英语小说网

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

"Having done all things that were necessary, and the season now being propitious for carrying on war, Cæsar began to arrange his legions in battle array."

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

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

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

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

"-- est perpetua. Una dormienda. Luna dies et nox."

"What sort?" Tom Davis insisted. "Harder than Cicero?"

"Is Latin poetry hard to read?" Eugene said.

"Who was Catullus?" Eugene shouted violently. Like a flung spear in his brain, the name.

"Now let me see," he began.

"Why, no," said Mr. Leonard, stroking his chin. "A different sort of Latin."

"Why," said Mr. Leonard reflectively, "it's a form of poetry."

"He wrote Odes and Epodes," said Tom Davis. "What is an Epode, Mr. Leonard?"

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

"Hell!" said "Pap" Rheinhart in a rude whisper to Eugene. "I knew that before I paid tuition."

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

"Well," said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head. "It's not easy. Horace --" he began carefully.

"Well," said Mr. Leonard, dubiously, "different. A little beyond you at present."

"Was it like Horace?"

"What was it like?" said Tom Davis. "Like your granny's gut," "Pap" Rheinhart toughly whispered.

"Why -- no -- yes -- I don't know about all that," said Mr. Leonard, challengingly, confused. "Where'd you hear all this, boy?"

"Why -- he wrote on topics of general interest in his day," said Mr. Leonard easily.

They turned thirsty faces up to him.

"He wrote about being in love," Eugene cried with sudden certain passion. "He wrote about being in love with a lady named Lesbia. Ask Mr. Leonard if you don't believe me."

"No-o," said Mr. Leonard reflectively. "It wasn't exactly like Horace."

"I read it in a book," said Eugene, wondering where. Like a flung spear, the name.

There was no answer.

Tom Davis turned a surprised face on him. "Gre-a-at Day!" he exclaimed, after a moment. Then he began to laugh.

"Did he write about being in love?" said Eugene in a quivering voice.

"What sort of poetry did he write?" asked Eugene.

"He was a poet," Mr. Leonard answered thoughtlessly, quickly, startled. He regretted.

"What was she, then?" said Tom Davis pointedly.

"Why -- not exactly," Mr. Leonard murmured, rubbing his chin.

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

Odi et amo: quore id faciam…

"Who was she?" said Tom Davis.

-- Whose tongue was fanged like a serpent, flung spear of ecstasy and passion.

Awful stillness.

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

"She was a Bad Woman," said Eugene. Then, most desperately, he added: "She was a Little Chippie."

"She was a man's wife!" he said loudly. "That's who she was."

"Why -- here -- who told you that?" said Mr. Leonard, bewildered, but considering matrimony a wild and possibly dangerous myth. "Who told you, boy?"

"Well, not altogether," said Mr. Leonard. "Some of them," he conceded.

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

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

"Pap" Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply.

-- Whose foulest cry was shafted with his passion, whose greatest music flowered out of filth --

Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea es."

"Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam

"You should be more careful of your talk, Eugene," said Mr. Leonard gently.

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

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

Tom Davis' hearty laughter boomed out, mingling with his own whine.

"All right, Tom," said Mr. Leonard briskly, "page 43, section 6, line 15. Begin at that point."

At this moment the bell rang and Tom Davis' laughter filled the room.

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

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

"What's the good of all this stuff?" said Tom Davis argumentatively.

"Well -- I'm not so sure of that," said Mr. Leonard with a protesting laugh. "I think it does."

"It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer Things. It gives him the foundations of a liberal education. It trains his mind."

"What good's it going to do him when he goes to work?" said "Pap" Rheinhart. "It's not going to teach him how to grow more corn."

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

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

"According to what you say," said Tom Davis, "a man who has studied Greek makes a better plumber than one who hasn't."

"It trains the mind to grapple with problems of all sorts," he said.

"Pshaw, Mr. Leonard," said "Pap" Rheinhart. "Are you going to talk Latin to your farmhands?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He must be a better man than he looks yet," said Tom Davis. "The little 'un's only two or three years old."

