It’s not hurt,” said Eugene, lifting his bandaged wrist.
“He didn’t hit you, did he?” asked Ben sternly.
“Oh, no.
Of course not.
He was just drunk.
He was sorry about it this morning.”
“Yes,” said Ben, “he’s always sorry about it — after he’s raised all the hell he can.”
He drank deeply at his cigarette, inhaling the smoke as if in the grip of a powerful drug.
“How’d you get along at college this year, ‘Gene?” he asked presently.
“I passed my work.
I made fair grades — if that’s what you mean?
I did better — this Spring,” he added, with some difficulty.
“It was hard getting started — at the beginning.”
“You mean last Fall?”
Eugene nodded.
“What was the matter?” said Ben, scowling at him.
“Did the other boys make fun of you?”
“Yes,” said Eugene, in a low voice.
“Why did they?
You mean they didn’t think you were good enough for them?
Did they look down on you?
Was that it?” said Ben savagely.
“No,” said Eugene, very red in the face.
“No.
That had nothing to do with it.
I look funny, I suppose.
I looked funny to them.”
“What do you mean you look funny?” said Ben pugnaciously.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, you know, if you didn’t go around looking like a bum.
In God’s name,” he exclaimed angrily, “when did you get that hair cut last?
What do you think you are: the Wild Man from Borneo?”
“I don’t like barbers!” Eugene burst out furiously.
“That’s why!
I don’t want them to go sticking their damned dirty fingers in my mouth.
Whose business is it, if I never get my hair cut?”
“A man is judged by his appearance today,” said Ben sententiously.
“I was reading an article by a big business man in The Post the other day.
He says he always looks at a man’s shoes before he gives him a job.”
He spoke seriously, haltingly, in the same way that he read, without genuine conviction.
Eugene writhed to hear his fierce condor prattle this stale hash of the canny millionaires, like any obedient parrot in a teller’s cage.
Ben’s voice had a dull flat quality as he uttered these admirable opinions: he seemed to grope behind it all for some answer, with hurt puzzled eyes.
As he faltered along, with scowling intensity, through a success-sermon, there was something poignantly moving in his effort: it was the effort of his strange and lonely spirit to find some entrance into life — to find success, position, companionship.
And it was as if, spelling the words out with his mouth, a settler in the Bronx from the fat Lombard plain, should try to unriddle the new world by deciphering the World Almanac, or as if some woodsman, trapped by the winter, and wasted by an obscure and terrible disease, should hunt its symptoms and its cure in a book of Household Remedies.
“Did the Old Man send you enough money to get along on?” Ben asked.
“Were you able to hold your own with the other boys?
He can afford it, you know.
Don’t let him stint you.
Make him give it to you, ‘Gene.”
“I had plenty,” said Eugene, “all that I needed.”
“This is the time you need it — not later,” said Ben.