Look Homeward, Angel Read Online

He dreamed of himself as the redemptive hero, saving her in an hour of great danger, making her penitent with grave reproof, accepting purely the love she offered.

In the morning, he breathed the seminal odor of her fresh bathed body as she passed him, gazed desperately into the tender sensuality of her face and, with a sense of unreality, wondered what change darkness wrought in this untelling face.

Steve returned from New Orleans after a year of vagabondage.  The old preposterous swagger, following the ancient whine, reappeared as soon as he felt himself safely established at home again.

"Stevie doesn't have to work," said he.  "He's smart enough to make the others work for him."  This was his defiance to his record of petty forgeries against Gant: he saw himself as a clever swindler although he had never had courage to swindle any one except his father.  People were reading the Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford stories: there was an immense admiration for this romantic criminal.

Steve was now a young man in the first twenties.  He was somewhat above the middle height, bumpy of face and sallow of skin, with a light pleasing tenor voice.  Eugene had a feeling of disgust and horror whenever his oldest brother returned: he knew that those who were physically least able to defend themselves, which included Eliza and himself, would bear the brunt of his whining, petty bullying, and drunken obscenity.  He did not mind the physical abuse so much as he did its cowardly stealth, weakness, and slobbering reconciliations.

Once, Gant, making one of his sporadic efforts to get his son fixed in employment, had sent him out to a country graveyard to put up a small monument.  Eugene was sent along.  Steve worked steadily in the hot sun for an hour, growing more and more irritable because of the heat, the rank weedy stench of the graveyard, and his own deep antipathy to work.  Eugene waited intensely for the attack he knew was coming.

"What are you standing there for?" screamed Big Brother at length, looking up in an agony of petulance.  He struck sharply at the boy's shin with a heavy wrench he held in his hand, knocking him to the ground, and crippling him for the moment.  Immediately, he was palsied, not with remorse, but with fear that he had injured him badly and would be discovered.

"You're not hurt, are you, buddy?  You're not hurt?" he began in a quivering voice, putting his unclean yellow hands upon Eugene.  And he made the effort at reconciliation Eugene so dreaded, whimpering, blowing his foul breath upon his brother's cringing flesh, and entreating him to say nothing of the occurrence when he went home. Eugene became violently nauseated: the stale odor of Steve's body, the clammy and unhealthy sweat that stank with nicotine, the touch of his tainted flesh filled him with horror.

There still remained, however, in the cast and carriage of his head, in his swagger walk, the ghost of his ruined boyishness: women were sometimes attracted to him.  It was his fortune, therefore, to secure Mrs. Selborne for his mistress the first summer she came to Dixieland.  At night her rich laughter welled up from the dark porch, they walked through the quiet leafy streets, they went to Riverside together, walking beyond the lights of the carnival into the dark sandy paths by the river.

But, as her friendship with Helen ripened, as she saw the revulsion of the Gants against their brother, and as she began to see what damage she had already done to herself by her union with this braggart who had brandished her name through every poolroom in town as a tribute to his own power, she cast him off, quietly, implacably, tenderly.  When she returned now, summer by summer, she met with her innocent and unwitting smile all of his obscene innuendoes, his heavily suggestive threats, his bitter revelations behind her back.  Her affection for Helen was genuine, but it was also, she felt, strategic and useful.  The girl introduced her to handsome young men, gave parties and dances at Gant's and Eliza's for her, was really a partner in her intrigues, assuring her of privacy, silence, and darkness, and defending her angrily when the evil whispering began.

"What do you know about her?  You don't know what she does.  You'd better be careful how you talk about her.  She's got a husband to defend her, you know.  You'll get your head shot off some day." Or, more doubtfully:

"Well, I don't care what they say, I like her.  She's mighty sweet. After all, what can we say about her for sure?  No one can PROVE anything on her."

And in the winters now she made short visits to the South Carolina town where Mrs. Selborne lived, returning with an enthusiastic description of her reception, the parties "in her honor," the food, the lavish entertainment.  Mrs. Selborne lived in the same town as Joe Gambell, the young clerk to whom Daisy was engaged.  He was full of sly hints about the woman, but before her his manner was obsequious, confused, reverential, and he accepted without complaint the presents of food and clothing which she sent him after their marriage.

Daisy had been married in the month of June following Eliza's purchase of Dixieland: the wedding was arranged on a lavish scale, and took place in the big dining-room of the house.  Gant and his two older sons grinned sheepishly in unaccustomed evening dress, the Pentlands, faithful in their attendance at weddings and funerals, sent gifts and came.  Will and Pett gave a heavy set of carving steels.

