He gave benediction to the words in which he had so happily defined his position as wage-earner. They stated and confirmed an attitude, and in some measure protected him against the constant betrayals of sentiment. During the Spring he worked stupendously at joining activities, knowing that here was coin whose ring they could hear. He wrote conscientiously each item of his distinctions; his name found its way back more than once to the indulgent Altamont papers. Gant kept the clippings proudly, and gave public readings when he could.
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During the few remaining days of his holiday, he stayed almost entirely away from the house, coming for a brief and mumbled meal, and late at night, for bed. He waited for departure as a prisoner for release. The dolorous prelude to a journey -- the wet platform eyes, the sudden radiation of hectic warmth, the declarations of love at sound of the whistle -- left him this time unmoved. The tear-ducts, he was beginning to discover, had, like sweat-glands, dermic foundations, and were easily brought to a salty sparkle at mere sight of a locomotive. He had, therefore, the somewhat detached composure of a gentleman on his way to a comfortable week-end, who stands in a noisy crowd, waiting for the ferry.
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The boy had two short awkward letters from Ben, who was now stationed one hundred miles away, in the tobacco town. At Easter, Eugene visited him, staying at his lodgings, where again his unerring destiny had thrown him into the welcoming arms of a gray-haired widow. She was under fifty -- a handsome silly woman, who prodded and teased him as she would an adored child. She addressed him -- with a loose giggle -- as "Old Curly-Head," at which he fetched out his usual disgusted plea to his Maker. "O my God! Listen to this!" She had reverted to an astonishing romping girlhood, and would exercise her playfulness by leaping suddenly upon Old Curly-Head, dealing him a stiff dig in the ribs, and skipping away with a triumphant "Hah! Got you that time!"
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There was forever in that town a smell of raw tobacco, biting the nostrils with its acrid pungency: it smote the stranger coming from the train, but all the people in the town denied it, saying: "No; there is no smell at all." And within a day the stranger too could smell it no more.
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Spring was coming on again across the earth like a light sparkle of water-spray: all of the men who had died were making their strange and lovely return in blossom and flower. Ben walked along the streets of the tobacco town looking like asphodel. It was strange to find a ghost there in that place: his ancient soul prowled wearily by the cheap familiar brick and all the young facades.
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"You ought to see it," Ben said. "It's a famous custom: people come from everywhere." But the older brother did not go. Behind massed bands of horns, the trumpeting blare of trombones, the big crowds moved into the strange burial ground where all the stones lay flat upon the graves -- symbol, it was said, of all-levelling Death. But as the horns blared, the old ghoul-fantasy of death returned, the grave slabs made him think of table-cloths: he felt as if he were taking part in some obscene feast.
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There was a Square on high ground; in the centre a courthouse. Cars were parked in close lines. Young men loitered in the drug-store.
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On Easter morning he arose in the blue light and went with the other pilgrims to the Moravian cemetery.
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How real it is, Eugene thought. It is like something we have always known about and do not need to see. The town would not have seemed strange to Thomas Aquinas -- but he to the town.
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Ben prowled along, greeting the merchants with a grave scowl, leaning his skull against their round skulls of practicality, across their counters -- a phantom soliciting advertisement in a quiet monotone.
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"This is my kid brother, Mr. Fulton."
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That's like thinking well of Balder, in Connecticut, Eugene thought.
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"I have only been here three months," said Ben, resting in bed on his elbow and smoking a cigarette. "But I know all the leading business men already. I'm well thought of here." He glanced at his brother quickly and grinned, with a shy charm of rare confession. But his fierce eyes were desperate and lonely. Hill-haunted? For -- home? He smoked.
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"Hello, son! Dogged if you don't grow tall 'uns up there, Ben. Well, if you're like Old Ben, young fellow, we won't kick. We think a lot of him here."
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"You see, they think well of you, once you get away from your people. You'll never have a chance at home, 'Gene. They'll ruin everything for you. For heaven's sake, get away when you can. -- What's the matter with you? Why are you looking at me like that?" he said sharply, alarmed at the set stare of the boy's face. In a moment he said: "They'll spoil your life. Can't you forget about her?"
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He twisted his throat with a wild cry.
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War is not death to young men; war is life. The earth had never worn raiment of such color as it did that year. The war seemed to unearth pockets of ore that had never been known in the nation: there was a vast unfolding and exposure of wealth and power. And somehow -- this imperial wealth, this display of power in men and money, was blended into a lyrical music. In Eugene's mind, wealth and love and glory melted into a symphonic noise: the age of myth and miracle had come upon the world again. All things were possible.
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"No," said Eugene. In a moment he added: "She's kept coming back all Spring."
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The Spring advanced with a mounting hum of war. The older students fell out quietly and drifted away to enlistments. The younger strained tensely, waiting. The war brought them no sorrow: it was a pageant which might, they felt, pluck them instantly into glory. The country flowed with milk and honey. There were strange rumors of a land of Eldorado to the north, amid the war industry of the Virginia coast. Some of the students had been there, the year before: they brought back stories of princely wages. One could earn twelve dollars a day, with no experience. One could assume the duties of a carpenter, with only a hammer, a saw, and a square. No questions were asked.
