XXVII

My Shakespeare, rise! He rose. The bard rose throughout the length and breadth of his brave new world. He was not for an age, but for all time. Then, too, his tercentenary happened only once⁠—at the end of three hundred years. It was observed piously from Maryland to Oregon. Eighty-one members of the House of Representatives, when asked by literate journalists for their favorite lines, replied instantly with a quotation from Polonius: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” The Swan was played, and pageanted, and essayed in every schoolhouse in the land.

Eugene tore the Chandos portrait from the pages of the Independent and nailed it to the calcimined wall of the backroom. Then, still full of the great echoing paean of Ben Jonson’s, he scrawled below it in large trembling letters: “My Shakespeare, rise!” The large plump face⁠—“as damned silly a head as ever I looked at”⁠—stared baldly at him with goggle eyes, the goatee pointed ripe with hayseed vanity. But, lit by the presence, Eugene plunged back into the essay littered across his table.

He was discovered. In an unwise absence, he left the Bard upon the wall. When he returned, Ben and Helen had read his scrawl. Thereafter, he was called poetically to table, to the telephone, to go an errand.

“My Shakespeare, rise!”

With red resentful face, he rose.

“Will My Shakespeare pass the biscuit?” or, “Could I trouble My Shakespeare for the butter?” said Ben, scowling at him.

“My Shakespeare! My Shakespeare! Do you want another piece of pie?” said Helen. Then, full of penitent laughter, she added: “That’s a shame! We oughtn’t to treat the poor kid like that.” Laughing, she plucked at her large straight chin, gazing out the window, and laughing absently⁠—penitently, laughing.

But⁠—“his art was universal. He saw life clearly and he saw it whole. He was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched every shore of thought. He was all things in one: lawyer, merchant, soldier, doctor, statesman. Men of science have been amazed by the depth of his learning. In The Merchant of Venice, he deals with the most technical questions of law with the skill of an attorney. In King Lear, he boldly prescribes sleep as a remedy for Lear’s insanity. ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.’ Thus, he has foreseen the latest researches of modern science by almost three centuries. In his sympathetic and well-rounded sense of characterization, he laughs with, not at, his characters.”

Eugene won the medal⁠—bronze or of some other material even more enduring. The Bard’s profile murkily indented. W. S. 1616⁠–⁠1916. A long and useful life.

The machinery of the pageant was beautiful and simple. Its author⁠—Dr. George B. Rockham, at one time, it was whispered, a trouper with the Ben Greet players⁠—had seen to that. All the words had been written by Dr. George B. Rockham, and all the words, accordingly, had been written for Dr. George B. Rockham. Dr. George B. Rockham was the Voice of History. The innocent children of Altamont’s schools were the mute illustrations of that voice.

Eugene was Prince Hal. The day before the pageant his costume arrived from Philadelphia. At John Dorsey Leonard’s direction he put it on. Then he came out sheepishly before John Dorsey on the school veranda, fingering his tin sword and looking somewhat doubtfully at his pink silk hose which came three quarters up his skinny shanks, and left exposed, below his doublet, a six-inch hiatus of raw thigh.

John Dorsey Leonard looked gravely.

“Here, boy,” he said. “Let me see!”

He pulled strongly at the top of the deficient hose, with no result save to open up large runs in them. Then John Dorsey Leonard began to laugh. He slid helplessly down upon the porch rail, and bent over, palsied with silent laughter, from which a high whine, full of spittle, presently emerged.

“O-oh my Lord!” he gasped. “Egscuse me!” he panted, seeing the boy’s angry face. “It’s the funniest thing I ever⁠—” at this moment his voice died of paralysis.

“I’ll fix you,” said Miss Amy. “I’ve got just the thing for you.”

She gave him a full baggy clown’s suit, of green linen. It was a relic of a Halloween party; its wide folds were gartered about his ankles.

He turned a distressed, puzzled face toward Miss Amy.

“That’s not right, is it?” he asked. “He never wore anything like this, did he?”

