You’ve framed up on me and you’re trying to beat me out of my share.”
He was weeping with genuine rage and fear, with the angry suspicion of a beaten child.
Eugene looked at him with pity and nausea: he was so foul, whipped, and frightened.
Then, with a sense of unreal horror and disbelief, he listened while they bawled out their accusations.
This disease of money and greed tainted other people, the people in books, not one’s own.
They were snarling like curs over one bone — their little shares in the money of an unburied dead man who lay, with low moanings of disease, not thirty feet away.
The family drew off in two camps of hostile watchfulness: Helen and Luke on one side and Daisy and Steve, subdued but stubborn, on the other.
Eugene, who had no talent for parties, cruised through sidereal space with momentary anchorings to earth.
He loafed along the avenue, and lounged in Wood’s; he gossiped with the pharmacy rakes; he courted the summer girls on boarding-house porches; he visited Roy Brock in a high mountain village, and lay with a handsome girl in the forest; he went to South Carolina; he was seduced by a dentist’s wife at Dixieland.
She was a prim ugly woman of forty-three, who wore glasses and had sparse hair.
She was a Daughter of the Confederacy and wore the badge constantly on her starched waists.
He thought of her only as a very chill and respectable woman.
He played Casino — the only game he knew — with her and the other boarders, and called her “ma’am.”
Then one night she took his hand, saying she would show him how to make love to a girl.
She tickled the palm, put it around her waist, lifted it to her breast, and plumped over on his shoulder, breathing stertorously through her pinched nostrils and saying,
“God, boy!” over and over.
He plunged around the dark cool streets until three in the morning, wondering what he would do about it.
Then he came back to the sleeping house, and crept on shoeless feet into her room.
Fear and disgust were immediate.
He climbed the hills to ease his tortured spirit and stayed away from the house for hours.
But she would follow him down the halls or open her door suddenly on him, clad in a red kimono.
She became very ugly and bitter, and accused him of betraying, dishonoring, and deserting her.
She said that where she came from — the good old State of South Carolina — a man who treated a woman in such fashion would get a bullet in him.
Eugene thought of new lands.
He was in an agony of repentance and guilty abasement: he framed a long plea for pardon and included it in his prayers at night, for he still prayed, not from devout belief, but from the superstition of habit and number, muttering a set formula over sixteen times, while he held his breath.
Since childhood he had believed in the magical efficacy of certain numbers — on Sunday he would do only the second thing that came into his head and not the first — and this intricate ritual of number and prayer he was a slave to, not to propitiate God, but to fulfil a mysterious harmonic relation with the universe, or to pay worship to the demonic force that brooded over him.
He could not sleep of nights until he did this.
Eliza finally grew suspicious of the woman, picked a quarrel with her, and ejected her.
No one said very much to him about going to Harvard.
He himself had no very clear reason for going, and only in September, a few days before the beginning of the term, decided to go.
He talked about it at intervals during the summer, but, like all his family, he needed the pressure of immediacy to force a decision.
He was offered employment on several newspapers in the State, and on the teaching staff of the run-down military academy that topped a pleasant hill two miles from town.
But in his heart he knew he was going to leave.
And no one opposed him very much.
Helen railed against him at times to Luke, but made only a few indifferent and unfriendly comments to himself about it.
Gant moaned wearily, saying:
“Let him do as he likes.
I can’t pay out any more money on his education.
If he wants to go, his mother must send him.”
Eliza pursed her lips thoughtfully, made a bantering noise, and said:
“Hm!
Harvard!
That’s mighty big talk, boy.
Where are you going to get the money?”
“I can get it,” he said darkly.
“People will lend it to me.”
“No, son,” she said with instant grave caution.
“I don’t want you to do anything like that.
You mustn’t start life by accumulating debts.”
He was silent, trying to force the terrible sentence through his parched lips.