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"Can't do without her? You can't fool me! No, sir. I know why you want to go," she said jocularly. "She's a married woman now: she may have a baby, for all you know. You've no right to go after her."
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Then abruptly, she said:
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"Mark my words," said Gant. "You'll be back in a week's time. It's a wild-goose chase you're going on."
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He went.
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He went home stretched like a bowstring and announced his intention of going away into Virginia. There was protest, but not loud enough to impede him. Eliza's mind was fastened on real-estate and the summer trade. Gant stared into the darkness at his life. Helen laughed at him and scolded him; then fell to plucking at her chin, absently.
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"Well, let him go if he wants to. It looks silly to me, but he's got to decide for himself."
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All through the night he drew toward her across Virginia, propped on his elbow in the berth and staring bewitched upon the great romantic country clumped with dreaming woodlands and white as a weird dawn beneath the blazing moonlight.
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He got twenty-five dollars from his father -- enough to pay his railway fare to Norfolk and leave him a few dollars.
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Early in the morning he came to Richmond. He had to change trains; there was a wait. He went out from the station and walked up the hill toward the fine old State House drenched cleanly in the young morning light. He ate breakfast at a lunchroom on Broad Street, filled already with men going to their work. This casual and brief contact with their lives, achieved after his lonely and magnificent approach through the night, thrilled him by its very casualness. All the little ticking sounds of a city beginning its day, the strange familiarity of voices in an alien place, heard curiously after the thunder of the wheels, seemed magical and unreal. The city had no existence save that which he conferred on it: he wondered how it had lived before he came, how it would live after he left. He looked at all the men, feeding with eyes that held yet the vast moon-meadows of the night and the cool green width of the earth. They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their limbs and faces of their own little cosmos. And the great hunger for voyages rose up in him -- to come always, as now at dawn, into strange cities, striding in among them, and sitting with them unknown, like a god in exile, stored with the enormous vision of the earth.
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Cars clanked by, beginning to work through the town. Merchants lowered their awnings; he left them as their day began.
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An hour later he was riding for the sea. Eighty miles away lay the sea and Laura. She slept unwitting of the devouring wheels that brought him to her. He looked at the aqueous blue sky whitened with little clouds, and at the land wooded with pines and indefinable tokens of the marshes and bright salt.
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The train drew under the boat-shed at Newport News. The terrific locomotive, as beautiful as any ship, breathed with unlaborious fatigue at the rail-head. There, by lapping water, she came to rest, like a completed destiny.
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The counterman yawned and turned the crackling pages of a morning paper. That was strange.
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The little boat lay waiting at the dock. Within a few minutes he had left the hot murky smell of the shed and was cruising out into the blue water of the Roads. A great light wind swept over the water, making a singing noise through the tackle of the little boat, making a music and a glory in his heart. He drove along the little decks at a bounding stride, lunging past the staring people, with wild noises in his throat. The lean destroyers, the bright mad camouflage of the freighters and the transports, the lazy red whirl of a propeller, half-submerged, and the light winey sparkle of the waves fused to a single radiance and filled him with glory. He cried back into the throat of the enormous wind, and his eyes were wet.
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The hot Virginias broiled under the fierce blue oven of the sky, but in the Roads the ships rocked in the freshening breeze of war and glory.
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Eugene remained in the furnace of Norfolk for four days, until his money was gone. He watched it go without fear, with a sharp quickening of his pulses, tasting the keen pleasure of his loneliness and the unknown turnings of his life. He sensed the throbbing antennae of the world: life purred like a hidden dynamo, with the vast excitement of ten thousand glorious threats. He might do all, dare all, become all. The far and the mighty was near him, around him, above him. There was no great bridge to span, no hard summit to win. From obscurity, hunger, loneliness, he might be lifted in a moment into power, glory, love. The transport loading at the docks might bear him war-ward, love-ward, fame-ward Wednesday night.
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O, the wonder, the magic and the loss! His life was like a great wave breaking in the lonely sea; his hungry shoulder found no barriers -- he smote his strength at nothing, and was lost and scattered like a wrack of mist. But he believed that this supreme ecstasy which mastered him and made him drunken might some day fuse its enormous light into a single articulation. He was Phaeton with the terrible horses of the sun: he believed that his life might pulse constantly at its longest stroke, achieve an eternal summit.
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Upon the decks of the boats, clean little figures in white moved about; under the bulging counter of a huge Frenchman young naked men were swimming. They come from France, he thought, and it is strange that they should be here.
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He walked by lapping water through the dark. He heard its green wet slap against the crusted pier-piles: he drank its strong cod scent, and watched the loading of great boats drenched in blazing light as they weltered slowly down into the water. And the night was loud with the rumble of huge cranes, the sudden loose rattle of the donkey-engines, the cries of the overseers, and the incessant rumbling trucks of stevedores within the pier.
