英语小说网

With fine enthusiasm, but poor judgment, Eugene paid the widow two months in advance. Her name was Bradley: she was a flabby petulant woman with a white face and heart-disease. But her food was excellent. Mrs. Bradley's student son answered to his initial letters --"G. T." G. T. Bradley, a member of the sophomore class, was a surly scowling youth of nineteen -- a mixture, in equal parts, of servility and insolence. His chief, but thwarted, ambition was to be elected to membership in a fraternity. Having failed to win recognition by the exercise of his natural talents, he was driven by an extraordinary obsession that fame and glory would come to him if he were known as the slave-driver of a number of Freshmen.

Before his first year was ended, the boy had changed his lodging four or five times. He finished the year living alone in a big bare carpetless room -- an existence rare at Pulpit Hill, where the students, with very few exceptions, lived two or three to a room. In that room began a physical isolation, hard enough to bear at first, which later became indispensable to him, mind and body.

He had come to Pulpit Hill with Hugh Barton, who met him at Exeter and drove him over in the big roadster. After his registration, he had secured lodging quickly at the house of an Altamont widow whose son was a student. Hugh Barton looked relieved and departed, hoping to reach home and his bride by nightfall.

But these tactics, tried on Eugene, produced at once defiance and resentment. Their hostility was bitter: G. T. set himself to thwart and ruin the beginnings of the boy's university life. He trapped him into public blunders, and solicited audiences to witness his humiliation; he wheedled his confidence and betrayed it. But there is a final mockery, an ultimate treachery that betrays us into shame; our capacity for villainy, like all our other capacities, is so small. The day came when Eugene was free from bondage. He was free to leave the widow's house of sorrow. G. T. approached him, scowling, diffidently.

"I hear you're leaving us, 'Gene," he said.

"Yes," said Eugene.

"You take things too seriously, 'Gene," he said.

"Yes," said Eugene.

"Is it because of the way I've acted?"

"Yes," said Eugene.

"I don't want you to go having hard feelings, 'Gene. Let's shake hands and be friends."

He thrust his hand out stiffly. Eugene looked at the hard weak face, the furtive, unhappy eyes casting about for something they might call their own. The thick black hair was plastered stiff with grease; he saw white points of dandruff at the roots. There was an odor of talcum powder. He had been borne and nourished in the body of his white-faced mother -- for what? To lap the scornful stroking fingers of position; to fawn miserably before an emblem. Eugene had a moment of nausea.

"No," said Eugene.

"You don't hate me, do you?" whined G. T.

"No," said Eugene.

"Let's shake hands, 'Gene," said the boy once more, waggling his out-thrust fingers.

Eugene lived in a small world, but its ruins for him were actual. His misfortunes were trifling, but their effect upon his spirit was deep and calamitous. He withdrew deeply and scornfully into his cell. He was friendless, whipped with scorn and pride. He set his face blindly against all the common united life around him.

He had a moment of pity, of sickness. He forgave because it was necessary to forget.

It was during this bitter and desperate autumn that Eugene first met Jim Trivett.

Jim Trivett, the son of a rich tobacco farmer in the eastern part of the State, was a good tempered young tough of twenty years. He was a strong, rather foul-looking boy, with a coarse protruding mouth, full-meated and slightly ajar, constantly rayed with a faint loose smile and blotted at the comer with a brown smear of tobacco juice. He had bad teeth. His hair was light-brown, dry, and unruly: it stuck out in large untidy mats. He was dressed in the last cheap extreme of the dreadful fashion of the time: skin-tight trousers that ended an inch above his oxford shoes exposing an inch of clocked hose, a bobtailed coat belted in across his kidneys, large striped collars of silk. Under his coat he wore a big sweater with high-school numerals.

"Come in the house, Goddamn it!" he would roar hospitably.

Jim Trivett lived with several other students from his community in a lodging-house near Mrs. Bradley's but closer to the west gate of the university. There were four young men banded together for security and companionship in two untidy rooms heated to a baking dryness by small cast-iron stoves. They made constant preparations for study, but they never studied: one would enter sternly, announcing that he had "a hell of a day tomorrow," and begin the most minute preparations for a long contest with his books: he would sharpen his pencils carefully and deliberately, adjust his lamp, replenish the red-hot stove, move his chair, put on an eye-shade, clean his pipe, stuff it carefully with tobacco, light, relight, and empty it, then, with an expression of profound relief, hear a rapping on his door.

"Hello, 'Gene! Pull up a chair, son, and sit down," said Tom Grant. He was a thickly built boy, gaudily dressed; he had a low forehead, black hair, and a kind, stupid, indolent temper.

"I thought you had Torrington," said Jim Trivett.

"Yes," said Jim Trivett.

"What he doesn't know about it," said Tom Grant, "you could write out on the back of a postage stamp. Old man Sanford thinks you're hell, 'Gene."

"Gene!" said Jim Trivett, "what the hell do you know about this damned English, anyway?"

"What do you want me to do? Write it for you?"

"Have you been working?"

"I've got a long paper to write. I don't know what to write about," said Jim Trivett.

