Life fell back into civilian patterns. The gray back of winter was broken: the Spring came through.
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Three weeks after Eugene's return to the university the war ended. The students cursed and took off their uniforms. But they rang the great bronze bell, and built a bonfire on the campus, leaping around it like dervishes.
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Eugene was a great man on the campus of the little university. He plunged exultantly into the life of the place. He cried out in his throat with his joy: all over the country, life was returning, reviving, awaking. The young men were coming back to the campus. The leaves were out in a tender green blur: the quilled jonquil spouted from the rich black earth, and peach-bloom fell upon the shrill young isles of grass. Everywhere life was returning, awaking, reviving. With victorious joy, Eugene thought of the flowers above Ben's grave.
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He was wild with ecstasy because the Spring had beaten death. The grief of Ben sank to a forgotten depth in him. He was charged with the juice of life and motion. He did not walk: he bounded along. He joined everything he had not joined. He made funny speeches in chapel, at smokers, at meetings of all sorts. He edited the paper, he wrote poems and stories -- he flung outward without pause or thought.
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Sometimes at night he would rush across the country, beside a drunken driver, to Exeter and Sydney, and there seek out the women behind the chained lattices, calling to them in the fresh dawn-dusk of Spring his young goat-cry of desire and hunger.
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Sometimes, when he walked softly by, he heard the young men talking in their rooms of Eugene Gant. Eugene Gant was crazy. Eugene Gant was mad. Oh, I (he thought) am Eugene Gant!
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Lily! Louise! Ruth! Ellen! O mother of love, you cradle of birth and living, whatever your billion names may be, I come, your son, your lover. Stand, Maya, by your opened door, denned in the jungle web of Niggertown.
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Then a voice said: "He didn't change his underwear for six weeks. One of his fraternity brothers told me so." And another: "He takes a bath once a month, whether he needs it or not." They laughed; one said then that he was "brilliant"; they all agreed.
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He caught the claw of his hand into his lean throat. They are talking of me, of me! I am Eugene Gant -- the conqueror of nations, lord of the earth, the Siva of a thousand beautiful forms.
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In nakedness and loneliness of soul he paced along the streets. Nobody said, I know you. Nobody said, I am here.
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Most of us think we're hell, thought Eugene. I do. I think I'm hell. Then, in the dark campus path, he heard the young men talking in their rooms, and he gouged at his face bloodily, with a snarl of hate against himself.
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I think I am hell, and they say I stink because I have not had a bath. But I could not stink, even if I never had a bath. Only the others stink. My dirtiness is better than their cleanliness. The web of my flesh is finer; my blood is a subtle elixir; the hair of my head, the marrow of my spine, the cunning jointure of my bones, and all the combining jellies, fats, meats, oils, and sinews of my flesh, the spittle of my mouth, the sweat of my skin, is mixed with rarer elements, and is fairer and finer than their gross peasant beef.
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The vast wheel of life, of which he was the hub, spun round.
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There had appeared that year upon the nape of his neck a small tetter of itch, a sign of his kinship with the Pentlands -- a token of his kinship with the great malady of life. He tore at the spot with frantic nails; he burned his neck to a peeled blister with carbolic acid -- but the spot, as if fed by some ineradicable leprosy in his blood, remained. Sometimes, during cool weather, it almost disappeared; but in warm weather it returned angrily, and he scraped his neck red in an itching torture.
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He would become at times insanely conscious of spotless youth: he was terrified before the loud good health of America, which is really a sickness, because no man will admit his sores. He shrank back at the memory of his lost heroic fantasies: he thought of Bruce-Eugene, of all his thousand romantic impersonations, and never could he endure himself with an itching tetter upon his flesh. He became morbidly conscious of all his blemishes, real and fancied: for days he would see nothing but people's teeth -- he would stare into their mouths when he talked to them, noting the fillings, the extractions, the plates and bridges. He would gaze with envy and fear at the sound ivory grinders of the young men, baring his own, which were regular but somewhat yellowed with smoking, a hundred times a day. He scrubbed at them savagely with a stiff brush until the gums bled; he brooded for hours upon a decaying molar which must one day be extracted, and, wild with despair, he would figure out on paper the age at which he might become toothless.
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He was afraid to let people walk behind him. He sat, whenever possible, with his back to the wall; he was in agony when he descended a crowded stair, holding his shoulders high so that the collar of his coat might hide the terrible patch. He let his hair grow in a great thick mat, partly to hide his sore, and partly because exposing it to the view of the barber touched him with shame and horror.
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But if, he thought, I lose only one every two years after I am twenty, I shall still have over fifteen left when I am fifty, since we have thirty-two, including wisdom-teeth. And it will not look so bad, if only I can save the front ones. Then, with his hope in futures, he thought: But by that time perhaps the dentists can give me real ones. He read several dental magazines to see if there was any hope for the transplanting of sound teeth for old ones. Then, with brooding satisfaction, he studied his sensual deeply scalloped mouth with the pouting underlip, noting that even when he smiled he barely revealed his teeth.
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He asked the medical students innumerable questions about the treatment or cure of inherited blood maladies, venereal diseases, intestinal and inguinal cancers, and the transference of animal glands to men. He went to the movies only to examine the teeth and muscles of the hero; he pored over the toothpaste and collar advertisements in the magazines; he went to the shower-rooms at the gymnasium and stared at the straight toes of the young men, thinking with desperate sick pain of his own bunched and crooked ones. He stood naked before a mirror, looking at his long gaunt body, smooth and white save for the crooked toes and the terrible spot on his neck -- lean, but moulded with delicate and powerful symmetry.
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Then, slowly, he began to take a terrible joy in his taint. The thing on his neck that could not be gouged or burnt away he identified with a tragic humor of his blood that plunged him downward at times into melancholia and madness. But there was, he saw, a great health in him as well, that could bring him back victoriously from desolation. In his reading of fiction, in the movies, in the collar advertisements, in all his thousand fantasies of Bruce-Eugene, he had never known a hero with crooked toes, a decaying tooth, and a patch of tetter on his neck. Nor had he ever known a heroine, whether among the society women of Chambers and Phillips, or among the great elegants of Meredith and Ouida, who had borne such a blemish. But, in all his fantasies now, he loved a woman with hair of carrot silk and eyes of a faintly weary violet, webbed delicately at the corners. Her teeth were small, white and irregular, and she had one molar edged with gold which was visible when she smiled. She was subtle, and a little weary: a child and a mother, as old and as deep as Asia, and as young as germinal April who returns forever like a girl, a mistress, a parent, and a nurse.
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Thus, through the death of his brother, and the sickness that was rooted in his own flesh, Eugene came to know a deeper and darker wisdom than he had ever known before. He began to see that what was subtle and beautiful in human life was touched with a divine pearl-sickness. Health was to be found in the steady stare of the cats and dogs, or in the smooth vacant chops of the peasant. But he looked on the faces of the lords of the earth -- and he saw them wasted and devoured by the beautiful disease of thought and passion. In the pages of a thousand books he saw their portraits: Coleridge at twenty-five, with the loose sensual mouth, gaping idiotically, the vast staring eyes, holding in their opium depths the vision of seas haunted by the albatross, the great white forehead -- head mixed of Zeus and the village degenerate; the lean worn head of Caesar, a little thirsty in the flanks; and the dreaming mummy face of Kublai Khan, lit with eyes that flickered with green fires. And he saw the faces of the great Thothmes, and Aspalta and Mycerinus, and all the heads of subtle Egypt -- those smooth unwrinkled faces that held the wisdom of 1,200 gods. And the strange wild faces of the Goth, the Frank, the Vandal, that came storming up below the old tired eyes of Rome. And the weary craftiness on the face of the great Jew, Disraeli; the terrible skull-grin of Voltaire; the mad ranting savagery of Ben Jonson's; the dour wild agony of Carlyle's; and the faces of Heine, and Rousseau, and Dante, and Tiglath-Pileser, and Cervantes -- these were all faces on which life had fed. They were faces wasted by the vulture, Thought; they were faces seared and hollowed by the flame of Beauty.
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The national demand for white shiny plumbing, toothpaste, tiled lunch-rooms, hair-cuts, manicured dentistry, horn spectacles, baths, and the insane fear of disease that sent the voters whispering to the druggist after their brutal fumbling lecheries -- all of this seemed nasty. Their outer cleanliness became the token of an inner corruption: it was something that glittered and was dry, foul, and rotten at the core. He felt that, no matter what leper's taint he might carry upon his flesh, there was in him a health that was greater than they could ever know -- something fierce and cruelly wounded, but alive, that did not shrink away from the terrible sunken river of life; something desperate and merciless that looked steadily on the hidden and unspeakable passions that unify the tragic family of this earth.
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And thus, touched with the terrible destiny of his blood, caught in the trap of himself and the Pentlands, with the little flower of sin and darkness on his neck, Eugene escaped forever from the good and the pretty, into a dark land that is forbidden to the sterilized. The creatures of romantic fiction, the vicious doll-faces of the movie women, the brutal idiot regularity of the faces in the advertisements, and the faces of most of the young college-men and women, were stamped in a mould of enamelled vacancy, and became unclean to him.
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It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it. He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places. He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles. Moreover, since Ben's death, the conviction had grown on him that men do not escape from life because life is dull, but that life escapes from men because men are little. He felt that the passions of the play were greater than the actors. It seemed to him that he had never had a great moment of living in which he had measured up to its fulness. His pain at Ben's death had been greater than he, the love and loss of Laura had left him stricken and bewildered, and when he embraced young girls and women he felt a desperate frustration: he wanted to eat them like cake and to have them, too; to roll them up into a ball; to entomb them in his flesh; to possess them more fully than they may ever be possessed.
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Yet, Eugene was no rebel. He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all. He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose. And he did not care under what form of government he lived -- Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist -- if it could assure him these things. He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if he could only go and find them. The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it. He felt sure things would be better elsewhere. He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
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Further, it annoyed and wounded him to be considered "queer." He exulted in his popularity among the students, his heart pounded with pride under all the pins and emblems, but he resented being considered an eccentric, and he envied those of his fellows who were elected to office for their solid golden mediocrity. He wanted to obey the laws and to be respected: he believed himself to be a sincerely conventional person -- but, some one would see him after midnight, bounding along a campus path, with goat-cries beneath the moon. His suits went baggy, his shirts and drawers got dirty, his shoes wore through -- he stuffed them with cardboard strips -- his hats grew shapeless and wore through at the creases. But he did not mean to go unkempt -- the thought of going for repairs filled him with weary horror. He hated to act -- he wanted to brood upon his entrails for fourteen hours a day. At length, goaded, he would lash his great bulk, lulled in the powerful inertia of its visions, into a cursing and violent movement.
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He was desperately afraid of people in crowds: at class meetings, or smokers, or at any public gathering, he was nervous and constrained until he began to talk to them, and got them under him. He was always afraid that some one would make a joke about him, and that he would be laughed at. But he was not afraid of any man alone: he felt that he could handle any one if he got him away from his crowd. Remembering his savage fear and hatred of the crowd, with a man alone he could play cruelly, like a cat, snarling gently at him, prowling in on him softly, keeping cocked and silent the terrible tiger's paw of his spirit. All of their starch oozed out of them; they seemed to squeak and twitter, and look round for the door. He would get some loud pompous yokel -- the student president of the Y. M. C. A., or the class president -- and bear down on him with evil gentle matter-of-factness.
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"Don't you think," he would begin with earnest piety, "don't you think that a man should kiss his wife on her belly?"
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And he would fasten all the eager innocence of his face into a stare.
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Eugene thought so. It was one of his few Utopias.
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"For, after all, the belly is sometimes more beautiful than the mouth, and far cleaner. Or do you believe in the belly-less marriage? I, for one," he went on with proud passion, "do not! I stand for more and better Belly-Kissing. Our wives, our mothers, and our sisters expect it of us. It is an act of reverence to the seat of life. Nay! it is even an act of religious worship. If we could get our prominent business men and all the other right-thinking people interested in it, it would bring about the mightiest revolution ever known in a nation's life. In five years it would do away with divorce and reestablish the prestige of the home. In twenty years it would make our nation the proud centre of civilization and the arts. Don't you think so? Or do you?"
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Sometimes, when he was in a chafed and bitter temper, he would hear a burst of laughter from a student's room, and he would turn snarling, and curse them, believing they laughed at him. He inherited his father's conviction at times that the world was gathered in an immense conspiracy against him: the air about him was full of mockery and menace, the leaves whispered with treason, in a thousand secret places people were assembled to humiliate, degrade, and betray him. He would spend hours under the terrible imminence of some unknown danger: although he was guilty of nothing but his own nightmare fantasies, he would enter a class, a meeting, a gathering of students, with cold constricted heart, awaiting exposure, sentence, and ruin, for he knew not what crime. Again, he would be wild, extravagant, and careless, squealing triumphantly in their faces and bounding along possessed with goaty joy, as he saw life dangling like a plum for his taking.
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I think I'm hell, thought Eugene, and they say I stink because I have not had a bath. Me! Me! Bruce-Eugene, the Scourge of the Greasers, and the greatest fullback Yale ever had! Marshal Gant, the saviour of his country! Ace Gant, the hawk of the sky, the man who brought Richthofen down! Senator Gant, Governor Gant, President Gant, the restorer and uniter of a broken nation, retiring quietly to private life in spite of the weeping protest of one hundred million people, until, like Arthur or Barbarossa, he shall hear again the drums of need and peril.
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And thus, going along a campus path at night, fulfilled with his dreams of glory, he heard young men talking of him kindly and coarsely, laughing at his antics, and saying he needed a bath and clean underwear. He clawed at his throat as he listened.
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Jesus-of-Nazareth Gant, mocked, reviled, spat upon, and imprisoned for the sins of others, but nobly silent, preferring death rather than cause pain to the woman he loves. Gant, the Unknown Soldier, the Martyred President, the slain God of Harvest, the Bringer of Good Crops. Duke Gant of Westmoreland, Viscount Pondicherry, twelfth Lord Runnymede, who hunts for true love, incognito, in Devon and ripe grain, and finds the calico white legs embedded in sweet hay. Yes, George-Gordon-Noel-Byron Gant, carrying the pageant of his bleeding heart through Europe, and Thomas-Chatterton Gant (that bright boy!), and François-Villon Gant, and Ahasuerus Gant, and Mithridates Gant, and Artaxerxes Gant, and Edward-the-Black-Prince Gant; Stilicho Gant, and Jugurtha Gant, and Vercingetorix Gant, and Czar-Ivan-the-Terrible Gant. And Gant, the Olympian Bull; and Heracles Gant; and Gant, the Seductive Swan; and Ashtaroth and Azrael Gant, Proteus Gant, Anubis and Osiris and Mumbo-Jumbo Gant.
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But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I'm not a Genius? He did not ask himself the question often. He was alone: he spoke aloud, but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of this blasphemy. It was a moonless night, full of stars. There was no thunder and no lightning.
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Then, as was his custom, when he had burnt his heart out, he began to look nakedly and critically at the question.
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Yes, but what, he thought with a livid snarl, but what if anybody else thinks I'm not? Ah, but they'd like to, the swine. They hate me, and are jealous of me because they can't be like me, so they belittle me if they can. They'd like to say it, if they dared, just to hurt me. For a moment his face was convulsed with pain and bitterness: he craned his neck, holding his throat with his hand.
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Well, he went on very calmly, what if I'm not? Am I going to cut my throat, or eat worms, or swallow arsenic? He shook his head slowly but emphatically. No, he said, I am not. Besides, there are enough geniuses. They have at least one in every high school, and one in the orchestra of every small-town movie. Sometimes Mrs. Von Zeck, the wealthy patroness of the arts, sends a genius or two off to New York to study. So that, he estimated, this broad land of ours has by the census not less than 26,400 geniuses and 83,752 artists, not counting those in business and advertising. For his personal satisfaction, Eugene then muttered over the names of 21 geniuses who wrote poetry, and 37 more who devoted themselves to the drama and the novel. After this, he felt quite relieved.
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What, he thought, can I be, besides a genius? I've been one long enough. There must be better things to do.
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Over that final hedge, he thought, not death, as I once believed -- but new life -- and new lands.
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Erect, with arm akimbo on his hip, he stood, his domed head turned out toward the light: sixty, subtle and straight of body, deep-browed, with an old glint of hawk-eyes, lean apple-cheeks, a mustache bristle-cropped. That face on which the condor Thought has fed, arched with high subtle malice, sophist glee.
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Below, benched in rapt servility, they waited for his first husky word. Eugene looked at the dull earnest faces, lured from the solid pews of Calvinism to the shadowland of metaphysics. And now his mockery will play like lightning around their heads, but they will never see it, nor feel it strike. They will rush forward to wrestle with his shadow, to hear his demon's laughter, to struggle solemnly with their unborn souls.
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The clean cuffed hand holds up an abraded stick. Their stare follows obediently along its lustre.
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"I see that Mr. Gant is leaning forward in his seat. There is a light in his face that I have seen there before. Mr. Gant will not sleep of nights, for thinking."
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"A stick," said Eugene, "is not only wood but the negation of wood. It is the meeting in Space of Wood and No-Wood. A stick is finite and unextended wood, a fact determined by its own denial."
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"Then we agree, Mr. Ransom, that a stick is not simply wood with unlimited extension?"
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White, bewildered, servile, the patient slave's face.
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"A stick, sir."
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A pause. Ironic eyebrows ask their laughter. They snicker smugly for the wolf that will devour them.
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"A stick is a piece of wood cut off at a certain length."
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"Mr. Willis says a stick is a piece of wood."
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"But a stick IS a piece of wood," says Mr. Willis.
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Their laughter rattles against the walls. Absurd.
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"It's a piece of wood, sir."
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"So is a tree or a telephone-pole. No, I'm afraid that will not do. Does the class agree with Mr. Willis?"
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"What is a stick?"
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The stunned peasant's face with its blink of effort.
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"What have I here?"
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"Yes, sir."
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"Mr. Willis?"
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"We have a new name for him, Professor Weldon," said Nick Mabley. "We call him Hegel Gant."
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The old head listens gravely above the ironic intake of their breath. He will bear me out and praise me, for I am measured against this peasant earth. He sees me with the titles of proud office; and he loves victory.
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He listened to their shout of laughter; he saw their pleased faces turn back on him. That was meant well. I shall smile -- their Great Original, the beloved eccentric, the poet of substantial yokels.
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Old Fox, I too can juggle with your phrases so they will never catch me. Over the jungle of their wits our unfoiled minds strike irony and passion. Truth? Reality? The Absolute? The Universal? Wisdom? Experience? Knowledge? The Fact? The Concept? Death -- the great negation? Parry and thrust, Volpone! Have we not words? We shall prove anything. But Ben, and the demon-flicker of his smile? Where now?
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"That's a name he may be worthy of," said Vergil Weldon seriously.
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The Spring comes back. I see the sheep upon the hill. The belled cows come along the road in wreaths of dust, and the wagons creak home below the pale ghost of the moon. But what stirs within the buried heart? Where are the lost words? And who has seen his shadow in the Square?
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"I'd have told the truth," said Mr. Rountree, removing his glasses.
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"There, if ever, was a situation to try the strongest soul. But the answer came like a flash. Ich kann nicht anders -- I can't do otherwise. It was one of the great utterances of history."
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"But they had built a good big fire, Mr. Rountree."
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How nobly we can die for truth -- in conversation.
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"That doesn't matter," said Mr. Rountree, putting his glasses on again.
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"On one side of the table stood the combined powers of Europe; on the other stood Martin Luther, the son of a blacksmith."
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"Who wants to be burned for anything?" said Eugene. "I'd have done what Galileo did -- backed out of it."
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Nevertheless, it moves.
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"I think it might be painful," Vergil Weldon suggested. "Even a little blister hurts."
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"Ah. I'd have let them burn," said the martyred Rountree through moistening spectacles.
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"So should I," said Vergil Weldon, and their faces arched with gleeful malice over the heavy laughter of the class.
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"And if they asked you, Mr. Rountree?"
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"It was a very hot fire, Mr. Rountree. They'd have burned you if you hadn't recanted."
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The voice of husky passion, soul-shaken. This they can remember, and put down.
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That phrase, used now for thirty years, relic of Yale and Harvard: Royce and Munsterberg. In all this jugglery, the Teutons were Weldon's masters, yet mark how thirstily the class lap it up. He will not let them read, lest some one find the rag-quilt of his takings from Zeno to Immanuel Kant. The crazy patchwork of three thousand years, the forced marriage of irreconcilables, the summation of all thought, in his old head. Socrates begat Plato. Plato begat Plotinus. Plotinus begat St. Augustine… Kant begat Hegel. Hegel begat Vergil Weldon. Here we pause. There's no more to beget. An Answer to All Things in Thirty Easy Lessons. How sure they are they've found it!
