Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (25 page)

But the union between Gant and his daughter was
finally consummated. Before Gant lay, half-presaged, a road of pain
and terror which led on to death, but as his great strength dwindled,
palsied, broke along that road, she went with him inch by inch,
welding beyond life, beyond death, beyond memory, the bond that
linked them.

"I'd have died if it hadn't been for that girl,"
he said over and over.  "She saved my life.  I
couldn't get along without her."  And he boasted again and
again of her devotion and loyalty, of the expenses of his journey, of
the hotels, the wealth, the life they both had seen.

And, as the legend of Helen's goodness and devotion
grew, and his dependence upon her got further advertisement, Eliza
pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully, wept sometimes into the
spitting grease of a pan, smiled, beneath her wide red nose, a smile
tremulous, bitter, terribly hurt.

"I'll show them," she wept.  "I'll
show them."  And she rubbed thoughtfully at a red itching
patch that had appeared during the year upon the back of her left
hand.

She went to Hot Springs in the winter that followed. 
They stopped at Memphis for a day or two: Steve was at work there in
a paint store; he slipped quickly in and out of saloons, as he took
Eugene about the city, leaving the boy outside for a moment while he
went "in here to see a fellow"--a "fellow" who
always sent him forth, Eugene thought, with an added impetuosity to
his swagger.

Dizzily they crossed the river: at night he saw the
small bleared shacks of Arkansas set in malarial fields.

Eliza sent him to one of the public schools of Hot
Springs: he plunged heavily into the bewildering new world?performed
brilliantly, and won the affection of the young woman who taught him,
but paid the penalty of the stranger to all the hostile and banded
little creatures of the class.  Before his first month was out,
he had paid desperately for his ignorance of their customs.

Eliza boiled herself out at the baths daily;
sometimes, he went along with her, leaving her with a sensation of
drunken independence, while he went into the men's quarters,
stripping himself in a cool room, entering thence a hot one lined
with couches, shutting himself in a steam-closet where he felt
himself momentarily dwindling into the raining puddle of sweat at his
feet, to emerge presently on trembling legs and to be rolled and
kneaded about magnificently in a huge tub by a powerful grinning
negro.  Later, languorous, but with a feeling of deep
purification, he lay out on one of the couches, victoriously his own
man in a man's world.  They talked from couch to couch, or
walked pot-belliedly about, sashed coyly with bath towels--malarial
Southerners with malarial drawls, paunch-eyed alcoholics,
purple-skinned gamblers, and broken down prize-fighters. He liked the
smell of steam and of the sweaty men.

Eliza sent him out on the streets at once with The
Saturday Evening Post.

"It won't hurt you to do a little light work
after school," said she.  And as he trudged off with his
sack slung from his neck, she would call after him:

"Spruce up, boy!  Spruce up!  Throw
your shoulders back.  Make folks think you're somebody." 
And she gave him a pocketful of printed cards, which bore this
inscription:
 

                     
SPEND YOUR SUMMERS AT
                          
DIXIELAND
                     
In Beautiful Altamont,
                     
America's Switzerland.
          
Rates Reasonable--Both Transient and Tourist.
                   
Apply Eliza E. Gant, Prop.
 

"You've got to help me drum up some trade, if
we're to live, boy," she said again, with the lip-pursing,
mouth-tremulous jocularity  that was coming to wound him so
deeply, because he felt it was only an obvious mask for a more
obvious insincerity.

He writhed as he saw himself finally a toughened
pachyderm in Eliza's world--sprucing up confidently, throwing his
shoulders back proudly, making people "think he was somebody"
as he cordially acknowledged an introduction by producing a card
setting forth the joys of life in Altamont and at Dixieland, and
seized every opening in social relations for the purpose of "drumming
up trade."  He hated the jargon of the profession, which
she had picked up somewhere long before, and which she used
constantly with such satisfaction--smacking her lips as she spoke of
"transients," or of "drumming up trade."  In
him, as in Gant, there was a silent horror of selling for money the
bread of one's table, the shelter of one's walls, to the guest, the
stranger, the unknown friend from out the world; to the sick, the
weary, the lonely, the broken, the knave, the harlot, and the fool.

