Gant was a spectre in waxen yellow. His disease, which had thrust out its branches to all parts of his body, gave him an appearance of almost transparent delicacy. His mind was sunken out of life in a dim shadowland: he listened wearily and indifferently to all the brawling clamor around him, crying out and weeping when he felt pain, cold, or hunger, smiling when he was comfortable and at ease. He was taken back to Baltimore two or three times a year now for radium treatments: he had a brief flare of vitality and ease after each visit, but everyone knew his relief would be only temporary. His body was a rotten fabric which had thus far miraculously held together.
Meanwhile, Eliza talked incessantly about real estate, bought, sold and traded. About her own ventures she was insanely secretive; she would smile craftily when questioned about them, wink in a knowing fashion, and make a bantering noise in her throat.
“I’m not telling all I know,” she said.
This goaded her daughter’s bitter curiosity almost past endurance, for, despite her angry mockery, the mania for property had bitten into her and Hugh Barton as well: secretly they respected Eliza’s shrewdness and got her advice on property into which he was putting all his surplus earnings. But when Eliza refused to reveal her own investments, the girl would cry out in a baffled hysteria:
“She has no right to do that! Don’t you know she hasn’t? It’s papa’s property just as much as hers, you know. If she should die now, that estate would be in a terrible mess. No one knows what she’s done: how much she’s bought and sold. I don’t think she knows herself. She keeps her notes and papers hidden away in little drawers and boxes.”
Her distrust and fear had been so great that, much to Eliza’s annoyance, she had persuaded Gant, a year or two before, to make a will: he had left $5,000 to each of his five children, and the remainder of his property and money to his wife. And, as the summer advanced, she again persuaded him to appoint as executors the two people in whose honesty she had the greatest trust: Hugh Barton and Luke Gant.
To Luke, who, since his discharge from the navy, had been salesman, in the mountain district, for electrical farm-lighting plants, she said:
“We’re the ones who’ve always had the interests of the family at heart, and we’ve had nothing for it. We’ve been the generous ones, but Eugene and Steve will get it all in the end. ’Gene’s had everything: we’ve had nothing. Now he’s talking of going to Harvard. Had you heard about that?”
“His m-m-m-majesty!” said Luke ironically. “Who’s going to p-p-p-pay the bills?”
Thus, as the summer waned, over the slow horror of Gant’s death was waged this ugly warfare of greed and hatred. Steve came in from Indiana; within four days he was insane from whiskey and veronal. He began to follow Eugene around the house, backing him ominously into corners, seizing him belligerently by the arm, as he breathed upon him his foul yellow stench, and spoke to him with maudlin challenge.
“I’ve never had your chance. Everyone was down on Stevie. If he’d had the chance some folks have, he’d be right up there with the Big Boys now. And at that, he’s got more brains than a lot of people I know who’ve been to college. You get that, don’t you?”
He thrust his pustulate face, foul and snarling, close to Eugene’s.
“Get away, Steve! Get away!” the boy muttered. He tried to move, but his brother blocked him. “I tell you to get away, you swine!” he screamed suddenly, and he struck the evil face away from him.
Then, as Steve sprawled dazed and witless on the floor, Luke sprang upon him with stammering curse, and, past reason, began to drag him up and down. And Eugene sprang upon Luke to stop him, and all three stammered and cursed and begged and accused, while the roomers huddled at the door, and Eliza wept, calling for help, and Daisy, who was up from the South with her children, wrung her plump hands, moaning “Oh, they’ll kill him! They’ll kill him. Have mercy on me and my poor little children, I beg of you.”
Then the shame, the disgust, the maudlin grievance, the weeping women, the excited men.
“You m-m-m-miserable degenerate!” cried Luke. “You c-c-came home because you thought p-p-p-papa would die and leave you a little money. You d-d-don’t deserve a penny!”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Steve screamed in an agony of suspicion. “You’re all against me! You’ve framed up on me and you’re trying to beat me out of my share.”
He was weeping with genuine rage and fear, with the angry suspicion of a beaten child. Eugene looked at him with pity and nausea: he was so foul, whipped, and frightened. Then, with a sense of unreal horror and disbelief, he listened while they bawled out their accusations. This disease of money and greed tainted other people, the people in books, not one’s own. They were snarling like curs over one bone—their little shares in the money of an unburied dead man who lay, with low moanings of disease, not thirty feet away.
The family drew off in two camps of hostile watchfulness: Helen and Luke on one side and Daisy and Steve, subdued but stubborn, on the other. Eugene, who had no talent for parties, cruised through sidereal space with momentary anchorings to earth. He loafed along the avenue, and lounged in Wood’s; he gossiped with the pharmacy rakes; he courted the summer girls on boardinghouse porches; he visited Roy Brock in a high mountain village, and lay with a handsome girl in the forest; he went to South Carolina; he was seduced by a dentist’s wife at Dixieland. She was a prim ugly woman of forty-three, who