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And to-night they will carry their dull souls into his study, will make unfleshly confessions, will writhe in concocted tortures of the spirit, revealing struggles that they never had. "It took character to do a thing like that. It took a man who refused to crack under pressure. And that is what I want my boys to do! I want them to succeed! I want them to absorb their negations. I want them to keep as clean as a hound's tooth!"
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Eugene winced, and looked around on all the faces set in a resolve to fight desperately for monogamy, party politics, and the will of the greatest number.
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So here is Hegel in the Cotton Belt!
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And yet the Baptists fear this man! Why? He has taken the whiskers off their God, but for the rest, he has only taught them to vote the ticket.
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During these years Eugene would go away from Pulpit Hill, by night and by day, when April was a young green blur, or when the Spring was deep and ripe. But he liked best to go away by night, rushing across a cool Spring countryside full of dew and starlight, under a great beach of the moon ribbed with clouds.
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He would go to Exeter or Sydney; sometimes he would go to little towns he had never before visited. He would register at hotels as "Robert Herrick," "John Donne," "George Peele," "William Blake," and "John Milton." No one ever said anything to him about it. The people in those small towns had such names. Once he registered at a hotel, in a small Piedmont town, as "Ben Jonson."
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The clerk spun the book critically.
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"Isn't there an h in that name?" he said.
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Sometimes, at hotels of ill-repute, he would register, with dark buried glee, as "Robert Browning," "Alfred Tennyson," and "William Wordsworth."
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"No," said Eugene. "That's another branch of the family. I have an uncle, Samuel, who spells his name that way."
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Once he registered as "Henry W. Longfellow."
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He was devoured by a vast strange hunger for life. At night, he listened to the million-noted ululation of little night things, the great brooding symphony of dark, the ringing of remote churchbells across the country. And his vision widened out in circles over moon-drenched meadows, dreaming woods, mighty rivers going along in darkness, and ten thousand sleeping towns. He believed in the infinite rich variety of all the towns and faces: behind any of a million shabby houses he believed there was strange buried life, subtle and shattered romance, something dark and unknown. At the moment of passing any house, he thought, some one therein might be at the gate of death, lovers might lie twisted in hot embrace, murder might be doing.
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"You can't fool me," said the clerk, with a hard grin of disbelief. "That's the name of a writer."
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Then they would ask him where his friends were.
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"Water! In God's name, water! I am ill!"
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Sometimes there were women, seductive and smiling, aware of his trick, but loath to let him go; sometimes women touched with compassion and tenderness. Then, having drunk, he would smile with brave apology into startled and sympathetic faces, murmuring:
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He felt a desperate frustration, as if he were being shut out from the rich banquet of life. And against all caution, he determined to break the pattern of custom, and look within. Driven on by this hunger, he would suddenly rush away from Pulpit Hill and, as dusk came on, prowl up and down the quiet streets of towns. Finally, lifted beyond all restraint, he would mount swiftly to a door and ring the bell. Then, to whoever came, reeling against the wall and clutching at his throat, he would say:
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"Pardon me. It came on suddenly -- one of my attacks. I had no time to go for help. I saw your light."
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"Friends!" he glanced about wildly and darkly. Then, with a bitter laugh, he said, "Friends! I have none! I am a stranger here."
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"Far away. Very far," he would say deeply. "You would not know if I told you."
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Then they would ask him what he did.
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Then he would rise, looking about him with grandeur and compassion.
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Then they would ask him where he came from.
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"And now I must go!" he would say mysteriously. "I have a long way to go before my journey is done. God bless you all! I was a stranger and you gave me shelter. The Son of Man was treated not so well."
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"I am a Carpenter," he would answer, smiling strangely.
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Sometimes, he would ring bells with an air of timid inquiry, saying:
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But what, thought Eugene, if one day, in the million streets of life, I should really find him?
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"Is this number 26? My name is Thomas Chatterton. I am looking for a gentleman by the name of Coleridge -- Mr. Samuel T. Coleridge. Does he live here?… No? I'm sorry… Yes, 26 is the number I have, I'm sure… Thank you… I've made a mistake… I'll look it up in the telephone directory."
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These were the golden years.
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