Moreover, his own feeling for order was so great that he had a passionate aversion for what was slovenly, disorderly, diffuse.
He was goaded to actual fury at times when he saw how carefully she saved bits of old string, empty cans and bottles, paper, trash of every description: the mania for acquisition, as yet an undeveloped madness in Eliza, enraged him.
“In God’s name!” he would cry with genuine anger.
“In God’s name!
Why don’t you get rid of some of this junk?”
And he would move destructively toward it.
“No you don’t, Mr. Gant!” she would answer sharply.
“You never know when those things will come in handy.”
It was, perhaps, a reversal of custom that the deep-hungering spirit of quest belonged to the one with the greatest love of order, the most pious regard for ritual, who wove into a pattern even his daily tirades of abuse, and that the sprawling blot of chaos, animated by one all-mastering desire for possession, belonged to the practical, the daily person.
Gant had the passion of the true wanderer, of him who wanders from a fixed point.
He needed the order and the dependence of a home — he was intensely a family man: their clustered warmth and strength about him was life.
After his punctual morning tirade at Eliza, he went about the rousing of the slumbering children.
Comically, he could not endure feeling, in the morning, that he was the only one awake and about.
His waking cry, delivered by formula, with huge comic gruffness from the foot of the stairs, took this form:
“Steve!
Ben!
Grover!
Luke!
You damned scoundrels: get up!
In God’s name, what will become of you!
You’ll never amount to anything as long as you live.”
He would continue to roar at them from below as if they were wakefully attentive above.
“When I was your age, I had milked four cows, done all the chores, and walked eight miles through the snow by this time.”
Indeed, when he described his early schooling, he furnished a landscape that was constantly three feet deep in snow, and frozen hard.
He seemed never to have attended school save under polar conditions.
And fifteen minutes later, he would roar again:
“You’ll never amount to anything, you good-for-nothing bums!
If one side of the wall caved in, you’d roll over to the other.”
Presently now there would be the rapid thud of feet upstairs, and one by one they would descend, rushing naked into the sitting-room with their clothing bundled in their arms.
Before his roaring fire they would dress.
By breakfast, save for sporadic laments, Gant was in something approaching good humor.
They fed hugely: he stoked their plates for them with great slabs of fried steak, grits fried in egg, hot biscuits, jam, fried apples.
He departed for his shop about the time the boys, their throats still convulsively swallowing hot food and coffee, rushed from the house at the warning signal of the mellow-tolling final nine-o’clock school bell.
He returned for lunch — dinner, as they called it — briefly garrulous with the morning’s news; in the evening, as the family gathered in again, he returned, built his great fire, and launched his supreme invective, a ceremony which required a half hour in composition, and another three-quarters, with repetition and additions, in delivery.
They dined then quite happily.
So passed the winter.
Eugene was three; they bought him alphabet books, and animal pictures, with rhymed fables below.
Gant read them to him indefatigably: in six weeks he knew them all by memory.
Through the late winter and spring he performed numberless times for the neighbors: holding the book in his hands he pretended to read what he knew by heart.
Gant was delighted: he abetted the deception.
Every one thought it extraordinary that a child should read so young.
In the Spring Gant began to drink again; his thirst withered, however, in two or three weeks, and shamefacedly he took up the routine of his life.
But Eliza was preparing for a change.
It was 1904; there was in preparation a great world’s exposition at Saint Louis: it was to be the visual history of civilization, bigger, better, and greater than anything of its kind ever known before.
Many of the Altamont people intended to go: Eliza was fascinated at the prospect of combining travel with profit.
“Do you know what?” she began thoughtfully one night, as she laid down the paper,
“I’ve a good notion to pack up and go.”
“Go?
Go where?”
“To Saint Louis,” she answered.