"Hell, yes!" shouted Jim Trivett. "I've been working like a son-of-a-bitch."

"God!" said Tom Grant, turning slowly to look at him. "Boy, you're going to choke to death on one of those some day." He shook his head slowly and sadly, then continued with a rough laugh: "If old man Trivett knew what you were doing with his money, damn if he wouldn't bust a gut."

"No," said Eugene, "I wasn't English enough. Young and crude. I changed, thank God! What is it you want, Jim?" he asked.

"Write your own damn paper," said Eugene with mimic toughness, "I won't do it for you. I'll help you if I can."

Jim Trivett's loose smile widened. He spat into the wood-box.

"Look here, Legs!" said Jim Trivett, grinning loosely. "Do you really want to go with me or are you just bluffing?"

"I'm ready to go any time he is," he said uneasily.

"I'll go with you! I've told you I'd go with you!" Eugene said angrily. He trembled a little.

"Well, what about it, 'Gene?" Jim Trivett demanded suddenly. "Is it a go? Saturday?"

"Suits me!" said Eugene.

"Gawd!" he said. "They'll think Spring is here when they see old Legs. They'll need a stepladder to git at him."

Eugene flushed, making a defensive answer.

"They sure God will!" he said.

When he had gone, they grinned thirstily at each other for a moment, the pleased corrupters of chastity.

Tom Grant was shaken with hard fat laughter.

"It'll make a man of you, 'Gene," he said. "Boy, it'll sure put hair on your chest." He laughed, not loudly, but uncontrollably, shaking his head as at some secret thought.

"When are you going to let Hard Boy take you to Exeter?" said Tom Grant, winking at Jim Trivett.

Tom Grant grinned slyly at Jim Trivett.

"Wait a minute!" whispered Jim Trivett. "I think this is the place."

"It's not going to hurt him," said Jim Trivett. "It'll be good for him."

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grinning.

"Pshaw!" said Tom Grant. "You oughtn't to do that, Hard Boy. You're leading the boy astray."

They had turned away from the centre of the dreary tobacco town. For a quarter of an hour they had walked briskly through drab autumnal streets, descending finally a long rutted hill that led them, past a thinning squalor of cheap houses, almost to the outskirts. It was three weeks before Christmas: the foggy air was full of chill menace. There was a brooding quietness, broken by far small sounds. They turned into a sordid little road, unpaved, littered on both sides with negro shacks and the dwellings of poor whites. It was a world of rickets. The road was unlighted. Their feet stirred dryly through fallen leaves.

They paused before a two-storey frame house. A lamp burned dimly behind lowered yellow shades, casting a murky pollen out upon the smoky air.

"Yes, suh," said the negro, "dis is it."

"Does Miss Lily know you're comin'?" the negro asked.

"Evenin', boss!" the negro answered wearily, but in the same tone.

Eugene leaned against a tree, listening to their quiet conspiratorial talk. The night, vast and listening, gathered about him its evil attentive consciousness. His lips were cold and trembled. He thrust a cigarette between them and, shivering, turned up the thick collar of his overcoat.

They heard scuffling steps through the leaves. In a moment a negro man prowled up.

Eugene waited in the shadow of the tree while the two men went up to the house. They avoided the front veranda, and went around to the side. The negro rapped gently at a latticed door. There were always latticed doors. Why?

"Hello, John," said Jim Trivett, almost inaudibly.

"We're looking for Lily Jones' house," said Jim Trivett. "Is this it?"

"Yes, suh," said the negro. "I'll go up dar wid yo'."

"No," said Jim Trivett. "Do you know her?"

"Wait a minute," said Jim Trivett, in a low voice, "I'll find out."

He waited, saying farewell to himself. He stood over his life, he felt, with lifted assassin blade. He was mired to his neck, inextricably, in complication. There was no escape.

There had been a faint closed noise from the house: voices and laughter, and the cracked hoarse tone of an old phonograph. The sound stopped quickly as the negro rapped: the shabby house seemed to listen. In a moment, a hinge creaked stealthily: he caught the low startled blur of a woman's voice. Who is it? Who?

In another moment Jim Trivett returned to him, and said quietly:

"It's all right, 'Gene. Come on."

He slipped a coin into the negro's hand, thanking him. Eugene looked for a moment into the black broad friendliness of the man's face. He had a flash of warmth through his cold limbs. The black bawd had done his work eagerly and kindly: over their bought unlovely loves lay the warm shadow of his affection.

They ascended the path quietly and, mounting two or three steps, went in under the latticed door. A woman stood beside it, holding it open. When they had entered, she closed it securely. Then they crossed the little porch and entered the house.

"Lord a' mercy! Any woman that gits him will have to cut off some of them legs."

They found themselves in a little hall which cleft the width of the house. A smoky lamp, wicked low, cast its dim circle into the dark. An uncarpeted stair mounted to the second floor. There were two doors both to left and right, and an accordion hat-rack, on which hung a man's battered felt hat.

Jim Trivett embraced the woman immediately, grinning, and fumbling in her breast.

"Hello, Lily," he said.

Lily Jones laughed hoarsely. The door to the right opened and Thelma, a small woman, slightly built, came out, followed by high empty yokel laughter. Jim Trivett embraced her affectionately.

"I'd like to see him with Thelma," said Jim Trivett, grinning.

"My Gawd!" said Thelma, in a tinny voice. "What've we got here?" She thrust out her sharp wrenny face, and studied Eugene insolently.

"Gawd!" She smiled crudely, and continued to peer at Eugene, curious at what the maw of night had thrown in to her. Then, turning to Jim Trivett with a coarse laugh, she said:

He winced a little.

"He's young, too," said Lily, staring at him intently. "How old are you, son?"

"He don't look that old," said Lily doubtfully. "I wouldn't call him more'n fifteen, to look at his face. Ain't he got a little face, though?" she demanded in a slow puzzled voice.

"Ain't he the lankiest feller you ever seen?" said Lily Jones impersonally. "How tall are you, son?" she added, addressing him in a kind drawl.

"I don't know," he said. "I think about six three."

"I brought you a new beau, Thelma," said Jim Trivett.

"He hasn't measured since last week," said Jim Trivett. "He can't be sure about it."

Eugene turned his pallid face away, indefinitely.

"Why," he croaked, "I'm about --"

"He's going on eighteen," said Jim Trivett loyally. "Don't you worry about him. Old Legs knows all the ropes, all right. He's a bearcat. I wouldn't kid you. He's been there."

"He's more than that!" said Thelma positively. "He's seven foot tall or I'm a liar."

"It's the only one I've got," said Eugene angrily. "Sorry I can't change it for a larger one."

"It looks so funny stickin' way up there above you," she went on patiently.

Thelma nudged her sharply.

"That's because he's got a big frame," she said. "Legs is all right. When he begins to fill out an' put some meat on them bones he's goin' to make a big man. You'll be a heartbreaker sure, Legs," she said harshly, taking his cold hand and squeezing it. In him the ghost, his stranger, turned grievously away. O God! I shall remember, he thought.

"See you later, 'Gene," said Jim Trivett. "Stay with them, son."

He hugged the boy roughly with one arm, and went into the room to the left with Thelma.

"Well," said Jim Trivett, "let's git goin'." He embraced Thelma again. They fumbled amorously.

Eugene mounted the creaking stairs slowly and entered the room with the open door. A hot mass of coals glowed flamelessly in the hearth. He took off his hat and overcoat and threw them across a wooden bed. Then he sat down tensely in a rocker and leaned forward, holding his trembling fingers to the heat. There was no light save that of the coals; but, by their dim steady glow, he could make out the old and ugly wall-paper, stained with long streaks of water rust, and scaling, in dry tattered scrolls, here and there. He sat quietly, bent forward, but he shook violently, as with an ague, from time to time. Why am I here? This is not I, he thought.

"You go on upstairs, son," said Lily. "I'll be up in a minute. The door's open."

Presently he heard the woman's slow heavy tread upon the stairs: she entered in a swimming tide of light, bearing a lamp before her. She put the lamp down on a table and turned the wick. He could see her now more plainly. Lily was a middle-aged country woman, with a broad heavy figure, unhealthily soft. Her smooth peasant face was mapped with fine little traceries of wrinkles at the corners of mouth and eyes, as if she had worked much in the sun. She had black hair, coarse and abundant. She was whitely plastered with talcum powder. She was dressed shapelessly in a fresh loose dress of gingham, unbelted. She was dressed like a housewife, but she conceded to her profession stockings of red silk, and slippers of red felt, trimmed with fur, in which she walked with a flat-footed tread.

The woman fastened the door, and returned to the hearth where the boy was now standing. He embraced her with feverish desire, fondling her with his long nervous hands. Indecisively, he sat in the rocker and drew her down clumsily on his knee. She yielded her kisses with the coy and frigid modesty of the provincial harlot, turning her mouth away. She shivered as his cold hands touched her.

"Let's git started," she said. "Where's my money?"

"You're cold as ice, son," she said. "What's the matter?"

Then he lay down beside her. He trembled, unnerved and impotent. Passion was extinct in him.

She chafed him with rough embarrassed professionalism. In a moment she rose impatiently.

He thrust two crumpled bills into her hand.

"Be quiet," she whispered, "there's a man across the street. They've been watching us lately."

When he went down stairs, he found Jim Trivett waiting in the hall, holding Thelma by the hand. Lily led them out quietly, after peering through the lattice into the fog, and listening for a moment.

"Come again, Slats," Thelma murmured, pressing his hand.

They went out softly, treading gently until they reached the road. The fog had thickened: the air was saturated with fine stinging moisture.

The massed coals caved in the hearth. The lost bright wonder died.

At the corner, in the glare of the street-lamp, Jim Trivett released his breath with loud relief, and stepped forward boldly.

"Damn!" he said. "I thought you were never coming. What were you trying to do with the woman, Legs?" Then, noting the boy's face, he added quickly, with warm concern: "What's the matter, 'Gene? Don't you feel good?"

