Look Homeward, Angel Read Online

And fear and a speechless pity rose in her when at times she saw the small uneasy eyes grow still and darken with the foiled and groping hunger of old frustration.  O lost!
 
 

3
 

In the great processional of the years through which the history of the Gants was evolving, few years had borne a heavier weight of pain, terror, and wretchedness, and none was destined to bring with it more conclusive events than that year which marked the beginning of the twentieth century.  For Gant and his wife, the year 1900, in which one day they found themselves, after growing to maturity in another century--a transition which must have given, wherever it has happened, a brief but poignant loneliness to thousands of imaginative people--had coincidences, too striking to be unnoticed, with other boundaries in their lives.

In that year Gant passed his fiftieth birthday: he knew he was half as old as the century that had died, and that men do not often live as long as centuries.  And in that year, too, Eliza, big with the last child she would ever have, went over the final hedge of terror and desperation and, in the opulent darkness of the summer night, as she lay flat in her bed with her hands upon her swollen belly, she began to design her life for the years when she would cease to be a mother.

In the already opening gulf on whose separate shores their lives were founded, she was beginning to look, with the infinite composure, the tremendous patience which waits through half a lifetime for an event, not so much with certain foresight, as with a prophetic, brooding instinct.  This quality, this almost Buddhistic complacency which, rooted in the fundamental structure of her life, she could neither suppress nor conceal, was the quality he could least understand, that infuriated him most.  He was fifty: he had a tragic consciousness of time--he saw the passionate fulness of his life upon the wane, and he cast about him like a senseless and infuriate beast.  She had perhaps a greater reason for quietude than he, for she had come on from the cruel openings of her life, through disease, physical weakness, poverty, the constant imminence of death and misery: she had lost her first child, and brought the others safely through each succeeding plague; and now, at forty-two, her last child stirring in her womb, she had a conviction, enforced by her Scotch superstition, and the blind vanity of her family, which saw extinction for others but not for itself, that she was being shaped to a purpose.

As she lay in her bed, a great star burned across her vision in the western quarter of the sky; she fancied it was climbing heaven slowly.  And although she could not have said toward what pinnacle her life was moving, she saw in the future freedom that she had never known, possession and power and wealth, the desire for which was mixed inextinguishably with the current of her blood.  Thinking of this in the dark, she pursed her lips with thoughtful satisfaction, unhumorously seeing herself at work in the carnival, taking away quite easily from the hands of folly what it had never known how to keep.

"I'll get it!" she thought, "I'll get it.  Will has it!  Jim has it.  And I'm smarter than they are."  And with regret, tinctured with pain and bitterness, she thought of Gant:

"Pshaw!  If I hadn't kept after him he wouldn't have a stick to call his own to-day.  What little we have got I've had to fight for; we wouldn't have a roof over our heads; we'd spend the rest of our lives in a rented house"--which was to her the final ignominy of shiftless and improvident people.

And she resumed:  "The money he squanders every year in licker would buy a good lot: we could be well-to-do people now if we'd started at the very beginning.  But he's always hated the very idea of owning anything: couldn't bear it, he told me once, since he lost his money in that trade in Sydney.  If I'd been there, you can bet your bottom dollar there'd been no loss.  Or, it'd be on the other side," she added grimly.

And lying there while the winds of early autumn swept down from the Southern hills, filling the black air with dropping leaves, and making, in intermittent rushes, a remote sad thunder in great trees, she thought of the stranger who had come to live in her, and of that other stranger, author of so much woe, who had lived with her for almost twenty years.  And thinking of Gant, she felt again an inchoate aching wonder, recalling the savage strife between them, and the great submerged struggle beneath, founded upon the hatred and the love of property, in which she did not doubt of her victory, but which baffled her, foiled her.

"I'll vow!" she whispered.  "I'll vow!  I never saw such a man!"

Gant, faced with the loss of sensuous delight, knowing the time had come when all his Rabelaisian excess in eating, drinking, and loving must come under the halter, knew of no gain that could compensate him for the loss of libertinism; he felt, too, the sharp ache of regret, feeling that he had possessed powers, had wasted chances, such as his partnership with Will Pentland, that might have given him position and wealth.  He knew that the century had gone in which the best part of his life had passed; he felt, more than ever, the strangeness and loneliness of our little adventure upon the earth: he thought of his childhood on the Dutch farm, the Baltimore days, the aimless drift down the continent, the appalling fixation of his whole life upon a series of accidents.  The enormous tragedy of accident hung like a gray cloud over his life. He saw more clearly than ever that he was a stranger in a strange land among people who would always be alien to him.  Strangest of all, he thought, was this union, by which he had begotten children, created a life dependent on him, with a woman so remote from all he understood.

