The national demand for white shiny plumbing, toothpaste, tiled lunchrooms, haircuts, manicured dentistry, horn spectacles, baths, and the insane fear of disease that sent the voters whispering to the druggist after their brutal fumbling lecheries—all of this seemed nasty. Their outer cleanliness became the token of an inner corruption: it was something that glittered and was dry, foul, and rotten at the core. He felt that, no matter what leper’s taint he might carry upon his flesh, there was in him a health that was greater than they could ever know—something fierce and cruelly wounded, but alive, that did not shrink away from the terrible sunken river of life; something desperate and merciless that looked steadily on the hidden and unspeakable passions that unify the tragic family of this earth.
Yet, Eugene was no rebel. He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all. He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose. And he did not care under what form of government he lived—Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist—if it could assure him these things. He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if he could only go and find them. The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it. He felt sure things would be better elsewhere. He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it. He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places. He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards’ bottles. Moreover, since Ben’s death, the conviction had grown on him that men do not escape from life because life is dull, but that life escapes from men because men are little. He felt that the passions of the play were greater than the actors. It seemed to him that he had never had a great moment of living in which he had measured up to its fullness. His pain at Ben’s death had been greater than he, the love and loss of Laura had left him stricken and bewildered, and when he embraced young girls and women he felt a desperate frustration: he wanted to eat them like cake and to have them, too; to roll them up into a ball; to entomb them in his flesh; to possess them more fully than they may ever be possessed.
Further, it annoyed and wounded him to be considered “queer.” He exulted in his popularity among the students, his heart pounded with pride under all the pins and emblems, but he resented being considered an eccentric, and he envied those of his fellows who were elected to office for their solid golden mediocrity. He wanted to obey the laws and to be respected: he believed himself to be a sincerely conventional person—but, someone would see him after midnight, bounding along a campus path, with goat-cries beneath the moon. His suits went baggy, his shirts and drawers got dirty, his shoes wore through—he stuffed them with cardboard strips—his hats grew shapeless and wore through at the creases. But he did not mean to go unkempt—the thought of going for repairs filled him with weary horror. He hated to act—he wanted to brood upon his entrails for fourteen hours a day. At length, goaded, he would lash his great bulk, lulled in the powerful inertia of its visions, into a cursing and violent movement.
He was desperately afraid of people in crowds: at class meetings, or smokers, or at any public gathering, he was nervous and constrained until he began to talk to them, and got them under him. He was always afraid that someone would make a joke about him, and that he would be laughed at. But he was not afraid of any man alone: he felt that he could handle anyone if he got him away from his crowd. Remembering his savage fear and hatred of the crowd, with a man alone he would play cruelly, like a cat, snarling gently at him, prowling in on him softly, keeping cocked and silent the terrible tiger’s paw of his spirit. All of their starch oozed out of them; they seemed to squeak and twitter, and look round for the door. He would get some loud pompous yokel—the student president of the Y.M.C.A., or the class president—and bear down on him with evil gentle matter-of-factness.
“Don’t you think,” he would begin with earnest piety, “don’t you think that a man should kiss his wife on her belly?”
And he would fasten all the eager innocence of his face into a stare.
“For, after all, the belly is sometimes more beautiful than the mouth, and far cleaner. Or do you believe in the belly-less marriage? I, for one,” he went on with proud passion, “do not! I stand for more and better Belly-Kissing. Our wives, our mothers, and our sisters expect it of us. It is an act of reverence to the seat of life. Nay! it is even an act of religious worship. If we could get our prominent business men and all the other right-thinking people interested in it, it would bring about the mightiest revolution ever known in a nation’s life. In five years it would do away with divorce and reestablish the prestige of the home. In twenty
