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Eugene began the year earnestly as room-mate of a young man who had been the best student in the Altamont High School. His name was Bob Sterling. Bob Sterling was nineteen years old, the son of a widow. He was of middling height, always very neatly and soberly dressed; there was nothing conspicuous about him. For this reason, he could laugh good-naturedly, a little smugly, at whatever was conspicuous. He had a good mind -- bright, attentive, studious, unmarked by originality or inventiveness. He had a time for everything: he apportioned a certain time for the preparation of each lesson, and went over it three times, mumbling rapidly to himself. He sent his laundry out every Monday. When in merry company he laughed heartily and enjoyed himself, but he always kept track of the time. Presently, he would look at his watch, saying: "Well, this is all very nice, but it's getting no work done," and he would go.

When he returned to the university for his second year, he found the place adjusted soberly to war. It seemed quieter, sadder -- the number of students was smaller and they were younger. The older ones had gone to war. The others were in a state of wild, but subdued, restlessness. They were careless of colleges, careers, successes -- the war had thrilled them with its triumphing Now. Of what use To-morrow! Of what use all labor for To-morrow! The big guns had blown all spun schemes to fragments: they hailed the end of all planned work with a fierce, a secret joy. The business of education went on half-heartedly, with an abstracted look: in the classroom, their eyes were vague upon the book, but their ears cocked attentively for alarums and excursions without.

Every one said he had a bright future. He remonstrated with Eugene, with good-natured seriousness, about his habits. He ought not to throw his clothes around. He ought not to let his shirts and drawers accumulate in a dirty pile. He ought to have a regular time for doing each lesson; he ought to live by regular hours.

Bob Sterling had heart-disease. He stood on the landing, gasping, when he had climbed the stairs. Eugene opened the door for him. Bob Sterling's pleasant face was dead white, spotted by pale freckles. His lips chattered and turned blue.

They lived in a private dwelling on the edge of the campus, in a large bright room decorated with a great number of college pennants, all of which belonged to Bob Sterling.

"Come here," said Bob Sterling with a grin. "Put your head down here." He took Eugene's head and placed it against his heart. The great pump beat slowly and irregularly, with a hissing respiration.

"Good God!" cried Eugene.

"Do you hear it?" said Bob Sterling, beginning to laugh. Then he went into the room, chafing his dry hands briskly.

"What is it, Bob? How do you feel?" said Eugene.

"He was so brave," she said, "so brave. Those last days -- I had not meant to -- Your letters made him so happy."

"Here's another," said Eugene.

But he fell sick and could not attend classes. He was taken to the College Infirmary, where he lay for several weeks, apparently not very ill, but with lips constantly blue, a slow pulse, and a sub-normal temperature. Nothing could be done about it.

Two weeks later the widow returned to gather together the boy's belongings. Silently she collected the clothing that no one would ever wear. She was a stout woman in her forties. Eugene took all the pennants from the wall and folded them. She packed them in a valise and turned to go.

His mother came and took him home. Eugene wrote him regularly twice a week, getting in return short but cheerful messages. Then one day he died.

She burst suddenly into tears and seized his hand.

I cannot stay here, he thought, where he has been. We were here together. Always I should see him on the landing, with the hissing valve and the blue lips, or hear him mumbling his lessons. Then, at night, the other cot would be empty. I think I shall room alone hereafter.

She's alone now, Eugene thought.

But he roomed the remainder of the term in one of the dormitories. He had two room-mates -- one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name of L. K. Duncan (the "L" stood for Lawrence, but every one called him "Elk") and the other, the son of an Episcopal minister, Harold Gay. Both were several years older than Eugene: Elk Duncan was twenty-four, and Harold Gay, twenty-two. But it is doubtful whether a more precious congress of freaks had ever before gathered in two small rooms, one of which they used as a "study."

Elk Duncan was the son of an Altamont attorney, a small Democratic politician, mighty in county affairs. Elk Duncan was tall -- an inch or two over six feet -- and incredibly thin, or rather narrow. He was already a little bald, he had a high prominent forehead, and large pale bulging eyes: from that point his long pale face sloped backward to his chin. His shoulders were a trifle bowed and very narrow; the rest of his body had the symmetry of a lead pencil. He always dressed very foppishly, in tight suits of blue flannel, with high stiff collars, fat silken cravats, and colored silk handkerchiefs. He was a student in the Law School, but he spent a large part of his time, industriously, in avoiding study.

The younger students -- particularly the Freshmen -- gathered around him after meals with mouths slightly ajar, feeding upon his words like manna, and hungrily demanding more, the wilder his fable became. His posture toward life was very much that of the barker of a carnival sideshow: loquacious, patronizing, and cynical.

The other room-mate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child. He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness of his face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them. Instead, he concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that echoed at all the wrong places, and a silly grin full of an absurd and devilish knowingness. His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy, he smoked cigarettes with a debauched leer, and cursed loudly and uneasily with the accent of a depraved clergyman.

"Harold! Harold!" said Elk Duncan reprovingly. "Damn, son! You're getting hard! If you go on like this, you'll begin to chew gum, and fritter away your Sunday-school money at the movies. Think of the rest of us, please. 'Gene here's only a young boy, as pure as a barnyard privy, and, as for me, I've always moved in the best circles, and associated with only the highest class of bartenders and ladylike streetwalkers. What would your father say if he could hear you? Don't you know he'd be shocked? He'd cut off your cigarette money, son."

"I don't give a damn what he'd do, Elk, nor you either!" said Harold toughly, grinning. "So, what the hell!" he roared as loudly as he could. There was an answering howl from the windows of the whole dormitory -- cries of "Go to hell!" "Cut it out!" and ironical cheers, at which he was pleased.

