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The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his young flesh. He was not so attractive physically -- he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward. Moreover, he sank deeper year by year into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.

In the years that had followed Eliza's removal to Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away from Helen's earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben. This separation was inevitable. The great affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.

And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could never understand, choked her with fury. It was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to fondle, love, and enslave it. Her boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch of the sun. It was necessary for her to dominate and enslave, all her virtues -- her strong lust to serve, to give, to nurse, to amuse -- came from the imperative need for dominance over almost all she touched.

She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield to her governance. In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound. She hated secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the unfathomable depths of other-wordliness goaded her to fury.

"You little freak. You nasty little freak. You don't even know who you are -- you little bastard. You're not a Gant. Any one can see that. You haven't a drop of papa's blood in you. Queer one! Queer one! You're Greeley Pentland all over again."

Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would caricature the pout of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding kangaroo walk.

She always returned to this -- she was fanatically partisan, her hysterical superstition had already lined the family in embattled groups of those who were Gant and those who were Pentland. On the Pentland side, she placed Steve, Daisy, and Eugene -- they were, she thought, the "cold and selfish ones," and the implication of the older sister and the younger brother with the criminal member of the family gave her an added pleasure. Her union with Luke was now inseparable. It had been inevitable. They were the Gants -- those who were generous, fine, and honorable.

The love of Luke and Helen was epic. They found in each other the constant effervescence, the boundless extraversion, the richness, the loudness, the desperate need to give and to serve that was life to them. They exacerbated the nerves of each other, but their love was beyond grievance, and their songs of praise were extravagant.

In spite of this violent dislike for the Pentlands, both Helen and Luke had inherited all Gant's social hypocrisy. They wanted above all else to put a good face on before the world, to be well liked and to have many friends. They were profuse in their thanks, extravagant in their praise, cloying in their flattery. They slathered it on. They kept their ill-temper, their nervousness, and their irritability for exhibition at home. And in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland's family their manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly with servility. Money impressed them.

Ben alone seemed to be without the grouping. He moved among them like a shadow -- he was remote from their passionate fullblooded partisanship. But she thought of him as "generous"-- he was, she concluded, a "Gant."

"I'll criticise him if I like," she said pugnaciously. "I've got the right to. But I won't hear any one else criticise him. He's a fine generous boy -- the finest one in this family. That's one thing sure."

Early in Spring the woman, whose name was Margaret Lutz, returned to Dixieland. One drowsy afternoon Eugene found them at Gant's. The house was deserted save for them. They were sprawled out face downward, with their hands across each other's hips, on Gant's bed. They lay there silently, while he looked, in an ugly stupor. Steve's yellow odor filled the room. Eugene began to tremble with insane fury. The Spring was warm and lovely, the air brooded slightly in a flowering breeze, there was a smell of soft tar. He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes. In a moment the world turned hag.

It was a period of incessant movement in the family. Steve had married a year or two before a woman from a small town in lower Indiana. She was thirty-seven years old, twelve years his senior, a squat heavy German with a big nose and a patient and ugly face. She had come to Dixieland one summer with another woman, a spinster of lifelong acquaintance, and allowed him to seduce her before she left. The winter following, her father, a small manufacturer of cigars, had died, leaving her $9,000 in insurance, his home, a small sum of money in the bank, and a quarter share in his business, which was left to the management of his two sons.

"What are you doing there on papa's bed?" he screamed.

"Get off papa's bed," said Eugene desperately. He jerked his arm away.

Eugene hated him because he stunk, because all that he touched stunk, because he brought fear, shame, and loathing wherever he went; because his kisses were fouler than his curses, his whines nastier than his threats. He saw the woman's hair blown gently by the blubbered exhalations of his brother's foul breath.

There was nothing that Steve touched that he did not taint.

"You're not going to tell on us, buddy, are you?" Steve wheedled, breathing pollution in his face.

Steve rose stupidly and seized him by the arm. The woman sat up, dopily staring, her short legs widened.

He grew sick.

"I suppose you're going to be a little Tattle-tale," said Steve, bludgeoning him with heavy contempt. "You're going to run right up and tell mama, aren't you?" he said. He fastened his yellow fingers on Eugene's arm.

Steve and Margaret were married soon after. With the old sense of physical shame Eugene watched them descend the stairs at Dixieland each morning for breakfast. Steve swaggered absurdly, smiled complacently, and hinted at great fortune about the town. There was rumor of a quarter-million.

"Let me go," he muttered. "No."

"Put it there, Steve," said Harry Tugman, slapping him powerfully upon the shoulder. "By God, I always said you'd get there."

"I tell you what," said Eliza with proud smiles, "he's no fool. He's as bright as the next one when he wants to be." Brighter, she thought.

Eliza smiled at swagger and boast, her proud, pleased, tremulous sad smile. The first-born.

