Speech choked in Eugene’s throat.
He stammered a few answers and fled from the house and the vacant fear in Gant’s eyes.
He walked prodigiously, day and night, in an effort to command his own fear.
He believed himself to be rotting with a leprosy.
And there was nothing to do but rot.
There was no cure.
For such had been the instruction of the moralists of his youth.
He walked with aimless desperation, unable to quiet for a moment his restless limbs.
He went up on the eastern hills that rose behind Niggertown.
A winter’s sun labored through the mist.
Low on the meadows, and high on the hills, the sunlight lay on the earth like milk.
He stood looking.
A shaft of hope cut through the blackness of his spirit.
I will go to my brother, he thought.
He found Ben still in bed at Woodson Street, smoking.
He closed the door, then spun wildly about as if caged.
“In God’s name!” Ben cried angrily.
“Have you gone crazy?
What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m — I’m sick!” he gasped.
“What’s the matter?
Where’ve you been?” asked Ben sharply.
He sat up in bed.
“I’ve been with a woman,” said Eugene.
“Sit down, ‘Gene,” said Ben quietly, after a moment.
“Don’t be a little idiot.
You’re not going to die, you know.
When did this happen?”
The boy blurted out his confession.
Ben got up and put on his clothes.
“Come on,” said he, “we’ll go to see McGuire.”
As they walked townward, he tried to talk, explaining himself in babbling incoherent spurts.
“It was like this,” he began, “if I had known, but at that time I didn’t — of course I know it was my own fault for —”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Ben impatiently.
“Dry up!
I don’t want to hear about it.
I’m not your damned Guardian Angel.”
The news was comforting.
So many people, after our fall from grace, are.
They mounted to the wide dark corridor of the Doctors’ and Surgeons’, with its sharp excitement of medical smells. McGuire’s anteroom was empty.
Ben rapped at the inner door. McGuire opened it: he pulled away the wet cigarette that was plastered on his heavy lip, to greet them.
“Hello, Ben.
Hello, son!” he barked, seeing Eugene.
“When’d you get back?”
“He thinks he’s dying of galloping consumption, McGuire,” said Ben, with a jerk of the head.
“You may be able to do something to prolong his life.”
“What’s the matter, son?” said McGuire.
Eugene gulped dryly, craning his livid face.
“If you don’t mind,” he croaked. “See you alone.”
He turned desperately upon his brother.