The scattered family drew together again at Christmas. A sense of impending dissolution, of loss and death, brought them back. The surgeon at Baltimore had given no hope. He had, rather, confirmed Gant's death-warrant.

"Can you help him at all? Do you think the radium does any good?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "My dear girl!" he said. "I have no idea. The man's a miracle. Do you know that he's Exhibit A here? Every surgeon in the place has had a look. How long can he last? I'll swear to nothing -- I no longer have any idea. When your father left here, the first time, after his operation, I never expected to see him again. I doubted if he would last the winter through. But he's back again. He may be back many times."

"Then how long can he live?" asked Helen.

"I can give him relief for a time. I can even check the growth of the disease for a time. Beyond that, I can do nothing. But his vitality is enormous. He is a creaking gate which hangs by one hinge -- but which hangs, nevertheless."

Thus, she had brought him home, the shadow of his death suspended over them like a Damocles sword. Fear prowled softly through their brains on leopard feet. The girl lived in a condition of repressed hysteria: it had its outburst daily at Eliza's or in her own home. Hugh Barton had purchased a house to which he had taken her.

"You'll get no peace," he said, "as long as you're near them. That's what's wrong with you now."

She had frequent periods of sickness. She went constantly to the doctors for treatment and advice. Sometimes she went to the hospital for several days. Her illness manifested itself in various ways -- sometimes in a terrible mastoid pain, sometimes in nervous exhaustion, sometimes in an hysterical collapse in which she laughed and wept by turns, and which was governed partly by Gant's illness and a morbid despair over her failure to bear a child. She drank stealthily at all times -- she drank in nibbling draughts for stimulants, never enough for drunkenness. She drank vile liquids -- seeking only the effect of alcohol and getting at it in strange ways through a dozen abominations called "tonics" and "extracts." Almost deliberately she ruined her taste for the better sort of potable liquors, concealing from herself, under the convenient labellings of physic, the ugly crawling hunger in her blood. This self-deception was characteristic of her. Her life expressed itself through a series of deceptions -- of symbols: her dislikes, affections, grievances, brandishing every cause but the real one.

But, unless actually bedridden, she was never absent from her father for many hours. The shadow of his death lay over their lives. They shuddered below its horror; its protracted menace, its unsearchable enigma, deprived them of dignity and courage. They were dominated by the weary and degrading egotism of life, which is blandly philosophical over the death of the alien, but sees in its own the corruption of natural law. It was as hard for them to think of Gant's death as of God's death: it was a great deal harder, because he was more real to them than God, he was more immortal than God, he was God.

This hideous twilight into which their lives had passed froze Eugene with its terror, and choked him with fury. He would grow enraged after reading a letter from home and pound the grained plaster of the dormitory wall until his knuckles were bloody. They have taken his courage away! he thought. They have made a whining coward out of him! No, and if I die, no damned family about. Blowing their messy breaths in your face! Snuffling down their messy noses at you! Gathering around you till you can't breathe. Telling you how well you're looking with hearty smiles, and boo-hooing behind your back. O messy, messy, messy death! Shall we never be alone? Shall we never live alone, think alone, live in a house by ourselves alone? Ah! but I shall! I shall! Alone, alone, and far away, with falling rain. Then, bursting suddenly into the study, he found Elk Duncan, with unaccustomed eye bent dully upon a page of Torts, a bright bird held by the stare of that hypnotic snake, the law.

"Yes, that's right, that's right! Calm yourself. You are Napoleon Bonaparte and I'm your old friend, Oliver Cromwell. Harold!" he called. "Help! He killed the keeper and got out."

"'Gene!" yelled Harold Gay, hurling a thick volume from him under the spell of Elk's great names. "What do you know about history? Who signed Magna Charta, eh?"

"Damn!" said Elk Duncan, folding the big calfskin and cowering defensively behind it.

"Correct!" roared Harold Gay. "Who was Æthelred the Unready?"

"He was the son of Cynewulf the Silly and Undine the Unwashed," said Eugene.

"Are we to die like rats?" he said. "Are we to smother in a hole?"

"It wasn't signed," said Eugene. "The King didn't know how to write, so they mimeographed it."

"He was excommunicated by the Pope in a Bull of the year 903, but he refused to be cowed," said Eugene.

"On his Uncle Jasper's side," said Elk Duncan, "he was related to Paul the Poxy and Genevieve the Ungenerous."

"Instead, he called together all the local clergy, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Gay, who was elected Pope," said Elk Duncan. "This caused a great schism in the Church."

"You boys are too good for me!" yelled Harold Gay, getting up abruptly. "Come on! Who's going to the Pic?"

The Pic was the only purchasable entertainment that the village afforded steadily. It was a moving-picture theatre, inhabited nightly by a howling tribe of students who rushed down aisles, paved with peanut-shells, through a shrapnel fire of flying goobers, devoting themselves studiously for the remainder of the evening to the unhappy heads and necks of Freshmen, and less attentively, but with roars of applause, indignation, or advice, to the poor flicker-dance of puppets that wavered its way illegibly across the worn and pleated screen. A weary but industrious young woman with a scrawny neck thumped almost constantly at a battered piano. If she was idle for five minutes, the whole pack howled ironically, demanding: "Music, Myrtle! Music!"

"But as usual, God was on the side of the greatest number of canons," said Eugene. "Later on, the family migrated to California, and made its fortune in the Gold Rush of '49."

