Morgan.

Eliza stood solidly, enjoying the warmth, pursing her lips.  "When do you expect to have your baby?" said Eliza suddenly.

Mrs. Morgan said nothing for a moment.  She kept on rocking.

"In less'n a month now, I reckon," she answered.

She had been getting bigger week after week.

Eliza bent over and pulled her skirt up, revealing her leg to the knee, cotton-stockinged and lumpily wadded over with her heavy flannels.

"Whew!" she cried out coyly, noticing that Eugene was staring. "Turn your head, boy," she commanded, snickering and rubbing her finger along her nose.  The dull green of rolled banknotes shone through her stockings.  She pulled the bills out.

"Well, I reckon you'll have to have a little money," said Eliza, peeling off two tens, and giving them to Mrs. Morgan.

"Thank you, ma'am," said Mrs. Morgan, taking the money.

"You can stay here until you're able to work again," said Eliza. "I know a good doctor."
 
 

"Mama, in heaven's name," Helen fumed.  "Where on earth do you get these people?"

"Merciful God!" howled Gant, "you've had 'em all--blind, lame, crazy, chippies and bastards.  They all come here."

Nevertheless, when he saw Mrs. Morgan now, he always made a profound bow, saying with the most florid courtesy:

"How do you do, madam?"  Aside, to Helen, he said:

"I tell you what--she's a fine-looking girl."

"Hahahaha," said Helen, laughing in an ironic falsetto, and prodding him, "you wouldn't mind having her yourself, would you?"

"B'God," he said humorously, wetting his thumb, and grinning slyly at Eliza, "she's got a pair of pippins."

Eliza smiled bitterly into popping grease.

"Hm!" she said disdainfully.  "I don't care how many he goes with. There's no fool like an old fool.  You'd better not be too smart. That's a game two can play at."

"Hahahahaha!" laughed Helen thinly, "she's mad now."

Helen took Mrs. Morgan often to Gant's and cooked great meals for her.  She also brought her presents of candy and scented soap from town.

They called in McGuire at the birth of the child.  From below Eugene heard the quiet commotion in the upstairs room, the low moans of the woman, and finally a high piercing wail.  Eliza, greatly excited, kept kettles seething with hot water constantly over the gas flames of the stove.  From time to time she rushed upstairs with a boiling kettle, descending a moment later more slowly, pausing from step to step while she listened attentively to the sounds in the room.

"After all," said Helen, banging kettles about restlessly in the kitchen, "what do we know about her?  Nobody can say she hasn't got a husband, can they?  They'd better be careful!  People have no right to say those things," she cried out irritably against unknown detractors.

It was night.  Eugene went out on to the veranda.  The air was frosty, clear, not very cool.  Above the black bulk of the eastern hills, and in the great bowl of the sky, far bright stars were  scintillant as jewels.  The light burned brightly in neighborhood houses, as bright and as hard as if carved from some cold gem. Across the wide yard-spaces wafted the warm odor of hamburger steak and fried onions.  Ben stood at the veranda rail, leaning upon his cocked leg, smoking with deep lung inhalations.  Eugene went over and stood by him.  They heard the wail upstairs.  Eugene snickered, looking up at the thin ivory mask.  Ben lifted his white hand sharply to strike him, but dropped it with a growl of contempt, smiling faintly.  Far before them, on the top of Birdseye, faint lights wavered in the rich Jew's castle.  In the neighborhood there was a slight mist of supper, and frost-far voices.

Deep womb, dark flower.  The Hidden.  The secret fruit, heart-red, fed by rich Indian blood.  Womb-night brooding darkness flowering secretly into life.
 
 

Mrs. Morgan went away two weeks after her child was born.  He was a little brown-skinned boy, with a tuft of elvish black hair, and very black bright eyes.  He was like a little Indian.  Before she left Eliza gave her twenty dollars.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"I've got folks in Sevier," said Mrs. Morgan.

She went up the street carrying a cheap imitation-crocodile valise. At her shoulder the baby waggled his head, and looked merrily back with his bright black eyes.  Eliza waved to him and smiled tremulously; she turned back into the house sniffling, with wet eyes.

Why did she come to Dixieland, I wonder? Eugene thought.
 