Steve bought new clothes, tan shoes, striped silk shirts, and a wide straw hat with a red, white and blue band. He swung his shoulders in a wide arc as he walked, snapped his fingers nonchalantly, and smiled with elaborate condescension on those who greeted him. Helen was vastly annoyed and amused; she had to laugh at his absurd strut, and she had a great rush of feeling for Margaret Lutz. She called her "honey," felt her eyes mist warmly with unaccountable tears as she looked into the patient, bewildered, and slightly frightened face of the German woman. She took her in her arms and fondled her.

"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any longer," said he. "He's on Easy Street. Where are all the Wise Guys now who said 'I told you so'? They're all mighty glad to give Little Stevie a Big Smile and the Glad Hand when he breezes down the street. Every Knocker is a Booster now all right, all right."

"That's all right, honey," she said, "you let us know if he doesn't treat you right. We'll fix him."

"Steve's a good boy," said Margaret, "when he isn't drinking. I've nothing to say against him when he's sober." She burst into tears.

"Well, she'll never win any beauty prizes, that's one thing sure," said Helen privately to Eliza.

"That awful, that awful curse," said Eliza, shaking her head sadly, "the curse of licker. It's been responsible for the ruination of more homes than anything else."

"I'll vow!" said Eliza.

"I think he's done pretty well, if you ask me," said Helen, annoyed. "Good heavens, mama! You talk as if he's some sort of prize. Every one in town knows what Steve is." She laughed ironically and angrily. "No, indeed! He got the best of the bargain. Margaret's a decent girl."

"What on earth did he mean by doing such a thing!" she continued. "She's ten years older than he if she's a day."

"Well," said Eliza hopefully, "maybe he's going to brace up now and make a new start. He's promised that he'd try."

Her dislike for him was innate. She had placed him among the tribe of the Pentlands. But he was really more like Gant than any one else. He was like Gant in all his weakness, with none of his cleanliness, his lean fibre, his remorse. In her heart she knew this and it increased her dislike for him. She shared in the fierce antagonism Gant felt toward his son. But her feeling was broken, as was all her feeling, by moments of friendliness, charity, tolerance.

"What are you going to do, Steve?" she asked. "You've got a family now, you know."

"Well, I should hope so," said Helen scathingly. "I should hope so. It's about time."

"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any longer," he said, smiling easily. "He lets the others do the worrying." He lifted his yellow fingers to his mouth, drawing deeply at a cigarette.

"Good heavens, Steve," she burst out angrily. "Pull yourself together and try to be a man for once. Margaret's a woman. You surely don't expect her to keep you up, do you?"

"What business is that of yours, for Christ's sake?" he said in a high ugly voice. "Nobody's asked your advice, have they? All of you are against me. None of you had a good word for me when I was down and out, and now it gets your goat to see me make good." He had believed for years that he was persecuted -- his failure at home he attributed to the malice, envy, and disloyalty of his family, his failure abroad to the malice and envy of an opposing force that he called "the world."

Helen laughed ironically, huskily.

Ben, who had been sitting on the piano stool all this time, scowling savagely at the keys, and humming a little recurrent tune to himself while he picked it out with one finger, turned now to Helen, with a sharp flicker of his mouth, and jerked his head sideways.

"You think you're a pretty wise guy, don't you?" said Steve heavily. "But I don't notice it's getting you anywhere."

"I hear Mr. Vanderbilt's getting jealous," he said.

"No," he said, taking another long puff at the moist cigarette, "don't worry about Stevie. He doesn't need anything from any of you, and you don't hear him asking for anything. You see that, don't you?" he said, pulling a roll of banknotes from his pocket and peeling off a few twenties. "Well, there's lots more where that came from. And I'll tell you something else: Little Stevie will be right up there among the Big Boys soon. He's got a couple of deals coming off that'll show the pikers in this town where to get off. You get that, don't you?" he said.

"Now, I hope you're not going to forget your old friends, Mr. Rockefeller," he said in his subdued, caressing ominous voice. "I'd like to be vice-president if the job's still open." He turned back to the keyboard -- and searched with a hooked finger.

Ben turned his scowling eyes upon him, and sniffed sharply, unconsciously.

"All right, all right," said Steve. "Go ahead and laugh, both of you, if you think it's funny. But you notice that Little Stevie isn't a fifteen-dollar clerk in a newspaper office, don't you? And he doesn't have to sing in moving-picture shows, either," he added.

"You'd better not talk, Steve, until you get a job and quit bumming around," she said. "You're a fine one to talk, hanging around pool-rooms and drug-stores all day on your wife's money. Why, it's absurd!" she said furiously.

"Oh for God's sake!" Ben cried irritably, wheeling around. "What do you want to listen to him for? Can't you see he's crazy?"

Helen's big-boned face reddened angrily. She had begun to sing in public with the saddlemaker's daughter.

As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink heavily again. His decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to ache simultaneously: he was wild with pain and cheap whisky. He felt that Eliza and Margaret were in some way responsible for his woe -- he sought them out day after day when they were alone, and screamed at them. He called them foul names and said they had poisoned his system.

One night, at the supper hour, he returned to Dixieland, holding his tortured jaws between his hands. He found Eliza bending over the spitting grease of the red-hot stove. He cursed her for bearing him, he cursed her for allowing him to have teeth, he cursed her for lack of sympathy, motherly love, human kindliness.