The campus had its candidates, its managers, its bosses, its machines, as had the State. A youngster developed in college the political craft he was later to exert in Party affairs. The son of a politician was schooled by his crafty sire before the down was off his cheeks: at sixteen, his life had been plotted ahead to the governorship, or to the proud dignities of a Congressman. The boy came deliberately to the university to bait and set his first traps: deliberately he made those friendships that were most likely to benefit him later. By his junior year, if he was successful, he had a political manager, who engineered his campus ambitions; he moved with circumspection, and spoke with a trace of pomp nicely weighed with cordiality:

It was necessary to speak to every one. If one spoke to every one, one was "democratic"; if one did not, one was a snob, and got few votes. The appraisal of personality, like all other appraisal with them, was coarse and blunt. They were suspicious of all eminence. They had a hard peasant hostility to the unusual. A man was brilliant? Was there a bright sparkle to him? Bad, bad! He was not safe; he was not sound. The place was a democratic microcosmos -- seething with political interests: national, regional, collegiate.

"Ah, there, gentlemen."

"A nice day, gentlemen."

The vast champaign of the world stretched out its limitless wonder, but few were seduced away from the fortress of the State, few ever heard the distant reverberation of an idea. They could get no greater glory for themselves than a seat in the Senate, and the way to glory -- the way to all power, highness, and distinction whatsoever -- was through the law, a string tie, and a hat. Hence politics, law schools, debating societies, and speechmaking. The applause of listening senates to command.

"Gentlemen, how are you?"

The yokels, of course, were in the saddle -- they composed nine-tenths of the student body: the proud titles were in their gift, and they took good care that their world should be kept safe for yokelry and the homespun virtues. Usually, these dignities -- the presidencies of student bodies, classes, Y. M. C. A.'s, and the managerships of athletic teams -- were given to some honest serf who had established his greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in all directions. Such an industrious hack was called an "all-round man." He was safe, sound, and reliable. He would never get notions. He was the fine flower of university training. He was a football scrub, and a respectable scholar in all subjects. He was a universal Two Man. He always got Two on everything, except Moral Character, where he shone with a superlative Oneness. If he did not go into the law or the ministry, he was appointed a Rhodes Scholar.

In this strange place Eugene flourished amazingly. He was outside the pale of popular jealousies: it was quite obvious that he was not safe, that he was not sound, that decidedly he was an irregular person. He could never be an all-round man. Obviously, he would never be governor. Obviously, he would never be a politician, because he said funny things. He was not the man to lead a class or say a prayer; he was a man for curious enterprise. Well, thought they benevolently, we need some such. We are not all made for weighty business.

He was happier than he had ever been in his life, and more careless. His physical loneliness was more complete and more delightful. His escape from the bleak horror of disease and hysteria and death impending, that hung above his crouched family, left him with a sense of aerial buoyance, drunken freedom. He had come to the place alone, without companions. He had no connections. He had, even now, not one close friend. And this isolation was in his favor. Every one knew him at sight: every one called him by name, and spoke to him kindly. He was not disliked. He was happy, full of expansive joy, he greeted every one with enthusiastic gusto. He had a vast tenderness, an affection for the whole marvellous and unvisited earth, that blinded his eyes. He was closer to a feeling of brotherhood than he had ever been, and more alone. He was filled with a divine indifference for all appearance. Joy ran like a great wine through his young expanding limbs; he bounded down the paths with wild cries in his throat, leaping for life like an apple, trying to focus the blind desire that swept him apart, to melt down to a bullet all of his formless passion, and so, slay death, slay love.

But not without labor had his titles come. The early autumn was lustreless and slack: he could not come from the shadow of Laura. She haunted him. When he went home at Christmas, he found the hills bleak and close, and the town mean and cramped in the grim stinginess of winter. There was a ludicrous, a desperate gaiety in the family.

He began to join. He joined everything. He had never "belonged" to any group before, but now all groups were beckoning him. He had without much trouble won a place for himself on the staff of the college paper and the magazine. The small beginning trickle of distinctions widened into a gushet. It began to sprinkle, then it rained. He was initiated into literary fraternities, dramatic fraternities, theatrical fraternities, speaking fraternities, journalistic fraternities, and in the Spring into a social fraternity. He joined enthusiastically, submitted with fanatical glee to the hard mauling of the initiations, and went about lame and sore, more pleased than a child or a savage, with colored ribbons in his coat lapel, and a waistcoat plastered with pins, badges, symbols, and Greek letterings.

Helen burst into a raucous angry laugh, looking at his sullen face, and prodding him roughly with her big fingers.

"Well!" said Eliza sorrowfully, as she peered above the stove, "let's all try to be happy this time and enjoy a quiet Christmas. You never know!" She shook her head, unable to continue. Her eyes were wet. "It may be the last time we're all together. The old trouble! The old trouble!" she said hoarsely, turning to him.

"What old trouble?" he said angrily. "Good God, why are you so mysterious?"

"My heart!" she whispered, with a brave smile. "I've said nothing to any one. But last week -- I thought I was gone." This was delivered in a boding whisper.

"You may laugh! You may laugh!" said Eliza with a smile of watery bitterness. "But I may not be here to laugh at much longer."

"Oh, my God!" he groaned. "You'll be here when the rest of us are rotten."

"K-K-K-K-K-K-K! Did you ever know it to fail? Did you? If you come to her with one of your kidneys gone, she's always got something worse the matter with her. No, sir! I've never known it to fail!"

"Good heavens, mama!" the girl cried irritably. "There's nothing wrong with you. You're not the sick one! Papa's the sick one. He's the one that needs attention. Can't you realize that -- he's dying. He may not last the winter out. I'm the sick one! You'll be here long after we're both gone."