 

Eliza was good to a little man with a mustache.  He had a wife and a little girl nine years old.  He was a hotel steward; he was out of work and he stayed at Dixieland until he owed her more than one hundred dollars.  But he split kindling neatly, and carried up coal; he did handy jobs of carpentry, and painted up rusty places about the house.

She was very fond of him; he was what she called "a good family man."  She liked domestic people; she liked men who were house-broken.  The little man was very kind and very tame.  Eugene liked him because he made good coffee.  Eliza never bothered him about the money.  Finally, he got work at the Inn, and quarters there. He paid Eliza all he owed her.

Eugene stayed late at the school, returning in the afternoon at three or four o'clock.  Sometimes it was almost dark when he came back to Dixieland.  Eliza was fretful at his absences, and brought him his dinner crisped and dried from its long heating in the oven. There was a heavy vegetable soup thickly glutinous with cabbage, beans, and tomatoes, and covered on top with big grease blisters.  There would also be warmed-over beef, pork or chicken, a dish full of cold lima beans, biscuits, slaw, and coffee.

But the school had become the centre of his heart and life--Margaret Leonard his spiritual mother.  He liked to be there most in the afternoons when the crowd of boys had gone, and when he was free to wander about the old house, under the singing majesty of great trees, exultant in the proud solitude of that fine hill, the clean windy rain of the acorns, the tang of burning leaves.  He would read wolfishly until Margaret discovered him and drove him out under the trees or toward the flat court behind Bishop Raper's residence at the entrance, which was used for basketball.  Here, while the western sky reddened, he raced down toward the goal, passing the ball to a companion, exulting in his growing swiftness, agility, and expertness in shooting the basket.

Margaret Leonard watched his health jealously, almost morbidly, warning him constantly of the terrible consequences that followed physical depletion, the years required to build back what had once been thrown carelessly away.

"Look here, boy!" she would begin, stopping him in a quiet boding voice.  "Come in here a minute.  I want to talk to you."

Somewhat frightened, extremely nervous, he would sit down beside her.

"How much sleep have you been getting?" she asked.

Hopefully, he said nine hours a night.  That should be about right.

"Well, make it ten," she commanded sternly.  "See here, 'Gene, you simply can't afford to take chances with your health.  Lordy, boy, I know what I'm talking about.  I've had to pay the price, I tell you.  You can't do anything in this world without your health, boy."

"But I'm all right," he protested desperately, frightened. "There's nothing wrong with me."

"You're not strong, boy.  You've got to get some meat on your bones.  I tell you what, I'm worried by those circles under your eyes.  Do you keep regular hours?"

He did not: he hated regular hours.  The excitement, the movement, the constant moments of crisis at Gant's and Eliza's had him keyed to their stimulation.  The order and convention of domestic life he had never known.  He was desperately afraid of regularity.  It meant dullness and inanition to him.  He loved the hour of midnight.

But obediently he promised her that he would be regular--regular in eating, sleeping, studying, and exercising.

But he had not yet learned to play with the crowd.  He still feared, disliked and distrusted them.

He shrank from the physical conflict of boy life, but knowing her eye was upon him he plunged desperately into their games, his frail strength buffeted in the rush of strong legs, the heavy jar of strong bodies, picking himself up bruised and sore at heart to follow and join again the mill of the burly pack.  Day after day to the ache of his body was added the ache and shame of his spirit, but he hung on with a pallid smile across his lips, and envy and fear of their strength in his heart.  He parroted faithfully all that John Dorsey had to say about the "spirit of fair play," "sportsmanship," "playing the game for the game's sake," "accepting defeat or victory with a smile," and so on, but he had no genuine belief or understanding.  These phrases were current among all the boys at the school--they had been made somewhat too conscious of them and, as he listened, at times the old, inexplicable shame returned--he craned his neck and drew one foot sharply off the ground.

And Eugene noted, with the old baffling shame again, as this cheap tableau of self-conscious, robust, and raucously aggressive boyhood  was posed, that, for all the mouthing of phrases, the jargon about fair play and sportsmanship, the weaker, at Leonard's, was the legitimate prey of the stronger.  Leonard, beaten by a boy in a play of wits, or in an argument for justice, would assert the righteousness of his cause by physical violence.  These spectacles were ugly and revolting: Eugene watched them with sick fascination.