He did not know whether the year 1900 marked for him a beginning or an ending; but with the familiar weakness of the sensualist, he resolved to make it an ending, burning the spent fire in him down to a guttering flame.  In the first half of the month of January, still penitently true to the New Year's reformation, he begot a child: by Spring, when it was evident that Eliza was again pregnant, he had hurled himself into an orgy to which even a notable four months' drunk in 1896 could offer no precedent.  Day after day he became maniacally drunk, until he fixed himself in a state of constant insanity: in May she sent him off again to a sanitarium at Piedmont to take the "cure," which consisted simply in feeding him plainly and cheaply, and keeping him away from alcohol for six weeks, a regime which contributed no more ravenously to his hunger than it did to his thirst.  He returned, outwardly chastened, but inwardly a raging furnace, toward the end of June: the day before he came back, Eliza, obviously big with child, her white face compactly set, walked sturdily into each of the town's fourteen saloons, calling up the proprietor or the barman behind his counter, and speaking clearly and loudly in the sodden company of bar clientry:

"See here: I just came in to tell you that Mr. Gant is coming back to-morrow, and I want you all to know that if I hear of any of you selling him a drink, I'll put you in the penitentiary."

The threat, they knew, was preposterous, but the white judicial face, the thoughtful pursing of the lips, and the right hand, which she held loosely clenched, like a man's, with the forefinger extended, emphasizing her proclamation with a calm, but somehow powerful gesture, froze them with a terror no amount of fierce excoriation could have produced.  They received her announcement in beery stupefaction, muttering at most a startled agreement as she walked out.

"By God," said a mountaineer, sending a brown inaccurate stream toward a cuspidor, "she'll do it, too.  That woman means business."

"Hell!" said Tim O'Donnel, thrusting his simian face comically above his counter, "I wouldn't give W.O. a drink now if it was fifteen cents a quart and we was alone in a privy.  Is she gone yet?"

There was vast whisky laughter.

"Who is she?" some one asked.

"She's Will Pentland's sister."

"By God, she'll do it then," cried several; and the place trembled again with their laughter.

Will Pentland was in Loughran's when she entered.  She did not greet him.  When she had gone he turned to a man near him, prefacing his remark with a birdlike nod and wink:  "Bet you can't do that," he said.

Gant, when he returned, and was publicly refused at a bar, was wild with rage and humiliation.  He got whisky very easily, of course, by sending a drayman from his steps, or some negro, in for it; but, in spite of the notoriety of his conduct, which had, he knew, become a classic myth for the children of the town, he shrank at each new advertisement of his behaviour; he became, year by year, more, rather than less, sensitive to it, and his shame, his quivering humiliation on mornings after, product of rasped pride and jangled nerves, was pitiable.  He felt bitterly that Eliza had with deliberate malice publicly degraded him: he screamed denunciation and abuse at her on his return home.

All through the summer Eliza walked with white boding placidity through horror--she had by now the hunger for it, waiting with terrible quiet the return of fear at night.  Angered by her pregnancy, Gant went almost daily to Elizabeth's house in Eagle Crescent, whence he was delivered nightly by a band of exhausted and terrified prostitutes into the care of his son Steve, his oldest child, by now pertly free with nearly all the women in the district, who fondled him with good-natured vulgarity, laughed heartily at his glib innuendoes, and suffered him, even, to slap them smartly on their rumps, making for him roughly as he skipped nimbly away.

"Son," said Elizabeth, shaking Gant's waggling head vigorously, "don't you carry on, when you grow up, like the old rooster here. But he's a nice old boy when he wants to be," she continued, kissing the bald spot on his head, and deftly slipping into the boy's hand the wallet Gant had, in a torrent of generosity, given to her.  She was scrupulously honest.

The boy was usually accompanied on these errands by Jannadeau and Tom Flack, a negro hack-man, who waited in patient constraint outside the latticed door of the brothel until the advancing tumult within announced that Gant had been enticed to depart.  And he would go, either struggling clumsily and screaming eloquent abuse at his suppliant captors, or jovially acquiescent, bellowing a wanton song of his youth along the latticed crescent, and through the supper-silent highways of the town.
 

     "Up in that back room, boys,
      Up in THAT back room,
      All among the fleas and bugs,
      I pit-tee your sad doom."
 

Home, he would be cajoled up the tall veranda stairs, enticed into his bed; or, resisting all compulsion, he would seek out his wife, shut usually in her room, howling taunts at her, and accusations of unchastity, since there festered in him dark suspicion, fruit of his age, his wasting energy.  Timid Daisy, pale from fright, would have fled to the neighboring arms of Sudie Isaacs, or to the Tarkintons; Helen, aged ten, even then his delight, would master him, feeding spoonfuls of scalding soup into his mouth, and slapping him sharply with her small hand when he became recalcitrant.

"You DRINK this!  You better!"

He was enormously pleased: they were both strung on the same wires.

Again, he was beyond all reason.  Extravagantly mad, he built roaring fires in his sitting-room, drenching the leaping fire with a can of oil; spitting exultantly into the answering roar, and striking up, until he was exhausted, a profane chant, set to a few recurrent bars of music, which ran, for forty minutes, somewhat like this:
 

     "O-ho--Goddam,
      Goddam, Goddam,
      O-ho--Goddam,
      Goddam--Goddam."
 

--adopting usually the measure by which clock-chimes strike out the hour.

And outside, strung like apes along the wide wires of the fence, Sandy and Fergus Duncan, Seth Tarkinton, sometimes Ben and Grover themselves, joining in the glee of their friends, kept up an answering chant:
 

     "Old man Gant
      Came home drunk!
      Old man Gant
      Came home drunk!"
 

