Look Homeward, Angel quotes

… from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.

Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.

The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.

The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

An Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he later changed to Gant (a concession probably to Yankee phonetics), having come to Baltimore from Bristol in 1837 on a sailing vessel, soon let the profits of a public house which he had purchased roll down his improvident …

The long fingers of his big hands closed. He felt that he wanted, more than anything in the world, to carve delicately with a chisel.

He wanted to wreak something dark and unspeakable in him into cold stone.

He wanted to carve an angel’s head.

“Why, say! That’s no way to talk!” she said. “You want to lay something by for a rainy day, don’t you?”

“I’m having my rainy day now,” he said gloomily. “All the property I need is eight feet of earth to be buried in.”

Then, talking more cheerfully, he walked with her to the door of the shop, and watched her as she marched primly away across the square, holding her skirts at the curbs with ladylike nicety.

When their laughter had died down, Eliza said: “And this—as the fellow says—is Uncle Bacchus.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bacchus beaming, “as large as life an’ twice as sassy.”

“They call him Back-us everywhere else,” said Will, including them all in a brisk wink, “but here in the family we call him Behind-us.”

“Well, what are you going to call it?” inquired Dr. Cardiac, referring thus, with shocking and medical coarseness, to this most royal imp.

Eliza was better tuned to cosmic vibrations.

With a full, if inexact, sense of what portended, she gave to Luck’s Lad the title of Eugene, a name which, beautifully, means “well born,” but which, as anyone will be able to testify, does not mean, has never meant, “well bred.”

caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost.

He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us.

Never, never, never, never, never.

He nodded briefly at their desperate faces:

“He’s being saved for Congress,” said he. “You have bad luck and hard heads, W. O.”

“You Goddamned black scoundrel,” yelled the master, turning with violent relief upon the driver. “I’ll put you behind the bars for this.”

“This looks worse than it is,” observed Dr. McGuire, laying the hero upon the lounge. “Some hot water, please.” Nevertheless, it took two hours to bring him round.

Everyone spoke highly of the horse.

“He had more sense than the nigger,” said Gant, wetting his thumb.

Gant recognized perhaps most of his son’s vices as his own: there was little, however, of his redeeming quality.

Steve had a piece of tough suet where his heart should have been.

Of them all, he had had very much the worst of it. Since his childhood he had been the witness of his father’s wildest debauches. He had not forgotten.

Indeed, when he described his early schooling, he furnished a landscape that was constantly three feet deep in snow, and frozen hard.

He seemed never to have attended school save under polar conditions.

And fifteen minutes later, he would roar again: “You’ll never amount to anything, you good-for-nothing bums! If one side of the wall caved in, you’d roll over to the other.”

She alone, in fact, of all the Pentlands was willing to relinquish the little moated castle of home; the particular secrecy and privacy of their walls she alone did not seem to value greatly.

And she was the only one of them that wore a skirt.

Eugene had been fed from her breast until he was more than three years old: during the winter he was weaned. Something in her stopped; something began.

Eugene had been fed from her breast until he was more than three years old: during the winter he was weaned.

Something in her stopped; something began.

She had her way finally. Sometimes she would talk to Gant thoughtfully and persuasively about the World’s Fair venture. Sometimes, during his evening tirades, she would snap back at him using the project as a threat.

He grew violently sick, vomited, and was unable to eat for some time.

He wondered why he had swallowed the fly when he had seen it all the time.

The summer came down blazing hot. Gant arrived for a few days, bringing Daisy with him. One night they drank beer at the Delmar Gardens. In the hot air, at a little table, he gazed thirstily at the beaded foaming stein:

She wept anew. The children went to bed. For some time Eliza and Gant continued to sit alone in the room. Gant leaned his face in his powerful hands. “The best boy I had,” he muttered. “By God, he was the best of the lot.”

And in the ticking silence they recalled him, and in the heart of each was fear and remorse, because he had been a quiet boy, and there were many, and he had gone unnoticed.

“I’ll never be able to forget his birthmark,” Eliza whispered. “Never, never.”

And companionship with the elect—those like the Hilliards—was equally impossible, even if they had had the gift or the desire for it. But they hadn’t.

Gant was a great man, and not a singular one, because singularity does not hold life in unyielding devotion to it.

As he stormed through the house, unleashing his gathered bolts, the children followed him joyously, shrieking exultantly as he told Eliza he had first seen her “wriggling around the corner like a snake on her belly,” or, as coming in from freezing weather he had …

fat red radishes; heavy tomatoes. The rich plums lay bursted on the grass; his huge cherry trees oozed with heavy gum jewels; his apple trees bent with thick green clusters.

The earth was spermy for him like a big woman.