Leonard himself was not a bad man--he was a man of considerable character, kindliness, and honest determination.  He loved his family, he stood up with some courage against the bigotry in the  Methodist church, where he was a deacon, and at length had towithdraw because of his remarks on Darwin's theory.  He was, thus, an example of that sad liberalism of the village--an advanced thinker among the Methodists, a bearer of the torch at noon, an apologist for the toleration of ideas that have been established for fifty years.  He tried faithfully to do his duties as a teacher.  But he was of the earth--even his heavy-handed violence was of the earth, and had in it the unconscious brutality of nature.  Although he asserted his interest in "the things of the mind," his interest in the soil was much greater, and he had added little to his stock of information since leaving college.  He was slow-witted and quite lacking in the sensitive intuitions of Margaret, who loved the man with such passionate fidelity, however, that she seconded all his acts before the world.  Eugene had even heard her cry out in a shrill, trembling voice against a student who had answered her husband insolently:  "Why, I'd slap his head off!  That's what I'd do!"  And the boy had trembled, with fear and nausea, to see her so.  But thus, he knew, could love change one. Leonard thought his actions wise and good: he had grown up in a tradition that demanded strict obedience to the master, and that would not brook opposition to his rulings.  He had learned from his father, a Tennessee patriarch who ran a farm, preached on Sundays, and put down rebellion in his family with a horse-whip and pious prayers, the advantages of being God!  He thought little boys who resisted him should be beaten.

Upon the sons of his wealthiest and most prominent clients, as well as upon his own children, Leonard was careful to inflict no chastisement, and these young men, arrogantly conscious of their immunity, were studious in their insolence and disobedience.  The son of the Bishop, Justin Raper, a tall thin boy of thirteen, with black hair, a thin dark bumpy face, and absurdly petulant lips, typed copies of a dirty ballad and sold them among the students at five cents a copy.
 

     "Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
      Slapoon!
      Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
      Slapoon!"
 

Moreover, Leonard surprised this youth one afternoon in Spring on the eastern flank of the hill, in the thick grass beneath a flowering dogwood, united in sexual congress with Miss Hazel Bradley, the daughter of a small grocer who lived below on Biltburn Avenue, and whose lewdness was already advertised in the town. Leonard, on second thought, did not go to the Bishop.  He went to the Grocer.

"Well," said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long mustache reflectively away from his mouth, "you ought to put up a no-trespassin' sign."

The target of concentrated abuse, both for John Dorsey and the boys, was the son of a Jew.  The boy's name was Edward Michalove. His father was a jeweller, a man with a dark, gentle floridity of  manner and complexion.  He had white delicate fingers.  His counters were filled with old brooches, gemmed buckles, ancient incrusted watches.  The boy had two sisters--large handsome women. His mother was dead.  None of them looked Jewish: they all had a soft dark fluescence of appearance.

At twelve, he was a tall slender lad, with dark amber features, and the mincing effeminacy of an old maid.  He was terrified in the company of other boys, all that was sharp, spinsterly, and venomous, would come protectively to the surface when he was ridiculed or threatened, and he would burst into shrill unpleasant laughter, or hysterical tears.  His mincing walk, with the constant gesture of catching maidenly at the fringe of his coat as he walked along, his high husky voice, with a voluptuous and feminine current playing through it, drew upon him at once the terrible battery of their dislike.

They called him "Miss" Michalove; they badgered him into a state of constant hysteria, until he became an unpleasant snarling little cat, holding up his small clawed hands to scratch them with his long nails whenever they approached; they made him detestable, master and boys alike, and they hated him for what they made of him.

Sobbing one day when he had been kept in after school hours, he leaped up and rushed suddenly for the doors.  Leonard, breathing stertorously, pounded awkwardly after him, and returned in a moment dragging the screaming boy along by the collar.

"Sit down!" yelled John Dorsey, hurling him into a desk.  Then, his boiling fury unappeased, and baffled by fear of inflicting some crippling punishment on the boy, he added illogically:  "Stand up!" and jerked him to his feet again.

"You young upstart!" he panted.  "You little two-by-two whippersnapper!  We'll just see, my sonny, if I'm to be dictated to
by the like of you."

