“Stop, you mountain grill, or I’ll put you in jail.”
“Whah-whah.”— His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto.
Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness, quite blue with terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual arrivals to her breast, melodramatically, and moan:
“I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my innocent motherless babes —”
“Whah-whah-whah!”
“He’s a fiend out of hell,” cried Gant, beginning to weep.
“Cruel and criminal monster that he is, he will batter our brains out against a tree, before he’s done.”
They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car that, with a startled screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like a frightened horse.
“You damned thug!” Gant roared, plunging forward and fastening his great hands around Luke’s throat.
“Will you stop?”
Luke added another notch of blazing speed.
Gant fell backward with a howl of terror.
On Sunday they made long tours into the country.
Often they drove to Reynoldsville, twenty-two miles away.
It was an ugly little resort, noisy with arriving and departing cars, with a warm stench of oil and gasoline heavy above its broad main street.
But people were coming and going from several States: Southward they came up from South Carolina and Georgia, cotton-farmers, small tradesmen and their families in battered cars coated with red sandclay dust.
They had a heavy afternoon dinner of fried chicken, corn, string-beans, and sliced tomatoes, at one of the big wooden boarding-house hotels, spent another hour in a drugstore over a chocolate nut-sundae, watched the summer crowd of fortunate tourists and ripe cool-skinned virgins flow by upon the wide sidewalk in thick pullulation, and returned again, after a brief tour of the town, on the winding immediate drop to the hot South.
New lands.
Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South filled summer porches.
Luke was a darling.
He was a dear, a fine boy, a big-hearted generous fellow, and just the cutest thing.
Women liked him, laughed at him, pulled fondly the thick golden curls of his hair.
He was sentimentally tender to children — girls of fourteen years.
He had a grand romantic feeling for Delia Selborne, the oldest daughter of Mrs. Selborne.
He bought her presents, was tender and irritable by turns.
Once, at Gant’s, on the porch under an August moon and the smell of ripening grapes, he caressed her while Helen sang in the parlor.
He caressed her gently, leaned his head over her, and said he would like to lay it on her b-b-b-b-breast.
Eugene watched them bitterly, with an inch of poison round his heart.
He wanted the girl for himself: she was stupid, but she had the wise body and faint hovering smile of her mother.
He wanted Mrs. Selborne more, he fantasied passionately about her yet, but her image lived again in Delia.
As a result, he was proud, cold, scornful and foolish before them.
They disliked him.
Enviously, with gnawn heart, he observed Luke’s ministrations to Mrs. Selborne.
His service was so devout, so extravagant that even Helen grew annoyed and occasionally jealous.
And nightly, from a remote corner at Gant’s or Eliza’s, or from a parked automobile before the house, he heard her rich welling laughter, full of tenderness, surrender, and mystery.
Sometimes, waiting in pitch darkness on the stairs at Eliza’s, at one or two o’clock in the morning, he felt her pass him.
As she touched him in the dark, she gave a low cry of terror; with an uncivil grunt he reassured her, and descended to bed with a pounding heart and burning face.
Ah, yes, he thought, with green morality, observing his brother throned in laughter and affection, you Big Fool, you — you’re just a sucker!
You show off and act big, my sonny, and spend your money bringing ice-cream for them — but what do you get out of it?
How do you feel when she gets out of an automobile at two o’clock in the morning after grunting in the dark with some damned travelling-man, or with old Poxy Logan who’s been keeping a nigger woman up for years.
“May I p-p-p-put my head on your breast?”
You make me sick, you damned fool. SHE’S no better, only you don’t know beans.
She’ll let you spend all your money on her and then she’ll run off with some little pimp in an automobile for the rest of the night.
Yes, that’s so.
Do you want to make anything out of it?
You big bluff.
Come out into the back yard. . . . I’ll show you . . . take that . . . and that . . . and that . . .
Pumping his fists wildly, he fought his phantom into defeat and himself into exhaustion.
Luke had several hundred dollars saved from The Saturday Evening Post days, when he went off to school.
He accepted very little money from Gant.