He did not tell the Leonards that he was working in the early morning. He knew they would oppose his employment, and that their opposition would manifest itself in the triumphant argument of lowered grades. Also, Margaret Leonard, he knew, would talk ominously of health undermined, of the promise of future years destroyed, of the sweet lost hours of morning sleep that could never be regained. He was really more robust now than he had ever been. He was heavier and stronger. But he sometimes felt a gnawing hunger for sleep: he grew heavy at midday, revived in the afternoon, but found it difficult to keep his sleepy brain fixed on a book after eight o’clock in the evening.

He learned little of discipline. Under the care of the Leonards he came even to have a romantic contempt for it. Margaret Leonard had the marvellous vision, of great people, for essences. She saw always the dominant color, but she did not always see the shadings. She was an inspired sentimentalist. She thought she “knew boys”: she was proud of her knowledge of them. In fact, however, she had little knowledge of them. She would have been stricken with horror if she could have known the wild confusion of adolescence, the sexual nightmares of puberty, the grief, the fear, the shame in which a boy broods over the dark world of his desire. She did not know that every boy, caged in from confession by his fear, is to himself a monster.

She did not have knowledge. But she had wisdom. She found immediately a person’s quality. Boys were her heroes, her little gods. She believed that the world was to be saved, life redeemed, by one of them. She saw the flame that burns in each of them, and she guarded it. She tried somehow to reach the dark gropings toward light and articulation, of the blunt, the stolid, the shamefast. She spoke a calm low word to the trembling racehorse, and he was still.

Thus, he made no confessions. He was still prison-pent. But he turned always to Margaret Leonard as toward the light: she saw the unholy fires that cast their sword-dance on his face, she saw the hunger and the pain, and she fed him⁠—majestic crime!⁠—on poetry.

Whatever of fear or shame locked them in careful silence, whatever decorous pretense of custom guarded their tongues, they found release in the eloquent symbols of verse. And by that sign, Margaret was lost to the good angels. For what care the ambassadors of Satan, for all the small fidelities of the letter and the word, if from the singing choir of earthly methodism we can steal a single heart⁠—lift up, flame-tipped, one great lost soul to the high sinfulness of poetry?

The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of poetry was inextinguishably mixed with her blood, entombed in her flesh.

By the beginning of his fifteenth year Eugene knew almost every major lyric in the language. He possessed them to their living core, not in a handful of scattered quotations, but almost line for line. His thirst was drunken, insatiate: he added to his hoard entire scenes from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, which he read by himself in German; the lyrics of Heine, and several folk songs. He committed to memory the entire passage in the Anabasis, the mounting and triumphal Greek which described the moment when the starving remnant of the Ten Thousand had come at length to the sea, and sent up their great cry, calling it by name. In addition, he memorized some of the sonorous stupidities of Cicero, because of the sound, and a little of Caesar, terse and lean.

The great lyrics of Burns he knew from music, from reading, or from hearing Gant recite them. But “Tam O’Shanter” Margaret Leonard read to him, her eyes sparkling with laughter as she read:

“In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin’.”

The shorter Wordsworth pieces he had read at grammar school. “My heart leaps up,” “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” and “Behold her, single in the field,” he had known for years; but Margaret read him the sonnets and made him commit “The world is too much with us” to memory. Her voice trembled and grew low with passion when she read it.

He knew all the songs in Shakespeare’s plays, but the two that moved him most were: “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” which blew a far horn in his heart, and the great song from Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” He had tried to read all the sonnets, and failed, because their woven density was too much for his experience, but he had read, and forgotten, perhaps half of them, and remembered a few which burned up from the page, strangely, immediately, like lamps for him.

Those that he knew were: “When, in the chronicle of wasted time,” “To me, fair friend, you never can be old,” “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” “From you have I been absent in the spring,” and “That time of year thou mayest in me behold,” the greatest of all, which Margaret brought him to, and which shot through him with such electric ecstasy when he came to “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” that he could hardly hold his course unbroken through the rest of it.

He read all the plays save Timon, Titus Andronicus, Pericles, Coriolanus, and King John, but the only play that held his interest from first to last was King Lear. With most of the famous declamatory passages he had been familiar, for years, by Gant’s recitation, and now they wearied him. And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the master’s swingeing wit, he felt vaguely were very dull. He never had any confidence in Shakespeare’s humor⁠—his Touchstones were not only windy fools, but dull ones.

