Look Homeward, Angel Read Online

They looked at each other a moment with that clear wonder by which children accept miracles, and they never spoke of it again.

"That's writin' now," said Max.  But they kept the mystery caged between them.

Eugene thought of this event later; always he could feel the opening gates in him, the plunge of the tide, the escape; out it happened like this one day at once.  Still midget-near the live pelt of the earth, he saw many things that he kept in fearful secret, knowing that revelation would be punished with ridicule. One Saturday in Spring, he stopped with Max Isaacs above a deep pit in Central Avenue where city workmen were patching a broken watermain.  The clay walls of their pit were much higher than their heads; behind their huddled backs there was a wide fissure, a window in the earth which opened on some dark subterranean passage. And as the boys looked, they gripped each other suddenly, for past the fissure slid the flat head of an enormous serpent; passed, and was followed by a scaled body as thick as a man's; the monster slid endlessly on into the deep earth and vanished behind the working and unwitting men.  Shaken with fear they went away, they talked about it then and later in hushed voices, but they never revealed it.

He fell now easily into the School-Ritual; he choked his breakfast with his brothers every morning, gulped scalding coffee, and rushed off at the ominous warning of the final bell, clutching a hot paper-bag of food, already spattered hungrily with grease blots. He pounded along after his brothers, his heart hammering in his throat with excitement and, as he raced into the hollow at the foot of the Central Avenue hill, grew weak with nervousness, as he heard the bell ringing itself to sleep, jerking the slatting rope about in its dying echoes.

Ben, grinning evilly and scowling, would thrust his hand against the small of his back and rush him screaming, but unable to resist the plunging force behind, up the hill.

In a gasping voice he would sing the morning song, coming in pantingly on the last round of a song the quartered class took up at intervals:
 

     "--Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
      Life is but a dream."
 

Or, in the frosty Autumn mornings:
 

     "Waken, lords and ladies gay,
      On the mountain dawns the day."
 

Or the Contest of the West Wind and the South Wind.  Or the Miller's Song:
 

     "I envy no man, no, not I,
      And no one envies me."
 

He read quickly and easily; he spelled accurately.  He did well with figures.  But he hated the drawing lesson, although the boxes of crayons and paints delighted him.  Sometimes the class would go into the woods, returning with specimens of flowers and leaves?the bitten flaming red of the maple, the brown pine comb, the brown oak leaf.  These they would paint; or in Spring a spray of cherry-blossom, a tulip.  He sat reverently before the authority of the plump woman who first taught him: he was terrified lest he do anything common or mean in her eyes.

The class squirmed: the little boys invented tortures or scrawled obscenities to the little girls.  And the wilder and more indolent seized every chance of leaving the room, thus:  "Teacher, may I be excused?"  And they would go out into the lavatory, sniggering and dawdling about restlessly.

He could never say it, because it would reveal to her the shame of nature.

Once, deathly sick, but locked in silence and dumb nausea, he had vomited finally upon his cupped hands.

He feared and hated the recess periods, trembled before the brawling confusion of the mob and the playground, but his pride forbade that he skulk within, or secrete himself away from them. Eliza had allowed his hair to grow long; she wound it around her finger every morning into fat Fauntleroy curls; the agony and humiliation it caused him was horrible, but she was unable or unwilling to understand it, and mouth-pursingly thoughtful and stubborn to all solicitation to cut it.  She had the garnered curls of Ben, Grover, and Luke stored in tiny boxes: she wept sometimes when she saw Eugene's, they were the symbol of his babyhood to her, and her sad heart, so keen in marking departures, refused to surrender them.  Even when his thick locks had become the luxuriant colony of Harry Tarkinton's lice, she would not cut them: she held his squirming body between her knees twice a day and ploughed his scalp with a fine-toothed comb.

As he made to her his trembling passionate entreaties, she would smile with an affectation of patronizing humor, make a bantering humming noise in her throat, and say:  "Why, say--you can't grow up yet.  You're my baby."  Suddenly baffled before the yielding inflexibility of her nature, which could be driven to action only after incessant and maddening prods, Eugene, screaming-mad with helpless fury, would understand the cause of Gant's frenzy.

At school, he was a desperate and hunted little animal.  The herd, infallible in its banded instinct, knew at once that a stranger had been thrust into it, and it was merciless at the hunt.  As the lunch-time recess came, Eugene, clutching his big grease-stained bag, would rush for the playground pursued by the yelping pack. The leaders, two or three big louts of advanced age and deficient mentality, pressed closely about him, calling out suppliantly, "You know me, 'Gene.  You know me"; and still racing for the far end, he would open his bag and hurl to them one of his big sandwiches, which stayed them for a moment, as they fell upon its possessor and clawed it to fragments, but they were upon him in a moment more with the same yelping insistence, hunting him down into a corner of the fence, and pressing in with outstretched paws and wild entreaty.  He would give them what he had, sometimes with a momentary gust of fury, tearing away from a greedy hand half of a sandwich and devouring it.  When they saw he had no more to give, they went away.

The great fantasy of Christmas still kept him devout.  Gant was his unwearied comrade; night after night in the late autumn and early winter, he would scrawl petitions to Santa Claus, listing interminably the gifts he wanted most, and transmitting each, with perfect trust, to the roaring chimney.  As the flame took the paper from his hand and blew its charred ghost away with a howl, Gant would rush with him to the window, point to the stormy northern sky, and say:  "There it goes!  Do you see it?"

He saw it.  He saw his prayer, winged with the stanch convoying winds, borne northward to the rimed quaint gabels of Toyland, into frozen merry Elfland; heard the tiny silver anvil-tones, the deep-lunged laughter of the little men, the stabled cries of aerial reindeer.  Gant saw and heard them, too.

He was liberally dowered with bright-painted gimcracks upon Christmas Day; and in his heart he hated those who advocated "useful" gifts.  Gant bought him wagons, sleds, drums, horns?best of all, a small fireman's ladder wagon: it was the wonder, and finally the curse, of the neighborhood.  During his unoccupied hours, he lived for months in the cellar with Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs: they strung the ladders on wires above the wagon, so that, at a touch, they would fall in accurate stacks.  They would pretend to doze in their quarters, as firemen do, would leap to action suddenly, as one of them imitated the warning bell:  "Clang-a-lang-a-lang."  Then, quite beyond reason, Harry and Max yoked in a plunging team, Eugene in the driver's seat, they would leap out through the narrow door, gallop perilously to a neighbor's house, throw up ladders, open windows, effect entries, extinguish imaginary flames, and return oblivious to the shrieking indictment of the housewife.