Daisy, from a neighbor's sanctuary, wept in shame and fear.  But Helen, small thin fury, held on relentlessly: presently he would subside into a chair, and receive hot soup and stinging slaps with a grin.  Upstairs Eliza lay, white-faced and watchfully.

So ran the summer by.  The last grapes hung in dried and rotten clusters to the vines; the wind roared distantly; September ended.

One night the dry doctor, Cardiac, said:  "I think we'll be through with this before to-morrow evening."  He departed, leaving in the house a middle-aged country woman.  She was a hard-handed practical nurse.

At eight o'clock Gant returned alone.  The boy Steve had stayed at home for ready dispatch at Eliza's need; for the moment the attention was shifted from the master.

His great voice below, chanting obscenities, carried across the neighborhood: as she heard the sudden wild roar of flame up the chimney, shaking the house in its flight, she called Steve to her side, tensely:  "Son, he'll burn us all up!" she whispered.

They heard a chair fall heavily below, his curse; they heard his heavy reeling stride across the dining-room and up the hall; they heard the sagging creak of the stair-rail as his body swung against it.

"He's coming!" she whispered.  "He's coming!  Lock the door, son!"

The boy locked the door.

"Are you there?" Gant roared, pounding the flimsy door heavily with his great fist.  "Miss Eliza: are you there?" howling at her the ironical title by which he addressed her at moments like this.

And he screamed a sermon of profanity and woven invective:--

"Little did I reck," he began, getting at once into the swing of preposterous rhetoric which he used half furiously, half comically, "little did I reck the day I first saw her eighteen bitter years ago, when she came wriggling around the corner at me like a snake on her belly--[a stock epithet which from repetition was now heart-balm to him]--little did I reck that--that--that it would come to this," he finished lamely.  He waited quietly, in the heavy silence, for some answer, knowing that she lay in her white-faced calm behind the door, and filled with the old choking fury because he knew she would not answer.

"Are you there?  I say, are you there, woman?" he howled, barking his big knuckles in a furious bombardment.

There was nothing but the white living silence.

"Ah me!  Ah me!" he sighed with strong self-pity, then burst into forced snuffling sobs, which furnished a running accompaniment to his denunciation.  "Merciful God!" he wept, "it's fearful, it's awful, it's croo-el.  What have I ever done that God should punish me like this in my old age?"

There was no answer.

"Cynthia!  Cynthia!" he howled suddenly, invoking the memory of his first wife, the gaunt tubercular spinstress whose life, it was said, his conduct had done nothing to prolong, but whom he was fond of supplicating now, realizing the hurt, the anger he caused to Eliza by doing so.  "Cynthia!  O Cynthia!  Look down upon me in my hour of need!  Give me succour!  Give me aid!  Protect me against this fiend out of Hell!"

And he continued, weeping in heavy snuffling burlesque:  "O-boo-hoo-hoo!  Come down and save me, I beg of you, I entreat you, I implore you, or I perish."

Silence answered.

"Ingratitude, more fierce than brutish beasts," Gant resumed, getting off on another track, fruitful with mixed and mangled quotation.  "You will be punished, as sure as there's a just God in heaven.  You will all be punished.  Kick the old man, strike him, throw him out on the street: he's no good any more.  He's no longer able to provide for the family--send him over the hill to the poorhouse.  That's where he belongs.  Rattle his bones over the stones.  Honor thy father that thy days may be long.  Ah, Lord!
 

     "'Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through;
       See what a rent the envious Casca made;
       Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed;
       And, as he plucked his curséd steel away,
       Mark how the blood of César followed it--'"
 

"Jeemy," said Mrs. Duncan at this moment to her husband, "ye'd better go over.  He's loose agin, an' she's wi' chile."

The Scotchman thrust back his chair, moved strongly out of the ordered ritual of his life, and the warm fragrance of new-baked bread.

At the gate, outside Gant's, he found patient Jannadeau, fetched down by Ben.  They spoke matter-of-factly, and hastened up the steps as they heard a crash upstairs, and a woman's cry.  Eliza, in only her night-dress, opened the door.

"Come quick!" she whispered.  "Come quick!"

"By God, I'll kill her," Gant screamed, plunging down the stairs at greater peril to his own life than to any other.  "I'll kill her now, and put an end to my misery."

He had a heavy poker in his hand.  The two men seized him; the burly jeweller took the poker from his hand with quiet strength. "He cut his head on the bed-rail, mama," said Steve descending.  It was true: Gant bled.

"Go for your Uncle Will, son.  Quick!"  He was off like a hound.

"I think he meant it that time," she whispered.

Duncan shut the door against the gaping line of neighbors beyond the gate.

"Ye'll be gettin' a cheel like that, Mrs. Gant."

"Keep him away from me!  Keep him away!" she cried out strongly.

"Aye, I will that!" he answered in quiet Scotch.

She turned to go up the stairs, but on the second step she fell heavily to her knees.  The country nurse, returning from the bathroom, in which she had locked herself, ran to her aid.  She went up slowly then between the woman and Grover.  Outside Ben dropped nimbly from the low eave on to the lily beds: Seth Tarkinton, clinging to fence wires, shouted greetings.

Gant went off docilely, somewhat dazed, between his two guardians: as his huge limbs sprawled brokenly in his rocker, they undressed him.  Helen had already been busy in the kitchen for some time: she appeared now with boiling soup.

