Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (59 page)

"I'm getting them lined up, brother," she
would say with cheerful confidence.  "Things are coming my
way.  J. D. came in to-day and said:  'Veve--you're the
only woman in the world that can put this thing across.  Go to
it, little girl.  There's a fortune in it foryou.'" 
And so on.

Her conversation, Eugene thought, was not unlike
Brother Steve's.

But their affection and loyalty for one another was
beautiful.  Its unaccustomed faith, its abiding tranquillity,
puzzled and disturbed the Gants.  They were touched indefinably,
a little annoyed, because of it.

The Bartons came to Woodson Street two weeks before
the wedding. Within three days after their arrival, Helen and old
lady Barton were at odds.  It was inevitable.  The heat of
the girl's first affection for Barton's family wore off very quickly:
her possessive instinct asserted itself--she would halve no one's
love, she would share with no other a place in the heart.  She
would own, she would possess completely.  She would be generous,
but she would be mistress.  She would give.  It was the law
of her nature.

She began immediately, by force of this essential
stress, to make out a case against the old woman.

Mrs. Barton, too, felt the extent of her loss. 
She wanted to be sure that Helen realized the extent of her
acquisition of one of the latter-day saints.

Rocking ponderously in the dark on Gant's veranda,
the old woman would say:

"You are get-ting a good boy, Hel-en." 
She would wag her powerful head from side to side, pugnaciously
emphatic.  "Though I do say it myself, you are get-ting one
good boy, Hel-en.  A bet-ter boy than Hugh does-ent live."

"Oh, I don't know!" said Helen, annoyed. 
"I don't think it's such a bad bargain for him either, you
know.  I think pretty well of myself, too."  And she
would laugh, huskily, heartily, trying in laughter to conceal her
resentment, but visibly, to every eye but Mrs. Barton's, angered.

A moment later, on some pretext, she would be back
into the house, where, with a face contorted by her rising hysteria,
to Luke, Eugene, or any sympathetic audience, she would burst out:

"You heard that, didn't you?  You heard
that?  You see what I've got to put up with, don't you?  Do
you see?  Do you blame me for not wanting that damned old woman
around?  Do you?  You see how she wants to run things,
don't you?  Do you see how she rubs it into me whenever she gets
a chance?  She can't bear to give him up.  Of course not! 
He's her meal-ticket.  They've bled him white.  Why, even
now, if it came to a question of choosing between us--" her face
worked strongly.  She could not continue.  In a moment she
quieted herself, and said decisively:  "I suppose you know
now why we're going to live away from them.  You see, don't
you?  Do you blame me?"

"No'm," said Eugene, obedient after
pumping.

"It's a d-d-damn shame!" said Luke loyally.

At this moment Mrs. Barton, kindly but authoritative,
called from the veranda:

"Hel-en!  Where are you, Hel-en?"

"O gotohell.  Gotohell!" said Helen,
in a comic undertone.

"Yes?  What is it?" she called out
sharply.

You see, don't you?

She was married at Dixieland, because she was having
a big wedding. She knew a great many people.

As her wedding-day approached, her suppressed
hysteria mounted. Her sense of decorum grew militant: she attacked
Eliza bitterly for keeping certain dubious people in the house.

"Mama, in heaven's name!  What do you mean
by allowing such goings-on right in the face of Hugh and his people? 
What do you suppose they think of it?  Have you no respect for
my feelings?  Good heavens, are you going to have the house full
of chippies on the night of my wedding?"  Her voice was
high and cracked.  She almost wept.

"Why, child!" said Eliza, with troubled
face.  "What do you mean? I've never noticed anything."

"Are you blind!  Every one's talking about
it!  They're practically living together!"  This last
was a reference to a condition existing between a dissipated and
alcoholic young man and a darkly handsome young woman, slightly
tubercular.

To Eugene was assigned the task of digging this
couple out of their burrow.  He waited sternly outside the
girl's room, watching the shadow dance at the door crack.  At
the end of the sixth hour, the besieged surrendered--the man came
out.  The boy--pallid, but proud of his trust--told the
house-defiler that he must go.  The young man agreed with
cheerful alcoholism.  He went at once.

Mrs. Pert was saved in the house-cleaning.

"After all," said Helen, "what do we
know about her?  They can say what they like about Fatty. 
I like her."
 
 

Fems, flowers, potted plants, presents and guests
arriving.  The long nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. 
The packed crowd. The triumphant booming of "The Wedding March."

A flashlight:  Hugh Barton and his bride limply
astare?frightened; Gant, Ben, Luke, and Eugene, widely, sheepishly
agrin; Eliza, high-sorrowful and sad; Mrs. Selborne and a smile of
subtle mystery; the pert flower-girls; Pearl Hines' happy laughter.

When it was over, Eliza and her daughter hung in each
other's arms, weeping.

Eliza repeated over and over, from guest to guest:
 

    
"A son is a son till he
gets him a wife,
     
But
a daughter's a daughter all the days of her life."
 

She was comforted.

They escaped at length, wilted, from the thronging
press of well-wishing guests.  White-faced, scared witless, Mr.
and Mrs. Hugh Barton got into a closed car.  It was done! 
They would spend the night at the Battery Hill.  Ben had engaged
the wedding-suite.  To-morrow, a honeymoon to Niagara.

Before they went, the girl kissed Eugene with
something of the old affection.

"I'll see you in the Fall, honey.  Come
over as soon as you're settled."

For Hugh Barton was beginning life with his bride in
a new place. He was going to the capital of the State.  And it
had already been determined, chiefly by Gant, that Eugene was going
to the State University.
 
 

But Hugh and Helen did not go honeymooning the next
morning, as they had planned.  During the night, as she lay at
Dixieland, old Mrs. Barton was taken with a violent, a retching
sickness.  For once, her massive digestive mechanism failed to
meet the heavy demands she had put upon it during the pre-nuptial
banqueting.  She came near death.

Hugh and Helen returned abruptly next morning to a
scene of dismal tinsellings and jaded lilies.  Helen hurled her
vitality into the sick woman's care; dominant, furious,
all-mastering, she blew back her life into her.  Within three
days, Mrs. Barton was out of danger; but her complete recovery was
slow, ugly, and painful.  As the days lengthened out wearily,
the girl became more and more bitter over her thwarted honeymoon. 
Rushing out of the sick-room, she would enter Eliza's kitchen with
writhen face, unable to control her anger:

"That damned old woman!  Sometimes I
believe she did it on purpose. My God, am I to get no happiness from
life?  Will they never leave me alone?  Urr-p! 
Urr-p!"--Her rough bacchic smile played loosely over her large
unhappy face.  "Mama, in God's name where does it all come
from?" she said, grinning tearfully.  "I do nothing
but mop up after her.  Will you please tell me how long it's
going to last?"

Eliza laughed slyly, passing her finger under her
broad nosewing.

"Why, child!" she said.  "What in
the world!  I've never seen the like!  She must have saved
up for the last six months."

"Yes, sir!" said Helen, looking vaguely
away, with a profane smile playing across her mouth, "I'd just
like to know where the hell it all comes from.  I've had
everything else," she said, with a rough angry laugh, "I'm
expecting one of her kidneys at any minute."

"Whew-w!" cried Eliza, shaken with
laughter.

"Hel-en!  Oh Hel'en!"  Mrs.
Barton's voice came feebly in to them.

"O gotohell!" said the girl, sotto-voce. 
"Urr-p!  Urr-p!"  She burst suddenly into tears: 
"Is it going to be like this always!  I sometimes believe
the judgment of God is against us all.  Papa was right."

"Pshaw!" said Eliza, wetting her fingers,
and threading a needle before the light.  "I'd go on and
pay no more attention to her. There's nothing wrong with her. 
It's all imagination!"  It was Eliza's rooted conviction
that most human ills, except her own, were "all imagination."

"Hel-en!"

"All right!  I'm coming!" the girl
cried cheerfully, turning an angry grin on Eliza as she went. 
It was funny.  It was ugly.  It was terrible.
 
 

It seemed, in fact, that papa was right, and that the
chief celestial Cloud-Pusher, the often hymned, whom our bitter
moderns have sometimes called "the ancient Jester"--had
turned his frown upon their fortunes.