For months they lived completely in this fantasy, modelling their actions on those of the town's firemen, and on Jannadeau, who was the assistant chief, child-proud over it: they had seen him, at the sound of the alarm, rush like a madman from his window in Gant's shop, leaving the spattered fragments of a watch upon his desk, and arriving at his duty just as the great wagon hurtled at full speed into the Square.  The firemen loved to stage the most daring exhibitions before the gaping citizenry; helmeted magnificently, they hung from the wagons in gymnastic postures, one man holding another over rushing space, while number two caught in mid-air the diving heavy body of the Swiss, who deliberately risked his neck as he leaped for the rail.  Thus, for one rapturous moment they stood poised triangularly over rocking speed: the spine of the town was chilled ecstatically.

And when the bells broke through the drowning winds at night, his demon rushed into his heart, bursting all cords that held him to the earth, promising him isolation and dominance over sea and land, inhabitation of the dark: he looked down on the whirling disk of dark forest and field, sloped over singing pines upon a huddled town, and carried its grated guarded fires against its own roofs, swerving and pouncing with his haltered storm upon their doomed and flaming walls, howling with thin laughter above their stricken heads and, fiend-voiced, calling down the bullet wind.

Or, holding in fief the storm and the dark and all the black powers of wizardry, to gaze, ghoul-visaged, through a storm-lashed windowpane, briefly planting unutterable horror in grouped and sheltered life; or, no more than a man, but holding, in your more than mortal heart, demoniac ecstasy, to crouch against a lonely storm-swept house, to gaze obliquely through the streaming glass upon a woman, or your enemy, and while still exulting in your victorious dark all-seeing isolation, to feel a touch upon your shoulder, and to look, haunter-haunted, pursuer-pursued, into the green corrupted hell-face of malignant death.
 
 

Yes, and a world of bedded women, fair glimmers in the panting darkness, while winds shook the house, and he arrived across the world between the fragrant columns of delight.  The great mystery of their bodies groped darkly in him, but he had found there, at the school, instructors to desire--the hair-faced louts of Doubleday.  They struck fear and wonder into the hearts of the smaller, gentler boys, for Doubleday was that infested region of the town-grown mountaineers, who lurked viciously through the night, and came at Hallowe'en to break the skulls of other gangs in rock warfare.

There was a boy named Otto Krause, a cheese-nosed, hair-faced, inch-browed German boy, lean and swift in the legs, hoarse-voiced and full of idiot laughter, who showed him the gardens of delight. There was a girl named Bessie Barnes, a black-haired, tall, bold-figured girl of thirteen years who acted as model.  Otto Krause was fourteen, Eugene was eight: they were in the third grade.  The German boy sat next to him, drew obscenities on his books, and passed his furtive scrawled indecencies across the aisle to Bessie.

And the nymph would answer with a lewd face, and a contemptuous blow against her shapely lifted buttock, a gesture which Otto considered as good as a promise, and which tickled him into hoarse sniggers.
 
 

Bessie walked in his brain.

In their furtive moments at school, he and Otto amused each other by drawing obscenities in their geographies, bestowing on the representations of tropical natives sagging breasts and huge organs.  And they composed on tiny scraps of paper dirty little rhymes about teachers and principal.  Their teacher was a gaunt red-faced spinster, with fierce glaring eyes: Eugene thought always of the soldier and the tinder and the dogs he had to pass, with eyes like saucers, windmills, the moon.  Her name was Miss Groody, and Otto, with the idiot vulgarity of little boys, wrote of her:

     "Old Miss Groody
      Has Good Toody."
 

And Eugene, directing his fire against the principal, a plump, soft, foppish young man whose name was Armstrong, and who wore always a carnation in his coat, which, after whipping an offending boy, he was accustomed to hold delicately between his fingers, sniffing it with sensitive nostrils and lidded eyes, produced in the first rich joy of  creation scores of rhymes, all to the discredit of Armstrong, his parentage, and his relations with Miss Groody.
 
He was obsessed; he spent the entire day now in the composition of poetry--all bawdy variations of a theme.  And he could not bring himself to destroy them.  His desk was stuffed with tiny crumpled balls of writing: one day, during the geography lesson, the woman caught him.  His bones turned to rubber as she bore down on him glaring, and took from the concealing pages of his book the paper on which he had been writing.  At recess she cleared his desk, read the sequence, and, with boding quietness, bade him to see the principal after school.

"What does it mean?  What do you reckon it means?" he whispered dryly to Otto Krause.

"Oh, you'll ketch it now!" said Otto Krause, laughing hoarsely.

And the class tormented him slily, rubbing their bottoms when they caught his eye, and making grimaces of agony.

He was sick through to his guts.  He had a loathing of physical humiliation which was not based on fear, from which he never recovered.  The brazen insensitive spirit of the boys he envied but could not imitate: they would howl loudly under punishment, in order to mitigate it, and they were vaingloriously unconcerned ten minutes later.  He did not think he could endure being whipped by the fat young man with the flower: at three o'clock, white-faced, he went to the man's office.

Armstrong, slit-eyed and thin lipped, began to swish the cane he held in his hand through the air as Eugene entered.  Behind him, smoothed and flatted on his desk, was stacked the damning pile of rhymed insult.

"Did you write these?" he demanded, narrowing his eyes to little points in order to frighten his victim.

"Yes," said Eugene.

The principal cut the air again with his cane.  He had visited Daisy several times, had eaten at Gant's plenteous board.  He remembered very well.

"What have I ever done to you, son, that you should feel this way?" he said, with a sudden change of whining magnanimity.

"N-n-nothing," said Eugene.

"Do you think you'll ever do it again?" said he, becoming ominous again.

"N-no, sir," Eugene answered, in the ghost of a voice.

"All right," said God, grandly, throwing away his cane.  "You can go."

His legs found themselves only when he had reached the playground.
 
 

But oh, the brave autumn and the songs they sang; harvest, and the painting of a leaf; and "half-holiday to-day"; and "up in the air so high"; and the other one about the train--"the stations go whistling past"; the mellow days, the opening gates of desire, the smoky sun, the dropping patter of dead leaves.

"Every little snowflake is different in shape from every other."

"Good grashus!  ALL of them, Miss Pratt?"

"All of the little snowflakes that ever were.  Nature never repeats herself."

"Aw!"
 
 

Ben's beard was growing: he had shaved.  He tumbled Eugene on the leather sofa, played with him for hours, scraped his stubble chin against the soft face of his brother.  Eugene shrieked.

"When you can do that you'll be a man," said Ben.