"I hope you always have something to use them on," said Will, flensing his hand, and winking at Joe Gambell.

Eugene remembered weeks of frantic preparation, dress fittings, rehearsals, the hysteria of Daisy, who stared at her nails until they went blue, and the final splendor of the last two days?the arriving gifts, the house, unnaturally cheerful with rich carpets and flowers, the perilous moment when their lives joined, the big packed dining-room, the droning interminable Scotch voice of the Presbyterian minister, the mounting triumph of the music when the grocery clerk got his bride.  Later, the confusion, the greetings, the hysteria of the women.  Daisy sobbing uncontrollably in the arms of a distant cousin, Beth Pentland, who had come up with her hearty red husband, the owner of a chain of small groceries in a South Carolina town, bringing gifts and a giant watermelon, andwhose own grief was enhanced by the discovery, after the wedding, that the dress she had worked on weeks in advance she had put on, in her frenzy, wrong side out.

Thus Daisy passed more or less definitely out of Eugene's life, although he was to see her briefly on visits, but with decreasing frequency, in the years that followed.  The grocery clerk was making the one daring gesture of his life: he was breaking away from the cotton town, in which all the years of his life had been passed, and from the long lazy hours of grocery clerks, the languorous gossip of lank cotton farmers and townsmen, to which he had been used.  He had found employment as a commercial traveller for a food products company: his headquarters was to be in Augusta, Georgia, but he was to travel into the far South.

This rooting up of his life, this adventure into new lands, the effort to improve his fortune and his state, was his wedding gift to his wife--a bold one, but imperilled already by distrust, fear, and his peasant suspicion of new scenes, new faces, new departures, of any life that differed from that of his village.

"There's no place like Henderson," said he, with complacent and annoying fidelity, referring to that haven of enervation, red clay, ignorance, slander, and superstition, in whose effluent rays he had been reared.

But he went to Augusta, and began his new life with Daisy in a lodging house.  She was twenty-one, a slender, blushing girl who played the piano beautifully, accurately, academically, with a rippling touch, and no imagination.  Eugene could never remember her very well.

In the early autumn after her marriage, Gant made the journey to Augusta, taking Eugene with him.  The inner excitement of both was intense; the hot wait at the sleepy junction of Spartanburg, the ride in the dilapidated day coaches of the branch line that ran to Augusta, the hot baked autumnal land, rolling piedmont and pine woods, every detail of the landscape they drank in with thirsty adventurous eyes.  Gant's roving spirit was parched for lack of travel: for Eugene, Saint Louis was a faint unreality, but there burned in him a vision of the opulent South, stranger even than his passionate winter nostalgia for the snow-bound North, which the drifted but short-lived snows in Altamont, the seizure of the unaccustomed moment for sledding and skating on the steep hills awakened in him with a Northern desire, a desire for the dark, the storm, the winds that roar across the earth and the triumphant comfort of warm walls which only a Southerner perhaps can know.

And he saw the town of Augusta first not in the drab hues of reality, but as one who bursts a window into the faery pageant of the world, as one who has lived in prison, and finds life and the earth in rosy dawn, as one who has lived in all the fabulous imagery of books, and finds in a journey only an extension and verification of it--so did he see Augusta, with the fresh washed eyes of a child, with glory, with enchantment.

They were gone two weeks.  He remembered chiefly the brown stains of the recent flood, which had flowed through the town and inundated its lower floors, the broad main street, the odorous and gleaming drugstore, scented to him with all the spices of his fancy, the hills and fields of Aiken, in South Carolina, where he  sought vainly for John D. Rockefeller, a legendary prince who, he heard, went there for sport, marvelling that two States could join imperceptibly, without visible markings, and the cotton gin where he saw the great press mash the huge raw bales cleanly into tight bundles half their former size.

Once, some children on the street had taunted him because of his long hair, and he had fallen into a cursing fury; once, in a rage at some quarrel with his sister, he set off on a world adventure, walking furiously for hours down a country road by the river and cotton fields, captured finally by Gant who sought for him in a hired rig.

They went to the theatre: it was one of the first plays he had seen.  The play was a biblical one, founded on the story of Saul and Jonathan, and he whispered to Gant from scene to scene the trend of coming events--a precocity which pleased his father mightily, and to which he referred for months.

Just before they came home, Joe Gambell, in a fit of concocted petulance, resigned his position, and announced that he was
returning to Henderson.  His adventure had lasted three months.
 