In the early hours of morning, at two or three o'clock, he would waken, and walk through the house weeping and entreating release. Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his residence, in Eugene's charge. The doctors, surly and half-awake, peeled back his shirtsleeve and drove a needle with morphine deep in his upper arm. After that, he found relief and sleep again.

"Get out of here," she said. "You don't know what you're talking about. It's that accursed licker that makes you so mean." She began to weep, brushing at her broad red nose with her hand.

Her white face worked silently above the heat.

"I never thought I'd live to hear such talk from a son of mine," she said. She held out her forefinger with the old powerful gesture.

"Now, I want to tell you," she said, "I'm not going to put up with you any longer. If you don't get out of here at once I'm going to call 38 and let them take you." This was the police station. It awoke unpleasant memories. He had spent the day in jail on two similar occasions. He became more violent than before, screamed a vile name at her, and made a motion to strike her. At this moment, Luke entered; he was on his way to Gant's.

"You m-m-m-miserable d-d-degenerate," he stuttered, unconsciously falling into the swing of the Gantian rhetoric. "You ought to b-b-b-be horsewhipped."

The antagonism between the boy and his older brother was deep and deadly. It had lasted for years. Now, trembling with anger, Luke came to his mother's defense.

He was a well grown and muscular young fellow of nineteen years, but too sensitive to all the taboos of brotherhood to be prepared for the attack Steve made on him. Steve drove at him viciously, smashing drunkenly at his face with both hands. He was driven gasping and blinded across the kitchen.

Ben scowled quietly at him for a moment while he pranced softly about, proposing his fists in Police Gazette attitudes. Then, exploding suddenly in maniacal anger, the quiet one sprang upon the amateur pugilist with one bound, and flattened him with a single blow of his fist. Steve's head bounced upon the floor in a most comforting fashion. Eugene gave a loud shriek of ecstasy and danced about, insane with joy, while Ben, making little snarling noises in his throat, leaped on his brother's prostrate body and thumped his bruised skull upon the boards. There was a beautiful thoroughness about his wakened anger -- it never made inquiries till later.

Wrong forever on the throne.

"Come on, come on, you big bastard," said Steve, exalted by his success, throwing himself into a fancy boxing posture. "I'll take you on now. You haven't got a chance, Ben," he continued, with elaborate pity. "You haven't got a chance, boy. I'll tear your head off with what I know."

Somewhere, through fear and fury, Eugene heard Ben's voice humming unconcernedly, and the slow picked tune on the piano.

Ben entered like a cat. Luke was bleeding warmly from the nose.

"Ben!" he screamed, dancing about and grasping a hammer.

"Good old Ben," screamed Eugene, howling with insane laughter. "Good old Ben."

Eliza, who had been calling out loudly for help, the police, and the interference of the general public, now succeeded, with Luke's assistance, in checking Ben's assault, and pulling him up from his dazed victim. She wept bitterly, her heart laden with pain and sadness, while Luke, forgetful of his bloody nose, sorrowful and full of shame only because brother had struck brother, assisted Steve to his feet and brushed him off.

Helen came in from town with a bag of warm bread and cakes.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand," Eliza wept.

"What's the matter?" she said, noting at once all that had happened.

"I don't know," said Eliza, her face working, shaking her head for several moments before she spoke. "It seems that the judgment of God is against us. There's been nothing but misery all my life. All I want is a little peace." She wept softly, wiping her weak bleared eyes with the back of her hand.

A terrible shame started up in each of them -- they were unable to meet one another's gaze. Ben's thin face was very white; he trembled violently and, catching sight of Steve's bleared eyes for a moment, he made a retching noise in his throat, went over to the sink, and drank a glass of cold water.

He would have continued indefinitely in this strain, but Helen checked him with weary finality.

"Well, forget about it," said Helen quietly. Her voice was casual, weary, sad. "How do you feel, Steve?" she asked.

"I wouldn't make any trouble for any one, Helen," he said, with a maudlin whimper. "No! No!" he continued in a brooding voice. "They've never given Steve a chance. They're all down on him. They jumped on me, Helen. My own brothers jumped on me, sick as I am, and beat me up. It's all right. I'm going away somewhere and try to forget. Stevie doesn't hold any grudge against any one. He's not built that way. Give me your hand, buddy," he said, turning to Ben with nauseous sentimentality and extending his yellow fingers, "I'm willing to shake your hand. You hit me to-night, but Steve's willing to forget."

"Oh my God," said Ben, grasping his stomach. He leaned weakly across the sink and drank another glass of water.

"Well, forget about it," she said, "all of you. Life's too short."

"No. No." Steve began again. "Stevie isn't built --"

Margaret came in fearfully. Her eyes were red, her broad German face white and tearful. A group of excited boarders whispered in the hall.

Their faces were sad. There was great age in them. They felt suddenly the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless nihilism of life.

Life was. At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion, antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with sad tranquillity. They were like men who, driving forward desperately at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their footprints stretching interminably away across the waste land of the desert; or I should say, they were like those who have been mad, and who will be mad again, but who see themselves for a moment quietly, sanely, at morning, looking with sad untroubled eyes into a mirror.