And he sang softly, in his thin humming ghost's voice:
 

     "The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse door,
      He pecked and he pecked till his pecker got sore.
      The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse bell,
      He pecked and he pecked till his pecker got well."
 

They laughed--Eugene with rocking throatiness, Ben with a quiet snicker.  He had aqueous gray eyes, and a sallow bumpy skin.  His head was shapely, the forehead high and bony.  His hair was crisp, maple-brown.  Below his perpetual scowl, his face was small, converging to a point: his extraordinarily sensitive mouth smiled briefly, flickeringly, inwardly--like a flash of light along a blade.  And he always gave a cuff instead of a caress: he was full of pride and tenderness.
 
 

9
 

Yes, and in that month when Prosperpine comes back, and Ceres' dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles; and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

And life unscales its rusty weathered pelt, and earth wells out in tender exhaustless strength, and the cup of a man's heart runs over with dateless expectancy, tongueless promise, indefinable desire. Something gathers in the throat, something blinds him in the eyes, and faint and valorous horns sound through the earth.

The little girls trot pigtailed primly on their dutiful way to school; but the young gods loiter: they hear the reed, the oatenstop, the running goathoofs in the spongy wood, here, there, everywhere: they dawdle, listen, fleetest when they wait, go vaguely on to their one fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient rumor and they cannot find the way.  All of the gods have lost the way.
 
 

But they guarded what they had against the barbarians.  Eugene, Max, and Harry ruled their little neighborhood: they made war upon the negroes and the Jews, who amused them, and upon the Pigtail Alley people, whom they hated and despised.  Catlike they prowled about in the dark promise of night, sitting at times upon a wall in the exciting glare of the corner lamp, which flared gaseously, winking noisily from time to time.

Or, crouched in the concealing shrubbery of Gant's yard, they waited for romantic negro couples climbing homewards, jerking by a cord, as their victims came upon the spot, a stuffed black snake-appearing stocking.  And the dark was shrill with laughter as the loud rich comic voices stammered, stopped, and screamed.

Or they stoned the cycling black boy of the markets, as he swerved down gracefully into an alley.  Nor did they hate them: clowns are black.  They had learned, as well, that it was proper to cuff these people kindly, curse them cheerfully, feed them magnanimously.  Men are kind to a faithful wagging dog, but he must not walk habitually upon two legs.  They knew that they must "take nothin' off a nigger," and that the beginnings of argument could best be scotched with a club and a broken head.  Only, you couldn't break a nigger's head.

They spat joyously upon the Jews.  Drown a Jew and hit a nigger.

The boys would wait on the Jews, follow them home shouting "Goose Grease!  Goose Grease!" which, they were convinced, was the chief staple of Semitic diet; or with the blind acceptance of little boys of some traditional, or mangled, or imaginary catchword of abuse, they would yell after their muttering and tormented victim: "Veeshamadye Veeshamadye!" confident that they had pronounced the most unspeakable, to Jewish ears, of affronts.

Eugene had no interest in pogroms, but it was a fetich with Max. The chief object of their torture was a little furtive-faced boy, whose name was Isaac Lipinski.  They pounced cattishly at him when he appeared, harried him down alleys, over fences, across yards, into barns, stables, and his own house; he moved with amazing speed and stealth, escaping fantastically, teasing them to the pursuit, thumbing his fingers at them, and grinning with wide Kike constant derision.
 
Or, steeped catlike in the wickedness of darkness, adrift in the brooding promise of the neighborhood, they would cluster silently under a Jew's home, grouped in a sniggering huddle as they listened to the rich excited voices, the throaty accentuation of the women; or convulsed at the hysterical quarrels which shook the Jew-walls almost nightly.
 
Once, shrieking with laughter, they followed a running fight through the streets between a young Jew and his father-in-law, in which each was pursued and pummelled, or pursuing and pummelling; and on the day when Louis Greenberg, a pale Jew returned from college, had killed himself by drinking carbolic acid, they stood curiously outside the dingy wailing house, shaken by sudden glee as they saw his father, a bearded orthodox old Jew, clothed in rusty, greasy black, and wearing a scarred derby, approach running up the hill to his home, shaking his hands in the air, and wailing rhythmically:
 

     "Oi, yoi yoi yoi yoi,
      Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi,
      Oi yoi yoi yoi yoi."
 

But the whiteheaded children of Pigtail Alley they hated without humor, without any mitigation of a most bitter and alienate hate. Pigtail Alley was a muddy rut which sprawled down hill off the lower end of Woodson Street, ending vaguely in the rank stench of a green-scummed marsh bottom.  On one side of this vile road there was a ragged line of whitewashed shacks, inhabited by poor whites, whose children were almost always whitehaired, and who, snuff-mouthed bony women, and tobacco-jawed men, sprawled stupidly in the sun-stench of their rude wide-boarded porches.  At night a smoky lamp burned dismally in the dark interiors, there was a smell of frying cookery and of unclean flesh, strident rasping shrews' cries, the drunken maniacal mountain drawl of men: a scream and a curse.

Once, in the cherry time, when Gant's great White Wax was loaded with its clusters, and the pliant and enduring boughs were dotted thickly by the neighbor children, Jews and Gentiles alike, who had been herded under the captaincy of Luke, and picked one quart of every four for their own, one of these whitehaired children had come doubtfully, mournfully, up the yard.

"All right, son," Luke, who was fifteen, called out in his hearty voice.  "Get a basket and come on up."

The child came up the gummed trunk like a cat: Eugene rocked from the slender spiral topmost bough, exulting in his lightness, the tree's resilient strength, and the great morning-clarion fragrant backyard world.  The Alley picked his bucket with miraculous speed, skinned spryly to the ground and emptied it into the heaping pan, and was halfway up the trunk again when his gaunt mother streaked up the yard toward him.

"You, Reese," she shrilled, "what're you doin' hyar?"  She jerked him roughly to the ground and cut across his brown legs with a switch.  He howled.

"You git along home," she ordered, giving him another cut.

She drove him along, upbraiding him in her harsh voice, cutting him sharply with the switch from moment to moment when, desperate with pride and humiliation, he slackened his retreat to a slow walk, or balked mulishly, howling again, and speeding a few paces on his short legs, when cut by the switch.

The treed boys sniggered, but Eugene, who had seen the pain upon the gaunt hard face of the woman, the furious pity of her blazing eyes, felt something open and burst stabbingly in him like an abscess.

"He left his cherries," he said to his brother.