 

13
 

In the years that followed, up to his eleventh or twelfth year when he could no longer travel on half fares, Eugene voyaged year by year into the rich mysterious South.  Eliza, who, during her first winter at Dixieland, had been stricken by severe attacks of rheumatism, induced partly by kidney trouble, which caused her flesh to swell puffily, and which was diagnosed by the doctor as Blight's Disease, began to make extensive, although economical, voyages into Florida and Arkansas in search of health and, rather vaguely, in search of wealth.

She always spoke hopefully of the possibility of opening a boarding-house at some tropical winter resort, during the seasons there and in Altamont.  In winter now, she rented Dixieland for a few months, sometimes for a year, although she really had no intention of allowing the place to slip through her fingers during the profitable summer season: usually, she let the place go, more or less deliberately, to some unscrupulous adventuress of lodging houses, good for a month's or two months' rent, but incapable of the sustained effort that would support it for a longer time.  On her return from her journey, with rents in arrears, or with some other violation of the contract as an entering wedge, Eliza would surge triumphantly into battle, making a forced entrance with police, plain-clothes men, warrants, summonses, writs, injunctions, and all the other artillery of legal warfare, possessing herself forcibly, and with vindictive pleasure, of her property.

But she turned always into the South--the North for her was a land which she threatened often to explore, but which secretly she held in suspicion: there was in her no deep animosity because of an old war, her feeling was rather one of fear, distrust, alienation?the "Yankee" to whom she humorously referred was foreign and remote. So, she turned always into the South, the South that burned like Dark Helen in Eugene's blood, and she always took him with her. They still slept together.

His feeling for the South was not so much historic as it was of the core and desire of dark romanticism--that unlimited and inexplicable drunkenness, the magnetism of some men's blood that takes them into the heart of the heat, and beyond that, into the polar and emerald cold of the South as swiftly as it took the heart of that incomparable romanticist who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, beyond which there is nothing.  And this desire of his was unquestionably enhanced by all he had read and visioned, by the romantic halo that his school history cast over the section, by the whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to live in "mansions," and slavery was a benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, all men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking cavaliers.  Years later, when he could no longer think of the barren spiritual wilderness, the hostile and murderous intrenchment against all new life--when their cheap mythology, their legend of the charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of their lives, the quaint sweetness of their drawl, made him writhe--when he could think of no return to their life and its swarming superstition without weariness and horror, so great was his fear of the legend, his fear of their antagonism, that he still pretended the most fanatic devotion to them, excusing his Northern residence on grounds of necessity rather than desire.

Finally, it occurred to him that these people had given him nothing, that neither their love not their hatred could injure him, that he owed them nothing, and he determined that he would say so, and repay their insolence with a curse.  And he did.
 
 

So did his boundaries stretch into enchantment--into fabulous and solitary wonder broken only by Eliza's stingy practicality, by her lack of magnificence in a magnificent world, by the meals of sweet rolls and milk and butter in an untidy room, by the shoe boxes of luncheon carried on the trains and opened in the diner, after a lengthy inspection of the menu had led to the ordering of coffee, by the interminable quarrels over price and charges in almost every place they went, by her commands to him to "scrooch up" when the conductor came through for the tickets, for he was a tall lank boy, and his half-fare age might be called to question.

She took him to Florida in the late winter following Gant's return from Augusta: they went to Tampa first, and, a few days later, to Saint Petersburg.  He plowed through the loose deep sand of the streets, fished interminably with jolly old men at the end of the long pier, devoured a chest full of dime novels that he found in the rooms she had rented in a private house.  They left abruptly, after a terrific quarrel with the old Cracker who ran the place, who thought himself tricked out of the best part of a season's rent, and hurried off to South Carolina on receipt of a hysterical message from Daisy which bade her mother to "come at once."  They arrived in the dingy little town, which was sticky with wet clay, and clammy with rain, in late March: Daisy's first child, a boy, had been born the day before.  Eliza, annoyed at what she considered the useless disruption of her holiday, quarrelled bitterly with her daughter a day or two after her arrival, and departed for Altamont with the declaration, which Daisy ironically applauded, that she would never return again.  But she did.

The following winter she went to New Orleans at the season of the Mardi Gras, taking her youngest with her.  Eugene remembered the huge cisterns for rain-water, in the back yard of Aunt Mary's house, the heavy window-rattling thunder of Mary's snores at night, and the vast pageantry of carnival on Canal Street: the storied floats, the smiling beauties, the marching troops, the masks grotesque and fantastical.  And once more he saw ships at anchor at the foot of Canal Street; and their tall keels looked over on the street behind the sea walls; and in the cemeteries all the graves were raised above the ground "because," said Oll, Gant's nephew, "the water rots 'em."

