It was the winter, and the sullen dying autumn that he hated most at Dixieland—the dim fly-specked lights, the wretched progress about the house in search of warmth, Eliza untidily wrapped in an old sweater, a dirty muffler, a cast-off man’s coat. She glycerined her cold-cracked hands. The chill walls festered with damp: they drank in death from the atmosphere: a woman died of typhoid, her husband came quickly out into the hall and dropped his hands. They were Ohio people.
Upstairs, upon a sleeping porch, a thin-faced Jew coughed through the interminable dark.
“In heaven’s name, mama,” Helen fumed, “why do you take them in? Can’t you see he’s got the bugs?”
“Why, no-o,” said Eliza, pursing her lips. “He said he only had a little bronchial trouble. I asked him about it, and he laughed just as big as you please:’Why, Mrs. Gant,’he said—” and there would follow an endless anecdote, embellished with many a winding rivulet. The girl raged: it was one of Eliza’s basic traits to defend blindly whatever brought her money.
The Jew was a kind man. He coughed gently behind his white hand and ate bread fried in battered egg and butter. Eugene developed a keen appetite for it: innocently he called it “Jew Bread” and asked for more. Lichenfels laughed gently, coughed—his wife was full of swart rich laughter. The boy did small services for him: he gave him a coin from week to week. He was a clothier from a New Jersey town. In the Spring he went to a sanitarium; he died there later.
In the winter a few chill boarders, those faces, those personalities which become mediocre through repetition, sat for hours before the coals of the parlor hearth, rocking interminably, dull of voice and gesture, as hideously bored with themselves and Dixieland, no doubt, as he with them.
He liked the summers better. There came slow-bodied women from