Or, they jeered Loney Shytle, who left a stale sharp odor as she passed, her dirty dun hair covered in a wide plumed hat, her heels out of her dirty white stockings.  She had caused incestuous rivalry between her father and her brother, she bore the scar of her mother's razor in her neck, and she walked, in her rundown shoes, with the wide stiff-legged hobble of disease.

One day as they pressed round a trapped alley boy, who backed slowly, fearfully, resentfully into a reeking wall, Willie Isaacs, the younger brother of Max, pointing with sniggering laughter, said:

"His mother takes in washin'."

And then, almost bent double by a soaring touch of humor, he added:

"His mother takes in washin' from an ole nigger."

Harry Tarkinton laughed hoarsely.  Eugene turned away indefinitely, craned his neck convulsively, lifted one foot sharply from the  ground.

"She don't!" he screamed suddenly into their astounded faces.  "She don't!"
 
 

Harry Tarkinton's parents were English.  He was three or four years older than Eugene, an awkward, heavy, muscular boy, smelling always of his father's paints and oils, coarse-featured, meaty sloping jaw and a thick catarrhal look about his nose and mouth.  He was the breaker of visions; the proposer of iniquities.  In the cool thick evening grass of Gant's yard one sunset, he smashed forever, as they lay there talking, the enchantment of Christmas; but he brought in its stead the smell of paint, the gaseous ripstink, the unadorned, sweating, and imageless passion of the vulgar.  But Eugene couldn't follow his barn-yard passion: the strong hen-stench, the Tarkintonian paint-smell, and the rank-mired branch-smell which mined under the filthy shambles of the backyard, stopped him.

Once, in the deserted afternoon, as he and Harry plundered through the vacant upper floor of Gant's house, they found a half-filled bottle of hair-restorer.

"Have you any hairs on your belly?" said Harry.

Eugene hemmed; hinted timidly at shagginess; confessed.  They undid their buttons, smeared oily hands upon their bellies, and waited through rapturous days for the golden fleece.

"Hair makes a man of you," said Harry.

More often, as Spring deepened, he went now to Gant's shop on the Square.  He loved the scene: the bright hill-cooled sun, the blown sheets of spray from the fountain, the garrulous firemen emerging from the winter, the lazy sprawling draymen on his father's wooden steps, snaking their whips deftly across the pavement, wrestling in heavy horseplay, Jannadeau in his dirty fly-specked window prying with delicate monocled intentness into the entrails of a watch, the reeking mossiness of Gant's fantastical brick shack, the great interior dustiness of the main room in front, sagging with gravestones--small polished slabs from Georgia, blunt ugly masses of Vermont granite, modest monuments with an urn, a cherub figure, or a couchant lamb, ponderous fly-specked angels from Carrara in Italy which he bought at great cost, and never sold--they were the joy of his heart.

Behind a wooden partition was his ware-room, layered with stonedust--coarse wooden trestles on which he carved inscriptions, stacked tool-shelves filled with chisels, drills, mallets, a pedalled emery wheel which Eugene worked furiously for hours, exulting in its mounting roar, piled sandstone bases, a small heat-blasted cast-iron stove, loose piled coal and wood.

Between the workroom and the ware-room, on the left as one entered, was Gant's office, a small room, deep in the dust of twenty years, with an old-fashioned desk, sheaves of banded dirty papers, a leather sofa, a smaller desk layered with round and square samples of marble and granite.  The sloping market Square, pocketed obliquely off the public Square, and filled with the wagons of draymen and county peddlers, and on the lower side on a few Poor White houses and on the warehouse and office of Will Pentland.

Eugene would find his father, leaning perilously on Jannadeau's dirty glass showcase, or on the creaking little fence that marked him off, talking politics, war, death, and famine, denouncing the Democrats, with references to the bad weather, taxation, and soup-kitchens that attended their administration, and eulogizing all the acts, utterances, and policies of Theodore Roosevelt.  Jannadeau, guttural, judiciously reasonable, statistically argumentative, would consult, in all disputed areas, his library--a greasy edition of the World Almanac, three years old, saying, triumphantly, after a moment of dirty thumbing:  "Ah--just as I thought: the muni-CIP-al taxation of Milwaukee under De-MO-cratic administration in 1905 was $2.25 the hundred, the lowest it had been in years.  I cannot ima-GINE why the total revenue is not given."  And he would argue with animation, picking his nose with his blunt black fingers, his broad yellow face breaking into flaccid creases, as he laughed gutturally at Gant's unreason.

"And you may mark my words," proceeded Gant, as if he had never been interrupted, and had heard no dissenting judgment, "if they get in again we'll have soup-kitchens, the banks will go to the wall, and your guts will grease your backbone before another winter's over."

Or, he would find his father in the workroom, bending over a trestle, using the heavy wooden mallet with delicate care, as he guided the chisel through the mazes of an inscription.  He never wore work-clothes; he worked dressed in well brushed garments of heavy black, his coat removed, and a long striped apron covering all his front.  As Eugene saw him, he felt that this was no common craftsman, but a master, picking up his tools briefly for a chef-d'oeuvre.

"He is better at this than any one in all the world," Eugene thought, and his dark vision burned in him for a moment, as he thought that his father's work would never, as men reckon years, be extinguished, but that when that great skeleton lay powdered in earth, in many a tangled undergrowth, in the rank wilderness of forgotten churchyards, these letters would endure.

And he thought with pity of all the grocers and brewers and clothiers who had come and gone, with their perishable work a forgotten excrement, or a rotted fabric; or of plumbers, like Max's father, whose work rusted under ground, or of painters, like Harry's, whose work scaled with the seasons, or was obliterated with newer brighter paint; and the high horror of death and oblivion, the decomposition of life, memory, desire, in the huge burial-ground of the earth stormed through his heart.  He mourned for all the men who had gone because they had not scored their name upon a rock, blasted their mark upon a cliff, sought out the most imperishable objects of the world and graven there some token, some emblem that utterly they might not be forgotten.

Again, Eugene would find Gant moving with bent strides across the depth of the building, tearing madly along between the sentinel marbles that aisled the ware-room, muttering, with hands gripped behind him, with ominous ebb and flow.  Eugene waited.  Presently, when he had shuttled thus across his shop some eighty times, he would leap, with a furious howl, to his front door, storming out upon the porch, and delivering his Jeremiad to the offending draymen:

"You are the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile.  You lousy good-for-nothing bums: you have brought me to the verge of starvation, you have frightened away the little business that might have put bread in my mouth, and kept the wolf from my door.  By God, I hate you, for you stink a mile off.  You low degenerates, you accursed reprobates; you would steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes, as you have from mine, fearful, awful, and bloodthirsty mountain grills that you are!"