“For my part I had rather bear with you than bear you; yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your purse.”

This sort of thing reminded him unpleasantly of the Pentlands. The Fool in Lear alone he thought admirable⁠—a sad, tragic, mysterious fool. For the rest, he went about and composed parodies, which, with a devil’s grin, he told himself would split the sides of posterity. Such as: “Aye, nuncle, an if Shrove Tuesday come last Wednesday, I’ll do the capon to thy cock, as Tom O’Ludgate told the shepherd when he found the cowslips gone. Dost bay with two throats, Cerberus? Down, boy, down!”

The admired beauties he was often tired of, perhaps because he had heard them so often, and it seemed to him, moreover, that Shakespeare often spoke absurdly and pompously when he might better have spoken simply, as in the scene where, being informed by the Queen of the death of his sister by drowning, Laertes says:

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.

You really can’t beat that (he thought). Aye, Ben! Would he had blotted a hundred! A thousand!

But he was deep in other passages which the elocutionist misses, such as the terrible and epic invocation of Edmund, in King Lear, drenched in evil, which begins:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess,

and ends,

Now, gods, stand up for bastards.

It was as dark as night, as evil as Niggertown, as vast as the elemental winds that howled down across the hills: he chanted it in the black hours of his labor, into the dark and the wind. He understood; he exulted in its evil⁠—which was the evil of earth, of illicit nature. It was a call to the unclassed; it was a cry for those beyond the fence, for rebel angels, and for all of the men who are too tall.

He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond Shakespeare’s plays. But he very early came to know a little of the poetry of Ben Jonson, whom Margaret looked on as a literary Falstaff, condoning, with the familiar weakness of the schoolmarm, his Gargantuan excesses as a pardonable whimsy of genius.

She was somewhat academically mirthful over the literary bacchanalia, as a professor in a Baptist college smacks his lips appetizingly and beams ruddily at his classes when he reads of sack and porter and tankards foaming with the musty ale. All this is part of the liberal tradition. Men of the world are broad-minded. Witness Professor Albert Thorndyke Firkins, of the University of Chicago, at the Falcon in Soho. Smiling bravely, he sits over a half-pint of bitter beer, in the company of a racing tout, a swaybacked barmaid, broad in the stern, with adjustable teeth, and three companionable tarts from Lisle street, who are making the best of two pints of Guinness. With eager impatience he awaits the arrival of G. K. Chesterton and E. V. Lucas.

“O rare Ben Jonson!” Margaret Leonard sighed with gentle laughter. “Ah, Lord!”

“My God, boy!” Sheba roared, snatching the suggested motif of conversation out of the air, and licking her buttered fingers noisily as she stormed into action. “God bless him!” Her hairy red face burned like clover, her veinous eyes were tearful bright. “God bless him, ’Gene! He was as English as roast beef and a tankard of musty ale!”

“Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret. “He was a genius if ever there was one.” With misty eyes she gazed far off, a thread of laughter on her mouth. “Whee!” she laughed gently. “Old Ben!”

“And say, ’Gene!” Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand gripped upon her knee. “Do you know that the greatest tribute to Shakespeare’s genius is from his hand?”

“Ah, I tell you, boy!” said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her voice was husky. He was afraid she was going to weep.

“And yet the fools!” Sheba yelled. “The mean little two-by-two pusillanimous swill-drinking fools⁠—”

“Whee!” gently Margaret moaned. John Dorsey turned his chalk-white face to the boy and whined with vacant appreciation, winking his head pertly. Ah absently!

“⁠—for that’s all they are, have had the effrontry to suggest that he was jealous.”

“Pshaw!” said Margaret impatiently. “There’s nothing in that.”

“Why, they don’t know what they’re talking about!” Sheba turned a sudden grinning face upon him. “The little upstarts! It takes us to tell ’em, ’Gene,” she said.

He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair. John Dorsey slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately, drooling slightly at the mouth.

“The Lord a’ mercy!” he wheezed, gasping.

“I was talking to a feller the other day,” said Sheba, “a lawyer that you’d think might know a little something, and I used a quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that every schoolboy knows⁠—‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ The man looked at me as if he thought I was crazy!”

