Why did she come to Dixieland, I wonder? Eugene thought.
Eliza was good to a little man with a mustache. He had a wife and a little girl nine years old. He was a hotel steward; he was out of work and he stayed at Dixieland until he owed her more than one hundred dollars. But he split kindling neatly, and carried up coal; he did handy jobs of carpentry, and painted up rusty places about the house.
She was very fond of him; he was what she called “a good family man.” She liked domestic people; she liked men who were house-broken. The little man was very kind and very tame. Eugene liked him because he made good coffee. Eliza never bothered him about the money. Finally, he got work at the Inn, and quarters there. He paid Eliza all he owed her.
Eugene stayed late at the school, returning in the afternoon at three or four o’clock. Sometimes it was almost dark when he came back to Dixieland. Eliza was fretful at his absences, and brought him his dinner crisped and dried from its long heating in the oven. There was a heavy vegetable soup thickly glutinous with cabbage, beans, and tomatoes, and covered on top with big grease blisters. There would also be warmed-over beef, pork or chicken, a dish full of cold lima beans, biscuits, slaw, and coffee.
But the school had become the centre of his heart and life — Margaret Leonard his spiritual mother. He liked to be there most in the afternoons when the crowd of boys had gone, and when he was free to wander about the old house, under the singing majesty of great trees, exultant in the proud solitude of that fine hill, the clean windy rain of the acorns, the tang of burning leaves. He would read wolfishly until Margaret discovered him and drove him out under the trees or toward the flat court behind Bishop Raper’s residence at the entrance, which was used for basketball. Here, while the western sky reddened, he raced down toward the goal, passing the ball to a companion, exulting in his growing swiftness, agility, and expertness in shooting the basket.
Margaret Leonard watched his health jealously, almost morbidly, warning him constantly of the terrible consequences that followed physical depletion, the years required to build back what had once been thrown carelessly away.
“Look here, boy!” she would begin, stopping him in a quiet boding voice. “Come in here a minute. I want to talk to you.”
Somewhat frightened, extremely nervous, he would sit down beside her.
“How much sleep have you been getting?” she asked.
Hopefully, he said nine hours a night. That should be about right.
“Well, make it ten,” she commanded sternly. “See here, ‘Gene, you simply can’t afford to take chances with your health. Lordy, boy, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve had to pay the price, I tell you. You can’t do anything in this world without your health, boy.”
“But I’m all right,” he protested desperately, frightened. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“You’re not strong, boy. You’ve got to get some meat on your bones. I tell you what, I’m worried by those circles under your eyes. Do you keep regular hours?”
He did not: he hated regular hours. The excitement, the movement, the constant moments of crisis at Gant’s and Eliza’s had him keyed to their stimulation. The order and convention of domestic life he had never known. He was desperately afraid of regularity. It meant dullness and inanition to him. He loved the hour of midnight.
But obediently he promised her that he would be regular — regular in eating, sleeping, studying, and exercising.
But he had not yet learned to play with the crowd. He still feared, disliked and distrusted them.
He shrank from the physical conflict of boy life, but knowing her eye was upon him he plunged desperately into their games, his frail strength buffeted in the rush of strong legs, the heavy jar of strong bodies, picking himself up bruised and sore at heart to follow and join again the mill of the burly pack. Day after day to the ache of his body was added the ache and shame of his spirit, but he hung on with a pallid smile across his lips, and envy and fear of their strength in his heart. He parroted faithfully all that John Dorsey had to say about the “spirit of fair play,” “sportsmanship,” “playing the game for the game’s sake,” “accepting defeat or victory with a smile,” and so on, but he had no genuine belief or understanding. These phrases were current among all the boys at the school — they had been made somewhat too conscious of them and, as he listened, at times the old, inexplicable shame returned — he craned his neck and drew one foot sharply off the ground.
And Eugene noted, with the old baffling shame again, as this cheap tableau of self-conscious, robust, and raucously aggressive boyhood was posed, that, for all the mouthing of phrases, the jargon about fair play and sportsmanship, the weaker, at Leonard’s, was the legitimate prey of the stronger. Leonard, beaten by a boy in a play of wits, or in an argument for justice, would assert the righteousness of his cause by physical violence. These spectacles were ugly and revolting: Eugene watched them with sick fascination.
Leonard himself was not a bad man — he was a man of considerable character, kindliness, and honest determination. He loved his family, he stood up with some courage against the bigotry in the Methodist church, where he was a deacon, and at length had to withdraw because of his remarks on Darwin’s theory. He was, thus, an example of that sad liberalism of the village — an advanced thinker among the Methodists, a bearer of the torch at noon, an apologist for the toleration of ideas that have been established for fifty years. He tried faithfully to do his duties as a teacher. But he was of the earth — even his heavy-handed violence was of the earth, and had in it the unconscious brutality of nature. Although he asserted his interest in “the things of the mind,” his interest in the soil was much greater, and he had added little to his stock of information since leaving college. He was slow-witted and quite lacking in the sensitive intuitions of Margaret, who loved the man with such passionate fidelity, however, that she seconded all his acts before the world. Eugene had even heard her cry out in a shrill, trembling voice against a student who had answered her husband insolently: “Why, I’d slap his head off! That’s what I’d do!” And the boy had trembled, with fear and nausea, to see her so. 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 horse-whip and pious prayers, the advantages of being God! He thought little boys who resisted him should be beaten.
Upon the sons of his wealthiest and most prominent clients, as well as upon his own children, Leonard was careful to inflict no chastisement, and these young men, arrogantly conscious of their immunity, were studious in their insolence and disobedience. The son of the Bishop, Justin Raper, a tall thin boy of thirteen, with black hair, a thin dark bumpy face, and absurdly petulant lips, typed copies of a dirty ballad and sold them among the students at five cents a copy.
“Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
Slapoon!
Madam, your daughter looks very fine,
Slapoon!”
Moreover, Leonard surprised this youth one afternoon in Spring on the eastern flank of the hill, in the thick grass beneath a flowering dogwood, united in sexual congress with Miss Hazel Bradley, the daughter of a small grocer who lived below on Biltburn Avenue, and whose lewdness was already advertised in the town. Leonard, on second thought, did not go to the Bishop. He went to the Grocer.
“Well,” said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long mustache reflectively away from his mouth, “you ought to put up a no-trespassin’ sign.”
The target of concentrated abuse, both for John Dorsey and the boys, was the son of a Jew. The boy’s name was Edward Michalove. His father was a jeweller, a man with a dark, gentle floridity of manner and complexion.