“I’ll do something,” he said. “I will.”
They looked shyly at his strange dark face, with all its passionate and naive ardor, and they felt tenderness and love for his youth and all that was unknown to it. And a great love and pity welled up in him because of their strange and awkward loneliness, and because he felt, through some terrible intuition, that he was already indifferent to the titles and honors they desired for him, and because those which he had come to desire for himself were already beyond the scale of their value. And, before the vision of pity and loss and loneliness, he turned away, clutching his lean hand into his throat.
It was over. Gant, who under the stimulus of his son’s graduation had almost regained the vitality of his middle years, relapsed now into whining dotage. The terrible heat came down and smote him. He faced with terror and weariness the long hot trip into the hills again.
“Merciful God!” he whined. “Why did I ever come! O Jesus, how will I ever face that trip again! I can’t bear it. I’ll die before I get there! It’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s cruel.” And he wept weak snuffling sobs.
Eugene took them to Exeter and got them comfortably disposed in a Pullman. He was remaining for a few days to gather his belongings—the clutter of four years, letters, books, old manuscript, worthless rubbish of every description, for he seemed to inherit Eliza’s mania for blind accumulation. Extravagant with money, and unable to husband it, he saved everything else even when his spirit grew sick at the stale and dusty weariness of the past.
“Well, son,” said Eliza, in the quiet moment before departure. “Have you thought yet of what you’re going to do?”
“Yes,” said Gant, wetting his thumb, “for you’ve got to shift for yourself from now on. You’ve had the best education money can buy. The rest is up to you.”
“I’ll talk to you in a few days when I see you at home,” said Eugene. “I’ll tell you about it then.”
Mercifully the train began to move: he kissed them quickly and ran down the aisle.
He had nothing to tell them. He was nineteen; he had completed his college course; but he did not know what he was going to do. His father’s plan that he should study law and “enter politics” had been forgotten since his sophomore year, when it became apparent that the impulse of his life was not toward law. His family felt obscurely that he was an eccentric—“queer,” they called it—and of an impractical or “literary” turn.
Without asking sharply why, they felt the absurdity of clothing this bounding figure, with the wild dark face, in a frock-coat and string tie: he did not exist in business, trade, or law. More vaguely, they classified him as bookish and a dreamer—Eliza referred to him as “a good scholar,” which, in fact, he had never been. He had simply performed brilliantly in all things that touched his hunger, and dully, carelessly, and indifferently in all things that did not. No one saw very clearly what he was going to do—he, surely, least of all—but his family, following the tack of his comrades, spoke vaguely and glibly of “a career in journalism.” This meant newspaper work. And, however unsatisfactory this may have been, their inevitable question was drugged for the moment by the glitter of success that had surrounded his life at the university.
But Eugene was untroubled by thought of a goal. He was mad with such ecstasy as he had never known. He was a centaur, moon-eyed and wild of mane, torn apart with hunger for the golden world. He became at times almost incapable of coherent speech. While talking with people, he would whinny suddenly into their startled faces, and leap away, his face contorted with an idiot joy. He would hurl himself squealing through the streets and along the paths, touched with the ecstasy of a thousand unspoken desires. The world lay before him for his picking—full of opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die.
He went back to Pulpit Hill for two or three days of delightful loneliness in the deserted college. He prowled through the empty campus at midnight under the great moons of the late rich Spring; he breathed the thousand rich odors of tree and grass and flower, of the opulent and seductive South; and he felt a delicious sadness when he thought of his departure, and saw there in the moon the thousand phantom shapes of the boys he had known who would come no more.
And in the day he went to talk with Vergil Weldon. The old man was charming, confidential, full of wise intimacy, gentle humor. They sat beneath the great trees of his yard and drank iced tea. Eugene was thinking of California, Peru, Asia, Alaska, Europe, Africa, China. But he mentioned Harvard. For him, it was not the name of a university—it was rich magic, wealth, elegance, joy, proud loneliness, rich books and golden browsing; it was an enchanted name like Cairo and Damascus. And he felt somehow that it gave a reason, a goal of profit, to his wild ecstasy.
“Yes,” said Vergil Weldon approvingly. “It’s the place for you, Mr. Gant. It doesn’t matter about the others. They’re ready now. But a mind like yours must not be pulled green. You must give it a chance to ripen. There you will find yourself.”
And he talked enchantingly about the good free life of the mind, cloistered study, the rich culture of the city, and about the food. “They give you food there that a man can eat, Mr. Gant,” he said. “Your mind can do its work on it.” Then he spoke of his own student days there, and of the great names of Royce
