Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (76 page)

He got up, and reeled out
of the alien presences of light and warmth in the kitchen; he went
out into the hall where a dim light burned and the high walls gave
back their grave-damp chill.  This, he thought, is the house.

He sat down upon the hard
mission settle, and listened to the cold drip of silence.  This
is the house in which I have been an exile. There is a stranger in
the house, and there's a stranger in me.

O house of Admetus, in
whom (although I was a god) I have endured so many things.  Now,
house, I am not afraid.  No ghost need fear come by me.  If
there's a door in silence, let it open.  My silence can be
greater than your own.  And you who are in me, and who I am,
come forth beyond this quiet shell of flesh that makes no posture to
deny you.  There is none to look at us: O come, my brother and
my lord, with unbent face.  If I had 40,000 years, I should give
all but the ninety last to silence.  I should grow to the earth
like a hill or a rock.  Unweave the fabric of nights and days;
unwind my life back to my birth; subtract me into nakedness again,
and build me back with all the sums I have not counted.  Or let
me look upon the living face of darkness; let me hear the terrible
sentence of your voice.

There was nothing but the
living silence of the house: no doors were opened.
 
 

Presently, he got up and
left the house.  He wore no hat or coat; he could not find
them.  The night was blanketed in a thick steam of mist: sounds
came faintly and cheerfully.  Already the earth was full of
Christmas.  He remembered that he had bought no gifts.  He
had a few dollars in his pocket; before the shops closed he must get
presents for the family.  Bareheaded he set off for the town. He
knew that he was drunk and that he staggered; but he believed that
with care and control he could hide his state from any one who saw
him.  He straddled the line that ran down the middle of the
concrete sidewalk, keeping his eyes fixed on it and coming back to it
quickly when he lurched away from it.  When he got into the town
the streets were thronged with late shoppers.  An air of
completion was on everything.  The people were streaming home to
Christmas. He plunged down from the Square into the narrow avenue,
going in among the staring passersby.  He kept his eye hotly on
the line before him.  He did not know where to go.  He did
not know what to buy.

As he reached the
entrance to Wood's pharmacy, a shout of laughter went up from the
lounging beaux.  The next instant he was staring into the
friendly grinning faces of Julius Arthur and Van Yeats.

"Where the hell do
you think you're going?" said Julius Arthur.

He tried to explain; a
thick jargon broke from his lips.

"He's cock-eyed
drunk," said Van Yeats.

"You look out for
him, Van," said Julius.  "Get him in a doorway, so
none of his folks will see him.  I'll get the car."

Van Yeats propped him
carefully against the wall; Julius Arthur ran swiftly into Church
Street, and drew up in a moment at the curb. Eugene had a vast
inclination to slump carelessly upon the nearest support.  He
placed his arms around their shoulders and collapsed. They wedged him
between them on the front seat; somewhere bells were ringing.

"Ding-dong!" he
said, very cheerfully.  "Cris-muss!"

They answered with a wild
yell of laughter.

The house was still empty
when they came to it.  They got him out of the car, and
staggered up the steps with him.  He was sorry enough that their
fellowship was broken.

"Where's your room,
'Gene?" said Julius Arthur, panting, as they entered the hall.

"This one's as good
as any," said Van Yeats.

The door of the front
bed-room, opposite the parlor, was open. They took him in and put him
on the bed.

"Let's take off his
shoes," said Julius Arthur.  They unlaced them and pulled
them off.

"Is there anything
else you want, son?" said Julius.

He tried to tell them to
undress him, put him below the covers, and close the door, in order
to conceal his defection from his family, but he had lost the power
of speech.  After looking and grinning at him for a moment, they
went out without closing the door.
 
 

When they had gone he lay
upon the bed, unable to move.  He had no sense of time, but his
mind worked very clearly.  He knew that he should rise, fasten
the door, and undress.  But he was paralyzed.

Presently the Gants came
home.  Eliza alone was still in town, pondering over gifts. 
It was after eleven o'clock.  Gant, his daughter, and his two
sons came into the room and stared at him. When they spoke to him, he
burned helplessly.

"Speak! 
Speak!" yelled Luke, rushing at him and choking him vigorously. 
"Are you dumb, idiot?"

I shall remember that, he
thought.

"Have you no pride? 
Have you no honor?  Has it come to this?" the sailor roared
dramatically, striding around the room.

Doesn't he think he's
hell, though? Eugene thought.  He could not fashion words, but
he could make sounds, ironically, in the rhythm of his brother's
moralizing.  "Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh!  Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh!
Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh!" he said, with accurate mimicry.  Helen,
loosening his collar, bent over him laughing.  Ben grinned
swiftly under a cleft scowl.

Have you no this? 
Have you no that?  Have you no this?  Have you no that?--he
was cradled in their rhythm.  No, ma'am.  We've run out of
honor to-day, but we have a nice fresh lot of self-respect.

"Ah, be quiet,"
Ben muttered.  "No one's dead, you know."

"Go heat some
water," said Gant professionally, "he's got to get it off
his stomach."  He no longer seemed old.  His life in a
marvellous instant came from its wasting shadow; it took on a hale
sinew of health and action.

"Save the
fireworks," said Helen to Luke, as she left the room. "Close
the door.  For heaven's sake, try to keep it from mama, if you
can."

