His pain at Ben’s death had been greater than he, the love and loss of Laura had left him stricken and bewildered, and when he embraced young girls and women he felt a desperate frustration: he wanted to eat them like cake and to have them, too; to roll them up into a ball; to entomb them in his flesh; to possess them more fully than they may ever be possessed.
Further, it annoyed and wounded him to be considered “queer.”
He exulted in his popularity among the students, his heart pounded with pride under all the pins and emblems, but he resented being considered an eccentric, and he envied those of his fellows who were elected to office for their solid golden mediocrity.
He wanted to obey the laws and to be respected: he believed himself to be a sincerely conventional person — but, some one would see him after midnight, bounding along a campus path, with goat-cries beneath the moon.
His suits went baggy, his shirts and drawers got dirty, his shoes wore through — he stuffed them with cardboard strips — his hats grew shapeless and wore through at the creases.
But he did not mean to go unkempt — the thought of going for repairs filled him with weary horror.
He hated to act — he wanted to brood upon his entrails for fourteen hours a day.
At length, goaded, he would lash his great bulk, lulled in the powerful inertia of its visions, into a cursing and violent movement.
He was desperately afraid of people in crowds: at class meetings, or smokers, or at any public gathering, he was nervous and constrained until he began to talk to them, and got them under him.
He was always afraid that some one would make a joke about him, and that he would be laughed at.
But he was not afraid of any man alone: he felt that he could handle any one if he got him away from his crowd.
Remembering his savage fear and hatred of the crowd, with a man alone he could play cruelly, like a cat, snarling gently at him, prowling in on him softly, keeping cocked and silent the terrible tiger’s paw of his spirit.
All of their starch oozed out of them; they seemed to squeak and twitter, and look round for the door.
He would get some loud pompous yokel — the student president of the Y. M. C. A., or the class president — and bear down on him with evil gentle matter-of-factness.
“Don’t you think,” he would begin with earnest piety, “don’t you think that a man should kiss his wife on her belly?”
And he would fasten all the eager innocence of his face into a stare.
“For, after all, the belly is sometimes more beautiful than the mouth, and far cleaner.
Or do you believe in the belly-less marriage?
I, for one,” he went on with proud passion, “do not!
I stand for more and better Belly–Kissing.
Our wives, our mothers, and our sisters expect it of us.
It is an act of reverence to the seat of life.
Nay! it is even an act of religious worship.
If we could get our prominent business men and all the other right-thinking people interested in it, it would bring about the mightiest revolution ever known in a nation’s life.
In five years it would do away with divorce and reestablish the prestige of the home.
In twenty years it would make our nation the proud centre of civilization and the arts.
Don’t you think so?
Or do you?”
Eugene thought so.
It was one of his few Utopias.
Sometimes, when he was in a chafed and bitter temper, he would hear a burst of laughter from a student’s room, and he would turn snarling, and curse them, believing they laughed at him.
He inherited his father’s conviction at times that the world was gathered in an immense conspiracy against him: the air about him was full of mockery and menace, the leaves whispered with treason, in a thousand secret places people were assembled to humiliate, degrade, and betray him.
He would spend hours under the terrible imminence of some unknown danger: although he was guilty of nothing but his own nightmare fantasies, he would enter a class, a meeting, a gathering of students, with cold constricted heart, awaiting exposure, sentence, and ruin, for he knew not what crime.
Again, he would be wild, extravagant, and careless, squealing triumphantly in their faces and bounding along possessed with goaty joy, as he saw life dangling like a plum for his taking.
And thus, going along a campus path at night, fulfilled with his dreams of glory, he heard young men talking of him kindly and coarsely, laughing at his antics, and saying he needed a bath and clean underwear.
He clawed at his throat as he listened.
I think I’m hell, thought Eugene, and they say I stink because I have not had a bath.
Me!
Me!
Bruce–Eugene, the Scourge of the Greasers, and the greatest fullback Yale ever had!
Marshal Gant, the saviour of his country!
Ace Gant, the hawk of the sky, the man who brought Richthofen down!
Senator Gant, Governor Gant, President Gant, the restorer and uniter of a broken nation, retiring quietly to private life in spite of the weeping protest of one hundred million people, until, like Arthur or Barbarossa, he shall hear again the drums of need and peril.
Jesus-of-Nazareth Gant, mocked, reviled, spat upon, and imprisoned for the sins of others, but nobly silent, preferring death rather than cause pain to the woman he loves.
Gant, the Unknown Soldier, the Martyred President, the slain God of Harvest, the Bringer of Good Crops.
Duke Gant of Westmoreland, Viscount Pondicherry, twelfth Lord Runnymede, who hunts for true love, incognito, in Devon and ripe grain, and finds the calico white legs embedded in sweet hay.
Yes, George–Gordon-Noel–Byron Gant, carrying the pageant of his bleeding heart through Europe, and Thomas–Chatterton Gant (that bright boy!), and Francois-Villon Gant, and Ahasuerus Gant, and Mithridates Gant, and Artaxerxes Gant, and Edward-the-Black–Prince Gant; Stilicho Gant, and Jugurtha Gant, and Vercingetorix Gant, and Czar–Ivan-the-Terrible Gant.
And Gant, the Olympian Bull; and Heracles Gant; and Gant, the Seductive Swan; and Ashtaroth and Azrael Gant, Proteus Gant, Anubis and Osiris and Mumbo–Jumbo Gant.
But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I’m not a Genius?
He did not ask himself the question often.