"I'll lose them all now," Eliza fretted. "The last time three left. Over twenty dollars a week and money so hard to get. I don't know what's to become of us all." She wept again.

Margaret sat in a chair on the other side of the disorderly table, leaning her face in her hand and weeping. Her tears dredged little gulches through the thick compost of rouge and powder with which she coated her rough skin.

"Give him a cup of coffee, mama," Helen cried irritably. "For heaven's sake, you might do a little for him."

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Helen impatiently. "Forget about the boarders once in a while."

Steve sank stupidly into a chair by the long table. From time to time he muttered sentimentally to himself. Luke, his face sensitive, hurt, ashamed around his mouth, stood by him attentively, spoke gently to him, and brought him a glass of water.

"Why here, here," said Eliza, rushing awkwardly to the gas range and lighting a burner. "I never thought -- I'll have some in a minute."

"Cheer up, honey," said Helen, beginning to laugh. "Christmas is coming." She patted the broad German back comfortingly.

Ben snarled softly at him, made a sudden motion to strike him, but stopped. A swift light flickered across his mouth. He smoked.

Steve went away with the German woman to Indiana, where, at first, came news of opulence, fatness, ease, and furs (with photographs), later of brawls with her honest brothers, and talk of divorce, reunion and renascence. He gravitated between the two poles of his support, Margaret and Eliza, returning to Altamont every summer for a period of drugs and drunkenness that ended in a family fight, jail, and a hospital cure.

Ben opened the torn screen door and stepped out on the back porch. It was a cool night in the rich month of August; the sky was deeply pricked with great stars. He lighted a cigarette, holding the match with white trembling fingers. There were faint sounds from summer porches, the laughter of women, a distant throb of music at a dance. Eugene went and stood beside him: he looked up at him with wonder, exultancy, and with sadness. He prodded him half with fear, half with joy.

But Eliza wrote her oldest son regularly, enclosed sums of money from time to time, and revived her hopes incessantly, against nature, against reason, against the structure of life. She did not dare to come openly to his defense, to reveal frankly the place he held in her heart's core, but she would produce each letter in which he spoke boastfully of his successes, or announced his monthly resurrection, and read them to an unmoved family. They were florid, foolish letters, full of quotation marks and written in a large fancy hand. She was proud and pleased at all their extravagances; his flowery illiteracy was another proof to her of his superior intelligence.

Yours of the 11th to hand and must say I was glad to know you were in "the land of the living" again as I had begun to feel it was a "long time between drinks" since your last. ("I tell you what," said Eliza, looking up and sniggering with pleasure, "he's no fool." Helen, with a smile that was half ribald, half annoyed, about her big mouth, made a face at Luke, and lifted her eyes patiently upward to God as Eliza continued. Gant leaned forward tensely with his head craned upward, listening carefully with a faint grin of pleasure.) Well, mama, since I last wrote you things have been coming my way and it now looks as if the "Prodigal Son" will come home some day in his own private car. ("Hey, what's that?" said Gant, and she read it again for him. He wet his thumb and looked about with a pleased grin. "Wh-wh-what's the matter?" asked Luke. "Has he b-b-bought the railroad?" Helen laughed hoarsely. "I'm from Missouri," she said.) It took me a long time to get started, mama, but things were breaking against me and all that little Stevie has ever asked from any one in this "vale of tears" is a fair chance. (Helen laughed her ironical husky falsetto. "All that little S-S-Stevie has ever asked," said Luke, reddening with annoyance, "is the whole g-g-g-goddam world with a few gold mines thrown in.") But now that I'm on my feet at last, mama, I'm going to show the world that I haven't forgotten those who stood by me in my "hour of need," and that the best friend a man ever had is his mother. ("Where's the shovel?" said Ben, snickering quietly.)

"Hell commences," howled Gant, "as soon as he comes home. He's a curse and a care, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. Woman, you have given birth to a monster who will not rest until he has done me to death, fearful, cruel, and accursed reprobate that he is!"

Dear Mama:

"I hope so!" said Helen wearily. "You've got to show me."

"Forget about it," she said wearily.

Privately: "You see how it is, don't you?" she said to Luke, mounting to hysteria. "Do I get any credit? Do I? I can work my fingers to the bone for them, but do I get so much as Go to Hell for my trouble? Do I?"

'That boy writes a good letter," said Gant appreciatively. "I'm damned if he's not the smartest one of the lot when he wants to be."

In these years Helen went off into the South with Pearl Hines, the saddlemaker's daughter. They sang together at moving-picture theatres in country towns. They were booked from a theatrical office in Atlanta.

"Well," said Eliza thoughtfully, holding the letter in her folded hands and gazing away, "perhaps he's going to turn over a new leaf now. You never know." Lost in pleased revery she looked into vacancy, pursing her lips.

"Yes," said Luke angrily, "he's so smart that you'll b-b-believe any fairy tale he wants to tell you. B-b-b-but the one who's stuck by you through thick and thin gets no c-c-credit at all." He glanced meaningly at Helen. "It's a d-d-damn shame."