Gant's dead eyes lit with recognition as he saw her.

"Why baby," he roared, making a vast maudlin circle with his arms, "how are you?"  She put the soup down; he swept her thin body crushingly against him, brushing her cheek and neck with his stiff-bristled mustache, breathing upon her the foul rank odor of rye whisky.

"Oh, he's cut himself!"  The little girl thought she was going to cry.

"Look what they did to me, baby," he pointed to his wound and whimpered.

Will Pentland, true son of that clan who forgot one another never, and who saw one another only in times of death, pestilence, and terror, came in.

"Good evening, Mr. Pentland," said Duncan.

"Jus' tolable," he said, with his bird-like nod and wink, taking in both men good-naturedly.  He stood in front of the fire, paring meditatively at his blunt nails with a dull knife.  It was his familiar gesture when in company: no one, he felt, could see what you thought about anything, if you pared your nails.

The sight of him drew Gant instantly from his lethargy: he remembered the dissolved partnership; the familiar attitude of Will Pentland, as he stood before the fire, evoked all the markings he so heartily loathed in the clan--its pert complacency, its incessant punning, its success.

"Mountain Grills!" he roared.  "Mountain Grills!  The lowest of the low!  The vilest of the vile!"

"Mr. Gant!  Mr. Gant!" pleaded Jannadeau.

"What's the matter with you, W. O.?" asked Will Pentland, looking up innocently from his fingers.  "Had something to eat that didn't agree with you?"--he winked pertly at Duncan, and went back to his fingers.

"Your miserable old father," howled Gant, "was horsewhipped on the public square for not paying his debts."  This was a purely imaginative insult, which had secured itself as truth, however, in Gant's mind, as had so many other stock epithets, because it gave him heart-cockle satisfaction.

"Horsewhipped upon his public square, was he?"  Will winked again, unable to resist the opening.  "They kept it mighty quiet, didn't they?"  But behind the intense good-humored posture of his face, his eyes were hard.  He pursed his lips meditatively as he worked upon his fingers.
 
"But I'll tell you something about him, W. O.," he continued after a moment, with calm but boding judiciousness.  "He let his wife die a natural death in her own bed.  He didn't try to kill her."

"No, by God!" Gant rejoined.  "He let her starve to death.  If the old woman ever got a square meal in her life she got it under my roof.  There's one thing sure: she could have gone to Hell and back, twice over, before she got it from old Tom Pentland, or any of his sons."

Will Pentland closed his blunt knife and put it in his pocket.

"Old Major Pentland never did an honest day's work in his life," Gant yelled, as a happy afterthought.

"Come now, Mr. Gant!" said Duncan reproachfully.

"Hush!  Hush!" whispered the girl fiercely, coming before him closely with the soup.  She thrust a smoking ladle at his mouth, but he turned his head away to hurl another insult.  She slapped him sharply across the mouth.

"You DRINK this!" she whispered.  And grinning meekly as his eyes rested upon her, he began to swallow soup.

Will Pentland looked at the girl attentively for a moment, then glanced at Duncan and Jannadeau with a nod and wink.  Without saying another word, he left the room, and mounted the stairs.  His sister lay quietly extended on her back.

"How do you feel, Eliza?"  The room was heavy with the rich odor of mellowing pears; an unaccustomed fire of pine sticks burned in the grate: he took up his place before it, and began to pare his nails.

"Nobody knows--nobody knows," she began, bursting quickly into a rapid flow of tears, "what I've been through."  She wiped her eyes in a moment on a corner of the coverlid: her broad powerful nose, founded redly on her white face, was like flame.

"What you got good to eat?" he said, winking at her with a comic gluttony.

"There are some pears in there on the shelf, Will.  I put them there last week to mellow."

He went into the big closet and returned in a moment with a large yellow pear; he came back to the hearth and opened the smaller blade of his knife.

"I'll vow, Will," she said quietly after a moment.  "I've had all I can put up with.  I don't know what's got into him.  But you can bet your bottom dollar I won't stand much more of it.  I know how to shift for myself," she said, nodding her head smartly.  He recognized the tone.

He almost forgot himself:  "See here, Eliza," he began, "if you were thinking of building somewhere, I"--but he recovered himself in time--"I'll make you the best price you can get on the material," he concluded.  He thrust a slice of pear quickly into his mouth.

She pursed her mouth rapidly for some moments.

"No," she said.  "I'm not ready for that yet, Will.  I'll let you know."  The loose wood-coals crumbled on the hearth.

"I'll let you know," she said again.  He clasped his knife and thrust it in a trousers pocket.

"Good night, Eliza," he said.  "I reckon Pett will be in to see you.  I'll tell her you're all right."

He went down the stairs quietly, and let himself out through the front door.  As he descended the tall veranda steps, Duncan and Jannadeau came quietly down the yard from the sitting-room.

"How's W. O.?" he asked.

"Ah, he'll be all right now," said Duncan cheerfully.  "He's fast asleep."

"The sleep of the righteous?" asked Will Pentland with a wink.

The Swiss resented the implied jeer at his Titan.  "It is a gread bitty," began Jannadeau in a low guttural voice, "that Mr. Gant drinks.  With his mind he could go far.  When he's sober a finer man doesn't live."