Spring was full of cool dewy mornings, spurting winds, and storms of intoxicating blossoms, and in this enchantment Eugene first felt the mixed lonely ache and promise of the seasons.

So, at the moment looking, Tarkinton of the paints said: “W. O.’s back.”

Thus came he home, who had put out to land westward, Gant the Far-Wanderer.

“Jesus God! What a travesty! A travesty on Nature! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” he exclaimed, indefinitely but violently, and then as he strode about, he gave way to loud, bitter, forced laughter.

Thus, pent in his dark soul, Eugene sat brooding on a firelit book, a stranger in a noisy inn.

The gates of his life were closing him in from their knowledge, a vast aerial world of fantasy was erecting its fuming and insubstantial fabric.

He was sick through to his guts.

He had a loathing of physical humiliation which was not based on fear, from which he never recovered.

The brazen insensitive spirit of the boys he envied but could not imitate: they would howl loudly under punishment, in order to mitigate it, and they were vaingloriously unconcerned ten minutes later.

“All of the little snowflakes that ever were.

Nature never repeats herself.

”

they hear the reed, the oatenstop, the running goat-hoofs in the spongy wood, here, there, everywhere: they dawdle, listen, fleetest when they wait, go vaguely on to their one fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient rumor and they cannot find the way.

All of the gods have lost the way.

But they guarded what they had against the barbarians. Eugene, Max, and Harry ruled their little neighborhood: they made war upon the negroes and the Jews, who amused them, and upon the Pigtail Alley people, whom they hated and despised.

Harry Tarkinton’s parents were English. He was three or four years older than Eugene, an awkward, heavy, muscular boy, smelling always of his father’s paints and oils, coarse-featured, meaty sloping jaw and a thick catarrhal look about his nose and mouth.

He was the breaker of visions; the proposer of iniquities.

In the cool thick evening grass of Gant’s yard one sunset, he smashed forever, as they lay there talking, the enchantment of Christmas; but he brought in its stead the smell of paint, the gaseous ripstink, the unadorned, sweating, and imageless passion of the vulgar.

… Jack, her brother, his truehearted fidelity, the deep eternal locking of their brave souls, as they looked dumbly at each other with misty eyes, and thought of the pact of danger, the shoulder-to-shoulder drive through death and terror which had soldered them silently but implacably.

Eugene wanted the two things all men want: he wanted to be loved, and he wanted to be famous.

His fame was chameleon, but its fruit and triumph lay at home, among the people of Altamont. The mountain town had for him enormous authority:

Luke parroted all of his father’s sermons, but earnestly and witlessly, without Gant’s humor, without his chicanery, only with his sentimentality.

He lived in a world of symbols, large, crude, and gaudily painted, labelled “Father,” “Mother,” “Home,” “Family,” “Generosity,” “Honor,” “Unselfishness,” made of sugar and molasses, and gummed glutinously with tear-shaped syrup.

“He’s one good boy,” the neighbors said.

“Wake up! You’re not in Fairyland. Go after them.”

Eugene’s face was of no use to him as a mask: it was a dark pool in which every pebble of thought and feeling left its circle

—his shame, his distaste for his employment was obvious, although he tried to conceal it: he was accused of false pride, told that he was “afraid of a little honest work,” and reminded of the rich benefits he had received from his bighearted parents.

“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” she said impatiently. “It’s no disgrace for a boy to do a little honest work, and no one thinks so.”

“Oh, my God,” he said to the dark angel. “Listen to that!”

Eliza pursed her lips without speaking for a time.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” she said after a moment. “Pride goeth before a fall.”

“I can’t see that that makes much difference to us,” said he. “We’ve got no place to fall to.”

“I consider myself as good as anyone,” she said, with dignity. “I hold my head up with anyone I meet.”

Eliza saw Altamont not as so many hills, buildings, people: she saw it in the pattern of a gigantic blueprint.

She knew the history of every piece of valuable property—who bought it, who sold it, who owned it in 1893, and what it was now worth. She watched the tides of traffic cannily;

“I told them,” said

Dick Ravenel, whose affection was like a flower that grew behind a wall

, “that the best surgeon in America when he was sober was a lousy bum named Hugh McGuire who was always drunk.”

“Removing a tumor from a woman, ain’t you?” said Coker.

“No,” said Dick Ravenel, “removing a woman from a tumor.”

“Bet you it weighs fifty pounds, if it weighs an ounce,” said McGuire with sudden professional interest.

“

These mountain women take a lot of killing,

” said Jeff Spaugh sagely.

The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life.

They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. Old haunt-eyed faces glimmered in his memory. He thought of Swain’s cow, St. Louis, death, himself in the cradle.

Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later? Where now?