Pearl Hines was a heavily built girl with a meaty face and negroid lips. She was jolly and vital. She sang ragtime and nigger songs with a natural passion, swinging her hips and shaking her breasts erotically.

O pop, O pop, O-o pop."

"Here comes my da-dad-dy now

They earned as much as $100 a week sometimes. They played in towns like Waycross, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

They brought with them the great armor of innocency. They were eager and decent girls. Occasionally the village men made cautious explorative insults, relying on the superstition that lives in small towns concerning "show girls." But generally they were well treated.

For them, these ventures into new lands were eager with promise. The vacant idiot laughter, the ribald enthusiasm with which South Carolina or Georgia countrymen, filling a theatre with the strong smell of clay and sweat, greeted Pearl's songs, left them unwounded, pleased, eager. They were excited to know that they were members of the profession; they bought Variety regularly, they saw themselves finally a celebrated high-salaried team on "big time" in great cities. Pearl was to "put over" the popular songs, to introduce the rag melodies with the vital rhythm of her dynamic meatiness, Helen was to give operatic dignity to the programme. In a respectful hush, bathed in a pink spot, she sang ditties of higher quality -- Tosti's "Goodbye," "The End of a Perfect Day," and "The Rosary." She had a big, full, somewhat metallic voice: she had received training from her Aunt Louise, the splendid blonde who had lived in Altamont for several years after her separation from Elmer Pentland. Louise gave music lessons and enjoyed her waning youth with handsome young men. She was one of the ripe, rich, dangerous women that Helen liked. She had a little girl and went away to New York with the child when tongues grew fanged.

Helen had not forgotten. She fantasied of France and Italy: the big crude glare of what she called "a career in opera," the florid music, the tiered galleries winking with gems, the torrential applause directed toward the full-blooded, dominant all-shadowing songsters struck up great anthems in her. It was a scene, she thought, in which she was meant to shine. And as the team of Gant and Hines (The Dixie Melody Twins) moved on their jagged circuit through the South, this desire, bright, fierce, and formless, seemed, in some way, to be nearer realization.

She wrote home frequently, usually to Gant. Her letters beat like great pulses; they were filled with the excitement of new cities, presentiments of abundant life. In every town they met "lovely people"-- everywhere, in fact, good wives and mothers, and nice young men, were attracted hospitably to these two decent, happy, exciting girls. There was a vast decency, an enormous clean vitality about Helen that subjugated good people and defeated bad ones. She held under her dominion a score of young men -- masculine, red-faced, hard-drinking and shy. Her relation to them was maternal and magistral, they came to listen and to be ruled; they adored her, but few of them tried to kiss her.

But she said: "Helen, that voice ought to be trained for grand opera."

Eugene was puzzled and frightened by these lamb-like lions. Among men, they were fierce, bold, and combative; with her, awkward and timorous. One of them, a city surveyor, lean, highboned, alcoholic, was constantly involved in police-court brawls; another, a railroad detective, a large fair young man, split the skulls of negroes when he was drunk, shot several men, and was himself finally killed in a Tennessee gun-fight.

She never lacked for friends and protectors wherever she went. Occasionally, Pearl's happy and vital sensuality, the innocent gusto with which she implored

"Some sweet old daddy

drew on village rakedom to false conjectures. Unpleasant men with wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial drink of corn whisky, call them "girley," and suggest a hotel room or a motorcar as a meeting-place. When this happened, Pearl was stricken into silence; helpless and abashed, she appealed to Helen.

Come make a fuss over me."

And she, her large loose mouth tense and wounded at the corners, her eyes a little brighter, would answer:

But this partnership came to an end. The intention of Pearl Hines' life was direct and certain. She wanted to get married, she had always wanted to get married before she was twenty-five. For Helen, the singing partnership, the exploration of new lands, had been a gesture toward freedom, an instinctive groping toward a centre of life and purpose to which she could fasten her energy, a blind hunger for variety, beauty, and independence. She did not know what she wanted to do with her life; it was probable that she would never control even partially her destiny: she would be controlled, when the time came, by the great necessity that lived in her. That necessity was to enslave and to serve.

"I don't know what you mean by that remark. I guess you've made a mistake about us." This did not fail to exact stammering apologies and excuses.

She was painfully innocent, temperamentally incapable of wholly believing the worst about any one. She lived in the excitement of rumor and suggestion: it never seemed to her actually possible that the fast young women who excited her had, in the phrase she used, "gone the limit." She was skilled in gossip, and greedily attentive to it, but of the complex nastiness of village life she had little actual knowledge. Thus, with Pearl Hines, she walked confidently and joyously over volcanic crust, scenting only the odor of freedom, change, and adventure.

But she was in love with no one -- she would never be-and caution told her that the life-risk on bush-league ball-players was very great. She married finally a young man from Jersey City, heavy of hand, hoof, and voice, who owned a young but flourishing truck and livery business.

For two or three years Helen and Pearl supported themselves by these tours, leaving Altamont during its dull winter lassitude, and returning to it in Spring, or in Summer, with money enough to suffice them until their next season.