"When he's sober?" said Will, winking at him in the dark.  "What about when he's asleep."

"He's all right the minute Helen gets hold of him," Mr. Duncan remarked in his rich voice.  "It's wonderful what that little girl can do to him."

"Ah, I tell you!" Jannadeau laughed with guttural pleasure.  "That little girl knows her daddy in and out."

The child sat in the big chair by the waning sitting-room fire: she read until the flames had died to coals--then quietly she shovelled ashes on them.  Gant, fathoms deep in slumber, lay on the smooth leather sofa against the wall.  She had wrapped him well in a blanket; now she put a pillow on a chair and placed his feet on it. He was rank with whisky stench; the window rattled as he snored.

Thus, drowned in oblivion, ran his night; he slept when the great pangs of birth began in Eliza at two o'clock; slept through all the patient pain and care of doctor, nurse, and wife.
 
 

4
 

The baby was, to reverse an epigram, an unconscionable time in getting born; but when Gant finally awoke just after ten o'clock next morning, whimpering from tangled nerves, and the quivering shame of dim remembrance, he heard, as he drank the hot coffee Helen brought to him, a loud, long lungy cry above.

"Oh, my God, my God," he groaned.  And he pointed toward the sound. "Is it a boy or a girl?"

"I haven't seen it yet, papa," Helen answered.  "They won't let usin.  But Doctor Cardiac came out and told us if we were good he might bring us a little boy."

There was a terrific clatter on the tin roof, the scolding countryvoice of the nurse: Steve dropped like a cat from the porch roof to the lily bed outside Gant's window.

"Steve, you damned scoundrel," roared the manor-lord with a momentary return to health, "what in the name of Jesus are you doing?"

The boy was gone over the fence.

"I seen it!  I seen it!" his voice came streaking back.

"I seen it too!" screamed Grover, racing through the room and out again in simple exultancy.

"If I catch you younguns on this roof agin," yelled the country nurse aloft, "I'll take your hide off you."

Gant had been momentarily cheered when he heard that his latest heir was a male; but he walked the length of the room now, making endless plaint.

"Oh my God, my God!  Did this have to be put upon me in my old age? Another mouth to feed!  It's fearful, it's awful, it's croo-el,"and he began to weep affectedly.  Then, realizing presently that noone was near enough to be touched by his sorrow, he paused suddenly and precipitated himself toward the door, crossing the dining-room, and, going up the hall, making loud lament:

"Eliza!  My wife!  Oh, baby, say that you forgive me!"  He went up the stairs, sobbing laboriously.

"Don't you let him in here!" cried the object of this prayersharply with quite remarkable energy.

"Tell him he can't come in now," said Cardiac, in his dry voice, tothe nurse, staring intently at the scales.  "We've nothing but milk to drink, anyway," he added.

Gant was outside.

"Eliza, my wife!  Be merciful, I beg of you.  If I had known--"

"Yes," said the country nurse opening the door rudely, "if the dog hadn't stopped to lift his leg he'd a-caught the rabbit!  You get away from here!"  And she slammed it violently in his face.

He went downstairs with hang-dog head, but he grinned slyly as hethought of the nurse's answer.  He wet his big thumb quickly on his tongue.

"Merciful God!" he said, and grinned.  Then he set up his caged lament.

"I think this will do," said Cardiac, holding up something red, shiny, and puckered by its heels, and smacking it briskly on its rump, to liven it a bit.

The heir apparent had, as a matter of fact, made his debut completely equipped with all appurtenances, dependences, screws, cocks, faucets, hooks, eyes, nails, considered necessary for completeness of appearance, harmony of parts, and unity of effectin this most energetic, driving, and competitive world.  He was thecomplete male in miniature, the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all ages, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of the budding GoldenAge and, what's more, Fortune and her Fairies, not content with well-nigh smothering him with these blessings of time and family saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with glory.

"Well, what are you going to call it?" inquired Dr. Cardiac, referring thus, with shocking and medical coarseness, to this most royal imp.

Eliza was better tuned to cosmic vibrations.  With a full, if inexact, sense of what portended, she gave to Luck's Lad the title of Eugene, a name which, beautifully, means "well born," but which, as any one will be able to testify, does not mean, has never meant, "well bred."
 
 

This chosen incandescence, to whom a name had already been given, and from whose centre most of the events in this chronicle must be seen, was borne in, as we have said, upon the very spear-head of history.  But perhaps, reader, you have already thought of that? You HAVEN'T?  Then let us refresh your historical memory.

By 1900, Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler had almost finished saying the things they were reported as saying, and that Eugene was destined to hear, twenty years later; most of the GreatVictorians had died before the bombardment began; William McKinley was up for a second term, the crew of the Spanish navy had returnedhome in a tugboat.

Abroad, grim old Britain had sent her ultimatum to the South Africans in 1899; Lord Roberts ("Little Bobs," as he was known affectionately to his men) was appointed commander-in-chief after several British reverses; the Transvaal Republic was annexed to Great Britain in September 1900, and formally annexed in the month of Eugene's birth.  There was a Peace Conference two years later.