I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me

, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what …

There would be peril, there would be toil, there would be struggle. But there would not be confusion and waste. There would not be groping. For collected Fate would fall, on its chosen moment, like a plum.

There was no disorder in enchantment.

Spring lay abroad through all the garden of this world. Beyond the hills the land bayed out to other hills, to golden cities, to rich meadows, to deep forests, to the sea. Forever and forever.

“That’s a very fine name,” said Simon. “Always try to live up to it.” He thrust his hand carelessly and magnificently into his coat pocket, drawing out under the boy’s astonished eyes, a handful of shining five and ten-cent pieces.

“Always be good to the birds, my boy,” said Simon, and he poured the money into Eugene’s cupped hands.

Everyone looked doubtfully at Mr. Gilroy.

… boots, the smell of a mashed persimmon on his knee, and the odor of wet earth and grass on the palms of his hands, and with a stubborn dislike and suspicion of the scene he had visited, and fear of the people who lived there.

He had the most extraordinary love of incandescence.

He hated dull lights, smoky lights, soft, or sombre lights. At night he wanted to be in rooms brilliantly illuminated with beautiful, blazing, sharp, poignant lights. After that, the dark.

… countless humiliations, physical and verbal, he had endured, at the hands of school and family, before the world, and as he thought, the horns of victory died within the wood, the battle-drums of triumph stopped, the proud clangor of the gongs quivered away in silence.

His eagles had flown; he saw himself, in a moment of reason, as a madman playing Caesar.

He craned his head aside and covered his face with his hand.

he wanted always to win, he wanted always to be the general, the heroic spearhead of victory. And after that he wanted to be loved.

Victory and love. In all of his swarming fantasies Eugene saw himself like this⁠—unbeaten and beloved.

But moments of clear vision returned to him when all the defeat and misery of his life was revealed.

He spoke to them of “the higher life” and of “the things of the mind.” He assured them that they were the leaders of tomorrow and the hope of the world. Then he quoted Longfellow.

He was a good man, a dull man, a man of honor.

He had a broad streak of coarse earthy brutality in him. He loved a farm better than anything in the world except a school. He had rented a big dilapidated house in a grove of lordly oaks on the outskirts of town:

“Well,” she said, “I’ll send him to you for a year.” That was the way she did business.

Tides run deep in Sargasso.

So, on the hairline of million-minded impulse, destiny bore down on his life again.

Literally, physically, he felt that, the great tide of valiance once flowed out of her, she would immediately go to pieces.

She was like some great general, famous, tranquil, wounded unto death, who, with his fingers clamped across a severed artery, stops for an hour the ebbing of his life⁠—sends on the battle.

Her hair was coarse and dull-brown, fairly abundant, tinged lightly with gray: it was combed evenly in the middle and bound tightly in a knot behind. Everything about her was very clean, like a scrubbed kitchen board:

In the cruel volcano of the boy’s mind, the little brier moths of his idolatry wavered in to their strange marriage and were consumed.

One by one the merciless years reaped down his gods and captains.

What had lived up to hope? What had withstood the scourge of growth and memory? Why had the gold become so dim? All of his life, it seemed, his blazing loyalties began with men and ended with images;

but enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested his hooded houseless soul. She remained.

O death in life that turns our men to stone! O change that levels down our gods!

If only one lives yet, above the cinders of the consuming years, shall not this dust awaken, shall not dead faith revive, shall we not see God again, as once in morning, on the mountain? Who walks with us on the hills?

O change that levels down our gods! If only one lives yet, above the cinders of the consuming years, shall not this dust awaken, shall not dead faith revive, shall we not see God again, as once in morning, on the mountain?

Who walks with us on the hills?

“Who was Catullus?” Eugene shouted violently.

Like a flung spear in his brain, the name.

“He was a poet,” Mr. Leonard answered thoughtlessly, quickly, startled. He regretted.

“Why—not exactly,” Mr. Leonard murmured, rubbing his chin.

“She was a Bad Woman,” said Eugene. Then, most desperately, he added: “She was a Little Chippie.”

“Pap” Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply.

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.

… about to die, that the whole little family, powerful in cohesive fidelity, were nursing their great sores in privacy, building up before the sharp eyes and rattling tongues of young boys a barrier of flimsy pretense and evasion, numbed him with a sense of unreality.

Eugene believed in the glory and the gold.

He lived more at Dixieland now. He had been more closely bound to Eliza since he began at Leonard’s. Gant, Helen, and Luke were scornful of the private school. The children were resentful of it—a little jealous.

But thus, he knew, could love change one. Leonard thought his actions wise and good: he had grown up in a tradition that demanded strict obedience to the master, and that would not brook opposition to his rulings.

He had learned from his father, a Tennessee patriarch who ran a farm, preached on Sundays, and put down rebellion in his family with a horsewhip and pious prayers, the advantages of being God!

