Of Time and the River/Book III

◄  BOOK TWO

Of Time and the River BOOK THREE written by Thomas Wolfe

BOOK FOUR  ►

Charles Scribner’s Sons 1935 (pages 327-404)

XXXIX

October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: frost was early, burning the thick green on the mountain sides to massed brilliant hues of blazing colours, painting the air with sharpness, sorrow and delight—and with October. Sometimes, and often, there was warmth by day, an ancient drowsy light, a golden warmth and pollenated haze in afternoon, but over all the earth there was the premonitory breath of frost, an exultancy for all the men who were returning, a haunting sorrow for the buried men and for all those who were gone and would not come again.

His father was dead, and now it seemed to him that he had never found him. His father was dead, and yet he sought him everywhere, and could not believe that he was dead, and was sure that he would find him. It was October and that year, after years of absence and of wandering, he had come home again.

He could not think that his father had died, but he had come home in October, and all the life that he had known there was strange and sorrowful as dreams. And yet he saw it all in shapes of deathless brightness—the town, the streets, the magic hills, and the plain prognathous faces of the people he had known. He saw them all in shapes of deathless brightness, and everything was instantly familiar as his father’s face, and stranger, more phantasmal than a dream.

Their words came to him with the accents of an utter naturalness, and yet were sorrowful and lost and strange like voices speaking in a dream, and in their eyes he read a lost and lonely light, as if they were all phantoms and all lost, or as if he had revisited the shores of this great earth again with a heart of fire, a cry of pain and ecstasy, a memory of intolerable longing and regret for all the glorious and exultant life that he had known and which he must visit now for ever as a fleshless ghost, never to touch, to hold, to have its palpable warmth and substance for his own again. He had come home again, and yet he could not believe his father was dead, and he thought he heard his great voice ringing in the street again, and that he would see him striding toward him across the Square with his gaunt earth-devouring stride, or find him waiting every time he turned the corner, or lunging toward the house bearing the tremendous provender of his food and meat, bringing to them all the deathless security of his strength and power and passion, bringing to them all again the roaring message of his fires that shook the fire-full chimney-throat with their terrific blast, giving to them all again the exultant knowledge that the good days, the magic days, the golden weather of their lives would come again, and that this dreamlike and phantasmal world in which they found themselves would waken instantly, as it had once, to all the palpable warmth and glory of the earth, if only his father would come back to make it live, to give them life, again.

Therefore, he could not think that he was dead, and yet it was October, and that year he had come home again. And at night, in his mother’s house, he would lie in his bed in the dark, hearing the wind that rattled dry leaves along the empty pavement, hearing, far-off across the wind, the barking of a dog, feeling dark time, strange time, dark secret time, as it flowed on around him, remembering his life, this house, and all the million strange and secret visages of time, dark time, thinking, feeling, thinking:

“October has come again, has come again…. I have come home again and found my father dead… and that was time… time… time…. Where shall I go now? What shall I do? For October has come again, but there has gone some richness from the life we knew, and we are lost.”

Storm shook the house at night—the old house, his mother’s house—where he had seen his brother die. The old doors swung and creaked in darkness, darkness pressed against the house, the darkness filled them, filled the house at night, it moved about them soft and secret, palpable, filled with a thousand secret presences of sorrowful time and memory, moving about him as he lay below his brother’s room in darkness, while storm shook the house in late October, and something creaked and rattled in the wind’s strong blast. It was October, and he had come home again: he could not believe that his father was dead.

Wind beat at them with burly shoulders in the night. The darkness moved there in the house like something silent, palpable—a spirit breathing in his mother’s house, a demon and a friend—speaking to him its silent and intolerable prophecy of flight, of darkness and the storm, moving about him constantly, prowling about the edges of his life, ever beside him, with him, in him, whispering:

“Child, child—come with me—come with me to your brother’s grave tonight. Come with me to the places where the young men lie whose bodies have long since been buried in the earth. Come with me where they walk and move again tonight, and you shall see your brother’s face again, and hear his voice, and see again, as they march toward you from their graves the company of the young men who died, as he did, in October, speaking to you their messages of flight, of triumph, and the all-exultant darkness, telling you that all will be again as it was once.”

October had come again, and he would lie there in his mother’s house at night, and feel the darkness moving softly all about him, and hear the dry leaves scampering on the street outside, and the huge and burly rushes of the wind. And then the wind would rush away with huge caprice, and he could hear it far off roaring with remote demented cries in the embraces of great trees, and he would lie there thinking:

“October has come again—has come again”—feeling the dark around him, not believing that his father could be dead, thinking: “The strange and lonely years have come again…. I have come home again… come home again… and will it not be with us all as it has been?”—feeling the darkness as it moved about him, thinking: “Is it not the same darkness that I knew in childhood, and have I not lain here in bed before and felt this darkness moving all about me?… Did we not hear dogs that barked in darkness, in October?” he then thought. “Were not their howls far broken by the wind?… And hear dry leaves that scampered on the streets at night… and the huge and burly rushes of the wind… and hear huge limbs that stiffly creak in the remote demented howlings of the burly wind… and something creaking in the wind at night… and think, then, as we think now, of all the men who have gone and never will come back again, and of our friends and brothers who lie buried in the earth?… Oh, has not October now come back again?” he cried. “As always—as it always was?”—and hearing the great darkness softly prowling in his mother’s house at night, and thinking, feeling, thinking, as he lay there in the dark:

"Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big you cannot say the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling about you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun, so that you cannot say where sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground and where the leaves.

“Meanwhile the Palisades are melting in massed molten colours, the season swings along the nation, and a little later in the South dense woodings on the hill begin to glow and soften, and when they smell the burning wood-smoke in Ohio children say:’I'll bet that there’s a forest fire in Michigan.’And the mountaineer goes hunting down in North Carolina; he stays out late with mournful flop-eared hounds, a rind of moon comes up across the rude lift of the hills: what do his friends say to him when he stays out late? Full of hoarse innocence and laughter, they will say:’Mister, yore ole woman’s goin’to whup ye if ye don’t go home.’”

Oh, return, return!

"October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.

"The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples—this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all: the sweat, the labour, and the plough are over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf; smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning, up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.

"There is a smell of burning in small towns in afternoon, and men with buckles on their arms are raking leaves in yards as boys come by with straps slung back across their shoulders. The oak leaves, big and brown, are bedded deep in yard and gutter: they make deep wadings to the knee for children in the streets. The fire will snap and crackle like a whip, sharp acrid smoke will sting the eyes, in mown fields the little vipers of the flame eat past the black coarse edges of burned stubble like a line of locusts. Fire drives a thorn of memory in the heart.

"The bladed grass, a forest of small spears of ice, is thawed by noon: summer is over but the sun is warm again, and there are days throughout the land of gold and russet. But summer is dead and gone, the earth is waiting, suspense and ecstasy are gnawing at the hearts of men, the brooding prescience of frost is there. The sun flames red and bloody as it sets, there are old red glintings on the battered pails, the great barn gets the ancient light as the boy slops homeward with warm foaming milk. Great shadows lengthen in the fields, the old red light dies swiftly, and the sunset barking of the hounds is faint and far and full of frost: there are shrewd whistles to the dogs, and frost and silence—this is all. Wind stirs and scuffs and rattles up the old brown leaves, and through the night the great oak leaves keep falling.

"Trains cross the continent in a swirl of dust and thunder, the leaves fly down the tracks behind them: the great trains cleave through gulch and gulley, they rumble with spoked thunder on the bridges over the powerful brown wash of mighty rivers, they toil through hills, they skirt the rough brown stubble of shorn fields, they whip past empty stations in the little towns and their great stride pounds its even pulse across America. Field and hill and lift and gulch and hollow, mountain and plain and river, a wilderness with fallen trees across it, a thicket of bedded brown and twisted undergrowth, a plain, a desert, and a plantation, a mighty landscape with no fenced niceness, an immensity of fold and convolution that can never be remembered, that can never be forgotten, that has never been described—weary with harvest, potent with every fruit and ore, the immeasurable richness embrowned with autumn, rank, crude, unharnessed, careless of scars or beauty, everlasting and magnificent, a cry, a space, an ecstasy!—American earth in old October.

"And the great winds howl and swoop across the land: they make a distant roaring in great trees, and boys in bed will stir in ecstasy, thinking of demons and vast swoopings through the earth. All through the night there is the clean, the bitter rain of acorns, and the chestnut burrs are plopping to the ground.

"And often in the night there is only the living silence, the distant frosty barking of a dog, the small clumsy stir and feathery stumble of the chickens on limed roosts, and the moon, the low and heavy moon of autumn, now barred behind the leafless poles of pines, now at the pine-woods’brooding edge and summit, now falling with ghost’s dawn of milky light upon rimed clods of fields and on the frosty scurf on pumpkins, now whiter, smaller, brighter, hanging against the steeple’s slope, hanging the same way in a million streets, steeping all the earth in frost and silence.

"Then a chime of frost-cold bells may peal out on the brooding air, and people lying in their beds will listen. They will not speak or stir, silence will gnaw the darkness like a rat, but they will whisper in their hearts:

"’Summer has come and gone, has come and gone. And now—?’But they will say no more, they will have no more to say: they will wait listening, silent and brooding as the frost, to time, strange ticking time, dark time that haunts us with the briefness of our days. They will think of men long dead, of men now buried in the earth, of frost and silence long ago, of a forgotten face and moment of lost time, and they will think of things they have no words to utter.

"And in the night, in the dark, in the living sleeping silence of the towns, the million streets, they will hear the thunder of the fast express, the whistles of great ships upon the river.

“What will they say then? What will they say?”

Only the darkness moved about him as he lay there thinking, feeling in the darkness: a door creaked softly in the house.

"October is the season for returning: the bowels of youth are yearning with lost love. Their mouths are dry and bitter with desire: their hearts are torn with the thorns of spring. For lovely April, cruel and flowerful, will tear them with sharp joy and wordless lust. Spring has no language but a cry; but crueller than April is the asp of time.

“October is the season for returning: even the town is born anew,” he thought. "The tide of life is at the full again, the rich return to business or to fashion, and the bodies of the poor are rescued out of heat and weariness. The ruin and horror of the summer are forgotten—a memory of hot cells and humid walls, a hell of ugly sweat and labour and distress and hopelessness, a limbo of pale greasy faces. Now joy and hope have revived again in the hearts of millions of people, they breathe the air again with hunger, their movements are full of life and energy. The mark of their summer’s suffering is still legible upon their flesh, there is something starved and patient in their eyes, and a look that has a child’s hope and expectation in it.

"All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken—all things that live upon this earth return, return: Father, will you not, too, come back again?

"Where are you now, when all things on the earth come back again? For have not all these things been here before, have we not seen them, heard them, known then, and will they not live again for us as they did once, if only you come back again?

"Father, in the night-time, in the dark, I have heard the thunder of the fast express. In the night, in the dark, I have heard the howling of the winds among great trees, and the sharp and windy raining of the acorns. In the night, in the dark, I have heard the feet of rain upon the roofs, the glut and gurgle of the gutter spouts, and the soaking gulping throat of all the mighty earth, drinking its thirst out in the month of May—and heard the sorrowful silence of the river in October. The hill-streams foam and welter in a steady plunge, the mined clay drops and melts and eddies in the night, the snake coils cool and glistening under dripping ferns, the water roars down past the mill in one sheer sheet-like plunge, making a steady noise like wind, and in the night, in the dark, the river flows by us to the sea.

"The great maw slowly drinks the land as we lie sleeping: the mined banks cave and crumble in the dark, the earth melts and drops into its tide, great horns are baying in the gulph of night, great boats are baying at the river’s mouth. Thus, darkened by our dumpings, thickened by our stains, rich, rank, beautiful, and unending as all life, all living, the river, the dark immortal river, full of strange tragic time is flowing by us—by us—by us—to the sea.

"All this has been upon the earth and will abide for ever. But you are gone; our lives are ruined and broken in the night, our lives are mined below us by the river, our lives are whirled away into the sea and darkness and we are lost unless you come to give us life again.

“Come to us, Father, in the watches of the night, come to us as you always came, bringing to us the invincible sustenance of your strength, the limitless treasure of your bounty, the tremendous structure of your life that will shape all lost and broken things on earth again into a golden pattern of exultancy and joy. Come to us, Father, while the winds howl in the darkness, for October has come again, bringing with it huge prophecies of death and life and the great cargo of the men who will return. For we are ruined, lost, and broken if you do not come, and our lives, like rotten chips, are whirled about us onward in darkness to the sea.”

So, thinking, feeling, speaking, he lay there in his mother’s house, but there was nothing in the house but silence and the moving darkness: storm shook the house and huge winds rushed upon them, and he knew then that his father would not come again and that all the life that he had known was now lost and broken as a dream.

XL

During the whole course of that last October—the last October he would spend at home—he was waiting day by day with a desperation of wild hope for a magic letter—one of those magic letters for which young men wait, which are to bring them instantly the fortune, fame, and triumph for which their souls thirst and their hearts are panting, and which never come.

Each morning he would get up with a pounding heart, trembling hands, and chattering lips, and then, like a man in prison who is waiting feverishly for some glorious message of release or pardon which he is sure will come that day, he would wait for the coming of the postman. And when he came, even before he reached the house, the moment that Eugene heard his whistle he would rush out into the street, tear the mail out of his astounded grasp, and begin to hunt through it like a madman for the letter which would announce to him that fortune, fame, and glittering success were his. He was twenty-two years old, a madman and a fool, but every young man in the world has been the same.

Then, when the wonderful letter did not come, his heart would sink down to his bowels like lead; all of the brightness, gold, and singing would go instantly out of the day and he would stamp back into the house, muttering to himself, sick with despair and misery and thinking that now his life was done for, sure enough. He could not eat, sleep, stand still, sit down, rest, talk coherently, or compose himself for five minutes at a time. He would go prowling and muttering around the house, rush out into the streets of the town, walk up and down the main street, pausing to talk with the loafers before the principal drug store, climb the hills and mountains all around the town and look down on the town with a kind of horror and disbelief, an awful dreamlike unreality because the town, since his long absence and return to it, and all the people in it, now seemed as familiar as his mother’s face and stranger than a dream, so that he could never regain his life or corporeal substance in it, any more than a man who revisits his youth in a dream, and so that, also, the town seemed to have shrunk together, got little, fragile, toy-like in his absence, until now when he walked in the street he thought he was going to ram his elbows through the walls, as if the walls were paper, or tear down the buildings, as if they had been made of straw.

Then he would come down off the hills into the town again, go home, and prowl and mutter around the house, which now had the same real-unreal familiar-strangeness that the town had, and his life seemed to have been passed there like a dream. Then, with a mounting hope and a pounding heart, he would begin to wait for the next mail again; and when it came, but without the letter, this furious prowling and lashing about would start all over again. His family saw the light of madness in his eyes and in his disconnected movements, and heard it in his incoherent speech. He could hear them whispering together, and sometimes when he looked up he could see them looking at him with troubled and bewildered faces. And yet he did not think that he was mad, nor know how he appeared to them.

Yet, during all this time of madness and despair his people were as kind and tolerant as anyone on earth could be.

His mother, during all this time, treated him with kindness and tolerance, and according to the law of her powerful, hopeful, brooding, octopal, and web-like character, with all its meditative procrastination, never coming to a decisive point, but weaving, re-weaving, pursing her lips, and meditating constantly and with a kind of hope, even though in her deepest heart she really had no serious belief that he could succeed in doing the thing he wanted to do.

Thus, as he talked to her sometimes, going on from hope to hope, his enthusiasm mounting with the intoxication of his own vision, he would paint a glittering picture of the fame and wealth he was sure to win in the world as soon as his play was produced. And his mother would listen thoughtfully, pursing her lips from time to time, in a meditative fashion, as she sat before the fire with her hands folded in a strong loose clasp above her stomach. Then, finally, she would turn to him and with a proud, tremulous, and yet bantering smile playing about her mouth, such as she had always used when he was a child, and had perhaps spoken of some project with an extravagant enthusiasm, she would say:

“Hm, boy! I tell you what!” his mother said, in this bantering tone, as if he were still a child. “That’s mighty big talk—as the sayin’goes,”—here she put one finger under her broad red nose-wing and laughed shyly, but with pleasure—“as the sayin’goes, mighty big talk for poor folks!” said his mother. “Well, now,” she said in a thoughtful and hopeful tone, after a moment’s pause, “you may do it, sure enough. Stranger things than that have happened. Other people have been able to make a success of their writings—and there’s one thing sure!” His mother cried out strongly with the loose, powerful and manlike gesture of her hand and index finger which was characteristic of all her family—“there’s one thing sure!—what one man has done another can do if he’s got grit and determination enough!” His mother said, putting the full strength of her formidable will into these words—“Why, yes, now!” she now said, with a recollective start, “Here, now! Say!” she cried—“wasn’t I reading?—didn’t I see? Why, pshaw!—yes! just the other day—that all these big writers—yes, sir! Irvin S. Cobb—there was the very feller!” cried his mother in a triumphant tone—“Why, you know,” she continued, pursing her lips in a meditative way, “—that he had the very same trials and tribulations—as the sayin’goes—as everyone else! Why, yes!—here he told it on himself—admitted it, you know—that he kept writin’these stories for years, sendin’them out, I reckon, to all the editors and magazines—and having them all sent back to him. That’s the way it was,” she said, “and now—look at him! Why, I reckon they’d pay him hundreds of dollars for a single piece—yes! and be glad of the chance to get it,” said his mother.

Then for a space his mother sat looking at the fire, while she slowly and reflectively pursed her lips.

“Well,” she said slowly at length, “you may do it. I hope you do. Stranger things than that have happened.—Now, there’s one thing sure,” she said strongly, “you have certainly had a good education—there’s been more money spent upon your schoolin’than on all the rest of us put together—and you certainly ought to know enough to write a story or a play!—Why, yes, boy! I tell you what,” his mother now cried in the old playful and bantering tone, as if she were speaking to a child, “if I had your education I believe I’d try to be a writer, too! Why, yes! I wouldn’t mind getting out of all this drudgery and house-work for a while—and if I could earn my living doin’some light easy work like that, why, you can bet your bottom dollar, I’d do it!” cried his mother. “But, say, now! See here!” his mother cried with a kind of jocose seriousness—“maybe that’d be a good idea, after all! Suppose you write the stories,” she said, winking at him, —“and I tell, you what I’ll do!—Why, I’ll tell’em to you! Now, if I had your education and your command of language,” said his mother, whose command of language was all that anyone could wish—“I believe I could tell a pretty good story—so if you’ll write’em out,” she said, with another wink, “I’ll tell you what to write—and I’ll bet you—I’ll bet you,” said his mother, “that we could write a story that would beat most of these stories that I read, all to pieces! Yes, sir!” she said, pursing her lips firmly, and with an invincible conviction—“and I bet you people would buy that story and come to see that play!” she said. “Because I know what to tell’em and the kind of thing people are interested in hearing,” she said.

Then for a moment more she was silent and stared thoughtfully into the fire.