"Take your hands off me!" Edward screamed, in an agony of physical loathing.  "I'll tell my father on you, old man Leonard, and he'll come down here and kick your big fat behind all over the lot.  See if he don't."

Eugene closed his eyes, unable to witness the snuffing out of a young life.  He was cold and sick about his heart.  But when he opened his eyes again Edward, flushed and sobbing, was standing where he stood.  Nothing had happened.

Eugene waited for God's visitation upon the unhappy blasphemer.  He gathered, from the slightly open paralysis that had frozen John Dorsey's and Sister Amy's face, that they were waiting too.

Edward lived.  There was nothing beyond this--nothing.
 
 

Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the old piercing shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the irrevocable moment of some cowardly or dishonorable act.  For not only did he join in the persecution of the boy--he was also glad at heart because of the existence of some one weaker than himself, some one at whom the flood of ridicule might be directed.  Years later it came to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a burden he might otherwise have borne, that that overladen heart was swollen with a misery that might have been his.

Mr. Leonard's "men of to-morrow" were doing nicely.  The spirit of justice, of physical honor was almost unknown to them, but they were loud in proclaiming the letter.  Each of them lived in a fear of discovery; each of them who was able built up his own defenses of swagger, pretense, and loud assertion--the great masculine flower of gentleness, courage, and honor died in a foul tangle. The great clan of go-getter was emergent in young boys--big in voice, violent in threat, withered and pale at heart--the "He-men" were on the rails.

And Eugene, encysted now completely behind the walls of his fantasy, hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated, as best he could, the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows, joined, by act or spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself, and was compensated sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret say that he was "a boy with a fine spirit."  She said it very often.

He was, fortunately, thanks to Gant and Eliza, a creature that was dominantly masculine in its sex, but in all his life, either at home or in school, he had seldom known victory.  Fear he knew well. And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the jostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.

He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him with shame.  But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate.  He was as much like a woman as a man.  That was all.  There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne--it must go to Parnassus.
 
 

18
 

In the years that had followed Eliza's removal to Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants.  Eugene had passed away from Helen's earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben.  This separation was inevitable.  The great affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.

The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his young flesh.  He was not so attractive physically?he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward.  Moreover, he sank deeper year by year into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.

And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could never understand, choked her with fury.  It was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to fondle, love, and enslave it.  Her boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch of the sun.  It was necessary for her to dominate and enslave, all her virtues?her strong lust to serve, to give, to nurse, to amuse--came from the imperative need for dominance over almost all she touched.

She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield to her governance.  In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound.  She hated secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the unfathomable depths of other-wordliness goaded her to fury.

Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would caricature the pout of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding kangaroo walk.

"You little freak.  You nasty little freak.  You don't even know who you are--you little bastard.  You're not a Gant.  Any one cansee that.  You haven't a drop of papa's blood in you.  Queer one! Queer one!  You're Greeley Pentland all over again."

She always returned to this--she was fanatically partisan, her hysterical superstition had already lined the family in embattled groups of those who were Gant and those who were Pentland.  On the Pentland side, she placed Steve, Daisy, and Eugene--they were, she thought, the "cold and selfish ones," and the implication of the older sister and the younger brother with the criminal member ofthe family gave her an added pleasure.  Her union with Luke was now inseparable.  It had been inevitable.  They were the Gants?those who were generous, fine, and honorable.

The love of Luke and Helen was epic.  They found in each other the constant effervescence, the boundless extraversion, the richness, the loudness, the desperate need to give and to serve that was life to them.  They exacerbated the nerves of each other, but their lovewas beyond grievance, and their songs of praise were extravagant.

"I'll criticise him if I like," she said pugnaciously.  "I've got the right to.  But I won't hear any one else criticise him.  He's a fine generous boy--the finest one in this family.  That's one thing sure."

Ben alone seemed to be without the grouping.  He moved among themlike a shadow--he was remote from their passionate fullbloodedpartisanship.  But she thought of him as "generous"--he was, she concluded, a "Gant."