Meanwhile, what was going on in Japan?  I will tell you: the firstparliament met in 1891, there was a war with China in 1894-95, Formosa was ceded in 1895.  Moreover, Warren Hastings had been impeached and tried; Pope Sixtus the Fifth had come and gone; Dalmatia had been subdued by Tiberius; Belisarius had been blinded by Justinian; the wedding and funeral ceremonies of Wilhelmina Charlotte Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach and King George the Second had been solemnized, while those of Berengaria of Navarre to King Richard the First were hardly more than a distant memory; Diocletian, Charles the Fifth, and Victor Amadeus of Sardinia, had all abdicated their thrones; Henry James Pye, Poet Laureate of England, was with his fathers; Cassiodorus, Quintilian, Juvenal, Lucretius, Martial, and Albert the Bear of Brandenburg had answered the last great roll-call; the battles of Antietam, Smolensko, Drumclog, Inkerman, Marengo, Cawnpore, Killiecrankie, Sluys, Actium, Lepanto, Tewkesbury, Brandywine, Hohenlinden, Salamis, and the Wilderness had been fought both by land and by sea; Hippias had been expelled from Athens by the AlCésaré and the Lacedé Simonides, Menander, Strabo, Moschus, and Pindar had closed their earthly accounts; the beatified Eusebius, Athanasius, and Chrysostom had gone to their celestial niches; Menkaura had built the Third Pyramid; Aspalta had led victorious armies; the remote Bermudas, Malta, and the Windward Isles had been colonized.  In addition, the Spanish Armada had been defeated; President Abraham Lincoln assassinated, and the Halifax Fisheries Award had given $5,500,000 to Britain for twelve-year fishing privileges.  Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.
 
 

Such was the state of history when Eugene entered the theatre of human events in 1900.

We would give willingly some more extended account of the world his life touched during the first few years, showing, in all its perspectives and implications, the meaning of life as seen from the floor, or from the crib, but these impressions are suppressed when they might be told, not through any fault of intelligence, but through lack of muscular control, the powers of articulation,and because of the recurring waves of loneliness,  weariness,depression, aberration, and utter blankness which war against the order in a man's mind until he is three or four years old.

Lying darkly in his crib, washed, powdered, and fed, he thought quietly of many things before he dropped off to sleep?the interminable sleep that obliterated time for him, and that gave him a sense of having missed forever a day of sparkling life.  At these moments, he was heartsick with weary horror as he thought of the discomfort, weakness, dumbness, the infinite misunderstanding he would have to endure before he gained even physical freedom.  He grew sick as he thought of the weary distance before him, the lack of co-ordination of the centres of control, the undisciplined and rowdy bladder, the helpless exhibition he was forced to give in the company of his sniggering, pawing brothers and sisters, dried, cleaned, revolved before them.

He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his mind was caught in a net because he had no words to work with.  He had not even names for the objects around him: he probably defined them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some mangling of the speech that roared about him, to which he listened intently day after day, realizing that his first escape must come through language.  He indicated as quickly as he could his ravenous hunger for pictures and print: sometimes they brought him great books profusely illustrated, and he bribed them desperately by cooing, shrieking with delight, making extravagant faces, and doing all the other things they understood in him.  He wondered savagely how they would feel if they knew what he really thought: at other times he had to laugh at them and at their whole preposterous comedy of errors as they pranced around for his amusement, waggled their heads at him, tickled him roughly, making him squeal violently against his will.  The situation was at once profoundly annoying and comic: as he sat in the middle of the floor and watched them enter, seeing the face of each transformed by a foolish leer, and hearing their voices become absurd and sentimental whenever they addressed him, speaking to him words which he did not yet understand, but which he saw they were mangling in the preposterous hope of rendering intelligible that which has been previously mutilated, he had to laugh at the fools, in spite of his vexation.

And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages.  Lost.  He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us.  Never, never, never, never, never.

He saw that the great figures that came and went about him, the huge leering heads that bent hideously into his crib, the great voices that rolled incoherently above him, had for one another not much greater understanding than they had for him: that even their speech, their entire fluidity and ease of movement were but meagre communicants of their thought or feeling, and served often not to promote understanding, but to deepen and widen strife, bitterness, and prejudice.

His brain went black with terror.  He saw himself an inarticulate stranger, an amusing little clown, to be dandled and nursed by these enormous and remote figures.  He had been sent from one mystery into another: somewhere within or without his consciousness he heard a great bell ringing faintly, as if it sounded undersea,and as he listened, the ghost of memory walked through his mind, and for a moment he felt that he had almost recovered what he had lost.

Sometimes, pulling himself abreast the high walls of his crib, he glanced down dizzily at the patterns of the carpet far below; the world swam in and out of his mind like a tide, now printing its whole sharp picture for an instant, again ebbing out dimly and sleepily, while he pieced the puzzle of sensation together bit by bit, seeing only the dancing fire-sheen on the poker, hearing then the elfin clucking of the sun-warm hens, somewhere beyond in a distant and enchanted world.  Again, he heard their morning-wakeful crowing dear and loud, suddenly becoming a substantial and alert citizen of life; or, going and coming in alternate waves of fantasy and fact, he heard the loud, faery thunder of Daisy's parlor music. Years later, he heard it again, a door opened in his brain: she told him it was Paderewski's "Minuet."