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

"He's not as old as he looks," said Eugene. "He looks old because he's been sick. He's only forty-nine."

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

"Well, if he's so old," said Eugene, "why did old Lady Lattimer marry him?"

"Why, because she couldn't get any one else, of course," said "Pap" Rheinhart, impatient at this obtuseness.

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

"Miss Amy says so," said Eugene innocently.

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

"Forty-nine!" he said, "you'd better see a doctor, boy. He's as old as God."

"That's what she said," Eugene insisted doggedly.

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

"Pap" Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene and carried his quid deftly on the end of his tongue to the other cheek.

"How do you know?" said Tom Davis.

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

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

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

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

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

Eugene believed in the glory and the gold.

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

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

"For God's sake! What's the matter with you?" Luke jeered. "You're not ashamed of a little honest work, are you?"

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

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

"Yes," Leonard agreed, "that's the very thing."

That boy's a hustler.

"He can help you drum up new prospects," said Eliza.

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

"Goddam it!" he yelled, and hurled them at the wall. Eliza came to the door.

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

"It would be a pity to throw away a good pair of shoes," she said. "Try 'em on, boy."

"O for God's sake!" he growled. "Listen to this! By God, you never hear me asking any one for anything, do you?" he burst out in a rage.

She took the shoes and gave them to Eugene.

"How do they feel?" asked Eliza.

"All right, I guess," he said doubtfully. "They're a little tight."

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

Ben entered the kitchen.

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

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

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

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

"You little brute!" he said. "You've a foot like a mule." Scowling, he knelt and touched the straining leather at the toes. Eugene winced.

"It does seem a pity to throw those good shoes away," sighed Eliza.

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

But she had strange fits of generosity. He didn't understand.

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

"Mark my words," said Gant. "That girl's got Cherokee blood in her somewhere."

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

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

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

Eliza was silent a moment longer.

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

"Where's your husband?" she asked presently.

"In Sevier," Mrs. Morgan said. "He's a railroad man."

"Yes'm."

"What's that, what's that?" said Eliza quickly, comically. "A railroad man, you say?" she inquired sharply.

"In less'n a month now, I reckon," she answered.

"Yes'm," said Mrs. Morgan sullenly. She kept on rocking.

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

"No'm," said Mrs. Morgan.

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

She had been getting bigger week after week.

"Have you got any money?" said Eliza.

"I tell you what," she said, "it looks like a hard winter for the poor folks."

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

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

"You can stay here until you're able to work again," said Eliza. "I know a good doctor."

"Thank you, ma'am," said Mrs. Morgan, taking the money.

"Merciful God!" howled Gant, "you've had 'em all -- blind, lame, crazy, chippies and bastards. They all come here."

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

"Well, I reckon you'll have to have a little money," said Eliza, peeling off two tens, and giving them to Mrs. Morgan.

"How do you do, madam?" Aside, to Helen, he said:

"Mama, in heaven's name," Helen fumed. "Where on earth do you get these people?"

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

"I tell you what -- she's a fine-looking girl."

"Hahahaha," said Helen, laughing in an ironic falsetto, and prodding him, "you wouldn't mind having her yourself, would you?"

Eliza smiled bitterly into popping grease.

"B'God," he said humorously, wetting his thumb, and grinning slyly at Eliza, "she's got a pair of pippins."

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

"Hahahahaha!" laughed Helen thinly, "she's mad now."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"I've got folks in Sevier," said Mrs. Morgan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How much sleep have you been getting?" she asked.

"But I'm all right," he protested desperately, frightened. "There's nothing wrong with me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Madam, your daughter looks very fine,

Slapoon!

Slapoon!"

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

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

Madam, your daughter looks very fine,

"Well," said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long mustache reflectively away from his mouth, "you ought to put up a no-trespassin' sign."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward lived. There was nothing beyond this -- nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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