“He must be a better man than he looks yet,” said Tom Davis.
“The little ’un’s only two or three years old.”
“He’s not as old as he looks,” said Eugene.
“He looks old because he’s been sick.
He’s only forty-nine.”
“How do you know?” said Tom Davis.
“Miss Amy says so,” said Eugene innocently.
“Pap” Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene and carried his quid deftly on the end of his tongue to the other cheek.
“Forty-nine!” he said, “you’d better see a doctor, boy.
He’s as old as God.”
“That’s what she said,” Eugene insisted doggedly.
“Why, of course she said it!”
“Pap” Rheinhart replied.
“You don’t think they’re going to let it out, do you?
When they’re running a school here.”
“Son, you must be simple!” said Jack Candler who had not thought of it up to now.
“Hell, you’re their Pet.
They know you’ll believe whatever they tell you,” said Julius Arthur.
“Pap” Rheinhart looked at him searchingly, then shook his head as if a cure was impossible.
They laughed at his faith.
“Well, if he’s so old,” said Eugene, “why did old Lady Lattimer marry him?”
“Why, because she couldn’t get any one else, of course,” said
“Pap” Rheinhart, impatient at this obtuseness.
“Do you suppose she has had to keep him up?” said Tom Davis curiously.
Silently they wondered.
And Eugene, as he saw the two lovely children fall like petals from their mother’s heavy breast, as he saw the waxen artist faltering his last steps to death, and heard Sheba’s strong voice leveling a conversation at its beginning, expanding in violent burlesque all of her opinions, was bewildered again before the unsearchable riddle — out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth, a flower.
His faith was above conviction.
Disillusion had come so often that it had awakened in him a strain of bitter suspicion, an occasional mockery, virulent, coarse, cruel, and subtle, which was all the more scalding because of his own pain.
Unknowingly, he had begun to build up in himself a vast mythology for which he cared all the more deeply because he realized its untruth.
Brokenly, obscurely, he was beginning to feel that it was not truth that men live for — the creative men — but for falsehood.
At times his devouring, unsated brain seemed to be beyond his governance: it was a frightful bird whose beak was in his heart, whose talons tore unceasingly at his bowels.
And this unsleeping demon wheeled, plunged, revolved about an object, returning suddenly, after it had flown away, with victorious malice, leaving stripped, mean, and common all that he had clothed with wonder.
But he saw hopefully that he never learned — that what remained was the tinsel and the gold.
He was so bitter with his tongue because his heart believed so much.
The merciless brain lay coiled and alert like a snake: it saw every gesture, every quick glance above his head, the shoddy scaffolding of all reception.
But these people existed for him in a world remote from human error.
He opened one window of his heart to Margaret, together they entered the sacred grove of poetry; but all dark desire, the dream of fair forms, and all the misery, drunkenness, and disorder of his life at home he kept fearfully shut.
He was afraid they would hear.
Desperately he wondered how many of the boys had heard of it.
And all the facts that levelled Margaret down to life, that plunged her in the defiling stream of life, were as unreal and horrible as a nightmare.
That she had been near death from tuberculosis, that the violent and garrulous Sheba had married an old man, who had begotten two children and was now about to die, that the whole little family, powerful in cohesive fidelity, were nursing their great sores in privacy, building up before the sharp eyes and rattling tongues of young boys a barrier of flimsy pretense and evasion, numbed him with a sense of unreality.
Eugene believed in the glory and the gold.
He lived more at Dixieland now.
He had been more closely bound to Eliza since he began at Leonard’s.
Gant, Helen, and Luke were scornful of the private school.
The children were resentful of it — a little jealous.
And their temper was barbed now with a new sting.
They would say:
“You’ve ruined him completely since you sent him to a private school.”
Or,