Miss Amy looked. Her deep bosom heaved with full contralto laughter.

“Yes, that’s right! That’s fine!” she yelled. “He was like that, anyway. No one will ever notice, boy.” She collapsed heavily into a wicker chair which widened with a protesting creak.

“Oh, Lord!” she groaned, wet-cheeked. “I don’t believe I ever saw⁠—”

The pageant was performed on the embowered lawns of the Manor House. Dr. George B. Rockham stood in a green hollow⁠—a natural amphitheatre. His audience sat on the turf of the encircling banks. As the phantom cavalcade of poetry and the drama wound down to him, Dr. George B. Rockham disposed of each character neatly in descriptive pentameter verse. He was dressed in the fashion of the Restoration⁠—a period he coveted because it understood the charms of muscular calves. His heavy legs bulged knottily below a coy fringe of drawer-ruffles.

Eugene stood waiting on the road above, behind an obscuring wall of trees. It was rich young May. “Doc” Hines (Falstaff) waited beside him. His small tough face grinned apishly over garments stuffed with yards of wadding. Grinning, he smote himself upon his swollen paunch: the blow left a dropsical depression.

He turned, with a comical squint, on Eugene:

“Hal,” said he, “you’re a hell of a looking prince.”

“You’re no beauty, Jack,” said Eugene.

Behind him, Julius Arthur (Macbeth), drew his sword with a flourish.

“I challenge you, Hal,” said he.

In the young shimmering light their tin swords clashed rapidly. Twittered with young bird-laughter, on bank and saddle sprawled, all of the Bard’s personæ. Julius Arthur thrust swiftly, was warded, then, with loose grin, buried his brand suddenly in “Doc” Hines’ receiving paunch. The company of the immortal shrieked happily.

Miss Ida Nelson, the assistant director, rushed angrily among them.

“Sh!” she hissed loudly. “Sh-h!” She was very angry. She had spent the afternoon hissing loudly.

Swinging gently in her sidesaddle, Rosalind, on horseback, a ripe little beauty from the convent, smiled warmly at him. Looking, he forgot.

Below them, on the road, the crowded press loosened slowly, broke off in minute fragments, and disappeared into the hidden gulch of Dr. George Rockham’s receiving voice. With fat hammy sonority he welcomed them.

But he had not come to Shakespeare. The pageant had opened with the Voices of Past and Present⁠—voices a trifle out of harmony with the tenor of event⁠—but necessary to the commercial success of the enterprise. These voices now moved voicelessly past⁠—four frightened salesladies from Schwartzberg’s, clad decently in cheesecloth and sandals, who came by bearing the banner of their concern. Or, as the doctor’s more eloquent iambics had it:

“Fair Commerce, sister of the arts, thou, too,
Shalt take thy lawful place upon our stage.”

They came and passed: Ginsberg’s⁠—“the glass of fashion and the mould of form”; Bradley the Grocer⁠—“when first Pomona held her fruity horn”; The Buick Agency⁠—“the chariots of Oxus and of Ind.”

Came, passed⁠—like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

Behind them, serried ranks of cherubim, the marshalled legions of Altamont’s Sunday schools, each in white arrayed and clutching grimly in tiny hands two thousand tiny flags of freedom, God’s small angels, and surely there for God knows what far-off event, began to move into the hollow. Their teachers nursed them gently into action, with tapping feet and palms.

“One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Quickly, children!”

A hidden orchestra, musical in the trees, greeted them, as they approached, with holy strains: the Baptists, with the simple doctrine of “It’s the Old-Time Religion”; the Methodists, with “I’ll Be Waiting at the River”; the Presbyterians, with “Rock of Ages”; the Episcopalians, with “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”; and rising to lyrical climactic passion, the little Jews, with the nobly marching music of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

They passed without laughter. There was a pause.

“Well, thank God for that!” said Ralph Rolls coarsely in a solemn quiet. The Bard’s strewn host laughed, rustled noisily into line.

“Sh-h! Sh-h!” hissed Miss Ida Nelson.

“What the hell does she think she is?” said Julius Arthur, “a steam valve?”

Eugene looked attentively at the shapely legs of the page, Viola.

“Wow!” said Ralph Rolls, with his accustomed audibility. “Look who’s here!”

She looked on them all with a pert impartial smile. But she never told her love.

Miss Ida Nelson caught the doctor’s stealthy sign. Carefully, in slow twos, she fed them down to him.

The Moor of Venice (Mr. George Graves), turned his broad back upon their jibes, and lurched down with sullen-sheepish grin, unable to conceal the massive embarrassment of his calves.

“Tell him who you are, Villa,” said Doc Hines. “You look like Jack Johnson.”

The town, in its first white shirting of Spring, sat on the turfy banks, and looked down gravely upon the bosky little comedy of errors; the encircling mountains, and the gods thereon, looked down upon the slightly larger theatre of the town; and, figuratively, from mountains that looked down on mountains, the last stronghold of philosophy, the author of this chronicle looked down on everything.

“Here we go, Hal,” said Doc Hines, nudging Eugene.

“Give ’em hell, son,” said Julius Arthur. “You’re dressed for the part.”

“He looks it, you mean,” said Ralph Rolls. “Boy, you’ll knock ’em dead,” he added with an indecent laugh.

They descended into the hollow, accompanied by a low but growing titter of amazement from the audience. Before them, the doctor had just disposed of Desdemona, who parted with a graceful obeisance. He was now engaged on Othello, who stood, bullish and shy, till his ordeal should finish. In a moment, he strode away, and the doctor turned to Falstaff, reading the man by his padded belly, briskly, with relief:

“Now, Tragedy, begone, and to our dell
Bring antic Jollity with cap and bells:
Falstaff, thou prince of jesters, lewd old man
Who surfeited a royal prince with mirth,
And swayed a kingdom with his wanton quips⁠—”

Embarrassed by the growing undertone of laughter, Doc Hines squinted around with a tough grin, gave a comical hitch to his padded figure, and whispered a hoarse aside to Eugene: “Hear that, Hal? I’m hell on wheels, ain’t I?”

Eugene saw him depart in a green blur, and presently became aware that an unnatural silence had descended upon Doctor George B. Rockham. The Voice of History was, for the moment, mute. Its long jaw, in fact, had fallen ajar.

Dr. George B. Rockham looked wildly about him for succor. He rolled his eyes entreatingly upwards at Miss Ida Nelson. She turned her head away.

“Who are you?” he said hoarsely, holding a hairy hand carefully beside his mouth.

“Prince Hal,” said Eugene, likewise hoarsely and behind his hand.

Dr. George B. Rockham staggered a little. Their speech had reached the stalls. But firmly, before the tethered chafing laughter, he began:

“Friend to the weak and comrade of the wild,
By folly sired to wisdom, dauntless Hal⁠—”

Laughter, laughter unleashed and turbulent, laughter that rose flood by flood upon itself, laughter wild, earthshaking, thunder-cuffing, drowned Dr. George B. Rockham and all he had to say. Laughter! Laughter! Laughter!

Helen was married in the month of June⁠—a month sacred, it is said, to Hymen, but used so often for nuptials that the god’s blessing is probably not infallible.

She had returned to Altamont in May, from her last singing engagement. She had beeen in Atlanta for the week of opera, and had come back by way of Henderson, where she had visited Daisy and Mrs. Selborne. There she had found her mate.

He was not a stranger to her. She had known him years before in Altamont, where he had lived for a short time as district agent for the great and humane corporation that employed him⁠—the Federal Cash Register Company. Since that time he had gone to various parts of the country at his master’s bidding, carrying with him his great message of prosperity and thrift. At the present time, he lived with his sister and his aged mother, whose ponderous infirmity of limb had not impaired her appetite, in a South Carolina town. He was devoted and generous to them both. And the Federal Cash Register Company, touched by his devotion to duty, rewarded him with a good salary. His name was Barton. The Bartons lived well.