Pearl juggled carefully with the proposals of several young men during this period. She had the warmest affection for a ball-player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont team. He was a tough handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down in a frenzy of despair during the course of a game, and rushing belligerently at the umpire. She liked his hard assurance, his rapid twang, his tanned lean body.

Thus, the partnership of the Dixie Melody Twins was dissolved. Helen, left alone, turned away from the drear monotony of the small towns to the gaiety, the variety, and the slaking fulfilment of her desires, which she hoped somehow to find in the cities.

She missed Luke terribly. Without him she felt incomplete, unarmored. He had been enrolled in the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta for two years. He was taking the course in electrical engineering, the whole direction of his life had been thus shaped by Gant's eulogies, years before, of the young electrical expert, Liddell. He was failing in his work -- his mind had never been forced to the discipline of study. All purpose with him was broken by a thousand impulses: his brain stammered as did his tongue, and as he turned impatiently and irritably to the logarithm tables, he muttered the number of the page in idiot repetition, keeping up a constant wild vibration of his leg upon the ball of his foot.

His great commercial talent was salesmanship; he had superlatively that quality that American actors and men of business call "personality"-- a wild energy, a Rabelaisian vulgarity, a sensory instinct for rapid and swinging repartee, and a hypnotic power of speech, torrential, meaningless, mad, and evangelical. He could sell anything because, in the jargon of salesmen, he could sell himself; and there was a fortune in him in the fantastic elasticity of American business, the club of all the queer trades, of wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he could have chanted the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from their coats, doing every one, everything, and finally himself. He was not an electrical engineer -- he was electrical energy. He had no gift for study -- he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with it desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus and the mechanical sciences.

His broad mouth, even when stammering irritably or when nervousness clouded his face, was always cocked for laughter -- unearthly, exultant, idiot laughter. There was in him demonic exuberance, a wild intelligence that did not come from the brain. Eager for praise, for public esteem, and expert in ingratiation, this demon possessed him utterly at the most unexpected moments, in the most decorous surroundings, when he was himself doing all in his power to preserve the good opinion in which he was held.

Enormous humor flowed from him like crude light. Men who had never known him seethed with strange internal laughter when they saw him, and roared helplessly when he began to speak. Yet, his physical beauty was astonishing. His head was like that of a wild angel -- coils and whorls of living golden hair flashed from his head, his features were regular, generous, and masculine, illuminated by the strange inner smile of idiot ecstasy.

Thus, listening to an old lady of the church, who with all her power of persuasion and earnestness was unfolding the dogmas of Presbyterianism to him, he would lean forward in an attitude of exaggerated respectfulness and attention, one broad hand clinched about his knee, while he murmured gentle agreement to what she said:

Suddenly the demonic force would burst in him. Insanely tickled at the cadences of his agreement, the earnest placidity and oblivion of the old woman, and the extravagant pretense of the whole situation, his face flooded with wild exultancy, he would croon in a fat luscious bawdily suggestive voice:

"Yes?… Ye-e-es?… Ye-e-e-es?… Ye-e-es?… Is that right?… Ye-e-es?"

"Y-ah-s?… Y-a-h-s?… Y-a-h-s?… Y-ah-s?"

And when at length too late she became aware of this drowning flood of demonic nonsense, and paused, turning an abrupt startled face to him, he would burst into a wild "Whah-whah-whah-whah" of laughter, beyond all reason, with strange throat noises, tickling her roughly in the ribs.

Often Eliza, in the midst of long, minutely replenished reminiscence, would grow conscious, while she was purse-lipped in revery, of this annihilating mockery, would slap at his hand angrily as he gooched her, and shake a pursed piqued face at him, saying, with a heavy scorn that set him off into fresh "whah-whahs": "I'll declare, boy! You act like a regular idiot," and then shaking her head sadly, with elaborate pity: "I'd be ash-a-amed! A-sha-a-med."

His quality was extraordinary; he had something that was a great deal better than most intelligence; he saw the world in burlesque, and his occasional answer to its sham, hypocrisy, and intrigue was the idiot devastation of "whah-whah!" But he did not possess his demon; it possessed him from time to time. If it had possessed him wholly, constantly, his life would have prevailed with astonishing honesty and precision. But when he reflected, he was a child -- with all the hypocrisy, sentimentality and dishonest pretense of a child.

His face was a church in which beauty and humor were married -- the strange and the familiar were at one in him. Men, looking at Luke, felt a start of recognition as if they saw something of which they had never heard, but which they had known forever.

Once or twice, during the Winter and Spring, while she was touring with Pearl Hines, Helen got into Atlanta to see him. In Spring they attended the week of Grand Opera. He would find employment for one night as a spearman in Aïda and pass the doorman for the remainder of the week with the assurance that he was "a member of the company -- Lukio Gantio."

His large feet spread tightly out in sandals; behind the shingreaves his awkward calves were spined thickly with hair; a thick screw of hair writhed under the edge of his tin helmet, as he loafed in the wings, leaning comically on his spear, his face lit with exultancy.