And he remembered the smells of the French market, the heavy fragrance of the coffee he drank there, and the foreign Sunday gaiety of the city's life--the theatres open, the sound of hammer and saw, the gay festivity of crowds.  He visited the Boyles, old guests at Dixieland, who lived in the old French quarter, sleeping at night with Frank Boyle in a vast dark room lighted dimly with tapers: they had as cook an ancient negress who spoke only French, and who returned from the Market early in the morning bearing a huge basket loaded with vegetables, tropical fruits, fowls, meats. She cooked strange delicious food that he had never tasted before--heavy gumbo, garnished steaks, sauced fowls.

And he looked upon the huge yellow snake of the river, dreaming of its distant shores, the myriad estuaries lush with tropical growth that fed it, all the romantic life of plantation and canefields that fringed it, of moonlight, of dancing darkies on the levee, of slow lights on the gilded river boat, and the perfumed flesh of black-haired women, musical wraiths below the phantom drooping trees.

They had but shortly returned from Mardi Gras when, one howling night in winter, as he lay asleep at Gant's, the house was wakened by his father's terrible cries.  Gant had been drinking heavily, day after fearful day.  Eugene had been sent in the afternoons to his shop to fetch him home, and at sundown, with Jannadeau's aid, had brought him, behind the negro's spavined horse, roaring drunk to his house.  There followed the usual routine of soup-feeding, undressing, and holding him in check until Doctor McGuire arrived, thrust his needle deeply into Gant's stringy arm, left sleeping-powders, and departed.  The girl was exhausted: Gant himself had ravaged his strength, and had been brought down by two or three painful attacks of rheumatism.

Now, he awoke in the dark, possessed by his terror and agony, for the whole right side of his body was paralyzed by such pain as he did not know existed.  He cursed and supplicated God alternately in his pain and terror.  For days doctor and nurse strove with him, hoping that the leaping inflammation would not strike at his heart. He was gnarled, twisted, and bent with a savage attack of inflammatory rheumatism.  As soon as he had recovered sufficiently to travel, he departed, under Helen's care, for Hot Springs. Almost savagely, she drove all other assistance from him, devoting every minute of the day to his care: they were gone six weeks--occasionally post-cards and letters describing a life of hotels, mineral baths, sickness and lameness, and the sport of the blooded rich, came to add new colors to Eugene's horizon: when they returned Gant was able again to walk, the rheumatism had been boiled from his limbs, but his right hand, gnarled and stiff, was permanently crippled.  He was never again able to close it, and there was something strangely chastened in his manner, a gleam of awe and terror in his eyes.

But the union between Gant and his daughter was finally consummated. Before Gant lay, half-presaged, a road of pain and terror which led on to death, but as his great strength dwindled, palsied, broke along that road, she went with him inch by inch, welding beyond life, beyond death, beyond memory, the bond that linked them.

"I'd have died if it hadn't been for that girl," he said over and over.  "She saved my life.  I couldn't get along without her."  And he boasted again and again of her devotion and loyalty, of the expenses of his journey, of the hotels, the wealth, the life they both had seen.

And, as the legend of Helen's goodness and devotion grew, and his dependence upon her got further advertisement, Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully, wept sometimes into the spitting grease of a pan, smiled, beneath her wide red nose, a smile tremulous, bitter, terribly hurt.

"I'll show them," she wept.  "I'll show them."  And she rubbed thoughtfully at a red itching patch that had appeared during the year upon the back of her left hand.

She went to Hot Springs in the winter that followed.  They stopped at Memphis for a day or two: Steve was at work there in a paint store; he slipped quickly in and out of saloons, as he took Eugene about the city, leaving the boy outside for a moment while he went "in here to see a fellow"--a "fellow" who always sent him forth, Eugene thought, with an added impetuosity to his swagger.

Dizzily they crossed the river: at night he saw the small bleared shacks of Arkansas set in malarial fields.

Eliza sent him to one of the public schools of Hot Springs: he plunged heavily into the bewildering new world?performed brilliantly, and won the affection of the young woman who taught him, but paid the penalty of the stranger to all the hostile and banded little creatures of the class.  Before his first month was out, he had paid desperately for his ignorance of their customs.

Eliza boiled herself out at the baths daily; sometimes, he went along with her, leaving her with a sensation of drunken independence, while he went into the men's quarters, stripping himself in a cool room, entering thence a hot one lined with couches, shutting himself in a steam-closet where he felt himself momentarily dwindling into the raining puddle of sweat at his feet, to emerge presently on trembling legs and to be rolled and kneaded about magnificently in a huge tub by a powerful grinning negro.  Later, languorous, but with a feeling of deep purification, he lay out on one of the couches, victoriously his own man in a man's world.  They talked from couch to couch, or walked pot-belliedly about, sashed coyly with bath towels--malarial Southerners with malarial drawls, paunch-eyed alcoholics, purple-skinned gamblers, and broken down prize-fighters. He liked the smell of steam and of the sweaty men.