"Jim," said Eugene, after a moment's pause.

They mounted the hill slowly. The light from winking cornerlamps fell with a livid stare across the fronts of the squalid houses.

"Don't say anything about my getting sick," he said awkwardly.

"How do you feel?" asked Jim Trivett. "Better?"

"Yes," said Eugene, "I'm all right now."

"Why didn't you tell me you were sick?" said Jim Trivett chidingly.

"Wait a minute!" said Eugene thickly. "Be all right!"

"I felt all right," said Jim Trivett. "A cup of coffee will fix you up," he added with cheerful conviction.

"Yes. What is it?"

He went to the curb, and vomited into the gutter. Then he straightened, mopping his mouth with a handkerchief.

"It came on all of a sudden," said Eugene. He added presently: "I think it was something I ate at that damn Greek's to-night."

Surprised, Jim Trivett stared at him.

"Oh, all right. I won't. Why should I?" said Jim Trivett.

"Why not? There's nothing in that," he said. "Pshaw, boy, any one's likely to get sick."

"Yes, I know. But I'd rather you wouldn't."

Eugene was haunted by his own lost ghost: he knew it to be irrecoverable. For three days he avoided every one: the brand of his sin, he felt, was on him. He was published by every gesture, by every word. His manner grew more defiant, his greeting to life more unfriendly. He clung more closely to Jim Trivett, drawing a sad pleasure from his coarse loyal praise. His unappeased desire began to burn anew: it conquered his bodily disgust and made new pictures. At the end of the week he went again, alone, to Exeter, No more of him, he felt, could be lost. This time he sought out Thelma.

When he went home for Christmas, his loins were black with vermin. The great body of the State lay like a barren giant below the leaden reek of the skies. The train roared on across the vast lift of the Piedmont: at night, as he lay in his berth, in a diseased coma, it crawled up into the great fortress of the hills. Dimly, he saw their wintry bulk, with its bleak foresting. Below a trestle, silent as a dream, a white rope of water coiled between its frozen banks. His sick heart lifted in the haunting eternity of the hills. He was hillborn. But at dawn, as he came from the cars with the band of returning students, his depression revived. The huddle of cheap buildings at the station seemed meaner and meaner than ever before. The hills, above the station flats, with their cheap propped houses, had the unnatural closeness of a vision. The silent Square seemed to have rushed together during his absence, and as he left the car and descended the street to Dixieland, it was as if he devoured toy-town distances with a giant's stride.

He did not know where to turn. He paced his chill room at night, muttering, until Eliza's troubled face appeared above her wrapper. His father was gentler, older than he had ever seen him; his pain had returned on him. He was absent and sorrowful. He talked perfunctorily with his son about college. Speech choked in Eugene's throat. He stammered a few answers and fled from the house and the vacant fear in Gant's eyes. He walked prodigiously, day and night, in an effort to command his own fear. He believed himself to be rotting with a leprosy. And there was nothing to do but rot. There was no cure. For such had been the instruction of the moralists of his youth.

He walked with aimless desperation, unable to quiet for a moment his restless limbs. He went up on the eastern hills that rose behind Niggertown. A winter's sun labored through the mist. Low on the meadows, and high on the hills, the sunlight lay on the earth like milk.

The Christmas was gray and chill. Helen was not there to give it warmth. Gant and Eliza felt the depression of her absence. Ben came and went like a ghost. Luke was not coming home. And he himself was sick with shame and loss.

"Sit down, 'Gene," said Ben quietly, after a moment. "Don't be a little idiot. You're not going to die, you know. When did this happen?"

"What's the matter? Where've you been?" asked Ben sharply. He sat up in bed.

"In God's name!" Ben cried angrily. "Have you gone crazy? What's wrong with you?"

As they walked townward, he tried to talk, explaining himself in babbling incoherent spurts.

"I've been with a woman," said Eugene.

He found Ben still in bed at Woodson Street, smoking. He closed the door, then spun wildly about as if caged.

The boy blurted out his confession.

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben impatiently. "Dry up! I don't want to hear about it. I'm not your damned Guardian Angel."

"It was like this," he began, "if I had known, but at that time I didn't -- of course I know it was my own fault for --"

"Come on," said he, "we'll go to see McGuire."

"I'm -- I'm sick!" he gasped.

Ben got up and put on his clothes.

He stood looking. A shaft of hope cut through the blackness of his spirit. I will go to my brother, he thought.

The news was comforting. So many people, after our fall from grace, are.

They mounted to the wide dark corridor of the Doctors' and Surgeons', with its sharp excitement of medical smells. McGuire's anteroom was empty. Ben rapped at the inner door. McGuire opened it: he pulled away the wet cigarette that was plastered on his heavy lip, to greet them.

"Hello, Ben. Hello, son!" he barked, seeing Eugene. "When'd you get back?"

"He thinks he's dying of galloping consumption, McGuire," said Ben, with a jerk of the head. "You may be able to do something to prolong his life."

"What's the matter, son?" said McGuire.

Eugene gulped dryly, craning his livid face.