Helen returned with the unexpectedness in which all returning Gants delighted. She came in on members of her family, one afternoon, in the kitchen at Dixieland.

“Hello, everybody!” she said.

“Well, for G-g-god’s sake,” said Luke after a moment. “Look who’s here!”

They embraced heartily.

“Why, what on earth!” cried Eliza, putting her iron down on the board, and wavering on her feet, in an effort to walk in two directions at once. They kissed.

“I was just thinking to myself,” said Eliza, more calmly, “that it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if you should come walking in. I had a premonition, I don’t know what else you’d call it⁠—”

“Oh, my God!” groaned the girl, good-humoredly, but with a shade of annoyance. “Don’t start that Pentland spooky stuff! It makes my flesh crawl.”

She exchanged a glance of burlesque entreaty with Luke. Winking, he turned suddenly, and with an idiotic laugh, tickled Eliza sharply.

“Get away!” she shrieked.

He chortled madly.

“I’ll declare, boy!” she said fretfully. “I believe you’re crazy. I’ll vow I do!”

Helen laughed huskily.

“Well,” said Eliza, “how’d you leave Daisy and the children?”

“They’re all right, I suppose,” said Helen wearily. “Oh, my God! Deliver me!” she laughed. “You never saw such pests! I spent fifty dollars on them in toys and presents alone! You’d never think it from the thanks I get. Daisy takes it all as her due! Selfish! Selfish! Selfish!”

“For G-g-god’s sake!” said Luke loyally.

She was one fine girl.

“I paid for everything I got at Daisy’s, I can assure you!” she said, sharply, challengingly. “I spent no more time there than I had to. I was at Mrs. Selborne’s nearly all the time. I had practically all my meals there.”

Her need for independence had become greater; her hunger for dependents acute. Her denial of obligation to others was militant. She gave more than she received.

“Well, I’m in for it,” she said presently, trying to mask her strong eagerness.

“In for what?” asked Luke.

“I’ve gone and done it at last,” she said.

“Mercy!” shrieked Eliza. “You’re not married, are you?”

“Not yet,” said Helen, “but I will be soon.”

Then she told them about Mr. Hugh T. Barton, the cash register salesman. She spoke loyally and kindly of him, without great love.

“He’s ten years older than I am,” she said.

“Well,” said Eliza thoughtfully, moulding her lips. “They sometimes make the best husbands.” After a moment, she asked: “Has he got any property?”

“No,” said Helen, “they live up all he makes. They live in style, I tell you. There are two servants in that house all the time. The old lady doesn’t turn her hand over.”

“Where are you going to live?” said Eliza sharply. “With his folks?”

“Well, I should say not! I should say not!” said Helen slowly and emphatically. “Good heavens, mama!” she continued irritably. “I want a home of my own. Can’t you realize that? I’ve been doing for others all my life. Now I’m going to let them do for me. I want no in-laws about. No, sir!” she said emphatically.

Luke bit his nails nervously.

“Well, he’s g-g-getting a great g-g-girl,” he said. “I hope he has sense enough to realize that.”

Moved, she laughed bigly, ironically.

“I’ve got one booster, haven’t I?” she said. She looked at him seriously with clear affectionate eyes. “Well, thanks, Luke. You’re one of the lot that’s always had the interests of the family at heart.”

Her big face was for a moment tranquil and eager. A great calm lay there: the radiant decent beauty of dawn and rainwater. Her eyes were as luminous and believing as a child’s. No evil dwelt in her. She had learned nothing.

“Have you told your papa?” said Eliza, presently.

“No,” she said, after a pause, “I haven’t.”

They thought of Gant in silence, with wonder. Her going was a marvel.

“I have a right to my own life,” said Helen angrily, as if someone disputed that right, “as much as anyone. Good heavens, mama! You and papa have lived your lives⁠—don’t you know that? Do you think it’s right that I should go on forever looking after him? Do you?” Her voice rose under the stress of hysteria.

