed in people,
which seemed to tell of a secret knowledge, an inhuman chemistry, a
communion in men's lives to which his own life was a stranger--he
hurried out into the street.

Outside the streets were wet with mist, the old cobbles shone with
a dull wet gleam, through the mist the lamps burned dimly, and
through the fog he heard the swift and unseen passing of the taxi-
cabs, the shrill tooting of their little horns.

Yet everything was ghost-like and phantasmal--the streets of Paris
had the unfamiliar reality of streets that one revisits after many
years of absence, or walks again after the confinement of a long
and serious illness.

He ate at a little restaurant in the Rue de la Seine, and troubled
by the dismal lights, the high old houses, and the empty streets of
the Latin Quarter sounding only with the brief passage of some
furious little taxi drilling through those narrow lanes towards the
bridge of the Seine and the great blaze and gaiety of night, he
finally forsook that dark quarter, which seemed to be the image of
the unquiet loneliness that beset him, and crossing the bridge, he
spent the remainder of the evening reading in one of the cafés near
Les Magasins du Louvre.



The next morning, when he awoke, a pneumatique was waiting for him.
It was from Elinor, and read:

"Darling, where are you?  Are you still recovering from the great
debauch, or have you given us the go-by, or what?  The suspense is
awful--won't you say it ain't so, and come to lunch with us today
at half-past twelve?  We'll be waiting for you at the studio.--
ELINOR"--Below this in a round and almost childish hand, was
written:  "We want to see you.  We missed you yesterday.--ANN."

He read this brief and casual little note over again and again, he
laughed exultantly, and smote his fist into the air and read again.
All of the old impossible joy was revived in him.  He went to the
window and looked out: a lemony sunlight was falling on the old
pale walls and roofs and chimney-pots of Paris: everything sparkled
with health and hope and work and morning--and all because two
girls from Boston in New England had written him a note.

He held the flimsy paper of the pneumatique tenderly, as if it were
a sacred parchment too old and precious for rough handling; he even
lifted it to his nose and smelled it.  It seemed to him that all
the subtle, sensuous femininity of the two women was in it--the
seductive and thrilling fragrance, impalpable and glorious as the
fragrance of a flower, which their lives seemed to irradiate and to
give to everything, to everyone they touched, a sense of triumph,
joy and tenderness.  He read the one blunt line that Ann had
written him as if it were poetry of haunting magic: the level,
blunt and toneless inflexibility of her voice sounded in the line
as if she had spoken; he read into her simple words a thousand
buried meanings--the tenderness of a profound, simple and
inarticulate spirit, whose feelings were too deep for language, who
had no words for them.



When he got to the studio he found the two women waiting, but
Starwick was not there.  Ann was quietly, bluntly matter of fact as
usual; Elinor almost hilariously gay, but beneath her gaiety he
sensed at once a deep and worried perturbation, a worn anxiety that
shone nakedly from her troubled eyes.

They told him that on their return from Rheims, Starwick had left
the studio to meet Alec and had not been seen since.  No word from
him had they had that night or the day before, and now, on the
second day since his disappearance, their anxiety was evident.

But during lunch--they ate at a small restaurant in the
neighbourhood, near the Montparnasse railway station--Elinor kept
up a gay and rapid conversation, and persisted in speaking of
Starwick's disappearance as a great lark--the kind of thing to be
expected from him.

"PERFECTLY insane, of course!" she cried, with a gay laugh.  "But
then, it's typical of him: it's just the kind of thing that kind
would do.  Oh, he'll turn up, of course," she said, with quiet
confidence, "--he'll turn up in a day or two, after some wild
adventure that no one in the world but Francis Starwick could have
had. . . .  I MEAN!" she cried, "picking that Frenchman--Alec--up
the way he did the other night.  UTTERLY mad, of course!" she said
gaily.  "--But then, there you ARE!  It wouldn't be Frank if he
didn't!"

"I see nothing very funny about it," said Ann bluntly.  "It looks
like a pretty rotten mess to me.  We know nothing at all about that
Frenchman--who he is, what he does; we don't even know his name.
For all you know he may be one of the worst thugs or criminals in
Paris."

"Oh, I know, my dear--but don't be absurd!" Elinor protested.  "The
man's all right--Frank's always picking up these people--it always
turns out all right in the end--oh, but of course!" she cried, as
if dispelling a troubling thought from her mind--"Of course it
will!  It's too ridiculous to allow yourself to be upset like
this!"

But in spite of her vigorous assurance, her eyes were full of care
and of something painful and baffled, an almost naked anguish.

He left them after lunch, promising to meet them again for dinner.
Starwick had not come back.  When they had finished dinner, the two
women went back to the studio to wait for Starwick's possible
return, and Eugene went to look for him in Montmartre, promising to
let them know at once if he found Starwick or got news of him.
When he got to Montmartre, he made a round first of all the resorts
which Starwick had liked best and frequented most, as Eugene
remembered them, of course; but no one had seen him since they had
last been there all together.  Finally, he went to the bistro in
the Rue Montmartre, where they had first encountered Alec, and
asked the soiled barman with the dark mistrustful eye if he had
seen either Alec or Starwick in the past three days.  The man eyed
him suspiciously for a moment before answering.  Then he surlily
replied that he had seen neither of them.  In spite of the man's
denial, he stayed on, drinking one cognac after another at the bar,
while it filled up, ebbed and flowed, with the mysterious rout and
rabble of the night.  He waited until four o'clock in the morning:
neither Starwick nor Alec had appeared.  He got into a taxi and was
driven back across Paris to Montparnasse.  When he got to the
studio, the two women were still awake, waiting, and he gave them
his disappointing news.  Then he departed, promising to return at
noon.

All through that day they waited: the apprehension of the two women
was now painfully evident, and Ann spoke bluntly of calling in the
police.  Towards six o'clock that evening, while they were engaged
in vigorous debate concerning their course of action, there were
steps along the alley-way outside, and Starwick entered the studio,
followed by the Frenchman, Alec.

Starwick was in excellent spirits, his eyes were clear, his ruddy
face looked fresh, and had a healthy glow.  In response to all
their excited greetings and inquiries, he laughed gleefully,
teasingly, and refused to answer.  When they tried to find out from
Alec where Starwick had been, he too smiled an engaging but
malicious smile, shrugged his shoulders politely, and said:  "I do
not know, I s'ink he tells you if he v'ants--if not!" again he
smiled, and shrugged politely.  And this moody and secretive
silence was never broken.  Starwick never told them where he had
been.  Once or twice, during dinner, which was a hilarious one, he
made casual and mysteriously hinting references to Brussels, but,
in response to all of Elinor's deft, ironic cross-examination, he
only laughed his burbling laugh, and refused to answer.

And she, finally defeated, laughed suddenly, a laugh of rich
astonishment, crying:  "PERFECTLY insane, of course!  But then,
what did I tell you?  It's just the sort of thing that Frank WOULD
do!"

But, in spite of all her high light spirits, her gay swift
laughter, her distinguished ease, there was in the woman's eyes
something the boy had never seen before: a horrible, baffled
anguish of torment and frustration.  And although her manner
towards the Frenchman, Alec, was gracious, gay, and charming--
although she now accepted him as "one of us," and frequently said
with warm enthusiasm that he was "a PER-FECTLY swell person--I like
him SO much!" there was often something in her eyes when she looked
at him that it was not good to see.

Alec was their guest, and Starwick's constant companion, everywhere
they went thereafter.  And everywhere, in every way, he proved
himself to be a droll, kind, courteous, witty and urbanely cynical
person: a man of charming and engaging qualities and delightful
company.  They never asked his name, nor inquired about his birth,
his family, or his occupation.  They seemed to accept his curious
fellowship with Starwick as a matter of course: they took him on
their daily round of café's, restaurants, night-clubs, and resorts,
as if he were a lifelong friend of the family.  And he accepted all
their favours gracefully, politely, with wit and grace and charm,
with a natural and distinguished dignity and ease.  He, too, never
asked disturbing questions; he was a diplomat by nature, a superb
tactician from his birth.  Nevertheless, the puzzled, doubting and
inquiring expression in his eyes grew deeper day by day; his tongue
was eloquently silent, but the question in his puzzled eyes could
not be hidden, and constantly sought speech.

As for Eugene, he now felt for the first time an ugly, disquieting
doubt: suddenly he remembered many things--words and phrases and
allusions, swift, casual darts and flashes of memory that went all
the way back to the Cambridge years, that had long since been
forgotten--but that now returned to fill his mind.  And sometimes
when he looked at Starwick, he had the weird and unpleasant
sensation of looking at someone he had never seen before.



LXXXV


At the last moment, when it seemed that the argosy of their
battered friendship was bound to sink, it was Elinor who saved it
again.  Ann, in a state of sullen fury, had announced that she was
sailing for home the next week; Eugene, that he was going South to
"some quiet little place where"--so did his mind comfortably phrase
it--"he could settle down and write."  As for Starwick, he remained
coldly, wearily, sorrowfully impassive; he accepted this bitter
dissolution of their plans with a weary resignation at once sad and
yet profoundly indifferent; his own plans were more wrapped in a
mantle of mysterious and tragic secretiveness than ever before.
And seeing the desperate state which their affairs had come to,
and that she could not look for help from these three gloomy
secessionists, Elinor instantly took charge of things again and
became the woman who had driven an ambulance in the war.

"Listen, my darlings," she said with a sweet, crisp frivolity,
that was as fine, as friendly, as comforting, and as instantly
authoritative as the words of a capable mother to her contrary
children--"no one is going away; no one is going back home; no one
is going anywhere except on the wonderful trip we've planned from
the beginning.  We're going to start out next week, Ann and I will
do the driving, you two boys can loaf and invite your souls to your
hearts' content, and when you see a place that looks like a good
place to work in, we'll stop and stay until you're tired of
working.  Then we'll go on again."

"Where?" said Starwick in a dead and toneless voice.  "Go on
where?"

"Why, my dear child!" Elinor cried in a gay tone.  "Anywhere!
Wherever you like!  That's the beauty of it!  We're not going to be
bound down by any programme, any schedule: we shall stay where we
like and go anywhere our sweet selves desire.

"I thought, however," she continued in a more matter-of-fact way,
"that we would go first to Chartres and then on to Touraine,
stopping off at Orléans or Blois or Tours--anywhere we like, and
staying as long as we care to.  After that, we could do the
Pyrenees and all that part of France: we might stop a few days at
Biarritz and then strike off into the Basque country.  I know
INCREDIBLE little places we could stop at."

"Could we see Spain?" asked Starwick for the first time with a note
of interest in his voice.

"But, of COURSE!" she cried.  "My dear child, we can see anything,
everything, go anywhere your heart desires.  That's the beauty of
the whole arrangement.  If you feel like writing, if you want to
run down to Spain to get a little writing done--why, presto!
chango!  Alacazam!" she said gaily, snapping her fingers, "--the
thing is done!  There's nothing simpler!"

For a moment, no one spoke.  They all sat entranced in a kind of
unwilling but magical spell of wonder and delight.  Elinor, with
her power to make everything seem delightfully easy, and magically
simple and exciting, had clothed that fantastic programme with all
the garments of naturalness and reason.  Everything now seemed not
only possible, but beautifully, persuasively practicable--even that
ludicrous project of "running down to Spain to do a little
writing," that hopeless delusion of "stopping off and working,
anywhere you like, until you are ready to go on again"--she gave to
the whole impossible adventure not only the thrilling colours of
sensuous delight and happiness, but also the conviction of a
serious purpose, a reasonable design.

And in a moment, Starwick, rousing himself from his abstracted and
fascinated reverie, turned to Eugene and, with the old gleeful
burble of laughter in his throat, remarked simply in his strangely
fibred voice:

"It sounds swell, doesn't it?"

And Ann, whose sullen, baffled look had more and more been tempered
by an expression of unwilling interest, now laughed her sudden
angry laugh, and said:

"It WOULD be swell if everyone would only act like decent human
beings for a change!"

In spite of her angry words, her face had a tender, radiant look of
joy and happiness as she spoke, and it seemed that all her hope and
belief had returned to her.

"But of course!" Elinor answered instantly, and with complete
conviction.  "And that's just exactly how everyone IS going to act!
Eugene will be all right," she cried--"the moment that we get out
of Paris!  You'll see!  We've gone at a perfectly KILLING pace this
last month or two!  No one in the world could stand it!  Eugene is
tired, our nerves are all on edge, we're worn out by staying up all
night, and drinking, and flying about from one place to another--
but a day or two of rest will fix all that. . . .  And that, my
children, is just exactly what we're going to do--now--at once!"
She spoke firmly, kindly, with authority.  "We're getting out of
Paris today!"

"Where?" said Starwick.  "Where are we going?"

"We're all going out to St. Germain-en-Laye to rest up for a day or
two before we leave.  We'll stay at your pension, Francis, and you
can pack your things while we're out there, because you won't be
going back again.  After that we'll come back to Paris to spend the
night--we won't stay here over a day at the outside: Ann and I will
clear our things out of the studio, and Eugene can get packed up at
his hotel--that should mean, let's see"--she tapped her lips
lightly with thoughtful fingers--"we should be packed up and ready
to start Monday morning, at the latest."

"Hadn't I better stay in town and do my packing now?" Eugene
suggested.

"Darling," said Elinor softly, with a tender and seductive humour,
putting her fingers on his arm--"you'll do nothing of the sort!
You're driving out with us this afternoon!  We all love you so much
that we're going to take no chance of losing you at the last
minute!"

And for a moment, the strange and almost noble dignity of Elinor's
face was troubled by a faint smile of pleasant, tender radiance,
the image of the immensely feminine, gracious, and lovely spirit
which almost grotesquely seemed to animate her large and heavy
body.



Thus, under the benevolent and comforting dictatorship of this
capable woman, hope had been restored to them, and in gay spirits,
shouting and laughing and singing, feeling an impossible happiness
when they thought of the wonderful adventure before them, they
drove out to St. Germain-en-Laye that afternoon.  The late sun was
slanting rapidly towards evening when they arrived: they left their
car before an old café near the railway station, and for an hour
walked together through the vast avenues of the forest, the
stately, sorrowful design of that great planted forest, so
different from anything in America, so different from the rude,
wild sweep and savage lyricism of our terrific earth, and so
haunted by the spell of time.  It was the forest which Henry the
Fourth had known so well, and which, in its noble planted
colonnades, suggested an architecture of nature that was like a
cathedral, evoked a sense of time that was ancient, stately,
classical, full of sorrow and a tragical joy, and haunted for ever
by the pacings of noble men and women now long dead.

When they came out of the forest at the closing hour--for in this
country, in this ancient noble place, even the forests were
controlled, and closed and opened by the measurements of mortal
time--the old red sun of waning day had almost gone.

For a time they stood on the great sheer butte of St. Germain, and
looked across the space that intervened between themselves and
Paris.  Below them in the valley, the Seine wound snakewise through
a series of silvery silent loops, and beyond, across the fields and
forests and villages, already melting swiftly into night and
twinkling with a diamond dust of lights, they saw the huge and
smoking substance that was Paris, a design of elfin towers and
ancient buildings and vast inhuman distances, an architecture of
enchantment, smoky, lovely as a dream, seeming to be upborne, to be
sustained, to float there like the vision of an impossible and
unapproachable loveliness, out of a huge opalescent mist.  It was a
land of far Cockaigne, for ever threaded by the eternity of its
silver, silent river; a city of enfabled walls, like Carcassonne,
and never to be reached or known.

And while they looked it seemed to them that they heard the huge,
seductive, drowsy murmur of that magic and eternal city--a murmur
which seemed to resume into itself all of the grief, the joy, the
sorrow, the ambitions, hopes, despairs, defeats and loves of
humanity.  And though all life was mixed and intermingled in that
distant, drowsy sound, it was itself detached, remote, eternal and
undying as the voice of time.  And it hovered there for ever in the
timeless skies of that elfin city, and was eternally the same, no
matter what men lived or died.

They turned, and went into the old café near the station for an
apéritif before dinner.  It was one of those old, pleasantly faded
cafés that one finds in little French towns.  The place had the
comfortable look and feel of an old shoe: the old, worn leather
cushions, the chairs and tables, the mirrors in their frames of
faded gilt, the old stained woods conveyed a general air of use, of
peace, of homely shabby comfort, which suggested the schedule of
generations of quiet people who had come here as part of the
ordered ritual of a day, and which was so different from the
feverish pulse, the sensual flash and glitter of the cafés of
Paris.  The noble peace and dignity of the great forest, and the
magic vision of the time-enchanted city in the evening light, the
silver, shining loops of its eternal river, still haunted their
spirits and filled their hearts with wonder and a tranquil joy.
And the old café seemed to possess them, to make them its own, with
its homely comfort: it was one of those places that one thinks of
at once, instinctively, by a powerful intuition, as being a "good"
place, and yet they could not have said why.  As they came in, the
proprietor smiled and spoke to them in a quiet, casual, and
friendly manner as if he had always known them and, in a moment,
when they were seated in the comfortable old leathers against the
wall, their waiter came and smilingly waited for their order.  He
was one of those waiters that one often sees abroad: an old man
with a sharp, worn face, full of quiet humour and intelligence, an
old, thin figure worn in service, but still spry and agile, a
decent "family man" with wife and children, a man seasoned in
humanity, whose years of service upon thousands of people had given
him a character that was wise, good, honest, gentle, and a trifle
equivocal.  Each ordered an apéritif, the two women a vermouth-
cassis, the two young men, Pernod: they talked quietly, happily,
and with the weary, friendly understanding that people have when
all their passion of desire and grief and conflict is past.  The
world that they had lived in for the last two months--that world of
night and Paris and debauch--seemed like an evil dream, and the way
before them now looked clear and plain.

When they left the café, full dark had come: they got in the car
and drove to the pension at the other end of town, where Elinor had
already engaged rooms for all of them.  It now turned out that
Elinor had taken rooms for Starwick at this pension three months
before, upon his arrival in Paris, but after the first two weeks he
had not lived in them, although most of his clothing, books, and
other belongings were still there.  It was one more of his costly,
wrong, and tragically futile efforts to find a place--some
impossibly fortunate and favourable place that never would be
found--where he could "settle down and get his writing done."

When the four friends got to the pension, dinner had already begun.
A table had been reserved for them, and as they entered the dining-
room everyone stopped eating--two dozen pairs of old dead eyes were
turned mistrustfully upon the young people, and in a moment, all
over the room, at every table, the old heads bent together eagerly
in conspiratorial secrecy, a low greedy whispering went up.

Starwick and Elinor were apparently already well and unfavourably
known to the old pensionnaires.  The moment they entered, in the
vast and sibilant whispering that went round the room, envenomed
fragments of conversation could be heard:

"Ah, c'est lui! . . .  Et la dame aussi! . . .  Ils sont revenus
ensemble. . . .  Mais oui, oui!"  At the next table to them an old
hag with piled masses of dyed reddish hair, dressed in an old-
fashioned dress bedecked with a thousand little gauds, peered at
them for a moment with an expression of venomous and greedy
curiosity, and then, leaning half across the table towards an old
man with a swollen apoplectic face and thick white moustaches, and
a little wizened old hag with the beady eyes of a reptile--possibly
his wife--she hissed:

"Mais oui! . . . Oui! . . . C'est lui, le jeune Américain! . . .
Personne ici ne l'a pas vu depuis trois mois."  The old man here
muttered something in a choked and phlegmy sort of voice, and the
old parrot-visaged hag straightened, struck her bony hand sharply
on the table, and cried out in a comical booming note:

"Mais justement! . . .  Justement! . . .  C'est comme vous
voyez!" . . .  Here she lowered her voice again, and peering
round craftily at Elinor and Frank, who were shaking with laughter,
she muttered hoarsely:

"Il n'est pas son mari! . . .  Il est beaucoup plus jeune. . . .
Mais non, mais non, mais non, mais non, mais non!" she cried with a
rapid and violent impatience as the old man muttered out a question
to her greedy ear.--"Elle est déjà mariée! . . . Oui!  Oui!"  This
last was boomed out positively, with an indignant glance at Elinor.
"Mais justement!  Justement! . . .  C'est comme vous voyez!"

That night Elinor was instant, swift, and happy as a flash of
light.  There was nothing that she did not seem to apprehend
immediately, to interpret instantly, to understand before a word
could be spoken, and to translate at once into a mercurial hilarity
which swept everyone along with it, and made all share instantly in
its wild swift gaiety, even when it would have been impossible to
say why one was gay.  The soup was served: it was a brown
disquieting liquid in which were floating slices of some troubling
and unknown tissue--a whitish substance of an obscenely porous
texture.  It was probably tripe: Eugene stared at it with a sullen
and suspicious face, and as he looked up, Elinor rocked back in her
chair with a gust of wild hilarity, placed her fingers across her
mouth and laughed a rich and sudden laugh.  Then, before he could
speak, she placed light fingers swiftly on his arm, and said
swiftly, gravely, in a tone of commiserating consent:

"Yes, I know, darling!  I quite agree with you!--"

"What is it?" he said dumbly, in a bewildered tone.  "It looks
like--"

"Exactly!  Exactly!" Elinor cried at once, before he could finish,
and was swept by that wild light gale of merriment again--"That's
exactly what it looks like--and don't say another word!  We all
agree with you!"  She looked drolly at the uneasy liquid in the
soup-plate, and then said, firmly and positively:  "No, I think
not! . . .  If you don't mind, I'd rather not!"--and then, seeing
his face again, was rocked with rude and sudden laughter.  "God!"
she cried.  "Isn't it marvellous!  Will you look at the poor kid's
face!"--And put light fingers gravely, swiftly, tenderly upon his
arm again.

The great wave of this infectious gaiety swept them along: it was a
wonderful meal.  Starwick's burble of gleeful, rich humorous and
suggestive laughter was heard again; Ann laughed her short and
sudden laugh, but her face was radiant, happy, lovelier than it had
ever been, everything seemed wonderfully good and pleasant to them.
Elinor called the waitress and quietly sent the troubling soup
away, but the rest of the meal was excellent, and they made a
banquet of it with two bottles of the best Sauterne the pension
afforded.  Their hilarity was touched somewhat by the scornful
patronage of bright young people among their dowdy elders, and yet
they did not intend to be unkind: the whole place seemed to them a
museum of grotesque relics put there for their amusement, they were
determined to make a wonderful occasion of it, the suspicious eyes,
greedy whisperings and conferring heads of the old people set them
off in gales of laughter, and Elinor, after a glance round and a
sudden peal of full rich laughter, would stifle her merriment with
her fingers, and say:

"Isn't it marvellous! . . .  God!  Isn't it wonderful! . . .  Could
anyone have imagined it! . . .  Frank. . . .  Frank!" she said
quietly in a small stifled tone, "will you LOOK! . . .  Will you
KINDLY take one look at the old girl with the dyed hair and all the
thingumajigs, at the next table. . . .  And the major! . . .  And
oh!  If looks could KILL!  The things they are saying about US! . . .
I'm sure they think we're ALL living in sin together. . . .
Such GOINGS on!" she cried with a gay pretence of horror.  "Such
open barefaced goings on, my friends, right in the face of decent
people! . . .  Now, is that terrible or not, Monsieur Duval, I ask
you! . . .  Darling," she said, turning to Starwick, and speaking
in a tone of droll reproach, "don't you feel a sense of guilt? . . .
Do you intend to do the right thing by a girl or not? . . .  Are
you going to make an honest woman of me, or aren't you? . . .  Come
on, now, darling," she said coaxingly, bending a little towards
him, "set my tortured heart at rest!  Just tell me that you intend
to do the right thing by me!  Won't you?" she coaxed.

"Quite!" said Starwick, his ruddy face reddening with laughter as
he spoke.  "But what--" the burble of gleeful and malicious
laughter began to play in his throat as he spoke--"just what is the
right thing? . . .  Do you mean?--" he trembled a little with
soundless laughter, and then went on in a gravely earnest but
uncertain tone--"do you mean that you want to live?"--he arched his
eyebrows meaningly, and then said in a tone of droll impossibly
vulgar insinuation--"you know what I mean--REALLY live, you know?"

"Frank!" she shrieked, and rocked back in her chair, covering her
mouth with her fingers--"But not at ALL, darling," she went on with
her former ironic seriousness, "--you're talking to an innocent
maid from Boston, Mass., who doesn't know what you MEAN--you
BEAST!" she cried.  "Don't you know we Boston girls cannot begin to
really live until you make an honest woman of us first?"

"In that case," Starwick said quietly, his face reddening again
with laughter, "I should think we could begin to live at once.  It
seems to me that another man has already taken care of making you
an honest woman!"

"God!" shrieked Elinor, falling back in her chair with another
burst of rich and sudden laughter.  "Poor Harold! . . .  I had
forgotten him! . . .  That's all this place needs to make it
perfect--Harold walking in right now to glare at us over the tops
of his horn-rimmed spectacles--"

"Yes," said Starwick, "and your father and mother bringing up the
rear and regarding me," he choked, "--with very BITTER looks--you
know," he said, turning to Eugene, "they feel QUITE bitterly
towards me--they really do, you know.  It's obvious," he said,
"that they regard me as an unprincipled seducer who has defiled,"
his voice trembled uncertainly again, "--who has defiled the virtue
of their only DARTER!" he brought this word out with a droll and
luscious nasality that made them howl with laughter.

