Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (29 page)

In Dr. Frank Engel's Sanitarium and Turkish Bath
Establishment on Liberty Street, Mr. J. H. Brown, wealthy sportsman
and publisher of the Altamont Citizen, sank into dreamless sleep,
after five minutes in the steam-closet, ten in the tub, and thirty in
the dry-room, where he had submitted to the expert osteopathy of
"Colonel" Andrews (as Dr. Engel's skilled negro masseur was
affectionately known), from the soles of his gouty feet to the
veinous silken gloss of his slightly purple face.

Across the street, at the corner of Liberty and
Federal, and at the foot of Battery Hill, a white-jacketed negro
sleepily restacked in boxes the scattered poker-chips that covered
the centre table in the upstairs centre room of the Altamont City
Club.  The guests, just departed, were Mr. Gilbert Woodcock, Mr.
Reeves Stikeleather, Mr. Henry Pentland, Jr., Mr. Sidney Newbeck, of
Cleveland, Ohio (retired), and the aforementioned Mr. J. H. Brown.
 
 

"And, Jesus, Ben!" said Harry Tugman,
emerging at this moment from Uneeda No. 3.  "I thought I'd
have a hemorrhage when they pulled the Old Man out of the closet. 
After all the stuff he printed about cleaning up the town, too."

"It wouldn't surprise me if Judge Sevier had
them raid him," said Ben.

"Why certainly, Ben," said Harry Tugman
impatiently, "that's the idea, but Queen Elizabeth was behind
it.  You don't think there's anything she doesn't hear about, do
you?  So help me Jesus, you never heard a yap out of him for a
week.  He was afraid to show his face out of the office."

At the Convent School of Saint Catherine's on Saint
Clement's Road, Sister Theresa, the Mother Superior, walked softly
through the dormitory lifting the window-shade beside each cot,
letting the orchard cherry-apple bloom come gently into the long cool
glade of roseleaf sleeping girls.  Their breath expired gently
upon their dewy half-opened mouths, light fell rosily upon the
pillowed curve of their arms, their slender young sides, and the
crisp pink buds of their breasts.  At the other end of the room
a fat girl lay squarely on her back, her arms and legs outspread, and
snored solidly through blubbering lips.  They had yet an hour of
sleep.

From one of the little white tables between the cots
Theresa picked up an opened book incautiously left there the night
before, read below her gray mustache with the still inward smile of
her great-boned face, its title--The Common Law, by Robert W.
Chambers?and gripping a pencil in her broad earthstained hand,
scrawled briefly in jagged male letters:  "Rubbish,
Elizabeth--but see for yourself."  Then, on her soft
powerful tread, she went downstairs, and entered her study, where
Sister Louise (French), Sister Mary (History), and Sister Bernice
(Ancient Languages) were waiting for the morning consultation. 
When they had gone, she sat down to her desk and worked for an hour
on the manuscript of that book, modestly intended for school
children, which has since celebrated her name wherever the noble
architecture of prose is valued?the great Biology.

Then the gong rang in the dormitory, she heard the
high laughter of young maidens, and rising saw, coming from the
plum-tree by the wall, a young nun, Sister Agnes, with blossoms in
her arms.

Below, tree-hidden, in the Biltburn bottom, there was
a thunder on the rails, a wailing whistle cry.

Beneath the City Hall, in the huge sloping cellar,
the market booths were open.  The aproned butchers swung their
cleavers down on fresh cold joints, slapping the thick chops on heavy
sheets of mottled paper, and tossing them, roughly tied, to the
waiting negro delivery-boys.

The self-respecting negro, J. H. Jackson, stood in
his square vegetable-stall, attended by his two grave-faced sons, and
his
spectacled businesslike daughter. 
He was surrounded by wide slanting shelves of fruit and vegetables,
smelling of the earth and morning--great crinkled lettuces, fat
radishes still clotted damply with black loam, quill-stemmed young
onions newly wrenched from gardens, late celery, spring potatoes, and
the thin rinded citrous fruits of Florida.

Above him, Sorrell, the fish and oyster man, drew up
from the depths of an enamelled ice-packed can dripping ladlefuls of
oysters, pouring them into thick cardboard cartons. 
Wide-bellied heavy seafish--carp, trout, bass, shad--lay gutted in
beds of ice.  Mr. Michael Walter Creech, the butcher, having
finished his hearty breakfast of calves' liver, eggs and bacon, hot
biscuits and coffee, made a sign to one of the waiting row of negro
boys.  The line sprang forward like hounds; he stopped them with
a curse and a lifted cleaver.  The fortunate youth who had been
chosen then came forward and took the tray, still richly morselled
with food and a pot half full of coffee.  As he had to depart at
this moment on a delivery, he put it down in the sawdust at the end
of the bench and spat copiously upon it in order to protect it from
his scavenging comrades.  Then he wheeled off, full of rich
laughter and triumphant malice.  Mr. Creech looked at his
niggers darkly.

The town had so far forgotten Mr. Creech's own
African blood (an eighth on his father's side, old Walter Creech, out
of Yellow Jenny) that it was about ready to offer him political
preferment; but Mr. Creech himself had not forgotten.  He
glanced bitterly at his brother, Jay, who, happily ignorant of
hatred, that fanged poison which may taint even a brother's heart,
was enthusiastically cleaving spare-ribs on the huge bole of his own
table, singing meanwhile in a rich tenor voice the opening bars of
"The Little Gray Home In The West":
 

    
". . . there are blue
eyes that shine
     
Just
because they meet mine . . ."
 

Mr. Creech looked venomously at Jay's yellow jowls,
the fat throbbing of his jaundiced throat, the crisp singed whorl of
his
hair.

By God, he thought in his anguish of spirit, he might
be taken for a Mexican.

Jay's golden voice neared its triumph, breaking with
delicate restraint, on the last note, into a high sweet falsetto
which he maintained for more than twenty seconds.  All of the
butchers stopped working, several of them, big strong men with
grown-up families dashed a tear out of their eyes.

The great audience was held spellbound.  Not a
soul stirred.  Not even a dog or a horse stirred.  As the
last sweet note melted away in a gossamer tremolo, a silence profound
as that of the tombs, nay, of death itself, betokened the highest
triumph the artist is destined to know upon this earth. 
Somewhere in the crowd a woman sobbed and collapsed in a faint. 
She was immediately carried out by two Boy Scouts who happened to be
present, and who administered first aid to her in the rest-room, one
of them hastily kindling a crackling fire of pine boughs by striking
two flints together, while the other made a tourniquet, and tied
several knots in his handkerchief.  Then pandemonium broke
loose.  Women tore the jewels from their fingers, ropes of
pearls from their necks, chrysanthemums, hyacinths, tulips and
daisies from their expensive corsages, while the fashionably-dressed
men in the near-by stalls kept up a constant bombardment of tomatoes,
lettuces, new potatoes, beef-tallow, pigs' knuckles, fishheads,
clams, loin-chops, and pork-sausages.

Among the stalls of the market, the boarding-house
keepers of Altamont walked with spying bargain-hunting eyes and
inquisitive nose.  They were of various sizes and ages, but they
were all stamped with the print of haggling determination and a
pugnaciousclosure of the mouth.  They pried in among the fish
and vegetables, pinching cabbages, weighing onions, exfoliating
lettuce-heads. You've got to keep your eye on people or they'll skin
you.  And if you leave things to a lazy shiftless nigger she'll
waste more than she cooks.  They looked at one another
hardfaced--Mrs. Barrett of the Grosvenor at Mrs. Neville of Glen
View; Mrs. Ambler of the Colonial at Miss Mamie Featherstone of
Ravencrest; Mrs. Ledbetter of the Belvedere--

"I hear you're full up, Mrs. Coleman," said
she inquiringly.

