“So get your education,” said Ben, scowling vaguely. “All the Big Men—Ford, Edison, Rockefeller—whether they had it or not, say it’s a good thing.”
“Why didn’t you go yourself?” said Eugene curiously.
“I didn’t have anyone to tell me,” said Ben. “Besides, you don’t think the Old Man would give me anything, do you?” He laughed cynically. “It’s too late now.”
He was silent a moment; he smoked.
“You didn’t know I was taking a course in advertising, did you?” he asked, grinning.
“No. Where?”
“Through the Correspondence School,” said Ben. “I get my lessons every week. I don’t know,” he laughed diffidently, “I must be good at it. I make the highest grades they have—98 or 100 every time. I get a diploma, if I finish the course.”
A blinding mist swam across the younger brother’s eyes. He did not know why. A convulsive knot gathered in his throat. He bent his head quickly and fumbled for his cigarettes. In a moment he said:
“I’m glad you’re doing it. I hope you finish, Ben.”
“You know,” Ben said seriously, “they’ve turned out some Big Men. I’ll show you the testimonials some time. Men who started with nothing: now they’re holding down big jobs.”
“I hope you do,” said Eugene.
“So, you see you’re not the only College Man around here,” said Ben with a grin. In a moment, he went on gravely: “You’re the last hope, ’Gene. Go on and finish up, if you have to steal the money. The rest of us will never amount to a damn. Try to make something out of yourself. Hold your head up! You’re as good as any of them—a damn sight better than these little pimps about town.” He became very fierce; he was very excited. He got up suddenly from the table. “Don’t let them laugh at you! By God, we’re as good as they are. If any of them laughs at you again, pick up the first damn thing you get your hand on and knock him down. Do you hear?” In his fierce excitement he snatched up the heavy carving steel from the table and brandished it.
“Yes,” said Eugene awkwardly. “I think it’s going to be all right now. I didn’t know how to do at first.”
“I hope you have sense enough now to leave those old hookers alone?” said Ben very sternly. Eugene made no answer. “You can’t do that and be anything, you know. And you’re likely to catch everything. This looks like a nice girl,” he said quietly, after a pause. “For heaven’s sake, fix yourself up and try to keep fairly clean. Women notice that, you know. Look after your fingernails, and keep your clothes pressed. Have you any money?”
“All I need,” said Eugene, looking nervously toward the kitchen. “Don’t, for God’s sake!”
“Put it in your pocket, you little fool,” Ben said angrily, thrusting a bill into his hand. “You’ve got to have some money. Keep it until you need it.”
Helen came out on the high front porch with them as they departed. As usual, she had added a double heaping measure to what they needed. There was another shoebox stuffed with sandwiches, boiled eggs, and fudge.
She stood on the high step-edge, with a cloth wound over her head, her gaunt arms, pitted with old scars, akimbo. A warm sunny odor of nasturtiums, loamy earth, and honeysuckle washed round them its hot spermy waves.
“O‑ho! A‑ha!” she winked comically. “I know something! I’m not as blind as you think, you know—” She nodded with significant jocularity, her big smiling face drenched in the curious radiance and purity that occasionally dwelt so beautifully there. He thought always when he saw her thus, of a sky washed after rain, of wide crystalline distances, cool and clean.
With a rough snigger she prodded him in the ribs:
“Ain’t love grand! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Look at his face, Laura.” She drew the girl close to her in a generous hug, laughing, Oh, with laughing pity, and as they mounted the hill, she stood there, in the sunlight, her mouth slightly open, smiling, touched with radiance, beauty, and wonder.
They mounted slowly toward the eastern edge of town, by the long upward sweep of Academy Street, which bordered the negro settlement sprawled below it. At the end of Academy Street, the hill loomed abruptly; a sinuous road, well paved, curved up along the hillside to the right. They turned into this road, mounting now along the eastern edge of Niggertown. The settlement fell sharply away below them, rushing down along a series of long clay streets. There were a few frame houses by the roadside: the dwellings of negroes and poor white people, but these became sparser as they mounted. They walked at a leisurely pace up the cool road speckled with little dancing patches of light that filtered through the arching trees and shaded on the left by the dense massed foliage of the hill. Out of this green loveliness loomed the huge raw turret of a cement reservoir: it was streaked and blotted coolly with watermarks. Eugene felt thirsty. Further along, the escape from a smaller reservoir roared from a pipe in a foaming hawser, as thick as a man’s body.
They climbed sharply up, along a rocky trail, avoiding the last long corkscrew of the road, and stood in the gap, at the road’s summit. They were only a few hundred feet above the town: it lay before them with the sharp nearness of a Sienese picture, at once close and far. On the highest ground, he saw the solid masonry of the Square, blocked cleanly out in light and shadow, and a crawling toy that was a car, and men no bigger than sparrows. And about the Square was the treeless brick jungle of business—cheap, ragged, and ugly, and beyond all this, in indefinite patches, the houses where all the people lived, with little bright raw ulcers of suburbia further off, and the healing and concealing grace of fair massed trees. And below him, weltering up from the hollow along the flanks
