Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (22 page)

Eugene liked the high crystal voices of the little
children, backed  by the substantial marrow of the older boys
and girls, and based on the strong volume of the Junior and Senior
Baraccas and Philatheas.  They sang:
 

    
"Throw out the
lifeline, throw out the lifeline,
     
Someone is sinking to-day-ee"--
 

on the mornings when the collection went for
missionary work.  And they sang:
 

    
"Shall we gather at the
river,
     
The
bew-tee-ful, the bew-tee-ful r-hiver."
 

He liked that one very much.  And the noble
surge of "Onward, Christian Soldiers."

Later, he went into one of the little rooms with his
class.  The sliding doors rumbled together all around; presently
there was a quiet drone throughout the building.

He was now in a class composed entirely of boys. 
His teacher was a tall white-faced young man, bent and thin, who was
known to all the other boys as secretary of the Y.M.C.A.  He was
tubercular; but the boys admired him because of his former skill as a
baseball and basketball player.  He spoke in a sad, sugary,
whining voice; he was oppressively Christ-like; he spoke to them
intimately about the lesson of the day, asking them what it might
teach them in their daily lives, in acts of obedience and love to
their parents and friends, in duty, courtesy, and Christian charity. 
And he told them that when they were in doubt about their conduct
they should ask themselves what Jesus would say: he spoke of Jesus
often in his melancholy, somewhat discontented voice--Eugene became
vaguely miserable as he talked, thinking of something soft, furry,
with a wet tongue.

He was nervous and constrained: the other boys knew
one another intimately--they lived on, or in the neighborhood of,
Montgomery Avenue, which was the most fashionable street in town. 
Sometimes, one of them said to him, grinning:  "Do you want
to buy The Saturday Evening Post, Mister?"

Eugene, during the week, never touched the lives of
any of them, even in a remote way.  His idea of their eminence
was grossly exaggerated; the town had grown rapidly from a straggling
village--it had few families as old as the Pentlands, and, like all
resort towns, its caste system was liquidly variable, depending
chiefly upon wealth, ambition, and boldness.

Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs were Baptists, as were
most of the people, the Scotch excepted, in Gant's neighborhood. 
In the social scale the Baptists were the most populous and were
considered the most common: their minister was a large plump man with
a red face and a white vest, who reached great oratorical effects,
roaring at them like a lion, cooing at them like a dove, introducing
his wife into the sermon frequently for purposes of intimacy and
laughing, in a programme which the Episcopalians, who held the
highest social eminence, and the Presbyterians, less fashionable, but
solidly decent, felt was hardly chaste.  The Methodists occupied
the middle ground between vulgarity and decorum.

This starched and well brushed world of Sunday
morning  Presbyterianism, with its sober decency, its sense of
restraint, its suggestion of quiet wealth, solid position, ordered
ritual, seclusive establishment, moved him deeply with its
tranquillity. He felt concretely his isolation from it, he entered it
from the jangled disorder of his own life once a week, looking at it,
and departing from it, for years, with the sad heart of a stranger.
And from the mellow gloom of the church, the rich distant organ, the
quiet nasal voice of the Scotch minister, the interminable prayers,
and the rich little pictures of Christian mythology which he had
collected as a child under the instruction of the spinsters, he
gathered something of the pain, the mystery, the sensuous beauty of
religion, something deeper and greater than this austere decency.
 
 

12
 

It was the winter, and the sullen dying autumn that
he hated most at Dixieland--the dim fly-specked lights, the wretched
progress about the house in search of warmth, Eliza untidily wrapped
in an old sweater, a dirty muffler, a cast-off man's coat.  She
glycerined her cold-cracked hands.  The chill walls festered
with damp: they drank in death from the atmosphere: a woman died of
typhoid, her husband came quickly out into the hall and dropped his
hands.  They were Ohio people.

Upstairs, upon a sleeping porch, a thin-faced Jew
coughed through the interminable dark.

"In heaven's name, mama," Helen fumed, "why
do you take them in? Can't you see he's got the bugs?"

"Why, no-o," said Eliza, pursing her lips. 
"He said he only had a little bronchial trouble.  I asked
him about it, and he laughed just as big as you please:  'Why,
Mrs. Gant,' he said--" and there would follow an endless
anecdote, embellished with many a winding rivulet.  The girl
raged: it was one of Eliza's basic traits to defend blindly whatever
brought her money.

The Jew was a kind man.  He coughed gently
behind his white hand and ate bread fried in battered egg and
butter.  Eugene developed a keen appetite for it: innocently he
called it "Jew Bread" and asked for more.  Lichenfels
laughed gently, coughed--his wife was full of swart rich laughter. 
The boy did small services for him: he gave him a coin from week to
week.  He was a clothier from a New Jersey town.  In the
Spring he went to a sanitarium; he died there later.

In the winter a few chill boarders, those faces,
those personalities which become mediocre through repetition, sat for
hours before the coals of the parlor hearth, rocking interminably,
dull of voice and gesture, as hideously bored with themselves and
Dixieland, no doubt, as he with them.

He liked the summers better.  There came
slow-bodied women from the hot rich South, dark-haired white-bodied
girls from New Orleans, corn-haired blondes from Georgia,
nigger-drawling desire from South Carolina.  And there was
malarial lassitude, tinged faintly with yellow, from Mississippi but
with white biting teeth.  A red-faced South Carolinian, with
nicotined fingers, took him daily to the baseball games; a lank
yellow planter, malarial from Mississippi, climbed hill, and wandered
through the fragrant mountain valleys with him; of nights he heard
the rich laughter of the women, tender and cruel, upon the dark
porches, heard the florid throat-tones of the men; saw the yielding
stealthy harlotry of the South--the dark seclusion of their midnight
bodies, their morning innocence. Desire, with bloody beak, tore at
his heart like jealous virtue: he was moral for that which was denied
him.

Of mornings he stayed at Gant's with Helen playing
ball with Buster Isaacs, a cousin of Max, a plump jolly little boy
who lived next door; summoned later by the rich incense of Helen's
boiling fudge. She sent him to the little Jewish grocery down the
street for the sour relishes she liked so well: tabled in mid-morning
they ate sour pickles, heavy slabs of ripe tomatoes, coated with
thick mayonnaise, amber percolated coffee, fig-newtons and
ladyfingers, hot pungent fudge pebbled with walnuts and coated
fragrantly with butter, sandwiches of tender bacon and cucumber, iced
belchy soft-drinks.

His trust in her Gantian wealth was boundless: this
rich store of delight came from inexhaustible resources.  Warm
lively hens cackled cheerfully throughout the morning neighborhood;
powerful negroes brought dripping ice in iron talons from their
smoking wagons; he stood beneath their droning saws and caught the
flying ice-pulp in his hands; he drank in the combined odor of their
great bodies together with the rich compost of the refrigeration, and
the sharp oiliness of the dining-room linoleum; and in the horsehair
walnut parlor at mid-day, good with the mellow piano-smell and the
smell of stale varnished wood, she played for him, and made him
sing:  "William Tell," "My Heart at Thy Sweet
Voice," "The Song Without Words," "Celeste Aé
"The Lost Chord," her long throat lean and tendoned as her
vibrant voice rang out.

She took insatiable delight in him, stuffing him with
sour and sugared relishes, tumbling him, in a random moment of her
restless activity, upon Gant's lounge, and pinioning him while she
slapped his squirming face sharply with her big hand.

Sometimes, frantic with some swift tangle of her
nerves, she would attack him viciously, hating him for his dark
brooding face, his full scalloped underlip, his deep absorption in a
dream.  Like Luke, and like Gant, she sought in the world
ceaseless entertainment for her restless biting vitality; it
infuriated her to see other people seek absorption within
themselves--she hated him at times when, her own wires strumming, she
saw his dark face brooding over a book or on some vision.  She
would tear the book from his hands, slap him, and stab him with her
cruel savage tongue.  She would pout out her lip, goggle her
face about stupidly on a drooping neck, assume an expression of dopey
idiocy, and pour out on him the horrible torrent of her venom.