“Great heavens!” said Margaret in a still voice.

“I said, ‘Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you may have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are a lot of things you don’t know yet. There are a lot of things money can’t buy, my sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.’ ”

“Why, pshaw!” said Mr. Leonard. “What do these little whippersnappers know about the things of the mind? You might as well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to construe a passage in Homer.” He grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the table, and tilting it intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds which he slid, quivering, into his mouth. “No, sir!” he laughed. “They may be Big Men on the tax collector’s books, but when they try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says, ‘they⁠—they⁠—’ ” he began to whine, “ ‘why, they just ain’t nothin’.’ ”

“What shall it profit a man,” said Sheba, “if he gain the whole world, and lose⁠—”

“Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret, shaking her smoke-dark eyes. “I tell you!”

She told him. She told him of the Swan’s profound knowledge of the human heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his enormous humor.

“Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!” She laughed. “The fat rascal! Imagine a man keeping the time!”

And, carefully: “It was the custom of the time, ’Gene. As a matter of fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries you see how much purer he is than they are.” But she avoided a word, a line, here and there. The slightly spotty Swan⁠—muddied a little by custom. Then, too, the Bible.

The smoky candle-ends of time. Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai: Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor McTavish (D.D.) of Presbyterian College.

“And observe, Eugene,” she said, “he never made vice attractive.”

“Why didn’t he?” he asked. “There’s Falstaff.”

“Yes,” she replied, “and you know what happened to him, don’t you?”

“Why,” he considered, “he died!”

“You see, don’t you?” she concluded, with triumphant warning.

I see, don’t I? The wages of sin. What, by the way, are the wages of virtue? The good die young.

Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!
I really feel so blue!
I was given to crime,
And cut off in my prime
When only eighty-two.

“Then, note,” she said, “how none of his characters stand still. You can see them grow, from first to last. No one is the same at the end as he was in the beginning.”

In the beginning was the word. I am Alpha and Omega. The growth of Lear. He grew old and mad. There’s growth for you.

This tin-currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses at college, and in her reading. They were⁠—are, perhaps, still⁠—part of the glib jargon of pedants. But they did her no real injury. They were simply the things people said. She felt, guiltily, that she must trick out her teaching with these gauds: she was afraid that what she had to offer was not enough. What she had to offer was simply a feeling that was so profoundly right, so unerring, that she could no more utter great verse meanly than mean verse well. She was a voice that God seeks. She was the reed of demonic ecstasy. She was possessed, she knew not how, but she knew the moment of her possession. The singing tongues of all the world were wakened into life again under the incantation of her voice. She was inhabited. She was spent.

She passed through their barred and bolted boy-life with the direct stride of a spirit. She opened their hearts as if they had been lockets. They said: “Mrs. Leonard is sure a nice lady.”

He knew some of Ben Jonson’s poems, including the fine “Hymn to Diana,” “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and the great tribute to Shakespeare which lifted his hair at

… But call forth thundering Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us⁠—

and caught at his throat at:

He was not for an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime⁠ ⁠…

The elegy to little Salathiel Pavy, the child actor, was honey from the lion’s mouth. But it was too long.

Of Herrick, sealed of the tribe of Ben, he knew much more. The poetry sang itself. It was, he thought later, the most perfect and unfailing lyrical voice in the language⁠—a clean, sweet, small, unfaltering note. It is done with the incomparable ease of an inspired child. The young men and women of our century have tried to recapture it, as they have tried to recapture Blake and, a little more successfully, Donne.

Here a little child I stand
Heaving up my either hand;
Cold as paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee,
For a benison to fall
On our meat and on us all. Amen.

There was nothing beyond this⁠—nothing that surpassed it in precision, delicacy, and wholeness.

Their names dropped musically like small fat bird-notes through the freckled sunlight of a young world: prophetically he brooded on the sweet lost bird-cries of their names, knowing they never would return. Herrick, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, Campion, Lovelace, Dekker. O sweet content, O sweet, O sweet content!

He read shelves of novels: all of Thackeray, all the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and Herman Melville’s Omoo and Typee, which he found at Gant’s. Of Moby Dick he had never heard. He read a half-dozen Coopers, all of Mark Twain, but failed to finish a single book of Howells or James.