"I don't want to go with you," said Ben surlily. "I've got troubles enough of my own."

Eugene followed McGuire's burly figure into the office; McGuire closed the door, and sat down heavily at his littered desk.

"If you don't mind," he croaked. "See you alone." He turned desperately upon his brother. "You stay here. Don't want you with me."

"Sit down, son," he commanded, "and tell me about it." He lit a cigarette and stuck it deftly on his sag wet lip. He glanced keenly at the boy, noting his contorted face.

"It was this way," Eugene began in a low voice. "I've made a mistake. I know that. I'm willing to take my medicine. I'm not making any excuses for what has happened," his voice rose sharply; he got half-way out of his chair, and began to pound fiercely upon the untidy desk. "I'm putting the blame on no one. Do you understand that?"

McGuire turned a bloated bewildered face slowly upon his patient. His wet cigarette sagged comically from his half-opened mouth.

"Take your time, son," he said kindly, "and control yourself. Whatever it is, it's probably not as bad as you think."

"Do I understand what?" he said. "See here, 'Gene: what the hell are you driving at? I'm no Sherlock Holmes, you know. I'm your doctor. Spit it out."

"What I've done," he said dramatically, "thousands have done. Oh, I know they may pretend not to. But they do! You're a doctor -- you know that. People high-up in society, too. I'm one of the unlucky ones. I got caught. Why am I any worse than they are? Why --" he continued rhetorically.

"I think I catch your drift," said McGuire dryly. "Let's have a look, son."

"Why should I bear the stigma for what others get away with? Hypocrites -- a crowd of damned, dirty, whining hypocrites, that's what they are. The Double-Standard! Hah! Where's the justice, where's the honor of that? Why should I be blamed for what people in High Society --"

"Who's blaming you? You don't think you're the first one who ever had this sort of trouble, do you? There's nothing wrong with you, anyway."

Eugene obeyed feverishly, still declaiming.

McGuire lifted his big head from its critical stare, and barked comically.

"Can -- can you cure me?" Eugene asked.

"No. You're incurable, son!" said McGuire. He scrawled a few hieroglyphics on a prescription pad. "Give this to the druggist," he said, "and be a little more careful hereafter of the company you keep. People in High Society, eh?" he grinned. "So that's where you've been?"

The great weight of blood and tears had lifted completely out of the boy's heart, leaving him dizzily buoyant, wild, half-conscious only of his rushing words.

He opened the door and went into the outer room. Ben got up quickly and nervously.

"Well," he said, "how much longer has he got to live?" Seriously, in a low voice, he added: "There's nothing wrong with him, is there?"

When they came out on the street again, Ben said:

"No," said McGuire, "I think he's a little off his nut. But, then, you all are."

"No," said Eugene.

"You damned fool!" Ben muttered. "Come on -- let's eat."

"Some time yesterday," said Eugene. "I don't remember."

"When did you eat last?"

"Have you had anything to eat?"

The idea became very attractive. The world was washed pleasantly in the milky winter sunshine. The town, under the stimulus of the holidays and the returning students, had wakened momentarily from its winter torpor: warm brisk currents of life seethed over the pavements. He walked along at Ben's side with a great bounding stride, unable to govern the expanding joy that rose yeastily in him. Finally, as he turned in on the busy avenue, he could restrain himself no longer: he leaped high in the air, with a yelp of ecstasy:

Eugene got back his heart again. He got it back fiercely and carelessly, with an eldritch wildness. During the remainder of his holiday, he plunged recklessly through the lively crowds, looking boldly but without insolence at the women and young girls. They grew unexpectedly out of the waste drear winter like splendid flowers. He was eager and alone. Fear is a dragon that lives among crowds -- and in armies. It lives hardly with men who are alone. He felt released -- beyond the last hedge of desperation.

"Bring me some veal cutlets breaded with tomato sauce," he said, "with a side-order of hash-brown potatoes, a dish of creamed carrots and peas, and a plate of hot biscuits. Also a cup of coffee."

"Hang on to him, Ben!" yelled Jim Pollock. He was a deadly little man, waxen and smiling under a black mustache, the chief compositor, a Socialist.

"You little idiot!" Ben cried sharply. "Are you crazy!"

He scowled fiercely, then turned to the roaring passersby, with a thin smile.

"Eat!" said Ben fiercely. "Eat!"

"Squee-ee!"

Eugene studied the card thoughtfully.

They went into the big new lunch-room and sat at one of the tables.

"A cup of coffee and a piece of mince pie," said Ben.

"I'll take the same," said Eugene.

"If you cut off his damned big feet," said Ben, "he'd go up like a balloon."

"What's yours?" said the waiter.

Freed and alone, he looked with a boding detachment at all the possessed and possessing world about him. Life hung for his picking fingers like a strange and bitter fruit. THEY -- the great clan huddled there behind the stockade for warmth and safety -- could hunt him down some day and put him to death: he thought they would.

But he was not now afraid -- he was content, if only the struggle might be fruitful. He looked among the crowds printed with the mark of his danger, seeking that which he might desire and take.

