He began to join. He joined everything. He had never “belonged” to any group before, but now all groups were beckoning him. He had without much trouble won a place for himself on the staff of the college paper and the magazine. The small beginning trickle of distinctions widened into a gushet. It began to sprinkle, then it rained. He was initiated into literary fraternities, dramatic fraternities, theatrical fraternities, speaking fraternities, journalistic fraternities, and in the Spring into a social fraternity. He joined enthusiastically, submitted with fanatical glee to the hard mauling of the initiations, and went about lame and sore, more pleased than a child or a savage, with colored ribbons in his coat lapel, and a waistcoat plastered with pins, badges, symbols, and Greek letterings.
But not without labor had his titles come. The early autumn was lustreless and slack: he could not come from the shadow of Laura. She haunted him. When he went home at Christmas, he found the hills bleak and close, and the town mean and cramped in the grim stinginess of winter. There was a ludicrous, a desperate gaiety in the family.
“Well!” said Eliza sorrowfully, as she peered above the stove, “let’s all try to be happy this time and enjoy a quiet Christmas. You never know! You never know!” She shook her head, unable to continue. Her eyes were wet. “It may be the last time we’re all together. The old trouble! The old trouble!” she said hoarsely, turning to him.
“What old trouble?” he said angrily. “Good God, why are you so mysterious?”
“My heart!” she whispered, with a brave smile. “I’ve said nothing to anyone. But last week—I thought I was gone.” This was delivered in a boding whisper.
“Oh, my God!” he groaned. “You’ll be here when the rest of us are rotten.”
Helen burst into a raucous angry laugh, looking at his sullen face and prodding him roughly with her big fingers.
“K-K-K-K-K-K-K! Did you ever know it to fail? Did you? If you come to her with one of your kidneys gone, she’s always got something worse the matter with her. No, sir! I’ve never known it to fail!”
“You may laugh! You may laugh!” said Eliza with a smile of watery bitterness. “But I may not be here to laugh at much longer.”
“Good heavens, mama!” the girl cried irritably. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not the sick one! Papa’s the sick one. He’s the one that needs attention. Can’t you realize that—he’s dying. He may not last the winter out. I’m the sick one! You’ll be here long after we’re both gone.”
“You never know,” said Eliza mysteriously. “You never know who’ll be the first one to go. Only last week, there was Mr. Cosgrave, as fine a looking man as—”
“They’re off!” Eugene screamed with a crazy laugh, stamping up and down the kitchen in a frenzy. “By God! They’re off!”
At this moment, one of the aged harpies, of whom the house always sheltered two or three during the grim winter, lurched from the hall back into the door-space. She was a large rawboned hag, a confirmed drug-eater, who moved by a violent and dissonant jerking of her gaunt limbs, pawing abruptly at the air with a gnarled hand.
“Mrs. Gant,” said she, writhing her loose gray lips horribly before she could speak. “Did I get a letter? Have you seen him?”
“Seen who? Go on!” said Eliza fretfully. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t believe you do, either.”
Smiling hideously at them all, and pawing the air, the monster got under way again, disappearing like an old wagon with loose wheels. Helen began to laugh, hoarsely, as Eugene’s face hung forward with mouth half-open in an expression of sullen stupefaction. Eliza laughed, too, slyly, rubbing her nosewing with a finger.
“I’ll vow!” she said. “I believe she’s crazy. She takes dope of some sort—that’s certain. It makes my flesh crawl when she comes around.”
“Then why do you keep her in the house?” said Helen resentfully. “Good heavens, mama! You could get rid of her if you wanted to. Poor old ’Gene!” she said, beginning to laugh again. “You always catch it, don’t you?”
“The time draws near the birth of Christ,” said he, piously.
She laughed; then, with abstracted eyes, plucked vaguely at her large chin.
His father spent most of the day staring vacantly into the parlor fire. Miss Florry Mangle, the nurse, gave him the morbid comfort of her silence: she rocked incessantly before the fire, thirty heel-taps to the minute, with arms tight-folded on her limp breasts. Occasionally she talked of death and disease. Gant had aged and wasted shockingly. His heavy clothes wound round his feeble shanks: his face was waxen and transparent—it was like a great beak. He looked clean and fragile. The cancer, Eugene thought, flowered in him like some terrible but beautiful plant. His mind was very clear, not doting, but sad and old. He spoke little, with almost comical gentleness, but he ceased to listen almost as soon as one answered.
“How have you been, son?” he asked.