Eliza sent him out on the streets at once with The Saturday Evening Post.

"It won't hurt you to do a little light work after school," said she.  And as he trudged off with his sack slung from his neck, she would call after him:

"Spruce up, boy!  Spruce up!  Throw your shoulders back.  Make folks think you're somebody."  And she gave him a pocketful of printed cards, which bore this inscription:
 

                      SPEND YOUR SUMMERS AT
                           DIXIELAND
                      In Beautiful Altamont,
                      America's Switzerland.
           Rates Reasonable--Both Transient and Tourist.
                    Apply Eliza E. Gant, Prop.
 

"You've got to help me drum up some trade, if we're to live, boy," she said again, with the lip-pursing, mouth-tremulous jocularity  that was coming to wound him so deeply, because he felt it was only an obvious mask for a more obvious insincerity.

He writhed as he saw himself finally a toughened pachyderm in Eliza's world--sprucing up confidently, throwing his shoulders back proudly, making people "think he was somebody" as he cordially acknowledged an introduction by producing a card setting forth the joys of life in Altamont and at Dixieland, and seized every opening in social relations for the purpose of "drumming up trade."  He hated the jargon of the profession, which she had picked up somewhere long before, and which she used constantly with such satisfaction--smacking her lips as she spoke of "transients," or of "drumming up trade."  In him, as in Gant, there was a silent horror of selling for money the bread of one's table, the shelter of one's walls, to the guest, the stranger, the unknown friend from out the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the broken, the knave, the harlot, and the fool.

Thus, lost in the remote Ozarks, he wandered up Central Avenue, fringed on both sides by the swift-sloping hills, for him, by the borders of enchantment, the immediate portals of a land of timeless and never-ending faery.  He drank endlessly the water that came smoking from the earth, hoping somehow to wash himself clean from all pollution, beginning his everlasting fantasy of the miraculous spring, or the bath, neck-high, of curative mud, which would draw out of a man's veins each drop of corrupted blood, dry up in him a cancerous growth, dwindle and absorb a cyst, remove all scorbutic blemishes, scoop and suck and thread away the fibrous slime of all disease, leaving him again with the perfect flesh of an animal.

And he gazed for hours into the entrances of the fashionable hotels, staring at the ladies' legs upon the verandas, watching the great ones of the land at their recreations, thinking, with a pangof wonder, that here were the people of Chambers, of Phillips, of all the society novelists, leading their godlike lives in flesh, recording their fiction.  He was deeply reverential before the grand manner of these books, particularly before the grand manner of the English books: there people loved, but not as other people,  elegantly; their speech was subtle, delicate, exquisite; even in their passions there was no gross lust or strong appetite?they were incapable of the vile thoughts or the meaty desire of common people.  As he looked at the comely thighs of the young women on horses, fascinated to see their shapely legs split over the strong good smell of a horse, he wondered if the warm sinuous vibration of the great horse-back excited them, and what their love was like. The preposterous elegance of their manner in the books awed him: he saw seduction consummated in kid gloves, to the accompaniment of subtle repartee.  Such thoughts, when he had them, filled him with shame at his own baseness--he imagined for these people a love conducted beyond all the laws of nature, achieving the delight of animals or of common men by the electrical touch of a finger, the flicker of an eye, the intonation of a phrase--exquisitely and incorruptibly.

And as they looked at his remote fabulous face, more strange now that its thick fringing curls had been shorn, they bought of him, paying him several times his fee, with the lazy penitence of wasters.

Great fish within the restaurant windows swam in glass wells?eels coiled snakily, white-bellied trout veered and sank: he dreamed of strange rich foods within.

And sometimes men returned in carriages from the distant river, laden with great fish, and he wondered if he would ever see that river.  All that lay around him, near but unexplored, filled him with desire and longing.

And later, again, along the sandy coast of Florida, with Eliza, he wandered down the narrow lanes of Saint Augustine, raced along the hard packed beach of Daytona, scoured the green lawns of Palm Beach, before the hotels, for coconuts, which Eliza desired as souvenirs, filling a brown tow sack with them and walking, with the bag hung from his shoulders, down the interminable aisles of the Royal Poinciana or the Breakers, target of scorn, and scandal, and amusement from slave and prince; or traversed the spacious palm-cool walks that cut the peninsula, to see, sprawled in the sensual loose sand the ladies' silken legs, the brown lean bodies of the men, the long seaplunges in the unending scroll-work of the emerald and infinite sea, which had beat in his brain from his father's shells, which had played at his mountain heart, but which never, until now, had he seen.  Through the spattered sunlight of the palms, in the smooth walks, princess and lord were wheeled: in latticed bar-rooms, droning with the buzzing fans, men drank from glaCésar tall glasses.
 
 

Or again, they came to Jacksonville, lived there for several weeks near Pett and Greeley; he studied under a little crippled man from Harvard, going to lunch with his teacher at a buffet, where the man consumed beer and pretzels.  Eliza protested the tuition when she left: the cripple shrugged his shoulders, took what she had to  offer.  Eugene twisted his neck about, and lifted his foot from the ground.
 
 

Thus did he see first, he the hill-bound, the sky-girt, of whom the mountains were his masters, the fabulous South.  The picture of flashing field, of wood, and hill, stayed in his heart forever: lost in the dark land, he lay the night-long through within his berth, watching the shadowy and phantom South flash by, sleeping at length, and waking suddenly, to see cool lakes in Florida at dawn, standing quietly as if they had waited from eternity for this meeting; or hearing, as the train in the dark hours of morning slid into Savannah, the strange quiet voices of the men upon the platform, the boding faint echoes of the station, or seeing, in pale dawn, the phantom woods, a rutted lane, a cow, a boy, a drab, dull-eyed against a cottage door, glimpsed, at this moment of rushing time, for which all life had been a plot, to flash upon the window and be gone.

The commonness of all things in the earth he remembered with a strange familiarity--he dreamed of the quiet roads, the moonlit woodlands, and he thought that some day he would come to them on foot, and find them there unchanged, in all the wonder of recognition.  They had existed for him anciently and forever.

Eugene was almost twelve years old.
 
 

PART TWO

14
 

The plum-tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice.  But in the Spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit and blossoms.  She will grow young again.  Red plums will ripen, will be shaken desperately upon the tiny stems.  They will fall bursted on the loamy warm wet earth; when the wind blows in the orchard the air will be filled with dropping plums; the night will be filled with the sound of their dropping, and a great tree of birds will sing, burgeoning, blossoming richly, filling the air also with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-notes.

The harsh hill-earth has moistly thawed and softened, rich soaking rain falls, fresh-bladed tender grass like soft hair growing sparsely streaks the land.

My Brother Ben's face, thought Eugene, is like a piece of slightly yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted fiercely by his old man's scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile the flicker of light across a blade.  His face is like a blade, and a knife, and a flicker of light: it is delicate and fierce, and scowls beautifully forever, and when he fastens his hard white fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he wants to fix, he sniffs with sharp and private concentration through his long pointed nose.  Thus women, looking, feel a well of tenderness for his pointed, bumpy, always scowling face: his hair shines like that of a young boy?it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce.

Into the April night-and-morning streets goes Ben.  The night is brightly pricked with cool and tender stars.  The orchard stirs leafily in the short fresh wind.  Ben prowls softly out of the sleeping house.  His thin bright face is dark within the orchard. There is a smell of nicotine and shoe leather under the young blossoms.  His pigeon-toed tan shoes ring musically up the empty streets.  Lazily slaps the water in the fountain on the Square; all the firemen are asleep--but Big Bill Merrick, the brave cop, hog-jowled and red, leans swinishly over mince-pie and coffee in Uneeda Lunch.  The warm good ink-smell beats in rich waves into the street: a whistling train howls off into the Springtime South.

By the cool orchards in the dark the paper-carriers go.  The copper legs of negresses in their dark dens stir.  The creek brawls cleanly.
 
 

A new one, Number 6, heard boys speak of Foxy:

"Who's Foxy?" asked Number 6.

"Foxy's a bastard, Number 6.  Don't let him catch you."

"The bastard caught me three times last week.  In the Greek's every time.  Why can't they let us eat?"

Number 3 thought of Friday morning--he had the Niggertown route.

"How many--3?"

"One hundred and sixty-two."

"How many Dead Heads you got, son?" said Mr. Randall cynically. "Do you ever try to collect from them?" he added, thumbing through the book.

"He takes it out in Poon-Tang," said Foxy, grinning, "A week's subscription free for a dose."

"What you got to say about it?" asked Number 3 belligerently. "You've been knocking down on them for six years."

"Jazz 'em all if you like," said Randall, "but get the money.  Ben,
I want you to go round with him Saturday."

Ben laughed silently and cynically into the air:

"Oh, my God!" he said.  "Do you expect me to check up on the little thug?  He's been knocking down on you for the last six months."

"All right!  All right!" said Randall, annoyed.  "That's what I want you to find out."

"Oh, for God's sake, Randall," said Ben contemptuously, "he's got niggers on that book who've been dead for five years.  That's what you get for keeping every little crook that comes along."

"If you don't get a move on, 3, I'll give your route to another boy," said Randall.

"Hell, get another boy.  I don't care," said Number 3, toughly.

"Oh, for God's sake!  Listen to this, won't you?" said Ben, laughing thinly and nodding to his angel, indicating Number 3 with a scowling jerk of his head.

"Yes, listen to this, won't you!  That's what I said," Number 3 answered pugnaciously.

"All right, little boy.  Run on and deliver your papers now, before you get hurt," said Ben, turning his scowl quietly upon him and looking at him blackly for a moment.  "Ah, you little crook," he said with profound loathing, "I have a kid brother who's worth six like you."
 
 

Spring lay strewn lightly like a fragrant gauzy scarf upon the earth; the night was a cool bowl of lilac darkness, filled with fresh orchard scents.

Gant slept heavily, rattling the loose window-sash with deep rasping snores; with short explosive thunders, ripping the lilac night, 36 began to climb Saluda.  She bucked helplessly like a goat, her wheels spun furiously on the rails, Tom Cline stared seriously down into the milky boiling creek, and waited.  She slipped, spun, held, ploughed slowly up, like a straining mule, into the dark.  Content, he leaned far out the cab and looked: the starlight glimmered faintly on the rails.  He ate a thick sandwich of cold buttered fried meat, tearing it raggedly and glueily staining it under his big black fingers.  There was a smell of dogwood and laurel in the cool slow passage of the world.  The cars clanked humpily across the spur; the switchman, bathed murkily in the hot yellow light of his perilous bank-edged hut, stood sullen at the switch.

Arms spread upon his cab-sill, chewing thoughtfully, Tom, goggle-eyed, looked carefully down at him.  They had never spoken.  Then in silence he turned and took the milk-bottle, half full of cold coffee, that his fireman offered him.  He washed his food down with the large easy gurgling swallows of a bishop.

At 18 Valley Street, the red shack-porch, slime-scummed with a greasy salve of yellow negroid mud, quaked rottenly.  Number 3's square-folded ink-fresh paper struck flat against the door, falling on its edge stiffly to the porch like a block of light wood. Within, May Corpening stirred nakedly, muttering as if doped and moving her heavy copper legs, in the fetid bed-warmth, with the slow noise of silk.
 
 

Harry Tugman lit a Camel, drawing the smoke deep into his powerful ink-stained lungs as he watched the press run down.  His bare arms were heavy-muscled as his presses.  He dropped comfortably into his pliant creaking chair and tilted back, casually scanning the warm pungent sheet.  Luxurious smoke steamed slowly from his nostrils. He cast the sheet away.

"Christ!" he said.  "What a makeup!"

Ben came down stairs, moody, scowling, and humped over toward the ice-box.

"For God's sake, Mac," he called out irritably to the Make-up Man, as he scowled under the lifted lid, "don't you ever keep anything except root-beer and sour milk?"

"What do you want, for Christ's sake?"

"I'd like to get a Coca-Cola once in a while.  You know," he said bitingly, "Old Man Candler down in Atlanta is still making it."

Harry Tugman cast his cigarette away.

"They haven't got the news up here yet, Ben," said he.  "You'll have to wait till the excitement over Lee's surrender has died down.  Come on," he said abruptly, getting up, "let's go over to the Greasy Spoon."

He thrust his big head down into the deep well of the sink, letting the lukewarm water sluice refreshingly over his broad neck and blue-white sallow night-time face, strong, tough, and humorous.  He soaped his hands with thick slathering suds, his muscles twisting slowly like big snakes.

He sang in his powerful quartette baritone:
 

     "Beware!  Beware!  Beware!
      Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep,
      So beware!  Bee-WARE!"
 

Comfortably they rested in the warm completed exhaustion of the quiet press-room: upstairs the offices, bathed in green-yellow light, sprawled like men relaxed after work.  The boys had gone to their routes.  The place seemed to breathe slowly and wearily.  The dawn-sweet air washed coolly over their faces.  The sky was faintly pearled at the horizon.
 
 

Strangely, in sharp broken fragments, life awoke in the lilac darkness.  Clop-clopping slowly on the ringing street, Number Six, Mrs. Goulderbilt's powerful brown mare, drew inevitably on the bottle-clinking cream-yellow wagon, racked to the top with creamy extra-heavy high-priced milk.  The driver was a fresh-skinned young countryman, richly odorous with the smell of fresh sweat and milk. Eight miles, through the starlit dewy fields and forests of Biltburn, under the high brick English lodgegate, they had come into the town.
 