His crib was a great woven basket, well mattressed and pillowed within; as he grew stronger, he was able to perform extraordinary acrobatics in it, tumbling, making a hoop of his body, and drawing himself easily and strongly erect: with patient effort he could worm over the side on to the floor.  There, he would crawl on the vast design of the carpet, his eyes intent upon great wooden blocks piled chaotically on the floor.  They had belonged to his brother Luke: all the letters of the alphabet, in bright multi-colored carving, were engraved upon them.

Holding them clumsily in his tiny hands, he studied for hours the symbols of speech, knowing that he had here the stones of the temple of language, and striving desperately to find the key that would draw order and intelligence from this anarchy.  Great voices soared far above him, vast shapes came and went, lifting him to dizzy heights, depositing him with exhaustless strength.  The bell rang under the sea.

One day when the opulent Southern Spring had richly unfolded, when the spongy black earth of the yard was covered with sudden, tender grass, and wet blossoms, the great cherry tree seethed slowly with a massive gem of amber sap, and the cherries hung ripening in prodigal clusters, Gant took him from his basket in the sun on the high front porch, and went with him around the house by the lily bed, taking him back under trees singing with hidden birds, to the far end of the lot.

Here the earth was unshaded, dry, clotted by the plough.  Eugene knew by the stillness that it was Sunday: against the high wire fence there was the heavy smell of hot dock-weed.  On the other side, Swain's cow was wrenching the cool coarse grass, lifting her head from time to time, and singing in her strong deep voice her Sunday exuberance.  In the warm washed air, Eugene heard with absolute clearness all the brisk backyard sounds of the neighborhood, he became acutely aware of the whole scene, and as Swain's cow sang out again, he felt the flooded gates in him swing open.  He answered "Moo!" phrasing the sound timidly but perfectly, and repeating it confidently in a moment when the cow answered.

Gant's delight was boundless.  He turned and raced back toward the house at the full stride of his legs.  And as he went, he nuzzled his stiff mustache into Eugene's tender neck, mooing industriously and always getting an answer.

"Lord a' mercy!" cried Eliza, looking from the kitchen window as he raced down the yard with breakneck strides, "He'll kill that child yet."

And as he rushed up the kitchen steps--all the house, save the upper side was off the ground--she came out on the little latticed veranda, her hands floury, her nose stove-red.

"Why, what on earth are you doing, Mr. Gant?"

"Moo-o-o!  He said 'Moo-o-o!'  Yes he did!"  Gant spoke to Eugene rather than to Eliza.

Eugene answered him immediately: he felt it was all rather silly, and he saw he would be kept busy imitating Swain's cow for several days, but he was tremendously excited, nevertheless, feeling now that that wall had been breached.

Eliza was likewise thrilled, but her way of showing it was to turn back to the stove, hiding her pleasure, and saying:  "I'll vow, Mr. Gant.  I never saw such an idiot with a child."

Later, Eugene lay wakefully in his basket on the sitting-room floor, watching the smoking dishes go by in the eager hands of the combined family, for Eliza at this time cooked magnificently, and a Sunday dinner was something to remember.  For two hours since their return from church, the little boys had been prowling hungrily around the kitchen: Ben, frowning proudly, kept his dignity outside the screen, making excursions frequently through the house to watch the progress of cookery; Grover came in and watched with frank interest until he was driven out; Luke, his broad humorous little face split by a wide exultant smile, rushed through the house, squealing exultantly:
 

     "Weenie, weedie, weeky,
      Weenie, weedie, weeky,
      Weenie, weedie, weeky,
      Wee, Wee, Wee."
 

He had heard Daisy and Josephine Brown doing César together, and his chant was his own interpretation of César brief boast: "Veni, Vidi, Vici."

As Eugene lay in his crib, he heard through the open door the dining-room clatter, the shrill excitement of the boys, the clangor of steel and knife as Gant prepared to carve the roast, the reception of the morning's great event told over and over without variation, but with increasing zest.

"Soon," he thought, as the heavy food fragrance floated in to him, "I shall be in there with them."  And he thought lusciously of mysterious and succulent food.

All through the afternoon upon the veranda Gant told the story, summoning the neighbors and calling upon Eugene to perform.  Eugene heard clearly all that was said that day: he was not able to answer, but he saw now that speech was imminent.

Thus, later, he saw the first two years of his life in brilliant and isolated flashes.  His second Christmas he remembered vaguely as a period of great festivity: it accustomed him to the third when it came.  With the miraculous habitude children acquire, it seemed that he had known Christmas forever.

He was conscious of sunlight, rain, the leaping fire, his crib, the grim jail of winter: the second Spring, one warm day, he saw Daisy go off to school up the hill: it was the end of the noon recess, she had been home for lunch.  She went to Miss Ford's School For Girls; it was a red brick residence on the corner at the top of the steep hill: he watched her join Eleanor Duncan just below.  Her hair was braided in two long hanks down her back: she was demure, shy, maidenly, a timid and blushing girl; but he feared her attentions to him, for she bathed him furiously, wreaking whatever was explosive and violent beneath her placidity upon his hide.  She really scrubbed him almost raw.  He howled piteously.  As she climbed the hill, he remembered her.  He saw she was the same person.