"But really," he went on seriously, turning to Elinor as he wiped
his laughter-reddened face with a handkerchief, "I'm sure that's
how they feel about it.  When your mother and father came to the
studio the other day and found me there,"--Elinor's parents were at
that time in Paris--"your father GLARED at me in much the same way
that Cotton Mather would look at Casanova.  But QUITE!  He really
did, you know.  I'm sure he thought you had become my concubine."

"But, darling," Elinor replied, in her playful coaxing tone, "can't
I be your concubine? . . .  Oh, how MEAN you are!" she said
reproachfully.  "I do SO want to be somebody's concubine."  She
turned to Eugene protestingly.  "Now is that mean or not?  I ask
you.  Here I am, a perfectly good well-meaning female thirty years
old, brought up in Boston all my life, and with the best
advantages.  I've been a good girl all my life and tried to do the
best I could for everyone, but try as I will," she sighed, "no one
will help me out in my lifelong ambition to be somebody's
concubine.  Now is that fair or not?--I ask you!"

"But not at all!" said Starwick reprovingly.  "Before you can
realize your ambition you've got to go out first and get yourself a
reputation! . . .  And," he added, with a swift exuberant glance at
the crafty whispering old heads and faces all around them, "--I
think you're getting one very fast."

They went upstairs immediately to the rooms that Elinor had
engaged.  Starwick had two comfortable big rooms in one wing of the
pension; in his living-room a comfortable wood-fire had been laid
and was crackling away lustily.  Elinor had taken a small bedroom
for Eugene and a larger room for herself and Ann.  In Ann's room a
good wood-fire was also burning cheerfully.  Elinor and Starwick
obviously wanted to be alone to talk together--they conveyed this
by a kind of mysterious more-to-this-than-meets-the-eye quietness
that had been frequent with them during all these weeks.  They
announced that they were going for a walk.



LXXXVI


When they had gone, Eugene went to Ann's door and knocked.  She
showed no surprise at seeing him, but stood aside sullenly until he
had come in, and then closed the door behind him.  Then she went
back, sat down in a chair before the fire, and leaned forward upon
her knees, and for some time stared dumbly and sullenly into the
crackling flames.

"Where are the others?" she said presently.  "Have they gone out?"

"Yes," he said.  "They went for a walk.  They said they'd be gone
about an hour."

"Yes," she said cynically, "and they thought it would be good for
me if you and I were left alone for a while.  I'm such a grand
person that something just HAS to be done for me.  God!" she
concluded bitterly, "I'm getting tired of having people do me good!
I'm fed up with it!"

He made no reply to this and she said nothing more.  Her big body
supported by her elbows, she continued to lean forward and stare
sullenly into the flames.

He had taken a seat in another chair, and at length the silence,
and his position in the chair, and the girl's sullen expression
became painfully awkward, unhappy and embarrassing.  He got up
abruptly, took a pillow from the bed, threw it upon the floor, and
lay down flat beside her chair, stretched out comfortably with his
head to the dancing flames.  The feel of the fire, its snap and
crackle, the soft flare and fall of burned wood ash, and the
resinous piny smell, together with the broad old wooden planking of
the floor, the silence of the house and the feel of numb silent
night outside, something homelike in the look of the room--these
things, together with Ann's big New England body leaned forward
towards the fire, the sullen speechless integrity of her grand and
lovely face, and the smell of her, which was the smell of a big
healthy woman warmed by fire--all of these things filled his senses
with something immensely strong, pleasant, and familiar, something
latent in man's blood, which he had not felt in many years, and
that now was quiet but powerfully reawakened.  It filled his heart,
his blood, his senses with peace and certitude, with drowsy sensual
joy, and with the powerful awakening of an old perception, like the
rediscovery of an ancient faith, that the sensuous integument of
life was everywhere the same, that the lives of people in this
little town in France were the same as the lives of people in the
town he came from, the same as the lives of people everywhere on
earth.  And after all the dark and alien world of night, of Paris,
and another continent, which he had known now for several months,
this rediscovery of the buried life, the fundamental structure of
the great family of earth to which all men belong, filled him with
a quiet certitude and joy.

Ann did not move; bent forward, leaning on her knees, she continued
to stare into the fire, and looking up at her warm, dark, sullen
face, he fell asleep--into a sleep which, after all the frenzy and
exhaustion of the last weeks, was as deep and soundless as if he
were drugged.

How long he lay asleep there on the floor he did not know.  But he
was wakened by the sound of her voice--a sullen monotone that spoke
his name--that spoke his name quietly with a toneless, brooding
insistence and that at first he thought he must have dreamed.  It
was repeated, again and again, quietly, insistently, without change
or variation until he knew there was no doubt of it, that he no
longer was asleep.  And with something slow and strange and numb
beating through him like a mighty pulse, he opened his eyes and
looked up into her face.  She had bent forward still more and was
looking down at him with a kind of slow, brooding intensity, her
face smouldering and drowsy as a flower.  And even as he looked at
her, she returned his look with that drowsy, brooding stare, and
again, without inflection, spoke his name.

He sat up like a flash and put his arms around her.  He was beside
her on his knees and he hugged her to him in a grip of speechless,
impossible desire: he kissed her on the face and neck, again and
again; her face was warm with the fire, her skin as soft and smooth
as velvet; he kissed her again and again on the face, clumsily,
thickly, with that wild, impossible desire, and with a horrible
feeling of guilt and shame.  He wanted to kiss her on the mouth,
and he did not dare to do it: all the time that he kept kissing her
and hugging her to him with a clumsy, crushing grip, he wanted her
more than he had ever wanted any woman in his life, and at the same
time he felt a horrible profanity in his touch, as if he were
violating a Vestal virgin, trying to rape a nun.

And he did not know why he felt this way, the reason for these
senseless feelings of guilt and shame and profanation.  He had been
with so many prostitutes and casual loose promiscuous women that he
would have thought it easy to make love to this big, clumsy,
sullen-looking girl, but now all he could do was to hug her to him
in an awkward grip, to mutter foolishly at her, and to kiss her
warm sullen face again and again.

He tried to put his clumsy hand upon her breast, but the feeling of
shame and profanation swept over him and he could not keep it
there.  He put his hand upon her knee, and thrust it under the
skirt: the warm flesh of her leg stung him like an electric shock
and he jerked his hand away.  And all the time the girl did
nothing, made no attempt to resist or push him away, just yielded
with a dumb sullen passiveness to his embraces, her face
smouldering with a slow sullen passion that he could not fathom or
define.  He did not know why she had wakened him, why she had
called his name, what meaning, what emotion lay behind her brooding
look, her dumb and sullen passiveness, whether she yielded herself
willingly to him or not.

He did not know why he should have this sense of shame and guilt
and profanation when he touched her.  It may have come from an
intrinsic nobility and grandeur in her person and in her character
that made physical familiarity almost unthinkable; it may even have
come in part from a feeling of social and class inferiority--a
feeling which may be base and shameful, but to which young men are
fiercely sensitive--the feeling which all Americans know and have
felt cruelly, even those who scornfully deny that it exists and yet
have themselves done most to foster it.  Certainly he had at times
been bitterly conscious of the girl's "exclusiveness"--the fact
that she was a member of "an old Boston family"--a wealthy,
guarded, and powerfully entrenched group; he knew that a beautiful
and desirable woman like Ann would have had many opportunities to
pick and choose among wealthy men of her own class, and that he
himself was just the son of a working-man.

But, most of all, he knew that, more than anything else, the thing
that checked him now, that overpowered him with its loveliness,
that filled his heart with longing and impossible desire, and at
the same moment kept him from possession--was the passionate and
bitter enigma of that strange and lovely thing which had shaped
itself into his life and could never be lost, could never be
forgotten, and was never to be known: the thing he knew by these
two words--"New England."

And as the knowledge came to him he felt the greatest love and
hatred for this thing that he had ever known.  A kind of wild
cursing anger, a choking expletive of frustration and despair
possessed him.  He took her by the arms and jerked her to her feet,
and cursed her bitterly.  And she came dumbly, passively, sullenly
as before, neither yielding nor resisting, as he shook her, hugged
her, cursed her incoherently in that frenzy of desire and frustrate
shame.

"Look here," he panted thickly, shaking her.  "Say something! . . .
Do something! . . .  Don't stand there like a God-damned wooden
Indian! . . .  Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? . . .
Why are you any better than anyone else? . . .  Ann!  Ann!  Look at
me! . . .  Speak!  What is it? . . .  Oh, God-damn you!" he said
with a savagely unconscious humour that neither of them noticed,
"--but I love you! . . .  Oh, you big, dumb, beautiful Boston bitch,"
he panted amorously, "--just turn your face to me--and look at me--
and by God!  I will!  I will!" he muttered savagely, and for the
first time, and with a kind of desperation, kissed her on the
mouth, and glared around him like a madman and, without knowing
what he was doing, began to haul and drag her along toward the bed,
muttering--"By God, I'll do it!--Oh, you sweet, dumb, lovely
trollop of a Back Bay--Ann!" he cried exultantly.  "Oh, by God,
I'll thaw you out, I'll melt your ice, my girl--by God, I'll open
you!--Is it her arm, now?" he began gloatingly, and lifted her long
arm with a kind of slow, rending ecstasy and bit into her shoulder
haunch, "or her neck, or her warm face and sullen mouth, or the
good smell of her, or that lovely belly, darling--that white,
lovely, fruitful Boston belly," he gloated, "good for about a dozen
babies, isn't it?--or the big hips and swelling thighs, the long
haunch from waist to knee--oh, you fertile, dumb, unploughed
plantation of a woman--but I'LL plant you!" he yelled exultantly--
"and the big, dumb eyes of her, and her long hands and slender
fingers--how did you ever get such slender, graceful hands, you
delicate, big--here! give me the hands now--and all the fine, long
lady-fingers"--he said with gentle, murderous desire, and suddenly
felt the girl's long fingers trembling on his arm, took them in his
hands and felt them there, and all her big, slow body trembling in
his grasp, and was suddenly pierced with a wild and nameless
feeling of pity and regret.

"Oh, Ann, don't," he said, and seized her hand and held it
prayerfully.  "Don't look like that--don't be afraid--oh, look
here!" he said desperately again, and put his arms round her
trembling shoulders and began to pat her soothingly.  "--Please
don't act like that--don't tremble so--don't be afraid of me!--Oh,
Ann, please don't look at me that way--I didn't mean it--I'm so
God-damned sorry, Ann--Ah-h! it's going to be all right!  It's
going to be all right!  I swear it's going to be all right!" he
stammered foolishly, and took her hand and pleaded with her, not
knowing what he was saying, and sick with guilt and shame and
horror at the profanation of his act.

Her breath was fluttering, coming uncertainly, panting short and
quick and breathless like a frightened child; this and her slender
hands, her long trembling fingers, the sight of her hands so
strangely, beautifully delicate for such a big woman, filled him
with an unspeakable anguish of remorse.  She began to speak, a
breathless, panting, desperate kind of speech, and he found himself
desperately agreeing with everything she said, even though he did
not hear or understand half of it!

". . . Mustn't stay here," she panted.  "Let's get out of here . . .
go somewhere . . . anywhere . . . I've got to talk to you. . . .
Something I've got to tell you!" she panted desperately.
". . . You don't understand . . . awful, horrible mistake!" she
muttered.  ". . . Got to tell you, now! . . .  Come on!  Let's go."

"Oh, yes--sure--anywhere, Ann.  Wherever you say," he agreed
eagerly to everything she said: they put on their hats and coats
with trembling haste, and were preparing to leave just as Starwick
and Elinor returned.

Starwick asked them where they were going: they said they were
going for a walk.  He said, "Oh!" non-committally.  Both he and
Elinor observed their flushed, excited manner, and trembling haste,
with a curious and rather perturbed look, but said nothing more,
and they departed.

The pension was silent: everyone had already gone to bed, and when
they got out into the street it was the same.  It was a night of
still, cold frost, and everywhere around them there were the
strange, living presences of silence and of sleep.  The houses had
the closed, shuttered and attentive secrecy that houses in a small
French town have at night, no one else seemed to be abroad: they
strode rapidly along in the direction of the railway station,
saying nothing for a time, their feet sounding sharply on the
frozen ground as they walked.

At length, beneath one of the sparse, infrequent street lamps, Ann
paused, turned to him, and in a rapid, excited tone which was so
different from her usual sullen curtness, began to speak:

"Look here!" she said, "we've got to forget about all that tonight--
about everything that happened! . . .  It was my fault," she
muttered, with a kind of dumb, spinsterly agony of conscience
which, in its evocation of the straight innocence and integrity of
her kind and person, was somehow pitiably moving--"I didn't mean to
lead you on," she said naïvely.  "I shouldn't have let you get
started."

"Oh, Ann," he said, "you didn't do anything!  It wasn't your fault!
You couldn't help it--I was the one who started it."

"No, no," she muttered, with a kind of sullen, miserable
doggedness.  "It was all my fault. . . .  Could have stopped it."
She turned abruptly, miserably, and began to stride on again.

"But, Ann," he began, with a kind of desperate persuasiveness, as
he caught up with her, "don't take it this way. . . .  Don't worry
about it like this! . . .  We didn't do anything bad, honestly we
didn't!"

"Oh," she muttered without turning her head, "it was an awful
thing--an awful thing to do to you! . . .  I'm SO ashamed," she
muttered.  "It was a rotten thing to do!"

"But you did nothing!" he protested.  "I'm the one!"

"No, no," she muttered again--"I started it . . . I don't know
why. . . .  But I had no right . . . there's something you don't
understand."

"But what?  What is it, Ann?"  He didn't know whether to laugh or
cry over this dumb, spinsterly integrity of New England conscience
which, it seemed to him, was taking the episode so bitterly to
heart.

She paused in her long stride below another street lamp, and
turning, spoke sternly, desperately, to him.

"Listen!" she said.  "You've got to forget everything that happened
tonight. . . .  I never knew you felt that way about me. . . .
You've got to forget about me. . . .  You must never think of me
that way again!"

"Why?" he said.

"Because," she muttered, "it's wrong . . . wrong."

"Why is it wrong?"

She did not answer for a moment, and then, turning, looked him
straight in the eye:

"Because," she said, with quiet bluntness, "nothing can come of
it. . . .  I don't feel that way about you."

He could not answer for a moment, and it seemed to him that a thin
film of ice had suddenly hardened round his heart.

"Oh," he said presently; and, after a moment, added, "and don't you
think you ever could?"

She did not answer, but began to walk rapidly ahead.  He caught up
with her again, took her by the arm and pulled her round to face
him.  He said sharply:

"Answer me!  Don't you think you ever could?"

Her face was full of dumb, sullen misery; she muttered:

"There's something you don't understand--something you don't know
about."

"That's not what I asked you.  Answer me."

"No," she muttered sullenly.  "I can't feel that way about you. . . .
I never will."  She turned with a miserable look in her face and
began to walk again.  The ring of ice kept hardening round his
heart all the time; he caught up with her again, and again stopped
her.

"Listen, Ann.  You've got to tell me why.  I've got to know."--She
shook her head miserably and turned away, but he caught her, and
pulled her back, saying in a sharper, more peremptory tone:

"No, now--I've got to know.  Is it because--you just never could
feel that way about a fellow like me--because you could never think
about me in that way--?"

She didn't answer for a moment; she just stood looking at him
dumbly and miserably; and finally she shook her head in a movement
of denial:

"No," she said.  "It's not that."

The ring of ice kept getting thicker all the time, it seemed he
would not be able to speak the words, but in a moment he said:

"Well, then, is it--is it someone else?"

She made a sudden tormented movement of anguish and despair, and
turning, tried to walk away.  He seized her, and jerked her back to
him, and said:

"Answer me, God-damn it!  Is that the reason why?"

He waited a long moment before the answer came, and then she
muttered it out so low he could scarcely hear it.

"Yes," she said, and wrenched her arm free.  "Let me go."

He caught her again, and pulled her back.  The ring of ice seemed
to have frozen solid, and in that cold block he could feel his
heart throbbing like a trip-hammer.

"Who is it?" he said.

She did not answer, and he shook her roughly.  "You answer me. . . .
Is it someone you knew back home--?"

"Let me go," she muttered.  "I won't tell you."

"By God, you will," he said thickly, and held her.  "Who is it?  Is
it someone you met back home, or not?"

"No!" she shouted, and wrenched free with a kind of stifled sob,
and started ahead, almost running:  "Leave me alone now!  I won't
tell you!"

A sudden flash of intuition, an instant flash of recognition and
horror went through him like a knife.  His heart seemed to have
frozen solid, his breath to have stopped: he jumped for her like a
cat, and whisking her round towards him, said:

"Ann!  Look at me a moment!"  He put his fingers underneath her
chin and jerked her face up roughly:  "Are you in love with
Starwick?"

A long wailing note of dumb anguish and despair was torn from her;
she tried to break from his grasp, and as she wrenched to get free,
cried pitiably, in a terror-stricken voice:

"Leave me alone!  Leave me alone!"

"Answer, God-damn you!" he snarled.  "Is it Starwick or not?"

With a last frenzied effort, she wrenched free, and screamed like a
wounded animal:

"YES!  YES! . . .  I've told you now!  Are you satisfied?  Will you
leave me alone?"  And with a sobbing breath, she began to run
blindly.

He ran after her again, and caught up with her and took her in his
arms, but not to embrace her, but just to hold her, stop her,
somehow quiet, if he could, the wild, dumb, pitiable anguish of
that big creature, which tore through the ventricles of his heart
like a knife.  He himself was sick with horror, and a kind of
utter, paralyzing terror he had never felt before; he scarcely knew
what he was doing, what he was saying, but the sight of that great,
dumb creature's anguish, that locked and inarticulate agony of
grief, was more than he could bear.  And cold with terror, he began
to mumble with a thickened tongue:  "Oh, but Ann, Ann!--Starwick,
Starwick!--it's no use!  It's no use!--Christ, what a shame!  What
a shame!"  For suddenly he knew what Starwick was, what he had
never allowed himself to admit that Starwick had become, and he
kept mumbling thickly, "Christ!  Christ!  What a pity!  What a
shame!" not knowing what he was saying, conscious only, with a kind
of sickening horror, of the evil mischance which had with such a
cruel and deliberate perversity set their lives awry, and of the
horrible waste and loss which had warped for ever this grand and
fertile creature's life and which now would bring all her strength,
her love, the noble integrity of her spirit, to barren sterile
nothing.

At the moment he had only one feeling, overwhelming and intolerable,
somehow to quiet her, to stop, to heal this horrible wound of grief
and love, to bring peace to her tormented spirit somehow, to do
anything, use his life in any way that would give her a little
peace and comfort.

And he kept holding her, patting her on the shoulders, saying
foolishly over and over again, and not knowing what he said:

"Oh, it's all right! . . .  It's all right, Ann! . . .  You mustn't
look like this, you mustn't act this way . . . it's going to be all
right!"  And knowing miserably, horribly, that it was not all
right, that the whole design and fabric of their lives were
ruinously awry, that there was a hurt too deep ever to heal, a
wrong too cruel, fatal, and perverse ever to be righted.

She stayed there in his arms, she turned her face into his
shoulder, she put her slender, strong and lovely hands upon his
arms and held on to him desperately, and there, in the frozen,
sleeping stillness of that street in a little French town, she wept
hoarsely, bitterly, dreadfully, like some great creature horribly
wounded; and all he could do was hold on to her until the last torn
cry of pain had been racked and wrenched out of her.

When it was all over, and she had grown quiet, she dried her eyes,
and looking at him with a dumb, pleading expression, she whispered
miserably:

"You won't tell them?  You won't say anything to Frank about this,
will you?  You'll never let him know?"

And stabbed again by wild, rending pity, sick with horror at her
devastating terror, he told her he would not.

They walked home in silence through the frozen, sleeping streets.
It was after midnight when they got back to the pension: the whole
house was long ago asleep.  As they went up the stairs a clock
began to strike.



LXXXVII


He did not see her the next morning until it was time for lunch.
She had gone out early with the big Alsatian dog, and had spent the
morning walking in the forest.  During the morning he told Elinor
and Starwick that he was going back to Paris.  Starwick said
nothing at all, but Elinor, after a moment's silence, said coldly,
and with a trace of sarcasm:

"Very well, my dear.  You're the doctor.  If the lure of the great
city has proved too much for you, go you must."  She was silent for
a moment, and then said ironically, "Does this mean that we are not
to have the honour of your distinguished company on our trip? . . .
Really," she said curtly, "I wish you'd try to make up your mind
what you're going to do. . . .  The suspense, darling, is growing
QUITE unbearable.  If you'd try to break it to us gently," she went
on poisonously, "I beg of you to let the blow fall now, and not to
spare us any longer.  After all," she said with a kind of evil
drollery, "we may manage to survive the shock. . . .  Really, I
should like to know," she said sharply, as he did not answer.  "If
you're not going, we'll get someone else to take your place--we
wanted a fourth party to help share in the expenses," she added
venomously, "and I'd like to know at once what your intentions
are."

He stared at her with a smouldering face and with a swelter of hot
and ugly anger in his heart, but as usual, her envenomed attack was
too quick and sudden for him.  Before he could answer, even as his
tongue was blundering at a hot reply, she turned swiftly away, and
with an air of resignation, said to Starwick:

"Will you try to find out what his intentions are?  I can't find
out what he wants to do.  APPARENTLY," she concluded in a rich,
astounded voice, "--apparently, your young friend is tongue-tied."
She walked away, contained and beautifully self-possessed as ever,
save for two angry spots of colour in her face.

When she had gone, Starwick turned to him, and said with quiet
reproof:

"You ought to let her know.  You really ought, you know."

"All right!" he said quickly and hotly, "I'm letting you know right
now.  I'm not going."

Starwick said nothing for a moment, then with a quiet, weary, and
sorrowful resignation, he said:

"I'm sorry, Gene."

The other said nothing, but just stood looking at Starwick with
eyes which were cold and hard and ugly with their hate.  Starwick's
quiet words, the almost Christ-like humility with which he uttered
them, now seemed to him to be nothing but the mask of a sneering
arrogance of pride and contemptuous assurance, the badge of his
immeasurable good fortune.  With cold, measuring eyes of hate he
looked at Starwick's soft and graceful throat, the languid
indolence of his soft, voluptuously graceful figure, and with
murderous calculation he thought:  "How easy it would be for me to
twist that damned, soft neck of yours off your shoulders!  How easy
it would be to take that damned, soft body in my hands and break it
like a rotten stick across my knees!  Oh, you damned, soft,
pampered makeshift of a human being--you thing of cunning tricks
and words and accents--you synthetic imitation of a living artist--
you dear, damned darling of æsthetic females--you Boston woman's
lap-dog, you--"

The foul words thickened to a swelter of blind hate and murder in
his heart, and would not give him ease, or phrase the choking and
intolerable burden of his hate; the light of hate and murder burned
in his naked eye, curled his hands into two rending paws of savage
power in which he seemed to feel the substance of that warm, soft
throat between the strangling grip of his long fingers; and all the
time he felt hopelessly tricked, outwitted, beaten by the very
nakedness of his surrender to his hate, beaten by something too
subtle, soft and cunning for him ever to grasp, by something which,
for so it now seemed, would always beat him, by something whose
impossible good fortune it would always be to take from him the
thing he wanted most.

A thousand times he had foreseen this thing.  A thousand times he
had foreseen, as young men will foresee, the coming of the enemy--
and always he had pictured him in a definite form and guise.
Always he had come, armed in insolence and power, badged with the
open menace of the jeering word, the sneering tongue, the
brandished fist.  Always he had come to strike terror to the heart
with naked threat and open brag, to try to break the heart and
courage of another man, to win his jeering domination of another's
life, by violence and brutal courage.  He had never come by stealth
but always by the frontal attack, and the youth, like every youth
alive, had sworn that he would be ready for him when he came, would
meet him fiercely and without retreat, and would either conquer him
or most desperately lie dead before he yielded to the inexpiable
shame of foul dishonour.

And now the enemy had come, but in no way that he had ever known,
in no guise that he had ever pictured.  The enemy had come, not
armed in brutal might and open brag and from the front, but subtle,
soft, and infinitely cunning, and from a place, and in a way that
he had never foreseen.  The enemy had come behind the mask of
friendship, he had come with words of praise, with avowals of proud
belief and noble confidence, in an attitude of admiration and
humility--had come in such a way, and even as he spoke the words of
praise and proud belief in him, had taken from him what he wanted
most in life, and had not seemed to take it, or to want it, or to
care.



Starwick and Elinor had quarrelled again: this time it was because
he too had decided to go back to Paris that afternoon.  No one but
Elinor knew the purpose of his going; and that purpose, whatever it
was, did not please her.  When Eugene entered the dining-room for
his last meal with them, they were at it hammer and tongs, totally
oblivious of the sensation they were causing among the whispering
and conspiring old men and women all about them.  Or, if not
oblivious, they were indifferent to it: even in their quarrels they
kept their grand and rare and special manner--a manner which more
and more conceived the universe as an appropriate backdrop for the
subtle and romantic complications of their own lives, and which, in
its remote and lofty detachment from the common run of man, said
that here was an intercourse of souls that was far too deep and
rare for the dull conscience of the world to apprehend.

Elinor was talking earnestly, positively, an accent rich, yet
sharp, cultivated, yet formidably assured, a well-mannered
authority, positive with denial and the conviction of experience.

"You cannot do it!  I tell you that you cannot DO it!  You will
come a cropper if you do!"

Starwick's face was flushed deeply with anger; he answered quietly
in a mannered tone filled with a sense of outrage and indignation.