He thought little boys who resisted him should be beaten.

He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes. In a moment the world turned hag.

There was nothing that Steve touched that he did not taint.

Eugene hated him because he stunk, because all that he touched stunk, because he brought fear, shame, and loathing wherever he went; because his kisses were fouler than his curses, his whines nastier than his threats.

He would have continued indefinitely in this strain, but Helen checked him with weary finality.

“Well, forget about it,” she said, “all of you. Life’s too short.”

Life was. At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion, antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with sad tranquillity.

… him in the fantastic elasticity of American business, the club of all the queer trades, of wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he could have chanted the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from their coats, doing every one, everything, and finally himself.

He was not an electrical engineer⁠—he was electrical energy.

He had no gift for study—he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with it desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus and the mechanical sciences.

it possessed him from time to time. If it had possessed him wholly, constantly, his life would have prevailed with astonishing honesty and precision. But when he reflected, he was a child—with all the hypocrisy, sentimentality and dishonest pretense of a child.

His face was a church in which beauty and humor were married⁠—the strange and the familiar were at one in him.

Men, looking at Luke, felt a start of recognition as if they saw something of which they had never heard, but which they had known forever.

“What about the bushes, Luke?” yelled Mr. Halloran, the dairy-lunch magnate.

“Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes,” Luke answered amid general tumult.

“All right, Major. You with the face. What am I offered? What am I offered?”

The draymen dispersed slowly, a slouchy policeman loafed down the steps of the city hall picking his teeth, and on the market side, from high grilled windows, there came the occasional howls of a drunken negress.

Life buzzed slowly like a fly.

The sun had reddened slightly, there was a cool flowing breath from the hills, a freshening relaxation over the tired earth, the hope, the ecstasy of evening in the air.

He fed hungrily, lewdly, on all news of seduction: his amusement had in it the eyes of eagerness, the hot breath of desire. He was incapable of the pleasant irony by which the philosophic spirit mocks that folly it is no longer able to enjoy.

Gant was incapable of resignation.

He had the most burning of all lusts—the lust of memory, the ravenous hunger of the will which tries to waken what is dead. He had reached the time of life when he read the papers greedily for news of death.

… of his disease with something of the horror with which one watches the movements of a dog with a broken leg, before he is destroyed—a horror greater than that one feels when a man has a similar hurt, because a man may live without legs.

A dog is all included in his hide.

His wild bombast was tempered now by senile petulance. He cursed and whined by intervals. At the dead of night he would rise, full of pain and terror, blaspheming vilely against his God at one moment, and frantically entreating forgiveness at the next.

“You hellhound!” he yelled. “You would drink my heart’s blood. You are without mercy and without pity—inhuman and bloody monster that you are.”

“Some day,” Eliza observed, “you’ll cry wolf-wolf once too often.”

He went three times a week to Cardiac’s office for treatment. The dry doctor had grown old; behind his dusty restraint, the prim authority of his manner, there was a deepening well of senile bawdry.

“Why did this have to come upon me in my old age!” He began to sniffle affectedly. “Boo-hoo-hoo! O Jesus, it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s cruel that you should put this affliction on me.” His contempt for reason was Parnassian.

He accused God for exposing him; he wept because he had been caught.

Helen rushed out to the playhouse and with large gesture and hearty entreaty strove to appease outraged Annie.

Eugene lolled about feebly on the floor, kicking one leg out gently as if he had just been decapitated, and fumbling blindly at the neckband of his nightshirt. A faint clucking sound came at intervals from his wide-open mouth.

They laughed wildly, helplessly, draining into mad laughter all the welled and agglutinated hysteria that had gathered in them, washing out in a moment of fierce surrender all the fear and fatality of their lives, the pain of age and death.

Dying, he walked among them, whining his lament against God’s lidless stare, gauging their laughter cautiously with uneasy prying eyes, a faint tickled grin playing craftily about his wailing mouth.

Rich cobwebbed grapes hung in packed clusters among the broad leaves. I didn’t raise my boy to be a southpaw. I’ve a good mind to give Gleason a sock in the eye.

Ben read painfully, pausing a moment later to snicker.

Thus, like a child, he groped intently at all meanings, with scowling studiousness. Women liked to see him scowl and study so. He was sudden only in anger, and in his quick communications with his angel.

Within a month a thick hummock of muscle hardened on his shoulder: he bent jubilantly into his work. He had now no fear of failure. His heart lifted like a proud crested cock. He had been dropped among others without favor, and he surpassed them.

He was a lord of darkness; he exulted in the lonely sufficiency of his work.

