Always I should see him on the landing, with the hissing valve and the blue lips, or hear him mumbling his lessons.
Then, at night, the other cot would be empty.
I think I shall room alone hereafter.
But he roomed the remainder of the term in one of the dormitories.
He had two room-mates — one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name of L.
K.
Duncan (the “L” stood for Lawrence, but every one called him “Elk”) and the other, the son of an Episcopal minister, Harold Gay.
Both were several years older than Eugene: Elk Duncan was twenty-four, and Harold Gay, twenty-two.
But it is doubtful whether a more precious congress of freaks had ever before gathered in two small rooms, one of which they used as a “study.”
Elk Duncan was the son of an Altamont attorney, a small Democratic politician, mighty in county affairs.
Elk Duncan was tall — an inch or two over six feet — and incredibly thin, or rather narrow.
He was already a little bald, he had a high prominent forehead, and large pale bulging eyes: from that point his long pale face sloped backward to his chin.
His shoulders were a trifle bowed and very narrow; the rest of his body had the symmetry of a lead pencil.
He always dressed very foppishly, in tight suits of blue flannel, with high stiff collars, fat silken cravats, and colored silk handkerchiefs.
He was a student in the Law School, but he spent a large part of his time, industriously, in avoiding study.
The younger students — particularly the Freshmen — gathered around him after meals with mouths slightly ajar, feeding upon his words like manna, and hungrily demanding more, the wilder his fable became.
His posture toward life was very much that of the barker of a carnival sideshow: loquacious, patronizing, and cynical.
The other room-mate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child.
He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness of his face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them.
Instead, he concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that echoed at all the wrong places, and a silly grin full of an absurd and devilish knowingness.
His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy, he smoked cigarettes with a debauched leer, and cursed loudly and uneasily with the accent of a depraved clergyman.
“Harold!
Harold!” said Elk Duncan reprovingly.
“Damn, son!
You’re getting hard!
If you go on like this, you’ll begin to chew gum, and fritter away your Sunday-school money at the movies.
Think of the rest of us, please.
‘Gene here’s only a young boy, as pure as a barnyard privy, and, as for me, I’ve always moved in the best circles, and associated with only the highest class of bartenders and ladylike streetwalkers.
What would your father say if he could hear you?
Don’t you know he’d be shocked?
He’d cut off your cigarette money, son.”
“I don’t give a damn what he’d do, Elk, nor you either!” said Harold toughly, grinning.
“So, what the hell!” he roared as loudly as he could.
There was an answering howl from the windows of the whole dormitory — cries of
“Go to hell!”
“Cut it out!” and ironical cheers, at which he was pleased.
The scattered family drew together again at Christmas.
A sense of impending dissolution, of loss and death, brought them back.
The surgeon at Baltimore had given no hope.
He had, rather, confirmed Gant’s death-warrant.
“Then how long can he live?” asked Helen.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“My dear girl!” he said.
“I have no idea.
The man’s a miracle.
Do you know that he’s Exhibit A here?
Every surgeon in the place has had a look.
How long can he last?
I’ll swear to nothing — I no longer have any idea.
When your father left here, the first time, after his operation, I never expected to see him again.