"I resent that VERY much," he said.  "It is VERY wrong and VERY
unfair of you to speak that way!  I RESENT it!" he said quietly but
with stern reproof.

"Sorry!" she clipped the word out curt and brusque, the way the
English say it.  "If you resent it, you resent it--and that's THAT!
But after ALL, my dear, what else do you expect?  If you insist on
bringing any little cut-throat you pick up in a Montmartre bistro
along with you everywhere you go, your friends are going to
complain about it!  And they've a right to!"

"I RESENT that VERY much!" he said again, in his mannered tone.

"Sorry!" she said crisply, curtly, as before.  "But that's the way
I feel about it!"  She looked at him for a moment, and then,
suddenly shaking her head in a short and powerful movement, she
said in a whispering shudder of revulsion and disgust:

"No good, Frank! . . .  I'm willing to make all the allowances I
can . . . but the man's no good--no good! . . .  He just won't do!"
Her tone was the tone of a powerful New Englander, of "fibre,"
character and breeding, putting the final dogma of his judgment
upon an inferior person who "just won't do."

And again, Starwick, two spots of bright colour burning in his
cheeks, said coldly, quietly, and with an inflexible obstinacy:

"I resent that VERY much!"

He had apparently decided that Alec, the Frenchman they had met in
a Montmartre bar one night, and who had accompanied them on most of
their expeditions since, should be their guest in their forthcoming
travels over France.  Moreover, with that arrogant secretiveness
that was characteristic of him, Frank had made an appointment to
meet the Frenchman in Paris that evening, and had not until that
morning informed anyone of his intentions.  This was the cause of
the quarrel.

As Eugene entered, they looked up at him indifferently, and resumed
their quarrel; Ann came in a little later, sat down without
speaking, and began to eat in sullen silence.  It was an unpleasant
meal.  Elinor assumed her customary manner of gay, light raillery,
but this time, in powerful contrast to her hilarious good spirits
of the night before, she was full of spite and malice--the angry
desire of her tormented spirit to sting and wound as if, by causing
pain to others, she could in some measure assuage her own.

"Darling," she said to Eugene, in her deft, malicious way, "I do
hope you're not going to forget all about me now that you're
deserting me? . . .  Won't you write me now and then to cheer me
up? . . .  Or is this going to be good-bye for ever! . . .
Because, darling, if it is, I want you to say so right out . . . no
matter how it hurts, I'd rather know the worst right now, so that I
can go out in the garden and eat worms, or howl, or beat my head
against the wall, or something," she said drolly, but with a glint
of spiteful motive in her eyes and in her smooth tone that left no
doubt of her intention.--"Won't you say it ain't so, darling? . . .
I mean, won't you remember me long enough some time just to write a
letter to me . . . I don't care how short it is if you'll just
write and let me know that you still CARE!" she said maliciously.
"Come on, darling," she added coaxingly, leaning towards him, "say
you will. . . .  Promise to write me just a little letter . . .
just a TEENY-WEENY little one like that," she measured drolly
between two fingers, and then, while he glared at her with a hot
face and angry eyes, she got in the instant, deft, decisive stroke
before he could think up an answer; and so concluded it:

"Good!" she said swiftly, and patted him quickly, decisively, on
the arm:  "God bless you, darling!  I knew you would!"

They finished lunch in a sullen and unhappy silence.  After lunch
Eugene went upstairs, packed and closed his valise and came down
and paid his bill.  When he got outside, Elinor was sitting in the
car, waiting for him.  Starwick had not yet come down.

"Put your suitcase in behind," she said curtly, "and do tell Frank
to hurry if he's coming.  There's not much time."

"Where's Ann?" he said.  "Is she coming with us to the station?"

"My dear," she said coldly, "I haven't the remotest idea.  Why
don't you ask her yourself if you want to know?"

He flushed again; and then with a feeling of painful embarrassment
and constraint, said:

"Elinor--if you don't mind--that is--I'd like--"

"What?" she said curtly, impatiently, and sharply, turning in her
seat and looking at him.  "You'd like WHAT?"

"If you don't mind," he said, gulping with embarrassment, and at
the same moment enraged that he should feel so--

"--My money!" he blurted out.

"What? . . .  What?" she demanded again, in a brusque, puzzled
tone.  "OH!" she cried with a sudden air of enlightenment.  "Your
MONEY! . . .  You mean those express cheques you gave me to keep
for you?"

"Yes," he said miserably, feeling an inexplicable shame and
embarrassment at having to ask for his own money, and inwardly
cursing the folly which, in the rush of affection that followed
their recent reconciliation, had caused him to give every cent he
had into her keeping--"if you don't mind--that is--"

"But of COURSE, my child!" cried Elinor, with a fine air of
astonishment.  "You shall have it at once!"--and opening her purse
she took out the thin little, black folder that contained all the
money he had left--three express cheques of twenty-dollar
denomination.  "Here you are, sir!" she said, and gave it to him in
such a way that he felt again a sense of guilt and shame as if he
were acting meanly towards her or were taking something that did
not belong to him.

"I'm sorry," he stammered apologetically, "--sorry to have to ask
you for it, Elinor--but you see it's all I've got left."

"It is?" she said curtly.  "What did you do with all the rest that
you had when we met you?"

"I--I guess I spent it," he stammered.

The answer came, and buried itself in his heart, as quick, as cold,
as poisonous as a striking snake.

"You did?" she said curtly.  "I wonder where.  I'm sure you didn't
spend any of it while you were with US."

He could have strangled her.  The veins stood out upon his forehead
like cords, his face was brick-red, and for a moment he went blind
with the rush of hot, choking blood to his head.  He tried to
speak, his throat worked convulsively, but no words came: he just
stood there goggling at her stupidly with an inflamed face,
uttering a few incoherent croaks.  Before he could think of
anything to say, she had escaped again: Starwick and Ann were
coming out of the pension, and she was speaking to them swiftly,
telling them to make haste.

No one spoke during the ride to the station.  He sat on the back
seat beside Ann and the big Alsatian dog; Starwick and Elinor were
in front.  When they got to the station, the clock still lacked
more than five minutes to train-time.  He and Starwick bought
third-class fares, and went outside where the women were still
waiting for them.  Starwick and Elinor walked away a few yards and
began their quarrel again; Ann said nothing, but looked at him
dumbly, miserably, a look that tore at him with pity and wild
regret, and that made him weak and hollow with his blind,
impossible desire.

They looked at each other with angry, sullen eyes, tormented with
the perverse and headstrong pride of youth, unwilling to make
concessions or relent, even when each desperately wanted the other
to do so.

"Good-bye," he said, and held out his hand.  "Good-bye, Ann."

"What do you mean--?" she began angrily.  "What are you going to
do?"

"I'm saying good-bye," he said doggedly.

"You mean you're not coming with us?"

For a moment he did not answer and then, nodding towards Elinor, he
said bitterly:

"Your lady friend there doesn't seem to want me very much.  She
doesn't seem to think I bear my fair share of the expenses."

"What did she say to you?" the girl asked.

"Oh, nothing," he said in a quiet, choking tone of fury.  "Nothing
in particular.  Just one of those friendly little things I've come
to look for.  She just said she didn't know what I'd done with my
money--that I hadn't spent any of it while I was with you."

Her face got brick-red with a heavy, smouldering flush, she looked
towards Elinor with angry eyes, and then muttered:

"It was a rotten thing to say!"  Turning towards him again, she
said in a low tone:

"Do you mean, then, that you've given up the trip?  You're not
coming with us?"

"That's what I've told you, isn't it?" he said harshly.  "What else
do you expect?"

She looked at him sullenly, angrily, a moment longer; and suddenly
her eyes were wet with tears.

"It's going to be a fine trip for me, isn't it?" she muttered.
"I've got a lot to look forward to, haven't I?"

"Oh, you'll get along, I guess," he jeered.  "I don't think you're
going to miss MY company very much."  And felt a desperate hope
that she would.

"Oh, it's going to be charming, charming, isn't it?" she said
bitterly.  "Nothing to do but hold down the back seat alone with
the dog--while THEY"--she nodded towards Elinor and Starwick--"are
up there having their wonderful talks together--leaving me alone to
watch the dog while they stay out all night together--oh, it's
going to be simply wonderful, isn't it?" she said with an
infuriated sarcasm.

"So that's the reason I was wanted?" he said.  "To keep you company
on the back seat!  To take the place of the dog!  To make it look
good, eh?--to make the party look a little more respectable back in
Boston when they hear of Mr. Starwick and his two lady friends!
That's why you wanted me, is it?  To fill in extra space--to be a
kind of damned male nurse and chaperon to you and Elinor and Frank
Starwick--"

She took a step towards him and stopped, her hands clenched beside
her, her eyes shot with tears, her big body trembling for a moment
with baffled anger and despair.

"God-damn you!" she said in a small, choked voice; and, her hands
still clenched, she turned away abruptly to hide her tears.

At this moment Starwick approached and, his ruddy face flushing as
he spoke, he said quietly, casually:

"Ann, look!  Will you let me have a thousand francs?"

She turned round, glared at Starwick for a moment with angry,
reddened eyes and then, to his astonishment and her own, boomed out
comically and in an enraged tone:

"No--o!"

His face went crimson with embarrassment, but after looking at her
steadily for a moment, he turned, and walked back to Elinor.  In a
moment she could be heard saying coldly:

". . . I am sorry, Francis, but I cannot! . . .  You should have
thought about all that before! . . .  If you won't stay out here
and go in with us tomorrow, you'll have to do the best you can by
yourself. . . .  No, sir, I cannot . . . if you want to put it that
way, yes; I WON'T then! . . .  I do not LIKE the man. . . .  I
THOROUGHLY disapprove of what you're doing. . . .  I WILL not help
you!"

Some low, excited words passed between them, and in a moment
Starwick said:

"You have no right to say that!  I RESENT that VERY much!"

His ruddy face was deeply flushed with anger and humiliation: he
turned abruptly on his heel and walked away without farewell.  At
this moment the guards could be heard calling, "En voiture!  En
voiture, messieurs!" and Elinor, glancing towards Ann and Eugene,
said curtly:

"If you're going to catch that train, you'll have to hurry!"

Eugene turned to say good-bye to Ann; she paid no attention to his
outstretched hand but stood, her hands clenched, glaring angrily at
him with wet eyes.

"Good-bye!" he said roughly.  "Aren't you going to say good-bye?"
She made no answer, but just stood glaring at him, and then turned
away.

"All right," he said angrily.  "Do as you like!"

Without a word to Elinor, he picked up his valise, ran into the
station and got through the gates just as the little suburban train
began to move.  Starwick was climbing up into a compartment,
Eugene followed him, flung his valise inside, and clambered in,
breathless, just as the guard with a remonstrant face slammed the
door behind him.



LXXXVIII


During the journey back to Paris, Eugene and Starwick said little.
The two young men were the sole occupants of the compartment, they
sat facing each other, looking out through the windows with gloomy
eyes.  The grey light of the short winter's day was fading rapidly:
when they entered Paris dusk had come; as the train rattled over
the switchpoints in the yard-approaches to the Gare St. Lazare,
they could see lights and life and sometimes faces in the windows
of the high, faded buildings near the tracks.  Through one window,
in a moment's glimpse, Eugene saw a room with a round table with a
dark cloth upon it, and with the light of a shaded chandelier
falling on it, and a dark-haired boy of ten or twelve leaning on
the table, reading a book, with his face propped in his hands, and
a woman moving busily about the table laying it with plates and
knives and forks.  And as the train slackened speed, he saw, high
up in the topmost floor of an old house that rose straight up from
the tracks, a woman come to the window, look for a moment at a
canary-bird cage which was hanging in the window, reach up and take
it from its hook.  She had the rough, blowsy, and somewhat old-
fashioned look of a demi-monde of the Renoir period; and yet she
was like someone he had known all his life.

They passed long strings of silent, darkened railway compartments,
and as they neared the station, several suburban trains steamed
past them, loaded with people going home.  Some of the trains were
the queer little double-deckers that one sees in France: Eugene
felt like laughing every time he saw them and yet, with their loads
of Frenchmen going home, they too were like something he had always
known.  As the train came into the station, and slowed down to its
halt, he could see a boat-train ready for departure on another
track.  Sleek as a panther, groomed, opulent, ready, purring softly
as a cat, the train waited there like a luxurious projectile,
evoking perfectly, and at once, the whole structure of the world of
power and wealth and pleasure that had created it.  Beyond it one
saw the whole universe of pleasure--a world of great hotels and
famed resorts, the thrilling structure of the huge, white-breasted
liners, and the slanting race and drive of their terrific stacks.
One saw behind it the dark coast of France, the flash of beacons,
the grey, fortressed harbour walls, the bracelet of their hard,
spare lights, and beyond, beyond, one saw the infinite beat and
swell of stormy seas, the huge nocturnal slant and blaze of liners
racing through immensity, and for ever beyond, beyond, one saw the
faint, pale coasts of morning and America, and then the spires and
ramparts of the enfabled isle, the legendary and aerial smoke, the
stone and steel, of the terrific city.



Now their own train had come to a full stop, and he and Starwick
were walking up the quay among the buzzing crowd of people.

Starwick turned and, flushing painfully, said in a constrained and
mannered tone:

"Look!  Shall I being seeing you again?"

Eugene answered curtly:  "I don't know.  If you want to find me, I
suppose I shall be at the same place, for a time."

"And after that?--Where will you go?"

"I don't know," he answered brusquely again.  "I haven't thought
about it yet.  I've got to wait until I get money to go away on."

The flush in Starwick's ruddy face deepened perceptibly, and, after
another pause, and with obvious embarrassment, he continued as
before:

"Look!  Where are you going now?"

"I don't know, Francis," he said curtly.  "To the hotel, I suppose,
to leave my suitcase and see if they've still got a room for me.
If I don't see you again, I'll say good-bye to you now."

Starwick's embarrassment had become painful to watch; he did not
speak for another moment, then said:

"Look!  Do you mind if I come along with you?"

He did mind; he wanted to be alone; to get away as soon as he could
from Starwick's presence and all the hateful memories it evoked,
but he said shortly:

"You can come along if you like, of course, but I see no reason why
you should.  If you're going to the studio we can take a taxi and
you can drop me at the hotel.  But if you're meeting somebody over
on this side later on, why don't you wait over here for him?"

Starwick's face was flaming with shame and humiliation; he seemed
to have difficulty in pronouncing his words and when he finally
turned to speak, the other youth was shocked to see in his eyes a
kind of frantic, naked desperation.

"Then, look!" he said, and moistened his dry lips.  "Could you let
me have some--some money, please?"

Something strangely like terror and entreaty looked out of his
eyes:

"I've GOT to have it," he said desperately.

"How much do you want?"

Starwick was silent, and then muttered:

"I could get along with 500 francs."

The other calculated swiftly: the sum amounted at the time to about
thirty dollars.  It was almost half his total remaining funds but--
one look at the desperate humiliation and entreaty of Starwick's
face, and a surge of savage, vindictive joy swept through him--it
would be worth it.

"All right," he nodded briefly, and started to walk forward again.

"You come with me while I leave this stuff at the hotel and later
on we'll see if we can't get these cheques cashed."

Starwick consented eagerly.  From that time on, Eugene played with
him as a cat plays with a mouse.  They got a taxi and were driven
across the Seine to his little hotel, he left Starwick below while
he went upstairs with his valise, promising to "be down in a
minute, after I've washed up a bit," and took a full and lesiurely
three-quarters of an hour.  When he got downstairs, Starwick's
restless manner had increased perceptibly: he was pacing up and
down, smoking one cigarette after another.  In the same leisurely
and maddening manner they left the hotel.  Starwick asked where
they were going: Eugene replied cheerfully that they were going to
dinner at a modest little restaurant across the Seine.  By the time
they had walked across the bridge, and through the enormous arches
of the Louvre, Starwick was gnawing his lips with chagrin.  In the
restaurant Eugene ordered dinner and a bottle of wine; Starwick
refused to eat, Eugene expressed regret and pursued his meal
deliberately.  By the time he had finished, and was cracking nuts,
Starwick was almost frantic.  He demanded impatiently to know where
they were going, and the other answered chidingly:

"Now, Frank, what's the hurry?  You've got the whole night ahead of
you: there's no rush at all. . . .  Besides, why not stay here a
while?  It's a good place.  Don't you think so?  I discovered it
all by myself!"

Starwick looked about him, and said:

"Yes, the place is all right, I suppose, the food looks good--it
really does, you know--but GOD!" he snarled bitterly, "how dull!
how dull!"

"DULL?" Eugene said chidingly, and with an air of fine astonishment.
"Frank, Frank, such language--and from YOU!  Is this the poet and
the artist, the man of feeling and of understanding, the lover
of humanity?  Is this GRAND, is this FINE, is this SWELL?" he
jeered.  "Is this the lover of the French--the man who's more
at home here than he is at home?  Why, Frank, this is unworthy
of you: I thought that every breath you drew was saturated with the
love of France.  I thought that every pulse-beat of your artist's
soul beat in sympathy with the people of this noble country.  I
thought that you would love this place--find it SIMPLY SWELL," he
sneered, "and VERY grand and MOST amusing--and here you turn your
nose up at the people and call them dull--as if they were a lot of
damned Americans!  DULL!  How can they be DULL, Frank?  Don't you
see they're FRENCH? . . .  Now this boy here, for example," he
pointed to a bus-boy of eighteen years who was noisily busy piling
dishes from a table on to a tray.--"Isn't he a SWEET person,
Frank?" he went on with an evil, jeering mimicry--"and there's
something VERY grand and ENORMOUSLY moving about the way he piles
those dishes on a tray," he continued with a deliberate parody of
Starwick's mannered accent.  "--I MEAN, the whole thing's there--it
really is, you know--it's like that painting by Cimabue in the
Louvre that we both like so much--you know the one of the Madonna
with the little madonnas all around her.--I mean the way he uses
his hands--Look!" he crooned rapturously as the bus-boy took a
thick, blunt finger and vigorously wiped his rheumy nose with it.
"--Now where, WHERE, Frank," he said ecstatically, "could you find
anything like that in America?  I MEAN, the GRACE, the DIGNITY, the
complete unselfconsciousness with which that boy just wiped his
nose across his finger--or his finger across his nose--Hah! hah!
hah!--I get all confused, Frank--REALLY!--the movement is so
beautiful and fluid--it's hard to say just which is which--which
does the WIPING--nose or finger--I mean, the whole thing's QUITE
incredible--and MOST astonishing--the way it comes back on itself:
it's like a FUGUE, you know," and looking at the other earnestly,
he said deeply:  "You see what I mean, don't you?"

Starwick's face had flamed crimson during the course of this
jeering parody: he returned the other's look with hard eyes, and
said with cold succinctness:

"Quite! . . .  If you don't mind, could we go along now and,"--
his flush deepened and he concluded with painful difficulty,
". . . and . . . and do what you said you would?"

"But of COURSE!" the other cried, with another parody of Starwick's
tone and manner.  "At once!  Immediately!  TOUT DE SUITE! . . .
as we say over here! . . .  Now, THERE you are!" he said
enthusiastically.  "THERE you are, Frank! . . .  TOUT DE SUITE!" he
murmured rapturously.  "TOUT DE SUITE! . . .  Not 'at once!'  Not
'right away!'  Not 'immediately!'  But TOUT DE SUITE! . . .  Ah,
Frank, how different from our own coarse tongue!  Quel charme!
Quelle musique!  Quelle originalité! . . .  I MEAN, the whole
thing's there! . . .  It really is, you know!"

"Quite!" said Starwick as before, and looked at him with hard,
embittered eyes.  "Could we go now?"

"Mais oui, mais oui, mon ami! . . .  But first, I want you to meet
yon noble youth who wipes his nose with such a simple unaffected
dignity, and is, withal, so FRENCH about it! . . .  I know him
well, we artists have the common touch, n'est-ce pas?  Many a time
and oft have we talked together. . . .  Why, Frank, you're going to
love him like a brother . . . the whole, great heart of France is
beating underneath that waiter's jacket . . . and, ah! such grace,
such flashing rapier-work of Gallic wit, such quick intelligence
and humour. . . .  Ecoutez, garçon!" he called; the boy turned,
startled, and then, seeing the young men, his thick lips slowly
wreathed themselves in a smile of amiable stupidity.  He came
towards them smiling eagerly, a clumsy boy of eighteen years with
the thick features, the dry, thick lips, the blunted, meaty hands
and encrusted nails of the peasant.  It was a face of slow,
wondering intelligence, thick-witted, unperceptive, flushed with
strong, dark colour, full of patient earnestness, and animal good-
nature.

"Bonsoir, monsieur," he said, as he came up.  "Vous désirez quelque
chose?"  And he grinned at them slowly, with a puzzled, trustful
stare.

"But yes, my boy! . . .  I have been telling my friend about you,
and he wants to meet you.  He is, like me, an American . . . but a
true friend of France.  And so I told him how you loved America!"

"But yes, but yes!" the boy cried earnestly, clutching eagerly at
the suggestion.  "La France and l'Amérique are of the true friends,
n'est-ce pas, monsieur?"

"You have reason!  It's as you say!"

"Vashingtawn!" the boy cried suddenly, with a burst of happy
inspiration.

"But yes!  But yes! . . .  Lafayette!" the other yelled
enthusiastically.

"Pair-SHING!" the boy cried rapturously.  "La France et l'Amérique!"
he passionately proclaimed, and he turned slowly to Starwick, joined
his thick, blunt fingers together, and thrusting them under
Starwick's nose, nodded his thick head vigorously and cried:  "C'est
comme ça! . . .  La France et l'Amérique!"--he shook his thick
joined fingers vigorously under Starwick's nose again, and said:
"Mais oui!  Mais oui! . . .  C'est toujours comme ça!"

"Oh, my God!" groaned Starwick, turning away, "how dull!  How
utterly, UNSPEAKABLY dreary!"

"Monsieur?" the boy spoke inquiringly, and turned blunt, puzzled
features at Starwick's dejected back.

Starwick's only answer was another groan: flinging a limp arm over
the back of his chair, he slumped in an attitude of exhausted
weariness.  The boy turned a patient, troubled face to the other
youth, who said, in an explanatory way:

"He is profoundly moved. . . .  What you have said has touched him
deeply!"

"Ah-h!" the boy cried, with an air of sudden, happy enlightenment,
and thus inspired, began with renewed ardour, and many a vigorous
wag of his thick and earnest beak, to proclaim:

"Mais c'est vrai!  C'est comme je dis! . . .  La France et
l'Amérique--" he intoned anew.

"Oh, God!" groaned Starwick without turning, and waved a feeble and
defeated arm.  "Tell him to go away!"

"He is deeply moved!  He says he can stand no more!"

The boy cast an earnest and immensely gratified look at Starwick's
dejected back, and was on the point of pushing his triumph farther
when the proprietor angrily called to him, bidding him be about his
work and leave the gentlemen in peace.

He departed with obvious reluctance, but not without vigorously
nodding his thick head again, proclaiming that "La France et
l'Amérique sont comme ça!" and shaking his thick, clasped fingers
earnestly in a farewell gesture of racial amity.

When he had gone, Starwick looked round wearily, and in a
dispirited tone said:

"God!  What a place!  How did you ever find it? . . .  And how do
you manage to stand it?"

"But look at him, Frank . . . I mean, don't you just LO-O-VE it?"
he jibed.  "I mean, there's something so GRAND and so SIMPLE and so
UNAFFECTED about the way he did it!  It's really QUITE astonishing!
It really is, you know!"

The poor bus-boy, indeed, had been intoxicated by his sudden and
unaccustomed success.  Now, as he continued his work of clearing
tables and stacking dishes on a tray, he could be seen nodding his
thick head vigorously and muttering to himself:  "Mais oui, mais
oui, monsieur! . . .  La France et l'Amérique. . . .  Nous sommes
de vrais amis!" and from time to time he would even pause in his
work to clasp his thick fingers together illustrating this and to
mutter:  "C'est toujours comme ça!"

This preoccupied elation soon proved the poor boy's undoing.  For
even as he lifted his loaded tray and balanced it on one thick palm
he muttered "C'est comme ça," again, making a recklessly inclusive
gesture with his free hand; the mountainously balanced tray was
thrown off balance, he made a desperate effort to retrieve it, and
as it crashed upon the floor he pawed frantically and sprawled
after it, in one general ruinous smash of broken crockery.

There was a maddened scream from the proprietor.  He came running
clumsily, a squat, thick figure of a bourgeois Frenchman, clothed
in black and screaming imprecations.  His moustaches bristled like
the quills of an enraged porcupine, and his ruddy face was swollen
and suffused, an apoplectic red:

"Brute!  Fool!  Imbecile!" he screamed as the frightened boy
clambered to his feet and stood staring at him with a face full of
foolish and helpless bewilderment.  ". . . Salaud! . . .  Pig . . .
Architect!" he screamed out this meaningless curse in a strangling
voice, and rushing at the boy cuffed him clumsily on the side of
the face and began to thrust and drive him before him in staggering
lunges.

"--And what grace, Frank!" Eugene now said cruelly.  "How GRAND and
SIMPLE and how unselfconscious they are in everything they do!  I
MEAN, the way they use their hands!" he said ironically, as the
maddened proprietor gave the unfortunate boy another ugly, clumsy
shove that sent him headlong.  "I MEAN, it's like a fugue--like
Cimabue or an early primitive--it really is, you know--"

"Assassin!  Criminal!" the proprietor screamed at this moment, and
gave the weeping boy a brutal shove that sent him sprawling forward
upon his hands and knees:

"Traitor!  Misérable scélérat!" he screamed, and kicked clumsily at
the prostrate boy with one fat leg.