In spite of this violent dislike for the Pentlands, both Helen and Luke had inherited all Gant's social hypocrisy.  They wanted aboveall else to put a good face on before the world, to be well likedand to have many friends.  They were profuse in their thanks,extravagant in their praise, cloying in their flattery.  They slathered it on.  They kept their ill-temper, their nervousness, and their irritability for exhibition at home.  And in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland's family their manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly with servility. Money impressed them.

It was a period of incessant movement in the family.  Steve had married a year or two before a woman from a small town in lowerIndiana.  She was thirty-seven years old, twelve years his senior, a squat heavy German with a big nose and a patient and ugly face. She had come to Dixieland one summer with another woman, a spinster of lifelong acquaintance, and allowed him to seduce her before she left.  The winter following, her father, a small manufacturer of cigars, had died, leaving her $9,000 in insurance, his home, a small sum of money in the bank, and a quarter share in his business, which was left to the management of his two sons.

Early in Spring the woman, whose name was Margaret Lutz, returned to Dixieland.  One drowsy afternoon Eugene found them at Gant's. The house was deserted save for them.  They were sprawled out face downward, with their hands across each other's hips, on Gant's bed. They lay there silently, while he looked, in an ugly stupor. Steve's yellow odor filled the room.  Eugene began to tremble with insane fury.  The Spring was warm and lovely, the air brooded slightly in a flowering breeze, there was a smell of soft tar.  He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes.  In a moment the world turned hag.

There was nothing that Steve touched that he did not taint.

Eugene hated him because he stunk, because all that he touched stunk, because he brought fear, shame, and loathing wherever he went; because his kisses were fouler than his curses, his whines nastier than his threats.  He saw the woman's hair blown gently by the blubbered exhalations of his brother's foul breath.

"What are you doing there on papa's bed?" he screamed.

Steve rose stupidly and seized him by the arm.  The woman sat up, dopily staring, her short legs widened.

"I suppose you're going to be a little Tattle-tale," said Steve, bludgeoning him with heavy contempt.  "You're going to run right up and tell mama, aren't you?" he said.  He fastened his yellow fingers on Eugene's arm.

"Get off papa's bed," said Eugene desperately.  He jerked his arm away.

"You're not going to tell on us, buddy, are you?" Steve wheedled, breathing pollution in his face. He grew sick.

"Let me go," he muttered.  "No."

Steve and Margaret were married soon after.  With the old sense of physical shame Eugene watched them descend the stairs at Dixieland each morning for breakfast.  Steve swaggered absurdly, smiled complacently, and hinted at great fortune about the town.  There was rumor of a quarter-million.

"Put it there, Steve," said Harry Tugman, slapping him powerfully upon the shoulder.  "By God, I always said you'd get there."

Eliza smiled at swagger and boast, her proud, pleased, tremulous sad smile.  The first-born.

"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any longer," said he.  "He's on Easy Street.  Where are all the Wise Guys now who said 'I told you so'?  They're all mighty glad to give Little Stevie a Big Smile and the Glad Hand when he breezes down the street.  Every Knocker is a Booster now all right, all right."

"I tell you what," said Eliza with proud smiles, "he's no fool.  He's as bright as the next one when he wants to be."  Brighter, she thought.

Steve bought new clothes, tan shoes, striped silk shirts, and a wide straw hat with a red, white and blue band.  He swung his shoulders in a wide arc as he walked, snapped his fingers nonchalantly, and smiled with elaborate condescension on those who greeted him.  Helen was vastly annoyed and amused; she had to laugh at his absurd strut, and she had a great rush of feeling for Margaret Lutz.  She called her "honey," felt her eyes mist warmly with unaccountable tears as she looked into the patient, bewildered, and slightly frightened face of the German woman.  She took her in her arms and fondled her.

"That's all right, honey," she said, "you let us know if he doesn't treat you right.  We'll fix him."

"Steve's a good boy," said Margaret, "when he isn't drinking.  I've nothing to say against him when he's sober."  She burst into tears.

"That awful, that awful curse," said Eliza, shaking her head sadly, "the curse of licker.  It's been responsible for the ruination of more homes than anything else."

"Well, she'll never win any beauty prizes, that's one thing sure," said Helen privately to Eliza.

"I'll vow!" said Eliza.

"What on earth did he mean by doing such a thing!" she continued.