“Well,” she said slowly, “you may do it. You may do it, sure enough! Now, boy,” she said, levelling that powerful index finger toward him, “I want to tell you! Your grandfather, Tom Pentland, was a remarkable man—and if he’d had your education he’d a-gone far! And everyone who ever knew him said the same!… Oh! stories, poems, pieces in the paper—why, didn’t they print something of his every week or two!” she cried. “And that’s exactly where you get it,” said his mother. “—But, say, now,” she said in a persuasive tone, after a moment’s meditation, “I’ve been thinkin’—it just occurred to me—wouldn’t it be a good idea if you could find some work to do—I mean, get you a job somewheres of some light easy work that would give you plenty of time to do your writin’as you went on! Now, Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know!” his mother said in the bantering tone, “—and you might have to send that play around to several places before you found the one who could do it right for you! So while you’re waitin’,” said his mother persuasively, “why, wouldn’t it be a good idea if you got a little light newspaper work, or a job teachin’somewheres—pshaw! you could do it easy as falling off a log,” his mother said contemptuously. “I taught school myself before I got married to your papa, and I didn’t have a bit of trouble! And all the schoolin’I ever had—all the schoolin’that I ever had,” she cried impressively, “was six months one time in a little backwoods school! Now if I could do it, there’s one thing sure, with all your education you ought to be able to do it, too! Yes, sir, that’s the very thing!” she said. “I’d do it like a shot if I were you.”

He said nothing, and his mother sat there for a moment looking at the fire. Suddenly she turned, and her face had grown troubled and sorrowful and her worn and faded eyes were wet with tears. She stretched her strong rough hand out and put it over his, shaking her head a little before she spoke:

“Child, child!” she said. “It worries me to see you act like this! I hate to see you so unhappy! Why, son,” his mother said, “what if they shouldn’t take it now! You’ve got long years ahead of you and if you can’t do it now, why, maybe, some day you will! And if you don’t!” his mother cried out strongly and formidably, “why, Lord, boy, what about it! You’re a young man with your whole life still before you—and if you can’t do this thing, why, there are other things you can do!… Pshaw! boy, your life’s not ended just because you find out that you weren’t cut out to be a playwriter,” said his mother, “There are a thousand things a young man of your age could do! Why, it wouldn’t bother me for a moment!” cried his mother.

And he sat there in front of her invincible strength, hope, and fortitude and her will that was more strong than death, her character that was as solid as a rock; he was as hopeless and wretched as he had ever been in his life, wanting to say a thousand things to her and saying none of them, and reading in her eyes the sorrowful message that she did not believe he would ever be able to do the thing on which his heart so desperately was set.

At this moment the door opened and his brother entered the room. As they stared at him with startled faces, he stood there looking at them out of his restless, tormented grey eyes, breathing his large and unhappy breath of unrest and nervousness, a harassed look on his handsome and generous face, as with a distracted movement he thrust his strong, impatient fingers through the flashing mop of his light brown hair, that curled everywhere in incredible whorls and screws of angelic brightness.

“Hah?” his mother sharply cried, as she looked at him with her white face, the almost animal-like quickness and concentration of her startled attention. “What say?” she said in a sharp startled tone, although as yet his brother had said nothing.

“W-w-w-wy!” he began in a distracted voice, as he thrust his fingers through his incredible flashing hair and his eyes flickered about absently and with a tormented and driven look, “I was just f-f-f-finkin’—” he went on in a dissonant and confused tone; then, suddenly catching sight of her white startled face, he smote himself suddenly and hard upon his temple with the knuckle of one large hand, and cried out “Haw!” in a tone of such idiotic exuberance and exultancy that it is impossible to reproduce in words the limitless and earthly vulgarity of its humour. At the same time he prodded his mother stiffly in the ribs with his clumsy fingers, an act that made her shriek out resentfully, and then say in a vexed and fretful tone:

“I’ll vow, boy! You act like a regular idiot! If I didn’t have any more sense than to go and play a trick like that—I’d be ash-a-a-med—ash-a-a-a-med,” she whispered, with a puckered mouth, as she shook her head at him in a movement of strong deprecation, scorn, and reproof. “I’d be ashamed to let anyone know I was such a fool,” his mother said.

“Whah! Whah!” Luke shouted with his wild, limitlessly exuberant laugh, that was so devastating in its idiotic exultancy that all words, reproaches, scorn, or attempts at reason were instantly reduced to nothing by it. “Whee!” he cried, prodding her in her resentful ribs again, his handsome face broken by his huge and exuberant smile. Then, as if cherishing something secret and uncommunicably funny in its idiotic humour, he smote himself upon the forehead again, cried out, “Whah—Whah!” and then, shaking his grinning face to himself in this movement of secret and convulsive humour, he said: “Whee! Go-o-d-damn!” in a tone of mincing and ironic refinement.

“Why, what on earth has got into you, boy?” his mother cried out fretfully. “Why, you’re actin’like a regular simpleton, I’ll vow you are!”

“Whah! Whah!” Luke cried exultantly.

“Now, I don’t know where it comes from,” said his mother judicially, with a deliberate and meditative sarcasm, as if she were seriously considering the origin of his lunacy. “There’s one thing sure: you never got it from me. Now, all my people had their wits about them—now, say what you please,” she went on in a thoughtful tone, as she stared with puckered mouth into the fire, “I never heard of a weak-minded one in the whole crowd—”

“Whah—whah!” he cried.

“—So you didn’t get it from any of my people,” she went on with deliberate and telling force—“no, you didn’t!” she said.

“Whah-h!” he prodded her in the ribs again, and then immediately, and in a very earnest tone, he said:

“W-w-w-wy, I was just f-f-f-finkin’it would be a good idea if we all w-ww-went for a little ride. F-f-f-frankly, I fink it would do us good,” he said, looking at Eugene with a very earnest look in his restless and tormented eyes. “I fink we need it! F-f-f-frankly, I fink we do,” he said, and then added abruptly and eagerly as he thrust his clumsy fingers through his hair: “W-w-w-wy, what do you say?”

“Why, yes!” his mother responded with an instant alacrity as she got up from her chair. “That’s the very thing! A little breath of fresh air is just the thing we need—as the feller says,” she said, turning to Eugene now and beginning to laugh slyly, and with pleasure, passing one finger shyly underneath her broad red nose-wing as she spoke—, “as the feller says, it costs nothin’and it’s Nature’s sovereign remedy, good for man and good for beast!—So let’s all get out into the light of open day again,” she said with rhetorical deliberation, “and breathe in God’s fresh air like He intended we should do—for there’s one thing sure,” his mother went on in tones of solemn warning, which seemed directed to a vast unseen audience of the universe rather than to themselves, “there’s one thing sure—you can’t violate the laws of God or nature,” she said decisively, “or you’ll pay for it—as sure as you’re born. As sure as you’re born,” she whispered. “Why, yes, now!”—she went on, with a start of recollective memory—“Here now!—Say!—Didn’t I see it—wasn’t I readin’?—Why, here, you know, the other day,” she went on impatiently, as if the subject of these obscure broken references must instantly be clear to everyone—“why, it was in the paper, you know—this article written by Doctor Royal S. Copeland,” his mother said, nodding her head with deliberate satisfaction over his name, and pronouncing the full title sonorously with the obvious satisfaction that titles and distinctions always gave her—“that’s who it was all right, sayin’that fresh air was the thing that everyone must have, and that all of us should take good care to—”

“Now, M-m-m-m-mama,” said Luke, who had paid no attention at all to what she had been saying, but had stood there during all the time she was speaking, breathing his large, weary, and unhappy breath, thrusting his clumsy fingers through his hair, as his harassed and tormented eyes flickered restlessly about the room in a driven but unseeing stare:—“Now, M-m-m-mama!” he said in a tone of exasperated and frenzied impatience, “if we’re g-g-g-going we’ve g-g-g-got to get started! N-n-n-now I d-d-don’t mean next W-w-w-w-Wednesday,” he snarled, with exasperated sarcasm, “I d-d-d-don’t m-m-m-mean the fifteenth of next July. But—now—now—now,” he muttered crazily, coming to her with his large hands lifted like claws, the fingers working, and with a look of fiendish madness in his eyes.

“Now!” he whispered hoarsely. “This week! Today! This afternoon! A-a-a-a-at once!” he barked suddenly, jumping at her comically; then thrusting his hand through his hair again, he said in a weary and exasperated voice:

“M-m-m-mama, will you please get ready? I b-b-b-beg of you. I beseech you—please!” he said, in tortured entreaty.

“All right! All right!” his mother replied instantly in a tone of the heartiest and most conciliatory agreement. “I’ll be ready in five minutes! I’ll just go back here and put on a coat over this old dress—so folks won’t see me,” she laughed shyly, “an’I’ll be ready before you know it!—Pshaw, boy!” she now said in a rather nettled tone, as if the afterthought of his impatience had angered her a little, “now you don’t need to worry about my being ready,” she said, “because when the time comes—I’ll be there!” she said, with the loose, deliberate, man-like gesture of her right hand and in tones of telling deliberation. “Now you worry about yourself!” she said. “For I’ll be ready before you are—yes, and I’m never late for an appointment, either,” she said strongly, “and that’s more than you can say—for I’ve seen you miss’em time an’time again.”

During all this time Luke had been thrusting his fingers through his hair, breathing heavily and unhappily, and pawing and muttering over a mass of thumbed envelopes and papers which were covered with the undecipherable scrawls and jottings of his nervous hand: “T-t-t-Tuesday,” he muttered, “Tuesday… Tuesday in Blackstone—B-b-b-b-Blackstone—Blackstone—Blackstone, South Car’lina,” he muttered in a confused and distracted manner, as if these names were completely meaningless to him, and he had never heard them before. “Now—ah!” he suddenly sang out in a rich tenor voice, as he lifted his hand, thrust his fingers through his hair, and stared wildly ahead of him—“meet Livermore in Blackstone Tuesday morning—see p-p-p-p-prospect in G-g-g-g-Gadsby Tuesday afternoon about—about—about—Wheet!”—here he whistled sharply, as he always did when he hung upon a word—“about a new set of batteries for his Model X—Style 37—lighting system—which the cheap p-p-p-penny-pinching South Car’lina bastard w-w-w-wants for nothing—Wednesday m-m-m-morning b-b-b-back to Blackstone—F’ursday… w-w-w-wy,” he muttered pawing clumsily and confusedly at his envelopes with a demented glare—"F-f-f-f-f’ursday—you—ah—j-j-j-jump over to C-c-c-Cavendish to t-t-t-try to persuade that ignorant red-faced nigger-Baptist son of a bitch that it’s f-f-f-for his own b-b-b-best interests to scrap the-the-w-w-w-wy the d-d-d-decrepit pile of junk he’s been using since S-s-s-Sherman marched through Georgia and b-b-b-buy the new X50 model T Style 46 transmission—

“M-m-m-mama!” he cried suddenly, turning toward her with a movement of frenzied and exasperated entreaty. “Will you please kindly have the g-g-g-goodness and the m-m-m-mercy to do me the favour to b-b-b-begin to commence—w-w-w-w-wy—to start—to make up your mind—to get ready,” he snarled bitterly. “W-w-w-w-wy sometime before midnight—I b-b-b-beg of you… I beseech you… I ask it of you p-p-p-please! for my sake—for all our sakes—for God’s sake!” he cried with frenzied and maddened desperation.

“All right! All right!” his mother cried hastily in a placating and reassuring tone, beginning to move with an awkward, distracted, bridling movement that got her nowhere, since there were two doors to the parlour and she was trying to go out both of them at the same time. “All right!” she said decisively, at length getting started toward the door nearest her. “I’ll just go back there an’slip on a coat—and I’ll be with you in a jiffy!” she said with comforting assurance.

“If you please!” Luke said with an ironic and tormented obsequiousness of entreaty, as he fumbled through his mass of envelopes. “If you please! W-w-w-wy I’d certainly be m-m-m-m-much obliged to you if you would!” he said.

At this moment, however, a car halted at the curb outside, someone got out, and in a moment more they could hear Helen’s voice, as she came towards the house, calling back to her husband in tones of exasperated annoyance:

“All right! Hugh! All right! I’m coming!”—although she was really going toward the house. “Will you kindly leave me alone for just a moment? Good heavens! Will I never get a little peace? All right! All right! I’m coming! For God’s sake, leave me alone for just five minutes, or you’ll drive me crazy!” she stormed, and with a high-cracked note of frenzied strain and exasperation that was almost like hysteria.

“All right, Mr. Barton,” she now said to her husband in a more good-humoured tone. “Now you just hold your horses for a minute and I’ll come on out. The house is not going to burn down before we get there.”

His lean, seamed, devoted face broke into a slow, almost unwilling grin, in which somehow all of the submission, loyalty and goodness of his soul was legible, and Helen turned, came up on the porch, opened the hall door, and came into the parlour where they were, beginning to speak immediately in a tone of frenzied and tortured exacerbation of the nerves and with her large, gaunt, liberal features strained to the breaking point of nervous hysteria.

“My God!” she said in a tone of weary exasperation. “If I don’t get away from them soon I’m going to lose my mind!… From the moment that I get up in the morning I never get a moment’s peace! Someone’s after me all day long from morn to night! Why, good heavens, Mama!” she cried out in a tone of desperate fury, and as if Eliza had contradicted something she had said, “I’ve got troubles enough of my own, without anyone else putting theirs on me! Have they got no one else they can go to? Haven’t they got homes of their own to look after? Do I have to bear the burden of it all for everyone all my life?” she stormed in a voice that was so hoarse, strained and exasperated now that she was almost weeping. “Do I have to be the goat all my life? Oh, I want a little peace,” she cried desperately, “I just want to be left alone by myself once in a while!—The rest of you don’t have to worry!” she said accusingly. “You don’t have to stand for it. You can get away from it!” she cried. “You don’t know—you don’t know!” she said furiously, “what I put up with—but if I don’t get away from it soon, I’m going all to pieces.”

During all the time that Helen had been pouring out her tirade of the wrongs and injuries that had been inflicted on her, Luke had acted as a kind of dutiful and obsequious chorus, punctuating all the places where she had to pause to pant for breath, with such remarks as—

“W-w-w-w-well, you d-d-do too much for everyone and they don’t appreciate it—that’s the trouble,” or, “I f-f-f-f-fink I’d tell them all to p-p-p-p-politely step to hell—f-f-frankly I fink you owe it to yourself to do it! W-w-w-wy you’ll only w-w-w-wear yourself out doing for others and in the end you d-d-d-don’t get so m-m-m-much as one good Goddamn for all your trouble! F-f-f-frankly, I mean it!” he would say with a very earnest look on his harassed and drawn face. “W-w-w-wy hereafter I’d let’em g-g-g-g-go to hell!”

—“If they’d only show a little appreciation once in a while I wouldn’t mind so much,” she panted. “But do you think they care? Do you think it ever occurs to them to lift a hand to help me when they see me working my fingers to the bone for them? Why”—and here her big-boned generous face worked convulsively—“if I should work myself to death for them, do you think any of them would even so much as send a bunch of flowers to the funeral?”

Luke laughed with jeering scorn: “W-w-w-wy,” he said, “it is to laugh! It is to laugh! They w-w-wouldn’t send a G-g-g-g-God-damn thing—n-n-n-not even a ten-cent b-b-b-bunch of-of-w-w-w-w-wy—of turnip-greens!” he said.

“All right! All right!” Helen again cried furiously through the door, as Barton sounded a long imperative blast of protest and impatience on his horn. “All right! Hugh! I’m coming! Good heavens, can’t you leave me in peace for just five minutes?… Hugh, please! Please!” she stormed in a tone of frenzied exasperation as he sourly answered her. “Give me a little time alone, I beg of you—or I’ll go mad!”—And she turned to them again, panting and with the racked and strained expression of hysteria on her big-boned features. In a moment, her harassed and driven look relaxed somewhat, and the big rough bawdy smile began to shape itself again around the corners of her generous mouth.

“My God, Mama,” she said in a tone of quiet and weary despair, but with this faint lewd smile about her mouth and growing deeper as she spoke, “what am I going to do about it? Will you please tell me that? Did you have to put up with that when you and Papa were together? Is that the way it is? Is there no such thing as peace and privacy in this world? Now, I’d like to know. When you marry one of them, does that mean that you’ll never get a moment’s peace or privacy alone as long as you live? Now, there are some things you like to do alone”—she said, and by this time the lewd smile had deepened perceptibly around her mouth. “Why, it’s got so,” she said, “that I’m almost afraid to go to the bathroom any more—”

“Whew-w!” shrieked Eliza, laughing, putting one finger underneath her nose.

“Yes, sir,” Helen said quietly, with the lewd smile now deep and loose around her mouth. “I’ve just got so I’m almost afraid to go, I don’t know from one moment to the next whether one of them is going to come in and keep me company or not.”

“Whew!” Eliza cried. “Why, you’ll have to put up signs!’No Visitors Allowed!’—that’s exactly what you ought to say! I’d fix’em! I’d do it like a shot,” she said.

Helen sniggered hoarsely, and absently began to pluck at her chin.

“But oh!” she said with a sigh. “If only they’d leave me alone an hour a day! If only I could get away for just an hour—”

“W-w-w-wy!” Luke began. “Why don’t you c-c-come with us! F-f-f-frankly, I fink you ought to do it! I fink the change would do you good,” he said.

“Why?” she said rather dully, yet curiously. “Where are you going?”

“W-w-w-wy,” he said, “we were just starting for a little ride…. Mama!” he burst out suddenly in a tone of exasperated entreaty—“Will you k-k-k-kindly go and get yourself ready? W-w-wy, it’s g-g-g-going to get d-d-d-dark before we get started,” he said bitterly, as if she had kept him waiting all this time. “Now, please—I b-b-b-beg of you—to g-g-g-get ready—wy-wy-wy without f-f-f-further delay—now, I ask it of you, for God’s sake!” he said, and then turning to Helen with a movement of utter exasperation and defeat, he shuddered convulsively, thrust his fingers through his hair, and moaned “Ah-h-h-h-h-h!” after which he began to mutter “My God! My God! My God!”

“All right, sir! All right!” Eliza said briskly, in a conciliatory tone. “I’ll just go right back there and put my coat and hat on and I won’t keep you waitin’five—”

“Wy, wy, wy. If you p-p-please, Mama,” said Luke with a tortured and ironic bow. “If you p-p-please.”

At length, they really did get out of the house and were assembled on the curb in the last throes of departure. Luke, breathing stertorously his large unhappy breath, began to walk about his battered little car, casting uneasy and worried looks at it and falling upon it violently from time to time, kicking it in the tyres with his large flat feet, smiting it with a broad palm and seizing it by the sides and shaking it so savagely that its instant dissolution seemed inevitable. Meanwhile Eliza stood planted solidly, facing her house, her hands clasped loosely at the waist and her powerful and delicate mouth pursed reflectively as she surveyed her property—a characteristic gesture that always marked every departure from the house and every return to it, in which the whole power and relish of possession were evident. As for Barton, while these inevitable ceremonies were taking place, he just sat in his car with a kind of sour resigned patience, and waited. And Helen, while this was going on, had taken Eugene by the arm and walked a few paces down the street with him, talking all the time in a broken and abstracted way, of which the reference could only be inferred:

“You see, don’t you?… You see what I’ve got to put up with, don’t you?… You only get it for a little while when you come here, but with me it’s all the time and all the time”—Suddenly she turned to him, looked him directly in the eye, and speaking quietly to him, but with a curious, brooding and disturbing inflection in her voice, she said:

“Do you know what day this is?”

“No.”

“Do you realize that Ben died five years ago this morning?—I was thinking of it yesterday when she was talking about getting that room ready for those people who are coming,” she muttered, and with a note of weary bitterness in her voice. For a moment her big-boned face was marked with the faint tension of hysteria, and her eyes looked dark and lustreless and strained as she plucked absently at her large chin. “But do you see how she can do it?” she went on in a low tone of brooding and weary resignation. “Do you understand how she can ever bear to go back in there? Do you see how she can rent that room out to any cheap lodger who comes along? Do you realize that she’s got the same bed in there he died on,” she said morbidly, “the same mattress?—K-k-k-k-k-k!” she laughed softly and huskily, poking at his ribs. “She’ll have you sleeping on it next—”

“I’ll be damned if she does!”

