Her voice had a note of exasperation in it. They all felt the grim trickery of Death, which had come in by the cellar while they waited at the window.
“Papa has no right to expect it of me!” she burst out resentfully. “He’s had his life. He’s an old man. We have a right to ours as well as anyone. Good heavens! Can’t they realize that! I’m married to Hugh Barton! I’m his wife!”
Are you? thought Eugene. Are you?
But Eliza sat before the fire at Dixieland with hands folded, reliving a past of tenderness and love that never had been. And as the wind howled in the bleak street, and Eliza wove a thousand fables of that lost and bitter spirit, the bright and stricken thing in the boy twisted about in horror, looking for escape from the house of death. No more! No more! (it said). You are alone now. You are lost. Go find yourself, lost boy, beyond the hills.
This little bright and stricken thing stood up on Eugene’s heart and talked into his mouth.
O but I can’t go now, said Eugene to it. (Why not? it whispered.) Because her face is so white, and her forehead is so broad and high, with the black hair drawn back from it, and when she sat there at the bed she looked like a little child. I can’t go now and leave her here alone. (She is alone, it said, and so are you.) And when she purses up her mouth and stares, so grave and thoughtful, she is like a little child. (You are alone now, it said. You must escape, or you will die.) It is all like death: she fed me at her breast, I slept in the same bed with her, she took me on her trips. All of that is over now, and each time it was like a death. (And like a life, it said to him. Each time that you die, you will be born again. And you will die a hundred times before you become a man.) I can’t! I can’t! Not now—later, more slowly. (No. Now, it said.) I am afraid. I have nowhere to go. (You must find the place, it said.) I am lost. (You must hunt for yourself, it said.) I am alone. Where are you? (You must find me, it said.)
Then, as the bright thing twisted about in him, Eugene heard the whine of the bleak wind about the house that he must leave, and the voice of Eliza calling up from the past the beautiful lost things that never happened.
“—and I said, ‘Why, what on earth, boy, you want to dress up warm around your neck or you’ll catch your death of cold.’ ”
Eugene caught at his throat and plunged for the door.
“Here, boy! Where are you going?” said Eliza, looking up quickly.
“I’ve got to go,” he said in a choking voice. “I’ve got to get away from here.”
Then he saw the fear in her eyes, and the grave troubled child’s stare. He rushed to where she sat and grasped her hand. She held him tightly and laid her face against his arm.
“Don’t go yet,” she said. “You’ve all your life ahead of you. Stay with me just a day or two.”
“Yes, mama,” he said, falling to his knees. “Yes, mama.” He hugged her to him frantically. “Yes, mama. God bless you, mama. It’s all right, mama. It’s all right.”
Eliza wept bitterly.
“I’m an old woman,” she said, “and one by one I’ve lost you all. He’s dead now, and I never got to know him. O son, don’t leave me yet. You’re the only one that’s left: you were my baby. Don’t go! Don’t go.” She laid her white face against his sleeve.
It is not hard to go (he thought). But when can we forget?
It was October and the leaves were quaking. Dusk was beginning. The sun had gone, the western ranges faded in chill purple mist, but the western sky still burned with ragged bands of orange. It was October.
Eugene walked swiftly along the sinuous paved curves of Rutledge Road. There was a smell of fog and supper in the air: a warm moist blur at windowpanes, and the pungent sizzle of cookery. There were mist-far voices, and a smell of burning leaves, and a warm yellow blur of lights.
He turned into an unpaved road by the big wooden sanitarium. He heard the rich kitchen laughter of the negroes, the larded sizzle of food, the dry veranda coughing of the lungers.
He walked briskly along the lumpy road, with a dry scuffling of leaves. The air was a chill dusky pearl: above him a few pale stars were out. The town and the house were behind him. There was a singing in the great hill-pines.
Two women came down the road and passed him. He saw that they were country women. They were dressed rustily in black, and one of them was weeping. He thought of the men who had been laid in the earth that day, and of all the women who wept. Will they come again? he wondered.
When he came to the gate of the cemetery he found it open. He went in quickly and walked swiftly up the winding road that curved around the crest of the hill. The grasses were dry and sere; a wilted wreath of laurel lay upon a grave. As he approached the family plot, his pulse quickened a little. Someone was moving slowly, deliberately, in among the gravestones. But as he came up he saw that it was Mrs. Pert.
“Good evening, Mrs. Pert,” said Eugene.
“Who is it?” she asked, peering murkily. She came to him with her grave unsteady step.
“It’s ’Gene,” he said.
“Oh, is it Old ’Gene?” she said. “How are you, ’Gene?”
“Pretty well,” he said. He stood awkwardly, chilled, not knowing how to continue. It was getting dark. There were long lonely preludes to winter in the splendid pines, and a whistling of wind in the long
