Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (41 page)

He talked with Jannadeau, while his fugitive eyes
roved over the east end of the Square.  Before the shop the
comely matrons of the town came up from the market.  From time
to time they smiled, seeing him, and he bowed sweepingly.  Such
lovely manners.

"The King of England," he observed, "is
only a figurehead.  He doesn't begin to have the power of the
President of the United States."

"His power is severely li-MIT-ed," said
Jannadeau gutturally, "by custom but not by statute.  In
actua-LITY he is still one of the most powerful monarchs in the
world."  His thick black fingers probed carefully into the
viscera of a watch.

"The late King Edward for all his faults,"
said Gant, wetting his thumb, "was a smart man.  This
fellow they've got now is a nonentity and a nincompoop." 
He grinned faintly, craftily, with pleasure at the big words,
glancing slily at the Swiss to see if they had told.

His uneasy eyes followed carefully the stylish
carriage of "Queen" Elizabeth's well clad figure as she
went down by the shop.  She smiled pleasantly, and for a moment
turned her candid stare upon smooth marble slabs of death, carved
lambs and cherubim.  Gant bowed elaborately.

"Good-evening, madam," he said.

She disappeared.  In a moment she came back
decisively and mounted the broad steps.  He watched her approach
with quickened pulses. Twelve years.

"How's the madam?" he said gallantly. 
"Elizabeth, I was just telling Jannadeau you were the most
stylish woman in town."

"Well, that's mighty sweet of you, Mr. Gant,"
she said in her cool poised voice.  "You've always got a
word for every one."

She gave a bright pleasant nod to Jannadeau, who
swung his huge scowling head ponderously around and muttered at her.

"Why, Elizabeth," said Gant, "you
haven't changed an inch in fifteen years.  I don't believe
you're a day older."

She was thirty-eight and pleasantly aware of it.

"Oh, yes," she said laughing.  "You're
only saying that to make me feel good.  I'm no chicken any
more."

She had a pale clear skin, pleasantly freckled,
carrot-colored hair, and a thin mouth live with humor.  Her
figure was trim and strong--no longer young.  She had a great
deal of energy, distinction, and elegance in her manner.

"How are all the girls, Elizabeth?" he
asked kindly.

Her face grew sad.  She began to pull her gloves
off.

"That's what I came to see you about," she
said.  "I lost one of them last week."

"Yes," said Gant gravely, "I was sorry
to hear of that."

"She was the best girl I had," said
Elizabeth.  "I'd have done anything in the world for her. 
We did everything we could," she added.  "I've no
regrets on that score.  I had a doctor and two trained nurses by
her all the time."

She opened her black leather handbag, thrust her
gloves into it, and pulling out a small bluebordered handkerchief,
began to weep quietly.

"Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh," said Gant, shaking
his head.  "Too bad, too bad, too bad.  Come back to
my office," he said.  They went back and sat down. 
Elizabeth dried her eyes.

"What was her name?" he asked.

"We called her Lily--her full name was Lillian
Reed."

"Why, I knew that girl," he exclaimed. 
"I spoke to her not over two weeks ago."

"Yes," said Elizabeth, "she went like
that--one hemorrhage right after another, down here."  She
tapped her abdomen.  "Nobody ever knew she was sick until
last Wednesday.  Friday she was gone."  She wept
again.

"T-t-t-t-t-t," he clucked regretfully. 
"Too bad, too bad.  She was pretty as a picture."

"I couldn't have loved her more, Mr. Gant,"
said Elizabeth, "if she had been my own daughter."

"How old was she?" he asked.

"Twenty-two," said Elizabeth, beginning to
weep again.

"What a pity!  What a pity!" he
agreed.  "Did she have any people?"

"No one who would do anything for her,"
Elizabeth said.  "Her mother died when she was
thirteen--she was born out here on the Beetree Fork--and her father,"
she added indignantly, "is a mean old bastard who's never done
anything for her or any one else.  He didn't even come to her
funeral."

"He will be punished," said Gant darkly.

"As sure as there's a God in heaven,"
Elizabeth agreed, "he'll get what's coming to him in hell. 
The old bastard!" she continued virtuously, "I hope he
rots!"

"You can depend upon it," he said grimly. 
"He will.  Ah, Lord." He was silent a moment while he
shook his head with slow regret.

"A pity, a pity," he muttered.  "So
young."  He had the moment of triumph all men have when
they hear some one has died.  A moment, too, of grisly fear. 
Sixty-four.

"I couldn't have loved her more," said
Elizabeth, "if she'd been one of my own.  A young girl like
that, with all her life before her."

"It's pretty sad when you come to think of it,"
he said.  "By God, it is."

"And she was such a fine girl, Mr. Gant,"
said Elizabeth, weeping softly.  "She had such a bright
future before her.  She had more opportunities than I ever had,
and I suppose you know"--she spoke modestly--"what I've
done."

"Why," he exclaimed, startled, "you're
a rich woman, Elizabeth--damned if I don't believe you are.  You
own property all over town."

"I wouldn't say that," she answered, "but
I've got enough to live on without ever doing another lick of work. 
I've had to work hard all my life.  From now on I don't intend
to turn my hand over."

She regarded him with a shy pleased smile, and
touched a coil of her fine hair with a small competent hand.  He
looked at her attentively, noting with pleasure her firm uncorseted
hips, moulded compactly into her tailored suit, and her cocked comely
legs tapering to graceful feet, shod in neat little slippers of tan.
She was firm, strong, washed, and elegant--a faint scent of lilac
hovered over her: he looked at her candid eyes, lucently gray, and
saw that she was quite a great lady.

"By God, Elizabeth," he said, "you're
a fine-looking woman."

"I've had a good life," she said. 
"I've taken care of myself."

