Eugene looked with passionate devotion at the grand old head, calm, wise and comforting. In a moment of vision, he saw that, for him, here was the last of the heroes, the last of those giants to whom we give the faith of our youth, believing like children that the riddle of our lives may be solved by their quiet judgment. He believed, and no experience, he knew, would ever make him disbelieve, that one of the great lives of his time had unfolded itself quietly in the little college town.
Oh, my old Sophist, he thought. What were all the old philosophies that you borrowed and pranked up to your fancy, to you, who were greater than all? What was the Science of Thinking, to you, who were Thought? What if all your ancient game of metaphysics never touched the dark jungle of my soul? Do you think you have replaced my childhood’s God with your Absolute? No, you have only replaced his beard with a mustache, and a glint of demon hawk-eyes. To me, you were above good, above truth, above righteousness. To me, you were the sufficient negation to all your teachings. Whatever you did was, by its doing, right. And now I leave you throned in memory. You will see my dark face burning on your bench no more; the memory of me will grow mixed and broken; new boys will come to win your favor and your praise. But you? Forever fixed, unfading, bright, my lord.
Then, while the old man talked, Eugene leaped suddenly to his feet, and grasped the lean hand tightly in his own.
“Mr. Weldon!” he said. “Mr. Weldon! You are a great man! I shall never forget you!”
Then, turning, he plunged off blindly down the path.
He still loitered, although his baggage had been packed for days. With a desperate pain, he faced departure from that Arcadian wilderness where he had known so much joy. At night he roamed the deserted campus, talking quietly until morning with a handful of students who lingered strangely, as he did, among the ghostly buildings, among the phantoms of lost boys. He could not face a final departure. He said he would return early in autumn for a few days, and at least once a year thereafter.
Then one hot morning, on sudden impulse, he left. As the car that was taking him to Exeter roared down the winding street, under the hot green leafiness of June, he heard, as from the sea-depth of a dream, far-faint, the mellow booming of the campus bell. And suddenly it seemed to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the footfalls of lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. Then, as he listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners thudded into oblivion. Soon the car roared up by Vergil Weldon’s house, and as he passed, he saw the old man sitting below his tree.
Eugene stood up in the car and waved his long arm in a gesture of farewell.
“Goodbye,” he cried. “Goodbye.”
The old man stood up with a quiet salute of parting, slow, calm, eloquently tender.
Then, even while Eugene stood looking back upon the street, the car roared up across the lip of the hill, and drove steeply down into the hot parched countryside below. But as the lost world faded from his sight, Eugene gave a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the elfin door had closed behind him, and that he would never come back again.
He saw the vast rich body of the hills, lush with billowing greenery, ripe-bosomed, dappled by far-floating cloud-shadows. But it was, he knew, the end.
Far-forested, the horn-note wound. He was wild with the hunger for release: the vast champaign of earth stretched out for him its limitless seduction.
It was the end, the end. It was the beginning of the voyage, the quest of new lands.
Gant was dead. Gant was living, death-in-life. In his big back room at Eliza’s he waited death, lost and broken in a semi-life of petulant memory. He hung to life by a decayed filament, a corpse lit by infrequent flares of consciousness. The sudden death whose menace they had faced so long that it had lost its meaning, had never come to him. It had come where they had least expected it—to Ben. And the conviction which Eugene had had at Ben’s death, more than a year and a half before, was now a materialized certainty. The great wild pattern of the family had been broken forever. The partial discipline that had held them together had been destroyed by the death of their brother: the nightmare of waste and loss had destroyed their hope. With an insane fatalism they had surrendered to the savage chaos of life.
Except for Eliza. She was sixty, sound of body and mind, triumphantly healthy. She still ran Dixieland, but she had given up the boarders for roomers, and most of the duties of management she entrusted to an old maid who lived in the house. Eliza devoted most of her time to real estate.
She had, during the past year, got final control of Gant’s property. She had begun to sell it immediately and ruthlessly, over his indifferent mutter of protest. She had sold the old house on Woodson Street for $7,000—a good enough price, she had said, considering the neighborhood. But, stark, bare, and raw, stripped of its girdling vines, annex now to a quack’s sanitarium for “nervous diseases,” the rich labor of their life was gone. In this, more than in anything else, Eugene saw the final disintegration of his family.
Eliza had also sold a wild tract of mountain farmland for $6,000, fifty acres on the Reynoldsville road for $15,000, and several smaller pieces. Finally she had sold Gant’s shop upon the Square for $25,000 to a syndicate of real estate people who were going to erect on the site the town’s first “skyscraper.” With this money as capital, she