He walked into the sprawled chaos of the settlement, the rifleman of news for sleeping men. His fast hands blocked the crackling sheet, he swung his lean arm like a whip. He saw the pale stars drown, and ragged light break open on the hills.

in the sweet blue air of Spring, as he sloped down to his route, he came to know the beauty of Lady Nicotine, the delectable wraith who coiled into his brain, left her poignant breath in his young nostrils, her sharp kiss upon his mouth.

He was a sharp blade.

The Spring drove a thorn into his heart, it drew a wild cry from his lips. For it, he had no speech.

He was a sharp blade.

The Spring drove a thorn into his heart, it drew a wild cry from his lips.

For it, he had no speech.

She would have been stricken with horror if she could have known the wild confusion of adolescence, the sexual nightmares of puberty, the grief, the fear, the shame in which a boy broods over the dark world of his desire.

She did not know that every boy, caged in from confession by his fear, is to himself a monster.

She did not have knowledge. But she had wisdom. She found immediately a person’s quality. Boys were her heroes, her little gods. She believed that the world was to be saved, life redeemed, by one of them.

For what care the ambassadors of Satan, for all the small fidelities of the letter and the word, if from the singing choir of earthly methodism we can steal a single heart—lift up, flame-tipped, one great lost soul to the high sinfulness of poetry?

The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of poetry was inextinguishably mixed with her blood, entombed in her flesh.

By the beginning of his fifteenth year Eugene knew almost every major lyric in the language. He possessed them to their living core, not in a handful of scattered quotations, but almost line for line. His thirst was drunken, insatiate:

“Three times a day,” Eugene screamed.

“He spends all morning going to dinner, and all afternoon going to supper.”

A whisper of laughter came from their weary jaws. They sighed like sedge.

“Come on back, Pudge,” said Euston Phipps, their escort. “You too, Brady.” He followed the ladies back—tall, bold, swagger—a young alcoholic with one sound lung.

He was a good golfer.

Pert boys rushed from the crowded booths and tables to the fountain, coming up with a long slide. They shouted their orders rudely, nagging the swift jerkers glibly, stridently.

“Well, what can I do for you, son?” he asked.

“I’m tired of pushing daisies here,” said Ben. “I want to push them somewhere else.”

“What do you mean, Ben?”

There’s plenty to live for, Ben. There’s something to keep you busy every moment.”

“You’re a great wit, Coker,” Ben said, scowling. “You’re as funny as a crutch.”

He straightened his humped shoulders self-consciously, and filled his lungs with air.

They looked at each other with clumsy tenderness. They thought of the lost years at Woodson Street. They saw with decent wonder their awkward bulk of puberty. The proud gate of the years swung open for them. They felt a lonely glory. They said farewell.

Charleston, fat weed that roots itself on Lethe wharf, lived in another time. The hours were days, the days weeks.

They arrived in the morning. By noon, several weeks had passed, and he longed for the day’s ending. They were quartered in a small hotel on King Street—an old place above stores, with big rooms. After lunch, they went out to see the town.

But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely thunder of the sea. He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage, and heard the little tinkling sounds of Asia.

He believed in harbors at the end.

Mrs. Bowden’s niece and the waitress came out on the next car. After his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the gusty wind, upon the beach. A fine tang of salt was on his lips. He licked his clean young flesh.

Laughter, laughter unleashed and turbulent, laughter that rose flood by flood upon itself, laughter wild, earthshaking, thunder-cuffing, drowned Dr. George B. Rockham and all he had to say.

Laughter! Laughter! Laughter!

Helen was married in the month of June—a month sacred, it is said, to Hymen, but used so often for nuptials that the god’s blessing is probably not infallible.

“How do you do?” he asked, and took her hand.

Everyone then felt that Hugh Barton had said something very, very important.

With equal slow gravity he greeted each one. They were somewhat awed by his lordliness. Luke, however, burst out uncontrollably:

“All right! I’m coming!” the girl cried cheerfully, turning an angry grin on Eliza as she went.

It was funny. It was ugly. It was terrible.

It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the chief celestial Cloud-Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter moderns have sometimes called “the ancient Jester”—had turned his frown upon their fortunes.

His cruel eyes had missed the meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter heart had sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at the glow of his imagination.

He was not a child when he reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief.

He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives.

“See here, sir! See here!” he began in a voice choking with fury and exasperation. “Sir—I assure you—” he thought of all the grinning apes in the class, palming off profitably their stolen translations, and he could not go on.

The Devil’s Disciple was not a bad man; he was only, like most men who pride themselves on their astuteness, a foolish one.

“Nonsense, Mr. Gant,” said he kindly. “You don’t think you can fool me on a translation, do you? It’s all right with me, you know,” he continued, grinning.