He went back to the university sealed up against the taunts of the young men: in the hot green Pullman they pressed about him with thronging jibe, but they fell back sharply, as fiercely he met them, with constraint.

There came and sat beside him Tom French, his handsome face vested in the hard insolence of money. He was followed by his court jester, Roy Duncan, the slave with the high hard cackle.

"Hello, Gant," said Tom French harshly. "Been to Exeter lately?" Scowling, he winked at grinning Roy.

"Yes," said Eugene, "I've been there lately, and I'm on my way there now. What's it to you, French?"

"Who's we?" said Eugene. "Who's them?"

Discomfited by this hard defiance, the rich man's son drew back.

The cluster of grinning students, the young impartial brutes who had gathered about them on the seats back and front, laughed loudly.

"We hear you're stepping out among them, 'Gene," said Roy Duncan, cackling.

"If I need cleaning," said Eugene, "I can always use the Gold Dust Twins, can't I? French and Duncan, the Gold Dust Twins -- who never do any work."

"That's right! That's right! Talk to them, 'Gene!" said Zeno Cochran, softly. He was a tall lad of twenty, slender and powerful, with the grace of a running horse. He had punted against the wind for eighty yards in the Yale Bowl. He was a handsome fellow, soft-spoken and kindly, with the fearless gentleness of the athlete.

"They say," said Tom French, "that you're as pure as the flowing sewer."

Confused and angry, with sullen boastfulness, Tom French said:

They left him. Unperturbed, relieved, he turned his face toward the vast bleak earth, gray and hoary in the iron grip of winter.

"Nobody has anything on me. I've been too slick for them. Nobody knows anything about me."

"You mean," said Eugene, "that every one knows all about you, and nobody wants to know anything about you."

The crowd laughed.

"What about that, Tom?" he asked challengingly. He was very small and plump, the son of a carpenter, offensively worthy, working his way through college by various schemes. He was a "kidder," an egger-on, finding excuse for his vulgarity and malice in a false and loud good-humor.

"Come on," said Roy Duncan, rising, "leave him alone, Tom. He can't take a joke. He takes things too seriously."

"Wow!" said Jimmy Revell.

Winter ended. The sleety frozen earth began to soften under thaw and the rain. The town and campus paths were dreary trenches of mud and slime. The cold rain fell: the grass shot up in green wet patches. He hurtled down the campus lanes, bounding like a kangaroo, leaping high at the lower boughs to clip a budding twig with his teeth. He cried loudly in his throat -- a whinnying squeal -- the centaur-cry of man or beast, trying to unburden its overladen heart in one blast of pain and joy and passion. At other times he slouched by, depressed by an unaccountable burden of weariness and dejection.

Eugene turned quietly on Tom French. "Stop it!" he said. "Don't go on because the others are listening. I don't think it's funny. I don't like it. I don't like you. I want you to leave me alone now. Do you hear?"

He went to see Helen and Hugh Barton several times. They lived thirty-five miles away at Sydney, the State capital. It was a town of thirty thousand people, sleepy, with quiet leafy pavements, and a capitol Square in the centre, with radial streets. At the head of the main street, across from the capitol, a brown weathered building of lichened stone, was a cheap hotel -- the largest and most notorious brothel in town. There were also three denominational colleges for young women.

He lost count of the hours -- he had no sense of time -- no regular periods for sleep, work, or recreation, although he attended his classes faithfully, and ate with fair regularity by compulsion of dining-hall or boarding-house schedules. The food was abundant, coarse, greasily and badly cooked. It was very cheap: at the college commons, twelve dollars a month; at the boarding-houses, fifteen. He ate at the commons for a month: his interest in food was too profound and too intelligent to stand it longer. The commons was housed in a large bleak building of white brick. It was called officially Stiggins Hall, but in the more descriptive epithet of the students -- The Sty.

"This must be it," she said. "His shop stood here. It's gone now."

The Bartons had rented quarters in an old house on the street above the Governor's Mansion. They lived in three or four rooms on the ground floor.

It was to Sydney that Gant had come, a young man, from Baltimore, on his slow drift to the South. It was in Sydney that he had first started business for himself and conceived, from the loss of his first investments, his hatred of property. It was in Sydney that he had met and wedded the sainted Cynthia, the tubercular spinstress who had died within two years of their marriage.

Their father's great ghost haunted them: it brooded over the town, above the scouring oblivion of the years that wipes all trace of us away.

There was no mark of his great hand on this bleak world. No vines grew round the houses. That part of him which had lived here was buried -- buried with a dead woman below the long gray tide of the years. They stood quietly, frightened, in that strange place, waiting to hear the summons of his voice, with expectant unbelief, as some one looking for the god in Brooklyn.

Together, they hunted down into the mean streets, until they stood at length before a dreary shop on the skirts of the negro district.

She was silent a moment. "Poor old Papa." She turned her wet eyes away.