He read a dozen of Scott, and liked best of all Quentin Durward, because the descriptions of food were as bountiful and appetizing as any he had ever read.

Eliza went to Florida again during his fourteenth year and left him to board with the Leonards. Helen was drifting, with crescent weariness and fear, through the cities of the East and Middle-West. She sang for several weeks in a small cabaret in Baltimore, she moved on to Philadelphia and thumped out popular tunes on a battered piano at the music counter of a five and ten cent store, with studious tongue out-thrust as she puzzled through new scores.

Gant wrote her faithfully twice a week⁠—a blue but copious log of existence. Occasionally he enclosed small checks, which she saved, uncashed.

“Your mother,” he wrote,

“has gone off on another wild-goose chase to Florida, leaving me here alone to face the music, freeze, or starve. God knows what we’ll all come to before the end of this fearful, hellish, and damnable winter, but I predict the poorhouse and soup-kitchens like we had in the Cleveland administration. When the Democrats are in, you may as well begin to count your ribs. The banks have no money, people are out of work. You can mark my words everything will go to the tax-collector under the hammer before we’re done. The temperature was 7 above when I looked this morning, coal has gone up seventy-five cents a ton. The Sunny South. Keep off the grass said Bill Nye. Jesus God! I passed the Southern Fuel Co. yesterday and saw old Wagner at the window with a fiendish smile of gloatation on his face as he looked out on the sufferings of the widows and orphans. Little does he care if they all freeze. Bob Grady dropped dead Tuesday morning as he was coming out of the Citizen’s Bank. I had known him twenty-five years. He’d never been sick a day in his life. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. Old Gant will be the next. I have been eating at Mrs. Sales’ since your mother went away. You’ve never seen such a table as she keeps in your life⁠—a profusion of fruits piled up in pyramids, stewed prunes, peaches, and preserves, big roasts of pork, beef, lamb, cold cuts of ham and tongue, and a half dozen vegetables in an abundance that beggars description. How in God’s name she does it for thirty-five cents I don’t know. Eugene is staying with the Leonards while your mother’s away. I take him up to Sales’ with me once or twice a week and give him a square meal. They look mighty serious when they see those long legs coming. God knows where he puts it all⁠—he can eat more than any three people I ever saw. I suppose he gets pretty lean pickings at the school. He’s got the lean and hungry Gant look. Poor child. He has no mother any more. I’ll do the best I can for him until the smash comes. Leonard comes and brags about him every week. He says his equal is not to be found anywhere. Everyone in town has heard of him. Preston Carr (who’s sure to be the next governor) was talking to me about him the other day. He wants me to send him to the State university law school where he will make lifelong friends among the people of his own State, and then put him into politics. It’s what I should have done. I’m going to give him a good education. The rest is up to him. Perhaps he’ll be a credit to the name. You haven’t seen him since he put on long pants. His mother picked out a beautiful suit at Moale’s Christmas. He went down to Daisy’s for Christmas and put them on. I bought him a cheap pair at the Racket Store for everyday wear. He can save the good ones for Sunday. Your mother has let the Old Barn to Mrs. Revell until she gets back. I went in the other day and found it warm for the first time in my life. She keeps the furnace going and she’s not afraid to burn coal. I hardly ever see Ben from one week to another. He comes in and prowls around in the kitchen at one and two o’clock in the morning and I’m up and gone hours before he’s awake. You can get nothing out of him⁠—he never says a half-dozen words and if you ask him a civil question he cuts you off short. I see him downtown late at night sometimes with Mrs. P. They’re thick as thieves together. I guess she’s a bad egg. This is all for this time. John Duke was shot and killed by the house detective at the Whitstone hotel Sunday night. He was drunk and threatening to shoot everyone. It’s a sad thing for his wife. He left three children. She was in to see me today. He was well-liked by everyone but a terror when he drank. My heart bled for her. She’s a pretty little woman. Liquor has caused more misery than all the other evils in the world put together. I curse the day it was first invented. Enclosed find a small check to buy yourself a present. God knows what we’re coming to.

She saved carefully all his letters⁠—written on his heavy slick business stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his crippled right hand.

In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length to Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and citrous fruits, the Pentlands waited her approach, Pett with a cold lust of battle on her face, Will with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand.