Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (51 page)

"Besides," said George Graves, "a man
ought to go anyway. Honesty's the best policy."

Across the street, on the second floor of a small
brick three-story building that housed several members of the legal,
medical, surgical, and dental professions, Dr. H. M. Smathers pumped
vigorously with his right foot, took a wad of cotton from his
assistant, Miss Lola Bruce, and thrusting it securely into the jaw of
the unseen patient, bent his fashionable bald head intently.  A
tiny breeze blew back the thin curtains, and revealed him,
white-jacketed, competent, drill in hand.

"Do you feel that?" he said tenderly.

"Wrogd gdo gurk!"

"Spit!"  With thee conversing, I
forget all time.

"I suppose," said George Graves
thoughtfully, "the gold they use in people's teeth is worth a
lot of money."

"Yes," said Eugene, finding the idea
attractive, "if only one person in ten has gold fillings that
would be ten million in the United States alone.  You can figure
on five dollars' worth each, can't you?"

"Easy!" said George Graves.  "More
than that."  He brooded lusciously a moment.  "That's
a lot of money," he said.

In the office of the Rogers-Malone Undertaking
Establishment the painful family of death was assembled, "Horse"
Hines, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his feet thrust out on the
broad window-ledge, chatted lazily with Mr. C. M. Powell, the suave
silent partner.  How sleep the brave, who sink to rest. 
Forget not yet.

"There's good money in undertaking," said
George Graves.  "Mr. Powell's well off."

Eugene's eyes were glued on the lantern face of
"Horse" Hines.  He beat the air with a convulsive arm,
and sank his fingers in his throat.

"What's the matter?" cried George Graves.

"They shall not bury me alive," he said.

"You can't tell," George Graves said
gloomily.  "It's been known to happen.  They've dug
them up later and found them turned over on their faces."

Eugene shuddered.  "I think," he
suggested painfully, "they're supposed to take out your insides
when they embalm you."

"Yes," said George Graves more hopefully,
"and that stuff they use would kill you anyway.  They pump
you full of it."

With shrunken heart, Eugene considered.  The
ghost of old fear, that had been laid for years, walked forth to
haunt him.

In his old fantasies of death he had watched his
living burial, had foreseen his waking life-in-death, his slow,
frustrated efforts to push away the smothering flood of earth until,
as a drowning swimmer claws the air, his mute and stiffened fingers
thrust from the ground a call for hands.

Fascinated, they stared through screen-doors down the
dark central corridor, flanked by jars of weeping ferns.  A
sweet funereal odor of carnations and cedar-wood floated on the cool
heavy air.  Dimly, beyond a central partition, they saw a heavy
casket, on a wheeled trestle, with rich silver handles and velvet
coverings.  The thick light faded there in dark.

"They're laid out in the room behind," said
George Graves, lowering his voice.

To rot away into a flower, to melt into a tree with
the friendless bodies of unburied men.

At this moment, having given to misery all he had (a
tear), the very Reverend Father James O'Haley, S.J., among the
faithless faithful only he, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, emerged
plumply from the chapel, walked up the soft aisle rug with brisk
short- legged strides, and came out into the light.  His pale
blue eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, his plump uncreased face set
firmly in a smile of quiet benevolence; he covered himself with a
small well-kept hat of black velvet, and set off toward the avenue.
Eugene shrank back gently as the little man walked past him: that
small priestly figure in black bore on him the awful accolade of his
great Mistress, that smooth face had heard the unutterable, seen the
unknowable.  In this remote outpost of the mighty Church, he was
the standard-bearer of the one true faith, the consecrate flesh of
God.

"They don't get any pay," said George
Graves sorrowfully.

"How do they live, then?" Eugene asked.

"Don't you worry!" said George Graves, with
a knowing smile.

"They get all that's coming to them.  He
doesn't seem to be starving, does he?"

"No," said Eugene, "he doesn't."

"He lives on the fat of the land," said
George Graves.  "Wine at every meal.  There are some
rich Catholics in this town."

"Yes," said Eugene.  "Frank
Moriarty's got a pot full of money that he made selling licker."

"Don't let them hear you," said George
Graves, with a surly laugh. "They've got a family tree and a
coat of arms already."

"A beer-bottle rampant on a field of limburger
cheese, gules," said Eugene.

"They're trying to get the Princess Madeleine
into Society," said George Graves.

"Hell fire!" Eugene cried, grinning. 
"Let's let her in, if that's all she wants.  We belong to
the Younger Set, don't we?"

"You may," said George Graves, reeling with
laughter, "but I don't. I wouldn't be caught dead with the
little pimps."

"Mr. Eugene Gant was the host last night at a
hot wienie roast given to members of the local Younger Set at
Dixieland, the beautiful old ancestral mansion of his mother, Mrs.
Eliza Gant."

George Graves staggered.  "You oughtn't to
say that, 'Gene," he gasped.  He shook his head
reproachfully.  "Your mother's a fine woman."

"During the course of the evening, the Honorable
George Graves, the talented scion of one of our oldest and wealthiest
families, the Chesterfield Graveses, ($10 a week and up), rendered a
few appropriate selections on the jews-harp."

Pausing deliberately, George Graves wiped his
streaming eyes, and blew his nose.  In the windows of Bain's
millinery store, a waxen nymph bore a confection of rakish plumes
upon her false tresses, and extended her simpering fingers in elegant
counterpoise.  Hats For Milady.  O that those lips had
language.

At this moment, with a smooth friction of trotting
rumps, the death-wagon of Rogers-Malone turned swiftly in from the
avenue, and wheeled by on ringing hoofs.  They turned curiously
and watched it draw up to the curb.

"Another Redskin bit the dust," said George
Graves.

Come, delicate death, serenely arriving, arriving.

"Horse" Hines came out quickly on long
flapping legs, and opened the doors behind.  In another moment,
with the help of the two men on the driver's seat, he had lowered the
long wicker basket gently, and vanished, quietly, gravely, into the
fragrant gloom of his establishment.

As Eugene watched, the old fatality of place
returned.  Each day, he thought, we pass the spot where some day
we must die; or shall I, too, ride dead to some mean building yet
unknown?  Shall this bright clay, the hill-bound, die in
lodgings yet unbuilt?  Shall these eyes, drenched with visions
yet unseen, stored with the viscous and interminable seas at dawn,
with the sad comfort of unfulfilled Arcadias, seal up their cold dead
dreams upon a tick, as this, in time, in some hot village of the
plains?

He caught and fixed the instant.  A telegraph
messenger wheeled vigorously in from the avenue with pumping feet,
curved widely into the alley at his right, jerking his wheel up
sharply as he took the curb and coasted down to the delivery boy's
entrance.  And post o'er land and ocean without rest. 
Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Descending the dark stairs of the Medical Building
slowly, Mrs. Thomas Hewitt, the comely wife of the prominent attorney
(of Arthur, Hewitt, and Grey), turned out into the light, and
advanced slowly toward the avenue.  She was greeted with
flourishing gestures of the hat by Henry T. Merriman (Merriman and
Merriman), and Judge Robert C. Allan, professional colleagues of her
husband. She smiled and shot each quickly with a glance. 
Pleasant is this flesh.  When she had passed they looked after
her a moment.  Then they continued their discussion of the
courts.

On the third floor of the First National Bank
building on the right hand corner, Fergus Paston, fifty-six, a thin
lecherous mouth between iron-gray dundrearies, leaned his cocked leg
upon his open window, and followed the movements of Miss Bernie
Powers, twenty-two, crossing the street.  Even in our ashes live
their wonted fires.

On the opposite corner, Mrs. Roland Rawls, whose
husband was manager of the Peerless Pulp Company (Plant No. 3), and
whose father owned it, emerged from the rich seclusion of Arthur N.
Wright, jeweller.  She clasped her silver mesh-bag and stepped
into her attendant Packard.  She was a tall black-haired woman
of thirty-three with a good figure: her face was dull, flat, and
Mid-western.

"She's the one with the money," said George
Graves.  "He hasn't a damn thing.  It's all in her
name.  She wants to be an opera singer."

"Can she sing?"

"Not worth a damn," said George Graves. 
"I've heard her.  There's your chance, 'Gene.  She's
got a daughter about your age."

"What does she do?" said Eugene.

"She wants to be an actress," said George
Graves, laughing throatily.

"You have to work too damn hard for your money,"
said Eugene.

They had reached the corner by the Bank, and now
halted, indecisively, looking up the cool gulch of afternoon. 
The street buzzed with a light gay swarm of idlers: the faces of the
virgins bloomed in and out like petals on a bough.  Advancing
upon him, an inch to the second, Eugene saw, ten feet away, the heavy
paralyzed body of old Mr. Avery.  He was a very great scholar,
stone-deaf, and seventy-eight years old.  He lived alone in a
room above the Public Library.  He had neither friends nor
connections.  He was a myth.

"Oh, my God!" said Eugene.  "Here
he comes!"

It was too late for escape.

Gasping a welcome, Mr. Avery bore down on him, with a
violent shuffle of his feet and a palsied tattoo of his heavy stick
which brought him over the intervening three yards in forty seconds.

"Well, young fellow," he panted, "how's
Latin?"

"Fine," Eugene screamed into his pink ear.

"Poeta nascitur, non fit," said Mr. Avery,
and went off into a silent wheeze of laughter which brought on a fit
of coughing strangulation.  His eyes bulged, his tender pink
skin grew crimson, he roared his terror out in a phlegmy rattle,
while his goose-white hand trembled frantically for his
handkerchief.  A crowd gathered. Eugene quickly drew a dirty
handkerchief from the old man's pocket, and thrust it into his
hands.  He tore up from his convulsed organs a rotting mass, and
panted rapidly for breath.  The crowd dispersed somewhat
dejectedly.

George Graves grinned darkly.  "That's too
bad," he said.  "You oughtn't to laugh, 'Gene." 
He turned away, gurgling.

"Can you conjugate?" gasped Mr. Avery. 
"Here's the way I learned:
 

    
"Amo, amas,
     
I love a lass.
     
Amat,
     
He loves her, too."
 

Quivering with tremors of laughter, he launched
himself again. Because he could not leave them, save by the inch,
they moved off several yards to the curb.  Grow old along with
me!

"That's a damn shame," said George Graves,
looking after him and shaking his head.  "Where's he
going?"

"To supper," said Eugene.

"To supper!" said George Graves. 
"It's only four o'clock.  Where does he eat?"

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.

"At the Uneeda," said Eugene, beginning to
choke, "It takes him two hours to get there."

"Does he go every day?" said George Graves,
beginning to laugh.

"Three times a day," Eugene screamed. 
"He spends all morning going to dinner, and all afternoon going
to supper."

A whisper of laughter came from their weary jaws. 
They sighed like sedge.

At this moment, dodging briskly through the crowd,
with a loud and cheerful word for every one, Mr. Joseph Bailey,
secretary of the Altamont Chamber of Commerce, short, broad, and
ruddy, came up by them with a hearty gesture of the hand:

"Hello, boys!" he cried.  "How're
they going?"  But before either of them could answer, he
had passed on, with an encouraging shake of his head, and a deep
applauding "THAT'S right."

"WHAT'S right?" said Eugene.

But before George Graves could answer, the great lung
specialist, Dr. Fairfax Grinder, scion of one of the oldest and
proudest families in Virginia, drove in viciously from Church Street,
with his sinewy length of six feet and eight inches coiled tensely in
the deep pit of his big Buick roadster.  Cursing generally the
whole crawling itch of Confederate and Yankee postwar rabbledom, with
a few special parentheses for Jews and niggers, he drove full tilt at
the short plump figure of Joe Zamschnick, men's furnishings ("Just
a Whisper Off The Square").