It was a spiritual and physical necessity for her to exhaust herself in service for others, and it was necessary for her to receive heavy slatherings of praise for that service, and especially necessary that she feel her efforts had gone unappreciated. Even at the beginning, she would become almost frantic reciting her grievances, telling the story of her service to Eliza in a voice that became harsh and hysterical:
“Let the least little thing go wrong and she’s at the phone. It’s not my place to go up there and work like a nigger for a crowd of old cheap boarders. You know that, don’t you? Don’t you?”
“Yes’m,” said Eugene, meekly serving as audience.
“But she’d die rather than admit it. Do you ever hear her say a word of thanks? Do I get,” she said laughing suddenly, her hysteria crossed for the moment with her great humor, “do I get so much as ‘go-to-hell’ for it?”
“No!” squealed Eugene, going off in fits of idiot laughter.
“Why, law me, child. H‑m! Yes. It’s good soup,” said she, touched with her great earthy burlesque.
He tore his collar open, and undid his trousers, sliding to the floor in an apoplexy of laughter.
“Sdop! Sdop! You’re g-g-gilling me!”
“H‑m! Why, law me! Yes,” she continued, grinning at him as if she hoped to succeed.
Nevertheless, whether Eliza was servantless or not, she went daily at dinner, the midday meal, to help at table, and frequently at night when Gant and the boys ate with Eliza instead of at home. She went because of her deep desire to serve, because it satisfied her need for giving more than was returned, and because, in spite of her jibes, along with Gant, at the Barn, and the “cheap boarders,” the animation of feeding, the clatter of plates, the braided clamor of their talk, stimulated and excited her.
Like Gant, like Luke, she needed extension in life, movement, excitement: she wanted to dominate, to entertain, to be the life of the party. On small solicitation, she sang for the boarders, thumping the cheap piano with her heavy accurate touch, and singing in her strong, vibrant, somewhat hard soprano a repertory of songs classical, sentimental, and comic. Eugene remembered the soft cool nights of summer, the assembled boarders and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” which Gant demanded over and over; “Love Me and the World Is Mine”; “Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold”; “Dear Old Girl, the Rob-bin Sings Above You”; “The End of a Perfect Day”; and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which Luke had practised in a tortured house for weeks, and sung with thunderous success in the High School Minstrels.
Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would hold forth on the porch, his great voice carrying across the quiet neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his torrential eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his prejudiced but bold opinion upon current news.
“—And what did we do, gentlemen? We sank their navy in an action that lasted only twenty minutes, stormed at by shot and shell, Teddy and his Rough Riders took the hill at Santiago—it was all over, as you well know, in a few months. We had declared war with no thought of ulterior gain; we came because the indignation of a great people had been aroused at the oppression of a smaller one, and then, with a magnanimity well worthy the greatest people of the face of the earth, we paid our defeated enemy twenty millions of dollars. Ah, Lord! That was magnanimity indeed! You don’t think any other nation would have done that, do you?”
“No, sir,” said the boarders emphatically.
They didn’t always agree with his political opinions—Roosevelt was the faultless descendant of Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Abraham Lincoln—but they felt he had a fine head and would have gone far in politics.
“That man should have been a lawyer,” said the boarders.
And yet, there was surging into these chosen hills the strong thrust of the world, like a kissing tide, which swings lazily in with a slapping glut of waters, and recoils into its parent crescent strength, to be thrown farther inward once again.
It was an element of Eliza’s primitive and focal reasoning that men and women withered by the desert would seek an oasis, that those who were thirsty would seek water, and that those panting on the plains would look into the hills for comfort and relief. She had that bull’s-eye accuracy which has since been celebrated, when plum-picking’s over, under the name of “vision.”
The streets, ten years before raw clay, were being paved: Gant went into frenzies over the paving assessments, cursed the land, the day of his birth, the machinations of Satan’s children. But Eugene followed the wheeled casks of boiling tar; watched the great roller, a monster that crushed him in nightmares, powder the layered rock; felt, as he saw the odorous pressed tongue of pavement lengthen out, a swelling ecstasy.
From time to time, a stilted Cadillac gasped cylindrically up the hill past Dixieland: Eugene said a spell, as it faltered, for its success—Jim Sawyer, a young blood, came for Miss Cutler, the Pittsburgh beauty: he