It began to rain--rain incessant, spouting,
torrential rain, fell among the reeking hills, leaving grass and
foliage drowned upon the slopes, starting the liquid avalanche of
earth upon a settlement, glutting lean rocky mountain-streams to a
foaming welter of yellow flood.  It mined the yellow banks away
with unheard droppings; it caved in hillsides; it drank the steep
banked earth away below the rails, leaving them strung to their
aerial ties across a gutted canyon.

There was a flood in Altamont.  It swept down in
a converging width from the hills, filling the little river, and
foaming beyond its banks in a wide waste Mississippi.  It looted
the bottomlands of the river; it floated iron and wooden bridges from
their piers as it might float a leaf; it brought ruin to the railway
flats and all who dwelt therein.

The town was cut off from every communication with
the world.  At the end of the third week, as the waters slid
back into their channels, Hugh Barton and his bride, crouched grimly
in the great pit of the Buick, rode out through flooded roads,
crawled desperately over ruined trestles, daring the irresistible
wrath of water to achieve their wilted anti-climactic honeymoon.
 
 

"He will go where I send him or not at all,"
Gant spoke his final word, not loudly.

Thus, it was decided that Eugene must go to the State
University.

Eugene did not want to go to the State University.

For two years he had romanced with Margaret Leonard
about his future education.  It was proposed that, in view of
his youth, he should attend Vanderbilt (or Virginia) for two years,
go to Harvard for two years more, and then, having arrived by easy
stages at Paradise, "top things off" with a year or two at
Oxford.

"Then," said John Dorsey Leonard, who
talked enchantingly on the subject, between mouthfuls of clabber,
"then, my sonny, a man may begin to say he's really
'cultsherd.'  After that, of course," he continued with a
spacious carelessness, "he may travel for a year or so."

But the Leonards were not yet ready to part with him.

"You're too young, boy," said Margaret
Leonard.  "Can't you persuade your father to wait another
year?  You're only a child in years, Eugene.  You have all
the time in the world."  Her eyes darkened as she talked.

Gant would not be persuaded.

"He's old enough," he said.  "When
I was his age I had been earning my living for years.  I'm
getting old.  I won't be here much longer.  I want him to
begin to make a name for himself before I die."

He refused stubbornly to consider any postponement. 
In his youngest son he saw the last hope of his name's survival in
laurels--in the political laurels he so valued.  He wanted his
son to be a great and far-seeing statesman and a member of the
Republican or Democratic party.  His choice of a university was
therefore a measure of political expediency, founded upon the
judgment of his legal and political friends.

"He's ready to go," said Gant, "and
he's going to the State University, and nowhere else.  He'll be
given as good an education there as he can get anywhere. 
Furthermore, he will make friends there who will stand by him the
rest of his life."  He turned upon his son a glance of
bitter reproach.  "There are very few boys who have had
your chance," said he, "and you ought to be grateful
instead of turning up your nose at it.  Mark my words, you'll
live to see the day when you'll thank me for sending you there. 
Now, I've given you my last word: you'll go where I send you or
you'll go nowhere at all."
 
 

PART THREE

28
 

Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was
sent away to the university.  He was, at the time, over six feet
and three inches tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds.  He had
been sick very little in his life, but his rapid growth had eaten
sharply at his strength: he was full of a wild energy of mind and
body that devoured him and left him exhausted.  He tired very
quickly.

He was a child when he went away: he was a child who
had looked much on pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the
Ideal. Walled up in his great city of visions, his tongue had learned
to mock, his lip to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn
no grooving in the secret life.  Again and again he had been
bogged in the gray slough of factuality.  His cruel eyes had
missed the meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter heart had
sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at
the glow of his imagination.  He was not a child when he
reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and
dreamer that governed his belief.  He belonged, perhaps, to an
older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. 
For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand
adventuring.  He believed in brave heroic lives.  He
believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and gentleness he had
little known.  He believed in beauty and in order, and that he
would wreak out their mighty forms upon the distressful chaos of his
life.  He believed in love, and in the goodness and glory of
women.  He believed in valiance, and he hoped that, like
Socrates, he would do nothing mean or common in the hour of danger. 
He exulted in his youth, and he believed that he could never die.