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Through the hot streets of that town seethed the toughs, the crooks, the vagabonds of a nation -- Chicago gunmen, bad niggers from Texas, Bowery bums, pale Jews with soft palms, from the shops of the city, Swedes from the Middle-West, Irish from New England, mountaineers from Tennessee and North Carolina, whores, in shoals and droves, from everywhere. For these the war was a fat enormous goose raining its golden eggs upon them. There was no thought or belief in any future. There was only the triumphant Now. There was no life beyond the moment. There was only an insane flux and reflux of getting and spending.
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His imperial country, for the first time, was gathering the huge thrust of her might. The air was charged with murderous exuberance, rioting and corrupt extravagance.
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And more quietly, soberly, in this crowd, moved the older thriftier workmen: the true carpenters, the true masons, the true mechanics -- the canny Scotch-Irish of North Carolina, the fishermen of the Virginia coast, the careful peasantry of the Middle-West, who had come to earn, to save, to profit from the war.
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They shifted, veered from camp to camp, worked for a month, loafed opulently for a week, enjoying the brief bought loves of girls they met upon the ocean-beach or in a brothel.
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Young men from Georgia farms came, in the evenings, from their work on piers, in camps, in shipyards, to dress up in their peacock plumage. And at night, hard and brown and lean of hand and face, they stood along the curbing in $18.00 tan leathers, $80.00 suits, and $8.00 silk shirts striped with broad alternating bands of red and blue. They were carpenters, masons, gang overseers, or said they were: they were paid ten, twelve, fourteen, eighteen dollars a day.
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Strapping black buck-niggers, with gorilla arms and the black paws of panthers, earned $60 a week as stevedores, and spent it on a mulatto girl in a single evening of red riot.
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Through this crowd, with matted uncut hair that fell into his eyes, that shot its spirals through the rents of his old green hat, that curled a thick scroll up his dirty neck, Eugene plunged with hot devouring eyes -- soaked in his sweat by day, sharp and stale by night.
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In this great camp of vagrant floaters he lost himself: he came home into this world from loneliness. The hunger for voyages, the hunger that haunts Americans, who are a nomad race, was half-assuaged here in this maelstrom of the war.
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Everywhere amid this swarming crowd gleamed the bright raiment of blood and glory: the sailors thronged the streets in flapping blues and spotless whites -- brown, tough, and clean. The marines strode by in arrogant twos, stiff as rods in the loud pomp of chevrons and striped trousers. Commanders gray and grim, hard-handed C. P. O.'s, and elegant young ensigns out of college, with something blonde and fluffy at their side, went by among the red cap-buttons of French matelots, or the swagger sea-wise port of the Englishmen.
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By night he prowled about among the negroes; he listened to their rich proposed seductions; he went where the sailors went, down Church Street, where the women were. He prowled the night with young beast-lust, his thin boy-body stale with sweat, his hot eyes burning through the dark.
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Finally, his money gone, he slept, until driven out, in all-night lunchrooms; upon the Portsmouth ferry; and over lapping water on a rotting pier.
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He lost himself in the crowd. He lost count of the days. His little store of money melted. He moved from a cheap hotel, loud at night with the noise of harlotry, to a little attic room in a lodging-house, an oven of hot pine and tarred roof; he moved from the lodging-house to a fifty-cent cot in the Y. M. C. A., where, returning night by night, he paid his fee, and slept in a room with forty snoring sailors.
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He grew hungry for food. His money was gone. But there was a hunger and thirst in him that could not be fed. Over the chaos of his brain hung the shadow of Laura James. Her shadow hung above the town, above all life. It had brought him here; his heart was swollen with pain and pride; he would not go to find her.
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Thus, unclean, unkempt, clothed in rags and hunger and madness, he saw himself victorious, heroic and beautiful. He was mad with his obsession. He thought he saw Laura on the streets a dozen times a day: his heart turned rotten; he did not know what he should do or say, whether to run or remain. He brooded for hours over her address in the telephone directory; sitting by the phone, he trembled with excitement because its awful magic could be sounded at a gesture, because within a minute he could be with her, voice to voice.
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He was obsessed with the notion that he would find her in the crowd, upon the street, around the corner. He would not speak to her if he met her. He would go proudly and indifferently by. He would not see her. She would see him. She would see him at some heroic moment, just as he was receiving the love and respect of beautiful women. She would speak to him; he would not speak to her. She would be stricken; she would be beaten down; she would cry to him for love and mercy.
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He hunted out her home. She was living in an old frame house far out from the centre of the town. He stalked carefully about the neighborhood, keeping a block away from the house at all times, observing it obliquely, laterally, from front and back, with stealthy eye and a smothering thud of the heart, but never passing before it, never coming directly to it.
