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 any one 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 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. And their temper was barbed now with a new sting. They would say:
“You’ve ruined him completely since you sent him to a private school.” Or, “He’s too good to soil his hands now that he’s quit the public school.”
Eliza herself kept him sufficiently reminded of his obligation. She spoke often of the effort she had to make to pay the tuition fee, and of her poverty. She said, he must work hard, and help her all he could in his spare hours. He should also help her through the summer and “drum up trade” among the arriving tourists at the station.
“For God’s sake! What’s the matter with you?” Luke jeered. “You’re not ashamed of a little honest work, are you?”
This way, sir, for Dixieland. Mrs. Eliza E. Gant, proprietor. Just A Whisper Off The Square, Captain. All the comforts of the Modern Jail. Biscuits and home-made pies just like mother should have made but didn’t.
That boy’s a hustler.
At the end of Eugene’s first year at Leonard’s, Eliza told John Dorsey she could no longer afford to pay the tuition. He conferred with Margaret and, returning, agreed to take the boy for half price.
“He can help you drum up new prospects,” said Eliza.
“Yes,” Leonard agreed, “that’s the very thing.”
Ben bought a new pair of shoes. They were tan. He paid six dollars for them. He always bought good things. But they burnt the soles of his feet. In a scowling rage he loped to his room and took them off.
“Goddam it!” he yelled, and hurled them at the wall. Eliza came to the door.
“You’ll never have a penny, boy, as long as you waste money the way you do. I tell you what, it’s pretty bad when you think of it.” She shook her head sadly with puckered mouth.
“O for God’s sake!” he growled. “Listen to this! By God, you never hear me asking any one for anything, do you?” he burst out in a rage.
She took the shoes and gave them to Eugene.
“It would be a pity to throw away a good pair of shoes,” she said. “Try ’em on, boy.”
He tried them on. His feet were already bigger than Ben’s. He walked about carefully and painfully a few steps.
“How do they feel?” asked Eliza.
“All right, I guess,”