Caruso, waiting his entrance, regarded him from time to time with a wide Wop smile.

"Wotta you call yourself, eh?" asked Caruso, approaching and looking him over.

"You're one hell of a soldier," said Caruso.

"W-w-w-why," he said, "d-don't you know one of your s-s-s-soldiers when you see him?"

In the summer now he returned to Altamont, finding employment with a firm of land-auctioneers, and assisting them at the sale of a tract or a parcel of lots. He moved about above the crowd in the bed of a wagon, exhorting them to bid, with his hand at the side of his mouth, in a harangue compounded of frenzy, passionate solicitation, and bawdry. The work intoxicated him. With wide grins of expectancy they crowded round the spokes. In a high throaty tenor he called to them:

"Whah-whah-whah!" Luke answered. With difficulty he restrained his prodding fingers.

"Step right up, gentlemen, lot number 17, in beautiful Homewood -- we furnish the wood, you furnish the home. Now gentlemen, this handsome building-site has a depth of 179 feet, leaving plenty of room for garden and backhouse (grow your own corn cobs in beautiful Homewood) with a frontage of 114 feet on a magnificent new macadam road."

"On the blueprint, of course, Colonel. You've got it all in black and white. Now, gentlemen, the opportunity of your lives is kicking you in the pants. Are you men of vision? Think what Ford, Edison, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Julius Caesar would do. Obey that impulse. You can't lose. The town is coming this way. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? Swell. The new courthouse will be built on yonder hill, the undertaker and the village bakery will occupy handsome edifices of pressed brick just above you. Oyez, oyez, oyez. What am I offered? What am I offered? Own your own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannonshot of all railway, automobile, and airplane connections. Running water abounds within a Washingtonian stone's throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all trains. Gentlemen, here's your chance to make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources -- gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the trees."

"Where is the road?" some one shouted.

"What about the bushes, Luke?" yelled Mr. Halloran, the dairy-lunch magnate.

"O that's all right." O modestly. Generously.

"Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes," Luke answered amid general tumult. "All right, Major. You with the face. What am I offered? What am I offered?"

When there was no sale, he greeted incoming tourists at the station-curbing with eloquent invitations to Dixieland, rich, persuasive, dominant above all the soliciting babel of the car-drivers, negro hotel-porters, and boarding-house husbands.

A fine boy. As she cooled from her labors in the summer night, he brought her little boxes of ice-cream from town.

"I'll give you a dollar apiece for every one you drum up," said Eliza.

He was a hustler: he sold patent washboards, trick potato-peelers, and powdered cockroach-poison from house to house. To the negroes he sold hair-oil guaranteed to straighten kinky hair, and religious lithographs, peopled with flying angels, white and black, and volant cherubs, black and white, sailing about the knees of an impartial and crucified Saviour, and subtitled "God Loves Them Both."

"He'd give you the shirt off his back," said Gant.

Otherwise, he drove Gant's car -- a 1913 five-passenger Ford, purchase of an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half Gant's conversation, object of abuse, boast, and anathema. It was before every one owned a car. Gant was awed and terrified by his rash act, exalted at the splendor of his chariot, appalled at its expense. Each bill for gasoline, repairs, or equipment brought a howl of anguish from him; a puncture, a breakdown, a minor disorder caused him to circle about in maddened strides, cursing, praying, weeping.

They sold like hot cakes.

"I've never had a moment's peace since I bought it," he howled. "Accursed and bloody monster that it is, it will not be content until it has sucked out my life-blood, sold the roof over my head, and sent me out to the pauper's grave to perish. Merciful God," he wept, "it's fearful, it's awful, it's cruel that I should be afflicted thus in my old age." Turning to his constrained and apologetic son abruptly, he said: "How much is the bill? Hey?" His eyes roved wildly in his head.

"D-d-d-don't get excited, papa," Luke answered soothingly, teetering from foot to foot, "it's only $8.92."

"Jesus God!" Gant screamed. "I'm ruined." Sobbing in loud burlesque sniffles, he began his caged pacing.

As the hour grew late, and the streets silent, his madness swelled in him. Lipping the rim of a long hill street, tree-arched and leafy and shelving in even terraces, he would burst suddenly into insane laughter, bend over the wheel, and pull the throttle open, his idiot "whah-whahs" filling the darkness as Gant screamed curses at him. Down through the night they tore at murderous speed, the boy laughing at curse and prayer alike as they shot past the blind menace of street-crossings.

But it was pleasant at dusk or in the cool summer nights, with Eliza or one of his daughters beside him, and a fragrant weed between his pallid lips, to hinge his long body into the back seat, and ride out into the fragrant countryside, or through the long dark streets of town. At the approach of another car he cried out in loud alarm, by turns cursing and entreating his son to caution. Luke drove nervously, erratically, wildly -- his stammering impatient hands and knees communicated their uneven fidget to the flivver. He cursed irritably, plunged in exacerbated fury at the brake, and burst out in an annoyed "tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh," when the car stalled.

"You Goddamned scoundrel!" Gant yelled. "Stop, you mountain grill, or I'll put you in jail."

