He let his hair grow in a great thick mat, partly to hide his sore, and partly because exposing it to the view of the barber touched him with shame and horror.
He would become at times insanely conscious of spotless youth: he was terrified before the loud good health of America, which is really a sickness, because no man will admit his sores.
He shrank back at the memory of his lost heroic fantasies: he thought of Bruce–Eugene, of all his thousand romantic impersonations, and never could he endure himself with an itching tetter upon his flesh.
He became morbidly conscious of all his blemishes, real and fancied: for days he would see nothing but people’s teeth — he would stare into their mouths when he talked to them, noting the fillings, the extractions, the plates and bridges.
He would gaze with envy and fear at the sound ivory grinders of the young men, baring his own, which were regular but somewhat yellowed with smoking, a hundred times a day.
He scrubbed at them savagely with a stiff brush until the gums bled; he brooded for hours upon a decaying molar which must one day be extracted, and, wild with despair, he would figure out on paper the age at which he might become toothless.
But if, he thought, I lose only one every two years after I am twenty, I shall still have over fifteen left when I am fifty, since we have thirty-two, including wisdom-teeth.
And it will not look so bad, if only I can save the front ones.
Then, with his hope in futures, he thought: But by that time perhaps the dentists can give me real ones.
He read several dental magazines to see if there was any hope for the transplanting of sound teeth for old ones.
Then, with brooding satisfaction, he studied his sensual deeply scalloped mouth with the pouting underlip, noting that even when he smiled he barely revealed his teeth.
He asked the medical students innumerable questions about the treatment or cure of inherited blood maladies, venereal diseases, intestinal and inguinal cancers, and the transference of animal glands to men.
He went to the movies only to examine the teeth and muscles of the hero; he pored over the toothpaste and collar advertisements in the magazines; he went to the shower-rooms at the gymnasium and stared at the straight toes of the young men, thinking with desperate sick pain of his own bunched and crooked ones.
He stood naked before a mirror, looking at his long gaunt body, smooth and white save for the crooked toes and the terrible spot on his neck — lean, but moulded with delicate and powerful symmetry.
Then, slowly, he began to take a terrible joy in his taint.
The thing on his neck that could not be gouged or burnt away he identified with a tragic humor of his blood that plunged him downward at times into melancholia and madness.
But there was, he saw, a great health in him as well, that could bring him back victoriously from desolation.
In his reading of fiction, in the movies, in the collar advertisements, in all his thousand fantasies of Bruce–Eugene, he had never known a hero with crooked toes, a decaying tooth, and a patch of tetter on his neck.
Nor had he ever known a heroine, whether among the society women of Chambers and Phillips, or among the great elegants of Meredith and Ouida, who had borne such a blemish.
But, in all his fantasies now, he loved a woman with hair of carrot silk and eyes of a faintly weary violet, webbed delicately at the corners.
Her teeth were small, white and irregular, and she had one molar edged with gold which was visible when she smiled.
She was subtle, and a little weary: a child and a mother, as old and as deep as Asia, and as young as germinal April who returns forever like a girl, a mistress, a parent, and a nurse.
Thus, through the death of his brother, and the sickness that was rooted in his own flesh, Eugene came to know a deeper and darker wisdom than he had ever known before.
He began to see that what was subtle and beautiful in human life was touched with a divine pearl-sickness.
Health was to be found in the steady stare of the cats and dogs, or in the smooth vacant chops of the peasant.
But he looked on the faces of the lords of the earth — and he saw them wasted and devoured by the beautiful disease of thought and passion.
In the pages of a thousand books he saw their portraits: Coleridge at twenty-five, with the loose sensual mouth, gaping idiotically, the vast staring eyes, holding in their opium depths the vision of seas haunted by the albatross, the great white forehead — head mixed of Zeus and the village degenerate; the lean worn head of Caesar, a little thirsty in the flanks; and the dreaming mummy face of Kublai Khan, lit with eyes that flickered with green fires.
And he saw the faces of the great Thothmes, and Aspalta and Mycerinus, and all the heads of subtle Egypt — those smooth unwrinkled faces that held the wisdom of 1,200 gods.
And the strange wild faces of the Goth, the Frank, the Vandal, that came storming up below the old tired eyes of Rome.
And the weary craftiness on the face of the great Jew, Disraeli; the terrible skull-grin of Voltaire; the mad ranting savagery of Ben Jonson’s; the dour wild agony of Carlyle’s; and the faces of Heine, and Rousseau, and Dante, and Tiglath–Pileser, and Cervantes — these were all faces on which life had fed.
They were faces wasted by the vulture, Thought; they were faces seared and hollowed by the flame of Beauty.
And thus, touched with the terrible destiny of his blood, caught in the trap of himself and the Pentlands, with the little flower of sin and darkness on his neck, Eugene escaped forever from the good and the pretty, into a dark land that is forbidden to the sterilized.
The creatures of romantic fiction, the vicious doll-faces of the movie women, the brutal idiot regularity of the faces in the advertisements, and the faces of most of the young college-men and women, were stamped in a mould of enamelled vacancy, and became unclean to him.
The national demand for white shiny plumbing, toothpaste, tiled lunch-rooms, hair-cuts, manicured dentistry, horn spectacles, baths, and the insane fear of disease that sent the voters whispering to the druggist after their brutal fumbling lecheries — all of this seemed nasty.
Their outer cleanliness became the token of an inner corruption: it was something that glittered and was dry, foul, and rotten at the core.
He felt that, no matter what leper’s taint he might carry upon his flesh, there was in him a health that was greater than they could ever know — something fierce and cruelly wounded, but alive, that did not shrink away from the terrible sunken river of life; something desperate and merciless that looked steadily on the hidden and unspeakable passions that unify the tragic family of this earth.
Yet, Eugene was no rebel.
He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all.
He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose.
And he did not care under what form of government he lived — Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist — if it could assure him these things.
He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if he could only go and find them.
The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it.
He felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it.
He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places.
He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards’ bottles.
Moreover, since Ben’s death, the conviction had grown on him that men do not escape from life because life is dull, but that life escapes from men because men are little.
He felt that the passions of the play were greater than the actors.
It seemed to him that he had never had a great moment of living in which he had measured up to its fulness.