“Mother decided some months ago that she could no longer live with Father,” said Genevieve, with sad dignity.
“Sure,” volunteered Jimmy, “he’s livin’with another woman!”
“Jimmy!” said Genevieve hoarsely.
Eugene had a momentary flash of humorous sympathy with the departed Simpson; then he looked at her white bickering face and felt sorry for her. She carried her own punishment with her.
XIX
Shall a man be dead within your heart before his rotten flesh be wholly dead within the ground, and before the producing fats and syrup cease to give life to his growing hair? Shall a man so soon be done with that which still provides a nest for working maggotry or shall a brother leave a brother’s memory before the worms have left his tissue? This is a pregnant subject: there should be laws passed, and a discipline, which train a man to greater constancy. And suddenly, out of this dream of time in which he lived, he would awaken, and instantly, like a man freed from the spell of an enchantment which has held him captive for many years in some strange land, he would remember home with an intolerable sense of pain and loss, the lost world of his childhood, and feel the strange and bitter miracle of life and have no words for what he wished to say.
That lost world would come back to him at many times, and often for no cause that he could trace or fathom—a voice half-heard, a word far-spoken, a leaf, a light that came and passed and came again. But always when that lost world would come back, it came at once, like a sword-thrust through the entrails, in all its panoply of past time, living, whole, and magic as it had always been.
And always when it came to him, and at whatever time, and for whatever reason, he could hear his father’s great voice sounding in the house again and see his gaunt devouring stride as he had come muttering round the corner at the hour of noon long years before.
And then he would hear again the voice of his dead brother, and remember with a sense of black horror, dream-like disbelief, that Ben was dead, and yet could not believe that Ben had ever died, or that he had had a brother, lost a friend. Ben would come back to him in these moments with a blazing and intolerable reality, until he heard his quiet living voice again, saw his fierce scowling eyes of bitter grey, his scornful, proud and lively face, and always when Ben came back to him it was like this:
