Urr-p!”— Her rough bacchic smile played loosely over her large unhappy face.
“Mama, in God’s name where does it all come from?” she said, grinning tearfully.
“I do nothing but mop up after her.
Will you please tell me how long it’s going to last?”
Eliza laughed slyly, passing her finger under her broad nosewing.
“Why, child!” she said.
“What in the world!
I’ve never seen the like!
She must have saved up for the last six months.”
“Yes, sir!” said Helen, looking vaguely away, with a profane smile playing across her mouth,
“I’d just like to know where the hell it all comes from.
I’ve had everything else,” she said, with a rough angry laugh,
“I’m expecting one of her kidneys at any minute.”
“Whew-w!” cried Eliza, shaken with laughter.
“Hel-en! Oh Hel’en!” Mrs. Barton’s voice came feebly in to them.
“O gotohell!” said the girl, sotto-voce.
“Urr-p!
Urr-p!”
She burst suddenly into tears:
“Is it going to be like this always!
I sometimes believe the judgment of God is against us all.
Papa was right.”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza, wetting her fingers, and threading a needle before the light.
“I’d go on and pay no more attention to her.
There’s nothing wrong with her.
It’s all imagination!”
It was Eliza’s rooted conviction that most human ills, except her own, were “all imagination.”
“Hel-en!”
“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.
It began to rain — rain incessant, spouting, torrential rain, fell among the reeking hills, leaving grass and foliage drowned upon the slopes, starting the liquid avalanche of earth upon a settlement, glutting lean rocky mountain-streams to a foaming welter of yellow flood.
It mined the yellow banks away with unheard droppings; it caved in hillsides; it drank the steep banked earth away below the rails, leaving them strung to their aerial ties across a gutted canyon.
There was a flood in Altamont.
It swept down in a converging width from the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its banks in a wide waste Mississippi.
It looted the bottomlands of the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all who dwelt therein.
The town was cut off from every communication with the world.
At the end of the third week, as the waters slid back into their channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads, crawled desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible wrath of water to achieve their wilted anti-climactic honeymoon.
“He will go where I send him or not at all,” Gant spoke his final word, not loudly.
Thus, it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University.
Eugene did not want to go to the State University.
For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard about his future education.
It was proposed that, in view of his youth, he should attend Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years, go to Harvard for two years more, and then, having arrived by easy stages at Paradise, “top things off” with a year or two at Oxford.
“Then,” said John Dorsey Leonard, who talked enchantingly on the subject, between mouthfuls of clabber, “then, my sonny, a man may begin to say he’s really ‘cultsherd.’
After that, of course,” he continued with a spacious carelessness, “he may travel for a year or so.”
But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him.
“You’re too young, boy,” said Margaret Leonard.