Thus, lost in the remote Ozarks, he wandered up
Central Avenue, fringed on both sides by the swift-sloping hills, for
him, by the borders of enchantment, the immediate portals of a land
of timeless and never-ending faery.  He drank endlessly the
water that came smoking from the earth, hoping somehow to wash
himself clean from all pollution, beginning his everlasting fantasy
of the miraculous spring, or the bath, neck-high, of curative mud,
which would draw out of a man's veins each drop of corrupted blood,
dry up in him a cancerous growth, dwindle and absorb a cyst, remove
all scorbutic blemishes, scoop and suck and thread away the fibrous
slime of all disease, leaving him again with the perfect flesh of an
animal.

And he gazed for hours into the entrances of the
fashionable hotels, staring at the ladies' legs upon the verandas,
watching the great ones of the land at their recreations, thinking,
with a pangof wonder, that here were the people of Chambers, of
Phillips, of all the society novelists, leading their godlike lives
in flesh, recording their fiction.  He was deeply reverential
before the grand manner of these books, particularly before the grand
manner of the English books: there people loved, but not as other
people,  elegantly; their speech was subtle, delicate,
exquisite; even in their passions there was no gross lust or strong
appetite?they were incapable of the vile thoughts or the meaty desire
of common people.  As he looked at the comely thighs of the
young women on horses, fascinated to see their shapely legs split
over the strong good smell of a horse, he wondered if the warm
sinuous vibration of the great horse-back excited them, and what
their love was like. The preposterous elegance of their manner in the
books awed him: he saw seduction consummated in kid gloves, to the
accompaniment of subtle repartee.  Such thoughts, when he had
them, filled him with shame at his own baseness--he imagined for
these people a love conducted beyond all the laws of nature,
achieving the delight of animals or of common men by the electrical
touch of a finger, the flicker of an eye, the intonation of a
phrase--exquisitely and incorruptibly.

And as they looked at his remote fabulous face, more
strange now that its thick fringing curls had been shorn, they bought
of him, paying him several times his fee, with the lazy penitence of
wasters.

Great fish within the restaurant windows swam in
glass wells?eels coiled snakily, white-bellied trout veered and sank:
he dreamed of strange rich foods within.

And sometimes men returned in carriages from the
distant river, laden with great fish, and he wondered if he would
ever see that river.  All that lay around him, near but
unexplored, filled him with desire and longing.

And later, again, along the sandy coast of Florida,
with Eliza, he wandered down the narrow lanes of Saint Augustine,
raced along the hard packed beach of Daytona, scoured the green lawns
of Palm Beach, before the hotels, for coconuts, which Eliza desired
as souvenirs, filling a brown tow sack with them and walking, with
the bag hung from his shoulders, down the interminable aisles of the
Royal Poinciana or the Breakers, target of scorn, and scandal, and
amusement from slave and prince; or traversed the spacious palm-cool
walks that cut the peninsula, to see, sprawled in the sensual loose
sand the ladies' silken legs, the brown lean bodies of the men, the
long seaplunges in the unending scroll-work of the emerald and
infinite sea, which had beat in his brain from his father's shells,
which had played at his mountain heart, but which never, until now,
had he seen.  Through the spattered sunlight of the palms, in
the smooth walks, princess and lord were wheeled: in latticed
bar-rooms, droning with the buzzing fans, men drank from glaCésar
tall glasses.
 
 

Or again, they came to Jacksonville, lived there for
several weeks near Pett and Greeley; he studied under a little
crippled man from Harvard, going to lunch with his teacher at a
buffet, where the man consumed beer and pretzels.  Eliza
protested the tuition when she left: the cripple shrugged his
shoulders, took what she had to  offer.  Eugene twisted his
neck about, and lifted his foot from the ground.
 