"They're off!" Eugene screamed with a crazy laugh, stamping up and down the kitchen in a frenzy. "By God! They're off!"

"You never know," said Eliza mysteriously. "You never know who'll be the first one to go. Only last week, there was Mr. Cosgrave, as fine a looking man as --"

At this moment, one of the aged harpies, of whom the house always sheltered two or three during the grim winter, lurched from the hall back into the door-space. She was a large raw-boned hag, a confirmed drug-eater, who moved by a violent and dissonant jerking of her gaunt limbs, pawing abruptly at the air with a gnarled hand.

"Mrs. Gant," said she, writhing her loose gray lips horribly before she could speak. "Did I get a letter? Have you seen him?"

"Seen who? Go on!" said Eliza fretfully. "I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't believe you do, either."

"I'll vow!" she said. "I believe she's crazy. She takes dope of some sort -- that's certain. It makes my flesh crawl when she comes around."

"The time draws near the birth of Christ," said he, piously.

Smiling hideously at them all, and pawing the air, the monster got under way again, disappearing like an old wagon with loose wheels. Helen began to laugh, hoarsely, as Eugene's face hung forward with mouth half-open in an expression of sullen stupefaction. Eliza laughed, too, slily, rubbing her nosewing with a finger.

"Then why do you keep her in the house?" said Helen resentfully. "Good heavens, mama! You could get rid of her if you wanted to. Poor old 'Gene!" she said, beginning to laugh again. "You always catch it, don't you?"

She laughed; then, with abstracted eyes, plucked vaguely at her large chin.

His father spent most of the day staring vacantly into the parlor fire. Miss Florry Mangle, the nurse, gave him the morbid comfort of her silence: she rocked incessantly before the fire, thirty heel-taps to the minute, with arms tight-folded on her limp breasts. Occasionally she talked of death and disease. Gant had aged and wasted shockingly. His heavy clothes wound round his feeble shanks: his face was waxen and transparent -- it was like a great beak. He looked clean and fragile. The cancer, Eugene thought, flowered in him like some terrible but beautiful plant. His mind was very clear, not doting, but sad and old. He spoke little, with almost comical gentleness, but he ceased to listen almost as soon as one answered.

"How have you been, son?" he asked. "Are you getting along all right?"

"Yes. I am a reporter on the paper now; I may be managing editor next year. I have been elected to several organizations," he went on eagerly, glad of the rare chance to speak to one of them about his life. But when he looked up again, his father's stare was fixed sadly in the fire. The boy stopped in confusion, pierced with a bitter pain.

"That's good," said Gant, hearing him speak no more. "Be a good boy, son. We're proud of you."

Ben came home two days before Christmas: he prowled through the house like a familiar ghost. He had left the town early in the autumn, after his return from Baltimore. For three months he had wandered alone through the South, selling to the merchants in small towns space for advertisements upon laundry cards. How well this curious business succeeded he did not say: he was scrupulously neat, but threadbare and haggard, and more fiercely secretive than ever. He had found employment at length upon a newspaper in a rich tobacco town of the Piedmont. He was going there after Christmas.

He had come to them, as always, bearing gifts.

"Couldn't be better, Colonel 'Gene, how are you, Old Scout? Good!" he said, without waiting for an answer. "Well, well, if it isn't Old Baldy," he cried, pumping Ben's hand. "I didn't know whether you'd be here or not. Mama, old girl," he said, as he embraced her, "how're they going? Still hitting on all six. Fine!" he yelled, before any one could reply to anything.

Luke came in from the naval school at Newport, on Christmas eve. They heard his sonorous tenor shouting greetings to people in the street; he entered the house upon a blast of air. Everyone began to grin.

"Well, here we are! The Admiral's back! Papa, how's the boy! Well, for God's sake!" he cried, embracing Gant, and slapping his back. "I thought I was coming to see a sick man! You're looking like the flowers that bloom in the Spring."

"Why, son -- what on earth!" cried Eliza, stepping back to look at him. "What have you done to yourself? You walk as if you are lame."

"Pretty well, my boy. How are you?" said Gant, with a pleased grin.

"Whah -- whah! I got torpedoed by a submarine," he said. "Oh, it's nothing," he added modestly. "I gave a little skin to help out a fellow in the electrical school."

He laughed idiotically at sight of her troubled face and prodded her.

"Oh, only a little six-inch strip," he said carelessly. "The boy was badly burned: a bunch of us got together and chipped in with a little hide."

"Mercy!" said Eliza. "You'll be lame for life. It's a wonder you can walk."

The sailor had secured an extra valise, and stocked it on the way home with a great variety of beverages for his father. There were several bottles of Scotch and rye whiskies, two of gin, one of rum, and one each of port and sherry wine.

Every one grew mildly convivial before the evening meal.

"What!" Eliza screamed. "How much did you give?"

"What! My ba-a-by! Why, son, you wouldn't drink, would you?" Eliza said playfully.

"He always thinks of others -- that boy!" said Gant proudly. "He'd give you his heart's-blood."

"Let's give the poor kid a drink," said Helen. "It won't hurt him."

She poured him out a stiff draught of Scotch whiskey.

"There!" she said cheerfully. "That's not going to hurt him."

"No," said Gant. "It'll ruin you quicker than anything in the world, if you do."

"Wouldn't he!" said Helen, prodding him. "Ho! ho! ho!"

They lavished fair warnings on him as he lifted his glass. He choked as the fiery stuff caught in his young throat, stopping his breath for a moment and making him tearful. He had drunk a few times before -- minute quantities that his sister had given him at Woodson Street. Once, with Jim Trivett, he had fancied himself tipsy.