They had always known each other--since first they
met.  They had no excuses, no questions, no replies.  The
world fell away from them.  In the silence they heard the
pulsing slap of the fountain, the high laughter of bawdry in the
Square.  He took a book of models from the desk, and began to
turn its slick pages.  They showed modest blocks of Georgia
marble and Vermont granite.

"I don't want any of those," she said
impatiently.  "I've already made up my mind.  I know
what I want."

He looked up surprised.  "What is it?"

"I want the angel out front."

His face was shocked and unwilling.  He gnawed
the corner of his thin lip.  No one knew how fond he was of the
angel.  Publicly he called it his White Elephant.  He
cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it.  For six
years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the
rain.  It was now brown and fly-specked.  But it had come
from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one
hand.  The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised
clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white
face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy.

In his rages, Gant sometimes directed vast climaxes
of abuse at the angel.  "Fiend out of Hell!" he
roared.  "You have impoverished me, you have ruined me, you
have cursed my declining years, and now you will crush me to death,
fearful, awful, and unnatural monster that you are."

But sometimes when he was drunk he fell weeping on
his knees before it, called it Cynthia, and entreated its love,
forgiveness, and blessing for its sinful but repentant boy. 
There was laughter from the Square.

"What's the matter?" said Elizabeth. 
"Don't you want to sell it?"

"It will cost you a good deal, Elizabeth,"
he said evasively.

"I don't care," she answered, positively. 
"I've got the money. How much do you want?"

He was silent, thinking for a moment of the place
where the angel stood.  He knew he had nothing to cover or
obliterate that place--it left a barren crater in his heart.

"All right," he said.  "You can
have it for what I paid for it--$420."

She took a thick sheaf of banknotes from her purse
and counted the money out for him.  He pushed it back.

"No.  Pay me when the job's finished and it
has been set up.  You want some sort of inscription, don't you?"

"Yes.  There's her full name, age, place of
birth, and so on," she said, giving him a scrawled envelope. 
"I want some poetry, too--something that suits a young girl
taken off like this."

He pulled his tattered little book of inscriptions
from a pigeonhole, and thumbed its pages, reading her a quatrain here
and there.  To each she shook her head.  Finally, he said:

"How's this one, Elizabeth?"  He read:
 

     
She went away in
beauty's flower,
     
Before
her youth was spent;
     
Ere
life and love had lived their hour
     
God called her, and she went.

     
Yet whispers Faith
upon the wind:
     
No
grief to her was given.
     
She
left YOUR love and went to find
     
A greater one in heaven.
 

"Oh, that's lovely--lovely," she said. 
"I want that one."

"Yes," he agreed, "I think that's the
best one."

In the musty cool smell of his little office they got
up.  Her gallant figure reached his shoulder.  She buttoned
her kid gloves over the small pink haunch of her palms and glanced
about her.  His battered sofa filled one wall, the line of his
long body was printed in the leather.  She looked up at him. 
His face was sad and grave.  They remembered.

"It's been a long time, Elizabeth," he
said.

They walked slowly to the front through aisled
marbles. Sentinelled just beyond the wooden doors, the angel leered
vacantly down.  Jannadeau drew his great head turtlewise a
little further into the protective hunch of his burly shoulders. 
They went out on to the porch.

The moon stood already, like its own phantom, in the
clear washed skies of evening.  A little boy with an empty
paper-delivery bag swung lithely by, his freckled nostrils dilating
pleasantly with hunger and the fancied smell of supper.  He
passed, and for a moment, as they stood at the porch edge, all life
seemed frozen in a picture: the firemen and Fagg Sluder had seen
Gant, whispered, and were now looking toward him; a policeman, at the
high side-porch of the Police Court, leaned on the rail and stared;
at the near edge of the central grass-plot below the fountain, a
farmer bent for water at a bubbling jet, rose dripping, and stared;
from the Tax Collector's office, City Hall, upstairs, Yancey, huge,
meaty, shirtsleeved, stared.  And in that second the slow pulse
of the fountain was suspended, life was held, like an arrested
gesture, in photographic abeyance, and Gant felt himself alone move
deathward in a world of seemings as, in 1910, a man might find
himself again in a picture taken on the grounds of the Chicago Fair,
when he was thirty and his mustache black, and, noting the bustled
ladies and the derbied men fixed in the second's pullulation,
remember the dead instant, seek beyond the borders for what was there
(he knew); or as a veteran who finds himself upon his elbow near
Ulysses Grant, before the march, in pictures of the Civil War, and
sees a dead man on a horse; or I should say, like some completed Don,
who finds himself again before a tent in Scotland in his youth, and
notes a cricket-bat long lost and long forgotten, the face of a poet
who has died, and young men and the tutor as they looked that Long
Vacation when they read nine hours a day for "Greats."

Where now?  Where after?  Where then?
 
 

20
 

Gant, during these years in which Helen and Luke, the
two for whom he felt the deepest affection, were absent a large part
of the time, lived a splintered existence at home and at Eliza's. 
He feared and hated a lonely life, but habit was deeply rooted in
him, and he was unwilling to exchange the well-used comfort of his
own home for the bald wintriness of Eliza's.  She did not want
him. She fed him willingly enough, but his tirades and his nightly
sojourns, both longer and more frequent now that his daughter was
absent, annoyed her more than they ever had before.

"You have a place of your own," she cried
fretfully.  "Why don't you stay in it?  I don't want
you around making trouble."

"Send him on," he moaned bitterly. 
"Send him on.  Over the stones rattle his bones, he's only
a beggar that nobody owns.  Ah, Lord! The old drayhorse has had
its day.  Its race is run.  Kick him out: the old cripple
can no longer provide them with victuals, and they will throw him on
the junkheap, unnatural and degenerate monsters  that they are."