Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (13 page)

"What have you got for breakfast?" he said
to Eliza.

"Why," she said, pursing her lips
meditatively, "would you like some eggs?"

"Yes," said he, "with a few rashers of
bacon and a couple of pork sausages."

He strode across the dining-room and went up the
hall.

"Steve!  Ben!  Luke!  You damned
scoundrels!" he yelled.  "Get up!"

Their feet thudded almost simultaneously upon the
floor.

"Papa's home!" they shrieked.

Mr. Duncan watched butter soak through a new-baked
roll.  He looked through his curtain angularly down, and saw
thick acrid smoke biting heavily into the air above Gant's house.

"He's back," said he, with satisfaction.

So, at the moment looking, Tarkinton of the paints
said:  "W. O.'s back."
 
 

Thus came he home, who had put out to land westward,
Gant the Far-Wanderer.
 
 

8
 

Eugene was loose now in the limitless meadows of
sensation: his sensory equipment was so complete that at the moment
of perception of a single thing, the whole background of color,
warmth, odor, sound, taste established itself, so that later, the
breath of hot dandelion brought back the grass-warm banks of Spring,
a day, a place, the rustling of young leaves, or the page of a book,
the thin exotic smell of tangerine, the wintry bite of great apples;
or, as with Gulliver's Travels, a bright windy day in March, the
spurting moments of warmth, the drip and reek of the earth-thaw, the
feel of the fire.

He had won his first release from the fences of
home--he was not quite six, when, of his own insistence, he went to
school.  Eliza did not want him to go, but his only close
companion, Max Isaacs, a year his senior, was going, and there was in
his heart a constricting terror that he would be left alone again. 
She told him he could not go: she felt, somehow, that school began
the slow, the final loosening of the cords that held them together,
but as she saw him slide craftily out the gate one morning in
September and run at top speed to the corner where the other little
boy was waiting, she did nothing to bring him back.  Something
taut snapped in her; she remembered his furtive backward glance, and
she wept. And she did not weep for herself, but for him: the hour
after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen
something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable
wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark
and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost
communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house,
lonely to himself and to the world.  O lost.

Busy with the ache of their own growing pains, his
brothers and sisters had little time for him: he was almost six years
younger than Luke, the youngest of them, but they exerted over him
the occasional small cruelties, petty tormentings by elder children
of a younger, interested and excited by the brief screaming insanity
of his temper when, goaded and taunted from some deep dream, he would
seize a carving knife and pursue them, or batter his head against the
walls.
 
They felt that he was
"queer"--the other boys preached the smug cowardice of the
child-herd, defending themselves, when their persecutions were
discovered, by saying they would make a "real boy" of him. 
But there grew up in him a deep affection for Ben who stalked
occasionally and softly through the house, guarding even then with
scowling eyes, and surly speech, the secret life.  Ben was a
stranger: some deep instinct drew him to his child-brother, a portion
of his small earnings as a paper-carrier he spent in gifts and
amusement for Eugene, admonishing him sullenly, cuffing him
occasionally, but defending him before the others.

Gant, as he watched his brooding face set for hours
before a firelit book of pictures, concluded that the boy liked
books, more vaguely, that he would make a lawyer of him, send him
into politics, see him elected to the governorship, the Senate, the
presidency.  And he unfolded to him time after time all the rude
American legendry of the country boys who became great men because
they were country boys, poor boys, and hard-working farm boys. 
But Eliza thought of him as a scholar, a learned man, a professor,
and with that convenient afterthought that annoyed Gant so deeply,
but by which she firmly convinced herself, she saw in this
book-brooder the fruit of her own deliberate design.

"I read every moment I could get the chance the
summer before he was born," she said.  And then, with a
complacent and confidential smile which, Gant knew, always preceded
some reference to her family, she said:  "I tell you what:
it may all come out in the Third Generation."

"The Third Generation be Goddamned!"
answered Gant furiously.

"Now, I want to tell you," she went on
thoughtfully, speaking with her forefinger, "folks have always
said that his grandfather would have made a fine scholar if--"

"Merciful God!" said Gant, getting up
suddenly and striding about the room with an ironical laugh.  "I
might have known that it would come to this!  You may be sure,"
he exclaimed in high excitement, wetting his thumb briefly on his
tongue, "that if there's any credit to be given I won't get it. 
Not from you!  You'd rather die than admit it!  No, but
I'll tell you what you will do!  You'll brag about that
miserable old freak who never did a hard day's work in his life."

"Now, I wouldn't be so sure of that if I were
you," Eliza began, her lips working rapidly.

"Jesus God!" he cried, flinging about the
room with his customary indifference to reasoned debate.  "Jesus
God!  What a travesty!  A travesty on Nature!  Hell
hath no fury like a woman scorned!" he exclaimed, indefinitely
but violently, and then as he strode about, he gave way to loud,
bitter, forced laughter.
 
 

Thus, pent in his dark soul, Eugene sat brooding on a
fire-lit book, a stranger in a noisy inn.  The gates of his life
were closing him in from their knowledge, a vast aerial world of
fantasy was erecting its fuming and insubstantial fabric.  He
steeped his soul in streaming imagery, rifling the book-shelves for
pictures and finding there such treasures as With Stanley in Africa,
rich in the mystery of the jungle, alive with combat, black battle,
the hurled spear, vast snake-rooted forests, thatched villages, gold
and ivory; or Stoddard's Lectures, on whose slick heavy pages were
stamped the most-visited scenes of Europe and Asia; a Book of Wonder,
with enchanting drawings of all the marvels of the age--Santos Dumont
and his balloon, liquid air poured from a kettle, all the navies of
the earth lifted two feet from the water by an ounce of radium (Sir
William Crookes), the building of the Eiffel Tower, the Flatiron
Building, the stick-steered automobile, the submarine. After the
earthquake in San Francisco there was a book describing it, its cheap
green cover lurid with crumbling towers, shaken spires, toppling
many-storied houses plunging into the splitting flame-jawed earth. 
And there was another called Palaces of Sin, or The Devil in Society,
purporting to be the work of a pious millionaire, who had drained his
vast fortune in exposing the painted sores that blemish the
spotless-seeming hide of great position, and there were enticing
pictures showing the author walking in a silk hat down a street full
of magnificent palaces of sin.

Out of this strange jumbled gallery of pictures the
pieced-out world was expanding under the brooding power of his
imagination: the lost dark angels of the Doré "Milton"
swooped into cavernous Hell beyond this upper earth of soaring or
toppling spires, machine wonder, maced and mailed romance.  And,
as he thought of his future liberation into this epic world, where
all the color of life blazed brightest far away from home, his heart
flooded his face with lakes of blood.

He had heard already the ringing of remote church
bells over a countryside on Sunday night; had listened to the earth
steeped in the brooding of dark, and the million-noted little night
things; and he had heard thus the far retreating wail of a whistle in
a distant valley, and faint thunder on the rails; and he felt the
infinite depth and width of the golden world in the brief seductions
of a thousand multiplex and mixed mysterious odors and sensations,
weaving, with a blinding interplay and aural explosions, one into the
other.

He remembered yet the East India Tea House at the
Fair, the sandalwood, the turbans, and the robes, the cool interior
and the smell of India tea; and he had felt now the nostalgic thrill
of dew-wet mornings in Spring, the cherry scent, the cool clarion
earth, the wet loaminess of the garden, the pungent breakfast smells
and the floating snow of blossoms.  He knew the inchoate sharp
excitement of hot dandelions in young Spring grass at noon; the smell
of cellars, cobwebs, and built-on secret earth; in July, of
watermelons bedded in sweet hay, inside a farmer's covered wagon; of
cantaloupe and crated peaches; and the scent of orange rind,
bittersweet, before a fire of coals.  He knew the good male
smell of his father's sitting-room; of the smooth worn leather sofa,
with the gaping horse-hair rent; of the blistered varnished wood upon
the hearth; of the heated calf-skin bindings; of the flat moist plug
of apple tobacco, stuck with a red flag; of wood-smoke and burnt
leaves in October; of the brown tired autumn earth; of honey-suckle
at night; of warm nasturtiums; of a clean ruddy farmer who comes
weekly with printed butter, eggs and milk; of fat limp underdone
bacon and of coffee; of a bakery-oven in the wind; of large deep-hued
stringbeans smoking-hot and seasoned well with salt and butter; of a
room of old pine boards in which books and carpets have been stored,
long closed; of Concord grapes in their long white baskets.

