God! thought he.
This is man’s work.
Heave-ho, ye black devils!
There’s a war on! He spat.
The tug came at nightfall and took him off.
He sat apart from the stevedores, trying to fancy the boat had come for him alone.
The lights went twinkling up the far Virginia shores.
He spat into the swirling waters.
When the trains slid in and out, the stevedores raised the wooden bridges that spanned the tracks.
Foot by foot, with rhythmic pull and halt, the gangs tugged at the ropes, singing, under the direction of their leader their song of love and labor:
“Jelly Roll! (Heh!) Je-e-elly Roll.”
They were great black men, each with his kept woman.
They earned fifty or sixty dollars a week.
Once or twice again, in the dying summer, Eugene went to Norfolk.
He saw the sailor, but he no longer tried to see Laura.
She seemed far and lost.
He had not written home all summer.
He found a letter from Gant, written in his father’s Gothic sprawl — a sick and feeble letter, written sorrowfully and far away.
O lost!
Eliza, in the rush and business of the summer trade, had added a few practical lines. Save his money.
Get plenty of good food.
Keep well.
Be a good boy.
The boy was a lean column of brown skin and bone.
He had lost over thirty pounds during the summer: he was over six foot four and weighed little more than one hundred and thirty pounds.
The sailor was shocked at his emaciation, and bullied him with blustering reproof:
“Why didn’t you t-t-tell me where you were, idiot?
I’d have sent you money.
For G-g-god’s sake!
Come on and eat!”
They ate.
The summer waned.
When September came, Eugene quit his work and, after a luxurious day or two in Norfolk, started homeward.
But, at Richmond, where there was a wait of three hours between trains, he changed his plans suddenly and went to a good hotel.
He was touched with pride and victory.
In his pockets he had $130 that he had won hardily by his own toil.
He had lived alone, he had known pain and hunger, he had survived.
The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart.
He thrilled to the glory of the secret life.
The fear of the crowd, a distrust and hatred of group life, a horror of all bonds that tied him to the terrible family of the earth, called up again the vast Utopia of his loneliness.
To go alone, as he had gone, into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth — it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
He thought of his own family with fear, almost with hatred.
My God!
Am I never to be free? he thought.
What have I done to deserve this slavery?
Suppose — suppose I were in China, or in Africa, or at the South Pole.
I should always be afraid of his dying while I was away. (He twisted his neck as he thought of it.) And how they would rub it in to me if I were not there!
Enjoying yourself in China (they would say) while your father was dying.
Unnatural son!
Yes, but curse them!