“Why, no-o. I never said⁠—” Eliza began, flustered and conciliatory.

“You’ve spent your life f-f-finking of others and not of yourself,” said Luke. “That’s the trouble. They don’t appreciate it.”

“Well, I’m not going to any longer. That’s one thing sure! No, indeed! I want a home and some children. I’m going to have them!” she said defiantly. In a moment, she added tenderly:

“Poor old papa! I wonder what he’s going to say?”

He said very little. The Gants, after initial surprise, moulded new events very quickly into the texture of their lives. Abysmal change widened their souls out in a brooding unconsciousness.

Mr. Hugh Barton came up into the hills to visit his affianced kin. He came, to their huge delight, lounging in the long racing chassis of a dusty brown 1911 Buick roadster. He came, in a gaseous coil, to the roaring explosion of great engines. He descended, a tall, elegant figure, dyspeptic, lean almost to emaciation, very foppishly laundered and tailored. He looked the car over slowly, critically, a long cigar clamped in the corner of his saturnine mouth, drawing his gauntlets off deliberately. Then, in the same unhurried fashion, he removed from his head the ten-gallon gray sombrero⁠—the only astonishing feature of his otherwise undebatable costume⁠—and shook each long thin leg delicately for a moment to straighten out the wrinkles. But there were none. Then, deliberately, he came up the walk to Dixieland, where the Gants were assembled. As he came, unhurried, he took the cigar from his mouth calmly and held it in the fingers of his lean, hairy, violently palsied hand. His thin black hair, fine spun, was fanned lightly from its elegance by a wantoning breeze. He espied his betrothed and grinned, with dignity, sardonically, with big nuggets of gold teeth. They greeted and kissed.

“This is my mother, Hugh,” said Helen.

Hugh Barton bent slowly, courteously, from his thin waist. He fastened on Eliza a keen penetrating stare that discomposed her. His lips twisted again in an impressive sardonic smile. Everyone felt he was going to say something very, very important.

“How do you do?” he asked, and took her hand.

Everyone then felt that Hugh Barton had said something very, very important.

With equal slow gravity he greeted each one. They were somewhat awed by his lordliness. Luke, however, burst out uncontrollably:

“You’re g-g-getting a fine girl, Mr. B-b-barton.”

Hugh Barton turned on him slowly and fixed him with his keen stare.

“I think so,” he said gravely. His voice was deep, deliberate, with an impressive rasp. He was selling himself.

In an awkward silence he turned, grinning amiably, on Eugene.

“Have a cigar?” he asked, taking three long powerful weeds from his upper vest pocket, and holding them out in his clean twitching fingers.

“Thanks,” said Eugene with a dissipated leer, “I’ll smoke a Camel.”

He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. Gravely, Hugh Barton held a match for him.

“Why do you wear the big hat?” asked Eugene.

“Psychology,” he said. “It makes ’em talk.”

“I tell you what!” said Eliza, beginning to laugh. “That’s pretty smart, isn’t it?”

“Sure!” said Luke. “That’s advertising! It pays to advertise!”

“Yes,” said Mr. Barton slowly, “you’ve got to get the other fellow’s psychology.”

The phrase seemed to describe an action of modified assault and restrained pillage.

They liked him very much. They all went into the house.

Hugh Barton’s mother was in her seventy-fourth year, but she had the strength of a healthy woman of fifty, and the appetite of two of forty. She was a powerful old lady, six feet tall, with the big bones of a man, and a heavy full-jawed face, sensuous and complacent, and excellently equipped with a champing mill of strong yellow horse-teeth. It was cake and pudding to see her at work on corn on the cob. A slight paralysis had slowed her tongue and thickened her speech a little, so that she spoke deliberately, with a ponderous enunciation of each word. This deformity, which she carefully hid, added to, rather than subtracted from, the pontifical weight of her opinions: she was an earnest Republican⁠—in memory of her departed mate⁠—and she took a violent dislike to anyone who opposed her political judgment. When thwarted or annoyed in any way, the heavy benevolence of her face was dislodged by a thundercloud of petulance, and her wide pouting underlip rolled out like a window-shade. But, as she barged slowly along, one big hand gripping a heavy stick on which she leaned her massive weight, she was an impressive dowager.