He passed his second birthday with the light growing.  Early in the following Spring he became conscious of a period of neglect: the house was deadly quiet; Gant's voice no longer roared around him, the boys came and went on stealthy feet.  Luke, the fourth to be attacked by the pestilence, was desperately ill with typhoid: Eugene was intrusted almost completely to a young slovenly negress. He remembered vividly her tall slattern figure, her slapping lazy feet, her dirty white stockings, and her strong smell, black and funky.  One day she took him out on the side porch to play: it was a young Spring morning, bursting moistly from the thaw of the earth.  The negress sat upon the side-steps and yawned while he grubbed in his dirty little dress along the path, and upon the lily bed.  Presently, she went to sleep against the post.  Craftily, he wormed his body through the wide wires of the fence, into the cindered alley that wound back to the Swains', and up to the ornate wooden palace of the Hilliards.

They were among the highest aristocracy of the town: they had come from South Carolina, "near Charleston," which in itself gave them at that time a commanding prestige.  The house, a huge gabled structure of walnut-brown, which gave the effect of many angles and no plan, was built upon the top of the hill which sloped down to Gant's; the level ground on top before the house was tenanted by lordly towering oaks.  Below, along the cindered alley, flanking Gant's orchard, there were high singing pines.  Mr. Hilliard's house was considered one of the finest residences in the town.  The neighborhood was middle-class, but the situation was magnificent, and the Hilliards carried on in the grand manner, lords of the castle who descended into the village, but did not mix with its people.  All of their friends arrived by carriage from afar; every day punctually at two o'clock, an old liveried negro drove briskly up the winding alley behind two sleek brown mares, waiting under the carriage entrance at the side until his master and mistress should come out.  Five minutes later they drove out, and were gone for two hours.

This ritual, followed closely from his father's sitting-room window, fascinated Eugene for years after: the people and the life next door were crudely and symbolically above him.

He felt a great satisfaction that morning in being at length in Hilliard's alley: it was his first escape, and it had been made into a forbidden and enhaloed region.  He grubbed about in the middle of the road, disappointed in the quality of the cinders. The booming courthouse bell struck eleven times.

Now, exactly at three minutes after eleven every morning, so unfailing and perfect was the order of this great establishment, a huge gray horse trotted slowly up the hill, drawing behind him a heavy grocery wagon, musty, spicy, odorous with the fine smells of grocery-stores and occupied exclusively by the Hilliard victuals, and the driver, a young negro man who, at three minutes past eleven every morning, according to ritual, was comfortably asleep. Nothing could possibly go wrong: the horse could not have been tempted even by a pavement of oats to betray his sacred mission. Accordingly he trotted heavily up the hill, turned ponderously into the alley ruts, and advanced heavily until, feeling the great circle of his right forefoot obstructed by some foreign particle, he looked down and slowly removed his hoof from what had recently been the face of a little boy.

Then, with his legs carefully straddled, he moved on, drawing the wagon beyond Eugene's body, and stopping.  Both negroes awoke simultaneously; there were cries within the house, and Eliza and Gant rushed out of doors.  The frightened negro lifted Eugene, who was quite unconscious of his sudden return to the stage, into the burly arms of Doctor McGuire, who cursed the driver eloquently. His thick sensitive fingers moved swiftly around the bloody little face and found no fracture.

He nodded briefly at their desperate faces:  "He's being saved for Congress," said he.  "You have bad luck and hard heads, W. O."

"You Goddamned black scoundrel," yelled the master, turning with violent relief upon the driver.  "I'll put you behind the bars for this."  He thrust his great length of hands through the fence and choked the negro, who mumbled prayers, and had no idea what was happening to him, save that he was the centre of a wild commotion.

The negro girl, blubbering, had fled inward.

"This looks worse than it is," observed Dr. McGuire, laying the hero upon the lounge.  "Some hot water, please."  Nevertheless, it took two hours to bring him round.  Every one spoke highly of the horse.

"He had more sense than the nigger," said Gant, wetting his thumb.

But all this, as Eliza knew in her heart, was part of the plan of the Dark Sisters.  The entrails had been woven and read long since: the frail shell of skull which guarded life, and which might have been crushed as easily as a man breaks an egg, was kept intact. But Eugene carried the mark of the centaur for many years, though the light had to fall properly to reveal it.

When he was older, he wondered sometimes if the Hilliards had issued from their high place when he had so impiously disturbed the order of the manor.  He never asked, but he thought not: he imagined them, at the most, as standing superbly by a drawn curtain, not quite certain what had happened, but feeling that it was something unpleasant, with blood in it.

Shortly after this, Mr. Hilliard had a "No-Trespassing" sign staked up in the lot.
 
 

5
 

Luke got well after cursing doctor, nurse, and family for several weeks: it was stubborn typhoid.

Gant was now head of a numerous family, which rose ladderwise from infancy to the adolescent Steve--who was eighteen--and the maidenly Daisy.  She was seventeen and in her last year at high school.  She was a timid, sensitive girl, looking like her name?Daisy-ish industrious and thorough in her studies: her teachers thought her one of the best students they had ever known.  She had very little fire, or denial in her; she responded dutifully to instructions; she gave back what had been given to her.  She played the piano without any passionate feeling for the music; but she rendered it honestly with a beautiful rippling touch.  And she practised hours at a time.

It was apparent, however, that Steve was lacking in scholarship.