“Can’t you persuade your father to wait another year?
You’re only a child in years, Eugene.
You have all the time in the world.”
Her eyes darkened as she talked.
Gant would not be persuaded.
“He’s old enough,” he said.
“When I was his age I had been earning my living for years.
I’m getting old.
I won’t be here much longer.
I want him to begin to make a name for himself before I die.”
He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement.
In his youngest son he saw the last hope of his name’s survival in laurels — in the political laurels he so valued.
He wanted his son to be a great and far-seeing statesman and a member of the Republican or Democratic party.
His choice of a university was therefore a measure of political expediency, founded upon the judgment of his legal and political friends.
“He’s ready to go,” said Gant, “and he’s going to the State University, and nowhere else.
He’ll be given as good an education there as he can get anywhere.
Furthermore, he will make friends there who will stand by him the rest of his life.”
He turned upon his son a glance of bitter reproach.
“There are very few boys who have had your chance,” said he, “and you ought to be grateful instead of turning up your nose at it.
Mark my words, you’ll live to see the day when you’ll thank me for sending you there.
Now, I’ve given you my last word: you’ll go where I send you or you’ll go nowhere at all.”
Part Three
28
Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the university.
He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds.
He had been sick very little in his life, but his rapid growth had eaten sharply at his strength: he was full of a wild energy of mind and body that devoured him and left him exhausted.
He tired very quickly.
He was a child when he went away: he was a child who had looked much on pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the Ideal.
Walled up in his great city of visions, his tongue had learned to mock, his lip to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life.
Again and again he had been bogged in the gray slough of factuality.
His cruel eyes had missed the meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter heart had sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at the glow of his imagination.
He was not a child when he reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief.
He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers.
For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring.
He believed in brave heroic lives.
He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and gentleness he had little known.
He believed in beauty and in order, and that he would wreak out their mighty forms upon the distressful chaos of his life.
He believed in love, and in the goodness and glory of women.
He believed in valiance, and he hoped that, like Socrates, he would do nothing mean or common in the hour of danger.
He exulted in his youth, and he believed that he could never die.
Four years later, when he was graduated, he had passed his adolescence, the kiss of love and death burned on his lips, and he was still a child.
When it was at last plain that Gant’s will was on this inflexible, Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:
“Well, then, go your ways, boy.
Go your ways.
God bless you.”
She looked a moment at his long thin figure and turned to John Dorsey Leonard with wet eyes:
“Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who came to us four years ago?
Can you believe it?”
John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary gentle relaxation.
“What do you know about it?” he said.