to crack under pressure. And that is what I want my boys to do! I want them to succeed! I want them to absorb their negations. I want them to keep as clean as a hound’s tooth!”
Eugene winced, and looked around on all the faces set in a resolve to fight desperately for monogamy, party politics, and the will of the greatest number.
And yet the Baptists fear this man! Why? He has taken the whiskers off their God, but for the rest, he has only taught them to vote the ticket.
So here is Hegel in the Cotton Belt!
During these years Eugene would go away from Pulpit Hill, by night and by day, when April was a young green blur, or when the Spring was deep and ripe. But he liked best to go away by night, rushing across a cool Spring countryside full of dew and starlight, under a great beach of the moon ribbed with clouds.
He would go to Exeter or Sydney; sometimes he would go to little towns he had never before visited. He would register at hotels as “Robert Herrick,” “John Donne,” “George Peele,” “William Blake,” and “John Milton.” No one ever said anything to him about it. The people in those small towns had such names. Once he registered at a hotel, in a small Piedmont town, as “Ben Jonson.”
The clerk spun the book critically.
“Isn’t there an h in that name?” he said.
“No,” said Eugene. “That’s another branch of the family. I have an uncle, Samuel, who spells his name that way.”
Sometimes, at hotels of ill-repute, he would register, with dark buried glee, as “Robert Browning,” “Alfred Tennyson,” and “William Wordsworth.”
Once he registered as “Henry W. Longfellow.”
“You can’t fool me,” said the clerk, with a hard grin of disbelief. “That’s the name of a writer.”
He was devoured by a vast strange hunger for life. At night, he listened to the million-noted ululation of little night things, the great brooding symphony of dark, the ringing of remote churchbells