In April the nation declared war on Germany. Before the month was out, all the young men at Pulpit Hill who were eligible -- those who were twenty-one -- were going into service. At the gymnasium he watched the doctors examine them, envying the careless innocence with which they stripped themselves naked. They threw off their clothes in indifferent heaps and stood, laughing and certain, before the doctors. They were clean-limbed, sound and white of tooth, graceful and fast in their movements. The fraternity men joined first -- those merry and extravagant snobs of whom he had never known, but who now represented for him the highest reach of urbane and aristocratic life. He had seen them, happy and idle, on the wide verandas of their chapter houses -- those temples where the last and awful rites of initiation were administered. He had seen them, always together, and from the herd of the uninitiated always apart, laughing over their mail at the post-office, or gambling for "black cows," at the drug-store. And, with a stab of failure, with regret, with pain at his social deficiency, he had watched their hot campaigns for the favor of some desirable freshman -- some one vastly more elegant than himself, some one with blood and with money. They were only the sons of the little rich men, the lords of the village and county, but as he saw them go so surely, with such laughing unconstraint, in well-cut clothes, well-groomed, well-brushed, among the crowd of humbler students, who stiffened awkwardly with peasant hostility and constraint -- they were the flower of chivalry, the sons of the mansion-house. They were Sydney, Raleigh, Nash. And now, like gentlemen, they were going to war.

"They're all Horse's Necks," he said. "They can go to hell before I'll boot to get in."

The gymnasium was thick with the smell of steam and of sweating men coming in to the showers from the playing fields. Washed, with opened shirt, Eugene walked slowly away into the green budding shade of the campus, companioned by an acquaintance, Ralph Hendrix.

"Yes," said Eugene.

"Look!" said Ralph Hendrix, in a low angry tone. "Look at that, will you!" He nodded toward a group of students ahead. "That little Horse's Neck is booting the Dekes all over the campus."

But he wanted to get in. He wanted to be urbane and careless. He wanted to wear well-cut clothes. He wanted to be a gentleman. He wanted to go to war.

Eugene looked, then turned to examine the bitter common face beside him. Every Saturday night, after the meeting of the literary society, Ralph Hendrix went to the drug-store and bought two cheap cigars. He had bent narrow shoulders, a white knobby face, and a low forehead. He spoke in a monotonous painful drawl. His father was foreman in a cotton mill.

On the central campus, several students who had been approved by the examining board, descended from the old dormitories, bearing packed valises. They turned down under the trees, walking toward the village street. From time to time they threw up an arm in farewell.

He read a great deal -- but at random, for pleasure. He read Defoe, Smollet, Stern, and Fielding -- the fine salt of the English novel lost, during the reign of the Widow of Windsor, beneath an ocean of tea and molasses. He read the tales of Boccaccio, and all that remained of a tattered copy of the Heptameron. At Buck Benson's suggestion, he read Murray's Euripides (at the time he was reading the Greek text of the Alcestis -- noblest and loveliest of all the myths of Love and Death). He saw the grandeur of the Prometheus fable -- but the fable moved him more than the play of Æschylus. In fact, Æschylus he found sublime -- and dull: he could not understand his great reputation. Rather -- he could. He was Literature -- a writer of masterpieces. He was almost as great a bore as Cicero -- that windy old moralist who came out so boldly in favor of Old Age and Friendship. Sophocles was an imperial poet -- he spoke like God among flashes of lightning: the Œdipus Rex is not only one of the greatest plays in the world, it is one of the greatest stories. This story -- perfect, inevitable, and fabulous -- wreaked upon him the nightmare coincidence of Destiny. It held him birdlike before its great snake-eye of wisdom and horror. And Euripides (whatever the disparagement of pedantry) he thought one of the greatest lyrical singers in all poetry.

"So long, boys! See you in Berlin." The shining and dividing sea was closer and not so wide.

He liked all weird fable and wild invention, in prose or verse, from the Golden Ass to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chief prince of the moon and magic. But he liked the fabulous wherever he found it, and for whatever purpose.

The best fabulists have often been the greatest satirists: satire (as with Aristophanes, Voltaire, and Swift) is a high and subtle art, quite beyond the barnyard snipings and wholesale geese-slaughterings of the present degenerate age. Great satire needs the sustenance of great fable. Swift's power of invention is incomparable: there's no better fabulist in the world.

He read Poe's stories, Frankenstein, and the plays of Lord Dunsany. He read Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight and the Book of Tobit. He did not want his ghosts and marvels explained. Magic was magic. He wanted old ghosts -- not Indian ghosts, but ghosts in armor, the spirit of old kings, and pillioned ladies with high coned hats. Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on. Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides there in the wilderness.

Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America -- more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly. He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food. He was reading of ancient sorceries and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land? The ghost of Hamlet's Father, in Connecticut.

Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine."

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night

"…… I am thy father's spirit,

He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation. Only the earth endured -- the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets. Only the earth endured -- this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it. Stogged in the desert, half-broken and overthrown, among the columns of lost temples strewn, there was no ruined image of Menkaura, there was no alabaster head of Akhnaton. Nothing had been done in stone. Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides. Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.

