Eugene staggered across the floor and collapsed upon a chair, roaring with laughter while his long arms flapped helplessly at his sides.
“Scuse!” he gasped.
“Don’t mean to — A-r-rt!
Yes!
Yes!
That’s it!” he screamed, and he beat his knuckles in a crazy tattoo upon the polished floor.
He slid gently off the chair, slowly unbuttoning his vest, and with a languid hand loosening his necktie.
A faint gurgle came from his weary throat, his head lolled around on the floor languidly, tears coursed down his swollen features.
“What’s wrong with you?
Are you c-c-c-crazy?” said the sailor, all a-grin.
Horse Hines bent sympathetically and assisted the boy to his feet.
“It’s the strain,” he said knowingly to the sailor.
“The pore fellow has become hysterical.”
37
So, to Ben dead was given more care, more time, more money than had ever been given to Ben living.
His burial was a final gesture of irony and futility: an effort to compensate carrion death for the unpaid wage of life — love and mercy.
He had a grand funeral.
All the Pentlands sent wreaths, and came with their separate clans, bringing along with their hastily assumed funeral manners a smell of recent business.
Will Pentland talked with the men about politics, the war, and trade conditions, paring his nails thoughtfully, pursing his lips and nodding in his curiously reflective way, and occasionally punning with a birdy wink.
His pleased self-laughter was mixed with Henry’s loud guffaw.
Pett, older, kinder, gentler than Eugene had ever seen her, moved about with a rustling of gray silk, and a relaxed bitterness.
And Jim was there, with his wife, whose name Eugene forgot, and his four bright hefty daughters, whose names he confused, but who had all been to college and done well, and his son, who had been to a Presbyterian college, and had been expelled for advocating free love and socialism while editor of the college paper.
Now he played the violin, and loved music, and helped his father with the business: he was an effeminate and mincing young man, but of the breed.
And there was Thaddeus Pentland, Will’s bookkeeper, the youngest and poorest of the three.
He was a man past fifty, with a pleasant red face, brown mustaches, and a gentle placid manner.
He was full of puns and pleased good-nature, save when he quoted from Karl Marx and Eugene Debs.
He was a Socialist, and had once received eight votes for Congress.
He was there with his garrulous wife (whom Helen called Jibber–Jibber) and his two daughters, languid good-looking blondes of twenty and twenty-four.
There they were, in all their glory — that strange rich clan, with its fantastic mixture of success and impracticality, its hard monied sense, its visionary fanaticism.
There they were, in their astonishing contradictions: the business man who had no business method, and yet had made his million dollars; the frantic antagonist of Capital who had given the loyal service of a lifetime to the thing he denounced; the wastrel son, with the bull vitality of the athlete, a great laugh, animal charm — no more; the musician son, a college rebel, intelligent, fanatic, with a good head for figures; insane miserliness for oneself, lavish expenditure for one’s children.
There they were, each with the familiar marking of the clan — broad nose, full lips, deep flat cheeks, deliberate pursed mouths, flat drawling voices, flat complacent laughter.
There they were, with their enormous vitality, their tainted blood, their meaty health, their sanity, their insanity, their humor, their superstition, their meanness, their generosity, their fanatic idealism, their unyielding materialism.
There they were, smelling of the earth and Parnassus — that strange clan which met only at weddings or funerals, but which was forever true to itself, indissoluble and forever apart, with its melancholia, its madness, its mirth: more enduring than life, more strong than death.
And as Eugene looked, he felt again the nightmare horror of destiny: he was of them — there was no escape.
Their lust, their weakness, their sensuality, their fanaticism, their strength, their rich taint, were rooted in the marrow of his bones.
But Ben, with the thin gray face (he thought) was not a part of them.
Their mark was nowhere on him.
And among them, sick and old, leaning upon his cane, moved Gant, the alien, the stranger.
He was lost and sorrowful, but sometimes, with a flash of his old rhetoric, he spoke of his grief and the death of his son.
The women filled the house with their moaning.
Eliza wept almost constantly; Helen by fits, in loose hysterical collapse.
And all the other women wept with gusto, comforting Eliza and her daughter, falling into one another’s arms, wailing with keen hunger.
And the men stood sadly about, dressed in their good clothes, wondering when it would be over.
Ben lay in the parlor, bedded in his expensive coffin.
The room was heavy with the incense of the funeral bowers.
Presently the Scotch minister arrived: his decent soul lay above all the loud posturings of grief like a bolt of hard clean wool.
He began the service for the dead in a dry nasal voice, remote, monotonous, cold, and passionate.
Then, marshalled by Horse Hines, the pallbearers, young men from the paper and the town, who had known the dead man best, moved slowly out, gripping the coffin-handles with their nicotined fingers.
In proper sequence, the mourners followed, lengthening out in closed victorias that exhaled their funeral scent of stale air and old leather.
To Eugene came again the old ghoul fantasy of a corpse and cold pork, the smell of the dead and hamburger steak — the glozed corruption of Christian burial, the obscene pomps, the perfumed carrion.