"Whah-whah."-- His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto.

Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness, quite blue with terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual arrivals to her breast, melodramatically, and moan:

"I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my innocent motherless babes --"

On Sunday they made long tours into the country. Often they drove to Reynoldsville, twenty-two miles away. It was an ugly little resort, noisy with arriving and departing cars, with a warm stench of oil and gasoline heavy above its broad main street. But people were coming and going from several States: Southward they came up from South Carolina and Georgia, cotton-farmers, small tradesmen and their families in battered cars coated with red sandclay dust. They had a heavy afternoon dinner of fried chicken, corn, string-beans, and sliced tomatoes, at one of the big wooden boarding-house hotels, spent another hour in a drugstore over a chocolate nut-sundae, watched the summer crowd of fortunate tourists and ripe cool-skinned virgins flow by upon the wide sidewalk in thick pullulation, and returned again, after a brief tour of the town, on the winding immediate drop to the hot South. New lands.

"He's a fiend out of hell," cried Gant, beginning to weep. "Cruel and criminal monster that he is, he will batter our brains out against a tree, before he's done." They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car that, with a startled screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like a frightened horse.

"Whah-whah-whah!"

"You damned thug!" Gant roared, plunging forward and fastening his great hands around Luke's throat. "Will you stop?"

Luke added another notch of blazing speed. Gant fell backward with a howl of terror.

Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South filled summer porches.

Luke was a darling. He was a dear, a fine boy, a big-hearted generous fellow, and just the cutest thing. Women liked him, laughed at him, pulled fondly the thick golden curls of his hair. He was sentimentally tender to children -- girls of fourteen years. He had a grand romantic feeling for Delia Selborne, the oldest daughter of Mrs. Selborne. He bought her presents, was tender and irritable by turns. Once, at Gant's, on the porch under an August moon and the smell of ripening grapes, he caressed her while Helen sang in the parlor. He caressed her gently, leaned his head over her, and said he would like to lay it on her b-b-b-b-breast. Eugene watched them bitterly, with an inch of poison round his heart. He wanted the girl for himself: she was stupid, but she had the wise body and faint hovering smile of her mother. He wanted Mrs. Selborne more, he fantasied passionately about her yet, but her image lived again in Delia. As a result, he was proud, cold, scornful and foolish before them. They disliked him.

Enviously, with gnawn heart, he observed Luke's ministrations to Mrs. Selborne. His service was so devout, so extravagant that even Helen grew annoyed and occasionally jealous. And nightly, from a remote corner at Gant's or Eliza's, or from a parked automobile before the house, he heard her rich welling laughter, full of tenderness, surrender, and mystery. Sometimes, waiting in pitch darkness on the stairs at Eliza's, at one or two o'clock in the morning, he felt her pass him. As she touched him in the dark, she gave a low cry of terror; with an uncivil grunt he reassured her, and descended to bed with a pounding heart and burning face.

Ah, yes, he thought, with green morality, observing his brother throned in laughter and affection, you Big Fool, you -- you're just a sucker! You show off and act big, my sonny, and spend your money bringing ice-cream for them -- but what do you get out of it? How do you feel when she gets out of an automobile at two o'clock in the morning after grunting in the dark with some damned travelling-man, or with old Poxy Logan who's been keeping a nigger woman up for years. "May I p-p-p-put my head on your breast?" You make me sick, you damned fool. SHE'S no better, only you don't know beans. She'll let you spend all your money on her and then she'll run off with some little pimp in an automobile for the rest of the night. Yes, that's so. Do you want to make anything out of it? You big bluff. Come out into the back yard… I'll show you… take that… and that… and that…

Luke worked as hard for an education as any other self-made man. He made every sacrifice. He did everything but study.

Luke had several hundred dollars saved from The Saturday Evening Post days, when he went off to school. He accepted very little money from Gant. He waited on tables, he solicited for college boarding-houses, he was the agent for a tailor who made Kippy Kampus Klothes. Gant boasted of these efforts. The town shifted its quid, nodded pertly, and spat, saying:

Pumping his fists wildly, he fought his phantom into defeat and himself into exhaustion.

"That boy'll make his mark."

He was an immense popular success, so very extra, so very Luky. The school sought and adored him. Twice, after football games, he mounted a hearse and made funeral orations over the University of Georgia.

But, in spite of all his effort, toward the end of his third year he was still a sophomore, with every prospect of remaining one. One day in Spring he wrote the following letter to Gant:

"The b-b-b-bastards who r-r-run this place have it in for me. I've been c-c-c-crooked good and proper. They take your hard-earned m-m-money here and skin you. I'm g-g-g-going to a real school."

He went to Pittsburgh and found work with the Westinghouse Electric Company. Three times a week at night he attended courses at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He made friends.

From time to time, in summer for a few weeks, at Christmas for a few days, he returned to celebrate his holidays with his family. Always he brought Gant a suitcase stocked with beer and whisky. That boy was "good to his father."

The war had come. After fifteen months in Pittsburgh he moved on to Dayton where he got employment at a boiler factory engaged in the fabrication of war materials.