“K-k-k-k-k-k-k!”

“Do you think I could be sleeping on it now?” Eugene said with a feeling of black horror and dread around his heart.

“K-k-k-k-k-k!” she snickered. “Would you like that? Would you sleep better if you knew it was?… No,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “Uh-uh! I don’t think so. It’s still up there in the same room. She may have painted the bed, but otherwise I don’t think she’s changed a thing. Have you ever been back up there since he died?” she said curiously.

“My God, no! Have you?”

She shook her head: “Not I,” she said with weary finality. “I’ve never even been upstairs since that morning…. Hugh hates the place,” she muttered, looking towards him. “He doesn’t even like to stop and wait for me. He won’t come in.”

Then she was silent for a moment as they looked at the gaunt ugly bay of the room upstairs where Ben had died. In the yard the maple trees were thinning rapidly; the leaves were sere and yellow and were floating to the ground. And the old house stood there in all its ugly, harsh, and prognathous bleakness, its paint of rusty yellow scaling from it in patches, and weathered and dilapidated as Eugene had never seen it before, but incredibly near, incredibly natural and familiar, so that all its ghosts of pain and grief and bitterness, its memories of joy and magic and lost time, the thousand histories of all the vanished people it had sheltered, whom all of them had known, revived instantly with an intolerable and dream-like strangeness and familiarity.

And now, as they looked up at the bleak windows of the room in which he died, the memory of his death’s black horror passed across their souls a minute, and then was gone, leaving them only with the fatality of weary resignation which they had learned from it. In a moment, with a look of ancient and indifferent weariness and grief in her eyes, Helen turned to him, and with a faint rough smile around her mouth, said quietly:

“Does he ever bother you at night?—When the wind begins to howl around the house, do you ever hear him walking up there? Has he been in to see you yet?—K-k-k k-k-k!” she poked him with her big stiff finger, laughing huskily, and then in a low, sombrely brooding tone, as if the grisly suggestion were his, she shook her head, saying:

“Forget about it! They don’t come back, Eugene! I used to think they did, but now I know they never do.—He won’t come,” she muttered, as she shook her head. “Forget about it. He won’t come. Just forget about it,” she continued, looking at Eliza with weary resignation. “It’s not her fault. I used to think that you could change them. But you can’t. Uh-uh!” she muttered, plucking at her large cleft chin. “It can’t be done. They never change.”

Luke stood distractedly for a moment on the curbstone, breathing his large unhappy breath and thrusting his clumsy fingers strongly through the flashing whirls and coils of his incredible hair.

“Now—ah!” he sang out richly. “Let me see! I—wy—I fink! M-m-m-mama, if you please!” he said. “Wy if you please!” with an exasperated and ironic obsequiousness.

She had been standing there, planted squarely on the sidewalk, facing her house. She stood with her hands clasped loosely across her stomach, and as she looked at the gaunt weathered shape of the old house, her mouth was puckered in an expression of powerful rumination in which the whole terrible legend of blood and hunger and desperate tenacity—the huge clutch of property and possession which, with her, was like the desperate clutch of life itself—was evident.

What was this great claw in her life—this thing that was stronger than life or death or motherhood—which made her hold on to anything which had ever come into her possession, which made her cling desperately to everything which she had ever owned—old bottles, papers, pieces of string, worn-out gloves with all the fingers missing, frayed cast-off sweaters which some departed boarder had left behind him, postcards, souvenirs, sea-shells, coco-nuts, old battered trunks, dilapidated furniture which could be no longer used, calendars for the year 1906, showing coy maidens simpering sidewise out beneath the crisply ruffled pleatings of a Japanese parasol—a mountainous accumulation of old junk for which the old dilapidated house had now become a fit museum.

Then in the wink of an eye she would pour thousands of dollars after the crazy promises of boom-town real-estate speculation that by comparison made the wildest infatuation of a drunken race-track gambler look like the austere process of a coldly reasoning mind.

Even as she stood there staring at her house with her pursed mouth of powerful and ruminant satisfaction, another evidence of this madness of possession was staring in their face. At the end of the alley slope, behind the house, there was a dilapidated old shed or house of whitewashed boards, which had been built in earlier times as a carriage house. Now through the open entrance of this shed they could see the huge and dusty relic of Eliza’s motor car. She had bought it four years before, and bought it instantly one day before they knew about it, and paid $2000 in hard cash for it—and why she bought it, what mad compulsion of her spirit made her buy it, no one knew, and least of all Eliza.

For from that day to this that car had never left the carriage house. Year by year, in spite of protest, oaths, and prayers, and all their frantic pleading, she had got no use from it herself, and would let no one else use it. No, what is more, she had even refused to sell it later, although a man had made her a good offer. Rather she pursed her lips reflectively, smiled in a bantering fashion, and said evasively: “Well, I’ll see now! I’ll think it over!—I want to study about it a little—you come back later and I’ll let you know!… I want to think about it!”—as if, by hanging on to this mass of rusty machinery, she hoped it would increase in value and that she could sell it some day for twice the price she paid for it, if only she “held on” long enough.

And at first they had all wrestled by turns with the octopal convolutions of her terrific character, exhausting all the strength and energy in them against the substance of a will that was like something which always gave and never yielded, which could be grasped, compressed, and throttled in the hard grip of their furious hands, only to bulge out in new shapes and forms and combinations—which flowed, gave, withdrew, receded and advanced, but which remained itself for ever, and beat everything before it in the end.

Now, for a moment, as Luke saw the car he was goaded into the old madness of despair. Thrusting his fingers through his hair, and with a look of desperate exasperation in his tortured eyes, he began: “M-m-m-mama—M-m-m-mama—I beg of you, I—wy I entreat you, —w-w-w-wy I beseech you either to s-s-s-sell that God-damn thing or—wy—g-g-g-get a little s-s-service out of it.”

“Well, now,” Eliza said quickly and in a conciliatory tone, “we’ll see about it!”

“S-s-s-see about it!” he stammered bitterly. “See about it! In G-g-g-God’s name, what is there to see about? M-m-m-mama, the car’s there—there—there—” he muttered crazily, poking his clumsy finger in a series of jerky and convulsive movements in the direction of the carriage house. “It’s there!” he croaked madly. “C-c-c-can’t you understand that? W-w-w-wy, it’s rotting away on its God-damn wheels—M-m-m-mama, will you please get it into your head that it’s not g-g-g-going to do you or anyone else any good unless you take it out and use it?”

“Well, as I say now”—she began hastily, and in a diplomatic tone of voice.

“M-m-m-m-mama”—he began, again thrusting at his hair—“wy, I beg of you—I beseech you to sell it, g-g-g-give it away, or wy-wy-wy try to get a little use out of it!—Let me take it out and drive you round the block in it—w-w-w-wy—just once! Just once! F-f-f-frankly, I’d like to have the satisfaction of knowing you’d had that much out of it!” he said. “Wy, I’ll p-p-p-pay for the p-p-p-petrol, if that’s what’s worrying you! Wy, I’ll do it with pleasure!… But just let me take it out of that G-g-g-g-God-damn place if all—if all—wy if all I do is drive you to the corner! Now, please!” he begged, with an almost frantic note of entreaty.

“Why, no, boy!” she cried out in a startled tone. “We can’t do that!”

“C-c-c-can’t do that!” he stuttered bitterly. “Wy, in G-g-g-g-God’s name, why can’t we?”

“I’d be afra-a-id!” she said with a little troubled smile, as she shook her head. “Hm! I’d be afraid!”

“Wy-wy-wy-wy afraid?” he yelled. “Wy, what’s there to be afraid of, in God’s name?”

“I’d be afraid you’d do something to it,” she said with her troubled smile. “ I’d be afraid you’d smash it up or run over someone with it. No, child,” she said gravely, as she shook her head. “I’d be afraid to let you drive it. You’re too nervous.”

“Ah-h-h-h-h-h!” he breathed clutching convulsively in his hair as his eyes flickered madly about in his head. “Ah-h-h-h-h! M-m-m-merciful God!” he muttered. “M-m-m-m-m-merciful God!”—and then laughed wildly, frantically, and bitterly.

Now Helen spoke curiously, plucking reflectively at her large chin, but with weariness and resignation in her accent as if already she knew the answer:

“Mama, what are you going to do with your car? It seems a shame to let it rot away back there after you’ve paid out all that money for it. Aren’t you going to try to get any use out of it at all?”

“Well, now, as I say,” Eliza began smugly, pursing her lips with ruminative relish as she looked into the air, “I’m just waitin’for the chance—I’m just waitin’till the first fine day to come along—and then, I’ve got a good notion to take that thing out and learn to run it myself.”

“Oh, Mama,” Helen began quietly and wearily, “good heavens—”

“Why, yes!” Eliza cried nodding her head briskly. “I could do it! Now, I can do most anything when I make my mind up to it! Now I’ve never seen anything yet I couldn’t do if I had to!… So I’m just waitin’until spring comes round again, and I’m goin’to take that car out and drive it all around,” she said. “I’m just goin’to sit up there an’enjoy the scenery an’have a big time,” said Eliza with her little tremulous smile. “That’s what I’m goin’to do,” she said.

“All right,” Helen said wearily. “Have it your own way. Do as you please: it’s your own funeral! Only it seems a shame to let it go to waste after you’ve spent all that money on it.”

But turning to Eugene, and speaking in a lowered tone, she said to him, with the faint tracing of hysteria on her big-decent face and weariness and resignation in her voice:

“Well, what are you going to do about it? I used to think that you could change her, but now I know she never will…. I’ve given up trying. It’s no use,” she muttered. “It’s no use. I worked my fingers to the bone to help them save a copper—and you see what comes of it…. I did the work of a nigger in the kitchen from the time I was ten years old—and you see what comes of it, don’t you? I went off and sang my way around the country in cheap moving-picture shows… and came up here and waited on the tables to help feed a crowd of cheap boarders—and Luke sold The Saturday Evening Post, and peddled hot dogs and toy balloons—and you got up at three o’clock, carried the morning paper—and they let Ben go to hell until his lungs were gone and it was too late—and you see what it all comes to in the end, don’t you?… It’s all given away to real-estate men or thrown away for motor cars they never use. I’ve given up worrying,” she said. “I don’t think about it any more…. They don’t change,” she muttered. “I used to think they did, but now I know they don’t. Uh-uh! They don’t change!… Well, forget about it,” and she turned wearily away.

The year Eliza bought the car, Eugene was eighteen years old and was a Junior at the State University. When he came home that year he asked her if she would let him learn to drive it. It was about the time when everyone in town was beginning to own motor cars. When he walked up town everyone he knew would drive by him in a car. Everyone on earth was beginning to live upon a wheel. Somehow it gave him a naked and desolate feeling, as if he had nowhere to go and no door to enter. When he asked her if she would let him take the car out and learn to drive it, she had looked at him a moment with her hands clasped loosely at the waist, her head cocked quizzically to one side, and the little tremulous and bantering smile that had always filled him with such choking exasperation and wordless shame, and somehow with a nameless and intolerable pity, too, because behind it he felt always her high white forehead and her faded, weak, and childlike eyes, the naked intelligence, whiteness, and immortal innocence of the child that was looking straight through the mask of years with all the deathless hope and faith and confidence of her life and character.

Now, for the last time, he asked her again the question he had asked with such an earnest hope so many times before. And instantly, as if he had dreamed her answer, she replied—the same reply that she had always made, the only reply the invincible procrastination of her soul could make.

“Hm!” she said, making the bantering and humming noise in her throat as she looked at him. “Wha-a-a-t! Why, you’re my ba-a-a-by!” she said with jesting earnestness, as she laid her strong worn hand loosely on his shoulder. “No, sir!” she said quickly and quietly, shaking her head in a swift sideways movement. “I’d be afra-a-id, afraid,” she whispered.

“Mama, afraid of what?”

“Why, child,” she said gravely, “I’d be afraid you’d go and hurt yourself. Uhuh!” she shook her head quickly and shortly. “I’d be afraid to let you try it—well, we’ll see,” she said, turning it off easily in an evasive and conciliatory tone. “We’ll see about it. I’d like to study about it a little first.”

After that there was nothing to do except to curse and beat their fists into the wall. And after that there was nothing to do at all. She had beaten them all, and they knew it. Their curses, prayers, oaths, persuasions and strangled cries availed them nothing. She had beaten them all, and finally they spoke no more to her or to themselves about her motor car: the gigantic folly of that mad wastefulness evoked for them all memories so painful, desolate and tragic—a memory of the fatality of blood and nature which could not be altered, of the done which could be undone never, and of the web of fate in which their lives were meshed—that they knew there was no guilt, no innocence, no victory, and no change. They were what they were, and they had no more to say.

So was it now as she stood planted there before her house. As she had grown older, her body had grown clumsier with the shapeless heaviness of age: as she stood there with her hands clasped in this attitude of ruminant relish, she seemed to be planted solidly on the pavement and somehow to own, inhabit, and possess the very bricks she walked on. She owned the street, the pavement, and finally her terrific ownership of the house was as apparent as if the house were living and could speak to her. For the rest of them that old bleak house had now so many memories of grief and death and intolerable, incurable regret that in their hearts they hated it; but although she had seen a son strangle to death in one of its bleak rooms, she loved the house as if it were a part of her own life—as it was—and her love for it was greater than her love for anyone or anything else on earth.

And yet, for her, even if that house, the whole world, fell in ruins around her, there could be no ruin—her spirit was as everlasting as the earth on which she walked, and could not be touched—no matter what catastrophes of grief, death, tragic loss, and unfulfilment might break the lives of other men—she was triumphant over the ravages of time and accident, and would be triumphant to her death. For there was only the inevitable fulfilment of her own destiny—and ruin, loss, and death availed not—she would be fulfilled. She had lived ten lives, and now she was embarked upon another one, and so it had been ordered in the beginning: this was all that mattered in the end.

But now, Luke, seeing her, as she stood planted there in all-engulfing rumination, thrust his hands distractedly through his shining hair again, and cried to her with exasperated entreaty:

“W-w-w-wy, Mama, if you please! I b-b-b-beg of you and beseech you, if you please!”

“I’m ready!” Eliza cried, starting and turning from her powerful contemplation of her house. “This very minute, sir! Come on!”

“Wy, if you p-p-p-please!” he muttered, thrusting at his hair.

They walked towards his car, which he had halted in the alley-way beside the house. A few leaves, sere and yellow, from the maples in the yard were drifting slowly to the ground.

XLI

During all that time, when he was waiting with a desperate hope that rose each day to the frenzy of a madman’s certitude, and sank each day to the abyss of his despair, for the magic letter which was coming to him from the city, and which would instantly give him all the fortune, fame, and triumph for which his soul was panting, his family looked at him with troubled question in their eyes. His enthusiastic hopes and assurances of the great success that he would have from writing plays seemed visionary and remote to them. Perhaps they were right about this, although the reason that they had for thinking so was wrong.

Thus, although they said little to Eugene at this time about his plans for the future, and what they did say was meant to hearten him, their doubt and disbelief were evident, and sometimes when he came into the house he could hear them talking in a troubled way about him.

“Mama,” he heard his sister say one day, as she sat talking with his mother in the kitchen, “what does Gene intend to do? Have you heard him say yet?”

“Why, no-o-o!” his mother answered slowly, in a puzzled and meditative tone. “He hasn’t said. At least he says he’s goin’to write plays, —of course, I reckon he’s waiting to hear from those people in New York about that play he’s written,” she added quickly.

“Well, I know,” his sister answered wearily. “That’s all very fine—if he can do it. But, good heavens, Mama!” she cried furiously—“you can’t live on hope like that! Gene’s only one out of a million! Can’t you realize that?—Why, they used to think I had some talent as a singer”—here she laughed ironically, a husky high falsetto, “I used to think so myself—but you don’t notice that it ever got me anywhere, do you? No, sir!” she said positively. “There are thousands more just like Gene, who are trying to get ahead and make a name for themselves. Why should he think he’s any better than the rest of them? Why, it might be years before he got a play produced—and even then, how can he tell that it would be a success?—What’s he going to live on? How’s he going to keep going until all this happens? What’s he going to do?—You know, Mama, Gene’s no little boy any more. Please get that into your head,” she said sharply, as if her mother had questioned the accuracy of her remark. “No, sir! No, sir!” she laughed ironically and huskily. “Your baby is a grown man, and it’s time he waked up to the fact that he’s got to support himself from now on.—Mama, do you realize that it has been over four months since Gene left Harvard and, so far as I can see, he has made no effort yet to get a job? What does he intend to do?” she said angrily. “You know, he just can’t mope around like this all his days! Sooner or later he’s got to find some work to do!”

In all these words there was apparent not so much hostility and antagonism as the driving fury and unrest of Helen’s nervous, exacerbated, dissonant, and unhappy character, which could lavish kindness and affection one moment and abuse and criticism the next. These were really only signs of the frenzy and unrest in her large, tortured, but immensely generous spirit. Thus, she would rage and storm at her husband at one moment for “moping about the house,” telling him, “for heaven’s sake am I never to be left alone? Am I never to get a moment’s peace or quiet? Must I have you around me every moment of my life? In God’s name, Hugh—go! go! go!—Leave me alone for a few minutes, I beg of you!”—and by this time his sister’s voice would be cracked and strident, her breath coming hoarsely and almost with a sob of hysteria. And yet, she could be just as violent in her sense of wrong and injustice done to her if she thought he was giving too much time to business, rushing through his meals, reading a book when he should be listening to her tirade, or staying away from home too much.

Poor, tortured, and unhappy spirit, with all the grandeur, valour, and affection that Eugene knew so well, it had found, since her father’s death, no medicine for the huge and constant frenzy of its own unrest, no guide or saviour to work for it the miracle of salvation it must work itself, and it turned and lashed out at the world, demanding a loneliness which it could not have endured for three days running, a peace and quiet from its own fury, a release from its own injustice. And it was for this reason—because her own unrest and frenzy made her lash out constantly against the world, praising one week, condemning the next, accusing life and people of doing her some injury or wrong that she had done herself—it was for this reason, more than for any other, that Helen now lashed out about Eugene to their mother.

And because Eugene was strung on the same wires, shaped from the same clay, cut from the same kind and plan and quality, he stood there in the hall as he heard her, his face convulsed and livid, his limbs trembling with rage, his bowels and his heart sick and trembling with a hideous grey nausea of hopelessness and despair, his throat choking with an intolerable anguish of resentment and wrong, as he heard Helen’s voice, and before he rushed back into the kitchen to quarrel with her and his mother.

“Well, now,” he heard his mother say in a diplomatic and hopeful tone that somehow only served to increase his feeling of rage and exasperation—“well, now—well, now,” she said, “let’s wait and see! Let’s wait and see what happens with this play. Perhaps he’ll hear tomorrow that they have taken it. Maybe it’s going to be all right, after all!”

“Going to be all right!” Eugene fairly screamed at this juncture, rushing in upon them in the kitchen. “You’re God-damned right it’s going to be all right. I’ll tell you what’s all right!” he panted, because his breath was labouring against his ribs as if he had run up a steep hill—“if it was some damned real-estate man, that would be all right! If it’s some cheap low-down lawyer, that would be all right! If it was some damned rascal sitting on his tail up here in the bank, cheating you out of all you’ve got, that would be all right—hey?” he snarled, conscious that his words had no meaning or coherence, but unable to utter any of the things he wished to say and that welled up in that wave of hot and choking resentment. “O yes! The big man! The great man! The big deacon—Mr. Scroop Pegram—the big bank president—that would be all right, wouldn’t it?” he cried in a choked and trembling voice. “You’d get down on your hands and knees, and crawl if he spoke to you, wouldn’t you?—’O thank you, Mr. Pegram, for letting me put my money in your bank so you can loan it out to a bunch of God-damn real-estate crooks,’” he sneered, in an infuriated parody of whining servility. “’Thank you, sir,’” he said, and in spite of the fact that these words made almost no coherent meaning, his mother began to purse her lips rapidly in an excited fashion, and his sister’s big-boned face reddened with anger.

“Now,” his mother said sternly, as she levelled her index finger at him, “I want to tell you something! You may sneer all you please, sir, at Scroop Pegram, but he’s a man who has worked all his life for everything he has—”

“Yes,” Eugene said bitterly, “and for everything you have, too—for that’s where it’s going in the end.”

“He has made his own way since his childhood,” Eliza continued sternly and deliberately—“no one ever did anything for him, for there’s one thing sure:—there was no one in his family who was in a position to do it.—What he’s done he’s done for himself, without assistance and,” his mother said in a stern and telling voice, “without education—for he never had three months’schoolin’in his life—and today he’s got the respect of the community as much as any man I know.”

“Yes! And most of their money, too,” Eugene cried.

“You’d better not talk!” Helen said. “If I were you I wouldn’t talk! Don’t criticize other people until you show you’ve got it in you to do something for yourself,” she said.

“You! You!” Eugene panted. “I’ll show you! Talking about me when my back is turned, hey? That’s the kind you are! All right! You wait and see! I’ll show you!” he said, in a choked and trembling whisper of fury and resentment.

“All right,” Helen said in a hard and hostile voice. “I’ll wait and see. I hope you do. But you’ve got to show me that you’ve got it in you. It’s time for you to quit this foolishness and get a job! Don’t criticize other people until you show you’ve got it in you to support yourself,” she said.

“No,” said Eliza, “for we’ve done as much for you as we are able to. You’ve had as good an education as anyone could want—and now the rest is up to you,” she said sternly. “I’ve got no more money to pay out on you, so you can make your mind up to it from now on,” she said. “You’ve got to shift for yourself.”

And in the warm and living silence of the kitchen they looked at one another for a moment, all three, breathing heavily, and with hard and bitter eyes.

“Well, Gene,” Helen said, “I know. Try to forget about it. You’ll change as you grow older,” she said wearily. “We’ve all been like that. We all have these wonderful ambitions to be somebody famous, but that all changes. I had them, too,” she said. “I was going to be a great singer, and have a career in opera, but that’s all over now, and I know I never will. You forget about it,” she said quietly and wearily. “It all seems wonderful to you, and you think that you can’t live without it, but you forget about it. Oh, of course you will!” she muttered, “of course! Why!” she cried, shaking Eugene furiously, and now her voice had its old hearty and commanding ring, “I’m going to beat you if you act like this! What if they don’t take your play! I’ll bet that has happened to plenty of people—Yes, sir!” she cried. “I’ll bet that has happened to all of them when they started out—and then they went on and made a big success of it later! Why, if those people didn’t take my play,” she said, “I’d sit down and write another one so good they’d be ashamed of themselves! Why, you’re only a kid yet!” she cried furiously, shaking Eugene, and frowning fiercely but with her tongue stuck out a little and a kind of grin on her big-boned liberal-looking face. “Don’t you know that! You’ve got loads of time yet! Your life’s ahead of you! Of course you will! Of course you will!” she cried, shaking him. “Don’t let a thing like this get you down! In ten years’time you’ll look back on all this and laugh to think you were ever such a fool! Of course you will!”—and then as her husband, who had driven up before their mother’s house, now sounded on the horn for her, she said again, in the quiet and weary tone: “Well, Gene, forget about it! Life’s too short! I know,” she said mysteriously, “I know!”

Then, as she started to go, she added casually: “Honey, come on over for supper, if you want to.—Now it’s up to you. You can suit yourself!—You can do exactly as you please,” she said in the almost hard, deliberately indifferent tone with which she usually accompanied these invitations:

“What would you like to eat?” she now said meditatively. “How about a nice thick steak?” she said juicily, as she winked at him. “I’ve got the whole half of a fried chicken left over from last night, that you can have if you come over!—Now it’s up to you!” she cried out again in that almost hard challenging tone, as if he had shown signs of unwillingness or refusal. “I’m not going to urge you, but you’re welcome to it if you want to come.—How about a big dish full of string beans—some mashed potatoes—some stewed corn, and asparagus? How’d you like some great big wonderful sliced tomatoes with mayonnaise?—I’ve got a big deep peach and apple pie in the oven—do you think that’d go good smoking hot with a piece of butter and a hunk of American cheese?” she said, winking at him and smacking her lips comically. “Would that hit the spot? Hey?” she said, prodding him in the ribs with her big stiff fingers and then saying in a hoarse, burlesque, and nasal tone, in extravagant imitation of a girl they knew who had gone to New York and had come back talking with the knowing, cock-sure nasal tone of the New Yorker.

“Ah, fine, boys!” Helen said, in this burlesque tone. “Fine! Just like they give you in New York!” she said. Then turning away indifferently, she went down the steps, and across the walk towards her husband’s car, calling back in an almost hard and aggressive tone:

“Well, you can do exactly as you like! No one is going to urge you to come if you don’t want to!”

Then she got into the car and they drove swiftly off down-hill, turned the corner and vanished.

The reason, in fact, which argued in Eugene’s family’s mind against his succeeding in the work he wished to do was the very thing that should have been all in his favour. But neither he nor his family thought so. It was this: a writer, they thought, should be a wonderful, mysterious, and remote sort of person—someone they had never known, like Irvin S. Cobb. “Now, this boy,” they argued in their minds, “our son and brother, is neither wonderful, mysterious, nor remote. We know all about him, we all grew up together here, and there’s no use talking—he’s the same kind of people that we are. His father was a stone-cutter—a man who was born on a farm and had to work all his life with his hands. And five of his father’s brothers were also stone-cutters, and had to earn their living in the same way—by the sweat of their brow. And his mother is a hard-working woman who brought up a big family, runs a boarding-house and has had to scrape and save and labour all her life. Everyone in this part of the country knows her family: her brothers are respected business men in town here, and there are hundreds of her kinsfolk—farmers, storekeepers, carpenters, lumber-dealers, and the like—all through this section. Now, they’re all good, honest, decent, self-respecting people—no one can say they’re not—but there’s never been a writer in the crowd. No—and no doctors or lawyers either. Now there may have been a preacher or two—his Uncle Bascom was a preacher and a highly educated man too, always poking his nose into a book and went to Harvard, and all—yes, and now that we remember, always had queer notions like this boy—had to leave the Church, you know, for being an agnostic, and was always writing poems, and all such as that. Well, this fellow is one of the same kind—a great book-reader but with no practical business sense—and it seems to us he ought to get a job somewhere teaching school, or maybe some newspaper work—which he could do—or, perhaps, he should have studied law.”

So did their minds work on this subject. Yet the very argument they made—that he was the same kind of person as the rest of them, and not remote, wonderful, or mysterious—should have been the chief thing in his favour. But none of them could see this. For where they thought there was nothing wonderful or mysterious about them, he thought that there was; and none of them could see that his greatest asset, his greatest advantage, if he had any, was that he was made out of the same earth—the same blood, bone, character, and fury—as the rest of them. For, could they only have known it, the reason he read all the books was not, as they all thought, because he was a bookish person, for he was not, but for the same reason that his mother was mad about property—talked, thought, felt, and dreamed about real estate all the time, and wanted to own the earth just as he wanted to devour it. Again, the fury that had made him read the books was the same thing that drove his brothers and his sisters around incessantly, feeding the huge fury of their own unrest, and making them talk constantly and to everyone, until they knew all about the lives of all the butchers, bakers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, Greek restaurant owners, and Italian fruit-dealers in the community.

If they had understood this—that he had the same thing in him that they all had in them—they would have understood about his wanting to be a writer, and even the trouble in which presently he would involve himself, and that seemed so catastrophic and disgraceful to him at that time, would not have seemed so bad to them, for his father, one of his brothers, and several of his kinsmen had been in this same trouble—and it had caused no astonishment at all. But now that he had done this thing—now that the one they looked on as the scholar, and the bookish person, had done it—it was as if the leading deacon of the Church had been caught in a raid on a bawdy-house.

Finally, there was to be some irony for Eugene later in the fact that, had he only known it and grasped it, there was ready to his use in that one conflict all of the substance and energy of the human drama, and that the only thing that was wonderful or important was that they were all full of the passion, stupidity, energy, hope, and folly of living men—fools, angels, guiltless and guilty all together, not to be praised or blamed, but just blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling—the whole swarming web of life and error in full play and magnificently alive. As for the fancied woes and hardships of the young artist in conflict with the dull and brutal Philistines, —that, he saw later, had had nothing to do with it, and was not worth a damn, any more than the plays that had been written in Professor Hatcher’s class, and in which a theatrical formula for living was presented in place of life. No; the conflict, the comedy, the tragedy, —the pain, the pride, the folly and the error—might have been just the same had Eugene wanted to be an aviator, a deep-sea diver, a bridge-builder, a professional pall-bearer, or a locomotive engineer. And the study of life was there in all its overwhelming richness, was right there in his grasp, but he could not see it, and would not use it. Instead he went snooping and prowling around the sterile old brothels of the stage, mistaking the glib concoctions of a counterfeit emotion for the very flesh and figure of reality. And this also has been true of every youth that ever walked the earth.

The letter came at length one grey day in late October; and instantly, when he had opened it, and read the first words “We regret,” his life went grey as that grey day, and he thought that he would never have heart or hope nor know the living joy of work again. His flesh went dead and cold and sick, yet he read the smooth lying phrases in the letter with the stolid face with which people usually receive bad news, and even tried to insinuate a thread of hope, to suck a kind of meagre and hopeless comfort from the hard, yet oily, words, “We are looking forward with great interest to reading your next play, and we hope you will send it to us as soon as it is completed.”… “Our members were divided in their opinion, four voting to reconsider it and five for rejection… although all were agreed on the freshness and vitality of the writing… while the power of some of the scenes is undeniable… we must reluctantly…. You are one of the young men whose work we are watching with the greatest interest…” and so on.

Those on whom the naked weight of shame has rested, who have felt its grey and hideous substance in their entrails, will not smile calmly and with comfort if their memory serves them.

Now a huge, naked, and intolerable shame and horror pressed down on Eugene with a crushing and palpable weight out of the wet, grey skies of autumn. The hideous grey stuff filled him from brain to bowels, was everywhere and in everything about him so that he breathed it out of the air, felt it like a naked stare from walls and houses and the faces of the people, tasted it on his lips, and endured it in the screaming and sickened dissonance of ten thousand writhing nerves so that he could no longer sit, rest, or find oblivion, exhaustion, forgetfulness or repose anywhere he went, or release from the wild unrest that drove him constantly about. He went to bed only to get up and prowl again the wet and barren little streets of night; he ate, and instantly vomited up again all he had eaten, and then like a dull, distressed and nauseated brute, he would sullenly and wretchedly eat again.

He saw the whole earth with the sick eyes, the sick heart, the sick flesh, and writhing nerves of this grey accursed weight of shame and horror in which his life lay drowned, and from which it seemed he could never more emerge to know the music of health and joy and power again; and from which, likewise, he could not die, but must live hideously and miserably the rest of his days, like a man doomed to live for ever in a state of retching and abominable nausea of heart, brain, bowels, flesh and spirit.

It seemed to him that all was lost, that he had been living in a fool’s dream for years, and that now he had been brutally wakened and saw himself as he was—a naked fool—who had never had an ounce of talent, and who no longer had an ounce of hope—a madman who had wasted his money and lost precious years when he might have learned some work consonant with his ability and the lives of average men. And it now seemed to him that his family had been terribly and mercilessly right in everything they had said and felt, and that he had been too great a fool to understand it. His sense of ruin and failure was abysmal, crushing, and complete.

XLII

It was in this temper, after two days of aimless and frenzied wandering about the streets of the town, and over the hills that surrounded it, during which time he was no more conscious of what he did, said, ate, thought or felt than a man in a trance, that Eugene started off suddenly to visit his other married sister, who lived in a little town in South Carolina. He had not seen her since his father’s death two years ago; she had written him a few days before asking him to come down, and now, driven more by a fury of flight and movement than by any other impulse, he wired her he was coming, and started out in one of the Public Service motor cars which at that time made the trip across the mountains. Luke had arranged to meet him sixty miles from home at the town of Blackstone, in South Carolina, and drive him the remainder of the distance to his sister’s house.

He set out on a day in late October, wild and windy, full of ragged torn clouds of light that came and went from grey to gold and back to grey again. And everything that happened on that savage day he was to remember later with a literal and blazing intensity.

Autumn had come sharp and quick that year. October had been full of frost and nipping days, the hills were glorious that year as Eugene had never seen them before. Now, only a day or two before, there had been, despite the early season, a sudden and heavy fall of snow. It still lay, light but fleecy, in the fields; and on the great bulk of the hills it lay in a pattern of shining white, stark greys and blacks, and the colours of the leaves, which now had fallen thickly and had lost their first sharp vividness, but were still burning with a dull massed molten glow.

An hour away, and twenty-five miles from home, the car had drawn up before the post office of a mountain village or resort which lay at the crest of the last barrier of the hills, before the road dropped sharply down the mountain-side to South Carolina.

While they were halted here, another car drove up—an open, glittering, and expensive-looking projectile of light grey—and in it were three young men from home, two of whom Eugene knew. This car drew up abreast, stopped, and he saw that its driver was Robert Weaver. And although he had not seen the other youth since a midnight visit Robert had made to his room in Cambridge, the latter peered over towards him owlishly and without a word of greeting and with that abrupt, feverish, and fragmentary speech that was characteristic of him and was constantly becoming more dissonant and broken, he barked out:

“Who’s in there? Who’s that sitting up there in the front seat? Is that you, Gene?” he called.

When Gene assured him that it was, Robert asked where he was going. When he told him “Blackstone,” he demanded at once that he leave the service car and come with him.

“We’re going there, too,” he said. Turning to his comrades, he added earnestly:

“Aren’t we? Isn’t that where we’re going, boys?”

The two young men to whom he spoke now laughed boisterously, crying: “Yeah! That’s right! That’s where we’re going, Robert,” and one of them added with a solemn gravity:

“We’re going to—Blackstone,” here a slight convulsion seemed to seize his throat, he swallowed hard, hiccoughed, and concluded, “to see a football game”—a statement which again set them off into roars of boisterous laughter. Then they all shouted at Eugene:

“Come on! Come on! Get in! We’ve lots of room.”

Eugene got out of the service car, paid the driver, took the small hand-case he had, and got into the other car with Robert and his two companions. They drove off fast, and almost immediately they were dropping down the mountain, along the sinuous curves and turns of the steep road.

Robert’s two companions on this journey were young men whom Eugene had not known in boyhood, with whom he had now only a speaking acquaintance, and both of whom were recent comers to the town. The older of these two was a man named Emmet Blake, and he now sat beside Robert on the front seat of the car.

Emmet Blake was a man of twenty-seven years, a frail and almost wasted-looking figure of medium height, straight black hair, black eyes, and a thin, febrile, and corrupted-looking face which, although almost dead-white in its colour, was given a kind of dark and feverish vitality by a faint thin smile that seemed always to hover about the edges of his mouth, and the dark unnatural glitter of his black eyes.

He lived a reckless and dissipated life and drank heavily: time after time, after a hæmorrhage of the lungs, he had been taken to a sanatorium in an ambulance, and his death had seemed to be a matter of only a few hours. And time after time he had come out again, and immediately started on another wild spree of women and corn whisky with Robert and others of the same breed. He was well-off as to money, and lived expensively, because he was a nephew of George Blake, the great Middle-Western manufacturer of cheap motor cars, which in twenty years’time had created twenty thousand jokes and glutted the highways of the earth in twenty million tinny and glittering repetitions.

The name of the other youth, who was Eugene’s own age and sat beside him on the back seat, was Kitchin. He was a tall, dark, handsome fellow, with agreeable manners and a pleasant voice, the nephew of a retired physician in the town but not native to the place. Eugene had seen him on the streets, but had never talked to him before. It was evident that both Robert and his two friends had been drinking, although not heavily: there was in their manner the subdued yet wild and mounting elation of young men when they begin to drink. They laughed a great deal, rather hilariously, and for no good reason: they insisted frequently that they were going to the town of Blackstone to see a football game, an announcement which would set them off again in roars of laughter.

Almost as soon as Eugene got into the car, and even as they started off again, Blake thrust his thin hand into the leather pocket of the door beside him, produced a bottle that was three-quarters full of Scotch whisky, and turning, gave it to Eugene, saying:

“Take a big one, Gant. We’re all ahead of you.”

He drank long and deep, gulping the fiery liquor down his throat recklessly, feeling suddenly an almost desperate sense of release from the grey misery of hopelessness which had crushed him down for days now, since the letter had come. When he had finished he handed the bottle back to Emmet Blake, who took it, looked at it with a thin, evil, speculative smile, and said:

“Well, that’s pretty good. What do you say, Robert? Shall we let him pass on that?”

“Hell, no!” cried Robert hoarsely, looking swiftly round at the bottle. “That’s no drink! Make him take a good one, Emmet. You’ve got to do better than that if you keep up with us,” he cried, and then he burst out suddenly in his staccato laugh, shaking his head to himself as he bent over the wheel, and crying out: “Lord! Lord!”

Blake handed Eugene the bottle again, and he drank some more. Then Kitchin took the bottle and drank; he handed it back to Emmet Blake, who drank, and Blake handed it to Robert, who took it with one hand, his face turned slightly from the wheel, his eyes still fastened on the road, and drank until the bottle was empty. Then he flung it away from him across his arm. The bottle went sailing out across the road and down the gulch or deep ravine that sloped away beside them far down: the bottle struck a rock, exploding brilliantly in a thousand glittering fragments, and they all roared happily, and cheered.

They had finished up that bottle in one round of gulps and swallows, passing it from hand to hand as they rushed down the mountain-side, and almost instantly they were at work on a beverage of a yet more instant and fiery power—raw, white corn-whisky, in a gallon jug, clear as water, rank and nauseous to an unaccustomed throat, strong and instant as the kick of a mule, fiery, choking, formidable, and savage. They hooked their thumbs into the handle of the jug and brought the stuff across their shoulders with a free-hand motion; they let the wide neck pour into their tilted throats with a fat thick gurgle, and they gulped that raw stuff down with greedy gulpings like water going down a gully drain.

It was a drink that would have felled an ox, a terrific lightning-blast of alcohol that would have thrown Polyphemus to the earth; and yet it was not drink alone that made them drunk that day. For they were all young men, and they had shouted, sung, and roared with laughter, and pounded one another with affectionate delight as they rushed on—and it was not drink alone that made them drunk.

For they felt that everything on earth was good and glorious, that everything on earth was made for their delight, that they could do no wrong and make no error, and that such invincible strength was in them that trees would fall beneath their stroke, the immortal hills bow down before their stride, and that nothing in the world could stop them.

And for Eugene it seemed that everything had come to life for him at once—that he had emerged instantly and victoriously from the horror of shame, the phantasmal and dreamlike unreality that had held him in its spell. It seemed to him that all the earth had come to life again in shapes of deathless and familiar brightness, that he had gloriously re-entered a life he thought he had lost for ever, and that all the plain priceless joy and glory of the earth was his, as it had never been before.

And first of all, and with an almost intolerable relief and happiness, he was conscious of the pangs of hunger: his famished belly and his withered stomach, which had for days shrunk wearily and with disgust from food, now, under the stimulation of a ravenous hunger, fairly pleaded for nourishment. He thought of food—food in a hundred glorious shapes and varieties: the literal sensual images of food blazed in his mind like paintings from the brush of a Dutch master, and it seemed to him that no one had ever painted, spoken, or written about food before in a way that would do it justice.

Later, these were the things Eugene would remember from that day with a living joy, for it was as if he had been born again, or discovered the world anew in all its glory. And besides all this—a part, an element in all this whole harmonious design of triumphant joy and rediscovery—was the way the hills had looked that day as they came down the mountain, the smell of the air which was mellow and autumnal, and yet had in it the premonitory breath of frost and sharpness, and the wild joy, power, and ecstasy that had filled their hearts, their throats, their lives—the sense of victory, triumph, and invincible strength, and of some rare, glorious, and intolerable happiness that was pending for them, and which seemed to swell the tremendous and exulting music of that magic day.

Around them, above them, below them—for the living and shining air of autumn, from the embrowned autumnal earth, from the great shapes of the hills behind them with their molten mass of colour—dull browns, rich bitter reds, dark bronze, and mellow yellow—from the raw crude clay of the piedmont earth and the great brown stubble of the cotton-fields—from a thousand impalpable and unutterable things, there came this glorious breath of triumph and delight. It was late October, there was a smell of smoke upon the air, an odour of burning leaves, the barking of a dog, a misty red, a pollenated gold in the rich, fading, sorrowful, and exultant light of the day, —and far off, a sound of great wheels pounding on a rail, the wailing whistle, and the tolling bell of a departing train.

And finally, the immortal visage of the earth itself, with the soaring and limitless undulations of its blue ranges, the great bulk of the autumn hills, immense and near, the rugged, homely, and familiar trees—the pines, oaks, chestnuts, maples, locusts—the homely look of the old red clay—the unforgettable and indescribable naturalness of that earth—with its rudeness, wildness, richness, rawness, ugliness, fathomless mystery and utter familiarity, and finally the lonely, haunting, and enchanted music that it made—the strange spirit of time and solitude that hovered above it eternally, and which can never be described, but which may be evoked by a cow-bell broken by the wind in distant valleys, the lonely whistle of a departing train, or simply a sinuous gust of wind that smokes its way across coarse mountain grasses when spring comes—all this, which Eugene had felt and known in his childhood, and yet had never had a tongue to utter, he seemed now to know and understand so well that he had himself become its tongue and utterance, the more its child because he had been so long away from it, the more its eye because he now saw it again as it must have seemed to the first men who ever saw it, with the eyes of discovery, love, and recognition.

And yet, for him all these things spoke instantly, intolerably, exultantly, not of home, return, and settlement, but of one image, which now burned for ever in his brain, rose like a triumphant music in his heart. And that image was the image of the enchanted city, in which, it now seemed, all the frenzy and unrest of his spirit would find a certain goal and triumph, and toward which everything on earth, and all the hope and joy now rising in his heart, was tending.

When they got down off the mountain into South Carolina they were very drunk. On a dusty sand-clay road between some cotton-fields they stopped the car, and walked out into the fields to make water. The cotton stood stiff and dry and fleecy in its pods, the coarse brown stalks rose up in limitless planted rows, and underneath, he could see the old and homely visage of the red-clay earth.

At one edge of the field, and seeming very far away and lonely-looking, there was a negro shanty, and behind this a desolate wooded stretch of pine. Over all the earth at once, now that the roar of the engine had stopped, there was an immense and brooding quietness, a drowsed autumnal fume and warmth, immensely desolate and mournful, holding somehow a tragic prophecy of winter that must come, and death, and yet touched with the lonely, mournful and exultant mystery of the earth.

Eugene pulled several of the big cotton-stalks out of the dry red earth, thrust one through the button-hole of his coat lapel, and tore it through exultantly, although the stalk was two feet long. Then he reeled back toward the car again, holding the other stalks of cotton in his hands, got into the car, and at once began to talk to his companions about the cotton—ending up in a passionate oration about the hills, the fields, the cotton and the earth—trying to tell them all about “the South” and making of the stalks of cotton and “the South” a kind of symbol, as young men will, although they all felt and acted just as young men anywhere would do.

But at that moment, all Eugene was trying to say about his years away from home, and his return, and how he had discovered his own land again and was, “by God!” one of them—waving the stalks of cotton as he talked, and finding the whole core and kernel of all he wished to say in these stalks of cotton—all of this, although incoherent, drunken, and confused, seemed so eloquent and beautiful to him, so truthful, passionate, and exact—that he began to weep for joy as he talked to them. And they—they were, of course, delighted: they howled with laughter, cheered enthusiastically, slapped him on the back, and shook hands all round, crying—“By God! Listen to him talk!… Give’em hell, son! We’re with you!… Hot-damn! Thataway, boy!… Stay with’em!… Whee!”

Meanwhile, Robert was driving at terrific speed. They had begun to rip and tear along between the cotton-fields and over the dusty sand-clay roads, mistaking the screams of women and the shouts of men, as they swerved by their cars and wagons in a cloud of yellow dust and at a murderous clip, for admiring applause and enthusiastic cheers, an illusion which only spurred them on to greater efforts.

The upshot of it was that they finally tore into town, careening hideously along a central street and with no slackening of their speed whatever. The excited people in that part of the State had been phoning in about them for the last fifteen miles of their mad journey, and now they were halted suddenly at sight of the police, who stood lined up across the street in a double row—big, red-faced, country cops—to stop them.

The first brilliant, sparkling and wildly soaring effects of their intoxication had now worn off and, although they still felt full of power and a savage rending strength, the corn whisky was now smouldering in their veins more dully and with a sombre and brutal drunkenness. Eugene seemed to see all shapes and figures clearly—the coarse red faces of the country cops and their clumsy lumbering bodies, and the street drowsy and dusty in the warmish autumn afternoon.

The grasses on the lawns of houses were faded, sere and withered-looking, the leaves upon the trees had thinned and hung yellowed, dry and dead, and in the gutters a few dead leaves stirred dryly, a few scampered dryly in the streets before a moment’s gust of wind, and then lay still again.

Robert slowed down and stopped before that solid wall of beefy country blue and red: the police surrounded them and clambered heavily over the sides of the car, two standing on the running-boards, two on either side of Eugene on the back seat, and one with Robert and Emmet Blake up front.

“All right, boys,” said one of them, good-naturedly and casually enough, in the full, sonorous and somewhat howling voice of the countryman, “drive on down thar to the station-house now.”

“Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” Robert replied at once in a meek and obedient tone, and with a comical drunken alacrity. “How do you get there, Captain?” he said with a cunning and flattering ingratiation.

“Right down this here street to your right,” said the policeman in his drawling and countrified tone, “until you come to that’air second turning where you see that’air f’ar hydrant. Turn in to the left thar,” he said.

“Yes, sir!” said Robert heartily, starting the car again. “We’re all strangers here,” he lied, as if he hoped this lie might make amends for them. “We don’t know our way about yet.”

“Well,” the policeman drawled with a kind of ugly heartiness, “maybe the next time you come back you’ll be better acquainted here,” he said, winking at his comrades, and they all guffawed. “We’re glad to see you, boys,” he continued, still with this ugly falseness of good nature in his tone. “We been hearin’about you,” he said, winking at his fellows again, “an’we wanted to git acquainted.”

Here the policemen laughed again with sonorous countrified appreciation of their spokesman’s wit.

The policemen were all big beefy men, with hearty drawling voices, red countrified faces. They had large square feet, wore dusty-looking black slouch hats with a wide brim, and were dressed in rather gaudy but slovenly-looking uniforms, with stripes of gold braid running up the sides of their baggy trousers, and with the lower brass buttons of their heavy blue coats unbuttoned, exposing areas of soiled shirts and paunchy bellies. Their faces had a look of a slow but powerful energy, a fathomless and mindless animal good nature, and at the same time a fathomless and mindless animal cruelty—instant, volcanic, and murderous—written terribly, somehow, into their wide, thin and horribly cruel mouths, in which there was legible a vitality that had all the wild and sensual force of nature packed into it, and was therefore beyond nature—almost supernatural—in its savage and mindless qualities.

He had seen them standing idly on the corners of the little towns, huge and slovenly, swinging their thonged clubs in the great muttons of their hands, surveying with their great red faces and their wide thin mouths of fathomless cruelty and good nature the crowds that swarmed around them. He had heard their drawling howling accents of the country, that had all of the moisture and distance of the earth in them, and seen their slow minds wake to a mindless and murderous fury. Once as a child he had seen one of them, a ponderous giant so huge he lurched from side to side when he walked, and seemed to fill up the street with his size, beat a drunken old man—a little howling integument of bone and gristle—to death with his club, smashing the little old man across the skull until the blood rushed out in torrents through his sparse silvery hair, lacing its way in channels of brilliant red across his face and through his beard until it seemed incredible so small and old a man could have such fountains of bright blood in him.

And these huge creatures evoked for Eugene a whole history of this earth and people, monstrous, savage, and unutterable—a congruent and unspeakable legend which he knew, and all of them knew, down to the roots, and which he could not speak about and had to speak about, somehow, or die. For in these men there was evident not only the savage and mindless energy of the earth itself, with all that was wild, sensual, fecund, cruel and good-natured—the whole weather of life—but there was also evident the fear, the shame, the horror that had crushed them beneath its ocean weight of nameless and cowering dread and broken or destroyed their souls.

The two policemen who had clambered into the back seat of the car and now sat on each side of Eugene had these mountainous and fleshy figures, heavy, yet with a kind of solid and ugly softness, meaty, and without the muscular and sinewy leanness of young men. The back seat of the car was a narrow one—the car was a new “sports model” designed only for four people—and now the huge fleshy figures of these two policemen, wedged against Eugene, gave him a feeling of disgust and revulsion.

Nevertheless, the feeling of exultant and jubilant power had not yet worn off, and although he had understood at once, when he saw the men lined up across the street, that they were under arrest and would be taken to the city jail, this sordid prospect caused him no uneasiness whatever. Rather, the feeling of drunken joy was still so powerful in him that everything on earth seemed good, and everything that happened wonderful. He hailed the experience of being arrested and taken to jail exultantly as if some fortunate and glorious experience was in store for him, and his exuberant affection for the world was so great that he even liked the policemen.

Eugene howled with laughter, smote them on their broad backs, flung his arms out and around their shoulders, saying, “By God, you’re fine fellows, both of you, and you’ve got to have a drink!”

At this Robert laughed uneasily, saying to the policemen:

“Don’t pay any attention to him! We haven’t got anything to drink—I swear we haven’t.”

One of them had been rummaging around, however, and now triumphantly produced the jug from its hiding place beneath Blake’s legs.

“Here it is, boys,” he cried, as he displayed it. “I’ve got it.”

The glass jug was almost empty, but there was still perhaps an inch of the whisky at the bottom. Robert’s face had a worried look, for the law was such that a capture of this sort might also mean the confiscation of the owner’s car.

Blake, meanwhile, had been talking in a low, craftily persuasive tone of drunken insinuation and bribery to the policeman up front, saying:

“Now I know you boys don’t want to get us into any trouble. We weren’t doing anything wrong—just having a drink or two together and if you fellows will just forget about this thing, we’ll fix it up right with you—anything you say,” he whispered cunningly, “and get on out of town right now without anyone knowing a thing about it. What do you say, now? Come on! You can do it,” he said, with a leer of ingratiation.

The policeman to whom he spoke smiled good-naturedly, but said nothing. At this moment they drove up before the station-house, a shabby-looking little building of brick, with bars over the window, and which was situated on a side-street.

The shabby street looked warm, faded, sleepy, touched with the ghosts of autumn, but in an instant, as the police got out, opened the doors, and the gay men clambered down drunkenly among them, a rabble-rout of ragged negro boys, grinning, gape-mouthed countrymen with red faces, slouchy-looking barbers in their shirt-sleeves, and wormy-looking loafers, had gathered magically from nowhere, stood in a ring about them and snickered and shuffled about, pressed up to the barred windows and peered in curiously with shaded eyes as the policemen took them into the station.

As they started, Robert held back a little, and said hoarsely, and in a plaintive, troubled voice to the policeman who had him by the arm:

“What are you taking us in here for? We weren’t doing anything. Honest we weren’t. What are you going to do to us?”

The policeman smiled good-humouredly, and then said in a hearty reassuring voice:

“Aw, we’re not goin’to do anything to you. We were just afraid you boys might run into something and hurt yourself, that’s all. We’re just goin’to take you in here, and let you stay here a little while until you feel better,” he said, at the same time winking at his fellows.

“Well,” said Robert sullenly, casting a troubled and unwilling glance back at his shining car, “—I want to find my car here when I come out. Now if anything happens to that car, there’s going to be trouble,” he said ominously.

“That car will be right here when you come out the way you left it,” the policeman said heartily. “No one is goin’to touch it. No, sir! I’ll look after that car myself!” he said, winking again at the others.

“All right, then,” said Robert. “That’s all I want to know.”

Then they marched all of them into the station-house.

The room they entered was a large one, and at first, because they had come into it out of the brightness of the sun, and the swimming confusion of drunkenness and arrest, it was so dark Eugene could not distinguish clearly any of its features. Then he saw that it was a square, rather high room with worn wooden floors, wainscoting of a dark varnished brown, and above that rude calcimined walls of white. In the wall along the street there were, besides the door, two barred windows which were very dirty and not very large, and did not give much light.

At one end of the room, as they came in, there was a row of dull green lockers, probably for the use of the police, and at the other end a high, square, somewhat majestical-looking desk, which was also of a dark maply-brown and which seemed to be built on an elevated rostrum or platform a few inches high. Over this desk a light with a green glass shade was burning, and behind it another large red-faced policeman was sitting. By his look of authority, and the military opulence of his slovenly uniform—for he had epaulets of thick gold braid upon his shoulders that would have glorified the uniform of a general in the Marine Corps—he seemed to be the superior in command.

As for the rest of the room, there was little decoration save for a row of worn and rickety-looking wooden chairs with rounded backs along the wall, and a liberal distribution of large brass spittoons which, to judge from the bare wooden boards around them, were used less frequently as receptacles than as targets, and obviously with uncertain success.

Finally, the whole place had the unforgettable look and smell that police-stations everywhere—and particularly those in little towns—have always had. Its stale dark air was impregnated with the odour of cheap cigars and tobacco-juice, of old worn varnished wood, of human sweat and urine and heavy wool, and with the strong tarry odour of a sanitary disinfectant. And somehow, in this stale, dark and weary odour, there was also a quality of terror, menace, and foreboding—as if the huge and dingy chronicle of human tragedy and error which this grim room had witnessed—all the brutal, shabby sinfulness of a little town—that swarming, hideous and tawdry fraternity of poverty, vice and error—dredged from its rat-holes in the dark depths of old brick buildings, hunted out of cheap hotels, pool rooms, greasy little lunch rooms, nigger shacks, and the rickety wooden brothels near the railroad tracks, with its vast brotherhood of scarred and battered men and women—chain-gang niggers, drunken country youths and cheap bootleggers, grimy prostitutes and all their furtive bawds and pimps, cutters, sluggers, slabbers, slashers, and brawlers—both those who live by vice and those who are its victims—this whole huge earth of pain and crime and misery had left the terrible imprint of its history so indelibly there that the weary air was impregnated with sorrow and fear, and the wood, walls, floors and ceilings were seasoned and ingrained with the substance of human wretchedness.

When they had come in, the police had lined up Eugene’s three companions before the imposing rostrum where the desk officer was sitting, but they had placed him carefully to one side against the wall, like an object too rare and precious for ordinary usage. Now, as the great man behind the desk glowered down gloomily and mistrustfully at them, one of the police spoke to the desk sergeant and, turning toward Eugene with a nod of the head, declared in a full countrified tone:

“This big’un here’s the drunkest of the lot.”

And the enthroned law bent his gloomy gaze upon him with a hostile and suspicious look which said as plain as words that it was no more than he had suspected.

Eugene had not realized, in fact, until he felt that wall against his shoulders, how very drunk he was; but he was drunker now than he had ever been in all his life before. He could feel his back slide down along the wall, and then his bending knees would straighten with a jerk, and he would solemnly begin to slide up the wall again. Meanwhile the room swam and rocked and then was still before his eyes: the shapes of things would melt into a smear, and then resolve into their proper selves once more.

And he was conscious that the police were searching him and his companions, patting their pockets to see if they carried weapons, examining wallets and letters for identifications, taking their watches from them, and arraigning them on a series of formal charges, some of which had no bearing on their case whatever. Drunk, assuredly, they were; disorderly they might have been—although it had not seemed so to them; of driving in a reckless manner they were guilty; but of resisting an officer in the performance of his duty they had been, up to that time, spotlessly innocent.

But such were the charges delivered against them in sonorous and countrified tones. And in the solemn voices of the policemen, the knowing and portentous way in which they searched the young men—as if they were a gang of armed desperadoes, and in a manner that smacked of correspondence-school detective methods—and finally in the solemn countrified tones of the one who had pointed to Eugene, saying: “This big’un here’s the drunkest of the lot,” there was something comical and ludicrous.

But in their sense of banded authority, in the stubborn almost conspiratorial way in which they had now hardened in a group against the young men, forsaking the good-humoured and jovial manners which had heretofore distinguished them, there was something ugly and revolting—something stupid, provincial, mob-like, and unreasoning, which told the young men plainly that “they had them” now, that they were “foreigners,” therefore suspect, and must bow their heads in silence to the obdurate and capricious tyrannies of a local and, for them, impregnable authority.

At length, the sonorous formalities of their arraignment having been completed, the sergeant having scrawled and written in his ledger, the man looked up and ordered sternly:

“All right, boys! Take’em back and lock’em up!”

Then the young men were marched back along a corridor into a large two-storeyed room, which had brick walls and cement floors, two rows of dirty barred windows, a grey and gelid light, and a general feel of raw and clammy dankness. This room, which had a harsh angular steel-and-cement newness that the other did not have, seemed to be of more recent construction, and to have been added on to the front part of the jail. In this room, also, there were several rows of cells, ascending in tiers up to the ceiling. When they entered, the place was quiet, but immediately a drunken negress in one of the cells began to bawl and rave and sob, smashing, hammering, and rattling the bars of her cell like a demented ape. There was everywhere a foul rank odour of undrained faecal matter, tempered with the odour of the tarry disinfectant, and cut more sharply with the acrid smell of some ammoniacal fluid.

At the first row of cells they paused, and the police in charge of Robert and Emmet Blake (for Eugene now discovered with a sense of shock that Kitchin was not with them) unlocked the doors of cells two and three and thrust Blake and Robert into them. The last, or end, cell in the row, Eugene now saw was intended for his occupancy and he stood waiting obediently, in the relaxed grip of one of the policemen, until his comrade should unlock the door.

Suddenly, as the door swung open, and Eugene stepped forward into the cell, his vision cleared somewhat, and he saw a young negro standing in the cell, beside the iron bed that projected from the wall, looking toward him with a startled expression on his face that suggested he had been asleep upon the cot, and had been rudely wakened by their entrance. Instantly, one fixed and all-obsessing belief began to burn in Eugene’s inflamed and drunken brain. He thought that he was being put here with this negro because the jail was crowded and the cell-space scanty, and further—and this was the thing that maddened him and that he found intolerable—because, as the policeman had said when they arraigned the young men, “this big’un here’s the drunkest of the lot,” and they thought he was too drunk to notice or to care about the advantage they were taking of him.

For this reason—and this reason only—he now acted as he did. As far as the negro himself was concerned, Eugene bore no grudge against him, and the feeling of shame and degradation which had swept over him in an overwhelming flood when he saw the cell and knew he was to be locked in it like an animal was so great that he would not have cared with whom he had to share that cell, if it had been the custom of the country so to share it. But the custom of the country was not so, he knew, and the belief that he was being put upon, his drunkenness taken advantage of, and that he was being dealt with less fairly than the others, now so stung his maddened pride that he turned and kicked the iron door back in the faces of the two policemen, just as they were closing it.

Then he started to come out of the cell. When he did, the two big red-faced policemen came running forward with a lumbering, panting, and somehow revolting clumsiness and tried to push him back into the cell. When this happened, something dark, grey, and terrible that he had never known before rose up in his soul—and this thing, which now came to him for the first time, was to return often in the savage years that followed.

As the police came rushing towards Eugene his fury and desperation were so great that he felt little or no fear, but the sensations of horror and disgust were so terrible that they drove him mad, and he seemed to be drowning in them. And the first visible and physical, although perhaps not the basic, causes of these sensations of horror and disgust came from the mountainous figures of the two policemen, and the feel of their huge soft-solid bodies as they jammed against him. For, if they had quelled his rebellion at the outset by smashing him over the head with their clubs, he might have felt a moment’s fear before the club crashed on his skull, but he would not have felt horror and disgust.

But the sight, the feel, the smell, the look of these huge soft-solid bodies of mountainous flesh, and the revolting clumsiness of their movements, made the thing horrible. As they rushed towards Eugene and tried to thrust him back into the cell, he grabbed hold of the bars on either side of the door, and began to howl at them and curse them foully, and to butt at them with his head. When this happened the policemen braced themselves together like turn-squat Buddhas, holding on to the bars with their huge muttony hands, that had no leanness in them, and butted back at Eugene with their huge soft-solid stomachs.

They stood, half-squatly, side by side, their muttony hands gripped around the bars, their great red faces moist and panting, their huge buttocks somehow obscenely womanish in their fat breadth, as they butted back clumsily at him with their soft ponderous bellies—all of this, and the revolting contact of their flesh against his own, filled him with such an infinite loathing of horror and disgust that he went mad.

He started to come out of the cell. When he did, the two big police men came running forward with a lumbering clumsiness and tried to push him back in. One of the men raised his ponderous fist and shouted: “Git back in thar now or I’ll hit ye.” A huge muttony fist smashed squarely on his nose and mouth: he butted, cursed, amid a pin-wheel aura of exploding rockets: the fist smashed hard again below one eye: the boy screamed like a wounded animal and cursing horribly all the time began to use his head as a battering ram, butting again and again at the fat red faces.

Meanwhile the other one, grunting and puffing, and with his tongue between his teeth, began to thump, tug and wrench at the fingers of one hand, trying to loosen them from the bar, and saying to his fellow:

“You git his other hand, Jim, an’try to make him turn a-loose.”

During all this time that Eugene had been cursing and butting at these men, he had also been shouting: “You God-damned red-faced South Car’lina bastards, you’re not going to lock me up in here with a nigger—no, you ain’t!”—and now he felt something rough and woolly scraping underneath his arm. It was the frightened negro’s head. He went squirming out below Eugene’s arm until he was outside peering with white eyeballs over a policeman’s shoulder, and when Eugene saw they would not try to keep the negro there with him, he went back in the cell and was locked up. He felt very sick, and everything was swimming nauseously around him: for a while he leaned over the w.c. and vomited into it. Then he sat down on the edge of the cot and stared ahead, thinking about nothing, but with something hideous, like a great grey smear, inside him.

XLIII

How long he sat there in this way he did not know, for time would pass in a hideous smear of brownish grey while all things reeled, mixed, and were fused drunkenly and shapelessly around him—and then for a moment time would burn in his mind like a small hard light of brilliant colour, and he would see everything with an exact and blazing vividness and hear the voices of his comrades in their cells.

The cell Eugene sat in was a little cubicle of space, perhaps eight feet deep and four or five feet wide. Its only furnishings were a black iron cot or bed which projected from the wall and could be turned up or out, and which had no springs or mattress on it, and a w.c. of dirty white enamel, which had no seat, and was broken and would not flush so that it had run over and spilled out upon the cement floor. The walls and ceilings of the cell were made of some hard slate-like substance of black-grey, scrawled with the familiar obscenities and pictures of its former occupants. Because of these solid walls, each cell was cut off from its neighbours and for this reason he could not see Emmet Blake, who had the cell next to him, nor Robert, who had the cell on the other side of Emmet, but now, as his mind swam from the stupor of its drunkenness, he could hear their voices and began to listen to their conversation.

Both were still quite drunk, and for a while they continued a kind of mournful drunken chant, each responding to the other with a repetition of his own misfortune.

“Yes, sir,” Robert would say, heaving a sigh and speaking in a hoarse, mournfully drunken voice, “this is certainly a hell of a way to treat a man who’s just been admitted to the bar six weeks ago! A hell of a thing!” he said.

And Blake would answer:

“Yes, sir! And I’ll tell you what is a hell of a thing! This is a hell of a way to treat George Blake’s nephew! A hell of a way!” he said. “If my uncle knew about this he’d come down here and tear their damned little jail to pieces! He’d ruin their town!” he cried. “Yes, sir! He’d wash’em out and send’em to the cleaners! Why!” Blake now said in a tone of drunken boastfulness, “there are 70, 000 Blake dealers in the United States alone—and if they knew that I was here,” he said, “every damned one of them would be on his way here in five minutes to get us out!”

“Lord! Lord!” said Robert, in a kind of mournful brooding ululation, as if he had not heard Blake’s words at all. “Who’d have thought it? A young attorney just admitted to the bar six weeks ago and here he is in jail! The damnedest thing I ever heard of!” he declared.

“Yes, sir,” Blake declared, not by way of response, but with the same self-centred concentration on the indignity which had been visited on him. “If you told any Blake dealer in the country that George Blake’s nephew was down here in the Blackstone jail, he wouldn’t believe you. Uncle George will carry this thing to the Supreme Court when we get out,” he said. “It is certainly a hell of a thing to happen to George Blake’s nephew!”

“Yes, sir,” Robert answered, “a hell of a thing to happen is right—and here I’ve only had my licence to practise for six weeks. Why, it’s awful!” he said solemnly.

“Robert!” Blake cried suddenly, getting to his feet.—“Do you guess these damned Blackstone cops know who I am? Do you guess they realize they’ve got George Blake’s nephew here?” Here he went to the door of his cell, rattled it violently, and yelled: “Hey—y! I’m George Blake’s nephew! Do you know you’ve got George Blake’s nephew back here? Come and let me out!” he shouted. No one answered.

Then they would be silent for a while, and mournful, brooding drunken time would pass around them.

Then Blake would say:

“Robert?”

“What do you want?” said Robert mournfully.

“What time is it?”

“Hell, how do I know what time it is?” said Robert in a sullen and protesting tone. “You know they took my watch.” Then there would be silence for a moment more.

“Emmet?” Robert would then say.

“All right. What is it?”

“Did they take your watch, too?”

“Yes!” Blake shouted suddenly in an angry and excited tone. “And that was an eighteen carat, thirty-two jewel platinum-case watch that Uncle George bought for me in Switzerland. That watch is worth $225 and I’d better get it back when I get out of here!” he shouted rattling the door. “Do you hear? If those sons of bitches try to steal my watch, my Uncle George will put’em all in jail! I want it back!” he shouted.

No one answered.

Then they were silent for another spell of time, and finally Robert said in a hoarse, brooding, and mournful tone:

“Eugene?”

“Well.”

“Are you there?”

“Where the hell do you think I am?” Eugene said bitterly. “You don’t see any holes in this place you can crawl out of, do you?”

Robert laughed his hoarse falsetto laugh, and then said with a kind of brooding wonder:

“Lord! Lord! Who’d have thought it? Who’d ever have thought Eugene and I would get put in jail together here in Blackstone, South Carolina. Here I am just out of Yale and admitted to the bar six weeks ago and you—boy!” he laughed suddenly his annoying falsetto laugh, and concluded—“Just got back from three years at Harvard and here you are in jail already! Lord! Lord! What are you going to tell your mother when she sees you? What’s she going to say when you tell her you’ve been in jail?”

“Oh, I don’t know!” the other said angrily. “Shut up!”

Robert laughed his annoying falsetto laugh again, and said:

“Boy! I’d hate to have to face her! I’m glad I’m not in your shoes!”

“Not in my shoes!” the other shouted in an exasperated tone. “You damned fool, you are in my shoes!”

Then they were silent for a spell, and grey time ticked wearily around them the slow remorseless sound of interminable minutes.

Presently Blake spoke, out of a drunken silence, saying:

“Gant?”

“What is it?”

“What time is it now?”

“I don’t know. They have my watch,” he said.

And grey time ticked around them.

“Robert,” Eugene said at length, straightening from his dejected stupor on the cot, “did you see that nigger?”

“What nigger?” Robert said stupidly.

“Why, the nigger they tried to put in here with me!” he said.

“Why, I didn’t see any nigger, Gene,” said Robert, in a hoarse and drunken tone of mild and melancholy protest. “When was this?”

“Why, Robert!” the other boy now cried in an excited voice and with a feeling of hideous dread inside him. “You were right here all the time! Didn’t you hear us?”

“Why no, Eugene,” Robert answered in a slow protesting voice that had dull wonder and surprise in it. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said.

“Why, my God, Robert!” Eugene now cried excitedly, and even with a kind of frenzy in his tone. “You must have heard us! Why, we were fighting here for ten minutes!” he said, for the time of the struggle now seemed at least that long to him.

“Who?” said Robert, dully and stupidly.

“Why, me and those two big cops!” he cried. “Good God, Robert, didn’t you see us?—didn’t you hear us?—butting and kicking like a goat—hitting me over the head, trying to make me turn a-loose!” he cried in an excited, almost incoherent tone.

“Who did?” Robert stupidly inquired.

“Why—those two big cops, Robert—that’s who! Good God, do you mean to tell me that you never heard us when we were cursing and butting away there right in front of you?”

“I didn’t hear anything—I thought you said a nigger,” he said in a stupid and confused tone.

“Why, Robert, that’s what I’m telling you!” Eugene shouted. “They had him in here—”

“Where?”

“Why, in the cell! They were trying to put me in here with him! That’s what the trouble was about!” he said.

“Why, Eugene,” Robert said with an uneasy and troubled laugh, which yet had a note of good-natured derision in it that was maddening, “I didn’t see any nigger. Did you, Emmet? I was right here all the time and I didn’t hear any trouble…. You’ve been dreaming,” Robert now said, with a conviction in his tone that goaded the other boy almost past endurance, and yet struck a knife of cold terror into his heart. And he began to laugh hoarsely his annoying and derisive laugh, as he shook his head, and said: “Lord! Lord!—He’s in there seeing niggers and policemen and I don’t know what-all.” And here he laughed hoarsely again, his derisive and falsetto laugh, and said: “Boy! You’ve got’em! You’ve got’em bad! You’ve been seeing things!”

“Robert, God-damn it!” Eugene now fairly screamed, “I tell you he was here! I tell you I saw him standing in the cell when I came in! I know what I’m talking about, Robert!—there was a nigger here when I came in!”

“Why, hell, Eugene!” Robert said more kindly, but with a hoarse derisive laugh, “you’ve just been seeing things, son. There was no one there; you just imagined it. I reckon you just passed out and dreamed it happened!”

“Dreamed! Dreamed!” Eugene shouted, “God-damn it, Robert, don’t you think I know when I’m dreaming? I’ll show you if it was a dream! I’ll prove it to you that it really happened! I can prove it by Blake!” he cried. “Ask Blake!… Blake! Blake! Blake!” he shouted.

And grey time slid with its slow sanded drop around them.

Blake did not answer: he had not heard their conversation and now they heard him talking softly, slowly, murderously to himself.

“Yes, sir,” he was saying, in a low, quiet, drunkenly intent soliloquy. “Yes, sir, I’ll kill him!… So help me, God, I’ll kill him dead, as sure as my name is Emmet Blake!… I’ll pull out my forty-five…. I’ll get my forty-five out when I go home… and I’ll go Ping! Ping! Ping! the minute that I see him. I’ll go Ping! Ping! Ping!” cried Blake. “I’ll kill him dead, so help me, God, if it’s the last thing that I ever do!”

“I’ll kill him!” Blake continued in a tone of dogged, drunken repetition, still talking to himself. “When I get home I’ll kill him if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

“And I’ll kill you, too,” Blake muttered in this same brooding and intent oblivion of drunken soliloquy. “You God-damned whore, I’ll kill you, too! I’ll kill the two of you together!… The bitch! The bitch! The dirty bitch!” the man now screamed, starting to his feet, and now really with a tortured note of agony and desperation in his voice. “I know where you are this minute! I know you’re with him! I know you’ll sleep with him tonight, you—dirty—low-down—”

“Emmet, you damned fool, shut up!” Robert now said, with a troubled and protesting laugh. “Do you want everyone in the whole damned place to hear you?” The dreadful shame and anguish in the man’s desperate life had burst nakedly through his drunkenness, and the hideous mutilation of his soul was suddenly stripped bare—“Don’t talk like that,” said Robert, with a troubled laugh—“you’ll be sorry tomorrow for what you said, you know you will: oh, Emmet, shut up!” Robert said again with a protesting and embarrassed laugh.

For Blake was now sobbing horribly in his cell: as Eugene stood leaning against the wall next to him, he could hear him sobbing and pounding his thin fist savagely into the grey-slate substance of the wall, while he went on:

“The whore! The dirty whore!” he wept. “I know that she’s just waiting for me to die! I know that’s what she wants! I know that’s all she’s waiting for!… That’s what you want, you bitch, isn’t it? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? That would just suit you, wouldn’t it?… Ah, I’ve fooled you! I’ve fooled you, haven’t I?” he panted, with a savage and vindictive triumph in his voice. “You’ve been waiting for it for the last two years, haven’t you? And I’ve fooled you every time,” he gasped. “And I’ll fool you yet—you bitch, you dirty bitch!”

And they sat there, saying nothing, listening with desolation in their hearts to the man’s naked shame, and now hearing nothing but his gasping sobs and the slow grey wear and waste of time around them. And then his sobbing breath grew quieter, they could hear him panting feebly, like an exhausted runner, and presently he went over and sat down upon his cot, and there was nothing but time and silence all about them.

Finally Blake spoke again, and now in a voice that was quiet, lifeless, and curiously sober, as if this outlet and easement of his grief had also quenched the drunkenness in him.

“Gant?” he said, in a quiet and lifeless tone that penetrated curiously the grey silence all around them.

“Yes,” said Eugene.

“I never met you till today,” said Blake, “and I want you to know I’ve got no grudge against you.”

“Why, Eugene never did anything to you, Emmet,” said Robert at this point, in a tone of protest. “Why should you have anything against him?”

“Now, wait a minute!” said Blake pugnaciously. “Eugene,” he went on in a maudlin tone of voice, “I’m friends with everyone, I haven’t got an enemy in the world…. There’s just one man in this world I hate,” he went on sombrely, “and I hate his guts—I hate his life—Goddamn him! I hate the air he breathes!” he snarled, and then was silent for a moment. “Eugene,” he went on in a moment, in a low voice, and with a tone of brooding drunken insinuation, “you know the man I mean, don’t you?”

Eugene made no answer, and in a moment he repeated the question, in a more insistent and pugnacious tone:

“Don’t you?” he demanded.

And Eugene said, “Yes.”

“You’re damned right you do,” he said in a low, ruminant, and brooding tone. “Everybody knows whom I mean. He’s a cousin of yours,” said Blake, and then began to mutter to himself:

“I’ll kill him! So help me, God, I’ll kill him!” And suddenly, starting from his cot with a scream of baffled misery and anguish, he began to beat his fist into the hard slate wall again, yelling:

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!… You son of a bitch, I’ll kill the two of you!… I’ll send you both to hell where you belong, if it’s the last thing that I ever do!”

And he began to sob horribly and curse foully, and pounded his fist into the wall again until he was exhausted, and went back and sat down on his cot again, muttering his drunken and impotent threats.

And Eugene did not try to answer him, for there was nothing he could say. George Pentland was his cousin, and had taken Blake’s wife away from him, and got her love; and Blake was dying, and they knew it. And suddenly it seemed to Eugene that there was in this whole story something dark and hideously shameful which he had never clearly seen in life before, which could not be endured, and which yet suspended over every man who ever lived the menace of its intolerable humiliation and dishonour.

For to see a man—a manly-looking man, strong of body, fearless and bold of glance, deep of voice—physically humiliated and disgraced, slapped and whipped like a cur before his wife, his mistress, or his children, and forced to yield, retreat and slink away, to see his face turn white and the look of the coward shine through his mask of manhood, is not an easy thing to see.

Presently they heard steps coming along the corridor again, and they were so certain they belonged to a messenger bringing them release that they all arose instinctively, and stood before the barred doors of the cells, waiting to walk out into the air of freedom again. To their astonishment the visitor was Kitchin. They had forgotten him completely, and now as they saw him doing a gleeful caper before their cells, with a grin of triumphant satisfaction written wide across his face, they looked at him with the astounded recognition of men who see a face which they had known years before, but have forgotten—in the lapse of time and memory.

“Where?—” Robert began hoarsely and accusingly, in a tone of astounded stupefaction. “Where have you been all this time?”

“Out front!” said Kitchin exultantly. “Sitting in your car!”

“Out front!” cried Robert in a bewildered and resentful tone. “Didn’t they lock you up, too?”

“Hell, no!” cried Kitchin, fairly dancing about with gleeful satisfaction. “They never touched me! And I’d had as much to drink as any of you. I’ve been sittin’out front all afternoon reading the paper! I guess they thought I was the only sober one of the crowd,” he said modestly. And this apparently was the reason for his astonishing freedom—this and another, more mercenary reason, which will presently be apparent.

“Why, what do they mean by keeping us locked up back here while you’re out front there reading the paper? Darnedest thing I ever heard of!” Robert barked. “Kitchin!” he now said angrily. “You go out there and tell them we want out of here!”

“I told’em! I told’em!” Kitchin said virtuously. “That’s what I’ve been telling them all afternoon.”

“Well, what do they say?” Robert demanded impatiently.

“Boys,” said Kitchin now, shaking his head regretfully, but unable to conceal his own elation and sense of triumph, “I’ve got news for you—and I’m afraid it’s not going to be good news, either. How much money you got?”

“Money!” Robert cried, in an astounded tone, as if the uses of this vile commodity had never occurred to him. “What’s money got to do with it? We want out of here!”

“I know you do,” said Kitchin coolly, “but you’re not going to get out unless you’ve got money enough to pay your fine.”

“Fine?” Robert repeated stupidly.

“Well, that’s what they call it, anyway. Fine or graft, or whatever the hell it is, you’ve got to pay it if you want to be let out.”

“How much is it?” said Robert. “How much do they want?”

“Boys,” said Kitchin, slowly and solemnly, “have you got seventy-three dollars?”

“Seventy-three dollars!” Robert shouted. “Kitchin, what are you talking about?”