“She’s a lady⁠—a real lady,” said Helen proudly. “Anyone can see that! She goes out with all the best people.”

Hugh Barton’s sister, Mrs. Genevieve Watson, was a sallow woman of thirty-eight years, tall, wren-like and emaciated, like her brother; dyspeptic, and very elegantly kept. The divorced Watson was conspicuous for his absence from all conversations: there was once or twice a heavy flutter around his name, a funereal hush, and a muttered suggestion of oriental debauchery.

“He was a beast,” said Hugh Barton, “a low dog. He treated sister very badly.”

Mrs. Barton wagged her great head with the slow but emphatic approval she accorded all her son’s opinions.

“O-o-h!” she said. “He was a ter-rib-bul man.”

He had, they inferred, been given to hellish practices. He had “gone after other women.”

Sister Veve had a narrow discontented face, a metallic vivacity, an effusive cordiality. She was always very smartly dressed. She had somewhat vague connections in the real estate business; she spoke grandly of obscure affairs; she was always on the verge of an indefinite “Big Deal.”

“I’m getting them lined up, brother,” she would say with cheerful confidence. “Things are coming my way. J. D. came in today and said: ‘Veve⁠—you’re the only woman in the world that can put this thing across. Go to it, little girl. There’s a fortune in it for you.’ ” And so on.

Her conversation, Eugene thought, was not unlike Brother Steve’s.

But their affection and loyalty for one another was beautiful. Its unaccustomed faith, its abiding tranquillity, puzzled and disturbed the Gants. They were touched indefinably, a little annoyed, because of it.

The Bartons came to Woodson Street two weeks before the wedding. Within three days after their arrival, Helen and old lady Barton were at odds. It was inevitable. The heat of the girl’s first affection for Barton’s family wore off very quickly: her possessive instinct asserted itself⁠—she would halve no one’s love, she would share with no other a place in the heart. She would own, she would possess completely. She would be generous, but she would be mistress. She would give. It was the law of her nature.

She began immediately, by force of this essential stress, to make out a case against the old woman.

Mrs. Barton, too, felt the extent of her loss. She wanted to be sure that Helen realized the extent of her acquisition of one of the latter-day saints.

Rocking ponderously in the dark on Gant’s veranda, the old woman would say:

“You are get-ting a good boy, Hel-en.” She would wag her powerful head from side to side, pugnaciously emphatic. “Though I do say it myself, you are get-ting one good boy, Hel-en. A bet-ter boy than Hugh does-ent live.”

“Oh, I don’t know!” said Helen, annoyed. “I don’t think it’s such a bad bargain for him either, you know. I think pretty well of myself, too.” And she would laugh, huskily, heartily, trying in laughter to conceal her resentment, but visibly, to every eye but Mrs. Barton’s, angered.

A moment later, on some pretext, she would be back into the house, where, with a face contorted by her rising hysteria, to Luke, Eugene, or any sympathetic audience, she would burst out:

“You heard that, didn’t you? You heard that? You see what I’ve got to put up with, don’t you? Do you see? Do you blame me for not wanting that damned old woman around? Do you? You see how she wants to run things, don’t you? Do you see how she rubs it into me whenever she gets a chance? She can’t bear to give him up. Of course not! He’s her meal-ticket. They’ve bled him white. Why, even now, if it came to a question of choosing between us⁠—” Her face worked strongly. She could not continue. In a moment she quieted herself, and said decisively: “I suppose you know now why we’re going to live away from them. You see, don’t you? Do you blame me?”

“No’m,” said Eugene, obedient after pumping.