"Son," said Eliza gravely, balancing her wine-glass, "I don't want you ever to acquire a taste for it." She was still loyal to the doctrine of the good Major.

"You're a goner, boy, if that stuff ever gets you," said Luke. "Take a fool's advice."

When they had eaten, they drank again. He was allowed a small one. Then they all departed for town to complete their belated shopping. He was left alone in the house.

What he had drunk beat pleasantly through his veins in warm pulses, bathing the tips of ragged nerves, giving to him a feeling of power and tranquillity he had never known. Presently, he went to the pantry where the liquor was stored. He took a water tumbler and filled it experimentally with equal portions of whiskey, gin, and rum. Then, seating himself at the kitchen table, he began to drink the mixture slowly.

The terrible draught smote him with the speed and power of a man's fist. He was made instantly drunken, and he knew instantly why men drank. It was, he knew, one of the great moments in his life -- he lay, greedily watching the mastery of the grape over his virgin flesh, like a girl for the first time in the embrace of her lover. And suddenly, he knew how completely he was his father's son -- how completely, and with what added power and exquisite refinement of sensation, was he Gantian. He exulted in the great length of his limbs and his body, through which the mighty liquor could better work its wizardry. In all the earth there was no other like him, no other fitted to be so sublimely and magnificently drunken. It was greater than all the music he had ever heard; it was as great as the highest poetry. Why had he never been told? Why had no one ever written adequately about it? Why, when it was possible to buy a god in a bottle, and drink him off, and become a god oneself, were men not forever drunken?

He had a moment of great wonder -- the magnificent wonder with which we discover the simple and unspeakable things that lie buried and known, but unconfessed, in us. So might a man feel if he wakened after death and found himself in Heaven.

He got up, and reeled out of the alien presences of light and warmth in the kitchen; he went out into the hall where a dim light burned and the high walls gave back their grave-damp chill. This, he thought, is the house.

Then a divine paralysis crept through his flesh. His limbs were numb; his tongue thickened until he could not bend it to the cunning sounds of words. He spoke aloud, repeating difficult phrases over and over, filled with wild laughter and delight at his effort. Behind his drunken body his brain hung poised like a falcon, looking on him with scorn, with tenderness, looking on all laughter with grief and pity. There lay in him something that could not be seen and could not be touched, which was above and beyond him -- an eye within an eye, a brain above a brain, the Stranger that dwelt in him and regarded him and was him, and that he did not know. But, thought he, I am alone now in this house; if I can come to know him, I will.

He sat down upon the hard mission settle, and listened to the cold drip of silence. This is the house in which I have been an exile. There is a stranger in the house, and there's a stranger in me.

Presently, he got up and left the house. He wore no hat or coat; he could not find them. The night was blanketed in a thick steam of mist: sounds came faintly and cheerfully. Already the earth was full of Christmas. He remembered that he had bought no gifts. He had a few dollars in his pocket; before the shops closed he must get presents for the family. Bareheaded he set off for the town. He knew that he was drunk and that he staggered; but he believed that with care and control he could hide his state from any one who saw him. He straddled the line that ran down the middle of the concrete sidewalk, keeping his eyes fixed on it and coming back to it quickly when he lurched away from it. When he got into the town the streets were thronged with late shoppers. An air of completion was on everything. The people were streaming home to Christmas. He plunged down from the Square into the narrow avenue, going in among the staring passersby. He kept his eye hotly on the line before him. He did not know where to go. He did not know what to buy.

There was nothing but the living silence of the house: no doors were opened.

O house of Admetus, in whom (although I was a god) I have endured so many things. Now, house, I am not afraid. No ghost need fear come by me. If there's a door in silence, let it open. My silence can be greater than your own. And you who are in me, and who I am, come forth beyond this quiet shell of flesh that makes no posture to deny you. There is none to look at us: O come, my brother and my lord, with unbent face. If I had 40,000 years, I should give all but the ninety last to silence. I should grow to the earth like a hill or a rock. Unweave the fabric of nights and days; unwind my life back to my birth; subtract me into nakedness again, and build me back with all the sums I have not counted. Or let me look upon the living face of darkness; let me hear the terrible sentence of your voice.

As he reached the entrance to Wood's pharmacy, a shout of laughter went up from the lounging beaux. The next instant he was staring into the friendly grinning faces of Julius Arthur and Van Yeats.

"Where the hell do you think you're going?" said Julius Arthur.

He tried to explain; a thick jargon broke from his lips.

"He's cock-eyed drunk," said Van Yeats.

"Ding-dong!" he said, very cheerfully. "Cris-muss!"

Van Yeats propped him carefully against the wall; Julius Arthur ran swiftly into Church Street, and drew up in a moment at the curb. Eugene had a vast inclination to slump carelessly upon the nearest support. He placed his arms around their shoulders and collapsed. They wedged him between them on the front seat; somewhere bells were ringing.

"You look out for him, Van," said Julius. "Get him in a doorway, so none of his folks will see him. I'll get the car."

They answered with a wild yell of laughter.

The house was still empty when they came to it. They got him out of the car, and staggered up the steps with him. He was sorry enough that their fellowship was broken.

The door of the front bed-room, opposite the parlor, was open. They took him in and put him on the bed.

"Where's your room, 'Gene?" said Julius Arthur, panting, as they entered the hall.

"This one's as good as any," said Van Yeats.

"Is there anything else you want, son?" said Julius.

"Let's take off his shoes," said Julius Arthur. They unlaced them and pulled them off.

He tried to tell them to undress him, put him below the covers, and close the door, in order to conceal his defection from his family, but he had lost the power of speech. After looking and grinning at him for a moment, they went out without closing the door.

Presently the Gants came home. Eliza alone was still in town, pondering over gifts. It was after eleven o'clock. Gant, his daughter, and his two sons came into the room and stared at him. When they spoke to him, he burned helplessly.

When they had gone he lay upon the bed, unable to move. He had no sense of time, but his mind worked very clearly. He knew that he should rise, fasten the door, and undress. But he was paralyzed.

Have you no this? Have you no that? Have you no this? Have you no that? -- he was cradled in their rhythm. No, ma'am. We've run out of honor today, but we have a nice fresh lot of self-respect.

"Speak! Speak!" yelled Luke, rushing at him and choking him vigorously. "Are you dumb, idiot?"

"Go heat some water," said Gant professionally, "he's got to get it off his stomach." He no longer seemed old. His life in a marvellous instant came from its wasting shadow; it took on a hale sinew of health and action.

I shall remember that, he thought.

"Have you no pride? Have you no honor? Has it come to this?" the sailor roared dramatically, striding around the room.

"Ah, be quiet," Ben muttered. "No one's dead, you know."

Doesn't he think he's hell, though? Eugene thought. He could not fashion words, but he could make sounds, ironically, in the rhythm of his brother's moralizing. "Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh! Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh! Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh!" he said, with accurate mimicry. Helen, loosening his collar, bent over him laughing. Ben grinned swiftly under a cleft scowl.

"Save the fireworks," said Helen to Luke, as she left the room. "Close the door. For heaven's sake, try to keep it from mama, if you can."

This is a great moral issue, thought Eugene. He began to feel sick.

"Hah? Huh? What is it?" said Eliza.

"What say?" she asked sharply. No one had said anything. He grinned feebly at her, tickled, above his nausea and grief, at the palpable assumption of blind innocence which always heralded her discoveries. Seeing her thus, they all laughed.

Helen returned in a very few minutes with a kettle of hot water, a glass, and a box of soda. Gant fed him the solution mercilessly until he began to vomit. At the summit of his convulsion Eliza appeared. He lifted his sick head dumbly from the bowl, and saw her white face at the door, and her weak brown eyes, that could take on so much sharpness and sparkle when her suspicion was awakened.

"Oh, my Lord!" said Helen. "Here she is. We were hoping you wouldn't get here till it was over. Come and look at your Baby," she said, with a good-humored snicker, keeping his head comfortably supported on the palm of her hand.

But she knew, of course, instantly, what it was.

"How do you feel now, son?" Gant asked kindly.

"Better," he mumbled, discovering, with some elation, that his vocal paralysis was not permanent.

"Well, you see!" Helen began, kindly enough, but with a brooding satisfaction. "It only goes to show we're all alike. We all like it. It's in our blood."

"That awful curse!" Eliza said. "I had hoped that I might have one son who might escape it. It seems," she said, bursting into tears, "as if a Judgment were on us. The sins of the fathers --"

Gant gnawed his thin lip, and wetted his great thumb in the old manner.

"You might know," he said, "that I'd get the blame for it. Yes -- if one of them broke a leg it would be the same."

"Oh! for heaven's sake!" Helen cried angrily. "Stop it! It's not going to kill him: he'll learn a lesson from it."

"There's one thing sure!" said Eliza. "None of them ever got it from my side of the house. Say what you will, his grandfather, Major Pentland, never in his life allowed a drop in his house."

"Major Pentland be damned!" said Gant. "If you'd depended on him for anything you'd have gone hungry."

When they had left him, the boy tried to picture them lulled in the dulcet tranquillity they so often invoked. Its effects, he thought, would be more disastrous than any amount of warfare.

Certainly, thought Eugene, you'd have gone thirsty.

In the darkness, everything around and within him swam hideously. But presently he slid down into a pit of distressed sleep.

"Forget it!" said Helen. "It's Christmas. Let's try to have a little peace and quiet once a year."

Every one had agreed on a studious forgiveness. They stepped with obtrusive care around his fault, filled pleasantly with Christmas and mercy. Ben scowled at him quite naturally, Helen grinned and prodded him, Eliza and Luke surrendered themselves to sweetness, sorrow, and silence. Their forgiveness made a loud noise in his ears.

During the morning his father asked him to come for a walk. Gant was embarrassed and hang-dog; a duty of gentle admonishment devolved upon him -- he had been counselled to it by Helen and Eliza. Now, no man in his time could carry on in the big, Bow-wow style better than Gant, but none was less fitted to scatter the blossoms of sweetness and light. His wrath was sudden, his invective sprang from the moment, but he had for this occasion no thunder-bolts in his quiver, and no relish for the business before him. He had a feeling of personal guilt; he felt like a magistrate fining for intoxication a culprit with whom he has been on a spree the night before. Besides -- what if the Bacchic strain in him had been passed on to his son?

They walked on in silence across the Square, by the rimmed fountain. Gant cleared his throat nervously several times.

"Son," said he presently, "I hope you'll take last night as a warning. It would be a terrible thing if you let whiskey get the best of you. I'm not going to speak harshly to you about it: I hope you'll learn a lesson by it. You had better be dead than become a drunkard."

"I will!" Eugene said. He was filled with gratitude and relief. How good every one was. He wanted to make passionate avowals, great promises. He tried to speak. But he couldn't. There was too much to be said.

There! He was glad it was over.