"You little freak--wandering around with your
queer dopey face. You're a regular little Pentland--you funny little
freak, you. Everybody's laughing at you.  Don't you know that? 
Don't you? We're going to dress you up as a girl, and let you go
around like that.  You haven't got a drop of Gant blood in
you?papa's practically said as much--you're Greeley all over again;
you're queer.  Pentland queerness sticking out all over you."

Sometimes her sweltering and inchoate fury was so
great that she threw him on the floor and stamped on him.

He did not mind the physical assault so much as he
did the poisonous hatred of her tongue, insanely clever in fashioning
the most wounding barbs.  He went frantic with horror, jerked
unexpectedly from Elfland into Hell, he bellowed madly, saw his
bountiful angel change in a moment to a snake-haired fury, lost
allhis sublime faith in love and goodness.  He rushed at the
wall like an insane little goat, battered his head screaming again
and again,wished desperately that his constricted and overloaded
heart would burst, that something in him would break, that somehow,
bloodily, he might escape the stifling prisonhouse of his life.

This satisfied her desire; it was what deeply she had
wanted?she had found purging release in her savage attack upon him,
and now she could drain herself cleanly in a wild smother of
affection. She would seize him, struggling and screaming, in her long
arms, plaster kisses all over his red mad face, soothing him with
hearty flattery addressed in the third person:

"Why, he didn't think I meant it, did he? 
Didn't he know I was only joking?  Why, he's strong as a little
bull, isn't he?  He's a regular little giant, that's what he
is.  Why, he's perfectly wild, isn't he?  His eyes popping
out of his head.  I thought he was going to knock a hole in the
wall.--Yes, ma'am.  Why, law me, yes, child.  It's GOOD
soup," resorting to her broad mimicry in order to make him
laugh.  And he would laugh against his will between his sobs, in
a greater torture because of this agony of affection and
reconciliation than because of the abuse.

Presently, when he had grown quiet, she would send
him off to the store for pickles, cakes, cold bottled drinks; he
would depart with red eyes, his cheeks furrowed dirtily by his tears,
wondering desperately as he went down the street why the thing had
happened, and drawing his foot sharply off the ground and craning his
neck convulsively as shame burnt in him.

There was in Helen a restless hatred of dullness,
respectability. Yet she was at heart a severely conventional person,
in spite of her occasional vulgarity, which was merely a
manifestation of her restless energy, a very naé a childishly
innocent person about even the simple wickedness of the village. 
She had several devoted young men on her list--plain, hard-drinking
country types: one, a native, lean, red-faced, alcoholic, a city
surveyor, who adored her; another, a strapping florid blond from the
Tennessee coal fields; another, a young South Carolinian, townsman of
her older sister's fianCésar

These young men--Hugh Parker, Jim Phelps, and Joe
Cathcart, were innocently devoted; they liked her tireless and
dominant energy, the eager monopoly of her tongue, her big sincerity
and deep kindliness.  She played and sang for them--threw all
her energy into entertaining them.  They brought her boxes of
candy, little presents, were divided jealously among themselves, but
united in their affirmation that she was "a fine girl."

And she would get Jim Phelps and Hugh Parker to bring
her a drink of whisky as well: she had begun to depend on small
potations of alcohol for the stimulus it gave her fevered body--a
small drink was enough to operate electrically in her blood: it
renewed her, energized her, gave her a temporary and hectic
vitality.  Thus, although she never drank much at a time and
showed, beyond the renewed vitality and gaiety, no sign of
intoxication, she nibbled at the bottle.

"I'll take a drink whenever I can get it,"
she said.

She liked, almost invariably, young fast women. 
She liked the hectic pleasure of their lives, the sense of danger,
their humor and liberality.  She was drawn magnetically to all
the wedded harlotry, which, escaping the Sunday discipline of a
Southern village, and the Saturday lust of sodden husbands, came
gaily to Altamont in summer.  She liked people who, as she said,
"didn't mind taking a little drink now and then."