“Well, don’t shout at me,” said Kitchin. “I can’t help it! I didn’t do it! But if you get out of here that’s what you’ve got to pay.”

“Seventy-three dollars!” Robert cried. “Seventy-three dollars for what?”

“Well, Robert,” said Kitchin patiently, “you’ve got to pay fifty dollars fine and one dollar costs. That’s because you were driving the car. That’s fifty-one. And Emmet and Eugene here have to pay ten dollars apiece and one dollar costs—that’s twenty-two dollars more. That figures up to seventy-three dollars. Have you got it?”

“Why, the dirty grafting sons of bitches!” Blake now cried. “Telling us that everything would be all right and that they had put us in here so we wouldn’t hurt ourselves!… All right, you cheap grafting bastards!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, rattling the barred door furiously as he spoke. “We’ll give you your dirty graft—but wait till I get out of here!” he cried threateningly. “Just wait till I get out! George Blake will tend to you!” he shouted. “It’ll be the worst day’s work you’ve ever done!”

But no one answered, although Blake and Robert cursed foully and shouted insults at the men. Meanwhile Kitchin waited patiently before their cells until the furious tumult should subside a little; when they were calmer he suggested that they pool their resources to see if they had enough to pay the total of the fines. But the sum of their combined funds was only a little more than forty dollars, of which Blake and Robert contributed the greater part and of which Eugene could contribute less than three dollars, which was all he had.

When it was apparent that their total funds would not be adequate to secure their release Blake, still furiously angry, began to talk in a loud and drunken tone of bravado about his famous uncle, scrawling out a cheque and instructing Kitchin to go at once to the local agent for his uncle’s motor cars and get the necessary money.

“Any Blake dealer in the country will cash my personal cheque for fifty thousand dollars any time I need it!” he cried with extravagant boast, as if he thought this threat of opulence would strike terror to the hearts of the police. “Yes, sir!” he said. “All you got to do is to walk into any Blake agency in the country and tell them George Blake’s nephew needs money—and they’ll give you everything they’ve got!” he cried. “Tell’em you need ten thousand dollars,” he said, coming down in scale somewhat, “and they’ll have it for you in five minutes.”

“Why, Emmet,” said Kitchin quietly, and yet with a trace of mockery and ridicule on his dark, handsome, and rather sly face. “We don’t need fifty thousand dollars. You know, we’re not trying to buy the whole damned jail. Now, I thought,” he went on quietly and ironically, “that all we needed was about thirty or forty—say fifty dollars—to make up the fine and get us out of town.”

“Yes,” said Robert in a quick excited tone of vigorous agreement. “You’re absolutely right! That’s all we need, all right!”

“All right! All right! Go to the Blake dealer! Go to the Blake dealer! That’s what I’m telling you,” cried Blake with an arrogant impatience. “He’ll give you anything you want.—What are you waiting for?” he cried furiously. “Go on! Go on!”

“But Emmet,” said Kitchin quietly and reasonably, in his dark low voice, as he looked at the cheque which Blake had scrawled out for him. “This cheque you’ve given me is for five hundred dollars. Hadn’t you better make out another one for fifty? You know, we don’t need five hundred dollars, Emmet. And besides,” he suggested tactfully, “the man might not have that much on hand. Hadn’t you better give me one just made out for what we need?”

“He’ll have it! He’s got it! He’s got to have it!” said Blake with a dogmatic and unreasoning arrogance. “Tell him I sent you and you’ll get the money right away!”

Kitchin did not answer him: he thrust the cheque into his pocket and turned to Eugene, saying quietly:

“Didn’t you say your brother was waiting to meet you here at a hotel?”

“Yes: he expected to meet me at four o’clock when that service car came in.”

“At what hotel?”

“The Blackstone—listen, Kitchin,” he reached through the bar and grabbed him by the arm, with a feeling of cold horror in his heart. “For Christ’s sake, don’t drag my brother into this,” he whispered. “Kitchin—listen to me! If you can get this money from the Blake agent here, for God’s sake, do it! What’s the use of bringing my brother into it,” he pleaded, “when it’s all between the four of us, and can stay that way? I don’t want my family to know I ever got into any trouble like this. Kitchin, look here—I can get the money for my fine: I’ve got a little money in the bank, and I’ll pay Blake every cent I owe him if you get the money from the agent. Now, promise me you won’t go and tell my brother!”

He held him hard in the tension of desperation, and Kitchin promised. Then he went swiftly away, and they were left alone in their cells again. Robert, utterly cast down from his high exaltation, now cursed bitterly and morosely against the police and the injustice of his luck and destiny.

Meanwhile, Blake, whose final and chief resource, it had now become pitifully evident, was nothing in himself but just the accident of birth that had made him nephew to a powerful and wealthy man, kept declaring in a loud voice of arrogant bravado that “any Blake agent in the United States will cash my personal cheque for fifty thousand dollars any time I ask for it! Yes, sir, any of them—I don’t give a damn where it is! He’s on his way here now! You’ll see! We’ll be out of here in five minutes now!”—a boastful assurance that was hardly out of his mouth before they heard steps approaching rapidly along the corridor and, even as Blake cried out triumphantly, “What did I tell you?” and as Eugene leaped up and ran to the door of his cell, clutching the bars with both hands, and peering out with bloodshot eyes like a caged gorilla, Kitchin entered the cell-room, followed by a policeman, and—Eugene’s brother!

Luke looked at him for a moment with a troubled expression and said: “Why, how did you get in here? What’s happened to you?” he said, suddenly noticing his battered face. “Are you hurt, Eugene?”

The boy made no reply but looked at him with sullen desperation and jerked his head towards the cells where his two companions were imprisoned—a gesture that pleaded savagely for silence. And Luke, instantly reading the meaning of that gesture, turned and called out cheerfully:

“Now you boys just hold on a minute and I’ll have you out of here.”

Then he came up close to the barred door of the cell where his younger brother stood and, his face stern with care, he said in a low voice: “What happened? Who hit you? Did any of these bastards hit you? I want to know.”

A policeman was standing behind him looking at them with narrowed eyes, and the boy said desperately:

“Get us out of here. I’ll tell you later.”

Then Luke went away with the policeman to pay their fines. When he had gone, Eugene turned bitterly on Kitchin, who had remained with the boys, accusing him of breaking his word by going to Luke. Kitchin’s dark evasive eyes shifted nervously in his head as he answered:

“Well, what else could I do? I went to the Blake agent here—”

“Did you get the money?” Blake said. “Did he give it to you?”

“Give!” Kitchin said curtly, with a sneer. “He gave me nothing—not a damned cent! He said he’d never heard of you!”

There was silence for a moment.

“Well, I can’t understand that,” Blake said at length, feebly, and in a tone of dazed surprise. “That’s the first time anything like that has ever happened.”

At this moment Eugene’s brother returned with two policemen, who unlocked the cell doors and let them out. The feeling of coming from the cell into free space again was terrific in its physical intensity: never before had Eugene known the physical sensations of release as he knew them at that moment. The very light and air in the space outside the cell had a soaring buoyancy and freshness which, by comparison, gave to that within the cell a material and oppressive heaviness, a sense of walled and mortared space that had pressed upon his heart and spirit with a crushing weight. Now, suddenly, as if a cord that bound him had been cut, or a brutal hand that held his life in its compelling grip had been removed, the sensations of release and escape filled his body with a sense of aerial buoyancy and the power of wing-like flight.

With a desperate eagerness he had never felt before he wanted to feel the free light and air again: even the shocked solicitude of his companions when they saw his puffed lips and his blackened eye was drearily oppressive. He thrust past them, muttering, striding towards the door.

It was the first time in his life that he had ever been arrested and locked up, and for the first time now, he felt and understood the meaning of an immense and brutal authority in life, which he had seen before, but to which he had always believed himself to be immune. Until that day he had had all the pride and arrogance a young man knows. Since childhood no one had ever compelled him to do anything by force, and although he had seen the million evidences of force, privilege, and compulsion applied to the lives of people around him, so that like every other native of the land in which he lived, he had in his heart no belief in law whatever, and knew that legal justice, where it was achieved, was achieved by fortuitous accident rather than by intent, he had believed, as every young man believes, that his own life and body were fiercely immune to every indignity of force and compulsion.

Now this feeling was gone for ever. And having lost it irrecoverably, he had gained something of more value.

For now, he was conscious, even at the moment he came out of the cell, of a more earthly, common, and familiar union with the lives of other men than he had ever known. And this experience was to have another extraordinary effect upon his spirit and its understanding and love of poetry, which may seem ludicrous, but which certainly dated from these few hours of his first imprisonment. Up to this time in his life, the poet who had stirred him by his power and genius more than any other was the poet Shelley.

But in the years that followed, Shelley’s poetry came to have so little meaning for him that all the magic substance which his lines once had was lost, and Eugene seemed to look indifferently at the hollow shells and ghosts of words, from which all enchantment and belief had vanished. And he felt this way not because the words of this great poet now seemed false to him, but because, more than any other poet he had known, Shelley was the poet of that time of life when men feel most strongly the sense of proud and lonely inviolability, which is legible in everything he wrote, and when their spirits, like his, are also “tameless and swift and proud.” And this is a time of life and magic that, once gone, is gone for ever, and that may never be recaptured save by memory.

But in the years that followed, just as Eugene’s physical body grew coarser and more heavy, and his sensual appetites increased enormously, so also did the energy of his spirit, which in childhood had been wing-like, soaring, and direct in its aerial buoyancy, grow darker, slower, heavier, smouldering and slow in its beginning heat and densely woven and involved in all its web-like convolutions.

And as all the strength and passion of his life turned more and more away from its childhood thoughts of aerial flight and escape into some magic and unvisited domain, it seemed to him that the magic and unvisited domain was the earth itself, and all the life around him—that he must escape not out of life but into it, looking through walls he never had seen before, exploring the palpable and golden substance of this earth as it had never been explored, finding, somehow, the word, the key, the door, to the glory of a life more fortunate and happy than any man has ever known, and which yet incredibly, palpably, is his, even as the earth beneath his feet is his, if he could only take it.

And as he discovered this, Eugene turned more and more for food and comfort to those poets who have found it and who have left great pieces of that golden earth behind them in their verse, as deathless evidence that they were there:—those poets who wrote not of the air but of the earth, and in whose verse the gold and glory of the earth are treasured—their names are Shakespeare, Spenser, Chaucer, Herrick, Donne, and Herbert.

Their names are Milton (whom fools have called glacial and austere, and who wrote the most tremendous lines of earthly passion and sensuous magic that have ever yet been written), Wordsworth, Browning, Whitman, Keats, and Heine—their names are Job, Ecclesiastes, Homer, and The Song of Solomon.

These are their names, and if any man should think the glory of the earth has never been, let him live alone with them, as Eugene did, a thousand nights of solitude and wonder, and they will reveal to him again the golden glory of the earth, which is the only earth that is, and is for ever, and is the only earth that lives, the only one that will never die.

XLIV

When they got out into the street again, night had almost come. It was about six o’clock, the lights in the streets had gone on, and in the figures of the people that went by, and the motor cars that flashed past sparsely, there was something hurried, mournful, and departing, like the breath of autumn and old leaves stirred by wind and driven on.

Neither spoke for some time, nor dared look at the other: the boy walked with lowered head, his hat pulled down across his eyes. His lips were puffed and swollen, and his left eye was now entirely closed, a blind poached swelling of bruised blue. They passed below a street lamp, paused for a minute in the hard white glare, turned as if impelled by sombre instinct, and regarded each other with the stern defenceless eye of shame and sorrow. Luke looked earnestly at his brother for a second and then said gently:

“How’s your eye, Eugene?”

The boy said nothing: sullenly, steadily, with his one good eye he returned his brother’s look. Luke stared for a minute at the nauseous, fatted purple where the bad eye was, suddenly cursed bitterly, turned, and walked ahead.

“The d-d-dirty bastards!” he said. “I’ve always fought they were a f-f-fairly decent lot till now, but the nice, damned, d-d-d-dirty South Car’lina—” he ground his teeth together, paused again, and turned towards his younger brother: “What d-d-did they do to you while you were in there? I w-w-w-want to know what happened.”

“I guess I got what was coming to me,” the boy muttered. “We were all drunk, and we were driving pretty fast. So I want you to know that I’m not making any excuses for that.”

“Well,” Luke said quietly, “that’s all over now, and there’s no use to w-w-worry about it. I guess you’re not the f-f-f-first one that it’s happened to. So let’s f-f-forget about that.” He was silent for a moment, and then he went on sternly: “But if those b-b-bastards beat you up while you were in there I w-w-w-want to know about it.”

“I’m not kicking about it,” the boy muttered again, because he was ashamed to tell him of the struggle he had had with the two policemen. “I guess I had it coming—but there was one thing!” he said with a surge of bitter feeling as he remembered it. “They did one thing I don’t believe they had any right to do. If it had happened in the North it would have been all right, but, by God, I don’t believe they have any right in this State to put a white man in the same cell with a nigger!”

“Did they d-d-d-do that to you?” Luke cried in an excited voice, stopping short and half turning as he spoke.

“Yes, they did, they tried to,” and then he told him what had happened. Luke turned completely, and started back towards the station, cursing bitterly.

“C-c-come on!” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m g-g-g-going down there and tell those b-b-b-bastards what I fink of them!”

“No, you’re not! Listen!” Eugene seized his brother by the arm. “We’ll only get locked up again! They’ve got us and we’ve got to take it! We’re not going! Let’s get out of this damned town quick as we can! I never want to see the place again!”

Luke paused and stood, distractedly thrusting his fingers through his hair.

“All right,” he said at last. “We’ll go…. But by G-g-god,” his voice rose suddenly and he shook his fist in the direction of the station, “I’ll be back. I’ve done business in this town for years, I’ve got f-f-f-friends here who are going goddam well to know the reason why a kid is beaten up and locked up with a n-n-nigger by the Blackstone cops. I’ll see this f’ing through now if it t-t-t-takes a lifetime!” Then, turning to his brother, he said shortly: “All right, Gene. C-c-come on. We’re g-g-getting out of town.”

Without further speech, they walked on down the street until they came to the place where Luke’s car was parked.

“W-w-w-what do you want to d-d-d-do, Gene?” he said quietly. “Do you want to go over to D-d-Daisy’s tonight?”

The boy shook his head: “No,” he said thickly. “Home. Home. Let’s get out of here. Got to go home now.”

Luke said nothing for a moment, thrusting his fingers through his hair. “W-w-w-well,” he muttered at length, “perhaps you’re right.”

XLV

They left town at once.

Luke drove savagely going out of town. He kept his big clumsy hands gripped hard upon the rim of the steering wheel, his brow knit and furrowed by its ridge of wrinkles, his face taut and drawn from the tension of his nerves. From time to time he would thrust his clumsy fingers strongly through his flashing mass of hair, laugh a wild jeering “whah-whah” of rage and exasperation, and then say in a voice so packed with sneering bitterness and contempt that it was hard to keep from laughing at him:

“S—t! Resisting an officer in the p-p-p-p-performance of his duties! Now ain’t that nice?” he said in a voice of mincing refinement and daintiness. “W-w-w-wy the nice neat nigger-Baptist God-damned sons of bitches!” he snarled. “The cheap grafting South Car’lina bastards! D-d-d-d-disorderly conduct! S—t!” he snarled with a savage, dainty, mincing bitterness that was somehow wildly and explosively funny.

Meanwhile they were speeding along through quiet streets that even in the night-time had the worn and faded dustiness of autumn, past withered lawns, by frame-houses which had the same faded dusty look, and under trees on which the dry leaves hung and fluttered: the mournful, worn, weary feeling told of departed summer, evoked sadly the memory of a savage heat, and the sorrowful ghosts and omens of the autumn were everywhere about them. October was there with its strange, brooding presences of sorrow and delight—its sense of something lost and vanished, gone for ever, its still impending prescience of something grand and wild to come. Above them the ragged cloudy sky had cleared: it was a night of blazing and magnificent stars, set in the limitless velvet substance of the sky, burning with faint brilliance and without light over the immense, mysterious, and mournful-looking earth.

Twice, going out of town, his brother stopped, and both times with a kind of sudden indecisive after-thought. Once, when they had passed a little corner drug-store, he jammed the brakes on suddenly, bringing the car to such an abrupt and jolting halt that Eugene was flung forward violently against the wind-screen. He turned to him with a nervous and distracted air of indecision, saying:

“Do you f-f-f-fink you could go a dope?” (this was the word in common use for Coca Cola) “W-w-w-would you like a drink?” he said, with a comical thrusting movement of the head, a wild look in his eyes, a restless and stammering indecision and earnestness. The boy told him no, and after a worried and restless look of his flickering grey eyes, in the direction of the drug-store, he thrust his large flat foot into the clutch and started the car in motion again, with the same violent and jarring movement as when he had halted.

Again, on the very outposts of the town, where there was nothing but the dusty road, a few cheap frame-houses, sparely, flimsily, and carelessly built upon the breast of an immense and formless land, which seemed indifferent to them and with which they seemed to have no union, and with nothing but the road, the stars and the huge mysteries of the earth before them, his brother had halted with another jarring jolt, when they had flashed past a filling station where, so read a sign, soft drinks and barbecued sandwiches were for sale.

“How about a b-b-b-barbecued sandwich?” he demanded, looking at Eugene with a wild and glaring suddenness. “C-c-c-could you go one? Huh?”—he said, almost barking at him, with a comical thrusting movement of the head. But even before the boy could answer, and he saw the sullen and exasperated scowl upon his face, he thrust his fingers wildly through his hair, burst into a wild rich “whah-whah” of crazy laughter—a laughter that was all the more strange and astonishing because even as he laughed the taut and drawn tension of his face and nerves, and the frenzied unrest of his eyes, were terribly apparent—and then started the car in motion again with a jarring, grinding and convulsive jolt. And Luke could not have said why he had halted at these last two outposts of the town—the drug-store and the filling station—but certainly the impulse that had made him halt had little to do with food or drink, for neither of them was hungry, and they had no need or desire for further nourishment.

But the impulse which had made his brother halt belonged to all the dissonance and frenzied unrest of his whole life, and by thousands of actions such as this, the course and pattern of his life were shaped. And finally, his brother had halted because those two small flares of light—pitiful and shabby as they were—had wakened in him a memory of the vast darkness of the huge and lonely earth before them, and because he gave himself into this dark regretfully and with some misgiving of his soul.

For his spirit was afraid of solitude and darkness and, like all men in this land, his soul was drawn by the small hard blaze of incandescence—even by those barren bulbous clusters of hard light upon the wintry midnight pavements of a little town—which somehow pitifully and terribly suggest the fear and loneliness in men’s souls, the small hard assurances of manufactured light which they have gathered as some beacon of comfort and security against a dark too vast and terrible, an earth too savage in its rudeness, space, and emptiness, for the spirit and the strength of men.

And now his brother and he were given to this earth, this dark, this loneliness again. And as they rushed on into the darkness, held, save for the throbbing motor of the little car, in the immutable silence of the earth and darkness, the flickering headlights of the car would suddenly pierce into the huge surrounding mystery of night, lunging for an instant the flashing finger of their light upon some fugitive and secret presence in the vault of night, where all the million lives of men were held. Sometimes the flashing light would blaze upon the boarding of a little house at the bend of the road, and then the house would flash behind and be engulfed in darkness.

Sometimes it would reveal the brown and dusty stubble of the cotton-fields, a stretch of ragged pine, a lonely little wooden church, a shack, a cabin, the swift and sinuous forking of another road that spoked into their own, flashed past, and curved away—was gone for ever—leaving an instant and intolerable pain and memory—a searing recognition and discovery—a road once seen but never followed and now for ever lost with all its promises of a life that they had never known or explored, of faces they had never seen.