Yes, and the exciting smell of chalk and varnished
desks; the smell of heavy bread-sandwiches of cold fried meat and
butter; the smell of new leather in a saddler's shop, or of a warm
leather chair; of honey and of unground coffee; of barrelled
sweet-pickles and cheese and all the fragrant compost of the
grocer's; the smell of stored apples in the cellar, and of
orchard-apple smells, of pressed-cider pulp; of pears ripening on a
sunny shelf, and of ripe cherries stewing with sugar on hot stoves
before preserving; the smell of whittled wood, of all young lumber,
of sawdust and shavings; of peaches stuck with cloves and pickled in
brandy; of pine-sap, and green pine-needles; of a horse's pared hoof;
of chestnuts roasting, of bowls of nuts and raisins; of hot cracklin,
and of young roast pork; of butter and cinnamon melting on hot
candied yams.

Yes, and of the rank slow river, and of tomatoes
rotten on the vine; the smell of rain-wet plums and boiling quinces;
of rotten lily-pads; and of foul weeds rotting in green marsh scum;
and the exquisite smell of the South, clean but funky, like a big
woman; of soaking trees and the earth after heavy rain.

Yes, and the smell of hot daisy-fields in the
morning; of melted puddling-iron in a foundry; the winter smell of
horse-warm stables and smoking dung; of old oak and walnut; and the
butcher's smell of meat, of strong slaughtered lamb, plump gouty
liver, ground pasty sausages, and red beef; and of brown sugar melted
with slivered bitter chocolate; and of crushed mint leaves, and of a
wet lilac bush; of magnolia beneath the heavy moon, of dogwood and
laurel; of an old caked pipe and Bourbon rye, aged in kegs of charred
oak; the sharp smell of tobacco; of carbolic and nitric acids; the
coarse true smell of a dog; of old imprisoned books; and the cool
fern-smell near springs; of vanilla in cake-dough; and of cloven
ponderous cheeses.

Yes, and of a hardware store, but mostly the good
smell of nails; of the developing chemicals in a photographer's
dark-room; and the young-life smell of paint and turpentine; of
buckwheat batter and black sorghum; and of a negro and his horse,
together; of boiling fudge; the brine smell of pickling vats; and the
lush undergrowth smell of southern hills; of a slimy oyster-can, of
chilled gutted fish; of a hot kitchen negress; of kerosene and
linoleum; of sarsaparilla and guavas; and of ripe autumn persimmons;
and the smell of the wind and the rain; and of the acrid thunder; of
cold starlight, and the brittle-bladed frozen grass; of fog and the
misted winter sun; of seed-time, bloom, and mellow dropping harvest.
 
 

And now, whetted intemperately by what he had felt,
he began, at school, in that fecund romance, the geography, to
breathe the mixed odors of the earth, sensing in every squat keg
piled on a pier-head a treasure of golden rum, rich port, fat
Burgundy; smelling the jungle growth of the tropics, the heavy odor
of plantations, the salt-fish smell of harbors, voyaging in the vast,
enchanting, but unperplexing world.
 
 

Now the innumerable archipelago had been threaded,
and he stood, firm-planted, upon the unknown but waiting continent.

He learned to read almost at once, printing the
shapes of words immediately with his strong visual memory; but it was
weeks later before he learned to write, or even to copy, words. 
The ragged spume and wrack of fantasy and the lost world still
floated from time to time through his clear school-day morning brain,
and although he followed accurately all the other instruction of his
teacher, he was walled in his ancient unknowing world when they made
letters.  The children made their sprawling alphabets below a
line of models, but all he accomplished was a line of jagged wavering
spear-points on his sheet, which he repeated endlessly and
rapturously, unable to see or understand the difference.