Four years later, when he was graduated, he had passed his adolescence, the kiss of love and death burned on his lips, and he was still a child.
When it was at last plain that Gant’s will was on this inflexible, Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:
“Well, then, go your ways, boy. Go your ways. God bless you.”
She looked a moment at his long thin figure and turned to John Dorsey Leonard with wet eyes:
“Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who came to us four years ago? Can you believe it?”
John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary gentle relaxation.
“What do you know about it?” he said.
When Margaret turned to him again her voice, low and gentle, was charged with the greatest passion he had ever heard in it.
“You are taking a part of our heart with you, boy. Do you know that?”
She took his trembling hand gently between her own lean fingers. He lowered his head and closed his eyelids tightly.
“Eugene,” she continued, “we could not love you more if you were our own child. We wanted to keep you with us for another year, but since that cannot be, we are sending you out with our hopes pinned to you. Oh, boy, you are fine. There is no atom in you that is not fine. A glory and a chrism of bright genius rest upon you. God bless you: the world is yours.”
The proud words of love and glory sank like music to his heart, evoking their bright pictures of triumph, and piercing him with the bitter shame of his concealed desires. Love bade him enter, but his soul drew back, guilty of lust and sin.
He tore his hand from her grasp, clinching, with the strangled cry of an animal, his convulsive throat.
“I can’t!” he choked. “You mustn’t think—” He could not go on; his life groped blindly to confessional.
Later, after he left her, her light kiss upon his cheek, the first she had ever given him, burned like a ring of fire.
That summer he was closer to Ben than ever before. They occupied the same room at Woodson Street. Luke had returned to the Westinghouse plant at Pittsburgh after Helen’s marriage.
Gant still occupied his sitting-room, but the rest of the house he had rented to a sprightly gray-haired widow of forty. She looked after them beautifully, but she served Ben with an especial tenderness. At night, on the cool veranda, Eugene would find them below the ripening clusters, hear the quiet note of his brother’s voice, his laugh, see the slow red arc of his cigarette in darkness.
The quiet one was more quiet and morose than he had ever been before: he stalked through the house scowling ferociously. All his conversation with Eliza was short and bitterly scornful; with Gant he spoke hardly at all. They had never talked together. Their eyes never met—a great shame, the shame of father and son, that mystery that goes down beyond motherhood, beyond life, that mysterious shame that seals the lips of all men, and lives in their hearts, had silenced them.
But to Eugene, Ben talked more freely than ever before. As they sat upon their beds at night, reading and smoking before they slept, all of the pain and bitterness of Benjamin Gant’s life burst out in violent denunciation. He began to speak with slow sullen difficulty, halting over his words as he did when he read, but speaking more rapidly as his quiet voice became more passionate.
“I suppose they’ve told you how poor they are?” he began, tossing his cigarette away.
“Well,” said Eugene, “I’ve got to go easy. I mustn’t waste my money.”
“Ah-h!” said Ben, making an ugly face. He laughed silently, with a thin and bitter contortion of his lips.
“Papa said that a lot of boys pay their own way through college by waiting on tables and so on. Perhaps I can do something like that.”
Ben turned over on his side until he faced his brother, propping himself on his thin hairy forearm.
“Now listen, ’Gene,” he said sternly, “don’t be a damned little fool, do you hear? You take every damn cent you can get out of them,” he added savagely.
“Well, I appreciate what they’re doing. I’m getting a lot more than the rest of you had. They’re doing a lot for me,” said the boy.
“For you, you little idiot!” said Ben, scowling at him in disgust. “They’re doing it all for themselves. Don’t let them get away with that. They think you’ll make good and bring a lot of credit to them some day. They’re rushing you into it two years too soon, as it is. No, you take everything you can get. The rest of us never had anything, but I want to see you get all that’s coming to you. My God!” he cried furiously. “Their money’s doing no one any good rotting in the damned bank, is it? No, ’Gene, get all you can. When you get down there, if you find you need more to hold your own with the other boys, make the old man give it to you. You’ve never had a chance to hold your head up in your own home town, so make the most of your chances when you get away.”
He lighted a cigarette and smoked in bitter silence for a moment.
“To hell with it all!” he said. “What in God’s name are we living for!”
Eugene’s first year at the university was filled for him with loneliness, pain, and failure. Within three weeks of his matriculation, he had been made the dupe of a half-dozen classic jokes, his ignorance of all
