Whom the Gods Destroyed

by Josephine Daskam Bacon

"It's not because—you're not—when did you have your lunch?" he demanded shortly.

The boy smiled weakly.

"And your breakfast?"

"Oh, I had that—quite a little—really I did!" he half whispered.

Delafield got him on his feet and around the corner to a restaurant. As they entered, the smell of the food weakened him again, and he staggered against his friend, begging his pardon helplessly.

"Soup—and hurry it up, it's immaterial what kind," the host commanded.

As the boy gulped it down he made out a further order, and while the hot meat, vegetables, and bread vanished and the strong, brown coffee lowered in the cup, he lighted a long cigar and talked with a quiet insistence. Later, when his guest blinked drowsily behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, he asked questions, marvelling at the simple replies.

The boy's name was Henry West; it was twenty-two years since he had made his appearance in a family already large enough to regard his advent with a stoical endurance. His people all worked in the mills in Lowell; he, too, till the noise and jar gave him racking headaches. He made his first verses in the mill. He had come to New York to learn to be a clerk in a corner drug-store kept by a distant cousin, but he couldn't seem to learn the business. The names of the things were hard to remember. His cousin said he was absent-minded.

And he had to read everything that was in sight: if a thing was printed he seemed to have to read it. He read books from the library and the night-school when his cousin thought he was polishing the soda-fountain. Of all the things he hated—and they were many—the soda-fountain was the worst. He wanted to study a great deal, but only the studies he liked. Not algebra and geometry, nor chemistry that made his head ache, but history and poetry and French. He thought he would like to know Italian, too. The family supposed he was still in the drug-store, but he had quarrelled with his cousin and left it a month ago. He stayed mostly in the library and helped the janitor with sweeping and airing the rooms. The janitor paid him a little to ease his own hours of night-watching, and often asked him to supper. He read nearly all day and wrote at night. It was better than the mills or the drug-store. He supposed he was lazy—his family always said he was.