And as he proceeded, with thumping heart and tremulous voice, Buck Benson’s manner would become more and more weary, until finally, dropping his book, he would drawl:

“Mister Gant, you make me so damned mad I could throw you out the window.”

But, on the examination, he gave an excellent performance, and translated from sight beautifully. He was saved. Buck Benson commended his paper publicly with lazy astonishment, and gave him a fair grade. Thereafter, they slipped quickly into an easier relation:

He had a moment of pity, of sickness.

He forgave because it was necessary to forget.

Eugene lived in a small world, but its ruins for him were actual. His misfortunes were trifling, but their effect upon his spirit was deep and calamitous. He withdrew deeply and scornfully into his cell. He was friendless, whipped with scorn and pride.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Ben impatiently. “Dry up! I don’t want to hear about it. I’m not your damned Guardian Angel.”

The news was comforting. So many people, after our fall from grace, are.

They mounted to the wide dark corridor of the Doctors’ and Surgeons’, with its sharp excitement of medical smells. McGuire’s anteroom was empty. Ben rapped at the inner door. McGuire opened it:

During the remainder of his holiday, he plunged recklessly through the lively crowds, looking boldly but without insolence at the women and young girls. They grew unexpectedly out of the waste drear winter like splendid flowers. He was eager and alone.

Fear is a dragon that lives among crowds⁠—and in armies. It lives hardly with men who are alone.

He felt released—beyond the last hedge of desperation.

“Nobody has anything on me. I’ve been too slick for them. Nobody knows anything about me.”

“You mean,” said Eugene, “that everyone knows all about you, and nobody wants to know anything about you.”

“What about that, Tom?” he asked challengingly. He was very small and plump, the son of a carpenter, offensively worthy, working his way through college by various schemes.

He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food. He was reading of ancient sorceries and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land?

The ghost of Hamlet’s Father, in Connecticut.

“… … I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.”

He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation.

Only the earth endured⁠—the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets.

Only the earth endured—this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it. Stogged in the desert, half-broken and overthrown, among the columns of lost temples strewn, there was no ruined image of Menkaura, there was no alabaster head of Akhnaton.

and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near.

And the old hunger returned⁠—the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.

Eliza visited Helen in Sydney in the Spring. The girl was quieter, sadder, more thoughtful than she had ever been. She was subdued by the new life: chastened by her obscurity. She missed Gant more than she would confess. She missed the mountain town.

he saw the black mournful calm of the negress’s face. He walked slowly up the dark hall, with a handkerchief tied loosely round his wound. He felt suddenly the peace that comes with despair.

The sword that pierces very deep had fared through the folds of his poor armor of pride.

The steel had sheared his side, had bitten to his heart. But under his armor he had found himself. No more than himself could be known. No more than himself could be given. What he was—he was:

“I’ll bring you something from the kitchen,” he said. “There’s plenty there.” In a moment he added: “I’m sorry, Laura.”

“What are you sorry for?” she asked.

He leaned against the wall limply, drained of his strength at her touch.

It sagged, and the light was dim—he hated dim lights, and the large moths, flapping blindly around on their dusty wings. He undressed in the moon.

The moonlight fell upon the earth like a magic unearthly dawn. It wiped away all rawness, it hid all sores.

It gave all common and familiar things—the sagging drift of the barn, the raw shed of the creamery, the rich curve of the lawyer’s crab-apple trees—a uniform bloom of wonder.

Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on the rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume of painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away.

Their world was a singing voice again: they were young and they could never die.

This would endure.

Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June.

There was a place where all the sun went glistering in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star.

Where is the day that melted into one rich noise?

“You should worry, boy. You should worry!” said Mr. Farrel, of Miami, the dancing instructor. “

Women are like streetcars: if you miss one, there’s another along in fifteen minutes.

Ain’t that right, lady?” he said pertly, turning to Miss Clark, of Valdosta, Georgia, for whom it had been uttered. She answered with a throaty confused twiddle-giggle of laughter. “Oh, aren’t men the awfullest—”

He straightened, brushing his whitened coat. In a moment, he went on quietly: “To hell with them, ’Gene. To hell with them all. Don’t let them worry you. Get all that you can. Don’t give a damn for anything.

Nothing gives a damn for you.

To hell with it all! To hell with it! There are a lot of bad days. There are a lot of good ones. You’ll forget. There are a lot of days. Let it go.”

Young men from Kansas were going to die in Picardy. In some foreign earth lay the iron, as yet unmoulded, that was to slay them. The strangeness of death and destiny was legible upon lives and faces which held no strangeness of their own.

For, it is the union of the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.

Luke had gone away to the training-school at Newport.

Such an industrious hack was called an “all-round man.” He was safe, sound, and reliable. He would never get notions. He was the fine flower of university training. He was a football scrub, and a respectable scholar in all subjects.

He was a universal Two Man.

He always got Two on everything, except Moral Character, where he shone with a superlative Oneness. If he did not go into the law or the ministry, he was appointed a Rhodes Scholar.

It was greater than all the music he had ever heard; it was as great as the highest poetry. Why had he never been told? Why had no one ever written adequately about it?

Why, when it was possible to buy a god in a bottle, and drink him off, and become a god oneself, were men not forever drunken?

He had a moment of great wonder—the magnificent wonder with which we discover the simple and unspeakable things that lie buried and known, but unconfessed, in us. So might a man feel if he wakened after death and found himself in Heaven.

Everyone had agreed on a studious forgiveness. They stepped with obtrusive care around his fault, filled pleasantly with Christmas and mercy. Ben scowled at him quite naturally, Helen grinned and prodded him, Eliza and Luke surrendered themselves to sweetness, sorrow, and silence.

Their forgiveness made a loud noise in his ears.

During the morning his father asked him to come for a walk. Gant was embarrassed and hangdog; a duty of gentle admonishment devolved upon him—he had been counselled to it by Helen and Eliza.

“Oh, there is! I’m sure there is!” cried Eugene. “Because I have been punished. By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child.

The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.

And now at last I am free from you all, although you may hold me for a few years more.

He waited for departure as a prisoner for release. The dolorous prelude to a journey—the wet platform eyes, the sudden radiation of hectic warmth, the declarations of love at sound of the whistle—left him this time unmoved.

The tear-ducts, he was beginning to discover, had, like sweat-glands, dermic foundations, and were easily brought to a salty sparkle at mere sight of a locomotive.

He had, therefore, the somewhat detached composure of a gentleman on his way to a comfortable weekend, who stands in a noisy crowd, waiting for the ferry.

they brought back stories of princely wages. One could earn twelve dollars a day, with no experience. One could assume the duties of a carpenter, with only a hammer, a saw, and a square. No questions were asked.

War is not death to young men; war is life.

The earth had never worn raiment of such color as it did that year. The war seemed to unearth pockets of ore that had never been known in the nation: there was a vast unfolding and exposure of wealth and power.

… haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain mummers of waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornful and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.

We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death⁠—but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben?

Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in the sad house of King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of this world.

We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death—but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben?

Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in the sad house of King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of this world.

And he lived here a stranger, trying to recapture the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great forgotten language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door.

Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in the sad house of King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of this world.

And he lived here a stranger, trying to recapture the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great forgotten language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door.

“I’m glad it’s over. Poor old Ben! I never got to know him until these last few days. He was the best of the lot. Thank God, he’s out of it now.”

Eugene thought of death now, with love, with joy. Death was like a lovely and tender woman, Ben’s friend and lover, who had come to free him, to heal him, to save him from the torture of life.

They stood there together, without speaking, in Eliza’s littered kitchen, and their eyes were blind with tears, because they thought of lovely and delicate death, and because they loved one another.

Eugene thought of death now, with love, with joy. Death was like a lovely and tender woman, Ben’s friend and lover, who had come to free him, to heal him, to save him from the torture of life.

They stood there together, without speaking, in Eliza’s littered kitchen, and their eyes were blind with tears, because they thought of lovely and delicate death, and because they loved one another.

Eugene and Luke went softly up the hall, and out into the dark. Gently, they closed the big front door behind them, and descended the veranda steps. In that enormous silence, birds were waking. It was a little after four o’clock in the morning.

His crow was drugged with sleep and death: it was like a far horn sounding under sea; and it was a warning to all the men who are about to die, and to the ghosts that must go home.

But the cock that crows at morning (he thought), has a voice as shrill as any fife.

It says, we are done with sleep. We are done with death. O waken, waken into life, says his voice as shrill as any fife. In that enormous silence, birds were waking.

Joy awoke in him, and exultation. They had escaped from the prison of death; they were joined to the bright engine of life again.

Life, ruddered life, that would not fail, began its myriad embarkations.

A paperboy came briskly, with the stiff hobbled limp that Eugene knew so well, down the centre of the street, hurling a blocked paper accurately upon the porch of the Brunswick.

She stared at him for a moment, swaying on her feet.

“Fatty liked Ben,” she said gently, in a moment. “Fatty and Old Ben were friends.”

She turned and started unsteadily across the street, holding one hand out gravely, for balance.

“That b-b-b-boy sure suffered.” Suddenly, turning his face away into his hand, he sobbed briefly and painfully, his confused stammering life drawn out of its sprawl into a moment of hard grief.

Eugene wept, not because he saw Ben there, but because Ben had gone, and because he remembered all the tumult and the pain.