"O, I'm full up all the time," said Mrs.
Coleman.  "My people are all permanents, I don't want to
fool with transients," she said loftily.

"Well," said Mrs. Ledbetter acidly, "I
could fill my house up at any time with lungers who call themselves
something else, but I won't have them.  I was saying the other
day--"

Mrs. Michalove of Oakwood at Mrs. Jarvis of The
Waverly; Mrs. Cowan of Ridgmont at--The city is splendidly equipped
to meet the demands of the great and steadily growing crowd of
tourists that fill the Mountain Metropolis during the busy months of
June, July, and August.  In addition to eight hotels de luxe of
the highest quality, there were registered at the Board of Trade in
1911 over 250 private hotels, boarding-houses and sanitariums all
catering to the needs of those who come on missions of business,
pleasure, or health.

Stop their baggage at the station.

At this moment Number 3, having finished his route,
stepped softly on to the slime-scummed porch of the house on Valley
Street, rapped gently at the door, and opened it quietly, groping his
way through black miasmic air to the bed in which May Corpening lay. 
She muttered as if drugged as he touched her, turned toward him, and
sleepily awakened, drew him down to her with heavied and sensual
caress, yoked under her big coppery arms.  Tom Cline clumped
greasily up the steps of his residence on Barlett Street, swinging
his tin pail; Ben returned to the paper office with Harry Tugman; and
Eugene, in the back room on Woodson Street, waking suddenly to Gant's
powerful command from the foot of the stairs, turned his face full
into a momentary vision of rose-flushed blue sky and tender blossoms
that drifted slowly earthward.
 
 

15
 

The mountains were his masters.  They rimmed in
life.  They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond
struggle and death.  They were his absolute unity in the midst
of eternal change.  Old haunt-eyed faces glimmered in his
memory.  He thought of Swain's cow, St. Louis, death, himself in
the cradle.  He was the haunter of himself, trying for a moment
to recover what he had been part of. He did not understand change, he
did not understand growth.  He stared at his framed baby picture
in the parlor, and turned away sick with fear and the effort to
touch, retain, grasp himself for only a moment.

And these bodiless phantoms of his life appeared with
terrible precision, with all the mad nearness of a vision.  That
which was five years gone came within the touch of his hand, and he
ceased at that moment to believe in his own existence.  He
expected some one to wake him; he would hear Gant's great voice below
the laden vines, would gaze sleepily from the porch into the rich low
moon, and go obediently to bed.  But still there would be all
that he remembered before that and what if--Cause flowed ceaselessly
into cause.

He heard the ghostly ticking of his life; his
powerful clairvoyance, the wild Scotch gift of Eliza, burned inward
back across the phantom years, plucking out of the ghostly shadows a
million gleams of light--a little station by the rails at dawn, the
road cleft through the pineland seen at twilight, a smoky cabin-light
below the trestles, a boy who ran among the bounding calves, a
wisp-haired slattern, with snuff-sticked mouth, framed in a door,
floury negroes unloading sacks from freight-cars on a shed, the man
who drove the Fair Grounds bus at Saint Louis, a cool-lipped lake at
dawn.

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past
like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and
movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of
a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of
accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him.  His mind
picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience
and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of
them.  So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting
vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a
whirlinglandscape through the windows of the train.

And it was this that awed him--the weird combination
of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with
eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and
the observed seem frozen in time.  There was one moment of
timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not
move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. 
It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless
orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped,
suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute.  Or like
those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making
a dive, or a horse taking a hedge--movement is petrified suddenly in
mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested.  Then,
completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the
pool.  Only, these images that burnt in him existed without
beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. 
Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of
transition.

His sense of unreality came from time and movement,
from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back
into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers.  Thus
life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again.  The boy
among the calves.  Where later?  Where now?