"Now where?--where?" Eugene said maliciously, as the wretched boy
clambered to his feet, weeping bitterly, "--where, Francis, could
you see anything like that in America?"

"God!" said Starwick, getting up.  "It's unspeakable!"  And
desperately:  "Let's go!"

They paid the bill and went out.  As they went down the stairs they
could still hear the hoarse, choked sobs of the bus-boy, his thick
face covered with his thick, blunt fingers, crying bitterly.



He didn't know what Starwick wanted the money for, but it was plain
he wanted it for something, badly.  His agitation was pitiable:--
the bitter exasperation and open flare of temper he had displayed
once or twice in the restaurant was so unnatural to him that it was
evident his nerves were being badly rasped by the long delay.  Now,
he kept consulting his watch nervously: he turned, and looking at
Eugene with a quiet but deep resentment in his eyes, he said:

"Look.  If you're going to let me have the money, I wish you'd let
me have it now--please.  Otherwise, I shall not need it."

And Eugene, touched with a feeling of guilt at the deep and quiet
resentment in his companion's face, knowing he had promised him the
money and feeling that this taunting procrastination was ungenerous
and mean, said roughly:

"All right, come on.  You can have it right away."

They turned into the Rue St. Honoré, turned again, and walked to
the Place Vendôme, where there was a small exchange office--or
"all-night bank"--where travellers' cheques were cashed.  They
entered, he cashed his three remaining cheques: the amount was
something over 900 francs.  He counted the money, kept out 500
francs for Starwick, stuffed the rest into his pocket, and,
turning, thrust the little sheaf of banknotes into Starwick's hand,
saying brutally:

"There's you money, Frank.  And now, good-bye to you.  I needn't
detain you any longer."

He turned to go, but the implication of his sneer had not gone
unnoticed:

"Just a minute," Starwick's quiet voice halted him.  "What did you
mean by that?"

He paused, with a slow thick anger beating in his veins:

"By what?"

"By saying you needn't detain me any longer?"

"You got what you wanted, didn't you?"

"You mean the money?"

"Yes."

Starwick looked quietly at him a moment longer, then thrust the
little roll of banknotes back into his hand.

"Take it," he said.

For a moment the other could not speak.  A murderous fury choked
him: he ground his teeth together, and clenched his fist, he felt a
moment's almost insane desire to grip that soft throat with his
strangling hand and beat the face into a bloody jelly with his
fist.

"Why, God-damn you--" he grated between clenched teeth.  "Goddamn
you for a--!"  He turned away, saying harshly:  "To hell with
you! . . .  I'm through!"

He began to walk away across the Square at a savage stride.  He
heard footsteps following him: near the corner of the Rue St.
Honoré Starwick caught up with him and said doggedly:

"No, but I'm going with you! . . .  I really MUST, you know!"  His
voice rose and became high, almost womanish, with his passionate
declaration:  "If there's anything between you and me that has to
be settled before you go away, you can't leave it like this . . .
we've got to have it out, you know . . . we really must!"

The other youth stood stock-still for a moment.  Every atom of him--
blood, bone, the beating of his heart, the substance of his flesh--
seemed to congeal in a paralysis of cold murder.  He licked his
dry lips and said thickly:

"Have it out!"--The blood swarmed through him in a choking flood,
it seemed instantly to rush down through his hands and to fill him
with a savage, rending strength, the curse was torn from him in a
bestial cry and snarling:

"Have it out!  Why, you damned rascal, we'll have it out, all
right!  We'll have it out, you dirty little fairy--"  The foul word
was out at last, in one blind expletive of murderous hate, and
suddenly that tortured, impossibly tangled web of hatred, failure,
and despair found its release.  He reached out, caught Starwick by
the throat and collar of his shirt, and endowed with that immense,
incalculable strength which hatred and the sudden lust to kill can
give a man, he lifted the slight figure from the ground as if it
were a bundle of rags and sticks, and slammed it back against the
façade of a building with such brutal violence that Starwick's head
bounced and rattled on the stone.  The blow knocked Starwick
senseless: his hat went flying from his head, his cane fell from
his grasp and rattled on the pavement with a hard, lean clatter.
For a moment, his eyes rolled back and forth with the wooden,
weighted movement of a doll's.  Then, as Eugene released his grip,
his legs buckled at the knees, his eyes closed and his head sagged,
and he began to slump down towards the pavement, his back sliding
all the time against the wall.

He would have fallen if Eugene had not caught him, held him,
propped him up against the wall, until he could recover.  And at
that moment, Eugene felt an instant, overwhelming revulsion of
shame, despair, and sick horror, such as he had never known before.
For a moment all the blood seemed to have drained out of his heart
and left it a dead shell.  He thought he had killed Starwick--
broken his neck or fractured his skull: even in death--or
unconsciousness--Starwick's frail body retained its languorous
dignity and grace.  His head dropped heavily to one side, the
buckling weight of the unconscious figure slumped in a movement of
terrible and beautiful repose--the same movement that one sees in a
great painting of Christ lowered from the cross, as if, indeed, the
whole rhythm, balance and design of that art which Starwick had
observed with such impassioned mimicry had left its image indelibly
upon his own life, so that, even in death or senselessness, his
body would portray it.

At that moment the measure of ruin and defeat which the other young
man felt was overwhelming.  It seemed to him that if he had
deliberately contrived to crown a ruinous career by the most
shameful and calamitous act of all, he could not have been guilty
of a worse crime than the one he had just committed.  It was not
merely the desperate, sickening terror in his heart when he thought
that Starwick might be dead--that he had killed him.  It was even
more than this, a sense of profanation, a sense of having done
something so foul and abominable that he could never recover from
it, never wash its taint out of his blood.  There are some people
who possess such a natural dignity of person--such a strange and
rare inviolability of flesh and spirit--that any familiarity, any
insult, above all any act of violence upon them, is unthinkable.
If such an insult be intended, if such violence be done, the act
returns a thousandfold upon the one who does it: his own blow
returns to deal a terrible revenge; he will relive his crime a
thousand times in all the shame and terror of inexpiable memory.

Starwick was such a person: he had this quality of personal
inviolability more than anyone the other youth had ever known.  And
now, as he stood there holding Starwick propped against the wall,
calling him by name, shaking him and pleading with him to recover
consciousness, his feeling of shame, despair, and bitter ruinous
defeat was abysmal, irremediable.  It seemed to him that he could
have done nothing which would more have emphasized his enemy's
superiority and his own defeat than this thing which he had done.
And the feeling that Starwick would always beat him, always take
from him the thing he wanted most, that by no means could he ever
match the other youth in any way, gain even the most trifling
victory, was now overpowering in its horror.  With a sick and
bitter heart of misery, he cursed the wretched folly of his act.
He would willingly have cut off his hand--the hand that gave the
blow--if by so doing he could undo his act, but he knew that it was
now too late, and with a feeling of blind terror he reflected that
this knowledge of his defeat and fear was now Starwick's also, and
that as long as Starwick lived, he would always know about it, and
realize from this alone the full measure of his victory.  And this
feeling of shame, horror, and abysmal, inexpiable regret persisted
even after, with a feeling of sick relief, he saw Starwick's eyes
flutter, open, and after a moment of vague, confused bewilderment,
look at him with a quiet consciousness.

Nevertheless, his feeling of relief was unspeakable.  He bent,
picked up Starwick's hat and cane, and gave them to him, saying
quietly:

"I'm sorry, Frank."

Starwick put on his hat and took the cane in his hand.

"It doesn't matter.  If that's the way you felt, you had to do it,"
he said in a quiet, toneless and inflexible voice.  "But now,
before we leave each other, we must see this through.  We've got to
bring this thing into the open, find out what it is.  That MUST be
done, you know!"  His voice had risen with an accent of inflexible
resolve, an accent which the other had heard before, and which he
knew no fear of death or violence or any desperate consequence
could ever alter by a jot.  "I've got to understand what this thing
is before I leave you," Starwick said.  "That must be done."

"All right!" Eugene said blindly, desperately.  "Come on, then!"

And together, they strode along in silence, along the empty
pavements of the Rue St. Honoré, past shuttered shops, and old,
silent buildings which seemed to abide there and attend upon the
anguish of tormented youth with all the infinite, cruel, and
impassive silence of dark time, the unspeakable chronicle of
foregone centuries, the unspeakable anguish, grief, and desperation
of a million vanished, nameless, and forgotten lives.

And thus, in bitter shame and silence and despair, the demented,
drunken, carnal, and kaleidoscopic circuit of the night began.



LXXXIX


About ten o'clock the next morning someone knocked at Eugene's
door, and Starwick walked in.  Without referring to the night
before, Starwick immediately, in his casual and abrupt way, said:

"Look.  Elinor and Ann are here: they came in this morning."

"Where are they?"  Excitement, sharp and sudden as an electric
shock, shot through him.  "Here?  Downstairs?"

"No: they've gone shopping.  I'm meeting them at Prunier's for
lunch.  Ann said she might come by to see you later on."

"Before lunch?"

"Ace," said Starwick.  "Look," he said again, in his casual,
mannered tone, "I don't suppose you'd care to come to lunch with
us?"

"Thanks," Eugene answered stiffly, "but I can't.  I've got another
engagement."

Starwick's face flushed crimson with the agonizing shyness and
embarrassment which the effort cost him.  He leaned upon his cane
and looked out of the window as he spoke.

"Then, look," he said, "Elinor asks to be remembered to you."  He
was silent a moment, and then continued with painful difficulty:
"We're all going to the Louvre after lunch: I want to see the
Cimabue once more before we leave."

"When are you leaving?"

"Tomorrow," Starwick said.  "--Look!" he spoke carefully, looking
out of the window, "we're leaving the Louvre at four o'clock. . . .
I thought . . . if you were going to be over that way. . . .  I
think Elinor would like to see you before she goes. . . .  We'll be
there at the main entrance."  The anguish which the effort had cost
him was apparent: he kept looking away out of the window, leaning
on his cane, and for a moment his ruddy face was contorted by the
old, bestial grimace of inarticulate pain and grief which the other
had noticed the first time they had met, in Cambridge, years
before.  Then Starwick, without glancing at Eugene, turned towards
the door.  For a moment he stood, back turned, idly tapping with
his cane against the wall.

"It would be nice if you could meet us there.  If not--"

He turned, and for the last time in life the two young men looked
squarely at one another, and each let the other see, without
evasion or constraint, the image of his soul.  Henceforth, each
might glimpse from time to time some shadow-flicker of the other's
life, the destiny of each would curiously be interwoven through
twinings of dark chance and tragic circumstance, but they would
never see each other face to face again.

Now, looking steadily at him before he spoke, and with the deep
conviction of his spirit, the true image of his life, apparent in
his face, his eyes, his tone and manner, Starwick said:

"If I don't see you again, good-bye, Eugene."  He was silent for a
moment and, the colour flaming in his face from the depth and
earnestness of his feeling, he said quietly:  "It was good to have
known you.  I shall never forget you."

"Nor I you, Frank," the other said.  "No matter what has happened--
how we feel about each other now--you had a place in my life that
no one else has ever had."

"And what was that?" said Starwick.

"I think it was that you were young--my own age--and that you were
my friend.  Last night after--after that thing happened," he went
on, his own face flushing with the pain of memory, "I thought back
over all the time since I have known you.  And for the first time I
realized that you were the first and only person of my own age that
I could call my friend.  You were my one true friend--the one I
always turned to, believed in with unquestioning devotion.  You
were the only real friend that I ever had.  Now something else has
happened.  You have taken from me something that I wanted, you have
taken it without knowing that you took it, and it will always be
like this.  You were my brother and my friend--"

"And now?" said Starwick quietly.

"You are my mortal enemy.  Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Eugene," said Starwick sadly.  "But let me tell you this
before I go.  Whatever it was I took from you, it was something
that I did not want or wish to take.  And I would give it back
again if I could."

"Oh, fortunate and favoured Starwick," the other jeered.  "To be so
rich--to have such gifts and not to know he has them--to be for
ever victorious, and to be so meek and mild."

"And I will tell you this as well," Starwick continued.  "Whatever
anguish and suffering this mad hunger, this impossible desire, has
caused you, however fortunate or favoured you may think I am, I
would give my whole life if I could change places with you for an
hour--know for an hour an atom of your anguish and your hunger and
your hope. . . .  Oh, to feel so, suffer so, and live so!--however
mistaken you may be! . . .  To have come lusty, young, and living
into this world . . . not to have come, like me, still-born from
your mother's womb--never to know the dead heart and the
passionless passion--the cold brain and the cold hopelessness of
hope--to be wild, mad, furious, and tormented--but to have belief,
to live in anguish, but to live--and not to die." . . .  He turned
and opened the door.  I would give all I have and all you think I
have, for just one hour of it.  You call me fortunate and happy.
YOU are the most fortunate and happy man I ever knew.  Good-bye,
Eugene."

"Good-bye, Frank.  Good-bye, my enemy."

"And good-bye, my friend," said Starwick.  He went out, and the
door closed behind him.



Eugene was waiting for them at four o'clock that afternoon when
they came out from the Louvre.  As he saw them coming down the
steps together he felt a sudden, blind rush of affection for all of
them, and saw that all of them were fine people.  Elinor came
towards him instantly, and spoke to him warmly, kindly, and
sincerely, without a trace of mannerism or affectation or concealed
spitefulness.  Starwick stood by quietly while he talked to Elinor:
Ann looked on sullenly and dumbly and thrust her hands in the
pockets of her fur jacket.  In the dull, grey light they looked
like handsome, first-rate, dignified people, who had nothing mean
or petty in them and with whom nothing but a spacious, high and
generous kind of life was possible.  By comparison, the Frenchmen
coming from the museum and streaming past them looked squalid and
provincial; and the Americans and other foreigners had a shabby,
dull, inferior look.  For a moment the bitter and passionate enigma
of life pierced him with desperation and wild hope.  What was wrong
with life?  What got into people such as these to taint their
essential quality, to twist and warp and mutilate their genuine and
higher purposes?  What were these perverse and evil demons of
cruelty and destructiveness, of anguish, error and confusion that
got into them, that seemed to goad them on, with a wicked and
ruinous obstinacy, deliberately to do the things they did not want
to do--the things that were so shamefully unworthy of their true
character and their real desire?

It was maddening because it was so ruinous, so wasteful and so
useless; and because it was inexplicable.  As these three
wonderful, rare and even beautiful people stood there saying to him
good-bye, every movement, look, and word they uttered was eloquent
with the quiet but passionate and impregnable conviction of the
human faith.  Their quiet, serious, and affectionate eyes, their
gestures, their plain, clear, and yet affectionate speech, even the
instinctive tenderness that they felt towards one another which
seemed to join them with a unity of living warmth and was evident
in the way they stood, glanced at each other, or in swift,
instinctive gestures--all this with a radiant, clear, and naked
loveliness seemed to speak out of them in words no one could
misunderstand, to say:

"Always there comes a moment such as this when, poised here upon
the ledge of furious strife, we stand and look; the marsh-veil
shifts from the enfevered swamp, the phantoms are dispersed like
painted smoke, and standing here together, friend, we all see clear
again, our souls are tranquil and our hearts are quiet--and we have
what we have, we know what we know, we are what we are."

It seemed to him that all these people now had come to such a
moment that this clear peace and knowledge rested in their hearts
and spoke out of their eyes; it seemed to him that all his life,
for years, since he had first gone to the dark North and known
cities--since he had first known Starwick--was now a phantasmal
nightmare--a kaleidoscope of blind, furious days, and drunken and
diverted nights, the measureless sea-depth of incalculable memory,
an atom lost and battered in a world of monstrous shapes, and
deafened in a word of senseless, stupefying war and movement and
blind fury.  And it seemed to him now that for the first time he--
and all of them--had come to a moment of clarity and repose, and
that for the first time their hearts saw and spoke the truth that
lies buried in all men, that all men know.

Elinor had taken him by the hand and was saying quietly:

"I am sorry that you will not go with us.  We have had a strange
and hard and desperate time together, but that is over now, Eugene:
we have all been full of pain and trouble, and all of us are sorry
for the things we've done.  I want you to know that we all love
you, and will always think of you with friendship, as our friend,
and will hope that you are happy, and will rejoice in your success
as if it were our own. . . .  And now, good-bye, my dear; try to
think of us always as we think of you--with love and kindness.  Do
not forget us; always remember us with a good memory, the way we
shall remember you. . . .  Perhaps"--for a moment her face was
touched with her gay, rueful smile--"perhaps when I'm an old Boston
lady with a cat, a parrot, and a canary, you will come to see me.
I will be a nice old lady, then--but also I will be a ruined old
lady--for they don't forget--not in a lifetime, not in Boston--and
this time, darling, I have gone too far.  So I shan't have many
callers, I shall leave them all alone--and if you're not too rich,
too famous, and too proper by that time, perhaps you'll come to see
me. . . .  Now, good-bye."

"Good-bye, Elinor," he said.  "And good luck to you."

"Look," said Starwick quietly, "we're going on--Elinor and I . . .
I thought . . . if you're not doing anything else . . . perhaps you
and Ann might have dinner together."

"I'm--I'm not," he stammered, looking at Ann, "but maybe you . . ."

"No," she muttered, staring sullenly and miserably at the ground.
"I'm not either."

"Then," Starwick said, "we'll see you later, Ann. . . .  And good-
bye, Eugene."

"Good-bye, Frank."

They shook hands together for the last time, and Starwick and
Elinor turned and walked away.  Thus, with such brief and casual
words, the bond of friendship--all of the faith, belief and
passionate avowal of their youth--was for ever broken.  They saw
each other once thereafter: by chance their lives would have
strange crossings; but they never spoke to each other again.



They waited in awkward silence for a moment until they saw Starwick
and Elinor get into a taxi and drive off.  Then they walked away
together across the great quadrangle of the Louvre.  A haze of
bluish mist, soft, smoky as a veil, hung in the air across the
vista'd sweep of the Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde.  The
little taxis drilled across the great space between the vast wings
of the Louvre and through the arches, filling the air with wasp-
like drone and menace, the shrill excitement of their tootling
horns.  And through that veil of bluish haze the vast mysterious
voice of Paris reached their ears: it was a sound immense and
murmurous as time, fused of the strident clamours of its four
million subjects, and yet, strangely muted, seductive, sensuous,
cruel and thrilling, filled with life and death.  The mysterious
fragrance of that life filled Eugene with the potent intoxication
of its magic.  He drew the pungent smoky air into his lungs, and it
seemed freighted with the subtle incense of the great city's hope
and secret promise, with grief and joy and terror, with a wild and
nameless hunger, with intolerable desire.  It numbed his entrails
and his loins with sensual prescience, and it made his heart beat
hard and fast; his breath came quickly: it was mixed into the
pulses of his blood and gave to grief and joy and sorrow the wild
mixed anguish beating in his heart, its single magic, its
impalpable desire.

They walked slowly across the great Louvre court and through the
gigantic masonries of the arch into the Rue de Rivoli.  The street
was swarming with its dense web of afternoon: the sensuous
complications of its life and traffic, the vast honeycomb of
business and desire; the street was jammed with its brilliant snarl
of motors, with shout and horn and cry, and with the throbbing
menace of machinery, and on the other side, beneath arched
colonnades, the crowd was swarming in unceasing flow.

They crossed the street and made their way through a thronging maze
into the Place de la Comédie Française, and found a table on the
terrace of La Régence.  The pleasant old café was gay with all its
chattering groups of afternoon, and yet, after the great boil and
fury of the streets, it was strangely calm, detached, and pleasant,
too.  The little separate verandahs of its terrace, the tables and
the old settees and walls, gave the café an incredibly familiar and
intimate quality, as if one were seated in a pleasant booth that
looked out on life, a box in an old theatre whose stage was the
whole world.

In one of the friendly booth-like verandahs of this pleasant old
café they found a table in a corner, seats against the wall, and
sat down and gave their order to the waiter.  Then, for some time,
as they drank their brandy, they looked out at the flashing
pulsations of the street, and did not speak.

Presently Ann, without looking at him, in her level, curt, and
almost grimly toneless speech, said:

"What did you and Frank do last night?"

Excitement caught him; his pulse beat faster; he glanced quickly at
her, and said:

"Oh, nothing.  We went out to eat, walked round a bit: that was
all."

"Out all night?" she said curtly.

"No.  I turned in early.  I was home by twelve o'clock."

"What happened to Frank?"

He looked at her sharply, startled.  "Happened?  What do you mean--
'what happened to him?'"

"What did he do when you went home?"

"How should I know?  He went back to the studio, I suppose.  Why do
you want to know?"

She made no answer for a moment, but sat looking sullenly into the
street.  When she spoke again, she did not look at him, her voice
was level, hard, and cold, quietly, grimly inflectionless.

"Do you think it's a very manly thing for a big hulking fellow like
you to jump on a boy Frank's size?"

Hot fury choked him, passed before his vision in a blinding flood.
He ground his teeth, rocked gently back and forth, and said in a
small, stopped voice:

"Oh, so he told you, did he?  He had to come whining to you about
it, did he?  The damned little . . . !"

"He told us nothing," she said curtly.  "Frank's not that kind; he
doesn't whine.  Only, we couldn't help noticing a lump on the back
of his head the size of a goose egg, and it didn't take me long to
figure out the rest."  She turned and looked at him with a
straight, unrelenting stare, and then said harshly:

"It was a wonderful thing to do, wasn't it?  I suppose you think
that settles everything.  You can be proud of yourself now, can't
you?"

The thin fine blade of cruel jealousy pierced him suddenly and was
twisted in his heart.  In a voice trembling with all the sweltering
anguish and defeat that packed his overladen heart, he sneered in
bitter parody:

"Come now, Frankie, dear!--Did bad naughty mans crack little
Frankie's precious head?--There, there, dearie!--Mamma kiss and
make it well . . . let nice big nursey-worsey kiss-um and make-um
well!--Next time Frankie-pankie goes for a walk, big Boston nursey
Ann will go wiv-ems, won't she, pet, to see that wuff, wuff man
leave poor little Frankie be."

She reddened angrily, and said:

"No one's trying to be Frankie's nurse.  He doesn't need it, and he
doesn't want it.  Only, I think it's a rotten shame that a big
hulking lout like you should have no more decency than to maul
around as fine a person as Frank is.  You ought to be ashamed of
yourself; it was a rotten thing to do!"

"Why, you bitch!" he said slowly, in a low, strangled tone.  "You
nice, neat, eighteen-carat jewel of a snobby Boston bitch!--Go back
to Boston where you came from!" he snarled.  "That's where you
belong; that's all you're worth. . . .  So I'm a big, hulking lout,
am I?  And that damned little affected æsthete's the finest person
that you ever knew!--Why, God-damn the lot of you for the cheap,
lying, fakey Boston bitches that you are!--with your 'he's a SWELL
person, he really is, you know,'--'Oh, GRAND!  Oh, SWELL!  Oh,
FINE!'" he jeered incoherently.  "Why, damn you, who do you think
you are, anyway?--that you think I'm going to stand for any more of
your snobby Boston backwash!--So I'm a big, hulking lout, am I?"--
the words rankled bitterly in his memory.  "And dear, darling
little Francis is too fine, too fine--oh, dearie me, now, yes--to
have his precious little head cracked up against a wall by the
likes of me. . . .  Why, damn you, Ann!" he said in a grating
voice, "what are you, anyway, but a damned dull lummox of a girl
from Boston?  Who the hell do you think you are, anyway, that I
should sit here and take your snobby backwash and play second
fiddle while two cheap Boston women praise Starwick up to the skies
all day long and tell me what a great genius he is and how much
finer than anyone else that ever lived?  By God, it is to laugh!"
he raved incoherently, blind with pain and passion, hindering his
own progress by his foolish words of wounded pride.  "--To see the
damned affected æsthete get it all!  You're not worth it!  You're
not worth it!" he cried bitterly.  "--You call me a big hulking
lout--and I feel more, know more, see more, have more life and
power and understanding in me in a minute than the whole crowd of
you will ever have--why, I'm so much better than the rest of you
that--that--that--there's no comparison!" he said lamely; and
concluded:  "Oh, you're not worth it!  You're not worth it, Ann!
Why should I get down on my knees to you this way, and worship you,
and beg you for just one word of love and mercy--when you call me a
big, hulking lout--and you are nothing but a rich, dull Boston
snob--and you're not worth it!" he cried desperately.  "Why has it
got to be like this, when you're not worth it, Ann?"

Her face flushed, and in a moment, laughing her short and angry
laugh, she said:

"God!  I can see this is going to be a pleasant evening, with you
raving like a crazy man and passing out your compliments already."
She looked at him with bitter eyes, and said sarcastically:
"You say such nice things to people, don't you?  Oh, charming!
Charming!  Simply delightful!"  She laughed her sudden angry laugh
again.  "God!  I'll never forget some of the nice things that you
said to me!"

And already tortured by remorse and shame, the huge, indefinable
swelter of anguish in his heart, he caught her hand, and pleaded
miserably, humbly.

"Oh, I know!  I know!--I'm sorry, Ann, and I'll do better--so help
me, God, I will!"

"Then why must you carry on like this?" she said.  "Why do you
curse and revile me and say such things about Francis, who is one
of the finest people that ever lived and who has never said a word
against you?"