He would tear back into the shop muttering, to return almost at once, with a strained pretense at calmness, which ended in a howl:

"Now I want to tell you: I give you fair warning once and for all. If I find you on my steps again, I'll put you all in jail."

They would disperse sheepishly to their wagons, flicking their whips aimlessly along the pavements.

"By God, somethin's sure upset the ole man."

An hour later, like heavy buzzing flies, they would drift back settling from nowhere on the broad steps.

As he emerged from the shop into the Square, they would greet him cheerfully, with a certain affection.

"'Day, Mr. Gant."

"Good day, boys," he would answer kindly, absently.  And he would be away with his gaunt devouring strides.

As Eugene entered, if Gant were busy on a stone, he would say gruffly, "Hello, son," and continue with his work, until he had polished the surface of the marble with pumice and water.  Then he would take off his apron, put on his coat, and say, to the dawdling, expectant boy:  "Come on.  I guess you're thirsty."

And they would go across the Square to the cool depth of the drugstore, stand before the onyx splendor of the fountain, under the revolving wooden fans, and drink chill gaseous beverages, limeade so cold it made the head ache, or foaming ice-cream soda, which returned in sharp delicious belches down his tender nostrils.

Eugene, richer by twenty-five cents, would leave Gant then, and spend the remainder of the day in the library on the Square.  He read now rapidly and easily; he read romantic and adventurous novels, with a tearing hunger.  At home he devoured Luke's piled shelves of five-cent novels: he was deep in the weekly adventures of Young Wild West, fantasied in bed at night of virtuous and heroic relations with the beautiful Arietta, followed Nick Carter, through all the mazes of metropolitan crime, Frank Merriwell's athletic triumphs, Fred Fearnot, and the interminable victories of The Liberty Boys of '76 over the hated Redcoats.

He cared not so much for love at first as he did for material success: the straw figures of women in boys' books, something with hair, dancing eyes, and virtuous opinions, impeccably good and vacant, satisfied him completely: they were the guerdon of heroism, something to be freed from villainy on the nick by a blow or a shot, and to be enjoyed along with a fat income.

At the library he ravaged the shelves of boys' books, going unweariedly through all the infinite monotony of the Algers?Pluck and Luck, Sink or Swim, Grit, Jack's Ward, Jed the Poor-house Boy--and dozens more.  He gloated over the fat money-getting of these books (a motif in boys' books that has never been sufficiently recognized); all of the devices of fortune, the loose rail, the signalled train, the rich reward for heroism; or the full wallet found and restored to its owner; or the value of the supposedly worthless bonds; or the discovery of a rich patron in the city, sunk so deeply into his desires that he was never after able to quench them.

And all the details of money--the value of the estate usurped by the scoundrelly guardian and his caddish son, he feasted upon, reckoning up the amount of income, if it were not given, or if it were, dividing the annual sum into monthly and weekly portions, and dreaming on its purchasing power.  His desires were not modest?no fortune under $250,000 satisfied him: the income of $100,000 at six per cent would pinch one, he felt, from lavishness; and if the reward of virtue was only twenty thousand dollars, he felt bitter chagrin, reckoning life insecure, and comfort a present warmth.

He built up a constant exchange of books among his companions, borrowing and lending in an intricate web, from Max Isaacs, from "Nosey" Schmidt, the butcher's son, who had all the rich adventures of the Rover Boys; he ransacked Gant's shelves at home, reading translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey at the same time as Diamond Dick, Buffalo Bill, and the Algers, and for the same reason; then, as the first years waned and the erotic gropings became more intelligible, he turned passionately to all romantic legendry, looking for women in whom blood ran hotly, whose breath was honey, and whose soft touch a spurting train of fire.

And in this pillage of the loaded shelves, he found himself wedged firmly into the grotesque pattern of Protestant fiction which yields the rewards of Dionysus to the loyal disciples of John Calvin, panting and praying in a breath, guarding the plumtree with the altar fires, outdoing the pagan harlot with the sanctified hussy.

Aye, thought he, he would have his cake and eat it too--but it would be a wedding-cake.  He was devout in his desire to be a good man; he would bestow the accolade of his love upon nothing but a Virgin; he would marry himself to none but a Pure Woman.  This, he saw from the books, would cause no renunciation of delight, for the good women were physically the most attractive.

He had learned unknowingly what the exquisite voluptuary finds, after weary toil, much later--that no condition of life is so favorable to his enjoyment as that one which is rigidly conventionalized.  He had all the passionate fidelity of a child to the laws of the community: all the filtered deposit of Sunday Morning Presbyterianism had its effect.

He entombed himself in the flesh of a thousand fictional heroes, giving his favorites extension in life beyond their books, carrying their banners into the gray places of actuality, seeing himself now as the militant young clergyman, arrayed, in his war on slum conditions, against all the moneyed hostility of his fashionable church, aided in his hour of greatest travail by the lovely daughter of the millionaire tenement owner, and winning finally a victory for God, the poor, and himself.
 
 

. . . They stood silently a moment in the vast deserted nave of Saint Thomas'.  Far in the depth of the vast church Old Michael's slender hands pressed softly on the organ-keys.  The last rays of the setting sun poured in a golden shaft down through the western windows, falling for a moment, in a cloud of glory, as if in benediction, on Mainwaring's tired face.

"I am going," he said presently.

"Going?" she whispered.  "Where?"

The organ music deepened.

"Out there," he gestured briefly to the West.  "Out there?among His people."

"Going?"  She could not conceal the tremor of her voice.  "Going? Alone?"

He smiled sadly.  The sun had set.  The gathering darkness hid the suspicious moisture in his gray eyes.

"Yes, alone," he said.  "Did not One greater than I go out alone some nineteen centuries ago?"

"Alone?  Alone?"  A sob rose in her throat and choked her.

"But before I go," he said, after a moment, in a voice which he strove in vain to render steady, "I want to tell you--"  He paused for a moment, struggling for mastery of his feelings.

"Yes?" she whispered.

"--That I shall never forget you, little girl, as long as I live. Never."  He turned abruptly to depart.

"No, not alone!  You shall not go alone!" she stopped him with a sudden cry.

He whirled as if he had been shot.

"What do you mean?  What do you mean?" he cried hoarsely.

"Oh, can't you see!  Can't you see!"  She threw out her little hands imploringly, and her voice broke.

"Grace!  Grace!  Dear heaven, do you mean it!"

"You silly man!  Oh, you dear blind foolish boy!  Haven't you known for ages--since the day I first heard you preach at the Murphy Street settlement?"