And again, out of this huge and mournful earth, out of the limitless mystery of this continent of night, the lights upon his brother’s car would for an instant pick out faces, shapes, and people, and they, too, would blaze there for a moment in their vision with an intolerable and lonely briefness, and then be lost for ever—and in that moment of instant parting and farewell was written the history of man’s destiny—his brother’s life, and that of all men living on the earth around him.

Once their lights picked out the figure of a country negro: his weary plodding figure loomed up for an instant dustily—a mournful image of bowed back, shapeless garments stained with red field earth, and clumsy brogans coated with the red dust of the road, plodding along against a terrific and desolate landscape of brown cotton-fields, clay, and lonely pine, as much a part of it as the earth he walked upon, fixed instantly into it in a vision of labour, sorrow, and destiny, that was eternal.

And again they passed by negroes coming from a country church, and for a moment saw their white eyes and their black and mournful faces staring towards the light, and lost these, too, for ever, and passed into a little town and out again, and saw far-off, and at its edges, a pollen of bright light above a little travelling carnival, and heard the sad wheeling music of the carousal, the mixed and woven clamour of the barker’s cries, the shouts, the people’s voices, and all far-faint and lost and mournful as a dream; and then the earth again—the two back wheels, clay-caked and rattling, of an ancient buggy, the lifting hooves of an old bone-yard nag, that slowly turned away from the road’s centre to make way for them, the slow, staring, stupid looks of wonder and astonishment of a young country fellow and his girl as they went by them—and finally, always and for ever, nothing but the earth—that mournful, desolate, and lonely earth of cotton-fields, and raw red clay and lonely pine, wheeling past for ever in rude and formless undulations, immemorable, everlasting, and terrific, above which the great stars blazed their imperturbable and inscrutable messages of deathless calm.

And as they rushed ahead into the dark, he thought of the hundreds of times his brother had hurled himself along this road at night alone, going furiously from nowhere into nowhere, rushing ahead with starlight shining on his knit brows and his drawn face, with nothing but the lonely, mournful, and desolate red clay earth about him, the immense, the merciless emptiness and calm of the imperturbable skies above him. And he wondered if there was anywhere on earth a goal for all his frenzy and unrest, some final dwelling-place of certitude and love for all his wandering, or if he must hurl furiously along in darkness beneath these stars for ever—lost, unassuaged, and driven—until the immense and mournful earth should take him once again.

The ride back up into the hills with Luke was cold, dark, bleak, and desolate—the very painting of his own sick soul. Black night had come when they had reached the mountains. The stars were out, and around them the great bulk of the hills was barren, bleak, and wintry-looking, and there was the distant roaring of demented winds upon the hills, the lonely preludes of grim winter among the barren trees. Already, it seemed, the same landscape which only a day or two before had flamed with all the blazing colours of October, and with the enchantment which his hope and joy had given it, had been sorrowfully transformed by the mournful desolation of coming winter. The earth was no longer beautiful and friendly: it had become a waste, a desert, and a prison bleak and bare.

During the ride up the mountain into Old Catawba the two brothers spoke seldom to each other. Luke, who had made that dark journey up into the hills a thousand times—for whom, in fact, this ceaseless hurtling along dark roads had become the very pattern of the unrest and fury that lashed his own life on for ever—drove hard and raggedly, communicating perfectly to the machine he drove the tension and dissonance of his own tormented spirit. This wordless instrument of steel and brass and leather seemed, in fact, to start, halt, jolt, stammer, and lunge fiercely onward as if it had a brain and spirit of its own that was in anguished sympathy with the tortured nerves that governed it. His brother drove, bent forward tensely, his large clumsy hands gripped hard and nervously upon the steering-wheel, as he peered out upon the ribbon of road before him, which bent and twisted in a bewildering serpentine that curved constantly upward along the slopes and flanks of the dark mountain-side. The boy sat cold and numb and sick at heart, hands thrust in pockets, his hat pulled low across his eyes, his overcoat turned up around his neck. He glanced at his brother once or twice. He could see his face drawn and taut and furrowed in the dim light, but when he tried to speak to him he could not. The sense of ruin, shame, and failure which filled his spirit seemed so abysmal and complete that there was nothing left to say. And he faced the meeting with his mother and his sister with a sick heart of dread.

Once going up the mountain-side his brother stopped, jamming his huge flat foot so rudely on the brake that the car halted with a jarring shuddering thud. They had just passed a road of unpaved clay which led off from the mountain road towards the right, and towards a farmhouse and a light or two which were clearly visible.

Now, looking nervously and uncertainly toward this house, Luke muttered, almost to himself, thrusting his hand through his hair with a distracted movement as he spoke: “Wy-wy-wy-I fink we could g-g-g-get a drink in here wy—if you’d like one. Wy-wy-I know the old fellow who lives there… he’s a moonshiner—wy-wy-I fink—would you like to stop?” he said abruptly and then, getting no answer from the younger one, he gave another worried and uncertain look in the direction of the house, thrust his fingers through his hair, and muttered to himself: “W-w-w-well, perhaps you’re right—maybe it’s j-j-j-just as well if we g-g-g-get home wy-wy-wy-I guess that Mama will be waiting up for us.”

When they reached town the hour was late, the streets had a wintry, barren, and deserted look, and the lights burned dim: from time to time another motor car would flash by them speedily, but they saw few people. As they drove across the Square it seemed almost to have been frozen in a cataleptic silence, the bulbous clusters of the street lamps around the Square burned with a hard and barren radiance—a ghastly mocking of life, of metropolitan gaiety, in a desert scene from which all life had by some pestilence or catastrophe of nature been extinguished. The fountain in the Square pulsed with a cold breezeless jet, and behind the greasy windows of a luncheon room he could see a man in a dim light seated on a stool and drinking coffee, and the swart muscular Greek leaned over the counter, his furrowed inch of brow painfully bent upon the columns of a newspaper.

As they turned into the street where stood his mother’s house, and sloped swiftly down the hill toward home, his brother, in a tone that tried in vain to be matter of fact and to conceal the concern and pain which his own generous spirit felt because of the feeling of defeat, failure, and desperation which was now legible in every word and gesture of the younger one, began to speak to him in a nervous, almost pleading voice:

“N-n-now I fink,” he began, thrusting his big hand through his hair, —“I—wy I fink when we get home wy—I just wouldn’t say anything to Mama about—wy-wy about that trouble—wy—that we had in Blackstone—wy—at all!” he blurted out. “Wy—f-f-f-frankly, I mean it!” he continued earnestly, as he brought the car to a jolting halt before the house. “ Wy-wy—if I were in your p-p-place, Gene—wy I’d just forget it…. It’s all over now—and it would only worry M-m-m-mama if you t-t-told her about it—Wy-wy—the whole f’ing’s over now… those—wy—those cheap nigger-Baptist South Car’lina sons of bitches—wy-wy—just saw the chance of m-m-making a martyr of you—so I’d j-j-just forget about it—It’s all over now—Wy-wy—f-f-f-forget it!” he cried earnestly. “I—I—wy I wouldn’t fink about it again!”

But the younger one, seeing the light that burned warmly behind the drawn shades of the parlour, set his sick heart and his grim face desperately towards the light, shook his head silently, and then walked grimly towards the house.

He found his mother and his sister seated together in the parlour before the fire. In another moment, almost before their first startled words of greeting were out of their mouths, he was blurting out the story of his drunkenness, arrest, and imprisonment. As he went on, he could see his mother’s face, white, serious, eagerly curious, fixed upon him, and her powerful, deliberate, and curiously flexible mouth which she pursed constantly, darting her eyes at him from time to time with the quick, startled attentiveness of an animal or a bird, as she said sharply: “Hah?… What say?… The police, you say?… Jail?… Who was with you—hah? Emmet Blake?… Weaver?… How much did they fine you—hah?”

Meanwhile his sister sat listening quietly, with an absent yet intent look in her eyes, stroking her large cleft chin in a reflective manner with her big hand, smiling a little, and saying from time to time:

“Ah-hah?… And what did Blake say then?… What did you say to the nigger when you saw him in the cell?… Ah-hah…. They didn’t abuse you, did they?… Did they hurt you when they hit you?… Ah-hah…. And what did Luke say when he saw you looking through the bars?” She snickered hoarsely, and then, taking him by the hand, turned to her mother and in a kindly yet derisive tone said:

“Here’s your Harvard boy…. What do you think of your baby now?” And seeing the gloomy and miserable look upon his face, she laughed her high, husky, and derisive falsetto, prodding him in the ribs with her big finger, saying: “K-k-k-k!… This is our Harvard boy!… Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi!… Here’s your baby son, Miss Eliza!” Then, releasing his hand and turning to her mother, she said in a good-natured tone, in which yet a kind of melancholy satisfaction was evident: “ Well, you see, don’t you?… It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?… I knew it all the time…. It just goes to show that we’re all the same beneath the skin…. We’re all alike…. We all like the stuff… with all his book education and going off to Harvard, he’s no different from Papa, when you come down to it,” she concluded with a note of sombre brooding satisfaction in her voice.

“Wy-wy-wy—” he could see Luke teetering nervously from one huge flat foot to another, thrusting his huge hand distractedly through his flashing hair as he attempted to stammer out an earnest and excited defence and justification for his disgrace:

“Wy-wy-wy I don’t believe that Gene was drunk at all!” he stammered. “Wy I fink wy—that he j-j-j-just had the bad luck to wy to f-f-f-fall in with that gang when they were drinking and and and—wy I f’ink those wy those B-B-B-B-Blackstone bastards just saw a chance wy of collecting a wy a little graft and and and wy j-j-just made Gene the goat. Wy f-f-f-frankly I don’t believe he was drunk at all…. Wy I doubt it very much,” he said, thrusting his fingers through his hair. “F-f-f-frankly, I do.”

“I was drunk!” the boy muttered sullenly and miserably. “Drunker than any of them…. I was the worst of the lot.”

“You see, don’t you?” his sister said again to her mother in a weary, kindly, yet triumphant tone. “You see what happens, don’t you?… I’ve known it…. I’ve known it all the time,” she said with sombre satisfaction. “… No, sir,” she shook her head with a movement of emphatic conviction, as if someone had disputed her argument, “you can’t change them!… You can’t change the leopard’s spots…. Murder will out…. You can’t tell me!” she cried again, shaking her head in a movement of denial. “Blood is thicker than water. But you see, don’t you?” she said again with this curiously kindly yet triumphant satisfaction; and then added illogically: “This is what comes of going to Harvard.”

And his mother, who had been following this broken and almost incoherent discourse of his brother and sister with the quick, startled darting and attentive glances of an animal or a bird, now said nothing. Instead she just stood looking at him, her broad worn hands held at the waist for a moment in a loose strong clasp, her face white and stern, and her mouth pursed in a strong pucker of reproach. For a moment it seemed that she would speak, but suddenly her worn brown eyes were hot with tears, she shook her head at him in a strong, convulsive and almost imperceptible tremor of grief and disappointment, and turning quickly with a rapid awkward movement of her short figure, she went out of the room as fast as she could, slamming the door behind her.

When she had gone there was silence for a minute, save for the gaseous flare and crumble of the coal-fire in the grate and the stertorous, nervous and uneasy labour of Luke’s breath. Then his sister turned to him and looking at him with eyes which had grown dead and lustreless, and in a tone that was full of the sombre and weary resignation that was now frequent when she spoke, she said: “Well, forget about it. She’ll get over it…. You will, too…. It’s done now, and it can’t be helped… So forget it…. I know, I know,” she said with a sombre, weary, and fatal resignation as she shook her head. “We all have these great dreams and big ambitions when we’re twenty…. I know…. I had them, too…. Don’t break your heart about it, Gene…. Life’s not worth it…. So forget it…. Just forget about it…. You’ll forget,” she muttered, “like I did.”

Later that night, when his sister had departed for her home and his brother had gone to bed, he sat with his mother in the parlour looking at the fire. Blundering, stumbling incoherently, he tried desperately to reassure her, to tell her of his resolution to expiate his crime, to retrieve his failure, somehow to justify her in the faith and support she had given him. He spoke wildly, foolishly, desperately, of a dozen plans in progress, promising everything, swearing anything, and sure of nothing. He told her he was ready to go to work at once, to do any work that he could find—like a drowning man he clutched wildly at a dozen straws—he would get a job on the paper as a reporter; he would teach school; there were great sums of money to be made from advertising, he had a friend in that profession, he was sure he would succeed there; he felt sure that Professor Hatcher could get him placed at some small college teaching drama and play-writing courses; someone had told him he could find employment editing the little magazine or “house organ” of a department store in the city; a friend at college had secured employment as librarian of an ocean liner; another made large sums of money selling floor-mops and brushes to the housewives of the Middle West—he blurted out the foolish and futile projects feverishly, clutching at straw after straw, and halted abruptly, baffled by her silence and by the sudden sickening realization that he no longer had a straw to clutch at—how foolish, futile, feeble all these projects were!

As for his mother, she sat staring straight into the fire and made no answer. Then, for a long time, he sat there melancholy, saying nothing, while the woman looked straight ahead, hands clasped across her waist, looking into the fire with a fixed stare of her white face and puckered mouth. At length she spoke:

… “I have brought them all into the world,” she said quietly, “and seen them all grow up… and some are dead now… and some have done nothing with their lives…. You were the youngest, and the last… my only hope…. Oh, to see them all, all go the same way… to hope and pray year after year that there would be one of them who would not fail—and now!” her voice rose strongly, and she shook her head with the old convulsive tremor, “to think that you—the one on whom my hope was set—the one who has had the education and the opportunity that the others never had—should go the way that the others went…. It’s too bad to bear!” she cried, and suddenly burst into tears. “Too much to ask of me!” she whispered huskily, and suddenly drew the sleeve of the old frayed sweater across her weak wet eyes, with the pathetic gesture of a child—a gesture that tore him with a rending anguish of pity, shame and inexpiable regret. “Too hard… too hard,” she whispered. “Surely there’s a curse of God upon us if after all the pain and sorrow all are lost.”

And he sat there sick with shame, self-loathing and despair, unable to reply. And then he heard again the remote demented howling of the wind, the creaking of bare boughs, the vast dark prowling of the beast of night about his mother’s house. And again he heard, as he had heard a thousand times in childhood, far, faint, and broken by the wind, the wailing whistle of a distant train. It brought to him, as it had brought to him so many times, the old immortal promises of flight and darkness, the golden promises of morning, new lands and a shining city. And to his sick and desperate soul the cry of the great train now came with a sterner and more desperate hope than he had ever known as a boy. Suddenly he knew that now there was one road, and only one before him—flight from this defeat and failure which his life had come to, redemption by stern labour and grim loneliness, the stern challenge, the sharp peril and the grand reward—the magic and undying image of the city. And suddenly he knew that he would go.

The night before he went away he went out and prowled restlessly about the streets of the town until the hour was very late. A letter from a friend had informed them that there was hope of a teaching appointment at one of the city universities, later, when the spring term began. Meanwhile, a swift exchange of telegrams had promised him temporary employment in New York, soliciting funds from alumni of his university for a memorial building. And uncertain, specious, and disheartening as this employment seemed to him, he had eagerly seized the offer when it came. He was leaving home the next day.

Now, sick of soul and driven by the unquiet heart, the furious unrest, he prowled the barren night-time streets of his native town. The Square was bleak and lifeless and deserted, with its hard glare of lights: along the main street of the town a few belated citizens hurried past from time to time, faces and voices he remembered from his childhood, driven by like ghosts. Everything he saw and touched was strange and familiar as a dream—a life which he had known utterly and which now vanished from his grasp whenever he approached it—his for ever, buried in his blood and memory, never to be made his own again.

When he returned home it was after midnight and his mother’s old gaunt house was dark. He went quietly up the steps and into the broad front hall, closing the heavy door quietly behind him. For a minute he stood there in that living dark, the ancient and breathing darkness of that old house which seemed to speak to him with all the thousand voices of its vanished lives—with all the shapes and presences of things and people he had known, who had been there, and who had passed or vanished, or had died.

Then quietly he groped his way along the dark old hall and towards the kitchen and the little room beyond in which his mother slept.

When he got to the kitchen the room was dark save for the soft flare and crumble of the fading ashes in the old coal range. But the kitchen was still warm, with a curious and recent currency of warmth and silence, as if it were still filled with his mother’s life and as if she had just been there.

He turned on the light and for a minute stood looking at the familiar old table with its sheathing of ragged battered zinc, and at the ironing board with its great stack of freshly ironed and neatly folded linen; and he knew that she had worked there late.

Suddenly, a desperate urge, an overmastering desire to see her, speak to her, awoke in him. He thought that if he could only see her now he could reveal himself to her, explain the purpose of his failure, the certainty of his success. He was sure that now, if ever, he could speak to her and say the things he had always wished to say but never said—speak the unspeakable, find a tongue for the unspoken language, make her understand his life, his purpose, and his heart’s desire, as he had never done before. And filled with this wild hope, this impossible conviction, he strode towards the closed door of her little room to arouse her.

Then, abruptly, he paused. Upon an old cupboard, in a glass half-filled with water, he saw, as he had seen a thousand times, grinning at him with a prognathous, a strangely human bleakness, the false teeth she had put there when she went to bed. And suddenly he knew he could not speak to her. For grotesque, ugly, and absurd as they were, those grinning teeth evolved for him, somehow, as nothing else on earth could do, the whole image of his mother’s life of grief and toil and labour—the intolerable memories of the vanished and the irrevocable years, the strange and bitter miracle of life. And he knew then that he could not speak, that there was nothing he could say to her.

He rapped gently at the door and in a moment heard her voice, quick, sharp, and startled, roused from sleep, saying: “Hah?… what say?… who’s there?”

He answered: in a moment she opened the door and stood there, her face startled, curiously small and white and sunken, somehow like a child’s. When he spoke to her she answered incoherently: and then she smiled in an apologetic and embarrassed manner, and covered her mouth shyly with one hand, while she extended her other for the glass that held her teeth. He turned his head away: when he looked again her face had taken on its familiar contour, and she was saying in her usual tone: “Hah?… What is it, son?”

“Nothing, Mama,” he said awkwardly. “I—I didn’t know you were asleep… I—I—just came in to say good night, Mama.”

“Good night, son,” she said, and turned her white cheek up to him. He kissed it briefly.

“Now go and get some sleep,” she said. “It’s late and you’ve all your packing to do yet when you get up tomorrow.”

“Yes,” he said awkwardly. “… I guess you’re right…. Well, good night.” And he kissed her again.

“Good night,” she said. “Turn out the lights, won’t you, before you go to bed.”

And as he turned the kitchen light out he heard her door close quietly behind him, and the dark and lonely silence of the old house was all around him as he went down the hall. And a thousand voices—his father’s, his brothers’, and of the child that he himself had been, and all the lives and voices of the hundred others, the lost, the vanished people—were whispering to him as he went down the old dark hall there in his mother’s house. And the remote demented wind was howling in the barren trees, as he had heard it do so many times in childhood, and far off, far-faint and broken by the wind he heard the wailing cry of the great train, bringing to him again its wild and secret promises of flight and darkness, new lands, and a shining city. And there was something wild and dark and secret in him that he could never utter. The strange and bitter miracle of life had filled him and he could not speak, and all he knew was that he was leaving home for ever, that the world, the future of dark time and of man’s destiny lay before him, and that he would never live here in his mother’s houseagain.