Three weeks after Eugene’s return to the university the war ended. The students cursed and took off their uniforms. But they rang the great bronze bell, and built a bonfire on the campus, leaping around it like dervishes.
Life fell back into civilian patterns. The gray back of winter was broken: the Spring came through.
Eugene was a great man on the campus of the little university. He plunged exultantly into the life of the place. He cried out in his throat with his joy: all over the country, life was returning, reviving, awaking. The young men were coming back to the campus. The leaves were out in a tender green blur: the quilled jonquil spouted from the rich black earth, and peach-bloom fell upon the shrill young isles of grass. Everywhere life was returning, awaking, reviving. With victorious joy, Eugene thought of the flowers above Ben’s grave.
He was wild with ecstasy because the Spring had beaten death. The grief of Ben sank to a forgotten depth in him. He was charged with the juice of life and motion. He did not walk: he bounded along. He joined everything he had not joined. He made funny speeches in chapel, at smokers, at meetings of all sorts. He edited the paper, he wrote poems and stories—he flung outward without pause or thought.
Sometimes at night he would rush across the country, beside a drunken driver, to Exeter and Sydney, and there seek out the women behind the chained lattices, calling to them in the fresh dawn-dusk of Spring his young goat-cry of desire and hunger.
Lily! Louise! Ruth! Ellen! O mother of love, you cradle of birth and living, whatever your billion names may be, I come, your son, your lover. Stand, Maya, by your opened door, denned in the jungle web of Niggertown.
Sometimes, when he walked softly by, he heard the young men talking in their rooms of Eugene Gant. Eugene Gant was crazy. Eugene Gant was mad. Oh, I (he thought) am Eugene Gant!