But they had their Christmas, beginning thus with parental advice and continuing through all the acts of contrition, love, and decorum. They put on, over their savage lives, the raiment of society, going diligently through the forms and conventions, and thinking, "now, we are like all other families"; but they were timid and shy and stiff, like rustics dressed in evening-clothes.

But they could not keep silence. They were not ungenerous or mean: they were simply not bred to any restraint. Helen veered in the wind of hysteria, the strong uncertain tides of her temperament. At times when, before her own fire, her vitality sank, and she heard the long howl of the wind outside, she almost hated Eugene.

"It's ridiculous!" she said to Luke. "His behaving like this. He's only a kid -- he's had everything, we've had nothing! You see what it's come to, don't you?"

"His college education has ruined him," said the sailor, not unhappy that his candle might burn more brightly in a naughty world.

"Why don't you speak to her?" she said irritably. "She may listen to you -- she won't to me! Tell her so! You've seen how she's rubbed it in to poor old papa, haven't you? Do you think that old man -- sick as he is -- is to blame? 'Gene's not a Gant, anyway. He takes after her side of the house. He's queer -- like all of them! WE'RE Gants!" she said with a bitter emphasis.

"I wish you'd tell her that. With all his moping into books, he's no better than we are. If he thinks he's going to lord it over me, he's mistaken."

"There was always some excuse for papa," said the sailor. "He's had a lot to put up with." All his convictions in family affairs had been previously signed with her approval.

"I'd like to see him try it when I'm around," said Luke grimly.

The boy was doing a multiple penance -- he had committed his first great wrong in being at once so remote from them and so near to them. His present trouble was aggravated by the cross-complication of Eliza's thrusts at his father, and the latent but constantly awakening antagonism of mother and daughter. In addition, he bore directly Eliza's nagging and carping attack. All this he was prepared for -- it was the weather of his mother's nature (she was as fond of him as of any of them, he thought), and the hostility of Helen and Luke was something implacable, unconscious, fundamental, that grew out of the structure of their lives. He was of them, he was recognizably marked, but he was not with them, nor like them. He had been baffled for years by the passionate enigma of their dislike -- their tenders of warmth and affection, when they came, were strange to him: he accepted them gratefully and with a surprise he did not wholly conceal. Otherwise, he had grown into a shell of sullenness and quiet: he spoke little in the house.

The outbreak came three nights before his departure as he stood, tense and stolid, in the parlor. For almost an hour, in a savage monotone, Ben had tried deliberately, it seemed, to goad him to an attack. He had listened without a word, smothering in pain and fury, and enraging by his silence the older brother who was finding a vent for his own alien frustration.

"-- and don't stand there scowling at me, you little thug. I'm telling you for your own good. I'm only trying to keep you from being a jailbird, you know."

He was wearing ragged from the affair and its consequences. He felt that he was being unfairly dealt with, but as the hammering went on he drew his head bullishly down and held his tongue, counting the hours until his holiday should end. He turned silently to Ben -- he should have turned nowhere. But the trusted brother, frayed and bitter on his own accord, scowled bitterly, and gave him the harsh weight of his tongue. This finally was unendurable. He felt betrayed -- utterly turned against and set upon.

"The trouble with you," said Luke, "is that you have no appreciation for what's been done for you. Everything's been done for you, and you haven't sense enough to appreciate it. Your college education has ruined you."

"All right, Ben," he muttered. "That's enough, now. I don't care what he says, but I've had enough of it from you."

The boy turned slowly on Ben.

"Don't talk back to me, you little fool, or I'll bat your brains out."

This was the admission the older one had wanted. They were all in very chafed and ugly temper.

The boy sprang at his brother like a cat, with a snarling cry. He bore him backward to the floor as if he were a child, laying him down gently and kneeling above him, because he had been instantly shocked by the fragility of his opponent and the ease of his advantage. He struggled with such mixed rage and shame as those who try quietly to endure the tantrum of a trying brat. As he knelt above Ben, holding his arms pinned, Luke fell heavily on his back, uttering excited cries, strangling him with one arm and cuffing awkwardly with the other.

"All right, B-B-Ben," he chattered, "you grab his legs."

"Mercy!" she shrieked, as she reached the door. "They'll kill him!"

A free scrimmage upon the floor followed, with such a clatter of upset scuttles, fire-irons, and chairs, that Eliza was brought at a fast gallop from the kitchen.

"I f-f-f-fink he's gone crazy," said Luke. "He j-j-jumped on us without a word of warning."

The hero replied to this with a drunken roll of the head, a furious dilation of the nostrils, and another horrible noise in his throat.

But, although being subdued -- in the proud language of an older South "defeated, sir, but never beaten"-- Eugene was doing very well for his age, and continued to chill the spines of his enemies with strange noises in his larynx, even after they had all clambered panting to their feet.

When he could speak, Eugene said quietly, to control the trembling of his voice:

"What's to become of us!" wept Eliza. "When brother strikes brother, it seems that the smash-up has come." She lifted the padded arm-chair, and placed it on its legs again.

"I'm sorry I jumped on you, Ben. You," he said to the excited sailor, "jumped on my back like a coward. But I'm sorry for what's happened. I'm sorry for what I did the other night and now. I said so, and you wouldn't leave me alone. You've tried to drive me crazy with your talk. And I didn't," he choked, "I didn't think you'd turn against me as you have. I know what the others are like -- they hate me!"

"Yes, you hate me," Eugene said, "and you're ashamed to admit it. I don't know why you should, but you do. You wouldn't ever admit anything like that, but it's the truth. You're afraid of the right words. But it's been different with you," he said, turning to Ben. "We've been like brothers -- and now, you've gone over against me."