“It is over now,” said Horse Hines gently. “He is at peace.”

“There!” he said, with deep satisfaction; and, rouge-stick in hand, head critically cocked, like a painter before his canvas, he stepped back into the terrible staring prison of their horror.

“There are artists, boys, in every profession,”

Horse Hines continued in a moment, with quiet pride, “and though I do say it myself, Luke, I’m proud of my work on this job. Look at him!” he exclaimed with sudden energy, and a bit of color in his gray face.

The procession moved off briskly to the smooth trotting pull of the velvet rumps. The mourning women peered out of the closed carriages at the gaping town. They wept behind their heavy veils, and looked to see if the town was watching.

Behind the world’s great mask of grief, the eyes of the mourners shone through with a terrible and indecent hunger, an unnameable lust.

It was raw October weather—gray and wet. The service had been short, as a precaution against the pestilence which was everywhere. The funeral entered the cemetery. It was a pleasant place, on a hill. There was a good view of the town.

Her voice had a note of exasperation in it. They all felt the grim trickery of

Death, which had come in by the cellar while they waited at the window.

“Papa has no right to expect it of me!” she burst out resentfully. “He’s had his life. He’s an old man. We have a right to ours as well as anyone. Good heavens! Can’t they realize that! I’m married to Hugh Barton! I’m his wife!”

“They call that death, Mrs. Pert.”

“Death! Yes, that’s it,” said Mrs. Pert brightly, nodding her head in agreement. “That’s one kind, ’Gene. There are some other kinds, too. Did you know that?”

She smiled at him.

… a light … a song … a light … a light swings over the hill … over us all … a star shines over the town … over us all … a light.

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again. But over us all, over us all, over us all is⁠—something.

Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were shaking. It was October, but some leaves were shaking.

And pain and pride and death will pass, and will not come again. And light and dawn will pass, and the star and the cry of a lark will pass, and will not come again. And we shall pass, and shall not come again.

What things will come again? O Spring, the cruellest and fairest of the seasons, will come again.

And the strange and buried men will come again, in flower and leaf the strange and buried men will come again, and death and the dust will never come again, for death and the dust will die.

And Ben will come again, he will not die again, in flower and leaf, in wind and music far, he will come back again.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

It had grown dark. The frosty night blazed with great brilliant stars. The lights in the town shone with sharp radiance. Presently, when he had lain upon the cold earth for some time, Eugene got up and went away toward the town.

The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it. He felt sure things would be better elsewhere.

He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.

It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it. He wanted no land of Make-believe:

Stilicho Gant, and Jugurtha Gant, and Vercingetorix Gant, and Czar-Ivan-the-Terrible Gant. And Gant, the Olympian Bull; and Heracles Gant; and Gant, the Seductive Swan; and Ashtaroth and Azrael Gant, Proteus Gant, Anubis and Osiris and Mumbo-Jumbo Gant.

But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I’m not a Genius?

He did not ask himself the question often. He was alone: he spoke aloud, but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of this blasphemy. It was a moonless night, full of stars. There was no thunder and no lightning.

Well, he went on very calmly, what if I’m not? Am I going to cut my throat, or eat worms, or swallow arsenic? He shook his head slowly but emphatically. No, he said, I am not.

Besides, there are enough geniuses. They have at least one in every high school, and one in the orchestra of every small-town movie.

Sometimes Mrs. Von Zeck, the wealthy patroness of the arts, sends a genius or two off to New York to study.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Rountree, putting his glasses on again.

How nobly we can die for truth⁠—in conversation.

“It was a very hot fire, Mr. Rountree. They’d have burned you if you hadn’t recanted.”

“I think it might be painful,” Vergil Weldon suggested. “Even a little blister hurts.”

“Who wants to be burned for anything?” said Eugene. “I’d have done what Galileo did⁠—backed out of it.”

“So should I,” said Vergil Weldon, and their faces arched with gleeful malice over the heavy laughter of the class.

He will not let them read, lest someone find the rag-quilt of his takings from Zeno to Immanuel Kant. The crazy patchwork of three thousand years, the forced marriage of irreconcilables, the summation of all thought, in his old head.

Socrates begat Plato. Plato begat Plotinus. Plotinus begat St. Augustine⁠ ⁠… Kant begat Hegel. Hegel begat Vergil Weldon. Here we pause. There’s no more to beget.

An Answer to All Things in Thirty Easy Lessons. How sure they are they’ve found it!

“Isn’t there an h in that name?” he said.

“No,” said Eugene. “That’s another branch of the family. I have an uncle, Samuel, who spells his name that way.”

Sometimes, at hotels of ill-repute, he would register, with dark buried glee, as “Robert Browning,” “Alfred Tennyson,” and “William Wordsworth.”