 

Thus did he see first, he the hill-bound, the
sky-girt, of whom the mountains were his masters, the fabulous
South.  The picture of flashing field, of wood, and hill, stayed
in his heart forever: lost in the dark land, he lay the night-long
through within his berth, watching the shadowy and phantom South
flash by, sleeping at length, and waking suddenly, to see cool lakes
in Florida at dawn, standing quietly as if they had waited from
eternity for this meeting; or hearing, as the train in the dark hours
of morning slid into Savannah, the strange quiet voices of the men
upon the platform, the boding faint echoes of the station, or seeing,
in pale dawn, the phantom woods, a rutted lane, a cow, a boy, a drab,
dull-eyed against a cottage door, glimpsed, at this moment of rushing
time, for which all life had been a plot, to flash upon the window
and be gone.

The commonness of all things in the earth he
remembered with a strange familiarity--he dreamed of the quiet roads,
the moonlit woodlands, and he thought that some day he would come to
them on foot, and find them there unchanged, in all the wonder of
recognition.  They had existed for him anciently and forever.

Eugene was almost twelve years old.
 
 

PART TWO

14
 

The plum-tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in
winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. 
But in the Spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great
load of fruit and blossoms.  She will grow young again. 
Red plums will ripen, will be shaken desperately upon the tiny
stems.  They will fall bursted on the loamy warm wet earth; when
the wind blows in the orchard the air will be filled with dropping
plums; the night will be filled with the sound of their dropping, and
a great tree of birds will sing, burgeoning, blossoming richly,
filling the air also with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-notes.

The harsh hill-earth has moistly thawed and softened,
rich soaking rain falls, fresh-bladed tender grass like soft hair
growing sparsely streaks the land.

My Brother Ben's face, thought Eugene, is like a
piece of slightly yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted
fiercely by his old man's scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile
the flicker of light across a blade.  His face is like a blade,
and a knife, and a flicker of light: it is delicate and fierce, and
scowls beautifully forever, and when he fastens his hard white
fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he wants to fix, he sniffs
with sharp and private concentration through his long pointed nose. 
Thus women, looking, feel a well of tenderness for his pointed,
bumpy, always scowling face: his hair shines like that of a young
boy?it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce.

Into the April night-and-morning streets goes Ben. 
The night is brightly pricked with cool and tender stars.  The
orchard stirs leafily in the short fresh wind.  Ben prowls
softly out of the sleeping house.  His thin bright face is dark
within the orchard. There is a smell of nicotine and shoe leather
under the young blossoms.  His pigeon-toed tan shoes ring
musically up the empty streets.  Lazily slaps the water in the
fountain on the Square; all the firemen are asleep--but Big Bill
Merrick, the brave cop, hog-jowled and red, leans swinishly over
mince-pie and coffee in Uneeda Lunch.  The warm good ink-smell
beats in rich waves into the street: a whistling train howls off into
the Springtime South.

By the cool orchards in the dark the paper-carriers
go.  The copper legs of negresses in their dark dens stir. 
The creek brawls cleanly.
 
 

A new one, Number 6, heard boys speak of Foxy:

"Who's Foxy?" asked Number 6.

"Foxy's a bastard, Number 6.  Don't let him
catch you."

"The bastard caught me three times last week. 
In the Greek's every time.  Why can't they let us eat?"

Number 3 thought of Friday morning--he had the
Niggertown route.

"How many--3?"

"One hundred and sixty-two."

"How many Dead Heads you got, son?" said
Mr. Randall cynically. "Do you ever try to collect from them?"
he added, thumbing through the book.

"He takes it out in Poon-Tang," said Foxy,
grinning, "A week's subscription free for a dose."

"What you got to say about it?" asked
Number 3 belligerently. "You've been knocking down on them for
six years."