"Hate you!" cried Luke excitedly. "For G-g-god's sake! You talk like a fool. We're only trying to help you, for your own good. Why should we hate you!"

"Ah!" Ben muttered, turning away nervously. "You're crazy. I don't know what you're talking about!" He lighted a cigarette, holding the match in a hand that trembled.

"Children, children!" said Eliza sadly. "We must try to love one another. Let's try to get along together this Christmas -- what time's left. It may be the last one we'll ever have together." She began to weep: "I've had such a hard life," she said, "it's been strife and turmoil all the way. It does seem I deserve a little peace and happiness now."

But although the boy had used a child's speech of woe and resentment, they knew there was a core of truth in what he had said.

They were touched with the old bitter shame: they dared not look at one another. But they were awed and made quiet by the vast riddle of pain and confusion that scarred their lives.

"And how are you going to keep booze from getting me, Luke?" he said. "By jumping on my back and trying to strangle me? That's on a level with every other effort you've ever made to know me."

The boy felt very tired; his voice was flat and low. He began to speak with the bluntness of despair: what he said had undebatable finality.

"No one, 'Gene," Luke began quietly, "has turned against you. We want to help you -- to see you amount to something. You're the last chance -- if booze gets you the way it has the rest of us, you're done for."

"I don't know what you want," Luke answered, "but I thought I was acting for the best. As to telling you about myself, what do you want to know?"

"That's no way to talk before your mother," said Luke sternly.

"Well," said Eugene slowly, "you're six years older than I am: you've been away to school, you've worked in big cities, and you are now enlisted in the United States Navy. Why do you always act like God Almighty," he continued with rankling bitterness. "I know what sailors do! You're no better than I am! What about liquor? What about women?"

"No," Eugene said quietly. "I don't think you do. You know nothing whatever about me. I know nothing about you -- or any of you. I have lived here with you for seventeen years and I'm a stranger. In all that time have you ever talked to me like a brother? Have you ever told me anything of yourself? Have you ever tried to be a friend or a companion to me?"

"Oh," said Luke ironically, "you don't think we understand you?"

"No, son," said Eliza in a troubled voice. "I don't like that way of talking."

"Son," said Eliza again with her ancient look of trouble and frustration, "we must try to get on together."

"Then I won't talk like that," Eugene said. "But I had expected you to say that. We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call things by their names, although we're willing to call one another bad ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honor. The way to make yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won't admit that either, but it's true. Well, then, Luke, we won't talk of the ladies, black or white, you may or may not know, because it would make you uncomfortable. Instead, you can keep on being God and I'll listen to your advice, like a little boy in Sunday School. But I'd rather read the Ten Commandments where it's written down shorter and better."

"No," he said. "Alone. I have done an apprenticeship here with you for seventeen years, but it is coming to an end. I know now that I shall escape; I know that I have been guilty of no great crime against you, and I am no longer afraid of you."

"Of breathing your air, of eating your food, of living under your roof, of having your life and your blood in my veins, of accepting your sacrifice and privation, and of being ungrateful for it all."

"Why, boy!" said Eliza. "We've done all we could for you. What crime have we accused you of?"

"We should all be thankful for what we have," said Luke sententiously. "Many a fellow would give his right eye for the chance you've been given."

"I've been given nothing!" said Eugene, his voice mounting with a husky flame of passion. "I'll go bent over no longer in this house. What chance I have I've made for myself in spite of you all, and over your opposition. You sent me away to the university when you could do nothing else, when it would have been a crying disgrace to you among the people in this town if you hadn't. You sent me off after the Leonards had cried me up for three years, and then you sent me a year too soon -- before I was sixteen -- with a box of sandwiches, two suits of clothes, and instructions to be a good boy."

"Why, son!" said Eliza diplomatically, "no one has a word to say against the way you've done your work. We're very proud of you."

"I'd be the only one who would, if I did," the boy answered. "For that is really what is behind everything, isn't it? My crime the other night was not in getting drunk, but in getting drunk without any money of my own. If I did badly at the university with money of my own, you'd dare say nothing, but if I do well on money you gave me, I must still be reminded of your goodness and my unworthiness."

"Yes, I have a great deal to give thanks for," said Eugene. "I give thanks for every dirty lust and hunger that crawled through the polluted blood of my noble ancestors. I give thanks for every scrofulous token that may ever come upon me. I give thanks for the love and mercy that kneaded me over the washtub the day before my birth. I give thanks for the country slut who nursed me and let my dirty bandage fester across my navel. I give thanks for every blow and curse I had from any of you during my childhood, for every dirty cell you ever gave me to sleep in, for the ten million hours of cruelty or indifference, and the thirty minutes of cheap advice."

"They sent you some money, too," said Luke. "Don't forget that."

"I said I thank you for nothing, but I take that back."

"That's better!" said Luke.

"You needn't be," he said sullenly. "I've wasted a great deal of time and some money. But I've had something out of it -- more than most -- I've done as much work for my wages as you deserve. I've given you a fair value for your money; I thank you for nothing."

"What's that! What's that!" said Eliza sharply.

"Oh, there is! I'm sure there is!" cried Eugene. "Because I have been punished. By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape. And now at last I am free from you all, although you may hold me for a few years more. If I am not free, I am at least locked up in my own prison, but I shall get me some beauty, I shall get me some order out of this jungle of my life: I shall find my way out of it yet, though it take me twenty years more -- alone."

"Alone?" said Eliza, with the old suspicion. "Where are you going?"

"Ah," he said, "you were not looking, were you? I've gone."

"Unnatural!" Eliza whispered. "Unnatural son! You will be punished if there's a just God in heaven."