"Oh, I know!" he groaned miserably, and smote his brow.  "--I don't
mean to--it just gets the best of me--Ann, Ann!  I love you so!"

"Yes," she muttered, "a funny kind of love, when you can say such
things to me!"

"And when I hear you praise up Starwick, it all comes back to me--
and Christ!  Christ!--why did it have to be this way?  Why did it
have to be Starwick that you--?"

She got up, her face flaring with anger and resentment.

"Come on!" she said curtly.  "If you can't behave yourself--if
you're starting in on that--I'm not going to stay--"

"Don't go!  Don't go!" he whispered, grabbing her hand and holding
it in a kind of dumb anguish.  "You said you'd stay!  It's just for
a few hours longer--oh, don't go and leave me, Ann!  I'm sorry!  I
promise I'll do better.  It's only when I think of it--oh, don't
go, Ann!  Please don't go!  I try not to talk about it, but it gets
the best of me!  I'll be all right now.  I'll not talk about it any
more--if you won't go.  It you'll just stay with me a little
longer--it will be all right.  I swear that everything will be all
right if you don't go."

She stood straight and rigid, her hands clenched convulsively at
her sides, her eyes shot with tears of anger and bewilderment.  She
made a sudden baffled movement of frustration and despair, and
cried bitterly:

"God!  What is it all about?  Why can't people be happy, anyway?"



They made a furious circuit of the night.  They went back to all
the old places--to the places they had been to with Elinor and
Starwick.  They went to Le Rat Mort, to Le Coq et l'Ane, to Le
Moulin Rouge, to Le Bal Tabarin, to La Bolée, to the Jockey Club,
to the Dome and the Rotonde,--even to the Bal Bullier.  They went
to the big night resorts and to the little ones, to great café's
and little bars, to dive and stew and joint and hole, to places
frequented exclusively by the rich and fashionable--the foreigners,
the wealthy French, the tourists, the expatriates--and to other
places where the rich and fashionable went to peer down into the
cauldrons of the lower depths at all those creatures who inhabited
the great swamp of the night--the thieves, the prostitutes, the
rogues, the pimps, the lesbians and the pederasts--the human
excrement, the damned and evil swarm of sourceless evil that
crawled outward from the rat-holes of the dark, lived for a period
in the night's huge blaze of livid radiance, and then were gone,
vanished, melted away as by an evil magic into that trackless
labyrinth from which they came.

Where had it gone?  That other world of just six weeks before, with
all its nocturnal and unholy magic, now seemed farther off and
stranger than a dream.  It was impossible to believe that these
shabby places of garish light, and tarnished gold, and tawdry
mirrors, were the same resorts that had glowed in all their hot and
close perfumes just six weeks before, had burned there in the train
of night like some evil, secret and unholy temple of desire.  It
was all worn off now: cheap as Coney Island, tawdry, tarnished as
the last year's trappings of a circus, bedraggled, shabby as a
harlot's painted face at noon.  All of its sinister and
intoxicating magic had turned dull and pitiably sordid: its people
were pathetic, and its music dead--serving only to recall the
splendid evil people and the haunting music of six weeks before.

And they saw now that this was just the way it was, the way it had
always been.  Places, people, music--they were just the same.  All
that had changed had been themselves.  And all through the night
they went from place to place, drinking, watching, dancing, doing
just the things they had always done, but it was no good--it had
all gone stale--it would never be any good again.  They sat there
sullenly, like people at a waning carnival, haunted by the ghosts
of memory and departure.  The memory of Elinor and Starwick--and
particularly of Starwick--haunted each place they went to like a
death's-head at a feast.  And again Eugene was filled with the old,
choking, baffled, and inchoate anger, the sense of irretrievable
and certain defeat: Starwick in absence was even more triumphantly
alive than if he had been there--he alone, by the strange, rare
quality in him, had been able to give magic to this sordid
carnival, and now that he was gone, the magic had gone, too.

The night passed in a kaleidoscope of baffled fury, of frenzied
search and frustrate desire.  All night they hustled back and forth
between the two blazing poles of Montmartre and Montparnasse: later
he was to remember everything like the exploded fragments of a
nightmare--a vision of dark, silent streets, old shuttered houses,
the straight slant and downward plunge out of Montmartre--the
sudden blaze of lights at crossings, boulevards, in cafés, night-
clubs, bars and avenues, the cool plunge and shock of air along
dark streets again, the taxi's shrill horn tootling at space, empty
reckless corners, the planted stems of light across the Seine, the
bridges and the sounding arches and dark streets, the steep slant
of the hill, the livid glare of night and all the night's scarred
faces over again.

They did not know why they stayed, why they hung on, why they
continued grimly at this barren hunt.  But something held them
there together: they could not say good-bye and part.  Ann hung on
sullenly, angrily, in a kind of stubborn silence, saying little,
ordering brandy at the bars and cafés, champagne in the night
resorts, drinking little herself, sitting by him in a sullen, angry
silence while he drank.

He was like a maddened animal: he raved, stormed, shouted, cursed,
implored, entreated, reviled her and made love to her at once--
there was no sense, or reason, or coherence in anything he said: it
came out of him in one tortured expletive, the urge of the baffled
touch, that conflict of blind love and hate and speechless agony,
in his tormented spirit:

"Oh, Ann! . . .  You lovely bitch! . . .  You big, dark, dumb,
lovely, sullen Boston bitch! . . .  Oh, you bitch!  You bitch!" he
groaned, and seizing her hand, he caught it to him and said
desperately, "Ann, Ann, I love you! . . .  You're the greatest . . .
grandest . . . best . . . most beautiful girl that ever lived . . .
Ann!  Look at me--you big, ox-dumb brute. . . .  Oh, you bitch. . . .
You Boston bitch. . . .  Will it never come out of you? . . .
Won't you ever let it come? . . .  Can't it be thawed, melted,
shaken loose? . . .  Oh, you dumb, dark, sullen, lovely bitch . . .
is there nothing there? . . . is this all you are? . . .  Oh, Ann,
you sweet, dumb wretch if you only knew how much I love you--"

"God!" she cried, with her quick, short and angry laugh that gave
her face its sudden, radiant tenderness, its indescribable
loveliness and purity, "--God!  But you're the gallant lover,
aren't you?  First you love me, then you hate me, then I'm a dumb,
sullen Boston bitch, and then a wretch and then the grandest and
most beautiful girl that ever lived!  God, you're wonderful, you
are!"  She laughed bitterly.  "You say such charming things."

"Oh, you bitch!" he groaned miserably.  "You big, sweet, dumb, and
lovely bitch--Ann, Ann, for God's sake, speak to me, talk to me!"
He seized her hand and shook it frantically.  "Say just one word to
show me you're alive--that you've got one single atom of life and
love and beauty in you.  Ann, Ann,--look at me!  In God's name,
tell me, what are you?  Is there nothing there?  Have you nothing
in you?  For Christ's sake, try to say a single, living word--for
Christ's sake, try to show me that you're worth it, that it's not
all death and codfish, Boston, Back Bay, and cold fishes' blood"--
he raved on incoherently.

"Oh!  Boston and cold fishes' blood, my eye!" she muttered, with an
angry flush in her face.

"And you?--What are you?" he jeered.  "For God's sake, what kind of
woman are you?  I never heard you speak a word that a child of ten
could not have spoken.  I never heard you say a thing that ought to
be remembered.  The only things I know about you are that you are a
Boston spinstress--thirty--no longer very young--a few grey hairs
already on your head--comfortably secure on dead investments--over
here on a spree--away from father and the family and The Boston
Evening Transcript--but never losing them: always knowing that you
will return to them--in God's name, woman, is that all you are?"

She laughed her sudden, short and angry laugh, and yet there was no
rancour in it.

"That's what Frank would call a brief but masterly description,
isn't it?  I suppose I should be grateful."  She looked at him with
quiet eyes, and said simply:  "What of it?  Even if what you say is
true, what of it?  As you say, I'm just a dull, ordinary kind of
person, and until you and Francis came along no one thought me
anything else or thought any the less of me for being like that.
Listen"--her voice was hard and straight and sullen--"what do you
expect people to be, anyway?  Do you think it's fair and decent to
talk about how beautiful I am when I'm not beautiful, and then to
turn and curse me because I'm just an ordinary girl?"  She was
silent a moment, with an angry flush upon her face, and then she
said:  "As for my intellect, I went to Bryn Mawr, and I got through
without flunking, with a C average.  That's about the kind of brain
I've got."  She turned and looked at him with straight, angry eyes,
now shut a little with tears.

"What of it?" she said.  "You say that I am dull and dumb and
ordinary--well, I never pretended to be anything else.  You know,
we all can't be great geniuses, like you and Francis," she said,
and suddenly her eyes were wet, and tears began to trickle down
across her flushed face.  "I'm just what I am, I've never pretended
to be any different--if you think I'm dull and stupid and ordinary,
you have no right to insult me like this.--Come on, I'm going
home."--She started to get up, he seized her, pulled her to him.

"Oh, you bitch! . . .  You big, dumb, lovely bitch! . . .  Oh, Ann,
Ann, you sweet devil, how I love you--I can never let you go--oh,
Goddamn you, Ann--"

It ended at last, at daybreak in a bistro near Les Halles, where
they had often gone at dawn with Elinor and Starwick for rolls and
chocolate or coffee.  Outside they could hear the nightly roar and
rumble of the market, the cries of the vendors, and smell all the
sweet smells of earth and morning, of first light, health, and joy,
and day beginning.

When they left the bistro full light had come, and they at length
had fallen silent.  They realized that it was useless, hopeless,
and impossible, that nothing could be said.

He left her at the gate outside the studio.  She pressed the bell,
the gate swung open, and for a moment before she left him she stood
looking at him with a flushed, angry face, wet angry eyes--a look
of dumb, sullen misery that tore at his heart, and for which he had
no word.

"Good-bye," she said, "if I don't see you again--" She paused and
clenched her fists together at her side, closed her eyes, tears
spurted out, and in a choking voice she cried out:

"Oh, this will be a fine thing for me all right!  This trip has
just been wonderful.  God!  I'm sorry that I ever saw any of you--"

"Ann!  Ann!"

"If you need money--if you're broke--"

"Ann!"

"God!" she cried again.  "Why did I ever come?"

She was weeping bitterly, and with a blind, infuriated movement she
rushed through the gate and slammed it behind her.  He never saw
her again.




BOOK VI



ANTÆUS: EARTH AGAIN



XC


When he awoke in Chartres he was filled with a numb excitement.  It
was a grey wintry day with snow in the air, and he expected
something to happen.  He had this feeling often in the country, in
France: it was a strange, mixed feeling of desolation and
homelessness, of wondering with a ghostly emptiness why he was
there--and of joy, and hope, and expectancy, without knowing what
it was he was going to find.

In the afternoon he went down to the station and took a train that
was going to Orléans.  He did not know where Orléans was.  The
train was a mixed train, made up of goods cars and passenger
compartments.  He bought a third-class ticket and got into one of
the compartments.  Then the shrill little whistle blew, and the
train rattled out of Chartres into the countryside, in the abrupt
and casual way a little French train has, and which was disquieting
to him.

There was a light mask of snow on the fields and the air was smoky:
the whole earth seemed to smoke and steam, and from the windows of
the train one could see the wet earth and the striped, cultivated
pattern of the fields, and, now and then, some farm buildings.  It
did not look like America: the land looked fat and well kept, and
even the smoky wintry woods had this well-kept appearance.  Far off
sometimes one could see tall lines of poplars and knew that there
was water there.

In the compartment he found three people--an old peasant and his
wife and daughter.  The old peasant had sprouting moustaches, a
seamed and weather-beaten face, and small rheumy-looking eyes.  His
hands had a rock-like heaviness and solidity, and he kept them
clasped upon his knees.  His wife's face was smooth and brown,
there were fine webs of wrinkles around her eyes, and her face was
like an old brown bowl.  The daughter had a dark sullen face and
sat away from them next the window as if she was ashamed of them.
From time to time when they spoke to her she would answer them in
an infuriated kind of voice without looking at them.

The peasant began to speak amiably to him when he entered the
compartment.  He smiled and grinned back at the man, although he
did not understand a word he was saying, and the peasant kept on
talking then, thinking he understood.

The peasant took from his coat a package of the cheap, powerful
tobacco--the 'bleu--which the French government provides for a few
cents for the poor, and prepared to stuff his pipe.  The young man
pulled a package of American cigarettes from his pocket and offered
them to the peasant.

"Will you have one?"

"My faith, yes!" said the peasant.

He took a cigarette clumsily from the package and held it between
his great, stiff fingers, then he held it to the flame the young
man offered, puffing at it in an unaccustomed way.  Then he fell to
examining it curiously, revolving it in his hands to read the
label.  He turned to his wife, who had followed every movement of
this simple transaction with the glittering intent eyes of an
animal, and began a rapid and excited discussion with her.

"It's American--this."

"Is it good?"

"My faith, yes--it's of good quality."

"Here, let me see!  What does it call itself?"

They stared dumbly at the label.

"What do you call this?" said the peasant to the young man.

"Licky Streek," said the youth, dutifully phonetical.

"L-l-leek-ee--?" they stared doubtfully.  "What does that wish to
say, in French?"

"Je ne sais pas," he answered.

"Where are you going?" the peasant said, staring at the youth with
rheumy little eyes of fascinated curiosity.

"Orléans."

"How?" the peasant asked, with a puzzled look on his face.

"Orléans."

"I do not understand," the peasant said.

"Orléans!  Orléans!" the girl shouted in a furious tone.  "The
gentleman says he is going to Orléans."

"Ah!" the peasant cried, with an air of sudden illumination.
"ORLÉANS!"

It seemed to the youth that he had said the word just the same way
the peasant said it, but he repeated it.

"Yes, Orléans."

"He is going to Orléans," the peasant said, turning to his wife.

"Ah-h!" she cried knowingly, with a great air of illumination, then
both fell silent, and began to stare at the youth with curious,
puzzled eyes again.

"What region are you from?" the peasant asked presently, still
intent and puzzled, staring at him with his small eyes.

"How's that?  I don't understand."

"I say--what region are you from?"

"The gentleman is not French!" the girl shouted furiously, as if
exasperated by their stupidity.  "He is a foreigner.  Can't you see
that?"

"Ah-h!" the peasant cried, after a moment, with an air of astounded
enlightenment.  Then, turning to his wife, he said briefly, "He is
not French.  He is a stranger."

"Ah-h!"

And then they both turned their small, round eyes on him and
regarded him with a fixed, animal-like curiosity.

"From what country are you?" the peasant asked presently.  "What
are you?"

"I am an American."

"Ah-h!  An American. . . .  He is an American," he said, turning to
his wife.

"Ah-h!"

The girl made an impatient movement and continued to stare
furiously and sullenly out of the window.

Then the peasant, with the intent, puzzled curiosity of an animal
began to examine his companion carefully from head to foot.  He
looked at his shoes, his clothes, his overcoat, and finally lifted
his eyes in an intent and curious stare to the young man's valise
on the rack above his head.  He nudged his wife and pointed to the
valise.

"That's good stuff, eh?" he said in a low voice.  "It's real
leather."

"Yes, it's good, that."

And both of them looked at the valise for some time and then turned
their curious gaze upon the youth again.  He offered the peasant
another cigarette, and the old man took one, thanking him.

"It's very fine, this," he said, indicating the cigarette.  "That
costs dear, eh?"

"Ah-h! . . .  That's very dear," and he began to look at the
cigarette with increased respect.

"Why are you going to Orléans?" he asked presently.  "Do you know
someone there?"

"No, I am just going there to see the town."

"How?" the peasant blinked at him stupidly, uncomprehendingly.
"You have business there?"

"No.  I am going just to visit--to see the place."

"How?" the peasant said stupidly in a moment, looking at him.  "I
do not understand."

"The gentleman says he is going to see the town," the girl broke in
furiously.  "Can't you understand anything?"

"I do not understand what he is saying," the old man said to her.
"He does not speak French."

"He speaks very well," the girl said angrily.  "I understand him
very well.  It is you who are stupid--that's all."

The peasant was silent for some time now, puffing at his cigarette,
and looking at the young man with friendly, puzzled eyes.

"America is very large--eh?" he said at length, making a wide
gesture with his hands.

"Yes, it is very large.  Much larger than France."

"How?" the peasant said again with a puzzled, patient look.  "I do
not understand."

"He says America is much larger than France," the girl cried in an
exasperated tone.  "I understand all he says."

Then, for several minutes, there was an awkward silence: nothing
was said.  The peasant smoked his cigarette, seemed on the point of
speaking several times, looked puzzled and said nothing.  Outside,
rain had begun to fall in long slanting lines across the fields,
and beyond, in the grey blown sky, there was a milky radiance where
the sun should be, as if it were trying to break through.  When the
peasant saw this, he brightened, and leaning forward to the young
man in a friendly manner, he tapped him on the knee with one of his
great, stiff fingers, and then pointing towards the sun, he said
very slowly and distinctly, as one might instruct a child:

"Le so-leil."

And the young man obediently repeated the word as the peasant had
said it:

"Le so-leil."

The old man and his wife beamed delightedly and nodded their
approval, saying, "Yes.  Yes.  Good.  Very good."  Turning to his
wife for confirmation, the old man said:  "He said it very well,
didn't he?"

"But, yes!  It was perfect!"

Then, pointing to the rain, and making a down-slanting movement
with his great hands, he said again, very slowly and patiently:

"La pluie."

"La pluie," the young man repeated dutifully, and the peasant
nodded vigorously, saying:

"Good, good.  You are speaking very well.  In a little time you
will speak good French."  Then, pointing to the fields outside the
train, he said gently:

"La terre."

"La terre," the young man answered.

"I tell you," the girl cried angrily from her seat by the window,
"he knows all these words.  He speaks French very well.  You are
too stupid to understand him--that's all."

The old man made no reply to her, but sat looking at the young man
with a kind, approving face.  Then, more rapidly than before, and
in succession, he pointed to the sun, the rain, the earth, saying:

"Le soleil . . . la pluie . . . la terre."

The young man repeated the words after him, and the peasant nodded
vigorously with satisfaction.  Then, for a long time, no one spoke,
there was no sound except for the uneven rackety-clack of the
little train, and the girl continued to look sullenly out of the
window.  Outside, the rain fell across the fertile fields in long
slanting lines.

Late in the afternoon the train stopped at a little station, and
everyone rose to get out.  This was as far as the train went: to
reach Orléans it was necessary to change to another train.

The peasant, his wife and his daughter collected their bundles and
got out of the train.  On another track another little train was
waiting, and the peasant pointed to this with his great, stiff
finger, and said to the young man:

"Orléans.  That's your train there."

The youth thanked him, and gave the old man the remainder of the
packet of cigarettes.  The peasant thanked him effusively and
before they parted he again pointed rapidly towards the sun, the
rain, and the earth, saying with a kind and friendly smile:

"Le soleil . . . la pluie . . . la terre."

And the young man nodded to show that he understood, repeated what
the old man had said.  And the peasant shook his head with vigorous
approval, saying:

"Yes, yes.  It's very good.  You will learn fast."

At these words, the girl, who with the same sullen, aloof, and
shamed look had walked on ahead of her parents, now turned and
cried out in a furious and exasperated tone:

"I tell you, the gentleman knows all that! . . .  Will you leave
him alone now? . . .  You are only making a fool of yourself!"

But the old man and old woman paid no attention to her, but stood
looking at the young man, with a friendly smile, and shook hands
warmly and cordially with him as he said good-bye.

Then he walked on across the tracks and got up into a compartment
in the other train.  When he looked out of the window again, the
peasant and his wife were standing on the platform looking towards
him with kind and eager looks on their old faces.  When the peasant
caught his eye, he pointed his great finger at the sun again, and
called out:

"Le so-leil."

"Le so-leil," the young man answered.

"Yes!  Yes!" the old man shouted, with a laugh.  "It's very good."

Then the daughter looked toward the young man sullenly, gave a
short and impatient laugh of exasperation, and turned angrily away.
The train began to move then, but the old man and woman stood
looking after him as long as they could.  He waved to them, and the
old man waved his great hand vigorously and, laughing, pointed
towards the sun.  And the young man nodded his head and shouted, to
show that he had understood.  Meanwhile, the girl had turned her
back angrily and was walking away around the station.

Then they were lost from sight, the train swiftly left the little
town behind, and now there was nothing but the fields, the earth,
the smoky and mysterious distances.  The rain fell steadily.



XCI


Full dark had come--the wintry darkness of a grey wet day in early
March--before he got to Orléans.  The train was of the variety
known in France as omnibus, one of those dingy little locals that
are made up of third-class compartments and that stop at every
country station.  As the train neared Orléans there was a
noticeable increase in the travelling public: at every station
there was a noisy traffic of arriving and departing passengers.
For the most part the people had the look of the country: they came
stamping in and out with muddy shoes, with a great banging of
compartment doors, with a great tumult of voices, with the vigorous
excitement of robust and talkative people.

They were a good-natured crowd, and seemed to know one another, if
not actually by name, with the even completer familiarity of race
and kind and region.  At the sudden pauses at dim-lit country
stations one could hear them shouting greetings and farewells, and
see them streaming away along a muddy road towards the dim light
and shine of a little town with all the utter, common, and dreary
familiarity of March.  And the train, in those abrupt and sudden
halts and pauses, seemed to be almost as casual a means of
transportation as a street-car: it would rattle up to a station
halt, the people would stamp in and out with a banging of doors and
with many shouts, cries, greetings, and farewells, then the shrill
little whistle would make its fifing note and the train would
rattle out into the wet and wintry countryside again.

In the compartments the lights were very low and dim, and cast
flickering shadows on the faces of the passengers.  Somewhere in
the train, in another compartment, there was a noisy and jolly
crowd of soldiers and robust country people.  One man in particular
dominated the whole train with his jolly energy, his vulgar and
high-spirited good nature.  The man's rich voice was charged
indescribably with the high, sanguinary vitality of the Frenchman.
The voice, to a foreigner, was at once inimitably strange in
accent, quality and intonation, and yet familiar as all life, all
living.  It was packed with the juice of life, and had the full
rich qualities of a good wine.

For the youth, that voice heard there in the flickering shadows of
the little train, heard with all its robust and full-blooded
penetration at the casual and abrupt halts and pauses at little
stations, was to be a strangely haunting one.  A thousand times
thereafter the tone of that rich voice would return to him and
reverberate in his memory with the haunting, strange and wonderful
recurrence with which the "little" things of life--a face seen one
time at a window, a voice that passed in darkness and was gone, the
twisting of a leaf upon a bough--come back to us out of all the
violence and savage chaos of the days--the "little" things that
persist so strangely, vividly, and inexplicably when the more
sensational and "important" events of life have been forgotten or
obscured.

So, now, the jolly voice of this unseen Frenchman, as it shouted
out good-natured but derisive comments on the customs, the
appearance, and the inhabitants of every little town at which they
stopped, as it was answered in like fashion by the people on the
station platforms, brought back to him instantly the memory of a
little country town in the South at which, on his way to and from
college, he had stopped a dozen times at just this hour.  The name
of the town was Creasman, there was a small sectarian school there
which was known as Creasman College, and it had become traditional
with the university students, who crowded the train on their
journeys home or back to college, to thrust their heads out of the
windows and howl with the derisive arrogance of youth:  "Whoopee,
girls!  Creasman College!"

And this sally was usually answered by similar jibes and jeers from
the group of students, townsfolk and country people who crowded the
platform of the station "to see the train come through."

In this Frenchman's taunts and jeers, and in the way the people at
the stations answered him, as well as in all the traffic of noisy,
muddy, talking and gesticulating people who streamed in and out of
the train at every halt, there was, in spite of all the local
differences, the same essential quality that had characterized the
halts at the little town set there upon the vast, raw Piedmont of
the South.

Moreover, there was in the tone and texture of the Frenchman's
voice--at once so actual, living, and familiar in its high,
sanguinary energy, and so foreign, alien, and troubling to a
stranger's ear--the whole warmth and vitality of centuries of
living, a quality which brought the ancient past of Europe, and of
France, to life, as the pages of history could never do.

In the same way the boy had long ago discovered that a single tone
or shading in his mother's or his father's voice could touch the
lost past of America--the past of the Civil War, the strange
mysteries of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, which is, for
most Americans, more far and strange in time than the Crusades--and
bring it instantly into life.

Thus he had never gained a living image of the Civil War until he
heard his mother speak of it one day.  Until that time all his
efforts to recapture that lost time out of the pages of books had
been futile; the men, the battles, the generals, and the lives of
all the people existed in a world of legendary unreality, and
seemed, in fact, as different from the world he knew as if they had
existed on a separate planet.  And then one day he heard his
mother--who had been only five years old when the war ended--
describe the return of the troops along a country road near home.
She told how the dust rose from the ragged feet of weary marching
men and of how she sat upon her father's shoulder as the troops
went by, and of all her friends and kinsmen who were standing near
her, and of the return of a cousin--a boy of sixteen years--
starved, ragged, wearing a stove-pipe hat, and without shoes, of
how the women wept and of the boy's words of jesting and good-
natured greeting, as he came to meet them.

Now, with the full rich accents of this unseen Frenchman, at once
so strange and so familiar, all of the ancient life of France--her
wars and histories, the great chronicles of her battles, and the
brilliant and indestructible fabric of her life and energy through
so many hundred years of victory and defeat, triumph and
catastrophe--began to pulse with such a living and familiar warmth
that it seemed to him as if the whole thing from the beginning had
been compacted and resumed into the rich and sanguinary energies of
this one Frenchman's voice.

