And you’re likely to catch everything.
This looks like a nice girl,” he said quietly, after a pause.
“For heaven’s sake, fix yourself up and try to keep fairly clean.
Women notice that, you know.
Look at your fingernails, and keep your clothes pressed.
Have you any money?”
“All I need,” said Eugene, looking nervously toward the kitchen.
“Don’t, for God’s sake!”
“Put it in your pocket, you little fool,” Ben said angrily, thrusting a bill into his hand.
“You’ve got to have some money.
Keep it until you need it.”
Helen came out on the high front porch with them as they departed.
As usual, she had added a double heaping measure to what they needed.
There was another shoe-box stuffed with sandwiches, boiled eggs, and fudge.
She stood on the high step-edge, with a cloth wound over her head, her gaunt arms, pitted with old scars, akimbo.
A warm sunny odor of nasturtiums, loamy earth, and honeysuckle washed round them its hot spermy waves.
“O-ho!
A-ha!” she winked comically.
“I know something!
I’m not as blind as you think, you know —” She nodded with significant jocularity, her big smiling face drenched in the curious radiance and purity that occasionally dwelt so beautifully there.
He thought always when he saw her thus, of a sky washed after rain, of wide crystalline distances, cool and clean.
With a rough snigger she prodded him in the ribs:
“Ain’t love grand!
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Look at his face, Laura.”
She drew the girl close to her in a generous hug, laughing, Oh, with laughing pity, and as they mounted the hill, she stood there, in the sunlight, her mouth slightly open, smiling, touched with radiance, beauty, and wonder.
They mounted slowly toward the eastern edge of town, by the long upward sweep of Academy Street, which bordered the negro settlement sprawled below it.
At the end of Academy Street, the hill loomed abruptly; a sinuous road, well paved, curved up along the hillside to the right.
They turned into this road, mounting now along the eastern edge of Niggertown.
The settlement fell sharply away below them, rushing down along a series of long clay streets.
There were a few frame houses by the roadside: the dwellings of negroes and poor white people, but these became sparser as they mounted.
They walked at a leisurely pace up the cool road speckled with little dancing patches of light that filtered through the arching trees and shaded on the left by the dense massed foliage of the hill.
Out of this green loveliness loomed the huge raw turret of a cement reservoir: it was streaked and blotted coolly with water-marks.
Eugene felt thirsty.
Further along, the escape from a smaller reservoir roared from a pipe in a foaming hawser, as thick as a man’s body.
They climbed sharply up, along a rocky trail, avoiding the last long corkscrew of the road, and stood in the gap, at the road’s summit.
They were only a few hundred feet above the town: it lay before them with the sharp nearness of a Sienese picture, at once close and far.
On the highest ground, he saw the solid masonry of the Square, blocked cleanly out in light and shadow, and a crawling toy that was a car, and men no bigger than sparrows.
And about the Square was the treeless brick jungle of business — cheap, ragged, and ugly, and beyond all this, in indefinite patches, the houses where all the people lived, with little bright raw ulcers of suburbia further off, and the healing and concealing grace of fair massed trees.
And below him, weltering up from the hollow along the flanks and shoulders of the hill, was Niggertown.
There seemed to be a kind of centre at the Square, where all the cars crawled in and waited, yet there was no purpose anywhere.
But the hills were lordly, with a plan.
Westward, they widened into the sun, soaring up from buttressing shoulders.
The town was thrown up on the plateau like an encampment: there was nothing below him that could resist time.
There was no idea.
Below him, in a cup, he felt that all life was held: he saw it as might one of the old schoolmen writing in monkish Latin a Theatre of Human Life; or like Peter Breughel, in one of his swarming pictures.
It seemed to him suddenly that he had not come up on the hill from the town, but that he had come out of the wilderness like a beast, and was staring now with steady beast-eye at this little huddle of wood and mortar which the wilderness must one day repossess, devour, cover over.
The seventh from the top was Troy — but Helen had lived there; and so the German dug it up.
They turned from the railing, with recovered wind, and walked through the gap, under Philip Roseberry’s great arched bridge.
To the left, on the summit, the rich Jew had his cattle, his stables, his horses, his cows, and his daughters.