He crushed her to him in a fierce embrace; her slender body yielded to his touch as he bent over her; and her round arms stole softly across his broad shoulders, around his neck, drawing his dark head to her as he planted hungry kisses on her closed eyes, the column of her throat, the parted petal of her fresh young lips.

"Forever," he answered solemnly.  "So help me God."

The organ music swelled now into a triumphant pé filling with its exultant melody that vast darkness of the church.  And as Old Michael cast his heart into the music, the tears flowed unrestrained across his withered cheeks, but smilingly happily through his tears, as dimly through his old eyes he saw the two young figures enacting again the age-old tale of youth and love, he murmured,

"I am the resurrection and the life, Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end" . . .
 
 

Eugene turned his wet eyes to the light that streamed through the library windows, winked rapidly, gulped, and blew his nose heavily. Ah, yes!  Ah, yes!
 
 

. . . The band of natives, seeing now that they had no more to fear, and wild with rage at the losses they had suffered, began to advance slowly toward the foot of the cliff, led by Taomi, who, dancing with fury, and hideous with warpaint, urged them on, exhorting them in a shrill voice.

Glendenning cursed softly under his breath as he looked once more at the empty cartridge belts, then grimly, as he gazed at the yelling horde below, slipped his two remaining cartridges into his Colt.

"For us?" she said, quietly.  He nodded.

"It is the end?" she whispered, but without a trace of fear.

Again he nodded, and turned his head away for a moment.  Presently he lifted his gray face to her.

"It is death, Veronica," he said, "and now I may speak."

"Yes, Bruce," she answered softly.

It was the first time he had ever heard her use his name, and his heart thrilled to it.

"I love you, Veronica," he said.  "I have loved you ever since I found your almost lifeless body on the beach, during all the nights I lay outside your tent, listening to your quiet breathing within, love you most of all now in this hour of death when the obligation to keep silence no longer rests upon me."

"Dearest, dearest," she whispered, and he saw her face was wet with tears.  "Why didn't you speak?  I have loved you from the first."

She leaned toward him, her lips half-parted and tremulous, her breathing short and uncertain, and as his bare arms circled her fiercely their lips met in one long moment of rapture, one final moment of life and ecstasy, in which all the pent longing of their lives found release and consummation now at this triumphant moment of their death.

A distant reverberation shook the air.  Glendenning looked up quickly, and rubbed his eyes with astonishment.  There, in the island's little harbor were turning slowly the lean sides of a destroyer, and even as he looked, there was another burst of flame and smoke, and a whistling five-inch shell burst forty yards from where the natives had stopped.  With a yell of mingled fear and baffled rage, they turned and fled off toward their canoes. Already, a boat, manned by the lusty arms of a blue-jacketed crew, had put off from the destroyer's side, and was coming in toward shore.

"Saved!  We are saved!" cried Glendenning, and leaping to his feet he signalled the approaching boat.  Suddenly he paused.

"Damn!" he muttered bitterly.  "Oh, damn!"

"What is it, Bruce?" she asked.

He answered her in a cold harsh voice.

"A destroyer has just entered the harbor.  We are saved, Miss Mullins.  Saved!"  And he laughed bitterly.

"Bruce!  Dearest!  What is it?  Aren't you glad?  Why do you act so strangely?  We shall have all our life together."

"Together?" he said, with a harsh laugh.  "Oh no, Miss Mullins.  I know my place.  Do you think old J. T. Mullins would let his daughter marry Bruce Glendenning, international vagabond, jack of all trades, and good at none of them?  Oh no.  That's over now, and it's good-by.  I suppose," he said, with a wry smile, "I'll hear of your marriage to some Duke or Lord, or some of those foreigners some day.  Well, good-by, Miss Mullins.  Good luck.  We'll both have to go our own way, I suppose."  He turned away.

"You foolish boy!  You dear bad silly boy!"  She threw her arms around his neck, clasped him to her tightly, and scolded him tenderly.  "Do you think I'll ever let you leave me now?"

"Veronica," he gasped.  "Do you MEAN it?"

She tried to meet his adoring eyes, but couldn't: a rich wave of rosy red mantled her cheek, he drew her rapturously to him and, for the second time, but this time with the prophecy of eternal and abundant life before them, their lips met in sweet oblivion. . . .
 
 

Ah, me!  Ah, me!  Eugene's heart was filled with joy and sadness--with sorrow because the book was done.  He pulled his clotted handkerchief from his pocket and blew the contents of his loaded heart into it in one mighty, triumphant and ecstatic blast of glory and sentiment.  Ah, me!  Good old Bruce-Eugene.
 
 

Lifted, by his fantasy, into a high interior world, he scored off briefly and entirely all the grimy smudges of life: he existed nobly in a heroic world with lovely and virtuous creatures.  He saw himself in exalted circumstances with Bessie Barnes, her pure eyes dim with tears, her sweet lips tremulous with desire: he felt the strong handgrip of Honest Jack, her brother, his truehearted fidelity, the deep eternal locking of their brave souls, as they looked dumbly at each other with misty eyes, and thought of the pact of danger, the shoulder-to-shoulder drive through death and terror which had soldered them silently but implacably.

Eugene wanted the two things all men want: he wanted to be loved, and he wanted to be famous.  His fame was chameleon, but its fruit and triumph lay at home, among the people of Altamont.  The mountain town had for him enormous authority: with a child's egotism it was for him the centre of the earth, the small but dynamic core of all life.  He saw himself winning Napoleonic triumphs in battle, falling, with his fierce picked men, like a thunderbolt upon an enemy's flank, trapping, hemming, and annihilating.  He saw himself as the young captain of industry, dominant, victorious, rich; as the great criminal-lawyer bending to his eloquence a charmed court--but always he saw his return from the voyage wearing the great coronal of the world upon his modest brows.

The world was a phantasmal land of faery beyond the misted hem of the hills, a land of great reverberations, of genii-guarded orchards, wine-dark seas, chasmed and fantastical cities from which he would return into this substantial heart of life, his native town, with golden loot.

He quivered deliciously to temptation--he kept his titillated honor secure after subjecting it to the most trying inducements: the groomed beauty of the rich man's wife, publicly humiliated by her brutal husband, defended by Bruce-Eugene, and melting toward him with all the pure ardor of her lonely and womanly heart, pouring the sad measure of her life into his sympathetic ears over the wineglasses of her candled, rich, but intimate table.  And as, in the shaded light, she moved yearningly toward him, sheathed plastically in her gown of rich velvet, he would detach gently the round arms that clung about his neck, the firm curved body that stuck gluily to his.  Or the blonde princess in the fabulous Balkans, the empress of gabled Toyland, and the Doll Hussars?he would renounce, in a great scene upon the frontiers, her proffered renunciation, drinking eternal farewell on her red mouth, but wedding her to himself and to the citizenship of freedom when revolution had levelled her fortune to his own.
 
 

But, steeping himself in ancient myths, where the will and the deed were not thought darkly on, he spent himself, quilted in golden meadows, or in the green light of woods, in pagan love.  Oh to be king, and see a fruity wide-hipped Jewess bathing on her roof, and  to possess her; or a cragged and castled baron, to execute le droit de seigneur upon the choicest of the enfeoffed wives and wenches, in a vast chamber loud with the howling winds and lighted by the mad dancing flames of great logs!
 
 

But even more often, the shell of his morality broken to fragments by his desire, he would enact the bawdy fable of school-boys, and picture himself in hot romance with a handsome teacher.  In the fourth grade his teacher was a young, inexperienced, but well-built woman, with carrot-colored hair, and full of reckless laughter.

He saw himself, grown to the age of potency, a strong, heroic, brilliant boy, the one spot of incandescence in a backwoods school attended by snag-toothed children and hair-faced louts.  And, as the mellow autumn ripened, her interest in him would intensify, she would "keep him in" for imaginary offenses, setting him, in a somewhat confused way, to do some task, and gazing at him with steady yearning eyes when she thought he was not looking.

He would pretend to be stumped by the exercise: she would come eagerly and sit beside him, leaning over so that a few fine strands of carrot-colored hair brushed his nostrils, and so that he might feel the firm warmth of her white-waisted arms, and the swell of her tight-skirted thighs.  She would explain things to him at great length, guiding his fingers with her own warm, slightly moist hand, when he pretended not to find the place; then she would chide him gently, saying tenderly:

"Why are you such a bad boy?" or softly:  "Do you think you're going to be better after this?"

And he, simulating boyish, inarticulate coyness, would say:  "Gosh, Miss Edith, I didn't mean to do nothin'."

Later, as the golden sun was waning redly, and there was nothing in the room but the smell of chalk and the heavy buzz of the old October flies, they would prepare to depart.  As he twisted carelessly into his overcoat, she would chide him, call him to her, arrange the lapels and his necktie, and smooth out his tousled hair, saying:

"You're a good-looking boy.  I bet all the girls are wild about you."

He would blush in a maidenly way and she, bitten with curiosity, would press him:

"Come on, now.  Who's your girl?"

"I haven't got one, honest, Miss Edith."

"You don't want one of these silly little girls, Eugene," she would say, coaxingly.  "You're too good for them--you're a great deal older than your years.  You need the understanding a mature woman can give you."

And they would walk away in the setting sun, skirting the pine-fresh woods, passing along the path red with maple leaves, past great ripening pumpkins in the fields, and under the golden autumnal odor of persimmons.

She would live alone with her mother, an old deaf woman, in a little cottage set back from the road against a shelter of lonely singing pines, with a few grand oaks and maples in the leaf-bedded yard.

Before they came to the house, crossing a field, it would be necessary to go over a stile; he would go over first, helping her down, looking ardently at the graceful curve of her long, deliberately exposed, silk-clad leg.

As the days shortened, they would come by dark, or under the heavy low-hanging autumnal moon.  She would pretend to be frightened as they passed the woods, press in to him and take his arm at imaginary sounds, until one night, crossing the stile, boldly resolved upon an issue, she would pretend difficulty in descending, and he would lift her down in his arms.  She would whisper:

"How strong you are, Eugene."  Still holding her, his hand would shift under her knees.  And as he lowered her upon the frozen clotted earth, she would kiss him passionately, again and again, pressing him to her, caressing him, and under the frosted persimmon tree fulfilling and yielding herself up to his maiden and unfledged desire.

"That boy's read books by the hundreds," Gant boasted about the town.  "He's read everything in the library by now."
 
"By God, W. O., you'll have to make a lawyer out of him.  That's what he's cut out for."  Major Liddell spat accurately, out of his high cracked voice, across the pavement, and settled back in his chair below the library windows, smoothing his stained white pointed beard with a palsied hand.  He was a veteran.
 

10
 

But this freedom, this isolation in print, this dreaming and unlimited time of fantasy, was not to last unbroken.  Both Gant and Eliza were fluent apologists for economic independence: all the boys had been sent out to earn money at a very early age.

"It teaches a boy to be independent and self-reliant," said Gant, feeling he had heard this somewhere before.

"Pshaw!" said Eliza.  "It won't do them a bit of harm.  If they don't learn now, they won't do a stroke of work later on.  Besides, they can earn their own pocket money."  This, undoubtedly, was a consideration of the greatest importance.

Thus, the boys had gone out to work, after school hours, and in the vacations, since they were very young.  Unhappily, neither Eliza nor Gant were at any pains to examine the kind of work their children did, contenting themselves vaguely with the comfortable assurance that all work which earned money was honest, commendable, and formative of character.

By this time Ben, sullen, silent, alone, had withdrawn more closely than ever into his heart: in the brawling house he came and went, and was remembered, like a phantom.  Each morning at three o'clock, when his fragile unfurnished body should have been soaked in sleep, he got up under the morning stars, departed silently from the sleeping house, and went down to the roaring morning presses and the ink smell that he loved, to begin the delivery of his route. Almost without consideration by Gant and Eliza he slipped quietly away from school after the eighth grade, took on extra duties at the paper's office and lived, in sufficient bitter pride, upon his earnings.  He slept at home, ate perhaps one meal a day there, loping home gauntly at night, with his father's stride, thin long shoulders, bent prematurely by the weight of the heavy paper bag,  pathetically, hungrily Gantian.

He bore encysted in him the evidence of their tragic fault: he walked alone in the darkness, death and the dark angels hovered, and no one saw him.  At three-thirty in the morning, with his loaded bag beside him, he sat with other route boys in a lunch room, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, laughing softly, almost noiselessly, with his flickering exquisitely sensitive mouth, his scowling gray eyes.

At home he spent hours quietly absorbed in his life with Eugene, playing with him, cuffing him with his white hard hands from time to time, establishing with him a secret communication to which the life of the family had neither access nor understanding.  From his small wages he gave the boy sums of spending-money, bought him expensive presents on his birthdays, at Christmas, or some special occasion, inwardly moved and pleased when he saw how like Mé he seemed to Eugene, how deep and inexhaustible to the younger boy were his meagre resources.  What he earned, all the history of his  life away from home, he kept in jealous secrecy.

"It's nobody's business but my own.  By God, I'm not asking any of you for anything," he said, sullenly and irritably, when Eliza pressed him curiously.  He had a deep scowling affection for them all: he never forgot their birthdays, he always placed where they might find it, some gift, small, inexpensive, selected with the most discriminating taste.  When, with their fervent over-emphasis, they went through long ecstasies of admiration, embroidering their thanks with florid decorations, he would jerk his head sideways to some imaginary listener, laughing softly and irritably, as he said:
"Oh for God's sake!  Listen to this, won't you!"

Perhaps, as pigeon-toed, well creased, brushed, white-collared, Ben loped through the streets, or prowled softly and restlessly about the house, his dark angel wept, but no one else saw, and no one knew.  He was a stranger, and as he sought through the house, he was always aprowl to find some entrance into life, some secret undiscovered door--a stone, a leaf,--that might admit him into light and fellowship.  His passion for home was fundamental, in that jangled and clamorous household his sullen and contained quiet was like some soothing opiate on their nerves: with quiet authority, white-handed skill, he sought about repairing old scars, joining with delicate carpentry old broken things, prying quietly about a short-circuited wire, a defective socket.

"That boy's a born electrical engineer," said Gant.  "I've a good notion to send him off to school."  And he would paint a romantic picture of the prosperity of Mr. Charles Liddell, the Major's worthy son, who earned thousands by his electrical wizardry, and supported his father.  And he would reproach them bitterly, as he dwelt on his own merit and the worthlessness of his sons:

"Other men's sons support their fathers in their old age--not mine! Not mine!  Ah Lord--it will be a bitter day for me when I  have to depend on one of mine.  Tarkinton told me the other day that Rafe   has given him five dollars a week for his food ever since he was sixteen.  Do you think I could look for such treatment from one of mine?  Do you?  Not until Hell freezes over--and not then!"  And he would refer to the hardships of his own youth, cast out, so he said, to earn his living, at an age which varied, according to his temper, at from six to eleven years, contrasting his poverty to the luxury in which his own children wallowed.

"No one ever did anything for me," he howled.  "But everything's been done for you.  And what gratitude do I get from you?  Do you ever think of the old man who slaves up there in his cold shop in order to give you food and shelter?  Do you?  Ingratitude, more fierce than brutish beasts!"  Remorseful food stuck vengefully in Eugene's throat.

Eugene was initiated to the ethics of success.  It was not enough that a man work, though work was fundamental; it was even more important that he make money--a great deal if he was to be a great success--but at least enough to "support himself."  This was for both Gant and Eliza the base of worth.  Of so and so, they might say:

"He's not worth powder enough to kill him.  He's never been able to support himself," to which Eliza, but not Gant, might add:

"He hasn't a stick of property to his name."  This crowned him with infamy.

In the fresh sweet mornings of Spring now, Eugene was howled out of bed at six-thirty by his father, descended to the cool garden, and there, assisted by Gant, filled small strawberry baskets with great  crinkled lettuces, radishes, plums, and green apples?somewhat later, with cherries.  With these packed in a great hamper, he would peddle his wares through the neighborhood, selling them easily and delightfully, in a world of fragrant morning cookery, at five or ten cents a basket.  He would return home gleefully with empty hamper in time for breakfast: he liked the work, the smell of gardens, of fresh wet vegetables; he loved the romantic structure of the earth which filled his pocket with chinking coins.

He was permitted to keep the money of his sales, although Eliza was annoyingly insistent that he should not squander it, but open a bank account with it with which, one day, he might establish himself in business, or buy a good piece of property.  And she bought him a little bank, into which his reluctant fingers dropped a portion of his earnings, and from which he got a certain dreary satisfaction from time to time by shaking it close to his ear and dwelling hungrily on all the purchasable delight that was locked away from him in the small heavy bullion-clinking vault.  There was a key, but Eliza kept it.

But, as the months passed, and the sturdy child's body of his infancy lengthened rapidly to some interior chemical expansion, and he became fragile, thin, pallid, but remarkably tall for his age, Eliza began to say:  "That boy's big enough to do a little work."

Every Thursday afternoon now during the school months, and thence until Saturday, he was sent out upon the streets to sell The Saturday Evening Post, of which Luke held the local agency.  Eugene hated the work with a deadly sweltering hatred; he watched the approach of Thursday with sick horror.

Luke had been the agent since his twelfth year: his reputation for salesmanship was sown through the town; he came with wide grin, exuberant vitality, wagging and witty tongue, hurling all his bursting energy into an insane extra version.  He lived absolutely in event: there was in him no secret place, nothing withheld and guarded--he had an instinctive horror of all loneliness.  He wanted above all else to be esteemed and liked by the world, and the need for the affection and esteem of his family was desperately essential.  The fulsome praise, the heartiness of hand and tongue, the liberal display of sentiment were as the breath of life to him: he was overwhelmingly insistent in the payment of drinks at the fountain, the bringer-home of packed ice-cream for Eliza, and of cigars to Gant and, as Gant gave publication to his generosity, the boy's need for it increased--he built up an image of himself as the Good Fellow, witty, unselfish, laughed at but liked by all--as Big-Hearted Unselfish Luke.  And this was the opinion people had of him.

Many times in the years that followed, when Eugene's pockets were empty, Luke thrust a coin roughly and impatiently in them, but, hard as the younger boy's need might be, there was always an awkward scene--painful, embarrassed protestations, a distressful confusion because Eugene, having accurately and intuitively gauged his brother's hunger for gratitude and esteem, felt sharply that he was yielding up his independence to a bludgeoning desire.

He had never felt the slightest shame at Ben's bounty: his enormously sensitized perception had told him long since that he might get the curse of annoyance, the cuff of anger, from his brother, but that past indulgences would not be brandished over him, and that even the thought of having bestowed gifts would give Ben inward shame.  In this, he was like Ben: the thought of a gift he made, with its self-congratulatory implications, made him writhe.

Thus, before he was ten, Eugene's brooding spirit was nettled in the complexity of truth and seeming.  He could find no words, no answers to the puzzles that baffled and maddened him: he found himself loathing that which bore the stamp of virtue, sick with weariness and horror at what was considered noble.  He was hurled, at eight years, against the torturing paradox of the ungenerous-generous, the selfish-unselfish, the noble-base, and unable to fathom or define those deep springs of desire in the human spirit that seek public gratification by virtuous pretension, he was made wretched by the conviction of his own sinfulness.

There was in him a savage honesty, which exercised an uncontrollable domination over him when his heart or head were deeply involved.