“It’s a d-d-damn shame!” said Luke loyally.

At this moment Mrs. Barton, kindly but authoritative, called from the veranda:

“Hel-en! Where are you, Hel-en?”

“O gotohell. Gotohell!” said Helen, in a comic undertone.

“Yes? What is it?” she called out sharply.

You see, don’t you?

She was married at Dixieland, because she was having a big wedding. She knew a great many people.

As her wedding-day approached, her suppressed hysteria mounted. Her sense of decorum grew militant: she attacked Eliza bitterly for keeping certain dubious people in the house.

“Mama, in heaven’s name! What do you mean by allowing such goings-on right in the face of Hugh and his people? What do you suppose they think of it? Have you no respect for my feelings? Good heavens, are you going to have the house full of chippies on the night of my wedding?” Her voice was high and cracked. She almost wept.

“Why, child!” said Eliza, with troubled face. “What do you mean? I’ve never noticed anything.”

“Are you blind! Everyone’s talking about it! They’re practically living together!” This last was a reference to a condition existing between a dissipated and alcoholic young man and a darkly handsome young woman, slightly tubercular.

To Eugene was assigned the task of digging this couple out of their burrow. He waited sternly outside the girl’s room, watching the shadow dance at the door crack. At the end of the sixth hour, the besieged surrendered⁠—the man came out. The boy⁠—pallid, but proud of his trust⁠—told the house-defiler that he must go. The young man agreed with cheerful alcoholism. He went at once.

Mrs. Pert was saved in the housecleaning.

“After all,” said Helen, “what do we know about her? They can say what they like about Fatty. I like her.”

Ferns, flowers, potted plants, presents and guests arriving. The long nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The packed crowd. The triumphant booming of “The Wedding March.”

A flashlight: Hugh Barton and his bride limply astare⁠—frightened; Gant, Ben, Luke, and Eugene, widely, sheepishly agrin; Eliza, high-sorrowful and sad; Mrs. Selborne and a smile of subtle mystery; the pert flower-girls; Pearl Hines’ happy laughter.

When it was over, Eliza and her daughter hung in each other’s arms, weeping.

Eliza repeated over and over, from guest to guest:

“A son is a son till he gets him a wife,
But a daughter’s a daughter all the days of her life.”

She was comforted.

They escaped at length, wilted, from the thronging press of well-wishing guests. White-faced, scared witless, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Barton got into a closed car. It was done! They would spend the night at the Battery Hill. Ben had engaged the wedding-suite. Tomorrow, a honeymoon to Niagara.

Before they went, the girl kissed Eugene with something of the old affection.

“I’ll see you in the Fall, honey. Come over as soon as you’re settled.”

For Hugh Barton was beginning life with his bride in a new place. He was going to the capital of the State. And it had already been determined, chiefly by Gant, that Eugene was going to the State University.

But Hugh and Helen did not go honeymooning the next morning, as they had planned. During the night, as she lay at Dixieland, old Mrs. Barton was taken with a violent, a retching sickness. For once, her massive digestive mechanism failed to meet the heavy demands she had put upon it during the prenuptial banqueting. She came near death.

Hugh and Helen returned abruptly next morning to a scene of dismal tinsellings and jaded lilies. Helen hurled her vitality into the sick woman’s care; dominant, furious, all-mastering, she blew back her life into her. Within three days, Mrs. Barton was out of danger; but her complete recovery was slow, ugly, and painful. As the days lengthened out wearily, the girl became more and more bitter over her thwarted honeymoon. Rushing out of the sickroom, she would enter Eliza’s kitchen with writhen face, unable to control her anger:

“That damned old woman! Sometimes I believe she did it on purpose. My God, am I to get no happiness from life? Will they never leave me alone? Urr-p! Urr-p!”⁠—Her rough bacchic smile played loosely over her large unhappy face. “Mama, in God’s name where does it all come from?” she said, grinning tearfully. “I do nothing but mop up after her. Will you please tell me how long it’s going to last?”

