Simon and his two keepers first came to Dixieland when difficulties with several of the Altamont hotels forced them to look for private quarters. The men took two rooms and a sleeping-porch, and paid generously.
“Why, pshaw!” said Eliza persuasively to Helen. “I don’t believe there’s a thing wrong with him. He’s as quiet and well-behaved as you please.”
At this moment there was a piercing yell upstairs, followed by a long peal of diabolical laughter. Eugene bounded up and down the hall in his exultancy and delight, producing little squealing noises in his throat. Ben, scowling, with a quick flicker of his mouth, drew back his hard white hand swiftly as if to cuff his brother. Instead, he jerked his head sideways to Eliza, and said with a soft, scornful laugh: “By God, mama, I don’t see why you have to take them in. You’ve got enough of them in the family already.”
“Mama, in heaven’s name —” Helen began furiously. At this moment Gant strode in out of the dusk, carrying a mottled package of pork chops, and muttering rhetorically to himself. There was another long peal of laughter above. He halted abruptly, startled, and lifted his head. Luke, listening attentively at the foot of the stairs, exploded in a loud boisterous guffaw, and the girl, her annoyance changing at once to angry amusement, walked toward her father’s inquiring face, and prodded him several times in the ribs.
“Hey?” he said startled. “What is it?”
“Miss Eliza’s got a crazy man upstairs,” she sniggered, enjoying his amazement.
“Jesus God!” Gant yelled frantically, wetting his big thumb swiftly on his tongue, and glancing up toward his Maker with an attitude of exaggerated supplication in his small gray eyes and the thrust of his huge bladelike nose. Then, letting his arms slap heavily at his sides, in a gesture of defeat, he began to walk rapidly back and forth, clucking his deprecation loudly. Eliza stood solidly, looking from one to another, her lips working rapidly, her white face hurt and bitter.
There was another long howl of mirth above. Gant paused, caught Helen’s eye, and began to grin suddenly in an unwilling sheepish manner.
“God have mercy on us,” he chuckled. “She’ll have the place filled with all of Barnum’s freaks the next thing you know.”
At this moment, Simon, self-contained, distinguished and grave in his manner, descended the steps with Mr. Gilroy and Mr. Flannagan, his companions. The two guards were red in the face, and breathed stertorously as if from some recent exertion. Simon, however, preserved his habitual appearance of immaculate and well-washed urbanity.
“Good evening,” he remarked suavely. “I hope I have not kept you waiting long.” He caught sight of Eugene.
“Come here, my boy,” he said very kindly.
“It’s all right,” remarked Mr. Gilroy, encouragingly. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Eugene moved into the presence.
“And what is your name, young man?” said Simon with his beautiful devil’s smile.
“Eugene.”
“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.
Every one looked doubtfully at Mr. Gilroy.
“Oh, that’s all right!” said Mr. Gilroy cheerfully. “He’ll never miss it. There’s lots more where that came from.”
“He’s a mul-tye-millionaire,” Mr. Flannagan explained proudly. “We give him four or five dollars in small change every morning just to throw away.”
Simon caught sight of Gant for the first time.
“Look out for the Stingaree,” he cried. “Remember the Maine.”
“I tell you what,” said Eliza laughing. “He’s not so crazy as you think.”
‘That’s right,” said Mr. Gilroy, noting Gant’s grin. “The Stingaree’s a fish. They have them in Florida.”
“Don’t forget the birds, my friends,” said Simon, going out with his companions. “Be good to the birds.”
They became very fond of him. Somehow he fitted into the pattern of their life. None of them was uncomfortable in the presence of madness. In the flowering darkness of Spring, prisoned in a room, his satanic laughter burst suddenly out: Eugene listened, thrilled, and slept, unable to forget the smile of dark flowering evil, the loose pocket chinking heavily with coins.
Night, the myriad rustle of tiny wings. Heard lapping water of the inland seas.
— And the air will be filled with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-notes. He was almost twelve. He was done with childhood. As that Spring ripened he felt entirely, for the first time, the full delight of loneliness. Sheeted in his thin nightgown, he stood in darkness by the orchard window of the back room at Gant’s, drinking the sweet air down, exulting in his isolation in darkness, hearing the strange wail of the whistle going west.
The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination — he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion. He no longer went through the torment of the recess flight and pursuit. He was now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys. His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter siege against Eliza’s obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the curls. But he had grown like a weed, he already topped his mother by an inch or two; his body was big-boned but very thin and fragile, with no meat on it; his legs were absurdly long, thin, and straight, giving him a curious scissored look as he walked with long bounding strides.
Stuck on a thin undeveloped neck beneath a big wide-browed head covered thickly by curling hair which had changed, since his infancy, from a light maple to dark brown-black, was a face so small, and so delicately sculptured, that it seemed not to belong to its body. The strangeness, the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool. The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply scooped and pouting. His rapt dreaming intensity set the face usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; he smiled, oftener than he laughed, inwardly, at some extravagant invention, or some recollection of the absurd, now fully appreciated for the first time. He did not open his lips to smile — there was a swift twisted flicker across his mouth. His thick heavily arched eyebrows grew straight across the base of his nose.
That Spring he was more alone than ever. Eliza’s departure for Dixieland three or four years before, and the disruption of established life at Gant’s, had begun the loosening of his first friendships with the neighborhood boys, Harry Tarkinton, Max Isaacs, and the others, and had now almost completely severed them. Occasionally he saw these boys again, occasionally he resumed again, at sporadic intervals, his association with them, but he now had no steady companionship, he had only a series of associations with children whose parents stayed for a time at Dixieland, with Tim O’Doyle, whose mother ran the Brunswick, with children here and there who briefly held his interest.
But he became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements. Dull people filled him with terror: he was