 

At the Pisgah Hotel, opposite the station, the last door clicked softly; the stealthy footfalls of the night ceased; Miss Bernice Redmond gave the negro porter eight one-dollar bills and went definitely to bed with the request that she be not disturbed until one o'clock; a shifting engine slatted noisily about in the yard; past the Biltburn crossing Tom Cline whistled with even, mournful respirations.  By this time Number 3 had delivered 142 of his papers; he had only to ascend the rickety wooden stairs of the Eagle Crescent bank to finish the eight houses of the Crescent.  He looked anxiously across the hill-and-dale-sprawled negro settlement to the eastern rim: behind Birdseye Gap the sky was pearl-gray?the stars looked drowned.  Not much time left, he thought.  He had a blond meaty face, pale-colored and covered thickly with young blond hair.  His jaw was long and fleshy: it sloped backward.  He ran his tongue along his full cracked underlip.

A 1910 model, four-cylinder, seven-passenger Hudson, with mounting steady roar, shot drunkenly out from the station curbing, lurched into the level negro-sleeping stretch of South End Avenue, where the firemen had their tournaments, and zipped townward doing almost fifty.  The station quietly stirred in its sleep: there were faint reverberating noises under the empty sheds; brisk hammer-taps upon  car wheels, metallic heel-clicks in the tiled waiting-room. Sleepily a negress slopped water on the tiles, with languid sullen movement pushing a gray sopping rag around the floor.
 
 

It was now five-thirty.  Ben had gone out of the house into the orchard at three twenty-five.  In another forty minutes Gant would waken, dress, and build the morning fires.
 
 

"Ben," said Harry Tugman, as they walked out of the relaxed office, "if Jimmy Dean comes messing around my press-room again they can get some one else to print their lousy sheet.  What the hell!  I can get a job on the Atlanta Constitution whenever I want it."

"Did he come down to-night?" asked Ben.

"Yes," said Harry Tugman, "and he got out again.  I told him to take his little tail upstairs."

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben.  "What did he say?"

"He said, 'I'M the editor!  I'm the editor of this paper!'  'I don't give a good goddam,' I said, 'if you're the President's snotrag.  If you want any paper to-day keep out of the pressroom.' And believe me, he went!"

In cool blue-pearl darkness they rounded the end of the Post Office and cut diagonally across the street to Uneeda Lunch No. 3.  It was a small beanery, twelve feet wide, wedged in between an optician's and a Greek shoe parlor.

Within, Dr. Hugh McGuire sat on a stool patiently impaling kidney beans, one at a time, upon the prongs of his fork.  A strong odor of corn whisky soaked the air about him.  His thick skilful butcher's hands, hairy on the backs, gripped the fork numbly.  His heavy-jowled face was blotted by large brown patches.  He turned round and stared owlishly as Ben entered, fixing the wavering glare of his bulbous red eyes finally upon him.

"Hello, son," he said in his barking kindly voice, "what can I do for you?"

"Oh, for God's sake," said Ben laughing contemptuously, and jerking his head toward Tugman.  "Listen to this, won't you?"

They sat down at the lower end.  At this moment, Horse Hines, the undertaker, entered, producing, although he was not a thin man, the effect of a skeleton clad in a black frock coat.  His long lantern mouth split horsily in a professional smile displaying big horse teeth in his white heavily starched face.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," he said for no apparent reason, rubbing his lean hands briskly as if it was cold.  His palm-flesh rattled together like old bones.

Coker, the Lung Shark, who had not ceased to regard McGuire's bean-hunt with sardonic interest, now took the long cigar out of his devil's head and held it between his stained fingers as he tapped his companion.

"Let's get out," he grinned quietly, nodding toward Horse Hines. "It will look bad if we're seen together here."

"Good morning, Ben," said Horse Hines, sitting down below him. "Are all the folks well?" he added, softly.

Sideways Ben looked at him scowling, then jerked his head back to the counterman, with a fast bitter flicker of his lips.

"Doctor," said Harry Tugman with servile medicine-man respect, "what do you charge to operate?"

"Operate what?" McGuire barked presently, having pronged a kidney bean.

"Why--appendicitis," said Harry Tugman, for it was all he could think of.

"Three hundred dollars when we go into the belly," said McGuire. He coughed chokingly to the side.

"You're drowning in your own secretions," said Coker with his yellow grin.  "Like Old Lady Sladen."

"My God!" said Harry Tugman, thinking jealously of lost news.