The man's speech, a kind of furious and high-spirited repartee,
carried on against all comers with an instant's readiness, an
animal vigour, that was almost like a national intoxication, was
penetrated constantly by the exclamation "Parbleu!"

And more than anything else, it seemed to the youth, it was the
tone and quality of that ancient exclamation, delivered with such a
buoyant and animal vitality, that united the Frenchman to the
distant past of his nation's history, to millions of buried and
forgotten lives, and through him, made that distant past blaze
instantly with all the warmth and radiance of life again.

The Frenchman's speech was lewd and ribald with the open and robust
vulgarity of healthy country people; his broad jests were published
without affectation in a tone loud enough for all the world to
hear, and it was evident from the roars of hearty, sensual laughter
with which his remarks were received by the soldiers, provincials,
and strapping peasant women who were with him, that his audience
was not a squeamish one.

The chief target for this robust fellow's humour, to which he
loudly returned with unwearied pertinacity, was that unfortunate
man, the station-master, whose calling, for some reason, is
provocative of unlimited mirth in France.  Now, at every station,
the Frenchman would publish to the world, amid roars of laughter,
his narration of the station-master's unhappy lot.  In particular,
he sang snatches of a ribald song entitled "Il est cocu le chef de
gare"--which described movingly the trials of a station-master's
life, the cuckoldries to which the nature of the work exposes him,
the conduct of his wife when he is away from home dispatching
trains.  And the Frenchman would garnish this ditty with certain
pointed speculations of his own, directed at the station-master of
each town, concerning the probable whereabouts, at that moment, of
the station-master's wife.

Sometimes the answer to this ribald banter would be curses, oaths
and maddened imprecations from the station-master; sometimes the
answer would be a good-natured one, as rough and ready in its
coarse spontaneity as the Frenchman's own, but whatever the result,
the Frenchman was always ready with a reply.

"Are you speaking from your own experience?" one of the station-
masters yelled ironically.  "Is that the way your old woman behaves
when you leave home?"

"Parbleu!  Oui!" the Frenchman roared back cheerfully.  "Why not?
The meat is all the sweeter for a little extra seasoning."

This sally was rewarded by a scream of delighted laughter from the
peasant women, and the jester, thus encouraged, continued:

"Parbleu!  Do you think I'd play the miser with the old girl, when
I've had so much myself?  But, no, my friend!  What the devil!  My
old girl's no rare canary who'll fade away the first time that you
look at her.  The devil, no!  There's good stuff there, sound and
solid as an ox, old boy, and lots more where the last batch came
from!"

At this delicate sally there were roars and screams of delighted
laughter from the peasant women in the train, and when the
commotion had somewhat subsided, one could hear the voice of the
station-master from the platform, yelling back ironically:

"Good!  Since there's enough for everyone, I'll come round to get
my share!"

"Parbleu!  Why not?" the high, sanguinary voice responded
instantly.  "Turn about's fair play, as the saying goes--I've
played the cock to many a station-master's hen--"

Roars of laughter.

"And I'd be the last fellow in the world to begrudge him now--" he
would conclude triumphantly, and the train would move off to the
accompaniment of roars of laughter, ribaldry, and lusty and
derisive banter, above which the high, rich energy of the
Frenchman's voice, crying out,--"Parbleu!  Oui!  Why not?" was
always dominant.

He left the train at one of the little stations near Orléans,
departing amid a rough but good-natured chorus of jeers, jibes, and
derisive yells which followed him as he walked away along the
platform, and to all of which he instantly responded with his
ribald vitality of coarse humour, that in its lusty ebullience was
somehow like the intoxication of a sound, rich wine.

The boy saw him for an instant as he passed by the window of the
compartment.  He was a strong, stocky figure of a man, wearing
leggings, with blue eyes, a brown moustache, and a solid face full
of dark, rich colour.  But even after he had disappeared from
sight, the boy could hear him shouting to the other people, the
sanguinary vitality of his instant, ribald--"Parbleu!  Why not?"--a
tone, a voice, a word that had evoked the past of France, in all
the living textures of her earth and blood, and that, in future
years, would bring this scene to life again--all of the faces,
voices, lives of these people--as no other single thing could do.



At one of the little stations near Orléans a girl opened the door
and climbed up into the compartment, which was already crowded.
The country people, however, made room for her, crowding a little
closer together on the wooden bench, and telling her to wedge
herself in, with the rough but good-natured familiarity that
characterized their conduct towards one another.

The girl sat down opposite the boy, beside the window, and put the
market basket which she was carrying on her knees.  She was cleanly
but plainly dressed, a very lovely and seductive girl with a
slender figure which seemed, however, already to have attained a
languorous and sensual maturity.  She was wearing a broad-brimmed
hat of blue that shaded her face, from which her eyes looked out
with a luminous, troubling, and enigmatic clarity.  She said
nothing, but sat silently listening to the rude jovialities of the
peasant people around her and to the ribald shouts and yells and
roars of laughter that came from the nearby compartment.

All the time, the girl gazed directly at the young man, her lovely
face traced faintly with a tender, enigmatic smile.  It seemed
certain to him that if he spoke to her she would not rebuff him.
The sensation of an impossible good fortune, of some vague and
unutterable happiness that was impending for him in this strange
and unknown town, returned.  Desire, slow, sultry, began to beat,
throbbing in his pulses and through the conduits of his blood.  He
felt certain that the girl would not rebuff him if he spoke to her.
And yet he did not speak.

And presently the little train came puffing in to Orléans, all of
the people got out and streamed away towards the station along the
platform.  He took the girl's basket and helped her down out of the
train, and with the old bewildered indecision in his heart stood
there looking after her as she walked away from him with a
graceful, slow, and sensual stride in which every movement that she
made seemed to imply reluctance to depart, an invitation to follow.
And he looked after her numbly, with hot desire pounding slow and
thick in pulse and blood.  And he told himself, as he had told
himself so many times before, that he would certainly find her
again, knowing in his heart he never would.

Already the girl had been lost among the crowds of people streaming
through the station, engulfed again in the everlasting web and
weaving of this great earth, to leave him with a memory of another
of those brief and final meetings, so poignant with their wordless
ache of loss and of regret, in which, perhaps more than in the
grander, longer meetings of our life, man's bitter destiny of days,
his fatal brevity, are apparent.

And again the boy found himself walking along the platform towards
the station after the departing people, whom he had met so briefly
and now lost for ever.  Again he had sought the mysterious promises
of a new land, new earth, and a shining city.  Again he had come to
a strange place, not knowing why he had come.

Why here?



XCII


The Grand Hôtel du Monde et d'Orléans, which was situated opposite
the railway station on one of the corners of the station square,
was, despite its sounding title, a modest establishment of forty or
fifty rooms, constructed in that style at once grandiose and solid
which is peculiar to French hotel architecture.  When he entered he
found two women seated in the bureau carrying on an animated
conversation in fluent English, of which the startling substance
ran somewhat as follows:

"But yes, madame.  I assure you--you need have no--kalms?--kalms?"--
the younger and larger of the two women said in a doubtful tone,
lifting puzzled eyebrows at her older companion--"KALMS, Comtesse,
je ne comprends pas KALMS.  Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire?"

"Mais non, cherie," the other answered patiently.  "Pas KALMS--
QUALMS--QUALMS."  She pronounced the word slowly and carefully
several times, until the other woman succeeded in saying it after
her, at which the little woman nodded her meagre little head
emphatically with a movement of bird-like satisfaction, and said:

"Oui!  Oui!  Bon!  C'est ça!  QUALMS?

"Mais ça veut dire?" the other said inquiringly in a puzzled tone.

"Ça veut dire, chérie--you need have no qualms, madame--" the
little wren-like woman considered carefully before she spoke--"Vous
n'avez pas besoin de perturbation--n'est-ce pas?" she cried, with
an eager look of triumph.

"Ah-h!" the other cried, with an air of great enlightenment.  "Oui!
Je comprends. . . .  I assure you, madame, that you need have no
qualms about the plumbing arrangements."

"Bon!  Bon!" the little woman nodded her head approvingly.
"PLUMBING, chérie.  PLUMBING," she added gently as an afterthought.

"You will find everyt'ing t'oroughly modairne--"

"THOROUGHLY--" the other said, slowly and carefully.  "THOROUGHLY--
you pronounce it this way, my dear--TH--TH--"  She leaned forward,
inserting her tongue illustratively between her false teeth.

"Thoroughly," the other said, with evident difficulty, and
repeated--"thoroughly modairne--"

"MODERN, dear!  MODERN!" the little wren-like woman said slowly and
carefully again, but then, nodding her head with a movement of
swift decision, she went on sharply:  "Mais non!  Ça va!  Ça va
bien!"  She nodded her head vigorously.  "Laissez comme ça!  Les
Américains aiment mieux comme ça--un peu d'accent, n'est-ce pas?"
she said craftily.  "Pour les Américains."

"Ah, oui!" the other woman responded at once, nodding seriously.
"Vous avez raison.  Ce n'est pas bon de parler trop correctement.
Un peu d'accent est mieux.  Ils aiment ça--les Américains."

They nodded wisely at each other, their faces comically eloquent
with that strange union of avarice, hard worldliness, and
provincial naïveté which qualifies a Frenchman's picture of the
earth.  Then, looking up at the young man, who was standing
awkwardly before the bureau, the younger of the two women said
coldly:

"Monsieur?--"

The young woman was perhaps twenty-eight years old, but her cold,
dark face, which was lean and sallow and cleft powerfully by a
large strong nose, had the maturity of cold mistrustfulness and
unyielding avarice which was incalculable.  It was as if from birth
her spirit had been steeped in the hard and bitter dyes of man's
iniquity, as if she had sucked the acid nutriment of mistrust and
worldly wisdom out of her mother's breast--as if her hard heart and
her cold, dark eyes had never known youth, remembered innocence, or
been blinded by romantic fantasies--as if, in short, she had sprung
full-armoured from her cradle, versed in all grim arts of seeking
for one's self, clutching her first sous in a sweating palm,
learning to add by numbers before she could prattle a child's
prayer.

Seen so, the woman's face had a cold and stern authority of
mistrust that was impregnable.  The face, indeed, might have been
the very image of a hotel-keeper's soul, impeccable in its
perfection of bought courtesy, but hard, cold, lifeless, cruel as
hell, obdurate as a block of granite, to any warming ray of mercy,
pardon, or concession where another's loss and its own gain might
be concerned.

And yet, for all its cold and worldly inhumanity, the face was a
passionate one as well.  Her strong, black brows grew straight and
thick in an unbroken line above her eyes, her upper lip was dark
with a sparse but unmistakable moustache of a few black hairs, her
face, at once cold and hard in its mistrust, and smouldering with a
dark and sinister desire, was stamped with that strange fellowship
of avarice and passion he had seen in the faces of women such as
this all over France.

He had seen these women everywhere--behind the cashier's desk in
restaurants, shops, and stores, behind the desks in cafés,
theatres, and brothels, or in the bureau of a hotel such as this.
Sometimes they were alone, sometimes they were seated together
behind one of those enormous tall twin desks, enthroned there like
the very magistrates of gain, totting up the interminable figures
in their ledgers with the slow care and minute painfulness of
greed.  They sat there, singly or two abreast, behind their tall
desks near the door, casting their hard eyes in a glance of cold
mistrust upon the customers and at each other, conspiring
broodingly together as they checked and compared each other's
ledgers--seeming to be set there, in fact, not only as a watch upon
the cheats and treasons of the world, but as a watch upon their own
as well.

And yet, haired darkly on their upper lips, cold, hard, mistrustful
in their grasping avarice as they might be, he had always felt in
them the complement of a sinister passion.  He felt that when all
the day's countings were over, the last entry made in the enormous
ledger, the last figure added up, and the last drops of sweat wrung
from the leaden visage of the final sous--then, THEN, he felt, they
would pull down the shutters, bare their teeth in smiles of savage
joy, and go to their appointed meeting with their lover, Jack the
Ripper.  Upon faces such as these, even during their daylight
impassivity of cold mistrust, the ardour of their nocturnal
secrecies was almost obscenely articulate; it required little
effort of the imagination to see these women quilted in a vile,
close darkness, a union of evil chemistries, locked in the grip of
a criminal love, with teeth bared in the bite and shine of a
profane and lawless ecstasy, and making savage moan.

Such, in fact, was the face of the young woman in the bureau of the
hotel, who now looked up at him with the cold inquiry of mistrust
and said:

"Monsieur?--"

"I--I'd like to get a room," he stammered awkwardly, faltering
before her hard, impassive stare, and speaking to her in her own
language.

"Comment?" she said sharply, a little startled at being addressed
so immediately in the language wherein she had just been holding--
studious practice.  "Vous désirez?--"

"Une chambre," he mumbled--"pas trop chère."

"Ah-h--a room!  He says he wants a room, my dear," the little woman
now put in, quickly and eagerly.  She hopped up briskly and came
towards him with an eager gleam in her sharp old eyes, an
anticipating hope in her meagre face.

"You are a stranger?" she inquired, peering sharply at him.  "An
American?"--with a look of eager hope.

"Yes," he said.

"Ah-h!" her breath went in with a little intake of greedy
satisfaction.  "I thought so! . . .  Yvonne!  Yvonne!" she cried
sharply, turning to the other woman in a state of great excitement.
"He's an American--he wants a room--he must have something good--an
American," she babbled, "the best you've got--"

"But yes!" cried Yvonne rising.  "To be sure.  At vunce!" she
cried, and struck a bell, calling:  "Jean!  Jean!"

"But not--not," the youth stuttered, "not the best--it's just for
me--I'm all alone," he appealed to the smaller woman--"something
not very expensive," he said desperately.

"Ah--hah--hah!" she said, emitting a little chuckling laugh of
gloating satisfaction and continuing to peer craftily up at him.
"An American!  And young, too.--How old are you, my boy?"

"T-t-twenty-four," he stuttered, staring at her helplessly.

"Ah--hah--hah!"  Again the little gloating laugh.  "I thought so--
and why are you here? . . .  What are you doing here in Orléans,
eh?" she said imperatively, yet coaxingly.  "What brings you here,
my boy?"

"Why--why--" he stammered confusedly, and then finding no adequate
reason (since there was none) for being there, he blurted out--
"I'm--a writer--a--a--journalist," he stammered, feeling this made
his lie the less.

"Ah--hah--hah," she chuckled softly again with a kind of abstracted
gluttony of satisfaction--"a journalist, eh, my boy?"  In her
ravenous eagerness she had begun to pat and stroke his arm with a
claw-like hand, as a cook might stroke a fat turkey before killing
it.  "A journalist, eh? . . .  Yvonne!  Yvonne!" suddenly she
turned to the other woman again, speaking rapidly in a burst of
high excitement.  "The young man is a journalist . . . an American
journalist . . . he writes for The New York Times, Yvonne . . . the
greatest newspaper in America."

"Well, not exactly that," he blundered, red in the face from
confusion and embarrassment.  "I never said--"

"Ah--hah--hah," the little old woman said again with her little
gloating laugh, peering up at him with a crafty gleam in her sharp
old eyes, and stroking his arm in her unconscious eagerness.
". . . And you've come to write about us, eh? . . .  Joan of Arc,
eh?" she said seducingly, with a little crafty laugh of triumph.
"--The Cathedral . . . the Maid of Orléans . . . ah, my boy,
you have come to the right place. . . .  I will show you
everything. . . .  I will take care of you. . . .  You are in good
hands now. . . .  Ah-h, we love the Americans here. . . .  Yvonne!
Yvonne!" she cried again, her excitement growing all the time.
"He says he is here to write about Orléans for The New York
Times . . . he will put it all in . . . the Cathedral . . . Joan
of Arc . . . the hotel here . . . the greatest paper in America . . .
millions of people will come here when they read it--"

"Well, now, I never said--" he began again.

"Ah--hah--hah," again she was peering up at him craftily, with old
eyes of eager greed, chortling her little laugh of gloating
triumph, as she stroked his arm.  "Twenty-four, eh? . . .  And
where are you from, my boy? . . .  Where is your home?"

"Why--New York, I suppose," he said hesitantly.

"Yes, yes, I know," she said impatiently--"but before that?  Where
were you born? . . .  What State are you from?"

He stared at her for a moment with bewildered face.

"Why, I don't think you'd know where it is," he said at length.
"I'm from Catawba."

"Catawba--yes!" the old woman pressed on eagerly.  "And what part
of Catawba?  What town?"

"Why,"--he stared at her, gape-jawed with amazement--"a place
called Altamont."

"Altamont!" she crowed jubilantly.  "Altamont--yes!  Altamont--of
course!"

"You KNOW it?" he said incredulously.  "You've HEARD of it?"

"HEARD of it!  Why, my boy, I've been there seven times!"  She
chuckled with triumph, then went on with a wild and incoherent
eagerness.  "Little Mother, they call me . . . I am known
everywhere. . . .  Letters . . . cablegrams . . . the Governor of
Arkansas . . ." she babbled.  "I gave up everything . . . spent my
fortune. . . .  Ah, my boy, I love the Americans. . . .  They call
me Little Mother. . . .  Altamont! . . .  A beautiful town! . . .
Do you know Doctor Bradford and his family? . . .  And how is
Harold? . . .  What's Alice doing now--has she married? . . . a
lovely girl. . . .  And how is George Watson? . . .  What's
he doing, eh? . . .  Is he still secretary of the Chamber of
Commerce? . . .  And Mrs. Morgan Hamilton. . . .  And Charles
McKee--ah, how I should like to see all my dear old friends in
Altamont again."

"You--you know them--all those people?" he gasped, hearing as in a
dream the great cathedral bells throng out upon the air of night.

"KNOW them! . . .  I know everyone in the town. . . .  I always
stay with Doctor Bradford and his family. . . .  Ah, what lovely
people, my boy. . . .  How good they have been to me. . . .  I love
Americans! . . .  Little Mother, they call me," she went on in a
strange, tranced tone, her eyes burning feverishly as she spoke--
"'As the brave little woman who is known to thousands of Our Boys
as the Little Mother of the Stars and Stripes stood before the
great audience that packed the City Auditorium last night as it had
never been packed before in its whole history, it is safe to say
there was not a dry eye in the great'--Yvonne!"  She broke sharply
away from her mysterious recitation, and again addressed herself
excitedly to the hotel woman--"I know his town . . . I know his
family . . . I know his father and mother . . . I have stayed at
their house! . . .  They are all dear friends of mine! . . .
Quick!  Tell Madame Vatel that an American friend of mine is
here. . . .  Tell her it is going to be a great thing for her . . .
for Orléans . . . for all of us. . . .  Tell her he is going to
write about the hotel in The New York Times . . . you will give him
a good room . . . a good price, eh?" she said cunningly.  "He will
bring hundreds of people here to the hotel--"

"But yes, Countess," said Yvonne.  "Perfectly."

"The best!  The best!" the old woman cried.  "He comes from one of
the most prominent families in America--ah--hah--hah!  You will
see!"  She chuckled with mysterious cunning.  "I shall make you all
rich and famous before I'm through . . . I know all the rich
Americans. . . .  Hah--hah. . . .  They will all come here now when
he has written about us. . . .  The New York Times, Yvonne," she
whispered gloatingly, "the paper all the rich Americans read. . . .
Tell Madame Vatel what has happened. . . .  Ah, a great thing,
Yvonne. . . . a great thing for us all--see!" she whispered
mysteriously, pointing towards the bewildered youth--"the head,
Yvonne!  The head!  You can tell by the head, Yvonne," she
whispered.  "WHAT a clever head, Yvonne. . . .  The New York Times,
eh? . . ." she chuckled craftily, "that all the clever writers
write for! . . .  Tell Vatel!" she whispered gloatingly, rubbing
her little claw-like hands together.  "Tell Madame. . . .  Tell
everyone. . . .  He must have the best," she muttered with
conspiratorial secrecy.  "The best."

"But yes, Countess," Yvonne said smoothly.  "Monsieur shall
have nothing but the best.  Number Seven, I think," she said
reflectively.  "Oui!  Number Seven!"  She nodded her head
decisively with satisfaction.  "I am sure Monsieur will like the
room. . . .  Jean!  Jean!"  She clapped her hands sharply to the
attentive porter, who now sprang forward nimbly.  "Apportez les
baggages de Monsieur au Numéro Sept."

"But--but--the price?" the youth said awkwardly.

"The price," said Yvonne, "to Monsieur is--twelve francs.  To
others--that is deeferent, eh?" she said with a significant smile
and an expressive shrug.  "But since Monsieur is a friend of the
Countess, the price will be twelve francs."

"Cheap!  Cheap!" the Countess muttered.  "And now, my boy," she
said coaxingly, taking him by the arm, "you must take your meals
here, too. . . .  The cuisine! . . .  Ah-h!  Merveilleuse!" she
whispered, making a small rhapsodic gesture with one hand.  "You
will eat here, too, my boy--eh?"

He nodded dumbly, and the old woman turned immediately to Yvonne
with a look of cunning triumph, saying:  "Did you hear, Yvonne? . . .
Do you see? . . .  He will take his meals here, too. . . .
Tell Vatel. . . .  Tell Madame. . . .  I know all the rich
Americans. . . .  They will all come now, Yvonne," she whispered.
"You will see. . . .  And now, my boy," she said with an air of
decision, turning to him again, "have you had dinner yet? . . .
No? . . .  Good!" she said with satisfaction.  "I shall eat with
you," she took him by the arm possessively.  "We shall eat together
here in the hotel. . . .  I shall have Pierre set a table for
us . . . we shall always eat together there--just you and I. . . .
Ah, you have come to the right place . . . I shall look after you
and watch you like your own mother, my boy. . . .  There are so many
bad places here in Orléans . . . so many low resorts.  I shall tell
you where they are so that you can keep out of them . . . it is so
easy for a young man to go astray. . . .  So many young Americans
who come over here get into trouble, meet with bad companions,
because they have no one to guide them. . . .  But have no fear,
my boy . . . I will watch over you while you are here like your
own mother. . . .  They call me Little Mother."

He cast a distressed and perplexed glance towards Yvonne, and that
capable person came instantly and suavely to his rescue.

"Perhaps, Countess," she said smoothly, "Monsieur would like to see
his room and brosh up a beet after ze fatigue of his journey--eh?"

He looked at her gratefully, and the Countess, nodding her head
vigorously, said instantly:

"Oui!  Oui!  C'est ça! . . .  By all means, my boy, go up to your
room and wash up a bit. . . .  Ah, a lovely room!  He will like it,
eh, Yvonne? . . .  New furnishings, hot and cold water, beautiful
plumbing."

"I can assure Monsieur," said Yvonne dutifully, "that he need have
no--kalms--"

"QUALMS, Yvonne, QUALMS," the Countess corrected her gently--"a
lovely room, my boy!  And when you have finished come on down and
we will dine together. . . .  You will find me here.  I will wait
for you.  And while you eat," she said enticingly.  "I shall let
you read my clippings--ah-h, I have a great book full of them. . . .
You shall read it all, everything--what it says about their
Little Mother," she said tenderly.  "And I shall keep you company.
I shall talk to you and tell you what to do in Orléans. . . .  No,
no, I shall eat nothing," she said hastily, as if to allay some
economic apprehension on his part.  "It will cost you nothing. . . .
A little of your coffee, perhaps. . . .  Perhaps a glass of
wine--no more.  Ah, my dear," the old woman went on sadly, "the
food here is so lovely, and I cannot eat it . . . I can eat
nothing--"

"Nothing?" he said, staring at her.

"Rien, rien, rien," she cried, waving her hand sidewise.

"The Countess is on--what you say--a diet?" said Yvonne
sympathetically.  "Eet ees the doctor's orders--she cannot eat."

"Rien du tout," the Countess said again.  "Nothing but horse's
blood, my dear," the Countess said in a sad voice.  "That's all I
live on now."

"HORSE'S blood!" he stared at her unbelievingly.

"Oui!" she nodded.  "Sang de cheval!  You see, my dear," she went
on in an explanatory tone, "I have anæmia--and by the doctor's
orders I take horse's blood. . . .  But the food here is so lovely.
Lovely.  I shall wait for you, my boy, and watch you eat."

"Jean!" cried Yvonne sharply, giving the youth his freedom by one
brisk act.  "Les baggages de Monsieur.  Numéro Sept."

She handed the key to the porter.

"Oui, monsieur," the porter said cheerfully, picking up the youth's
valise.  "Par ici, s'il vous plaît."

They went back and got into the little lift, just big enough for
two.  It mounted slowly, creakingly, with slatting rope.  They got
off at the first flight: he followed the porter down a thickly
carpeted hall and then, while the man switched on lights, turned
down the coverlet of the bed, and pulled the heavy curtains
together in order to assure that atmosphere of stale nocturnal
confinement without which sleep in France seems impossible, he
examined the room.

The place easily lived up to all the rapturous prophesies which the
Countess had made of it.  It was astonishingly luxurious--with that
almost indecent luxury that is characteristic of a French hotel
room, and that is disquietingly similar to the luxury of a brothel.
The bed was a lavish, canopied affair with crimson hangings; the
floor was covered with a thick crimson carpet, completely noiseless
to the tread; there was a sensually fat sofa and several fat chairs
covered with fat, red plush and painted with gilt, a great gilt-
rimmed mirror above the mantel, a washbowl of deep and heavy
porcelain with glittering nickel fixtures, a lavish bidet, the
inevitable provision of a French woman's needs, and curtains of a
fat, silk, quilted material whose sensual folds were now closely
drawn together, completing the effect of bordello secrecy and
luxury previously described.

And this oriental luxury was being provided to him for seventy
cents a day on the recommendation of a mad old woman who drank
horse's blood and whom he had never seen until a half-hour ago.  As
he stood there bewildered by this new, strange turn of chance and
destiny, he felt the stillness of the old town around him, and
heard again the vast, sweet thronging of the cathedral bells
through the dark and silent air, and felt again, as he had felt so
many times, the strange and bitter miracle of life.  And there was
something in his heart he could not utter.

When he went downstairs again, he found the old woman waiting for
him, with an eager and cunning gleam at once comical and pathetic
in her sharp old eyes, and a great book of newspaper clippings in
her arms.

With an air of complete possession, she took him by the arm, and
thus linked, they entered the hotel restaurant together.  As they
went in, it was at once evident that the fame of the young
journalist had preceded him.  There was a great scraping of chairs
around the family table and Madame Vatel, her husband, their comely
married daughter, and the daughter's little girl, rose from the
family soup in unison, and received him with a chorus of smiles,
bows, and enchanted murmurs of greeting that alarmed him by their
profuse respectfulness, and that became almost fawningly obsequious
as the Countess began to publish the merits of his power and
influence in a torrential French of which he could only capture
occasional glittering fragments, the chief of which was the proud
name of The New York Times--"le grand journal américain."

Then, having muttered out a few desperate words of thanks for the
overwhelming and unexpected warmth of their reception, he and the
Countess were escorted by a bowing waiter to the table which had
been prepared for them at the other end of the restaurant, near the
street entrance.  The food--a savoury and wholesome country soup,
broiled fish, succulent thick slices of roast beef, tender, red,
and juicy as none he had ever tasted before, a crisp and tender
salad of endive, and camembert and coffee--was as delicious as the
Countess had predicted; the wine--a Beaujolais, of which the old
woman drank half a glass--both cheap and good; the service of the
old waiter, suave, benevolent, and almost unctuously attentive; and
his own mixed feelings of alarm, astonishment, embarrassment at the
position in which he had been placed, resentment at the imposture
into which the old woman had compelled him, and wild, helpless,
mounting, and astounded laughter--were explosive, indescribable.

He would look up uneasily from the delicious food to see the Vatel
family, heads together around their table in a congress of
whispering secrecy, and with the imprint of conspiratorial greed
and cunning on their faces.  Then they would catch his eye, nudge
one another, and bow and smile at him with fawning graciousness,
and he would return to his food savagely, not knowing whether to
curse or howl with laughter.

During the whole course of the meal, the Countess sat opposite him,
watching like a hawk every move he made, her old eyes gleaming
cunningly and a strange, fixed smile, which he had come to
recognize as being at once crafty and naïve, shrewd with guile and
yet pathetically inquiring, hovering faintly upon her sharp and
meagre face.

All the time while he was eating, the old woman kept up her
strange, fragmentary monologue--a semi-coherent discourse which
mirrored forth the very image of her soul and seemed to be
addressed to herself as much as to any listener.  With a ravenous
attentiveness she watched him devour his food, exhorted him to
waste none of it, and to sop up the sauce as well, demanded of
the old waiter second helpings of the delicious roast beef,
accompanying her command with a glittering account of the
prosperity that would accrue to him and the hotel as a result of
this solicitude; plied the boy with questions concerning his
friends, his work, his future prospects, and his travels--in short,
pried, probed, wormed and insinuated her way into every corner of
his history, and appointed herself guide and censor of his life and
conduct from this moment on.

"How long have you been over here, my boy?"--she said in her low
but vibrant monotone, which had that curious, dead resonance, an
almost bodiless energy that seems to come from indestructible
vitality of mind or spirit when the vitality of flesh has been
exhausted.  It was an energy at once as bitterly tenacious as man's
clutch on life, yet marked all the time by the brooding fatality of
people who have lived too long and seen all things go--"How long
have you been in Europe? . . .  And where were you first? . . .
England, yes. . . .  And after England. . . .  Paris?  Where did
you stay there? . . .  How much did they charge you for your
room? . . .  Twelve francs. . . .  Yes, but you could do better,
my boy. . . .  You could do much better. . . .  You should find a
place for eight francs a day. . . .  All the Americans spend too
much money," she said sadly.  "They come over here and waste their
money. . . .  I have seen so many Americans get stranded here. . . .
During the war I had to help so many out. . . .  Tell me, my boy,"
she leaned over and clutched his arm with her claw-like hand, "you
are not going to get stranded here like other Americans, are you?"
Her voice had a low, hoarse, and fatal note in it.  "Promise me you
won't get stranded here."

He promised her.

"How much money have you got, my boy--eh?" she said, her old eyes
lighted with an avaricious gleam.  A sudden apprehension shocked
her; she started forward, saying quickly--"You've got enough to pay
your bill?  You've got enough to get you out of Orléans? . . .  You
won't get stranded here at the hotel?"

He reassured her, and with a look of relief she continued:

"You must tell me every day how much you spend. . . .  You must let
me watch your money for you. . . .  So few young men in America
understand the value of money. . . .  They throw it away as if it
were dirt. . . .  There are so many ways to waste your money here
in France. . . .  We have so many things to spend money on--it's
gone before you know it--restaurants, hotels, liquor, wine, cafés--
Ah, cafés, cafés!" she sighed with dead fatality.  "Cafés
everywhere you go," she said.  "They are the curse of France.
Cafés and women. . . .  Have you met the women yet?" she demanded
sharply.

He told her that he had.

"Yes, I know," she said, her voice sad with its note of resigned
fatality.  "You meet them in cafés--bad women, waiting there to
prey upon the young Americans. . . .  Tell me--" the eager gleam
awakened in her eyes again--" have you given them much of your
money?"

He told her that he had.

"Ah, I know," she answered sadly.  "All the young Americans waste
their money in that way. . . .  Don't do it, my boy," her claw-like
hand went out and grasped his arm.  "Promise me you will not give
any more money away to those women. . . .  They are BAD, bad . . .
the shame of France. . . .  Get yourself a nice girl, my boy. . . .
I know some nice girls here in Orléans. . . .  I will introduce
you--But don't go to the cafés, my boy--Or, if you go, don't talk
to any of the women there. . . .  No nice woman here in Orléans
goes to the café . . . all the women that you meet there are bad,
bad. . . .  The best café," she concluded irrelevantly, "is on the
Place Martroi.  You will find the women there. . . .  If you go,
tell me tomorrow about the music. . . .  They have good music
there. . . .  I love good music. . . .  One hears so little music
here in Orléans. . . .  There are so few amusements for a decent
woman here. . . .  Sometimes I want to go to the café to hear the
music, but if I did I would no longer be a decent woman. . . .  I
suppose you'll go to the café tonight?" she said sadly, fatally,
but with an eager glint of inquiry in her old eyes.  "All the
Americans go to the café's.  It's the only place there is to go to
here."



Towards ten o'clock, which was the hour of retiring, he escaped
from her and went to the café of which she had spoken.  There was
an orchestra of three pieces playing the kind of music that is
played in French cafés; and many mirrors, and long seats of old
worn leather around the walls; and several young prostitutes
sitting singly at tables, patiently ogling the sporting males of
Orléans, who stroked their moustaches and ogled back, but spent no
money on them.  And there was one extremely lovely, blond,
seductive and experienced-looking prostitute from Paris who ogled
no one, but sat by herself at a table, frowning reflectively with
half-closed eyes and with a cigarette in her mouth, studiously
involved in solitaire and completely indifferent to the gallantries
of the ogling males of Orléans, although many a languishing look
was cast in her direction.  The men played cards or dominoes
together, held their secret, sly, and whispered conversations, and
then roared with laughter; the café orchestra played the music that
a French café orchestra always plays; the waiters went back and
forth with trays and glasses; the proprietor went from table to
table talking to his regular patrons; the women sat patiently at
tables, and smiled and ogled when they caught somebody's eye; and
somehow the whole scene was instantly, poignantly familiar, like
something he had known all his life.

And he did not know why this was true.  But something essential in
the substance and the structure of the scene--the beautiful and
sophisticated prostitute from Paris, the seducers and gallants of
the town of Orléans, the feeling of silence, secrecy, and darkness
all around him in the old sleeping town--in which this place was
now the only spot of warmth and gaiety and lightness--even the
occasional shrill fife and piping whistle at the railway station
not far away--all these things and people had their counterpart,
somehow, in the life of small towns everywhere and in the life he
had known in a small town as a child, when he had lain in his bed
in darkness and had heard the distant wail and thunder of a
departing train, and had seen then in the central core and vision
of his heart's desire, his image of the distant, the shining, the
fabulous, thousand-spired, magic city, and had thought then of a
lovely and seductive red-haired woman named Norah Ryan, who had
that year come from the great city to live there in his mother's
house, and whose coming and whose going would always be a thing of
mystery and wonder to them all; and felt, then, as now, all around
him the numb nocturnal stillness of the town, the impending
prescience of wild joy, the heartbeats of ten thousand sleeping
men.

And this feeling of unutterable loss and familiarity, of strangeness
and reality, remained with him later when he left the closing café
and walked home towards his hotel through a silent, cobbled street,
between rows of old, still houses, the shuttered secrecy of the
shops.

And later, the feeling was more strong and strange than ever, as he
lay in his sumptuous bed in the hotel, reading the clippings in the
Countess's books--those incredible explosions of Yankee journalese
that this old woman had inspired in a thousand little towns across
America--brought back here, read here now, in the midnight
stillness of this ancient town as the great cathedral bells
thronged through the air--the miraculous weavings of dark chance
and destiny, all near as his heart and farther off than heaven,
familiar as his life, and stranger than a dream.



XCIII


In the weeks that followed, the boy discovered in the totally
absurd, yet curiously persuasive illogic of the woman's mind a
revealing illustration of the psychology of fraud, the self-
hypnosis of the impostor.  When he would protest to her at the
effrontery of her representations, the staggering fiction she had
now woven about him, his family, his wealth, his power, his
influence, and his profession, which made an open, barefaced use of
great names and institutions of which he had no knowledge and to
which he could make no claim, the old woman would answer him at
once with a series of arguments so ingeniously persuasive that for
a moment he would find himself almost conquered by their hypnotic
power, absurdly false though he knew them to be.

"Look here," he would say resentfully.  "What do you mean by
telling all these people that I represent The New York Times?  What
if The New York Times should hear about it and have me thrown in
jail for fraud--for using their name when I had no right to do it?--
You'd be safe--you would," he said bitterly.  "I'd be the one to
suffer--YOU could always get out of it by saying that you acted in
good faith, that you really thought I DID work for The Times."

"But you DO, don't you?"  She looked at him with a surprised and
puzzled face.

"No!" he shouted.  "Of course I don't!  And I never told you so,
either!  It's something you made up out of your own head five
minutes after I met you, and nothing I could say would stop you.--
Now you've told people all over the town that I'm writing stories
about Orléans for The New York Times, and am going to put THEM in
the stories.  We've accepted favours, got things at reduced prices
and been entertained by these people all because you told them I am
working for The Times and that they are going to get some free
publicity out of it.  Don't you realize what that is?" he said
angrily, glaring at her.  "That's fraud.  That's getting something
by false pretence.  You can be put in jail for that! . . .  Why,
the next thing I know you'll be getting money from them--collecting
a commission from them for getting me to write them up.  Perhaps
you have already, for all I know," he concluded bitterly.

"But you did tell me that you were a journalist, my boy," the old
woman said gently.  "You told me that, you know."

"Well--yes," he sullenly admitted.  "I did tell you that.  I said
that because I want to be a writer, and I've done nothing yet--and
somehow it didn't seem so big to say I was a journalist. . . .
Besides," he blundered on uncertainly, "I thought the word had a
kind of different meaning here from what it has at home--"

She nodded her head briskly with a satisfied air:

"Exactly. . . .  A journalist is one who contributes articles and
sketches on timely subjects to current publications. . . .  And
you've done that, haven't you?"

"Well," he conceded, "I wrote some pieces for the university
magazine when I was at college--"

"Ah-h!  Exactly!"--this with an air of triumph.

"And I was editor of the college newspaper."

"But of course!  Just as I say!"

"And I suppose I did write news stories about the university once
in a while and send them to the paper back home."

"Of course you did, my boy!  Of course!"

"And I did write what they call a feature article one time and sold
it to a paper. . . .  And I wrote a one-act play and it was
published in a book and I've had so far eight dollars royalty on
it," he concluded his recital with a meagre glow of hope, a lame
belief that his journalistic pretensions were not wholly fraudulent.

"But--" the Countess lifted astounded eyebrows and looked about her
with a fine gesture of the hands expressive of bewilderment--"just
as I SAY, my boy!  Just as I SAY.  From what you tell me there's no
doubt of it!  You are a journalist."

"Well," he conceded gloomily, "I guess if you can establish my
reputation from that, I could swear to what I've told you. . . .
Oh, yes," he added ironically, "and I forgot to tell you that I got
up early in the morning and delivered papers when I was a kid."

"Exactly!  Exactly!" she nodded seriously--"you showed a talent for
your present work right from the start.  You have been trained in
your profession since childhood."

"Oh, my God!" he groaned.  "What's the use?  Have it your own way,
then.  I can't argue with you. . . .  Only, for God's sake,
Countess, stop telling people around here that I am working for The
New York Times."

"Now, my boy, see here; you mustn't be so modest about things.  If
you don't learn to blow your own trumpet a little no one else will
do it for you.  As clever and brilliant as you are, you mustn't be
so self-effacing.  What if you are not yet editor of The New York
Times--?"

"Editor!  Editor, hell!  I'm not even office-boy!"

"But, of COURSE, my dear!" she said patiently.  "You will be some
day.  But at the present time you are a rising young journalist of
great gifts, for whom all of your confrères of The Times are
expecting a brilliant career--"

"Now, Countess, you look here--"

She waved her hand tolerantly with a dismissing gesture, and went
on:

"All that will come," she said.  "You are still young--no one
expects you to be editor yet."

"You'll have me editor if you talk much longer," he said
sarcastically.  "I wouldn't put it past you.  But if you're
determined to tell people I'm a journalist, why drag in The New
York Times?  After all, I could pretend to be a journalist without
feeling an utter fraud.  So why drag in The Times?"

"Ah," she said.  "The Times is a great newspaper.  People have
heard of The Times.  To say you are connected with The Times means
something, carries prestige."

"Well, if it's prestige you want, why don't you tell them I'm a
college professor?  You know, I did work as an instructor for a
year in New York.  If you told them I'm a professor I could at
least feel a little less guilty."

"Oh," she said seriously, "but no one here would believe such a
story as that.  You are too young to be a professor.  Besides," she
added practically, "it is much better, anyway, to tell them you are
working for The Times."

"Why?"

"Because," she patiently explained, "they can see some value in
that.  The power of the press is great.  A professor could do
nothing for them.  A clever young man writing articles for The
Times might do much."

"But, damn it," he cried, in an exasperated tone, "I've never
written articles for The Times.  Can't you understand that?"

"Now, see here, my boy," she said quietly.  "Try to be reasonable
about this thing.  What's the use of confusing these people here
with needless explanations?  What does it matter if you haven't
written articles for The Times?  You ARE writing them now--"

"Oh, hell, Countess!"

"You are going to write these very brilliant and interesting
articles about Orléans," she went on calmly, "and they will be
published in The New York Times, because they will be so very
clever that The New York Times will want to publish them.  So why
tell these simple people here anything more than that?  It would
only confuse them.  I have told them nothing but the truth," she
said virtuously, "I have told them you are writing a series of
articles about Orléans for the great newspaper, The New York Times,
and that, my boy, is all they need to know."  She smiled tranquilly
at him.  He gave up.

"All right," he said.  "You win.  Have it your own way.  I'm
anything you like--the white-haired boy, the prize performer, the
crown jewel of The New York Times."

She nodded with approval.



The farce grew more extravagant day by day.  And because this
fantastic chance had somewhat dulled the smothering ache that had
been almost constant since his parting with Ann, Elinor, and
Starwick, he stayed on from day to day, not knowing why he stayed
or why he should depart, but held with a kind of hypnotic interest
by this web of absurd circumstance in which he had so swiftly been
involved.

In the morning, when he came downstairs, the old woman would be
waiting for him and would sharply and eagerly catechize him about
his conduct the night before.

"Did you go to the café last night, my dear? . . .  How much did
you have to drink?  Eh? . . .  A Pernod, four cognacs, coffee, a
packet of cigarettes. . . .  What did that come to, eh? . . .  How
much did you spend? . . .  Twenty-one francs! . . .  Ah, my dear,
too much, too much!" she clucked sadly and regretfully.  "You will
spend all your money in café's and have nothing to go on with! . . .
Tell me, now, my dear," her old eyes had an eager glint of
curiosity, "were there many people there? . . .  Was the place
crowded? . . .  Were there many women? . . .  You didn't talk to
any of the girls, did you?" she said sharply.

He said that he had.

"You should not have done that!" she said reproachfully.  "And what
did she want?  She wanted you to come with her, eh?"

"No; we didn't get that far.  She asked me for a cigarette."

"And did you give it to her?"

"Yes, of course."

"But no money!  You didn't give her any money?" she said
feverishly.

"No."

"Did you buy her a drink? . . .  Was that what all the cognac was
for?"

"No.  It was for me."

"How much money have you left, my boy? . . .  Are you keeping track
of your expenses? . . .  Did you get another of those express
cheques cashed yesterday?"

"Yes, I did."

"What kind?  A ten-dollar one?"

"Yes."

"Ah, you shouldn't have done that," she said regretfully.  "Once
you cash it, it goes quickly."  She snapped her fingers, "like
that!  Ça file!  Ça file!--You do not watch your money as you
should.  You do not keep track of what you spend. . . .  My boy,
promise me something, will you?" she went on in a low, earnest
tone.  "Promise me you won't spend all your money and get stranded
here. . . .  You won't do that, will you? . . .  How much money
have you left? . . .  Tell me," she said eagerly.  "How many of
those express cheques have you left? . . .  Count it, count it,"
she demanded greedily.  "Take the book out and let me see what you
have left."

He took out the little leather folder of express cheques and opened
it.  It was getting very thin.  Then he thumbed rapidly through the
little sheaf of cheques, trying to get it over as quickly as he
could because of its distasteful reminder of a harsh reality he
wanted to forget.  He not only lacked by nature the sense of money,
he was also at the blissful period in a young man's life when one
hundred dollars is as good as a million.  In fact, with twenty
dollars in bright, flimsy fifty-franc notes in his pocket, the
pleasant terrace of a good café, a drink, the knowledge of
delicious food and wine within, and the slow, sensual meditations
of desire, he felt as rich as any millionaire on earth.  At such a
time, the whole earth lay before him in winding vistas of pleasure,
joy, and mystery: in the huge unreason of this enchantment he was
sure that there was nothing ahead of him but a beautiful and
fortunate life, filled with success and happiness, and if by any
chance he thought of money, it was only to dismiss the thought
impatiently with the irrational conviction that it would always be
ready when he needed it, that it would come to him miraculously and
wonderfully like manna out of heaven, that he could get great sums
of money, in many strange, delightful ways, at any time he wanted
it.

Now the Countess, by the harsh worldliness of her insistence, had
jarred him back to a disquieting reality for which he had no
relish.  While the old woman followed every movement with greedy,
avaricious eyes glued on the cheques, he thumbed them over quickly
and sullenly, told her curtly their amount, and thrust the book
brusquely back into his pocket.

When he had finished, she shook her head at him with sad reproach.

"Ah!" she said, "what extravagance!  A French family could have
lived comfortably for a month on what you have spent here in the
last week."

He winced and stirred restlessly, pierced suddenly with a nameless
sense of guilt and shame, and personal unworthiness, a sudden
evocation of the infinite toil and minute saving of his mother's
life.  And he felt this despite the fact that his mother had now
acquired a considerable estate, a large sum of money, and, in spite
of her parsimonious economies in innumerable small ways, displayed
in her real estate investments a riotous extravagance that far
surpassed any of his own on the sensual pleasures of food and drink
and books, on voyages and women.  And this curious and irrational
sense of guilt and shame was, he knew, not peculiar to himself, but
rooted somehow in the structure of the lives of most of the
Americans he had known.  It was something that went back almost
past time and memory, that they had always had, that was distilled
out of their blood and drawn from the very air they breathed: a
feeling that any life not based on gainful labour, any life devoted
openly and nakedly to pleasure, idleness and leisure, and the
gratification of one's own desires, was, somehow, an ignoble and
shameful life.

Now, suddenly torn with this old and irremediable sense of guilt,
he scowled suddenly, fidgeted restlessly in his chair, and then
spoke sharply and angrily to the old woman, who sat with her sad,
reproachful gaze upon him.

"Well, it's spent now, it's gone, it can't be helped.  What do you
expect people to do with money, anyway?" he said irritably.  "Count
it and kiss it and say good night to it every time they go to
sleep--and kiss it and count it over again every time they wake up,
to see none of it has got away from them in the night?  What's it
for, anyway, if it's not to spend?  What are you living for?" he
said bitterly.  "What are you waiting for?  Are you saving your
money so you can have a nice coffin when they bury you?"

"Yes, my boy, but you spend so much on food and drink and on the
girls," the old woman said in a sad tone.  "So much of it goes on
things like that."

"And why not?" he said resentfully.  "Will you please tell me what
else I should spend it on?  Is there anything better than that to
spend it on?"

"Don't spend it on those girls in the café," she said.  "They are
bad--bad--they will bring you nothing but misfortune and trouble.
Come," she said, getting up briskly.  "I shall take you with me
this morning and introduce you to two nice girls.  You will be
better off with them than with those women in the café."

They went out and walked along the streets of the old town, brisk
with morning life, cheerful with the thin, musty yellow of a wintry
sun.  As they walked along those streets of morning, many people
recognized the old woman and spoke respectfully to her.  Sometimes
shopkeepers spoke to her from doorways, smiling good-naturedly at
the sight of the little old woman trotting briskly along beside the
towering height of the young man.  Sometimes she would hear their
laughter and bantering comment among themselves about the ludicrous
disproportion of the pair, and then, turning to the young man, she
would laugh in an abstracted and yet pleased way, saying:

"Ah--hah--hah!  They are laughing at you and me, boy.  They think
it is very funny, the way we look together. . . .  Un grand garçon,
eh?" she called out to a man standing in the doorway of a shop, who
was measuring the boy up and down with a look of good-natured
astonishment.

"Mon Dieu!" the man cried.  "Qu'il est grand!  Il mange beaucoup de
soupe!"

At length they stopped before a small millinery shop, where the old
woman was having a hat made, and went in.  A small bell tinkled
thinly as they entered, and the milliner and her assistant came out
from behind some curtains to greet them.  The milliner was a
competent-looking woman of thirty years, dark, with a wide face and
a strong, compact, and yet seductive figure.  The assistant was
younger, taller, and fair in colouring.  Both were attractive
girls, and both greeted him with smiles and the exclamation of
good-natured astonishment that he had heard upon the street.  Then,
for several minutes, the little shop was gay with the light, rapid
French of the three women.  All seemed to be talking and laughing
at the same time, in excited tones; he saw that the Countess was
eagerly publishing his merits to the two girls, he caught the magic
phrase The New York Times now and then, the two girls kept glancing
at him with smiling faces, and presently the older one, who was the
proprietress, walked towards him, measured her height against his
shoulder, and then, with a little laugh of astonishment, said:

"Mon Dieu!  Qu'il est grand!"

The younger of the two girls, laughing, made a reply in rapid
French which he could not follow, and the Countess, with a little
chuckle of satisfaction, turned towards him, saying in an
explanatory manner:

"They say they need you here, my dear, to get boxes down from the
top shelf.  It's too tall for them."

"Mon Dieu, oui!" the younger, taller girl, who had picked up the
hat she had been making for the old woman and was shaping it in her
hands, now answered instantly.  "He can help Hélène now with the
box while you try this on.  Hélène," she called to the other girl,
"show Monsieur where the boxes are and have him get one down for
you."

He followed Hélène through the curtains to the rear of the shop,
pursued by the laughter and chattering comment of the other two
women.  Upon a shelf in the rear a number of hat-boxes were stacked
up, but when he looked inquiringly at Hélène, she smiled good-
naturedly, and kindly said:

"Mais non, monsieur.  Nous ne sommes pas sérieuses.  Attendez," and
got up briskly on a chair, reaching for a box herself.  It was, in
fact, almost out of reach; she touched it with her outstretched
finger-tips, dislodged it, it came tumbling down, and he caught it
as it fell.  And Hélène herself came close to falling.  She
teetered uncertainly on her unsteady balance, swayed towards him,
and he lifted her down.  For a moment her weight was strong and
palpable in his arms.  He put her down reluctantly, and for an
instant or two she stood flat against him, her hands gently resting
on his arms.  Then, with a pleasant little laugh, she said:

"Oh, là, là!  Qu'il est fort!"

They went out front again, the Countess finished trying on the hat,
and presently, after another burst of gay and rapid talk, he and
the old woman departed.  As he went out, the little bell tinkled
thinly and pleasantly again; he had to stoop to go through the
door.  He turned to say good-bye again, the two girls were looking
towards him with gay and friendly smiles; he was sorry to go and
wanted some excuse for staying.  Hélène looked strong and competent
and desirable, she smiled at him a friendly farewell: he thought if
he came back again she would be glad to see him, but he never saw
her after that.