Eliza visited Helen in Sydney in the Spring. The girl was quieter, sadder, more thoughtful than she had ever been. She was subdued by the new life: chastened by her obscurity. She missed Gant more than she would confess. She missed the mountain town.

O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned -- the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.

"Fifty dollars a month," said Helen.

"No, we had to buy furniture."

"What do you have to pay for this place?" said Eliza, looking around critically.

"Furnished?"

"I tell you what, that's pretty high," said Eliza, "just for down stairs. I believe rents are lower at home."

"Yes, I know it's high," said Helen. "But good heavens, mama! Do you realize that this is the best neighborhood in town? We're only two blocks from the Governor's Mansion, you know. Mrs. Mathews is no common boarding-house keeper, I can assure you! No sir!" she exclaimed, laughing. "She's a real swell -- goes to all the big functions and gets in the papers all the time. You know Hugh and I have got to try to keep up appearances. He's a young man just starting out here."

"O'Toole says he's the best agent he's got," said Helen. "Hugh's all right. We could get along together anywhere, as long as there's no damned family about. It makes me furious at times to see him slaving to feather O'Toole's pockets. He works like a dog. You know, O'Toole gets a commission on every sale he makes. And Mrs. O'T. and those two girls ride around in a big car and never turn their hands over. They're Catholics, you know, but they get to go everywhere."

"Yes. I know," Eliza agreed thoughtfully. "How's he been doing?"

"I tell you what," said Eliza with a timid half-serious smile, "it might not be a bad idea if Hugh became his own boss. There's no use doing it all for the other fellow. Say, child!" she exclaimed, "why wouldn't it be a good idea if he tried to get the Altamont agency? I don't believe that fellow they've got is much account. He could get it without trying."

There was a pause.

"We've been thinking of that," the girl admitted slowly. "Hugh has written in to the main office. Anyway," she said a moment later, "he'd be his own boss. That's something."

"Well," said Eliza slowly, "I don't know but what it'd be a good idea. If he works hard there's no reason why he shouldn't build a good business up. Your papa's been complaining here lately about his trouble. He'd be glad to have you back." She shook her head slowly for a moment. "Child! they didn't do him a bit of good, up there. It's all come back."

They drove over to Pulpit Hill at Easter for a two days' visit. Eliza took him to Exeter and bought him a suit of clothes.

When he was newly dressed, she puckered her lips, smiling, and said:

"I don't like those skimpy trousers," she told the salesman. "I want something that makes him look more of a man."

"Spruce up, boy! Throw your shoulders back! That's one thing about your father -- he carries himself straight as an arrow. If you go all humped over like that, you'll have lung trouble before you're twenty-five."

Eugene turned a hot distressed face toward Helen. She laughed huskily, ironically, then turning to the boy, said:

"You're a good smart-looking fellow," said Eliza smiling, "I'll make a trade with you. If you drum up some boarders for me among your friends here in this part of the State, I'll throw in your board free. Here are some of my cards," she added, opening her purse. "You might hand a few of them out, if you get a chance, and say a good word for Dixieland in the Land of the Sky."

"I want you to meet my mother," he said awkwardly to Mr. Joseph Ballantyne, a smooth pink young man who had been elected president of the Freshman class.

"Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Ballantyne, in a slow surprised voice, "I certainly will."

"You're welcome at any time, Mr. Ballantyne, boarders or not. We'll always find a place for you."

When they were alone, in answer to his stammering and confused protests, she said with an annoyed grin:

"Yes, I know. It's pretty bad. But you're away from it most of the time. You're the lucky one. You see what I've had to listen to, the last week, don't you? You see, don't you?"

When he went home at the end of the year, late in May, he found that Helen and Hugh Barton had preceded him. They were living with Gant, at Woodson Street. Hugh Barton had secured the Altamont agency.

The town and the nation boiled with patriotic frenzy -- violent, in a chaotic sprawl, to little purpose. The spawn of Attila must be crushed ("exterminated," said the Reverend Mr. Smallwood) by the sons of freedom. There were loans, bond issues, speech-making, a talk of drafts, and a thin trickle of Yankees into France. Pershing arrived in Paris, and said, "Lafayette, we are here!", but the French were still looking. Ben went up before the enlistment board and was rejected. "Lungs -- weak!" they said quite definitely. "No -- not tubercular. A tendency. Underweight." He cursed. His face was a little more like a blade -- thinner, grayer. The cleft of his scowl was deeper. He seemed more alone.

"They tell me you're batting a thousand down there, son," yelled Mr. Wood, the plump young pharmacist, who had been told nothing at all. "That's right, boy! Go get 'em." The man passed forward cheerfully, up the prosperous glade of his store. Fans droned.

Eugene was sixteen years old. He was a College Man. He walked among the gay crowd of afternoon with a sense of elation, answering the hearty greetings with joy, warming to its thoughtless bombast.

Eugene came up into the hills again and found them in their rich young summer glory. Dixieland was partly filled by paying guests. More arrived.

After all, Eugene thought, he had not done so badly. He had felt his first wounds. He had not been broken. He had seen love's bitter mystery. He had lived alone.