Eliza laughed slyly, passing her finger under her broad nosewing.

“Why, child!” she said. “What in the world! I’ve never seen the like! She must have saved up for the last six months.”

“Yes, sir!” said Helen, looking vaguely away, with a profane smile playing across her mouth, “I’d just like to know where the hell it all comes from. I’ve had everything else,” she said, with a rough angry laugh, “I’m expecting one of her kidneys at any minute.”

“Whew-w!” cried Eliza, shaken with laughter.

“Hel-en! Oh Hel’en!” Mrs. Barton’s voice came feebly in to them.

“O gotohell!” said the girl, sotto-voce. “Urr-p! Urr-p!” She burst suddenly into tears: “Is it going to be like this always! I sometimes believe the judgment of God is against us all. Papa was right.”

“Pshaw!” said Eliza, wetting her fingers, and threading a needle before the light. “I’d go on and pay no more attention to her. There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s all imagination!” It was Eliza’s rooted conviction that most human ills, except her own, were “all imagination.”

“Hel-en!”

“All right! I’m coming!” the girl cried cheerfully, turning an angry grin on Eliza as she went. It was funny. It was ugly. It was terrible.

It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the chief celestial Cloud-Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter moderns have sometimes called “the ancient Jester”⁠—had turned his frown upon their fortunes.

It began to rain⁠—rain incessant, spouting, torrential rain, fell among the reeking hills, leaving grass and foliage drowned upon the slopes, starting the liquid avalanche of earth upon a settlement, glutting lean rocky mountain-streams to a foaming welter of yellow flood. It mined the yellow banks away with unheard droppings; it caved in hillsides; it drank the steep banked earth away below the rails, leaving them strung to their aerial ties across a gutted canyon.

There was a flood in Altamont. It swept down in a converging width from the hills, filling the little river, and foaming beyond its banks in a wide waste Mississippi. It looted the bottomlands of the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from their piers as it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway flats and all who dwelt therein.

The town was cut off from every communication with the world. At the end of the third week, as the waters slid back into their channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly in the great pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads, crawled desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible wrath of water to achieve their wilted anticlimactic honeymoon.

“He will go where I send him or not at all,” Gant spoke his final word, not loudly.

Thus, it was decided that Eugene must go to the State University.

Eugene did not want to go to the State University.

For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard about his future education. It was proposed that, in view of his youth, he should attend Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years, go to Harvard for two years more, and then, having arrived by easy stages at Paradise, “top things off” with a year or two at Oxford.

“Then,” said John Dorsey Leonard, who talked enchantingly on the subject, between mouthfuls of clabber, “then, my sonny, a man may begin to say he’s really ‘cultsherd.’ After that, of course,” he continued with a spacious carelessness, “he may travel for a year or so.”

But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him.

“You’re too young, boy,” said Margaret Leonard. “Can’t you persuade your father to wait another year? You’re only a child in years, Eugene. You have all the time in the world.” Her eyes darkened as she talked.

Gant would not be persuaded.

“He’s old enough,” he said. “When I was his age I had been earning my living for years. I’m getting old. I won’t be here much longer. I want him to begin to make a name for himself before I die.”

He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement. In his youngest son he saw the last hope of his name’s survival in laurels⁠—in the political laurels he so valued. He wanted his son to be a great and farseeing statesman and a member of the Republican or Democratic party. His choice of a university was therefore a measure of political expediency, founded upon the judgment of his legal and political friends.

“He’s ready to go,” said Gant, “and he’s going to the State University, and nowhere else. He’ll be given as good an education there as he can get anywhere. Furthermore, he will make friends there who will stand by him the rest of his life.” He turned upon his son a glance of bitter reproach. “There are very few boys who have had your chance,” said he, “and you ought to be grateful instead of turning up your nose at it. Mark my words, you’ll live to see the day when you’ll thank me for sending you there. Now, I’ve given you my last word: you’ll go where I send you or you’ll go nowhere at all.”