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At length, he tried to get work. Work there was in great abundance -- but the princely wages of which he had been told were hard to find. He could not swear he was a carpenter, a mason. He was a dirty boy, and looked it. He was afraid. He went to the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, the Naval Base at Norfolk, the Bush Terminal -- everywhere there was work, abundant work -- hard labor that paid four dollars a day. This he would gladly have taken; but he found that he could not have his wages until after the second week, and that one week's pay would be withheld to tide him over in illness, trouble, or departure.
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And he had no money left.
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He went to a Jew and pawned the watch Eliza had given him upon his birthday. He got five dollars on it. Then he went by boat once more to Newport News, and by trolley up the coast to Hampton. He had heard, in the thronging rumor of Norfolk, that there was work upon the flying field, and that the worker was fed and housed upon the field, at company expense.
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He was foul and dirty. The soles of his shoes wore through: his calloused feet beat against hot pavements. He stank.
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In the little employment shack at the end of the long bridge that led across into the field, he was signed on as a laborer and searched by the sentry, who made him open his valise. Then he labored across the bridge, kneeing his heavy bag, which bulged with his soiled and disorderly belongings, before him.
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"No, sir," said Eugene.
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Eugene thrust out his employment slip in shaking fingers. The man looked briefly at it.
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The superintendent grinned wearily.
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He staggered at length into the rude company office and sought out the superintendent, a man in the thirties, shaven, pale, weary, who wore a blue eyeshade, armbands, and talked with a limp cigarette plastered on his lip.
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"Did you ever do day labor before?" said the man.
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"How old are you, son?" the man asked.
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"Yes, sir," said Eugene.
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Eugene was silent for a moment. "I'm -- nineteen," he said at length, wondering, since he had lied, why he had not had courage to say twenty.
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"It's hard work, son," the man said. "You'll be among the wops and the Swedes and the hunkies. You'll live in the same bunkhouse, you'll eat with them. They don't smell nice, son."
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"College boy, aren't you, son?" he said, glancing at Eugene.
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"No," said the man. "No, I won't do that."
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"I have no money," said Eugene. "I'll work hard. I won't get sick. Give me the job. Please!"
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"You'll have a horse," said the superintendent, "to ride around on."
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"H-h-how much --?" he finally croaked, feeling that he must. Business.
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Eugene turned blindly away.
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"The checker we've got is quitting," said the superintendent. "You'll go to the stables with him in the morning to get your horse."
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"H-h-h-horse?" said Eugene.
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With strong bowel-excitement Eugene began to think of the horse, with joy, with fear. He turned to go. He could not bear to talk of money.
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"Thank you," said Eugene, clenching his fingers, with husky emotion. "Thank you."
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"I tell you what I'll do," said the superintendent. "I'll give you a job as a checker. You'll be with the office force. That's where you belong. You'll live with them in their own bunk-house. They're nice fellows," he said elegantly, "college fellows, like yourself."
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"I'll give you $80 a month to begin with," said the manager with a touch of magnificence. "If you make good, I'll give you a hundred."
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"And my keep?" whispered Eugene.
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"Sure!" said the manager. "That's thrown in."
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Eugene worked upon the Flying Field for a month. Three times a day he rode around the field to check the numbers of two dozen gangs who were engaged in the work of grading, levelling, blasting from the spongy earth the ragged stumps of trees and filling interminably, ceaselessly, like the weary and fruitless labor of a nightmare, the marshy earth-craters, which drank their shovelled toil without end. The gangs were of all races and conditions: Portugee niggers, ebony-black, faithful and childlike, who welcomed him with great toothy grins, each pointing to his big white pin, on which was printed his number, crying out in strange outlandish voices, "feefety-nine, nine-net-ty seex," and so on; Bowery bums, in greasy serge and battered derbies, toying distastefully with pick-handles that shredded their dirty uncalloused palms -- their hard evil faces, with their smudge of beard, were like things corrupt, green-yellow, that grow under barrels. And there were also drawling fishermen from the Virginia coast, huge gorilla niggers from Georgia and the lower South, Italians, Swedes, Irishmen -- part of the huge compost of America.
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Eugene reeled away with his valise, and with a head full of exploding rockets.
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These months, although filled with terror and hunger, must be passed in rapid summary with bare mention of the men and actions that a lost boy knew. They belong to a story of escape and wandering -- valuable here to indicate the initiation to the voyage this life will make. They are a prelude to exile, and into their nightmare chaos no other purpose may be read than the blind groping of a soul toward freedom and isolation.
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Stuck like a jigging doll upon the horse, whom he feared, he rode, staring into heaven, sometimes almost unconscious of the great engine expanding and contracting below him with a brown sensual rhythm. The bird-men filled the blue Virginia weather with the great drone of the Liberties.
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He came to know them and their overseers -- tough reckless men, gray-haired and lustful, full of swift action and coarse humor.
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At length, hungry again for the ships and faces, he left his work and spent his earnings in a week of gaudy riot in Norfolk and on the Virginia beaches. Almost penniless again, with only the savage kaleidoscope of a thousand streets, a million lights, the blazing confusion and the strident noise of carnival, he returned to Newport News in search of employment, accompanied by another youth from Altamont, likewise a thriftless adventurer in war-work, whom he had found upon the beach. This worthy, whose name was Sinker Jordan, was three years older than Eugene. He was a handsome reckless boy, small in stature, and limping from an injury he had received in a football game. His character was weak and volatile -- he hated effort, and was obstinate only in cursing ill-fortune.
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The two young men had a few dollars between them. They pooled their resources, and, with wild optimism, purchased from a pawnbroker in Newport News the rudiments of carpenter's equipment -- hammers, saws, and T-squares. They went inland fifteen or twenty miles to a dreary government camp sweltering in the Virginia pines. They were refused employment here and in black dejection returned in the afternoon to the town they had left so hopefully in the morning. Before sundown they had secured employment in the Shipbuilding Yards, but they had been discharged five minutes after they reported for work, when they confessed to a grinning foreman in a room full of woodshavings and quietly slatting belts, that they had no knowledge of the intensely special carpentry of ship's carving. Nor (they might have added) of any other.
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They were quite moneyless now, and once on the street again, Sinker Jordan had hurled upon the pavement the fatal tools, cursing savagely the folly that threatened now to keep them hungry. Eugene picked the tools up, and took them back to the imperturbable Uncle, who repurchased them for only a few dollars less than the sum they had paid him in the morning.
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Thus the day. They found a lodging in a dingy house where, as an appropriate climax to his folly, Sinker Jordan surrendered their remaining capital into the greedy palm of the landlady -- and a real lady too, she admitted. But, having previously eaten, they had all the hope of a full belly and their youth -- they slept, Sinker without care and without effort.
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Eugene was early up at dawn, and after futile efforts to waken the luxuriously somnolent Sinker, he was off to the dingy yellow piers along the waterfront, which were stored with munitions for the war. After a morning tramping up and down the dusty road outside the guarded enclosure, he had obtained employment for himself and Sinker from the chief checker, a nervous ugly man, swollen with petty tyranny. He had gimlet eyes, glittering below spectacles, and hard muscular jaws that writhed constantly.
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Eugene went to work at seven the next morning -- Sinker, a day or two later, only when his last small coin had vanished. Eugene screwed up his pride and borrowed a few dollars from one of the other checkers. On this he and Sinker lived meagerly until pay-day -- which was only a few days off. This money slipped quickly through their careless fingers. Down to a few coins again, with the next pay-day almost two weeks off, Sinker gambled at dice with the checkers, behind the great fortress of sacked oats upon the pier -- lost, won, lost, rose penniless and cursing God. Eugene knelt beside the checkers, with his last half-dollar in his palm, heedless of Sinker's bitter taunt. He had never thrown dice before: naturally, he won --$8.50. He rose exultantly from their profane surprise, and took Sinker to dinner at the best hotel.
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A day or two later, he went behind the oats again, gambled with his last dollar -- and lost.
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He began to starve. Day crawled into weary day. The fierce eye of July beat down upon the pier with a straight insufferable glare. The boats and trains slid in and out, crammed to the teeth with munitions -- with food for the soldiers. The hot grainy air on the pier swam before his eyes speckled with dancing patches, and he made weary tallies on a sheet as the big black stevedores swarmed past him with their trunks. Sinker Jordan cadged small sums from the other checkers, and lived miserably on bottled pop and cheese at a little grocery across the road from the pier. Eugene was unable to beg or borrow. Partly from pride, but more from the powerful brooding inertia of his temper, which more and more was governing his will to act, he found himself unable to speak. Each day he said: "I shall speak to one of them today. I shall say that I must eat, and that I have no money." But when he tried to speak he could not.
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As they grew more efficient in their work they were called back, after the day's end, for work at night. This extra work, with its time-and-a-half pay, he would otherwise have been glad to get, but stumbling from exhaustion, the command to return was horrible. For several days now he had not been home to the dingy little room which he shared with Sinker Jordan. At the end of his day's work, he would climb to a little oasis in the enormous wall of sacked oats and sink into exhausted sleep, with the rattling of cranes and winches, the steady rumble of the trucks, and the remote baying of boats anchored in the stream -- mixing in a strange faint symphony in his ears.
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And he thought of the strange lost faces he had known, the lonely figures of his family, damned in chaos, each chained to a destiny of ruin and loss -- Gant, a fallen Titan, staring down enormous vistas of the Past, indifferent to the world about him; Eliza, beetle-wise, involved in blind accretions; Helen, childless, pathless, furious -- a great wave breaking on the barren waste; and finally, Ben -- the ghost, the stranger, prowling at this moment in another town, going up and down the thousand streets of life, and finding no doors.
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But the next day, on the pier, Eugene was weaker than ever. He sat sprawled upon a throne of plump oat sacks, with blurred eyes watching the loading of the bags at the spout, marking raggedly his tally upon the sheet as the stevedores plunged in and out. The terrible heat steamed through the grainy pollen of the air: he moved each limb with forethought, picking it up and placing it as if it were a detached object.
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And he lay there, with the fading glimmer of the world about him, as the war mounted to its climax of blood and passion during that terrible month. He lay there, like his own ghost, thinking with pain, with grief, of all the million towns and faces he had not known. He was the atom for which all life had been aplot -- Caesar had died and a nameless wife of Babylon, and somewhere here, upon this marvellous dying flesh, this myriad brain, their mark, their spirit, rested.
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The supper hour came, upon the heated pier, with the sudden noise of silence. There were small completed noises up and down the enormous shed: a faint drumming of footfalls of workers walking toward the entrance, a slap of water at the ship's hull, a noise from the bridge.
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At the end of the day he was asked to return for night-work. He listened, swaying on his feet, to the far-sounding voice of the chief checker.
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Eugene went behind the oat pile and climbed blindly up until he reached his little fortress at the top. The world ebbed from his fading sense: all sound grew fainter, more far. Presently, he thought, when I have rested here, I shall get up and go down to work. It has been a hot day. I am tired. But when he tried to move he could not. His will struggled against the imponderable lead of his flesh, stirring helplessly like a man in a cage. He thought quietly, with relief, with tranquil joy. They will not find me here. I cannot move. It is over. If I had thought of this long ago, I would have been afraid. But I'm not, now. Here -- upon this oat pile -- doing my bit -- for Democracy. I'll begin to stink. They'll find me then.
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They went across the road to a little grocery-store. The checker ordered a bottle of milk, a box of crackers, and a big block of cheese. As Eugene ate, the tears began to flow down his grimy face, dredging dirty gullies on his skin. They were tears of hunger and weakness: he could not restrain them.
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The checker stood over him watchfully, with a kindly troubled stare. He was a young man with a lantern jaw, and a thin dish face: he wore scholarly spectacles, and smoked a pipe reflectively.
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In this way the young checker, who had loaned him money, found him. The checker knelt above him, supporting Eugene's head with one hand, and putting a bottle of raw hard liquor to his mouth with the other. When the boy had revived somewhat, the checker helped him to descend the pile and walked slowly with him up the long wooden platform of the pier.
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Life glimmered away out of his weary eyes. He lay, half-conscious, sprawled upon the oats. He thought of the horse.
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"Why didn't you tell me, boy? I'd have let you have the money," he said.
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With the checker's loan of five dollars he and Sinker Jordan lived until pay-day. Then, after dining together on four pounds of steak, Sinker Jordan departed for Altamont and the enjoyment of an inheritance which had fallen due a few days before, on his twenty-first birthday. Eugene stayed on.
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"I -- don't -- know," said Eugene, between bites of cheese. "Couldn't."
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At night, when he was not called back to work he rode out by trolley to one of the Virginia beaches. But the only sound that was real, that was near and present, was the sound in his heart, in his brain, of the everlasting sea. He turned his face toward it: behind him, the cheap million lights of the concessionaires, the clatter, the racket, the confetti, the shrill blare of the saxophones, all the harsh joyless noise of his country, was softened, was made sad, far, and phantom. The wheeling merry-go-round, the blaring dance-orchestra, played K-K-K-Katy Beautiful Katy, Poor Little Buttercup, and Just a Baby's Prayer at Twilight.
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He was like a man who had died, and had been reborn. All that had gone before lived in a ghostly world. He thought of his family, of Ben, of Laura James, as if they were ghosts. The world itself turned ghost. All through that month of August, while the war marched to its ending, he looked upon its dying carnival. Nothing seemed any longer hard and hot and raw and new. Everything was old. Everything was dying. A vast aerial music, forever far-faint, like the language of his forgotten world, sounded in his ears. He had known birth. He had known pain and love. He had known hunger. Almost he had known death.
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His face was thin and bright as a blade, below the great curling shock of his hair; his body as lean as a starved cat's; his eyes bright and fierce.
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O sea! (he thought) I am the hill-born, the prison-pent, the ghost, the stranger, and I walk here at your side. O sea, I am lonely like you, I am strange and far like you, I am sorrowful like you; my brain, my heart, my life, like yours, have touched strange shores. You are like a woman lying below yourself on the coral floor. You are an immense and fruitful woman with vast thighs and a great thick mop of curling woman's hair floating like green moss above your belly. And you will bring me to the happy land, you will wash me to glory in bright ships.
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And that cheap music turned elfin and lovely; it was mixed into magic -- it became a part of the romantic and lovely Virginias, of the surge of the sea, as it rolled in from the eternal dark, across the beach, and of his own magnificent sorrow -- his triumphant loneliness after pain and love and hunger.
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There by the sea of the dark Virginias, he thought of the forgotten faces, of all the million patterns of himself, the ghost of his lost flesh. The child that heard Swain's cow, the lost boy in the Ozarks, the carrier of news among the blacks, and the boy who went in by the lattice with Jim Trivett. And the waitress, and Ben, and Laura? Dead, too? Where? How? Why? Why has the web been woven? Why do we die so many deaths? How came I here beside the sea? O lost, O far and lonely, where?
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And while he stared and saw himself beloved and admitted, he heard them laugh: he felt suddenly the hard white ring of their faces about him, and he plunged away, with cursing mouth.
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Sometimes, as he walked back among the dancers, a scarecrow in flapping rags, he looked and saw himself among them. He seemed to be two people: he constantly saw himself with dark bent face sitting upon the top rail of a fence, watching himself go by with a bright herd of young people. He saw himself among the crowds, several inches shorter than he was, fitting comfortably into a world where everything was big enough for him.
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O my sweet bitches! My fine cheap sluts! You little crawling itch of twiddlers: you will snigger at me! At me! At me! (He beat his hands against his ribs.) You will mock at me, with your drug-store pimps, your Jazz-bo apes, your gorilla gobs, you cute little side-porch chippies! What do you understand? The lust of a goat, the stink of your kind -- that does for you, my girls. And yet you laugh at me! Ah, but I'll tell you why you laugh: you are afraid of me because I am not like the others. You hate me because I do not belong. You see I am finer and greater than any one you know: you cannot reach me and you hate me. That's it! The ethereal (yet manly) beauty of my features, my boyish charm (for I am Just a Boy) blended with the tragic wisdom of my eyes (as old as life and filled with the brooding tragedy of the ages), the sensitive and delicate flicker of my mouth, and my marvellous dark face blooming inward on strange loveliness like a flower -- all this you want to kill because you cannot touch it. Ah me! (Thinking of his strange beauty, his eyes grew moist with love and glory, and he was forced to blow his nose.) Ah, but She will know. The love of a lady. Proudly, with misty eyes, he saw her standing beside him against the rabble: her elegant small head, wound with a bracelet of bright hair, against his shoulder, and with two splendid pearls in her ears. Dearest! Dearest! We stand here on a star. We are beyond them now. Behold! They shrink, they fade, they pass -- victorious, enduring, marvellous love, my dearest, we remain.
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Brooding thus on the vision of his own beauty, stirred by his own heroic music, with misty eyes, he would pass over into the forbidden settlement, with its vigilant patrols of naval and military police on the watch for their own, and prowl softly down a dark little street to a dingy frame house with drawn blinds, where dwelt a love that for three dollars could be bought and clothed with his own fable. Her name was Stella Blake. She was never in a hurry.
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With her lived a young corn-haired girl of twenty years whose family lived in Pulpit Hill. Sometimes he went to see her.
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Twice a week the troops went through. They stood densely in brown and weary thousands on the pier while a council of officers, tabled at the gangways, went through their clearance papers. Then, each below the sweating torture of his pack, they were filed from the hot furnace of the pier into the hotter prison of the ship. The great ships, with their motley jagged patches of deception, waited in the stream: they slid in and out in unending squadrons.
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Sometimes the troops were black -- labor regiments from Georgia and Alabama; big gorilla bucks from Texas. They gleamed with sweat and huge rich laughter: they were obedient as children and called their cursing officers "boss."
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"And don't you call me 'boss' again, you bastards!" screamed a young Tennessee lieutenant, who had gone slowly insane during the moving, as he nursed his charges through hell. They grinned at him cheerfully, with affection, like good obedient children, as he stamped, raving, up and down the pier. From time to time they goaded him into a new frenzy with complaints about lost hats, bayonets, small arms, and papers. Somehow he found things for them; somehow he cursed his way through, keeping them in order. They grinned affectionately, therefore, and called him boss.
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"And what in Jesus' name have you done now?" he yelled, as a huge black sergeant with several enlisted men, who had gathered at the examiner's table, burst suddenly into loud roars of grief. The fiery lieutenant rushed at the table, cursing.
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"Boss," blubbered the big black sergeant, "we wants to go to France. We don't want to git lef' in dis Gawd-dam hole."
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The sergeant and several enlisted men, all Texas darkies, had come away from camp without a clean bill of health: they were venereals and had not been cured.
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(Nor do I blame them, thought Eugene.)
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"You see," said the dish-faced checker, while he and Eugene watched, "that's what it takes to hold a crowd of niggers. You can't be nice to 'em. They'd do anything for that guy."
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"I'll kill you! So help me God, I'll kill you!" screamed the officer, hurling his trim cap upon the ground and stamping upon it. But, a moment later, with a medical officer he was leading them away for examination behind the great wall of sacked oats. Five minutes later they emerged. The negroes were cavorting with joy: they pressed around their fierce commander, seizing and kissing his hand, fawning upon him, adoring him.
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"He would for them," said Eugene.
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These negroes, he thought, who came from Africa, were sold at the block in Louisiana, and live in Texas, are now on their way to France.
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"Why not?" said Eugene.
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"I've got a job for you, Gant," he said. "Double-time pay. I want you to get in on some of the easy money."
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"They asked me to go, but I wouldn't."
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When the big freighter slid away from the pier, he stood in the bow with spread legs, darting his eyes about with fierce eagle glances. The iron decks blistered his feet through the thin soles of his shoes. He did not mind. He was the captain.
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The dish-faced checker, when jubilantly he told him of his appointment, said:
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This was danger, war. He was definitely in on it, risking his hide for Democracy. He was thrilled.
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"What is it?" said Eugene.
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"It's all in the day's work," said Eugene dramatically.
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Mr. Finch, the chief checker with the ugly slit eyes, approached Eugene with a smile of false warmth. His gray jaws worked.
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"They're loading this ship with big stuff," said Mr. Finch. "They're taking her into the stream to get it on. I want you to go out with her. They'll take you off in a tug to-night."
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"I don't want the money bad enough. They're loading her with T. N. T. and nitro-glycerin. The niggers play baseball with those cases. If they ever drop one, they'll bring you home in a bucket."
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She anchored seaward down the Roads, and the great barges were nosed in by the tugs. All through the day, under a broiling sun, they loaded her from the rocking barges: her huge yellow booms swung up and down; by nightfall she rode deeply in the water, packed to her throat with shells and powder, and bearing on the hot plates of her deck 1200 grisly tons of field artillery.
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Eugene stood with fierce appraising eyes, walking about the guns with a sense of authority, jotting down numbers, items, pieces. From time to time he thrust a handful of moist scrap-tobacco into his mouth, and chewed with an air of relish. He spat hot sizzling gobs upon the iron deck. God! thought he. This is man's work. Heave-ho, ye black devils! There's a war on! He spat.
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When the trains slid in and out, the stevedores raised the wooden bridges that spanned the tracks. Foot by foot, with rhythmic pull and halt, the gangs tugged at the ropes, singing, under the direction of their leader their song of love and labor:
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The tug came at nightfall and took him off. He sat apart from the stevedores, trying to fancy the boat had come for him alone. The lights went twinkling up the far Virginia shores. He spat into the swirling waters.
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Once or twice again, in the dying summer, Eugene went to Norfolk. He saw the sailor, but he no longer tried to see Laura. She seemed far and lost.
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He had not written home all summer. He found a letter from Gant, written in his father's Gothic sprawl -- a sick and feeble letter, written sorrowfully and far away. O lost! Eliza, in the rush and business of the summer trade, had added a few practical lines. Save his money. Get plenty of good food. Keep well. Be a good boy.
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"Jelly Roll! (Heh!) Je-e-elly Roll."
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The boy was a lean column of brown skin and bone. He had lost over thirty pounds during the summer: he was over six foot four and weighed little more than one hundred and thirty pounds.
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The sailor was shocked at his emaciation, and bullied him with blustering reproof:
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They were great black men, each with his kept woman. They earned fifty or sixty dollars a week.
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The summer waned. When September came, Eugene quit his work and, after a luxurious day or two in Norfolk, started homeward. But, at Richmond, where there was a wait of three hours between trains, he changed his plans suddenly and went to a good hotel.
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"Why didn't you t-t-tell me where you were, idiot? I'd have sent you money. For G-g-god's sake! Come on and eat!" They ate.
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He thought of his own family with fear, almost with hatred. My God! Am I never to be free? he thought. What have I done to deserve this slavery? Suppose -- suppose I were in China, or in Africa, or at the South Pole. I should always be afraid of his dying while I was away. (He twisted his neck as he thought of it.) And how they would rub it in to me if I were not there! Enjoying yourself in China (they would say) while your father was dying. Unnatural son! Yes, but curse them! Why should I be there? Can they not die alone? Alone! O God, is there no freedom on this earth?
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He was touched with pride and victory. In his pockets he had $130 that he had won hardily by his own toil. He had lived alone, he had known pain and hunger, he had survived. The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart. He thrilled to the glory of the secret life. The fear of the crowd, a distrust and hatred of group life, a horror of all bonds that tied him to the terrible family of the earth, called up again the vast Utopia of his loneliness. To go alone, as he had gone, into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth -- it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
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With quick horror, he saw that such freedom lay a weary world away, and could be bought by such enduring courage as few men have.
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Before he went home he wrote an enormous letter to Laura James at Norfolk, a pitiable and boasting letter which rose at its end to an insane crow: "I was there all summer and I never looked you up. You were not decent enough to answer my letters; I saw no reason why I should bother with you any more. Besides, the world is full of women; I got my share and more this summer."
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He stayed in Richmond several days, living sumptuously in the splendid hotel, eating from silver dishes in the grill, and roaming pleasantly through the wide streets of the romantic old town, to which he had come once as a Freshman at Thanksgiving, when the university's team had played Virginia there. He spent three days trying to seduce a waitress in an ice-cream and candy-store: he lured her finally to a curtained booth in a chop-suey restaurant, only to have his efforts fail when the elaborate meal he had arranged for with the Chinaman aroused her distaste because it had onions in it.
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He mailed the letter, with a sense of malevolent triumph. But the moment the iron lid of the box clanged over it, his face was contorted by shame and remorse: he lay awake, writhing as he recalled the schoolboy folly of it. She had beaten him again.
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