Later the two girls stayed in his memory with a vivid, pleasant
warmth: he thought of Hélène many times, her strong seductive
figure and her wide, dark face, and he wondered what her life had
been, if she had married, and what time had brought to her.



XCIV


The crowning extravagance of the Countess's misrepresentation was
revealed one morning when he found a letter addressed to him in a
firm, feminine, and completely unfamiliar handwriting.  The
Countess had spoken to him several times of a great noblewoman in
the neighbourhood, who lived in a magnificent château, and with
whom, it was obvious, the Countess wished to improve her slight
acquaintance.  Now, upon opening the letter, the following message
greeted his astounded eye:


Le Château de Mornaye,
February 23, 1925.

My dear Mr. Gant:

My old friend, La Comtesse de Caux, informs me that you are
spending some time in Orléans preparing a series of articles for
the great journal you represent, The New York Times.

It will be a great pleasure to me if you, together with La
Comtesse, will give me the honour of your presence at Mornaye for
luncheon on Thursday, the twenty-sixth.  La Comtesse de Caux
informs me that you became acquainted with my son Paul when he
visited America with Le Maréchal Foch in 1922, and that a warm
friendship grew up between you at that time.  I have often heard my
son speak of his American tour, and of the dear friendships he made
there, and I know how keen will be his regret when he hears that
you were here and that he missed you.  He is at present, I regret
to say, at Paris, but I have written informing him of your presence
here.

At any rate, it will give me great pleasure to welcome one of my
son's American friends to Mornaye, and I am looking forward to your
visit with the most eager anticipation.  La Comtesse de Caux has
already informed me of your acceptance, and my motor will be
waiting for you at the village station, Thursday, the twenty-sixth,
at noon.

Until then, ever sincerely yours,

MATHILDE, MARQUISE DE MORNAYE.


He read the letter a second time, anger swelling in a hot flood as
its full significance was revealed to him.  When he at length found
the Countess, he was so choked with exasperation that for a moment
he could not speak, but stood glaring at her with infuriated eyes,
holding the crumpled letter in one clenched fist.

"Now, you look here," he said at length in a smothered tone, "you
look here--" he held the letter out and shook it furiously under
her nose.  "What do you mean by a thing like this?"

She returned his furious gaze with a glance of bright inquiry, took
the letter from his hand, and immediately, after looking at it,
said cheerfully:

"Oh, yes!  La Marquise has written to you, as she said she would.
Did I not tell you I had great things in store for you?" she said
triumphantly.  "Ah, my boy, how fortunate you were in finding me
the way you did!  Do you realize how few Americans ever have the
opportunity you are getting?  Here you are, a boy of twenty-four,
being received with open arms into one of the greatest families in
France.  Why, there are American millionaires who would pay a
fortune for the privilege!"

"Now, you see here," he said again in a choking tone.  "What do you
mean by doing a thing like this behind my back?"

She raised puzzled eyebrows inquiringly.

"Behind your back?  What do you mean, my boy?"

"What right have you got to tell this woman I had accepted her
invitation, when you never spoke to me about it?"

"But!" she said, with a small protesting gasp--"I was sure you
would be delighted!  It never occurred to me that you wouldn't be!
I felt sure you'd jump at the opportunity!"

"Opportunity!" he jeered.  "Opportunity for what?  Opportunity to
let you tell this woman a pack of lies about me, and try to work
her with some trick or dodge that you've got up your sleeve!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said, with quiet
dignity.

"Oh, yes, you have!" he snarled.  "You know very well what I'm
talking about.  You've told these lying stories and misrepresented
things to people ever since I met you, but you've gone too far this
time.  What the hell do you mean by telling this woman that I am a
good friend of her son's and met him in America?"  He picked up the
letter and shook it in her face again.  "What do you mean by
telling her such a lie as that?"

"Lie!"  Her brows were lifted with an air of pained surprise.
"Why, my boy, you told me that you did know her son."

"_I_ told you!" he fairly screamed.  "I told you nothing!  I never
knew the woman had a son until I got this letter."

"Listen, my friend," the Countess spoke gently and patiently as she
would speak to a child.  "Think back a little, won't you--?"

"Think back my eye!" he said rudely.  "There's nothing to think
back about.  It's another lying story you made up on the spur of
the moment, and you know it!"

"Don't you remember," she went on in the same quiet and patient
voice, "--don't you remember telling me you were a student at
Harvard University?"

"Yes, I did tell you that.  And that was true.  What has that got
to do with knowing this woman's son?"

"Wait!" she said quietly.  "Don't you remember telling me that you
were there at Harvard when Marshal Foch made his visit to America?"

"Yes, I did tell you that."

"And that you saw him when he visited the university?  You told me
that, you know."

"Of course I did!  I did see him.  Everyone else saw him, too.  He
stood on the steps of the library with his aides, and saluted while
they fired the cannon off!"

"Ah!--With his aides, you say?" she said eagerly.

"Yes, of course, what's wrong with that?"

"But nothing is wrong!  It's all just as I said!--Among his aides,
now," she said persuasively, "did you not notice a young man, with
a little moustache, about twenty-five years old, dressed in the
uniform of a captain in the French army?--Think now, my boy," she
went on coaxingly--"a young man--much younger than the other
officers on the Marshal's staff?"

"Perhaps I did," he said impatiently.  "How should I remember now?
What difference does it make?"

"Because that young man, my dear," the Countess patiently
explained, "that you saw standing there with the Marshal is the
young Marquis--this woman's son."

He stared at her with fascinated disbelief.

"And do you mean to tell me," he said presently, "that because I
may have seen someone like that standing in a great crowd of people
three years ago, you had the gall to tell that woman that I knew
her son--that we were friends?"

"No, no," the Countess said evasively, a little nervously.  "I
didn't tell her that, my dear.  I'm sure I didn't tell her that.
She must have misunderstood me.  All I said was that you SAW her
son when he was in America.  I'm sure that was all I said.  And
that was true, wasn't it?  You DID see him, didn't you?" she said
triumphantly.

He stared at her, with mouth ajar, unable for a moment to
comprehend the full enormity of such deception.  Then he closed his
jaws with a stubborn snap, and said:

"All right.  You got yourself into this, now you get out of it.
I'm not going with you."

The old woman's eyes were suddenly sharp with apprehension.  She
leaned forward, clutched him by the arm, and said pleadingly:

"Oh, my boy, you wouldn't do a thing like that to me, would you?
Think what it means to me--the humiliation you would cause me now
if you refused to go."

"I can't help that.  You had no right to make arrangements with the
woman, in the first place, before you spoke to me.  Even that
wouldn't matter so much if you hadn't told her that other story
about her son and me.  That's the reason she's inviting me--because
she thinks her son and I were friends.  How can I accept such an
invitation--take advantage of the woman's hospitality because you
told her a story that had no truth in it?"

"Oh, that doesn't matter," the Countess spoke quickly, eagerly.
"If you want me to, I shall explain to her that there was a
mistake--that you really do not know her son.  But it makes no
difference, anyway.  She would want you to come just the same.--You
see," she spoke carefully, and for a moment there was a gleam of
furtive, cunning understanding in her eye--the wisdom of fox for
fox--"I don't think it's exactly for that reason she is inviting
you."

"What other reason could there be?  The woman does not know me.
What other interest could she have in me?"

"Well, my boy--" the Countess hesitated, and spoke carefully--"you
see, it's this way.  I think she wants to speak to you," she paused
carefully again before she spoke--"about a certain matter--about
something she's interested in--When she heard that you were
connected with The New York Times--"

"WHAT!"  He stared at her again, and suddenly exploded in a short
angry laugh of resignation and defeat--"Are the whole crowd of you
alike?  Is there a single one of you who doesn't have some scheme,
some axe to grind--who doesn't hope to get something out of
Americans--"

"Then you'll go?" she said eagerly.

"Yes, I'll go!" he shouted.  "Tell her anything you like.  It'll
serve both of you right!  I'll go just to see what new trick or
scheme you and this other woman are framing up.  All right, I'll
go!"

"Good!" she nodded briskly, satisfied.  "I knew you would, my boy.
La Marquise will tell you all about it when she sees you."



This final grotesque episode had suddenly determined his decision
to leave Orléans.  For a short time his chance meeting with this
strange old woman, his instant inclusion in the curious schemes,
designs and stratagems of her life, with all that it evoked of the
strange and the familiar, its haunting glimpse of the million-noted
web and weaving of dark chance and destiny, had struck bright
sparks of interest from his mind, had fused his spirit to a brief
forgetfulness and wonder.

Now, as suddenly as it had begun, that wonder died: the life of the
town, the people, the old Countess and her friends, which had for a
few days seemed so new, strange, and interesting, now filled him
with weariness and distaste.  He was suddenly fed up with the
provincial tedium of the town, he felt the old dislike and boredom
that all dark bloods and races could awake in him an importunate
and unreasonable desire, beneath these soft, dull skies of grey,
for something bright, sharp, Northern, fierce, and wild, in life--
for something gold and blue and shining, the lavish flesh of great
blond women, the surge of savage drunkenness, the fatal desperation
of strong joy.  The dark, strange faces of the Frenchmen all
around, and all the hard perfection of that life, at once so alien
and so drearily familiar, the unwearied energies of their small
purposes fixed there in the small perfection of their universe, so
dully ignorant of the world, so certain of itself, filled him
suddenly with exasperation and dislike.  He was tired suddenly of
their darkness, their smallness, their hardness, their cat-like
nervousness, their incessant ebullience, their unwearied and yet
joyless vitalities, and the dreary monotony of their timeless
greed.

He was tired of Orléans, tired of the Vatels; most of all tired,
with a feeling of weary disgust and dislike, of the old Countess
and all the small tricks and schemings of her life.

And with this sudden weariness and distaste, this loss of interest
in a life which had for a week or two devoured his interest, the
old torment and unrest of spirit had returned.  Again the old
question had returned in all its naked desolation:  "Why here?  And
where shall I go now?  What shall I do?"  He saw, with a return of
the old naked shame, in a flash of brutal revelation, the aimless
lack of purpose in his wandering.  He saw that there had been no
certain reason, no valid purpose, for his coming here to Orléans,
and with a sense of drowning horror, as if the phial of his spirit
had exploded like a flash of ether and emptied out into the
formless spaces of a planetary vacancy, he felt that there was no
purpose and no reason for his going anywhere.

And yet the demons of unrest and tortured wandering had returned
with all their fury: he knew that he must leave, that he must go on
to some other destination, and he knew nowhere to go.  Like a
drowning man who clutches at a straw, he sought for some goal or
purpose in his life, some justification for his wanderings, some
target for his fierce desire.  A thousand plans and projects
suggested themselves to him, and each one seemed more futile,
hopeless, barren than the rest.  He would return to Paris and
"settle down and write."  He would go back to England, get a room
in London, go to Oxford, the Lake District, Cornwall, Devon--a
thousand towns and places, evoked by a thousand fleeting memories,
returned to argue some reasonable purpose for his blind wandering.
Or he would go to the South of France, "to some quiet place," or to
Switzerland, "to some quiet place," or to Germany, Vienna, Italy,
Spain, Majorca,--always "to settle down in some quiet place"--and
for what? for what?  Why, always, of course, "to write," "to
write"--Great God! "to write," and even as he spoke the words the
old dull shame returned to make him hate his life and all these
sterile, vain pretensions of his soul.  "To write"--always to seek
the magic skies, the golden clime, the wise and lovely people who
would transform him.  "To write"--always to seek in the enchanted
distances, in the dreamy perspectives of a fool's delusions, the
power and certitude he could not draw out of himself.  "To write"--
to be that most foolish, vain, and impotent of all impostors, a man
who sought the whole world over "looking for a place to write,"
when, he knew now, with every naked, brutal penetration of his
life, "the place to write" was Brooklyn, Boston, Hammersmith, or
Kansas--anywhere on earth, so long as the heart, the power, the
faith, the desperation, the bitter and unendurable necessity, and
the naked courage were there inside him all the time.

Now, having agreed to accompany the Countess on her visit to the
Marquise, he suddenly decided to leave Orléans at the same time,
spend the night at Blois, and go on to Tours the next day, after
visiting Mornaye.  And with this purpose he packed his bag, paid
his bill at the hotel, and set out on the appointed day with the
old woman who for two weeks now had been his self-constituted guide
and keeper.



XCV


The village of Mornaye was a small and ancient settlement, similar
to thousands of others, situated near the gate of the château from
which it got its name.  A man was waiting for them at the station
with a motor car: they got in and were driven swiftly through the
town--a dense cluster of old grey-lemon buildings with tiled roofs,
a thatched one here and there, the shops of the village grocer,
cobbler, baker, visible through small dormer windows, some farm
buildings, a fleeting glimpse of the old cobbled court yard of a
barn, some wagons and farm implements--a little universe of life,
compact, unbroken, built up to the edge of the road--and then,
almost immediately, the gates of the château.

They drove through the gates and down a long and stately avenue of
noble trees, and presently came to a halt before the great entrance
of the château.  As they approached, a footman came swiftly down
the steps, opened the door of the car, and bowed, and in another
moment, led by the man, they had entered the hall and were being
escorted into the great salon where their hostess was awaiting
them.

La Marquise de Mornaye was a woman of about sixty, but from the
energy and vigour of her appearance she seemed to be in the very
prime of life.  She was an extraordinary figure of a woman, as tall
and strong-looking as a man, with a personal quality that was
almost mountainously impressive in its command.  The image of the
boy's recent discontent had so shaped the French as a dark and
swarthy people of mean stature that it was now startling to be
confronted by a woman of this grand proportion.

She had a wide, round face, smooth, brown and unwrinkled, such as
one often finds in peasant people; her eyes were round, bright, and
shrewd, webbed minutely by fine wrinkles at the corners.  She had
strong, coarse hair of grey, brushed vigorously back from a wide,
low forehead.  She was big in foot and limb and body, everything
about the woman was strong, large and vigorous except her hands.
And her hands were plump, white, tiny, as useless-looking as a
baby's, shockingly disproportionate to the power and vigour of the
rest of her big frame.

The woman had on a long, brown dress that completely covered her
from neck to toe: it was a strangely old-fashioned garment--or,
rather, it did not seem to have any fashion or style whatsoever--
but it was, nevertheless, a magnificent garment, in its plain and
homely strength perfectly appropriate to the extraordinary woman
who wore it.

In every respect--in word, tone, gesture, look, and act--the woman
showed a plain, forceful, and immensely able character.  Her
strong, brown face was friendly, yet shrewd and knowing; she
greeted the Countess cordially, but it was evident from the humour
in her round, bright eyes that she was no fool in the ways of the
world and perfectly able to hold her own in any worldly encounter.

She was waiting for them, erect and smiling, as they entered the
great salon, a magnificent room at least forty feet in length,
warmly, luxuriously, yet plainly furnished, and with nothing cold
or repellent in its grand proportions.  She greeted the Countess
immediately and cordially, extending her plump little white hand in
a friendly greeting, and bending and kissing the little wren-like
woman on her withered cheek.  La Marquise, in deference to her
young American guest, spoke English from the beginning.  And her
English, like everything else about her, was plain, forceful, and
direct, completely fluent, although marked with a heavy accent.

"'Ow are you, my dear?" La Marquise said, as she kissed the other
woman on the cheek.  "It is good to see you again after these so
many years.  'Ow long 'as it been since you were last at Mornaye?"

"Almost seven years, Marquise," the Countess answered eagerly.
"The last time--do you remember?--was in the spring of 1918."

"Ah, yes," the other answered benevolently.  "Now I can remember.
You were here when many of our so brave Américains were quartered
here at Mornaye--Monsieur," she said, using this reference as an
introduction, and turning to the boy with her plump little hand
extended in a movement of kindly greeting, "I am delighted.  I meck
apologies for my son.  I know he will so much regret not seeing
you."

He flushed, and stammered out his thanks: she seemed to take no
notice of his embarrassment and, having completed her friendly
welcome, she turned smilingly to the Countess again, and said:

"And 'ow 'ave you been, my dear?  You are looking very well," she
said approvingly, "and no older dan you were de lest time you were
here.  I s'ink," she said smilingly, including the young man now in
her friendly humour--"I s'ink la Comtesse must 'ave discover--wat
you call it, eh?" she shrugged--"ze se-CRET of ze fountain of
yout', eh?"

"Ah, Marquise," the Countess fawned greedily upon the grand woman,
obviously elated by these signs of intimacy--"ah--hah--hah! it is
so kind of you to say so--but I fear I have grown much older since
I saw you last.  I have known great trouble," she said sadly, "and,
as you know, Marquise, my health has not been good."

"Non?" the other said with an air of solicitous inquiry.  "I am so
sor-REE," she continued in a tone of unimpeachable regret, which
nevertheless showed that the Countess's health or lack of it was
really of no moment to her whatever.  "Perhaps, my dear, it is ze
wretchet cleemat here.  I s'ink perhaps you should go Sout' in
vintaire--ah, monsieur," she continued regretfully, turning to the
youth, "you see Mornaye at a bat season of ze year--I fear you may
be disappointed by our coun-TREE.  I 'ope you vill come beck some
time in sprink.  Zen, I s'ink you vill agree la France is
beautiful."

"I should like to," he replied.

"But oh, zis vintaire!  Zis VINTAIRE!" La Marquise cried with
passionate distaste, folding her arms and drawing herself together
in a movement of chilled ardour as she looked through a tall French
door across one of those magnificent and opulent vistas that one
finds in France, an architecture of proud, comely space into whose
proportionate dimensions even nature herself has been compelled.
It was a tremendous sweep of velvet sward, that faded into misty
distances and that was cut cleanly on each side by the smoky
denseness of her forest parks.  Her shrewd eyes ranged across this
noble prospect for a moment in an expression of chilled distaste.
Then, with a slight contracted shudder of her folded arms, she
turned, and said wearily:

"Ah, zis vintaire!  Zis VINTAIRE!  Sometimes I s'ink it vill
nevaire end.  Every day," she went on indignantly, "it rain, rain,
rain!  All vintaire lonk I see noz-ZING but rain!  I get up in ze
mornink and look out--and it rain!  I turn my beck and zen look out
again--it rain!  I take a nep, I get up, I go to bet--always it
rain!"  She shrugged her shoulders comically and turning to the boy
with a glint of shrewdly cynical humour, she said, "I s'ink if it
keep on ve 'ave again--vat you call it?--Noah's Floot, eh?"

The Countess clucked sympathetically at this watery chronicle of
woe, and said:

"But have you been here by yourself all winter?  I should think you
would get awfully lonely, my dear," she went on in a tone of
ingratiating commiseration.  "I know how you must miss your son."

"No.  I vas in Paris for two veeks in Decembaire," said La
Marquise.  "But it rain zere too," she said, with another shrug of
comic despair, and then added vigorously, "No!  I do not get lonely
if it do not rain.  But ven it rains--zen it is tereeble. . . .
Come," she said brusquely, almost curtly, turning away from the
grey prospect through the window, "let us seet here vere eet ees
varm."  Still clasping her arms across her breast, she led them
towards a coal fire which was crackling cheerfully in a hearth at
one end of the great room; they seated themselves comfortably
around the fire, La Marquise rang a bell, and spoke a few words to
a butler, and presently he returned, bringing glasses and a
decanter of old sherry on a tray.

They sat talking amiably then of many things.  La Marquise
questioned the boy about America, his stay in France, the places he
had seen, referred regretfully again to the absence of her son and
of the great friendship he cherished for America and Americans as a
result of his travels there with Marshal Foch.  And from time to
time, the Countess, with a cunning that was comically naïve in its
barefaced self-exposure, would prod him with a skinny finger, and
whisper hoarsely:

"Ask her some questions, my dear.  You should ask her more
questions and write more in your little book.  It will make a good
impression."

And although he saw from the glint of shrewd humour in the sharp
eyes of La Marquise that none of this clumsy by-play had been lost
on her, and that the other woman's design was perfectly apparent to
her, he responded dutifully, if awkwardly, asking respectful
questions about the age and history of the château, the extent of
its estate, and so on.  At length, emboldened by the modest success
of these beginnings and feeling that a clever young journalist
should display an intelligent curiosity about the current affairs
of the nation to which he is a visitor, he asked a question about
the government of the period, of which Herriot was the leader and
which was dominantly socialist.

It was, he saw, an unfortunate move; the Countess poked him sharply
with a warning finger, but it was too late.  He saw instantly that
his question had produced a bad impression on La Marquise: for the
first time, her manner of amiable and cordial friendliness
vanished, her face hardened, there was an angry glint in her shrewd
eyes, and in a moment she said harshly, and in a tone of arrogant
impatience:

"I know nozzing about zose pipple!  I pay no attention to anys'ing
zey say!  Zey are fools! fools!" she cried violently.  "You must
not believe anys'ing zey say!  Zose men are traitors! . . .
Charlatans! . . .  Zey are ze pipple who have ruined and betrayed
France!"  In her agitation she got up and walked across the room.
"Here!" she cried, picking up a newspaper on a table and returning
with it.  "Here is what you should reat if you want ze trut!"  She
thrust a copy of L'Action Française into his hands.  "Zat paper--
and zat alone--will tell you ze trut about ze way s'ings are in
France today.  Ah, monsieur!" she cried earnestly, "you do not
know--ze world does not know--no one outside of France can know ze
trut, because zese wretched men control ze press--and make it print
vatever lies zey tell it to.  But you reat ZIS, monsieur--you reat
ZIS," she struck the paper with the back of her hand as she spoke,
"and you will get ze trut!  Ah, zat man!" she said with a grim
chuckle of admiration.  "Ze rédacteur--ze--vat you say?--ze EDITOR
of zat paper, Léon Daudet--ah, zat man is RIGHT!" she said with a
chuckle of satisfaction.  "Zat man is sometimes coarse--he call zem
bat names--he is not always très gentil--but," again she chuckled
grimly, "he iss RIGHT!  He tells ze trut--he calls zem vat zey are--
ze traitors and creemiNALS who 'ave ruined France."  She was
silent for a moment, and then in a voice harsh with passion, she
said violently:  "La France, monsieur, is a royaume--a--vat you
call it?--a monarchy--a kinkdom.  Ze French people must have a
kink--zey are lost vitout a kink--zey cannot govern zemselves
vitout a kink! . . .  Zere can be no France, monsieur, vitout a
kink!" she almost shouted.  "Zere has been no France since ze
monarchy vas destroyed by zese scélérats who 'ave betrayed La
France--zere vill never be a France until ze kink is restored to
his rightful office and zese creeminals and traitors 'ave been sent
to ze guillotine vere zey belonk. . . .  So do not ask me anys'ink
about zese men, monsieur," she said with arrogant passion.  "I know
nozzing about zem.  I pay no attention to zem!  Zey are fools . . .
traitors . . . creeminals," she shouted.  "You reat zat paper, you
vill get ze trut."

She was breathing hoarsely and her eyes glinted with hard fires of
passion.  At this moment, fortunately, the butler entered, bowed,
and, speaking in a quiet voice, informed his mistress that luncheon
was served.  The words recalled the angry woman to her duties as a
hostess: with an almost comical suddenness she assumed her former
manner of gracious cordiality, smiled amiably at her guests, and
saying with benevolent good-nature, "After our lonk journey and our
so much talk, ve are 'ongry--yes?" led the way into the dining-
room.

As they went in, the little old Countess nudged her young companion
again with a stealthy warning, and whispered with nervous reproach:

"You should not have asked her that, my dear.  Please do not say
anything more to her about the government."

The dining-room of the château was another magnificent chamber,
like everything else about the château, nobly harmonious with those
elements of strength and grace, splendour and simplicity, warmth
and delicacy, united with princely dignity, which are the triumphs
of this period of French architecture.  In spite of the chill air
of the room--for it was poorly heated--one felt its living and
noble warmth immediately.

The boy, who had looked forward to this meeting with considerable
awe and apprehension, now felt himself completely at home, stirred
by a profound, tranquil and lovely joy at the noble beauty and
simplicity of the château.  Even in the sense of retrenchment, the
worn uniforms of the servants, the knowledge that they served their
mistress in various offices, there was something pleasant, homely,
and familiar; he discovered, to his surprise, that he now felt none
of the constraint and uneasiness which he experienced when Joel
Pierce had taken him to his great estate upon the Hudson River and
he had for the first time seen the lives of the great American
millionaires.

With La Marquise de Mornaye he was not conscious of that exactly
mannered style--most mannered in its very affectation of
simplicity--that vulgar arrogance which he had felt among the rich
Americans of Joel Pierce's class.  La Marquise was plain as an old
shoe, vigorous and lusty as a peasant, and completely an
aristocrat--magnificently herself, without an ounce of affectation--
a woman Joel Pierce's people would have fawned upon and to whom
they would have given a king's ransom if by so doing they could
have bought for son or daughter an alliance with her family.

La Marquise seated him beside her, the Countess opposite her, and
at once they began to eat.  The food was magnificent, there was a
different wine of royal vintage (brought up from the famous cellar
of the château) with every course.  La Marquise left no doubt at
all about the robust nature of her appetite, and by everything she
did and was--the plain shrewdness, warmth, and sensible humanity of
her nature--she made it plain that she expected her guests to eat
heartily also, and not to be too nice and dainty about it either.

"Ven vun is you