She liked the fire and the radiance of warmth: sleepily alert she sat by the stove, with her legs spread, sucking in the heat, her large earth strength more heavily sensuous than her brother’s. Stroked by the slow heat-tingle she smiled slowly with indifferent affection on all the boys. No men came to see her: like a pool she was thirsty for lips. She sought no one. With lazy cat-warmth she smiled on all the world.
She was a good teacher of mathematics: number to her was innate. Lazily she took their tablets, worked answers lazily, smiling good-naturedly with contempt. Behind her, at a desk, Durand Jarvis moaned passionately to Eugene, and writhed erotically, gripping the leaf of his desk fiercely.
Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at the end of the second year—cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with blood, seventy-three years old. They said he was forty-nine—sickness made him look old. He was a tall man, six feet three, with long straight mustaches, waxen and emaciated as a mandarin. He painted pictures—impressionist blobs—sheep on a gorsey hill, fishboats at the piers, with a warm red jumble of brick buildings in the background.
Old Gloucester Town, Marblehead, Cape Cod Folks, Captains Courageous—the rich salty names came reeking up with a smell of tarred rope, dry codheads rotting in the sun, rocking dories knee-deep in gutted fish, the strong loin-smell of the sea in harbors, and the quiet brooding vacancy of a seaman’s face, sign of his marriage with ocean. How look the seas at dawn in Spring? The cold gulls sleep upon the wind. But rose the skies.
They saw the waxen mandarin walk shakily three times up and down the road. It was Spring, there was a south wind high in the big trees. He wavered along on a stick, planted before him with a blue phthisic hand. His eyes were blue and pale as if he had been drowned.
He had begotten two children by Sheba—girls. They were exotic tender blossoms, all black and milky white, as strange and lovely as Spring. The boys groped curiously.
“He must be a better man than he looks yet,” said Tom Davis. “The little ’un’s only two or three years old.”
“He’s not as old as he looks,” said Eugene. “He looks old because he’s been sick. He’s only forty-nine.”
“How do you know?” said Tom Davis.
“Miss Amy says so,” said Eugene innocently.
“Pap” Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene and carried his quid deftly on the end of his tongue to the other cheek.
“Forty-nine!” he said, “you’d better see a doctor, boy. He’s as old as God.”
“That’s what she said,” Eugene insisted doggedly.
“Why, of course she said it!” “Pap” Rheinhart replied. “You don’t think they’re going to let it out, do you? When they’re running a school here.”
“Son, you must be simple!” said Jack Candler who had not thought of it up to now.
“Hell, you’re their Pet. They know you’ll believe whatever they tell you,” said Julius Arthur. “Pap” Rheinhart looked at him searchingly, then shook his head as if a cure was impossible. They laughed at his faith.
“Well, if he’s so old,” said Eugene, “why did old Lady Lattimer marry him?”
“Why, because she couldn’t get anyone else, of course,” said “Pap” Rheinhart, impatient at this obtuseness.
“Do you suppose she has had to keep him up?” said Tom Davis curiously. Silently they wondered. And Eugene, as he saw the two lovely children fall like petals from their mother’s heavy breast, as he saw the waxen artist faltering his last steps to death, and heard Sheba’s strong voice leveling a conversation at its beginning, expanding in violent burlesque all of her opinions, was bewildered again before the unsearchable riddle—out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth, a flower.
His faith was above conviction. Disillusion had come so often that it had awakened in him a strain of bitter suspicion, an occasional mockery, virulent, coarse, cruel, and subtle, which was all the more scalding because of his own pain. Unknowingly, he had begun to build up in himself a vast mythology for which he cared all the more deeply because he realized its untruth. Brokenly, obscurely, he was beginning to feel that it was not truth that men live for—the creative men—but for falsehood. At times his devouring, unsated brain seemed to be beyond his governance: it was a frightful bird whose beak was in his heart, whose talons tore unceasingly at his bowels. And this unsleeping demon wheeled, plunged, revolved about an object, returning suddenly, after it had flown away, with victorious malice, leaving stripped, mean, and common all that he had clothed with wonder.
But he saw hopefully that he never learned—that what remained was the tinsel and the gold. He was so bitter with his tongue because his heart believed so much.
The merciless brain lay coiled and alert like a snake: it saw every gesture, every quick glance above his head, the shoddy scaffolding of all reception. But these people existed for him in a world remote from human error. He opened one window of his heart to Margaret, together they entered the sacred grove of poetry; but all dark desire, the dream of fair forms, and all the misery, drunkenness, and disorder of his life at home he kept fearfully shut. He was afraid they would hear. Desperately he wondered how many of the boys had heard of it. And all the facts that levelled Margaret down to life, that plunged her in the defiling stream of life, were as unreal and horrible as a nightmare.
That she had been near death from tuberculosis, that the violent and garrulous Sheba had married an old man, who had begotten two children and was now about to die, that the whole little family, powerful in cohesive fidelity, were nursing their great sores in privacy, building up