This is a great moral
issue, thought Eugene.  He began to feel sick.

Helen returned in a very
few minutes with a kettle of hot water, a glass, and a box of soda. 
Gant fed him the solution mercilessly until he began to vomit. 
At the summit of his convulsion Eliza appeared.  He lifted his
sick head dumbly from the bowl, and saw her white face at the door,
and her weak brown eyes, that could take on so much sharpness and
sparkle when her suspicion was awakened.

"Hah?  Huh? 
What is it?" said Eliza.

But she knew, of course,
instantly, what it was.

"What say?" she
asked sharply.  No one had said anything.  He grinned
feebly at her, tickled, above his nausea and grief, at the palpable
assumption of blind innocence which always heralded her discoveries. 
Seeing her thus, they all laughed.

"Oh, my Lord!"
said Helen.  "Here she is.  We were hoping you
wouldn't get here till it was over.  Come and look at your
Baby," she said, with a good-humored snicker, keeping his head
comfortably supported on the palm of her hand.

"How do you feel
now, son?" Gant asked kindly.

"Better," he
mumbled, discovering, with some elation, that his vocal paralysis was
not permanent.

"Well, you see!"
Helen began, kindly enough, but with a brooding satisfaction. 
"It only goes to show we're all alike.  We all like it. 
It's in our blood."

"That awful curse!"
Eliza said.  "I had hoped that I might have one son who
might escape it.  It seems," she said, bursting into tears,
"as if a Judgment were on us.  The sins of the fathers--"

"Oh! for heaven's
sake!" Helen cried angrily.  "Stop it!  It's not
going to kill him: he'll learn a lesson from it."

Gant gnawed his thin lip,
and wetted his great thumb in the old manner.

"You might know,"
he said, "that I'd get the blame for it.  Yes?if one of
them broke a leg it would be the same."

"There's one thing
sure!" said Eliza.  "None of them ever got it from my
side of the house.  Say what you will, his grandfather, Major
Pentland, never in his life allowed a drop in his house."

"Major Pentland be
damned!" said Gant.  "If you'd depended on him for
anything you'd have gone hungry."

Certainly, thought
Eugene, you'd have gone thirsty.

"Forget it!"
said Helen.  "It's Christmas.  Let's try to have a
little peace and quiet once a year."

When they had left him,
the boy tried to picture them lulled in the dulcet tranquillity they
so often invoked.  Its effects, he thought, would be more
disastrous than any amount of warfare.

In the darkness,
everything around and within him swam hideously. But presently he
slid down into a pit of distressed sleep.

Every one had agreed on a
studious forgiveness.  They stepped with obtrusive care around
his fault, filled pleasantly with Christmas and mercy.  Ben
scowled at him quite naturally, Helen grinned and prodded him, Eliza
and Luke surrendered themselves to sweetness, sorrow, and silence. 
Their forgiveness made a loud noise in his ears.

During the morning his
father asked him to come for a walk.  Gant was embarrassed and
hang-dog; a duty of gentle admonishment devolved upon him--he had
been counselled to it by Helen and Eliza. Now, no man in his time
could carry on in the big, Bow-wow style better than Gant, but none
was less fitted to scatter the blossoms of sweetness and light. 
His wrath was sudden, his invective sprang from the moment, but he
had for this occasion no thunder-bolts in his quiver, and no relish
for the business before him.  He had a feeling of personal
guilt; he felt like a magistrate fining for intoxication a culprit
with whom he has been on a spree the night before. 
Besides--what if the Bacchic strain in him had been passed on to his
son?

They walked on in silence
across the Square, by the rimmed fountain.  Gant cleared his
throat nervously several times.

"Son," said he
presently, "I hope you'll take last night as a warning.  It
would be a terrible thing if you let whiskey get the best of you. 
I'm not going to speak harshly to you about it: I hope you'll learn a
lesson by it.  You had better be dead than become a drunkard."

There!  He was glad
it was over.

"I will!"
Eugene said.  He was filled with gratitude and relief. How good
every one was.  He wanted to make passionate avowals, great
promises.  He tried to speak.  But he couldn't.  There
was too much to be said.

But they had their
Christmas, beginning thus with parental advice and continuing through
all the acts of contrition, love, and decorum.  They put on,
over their savage lives, the raiment of society, going diligently
through the forms and conventions, and thinking, "now, we are
like all other families"; but they were timid and shy and stiff,
like rustics dressed in evening-clothes.

But they could not keep
silence.  They were not ungenerous or mean: they were simply not
bred to any restraint.  Helen veered in the wind of hysteria,
the strong uncertain tides of her temperament. At times when, before
her own fire, her vitality sank, and she heard the long howl of the
wind outside, she almost hated Eugene.

"It's ridiculous!"
she said to Luke.  "His behaving like this. He's only a
kid--he's had everything, we've had nothing!  You see what it's
come to, don't you?"

"His college
education has ruined him," said the sailor, not unhappy that his
candle might burn more brightly in a naughty
world.

"Why don't you speak
to her?" she said irritably.  "She may listen to
you--she won't to me!  Tell her so!  You've seen how she's
rubbed it in to poor old papa, haven't you?  Do you think that
old man--sick as he is--is to blame?  'Gene's not a Gant,
anyway.  He takes after her side of the house.  He's
queer--like all of them!  WE'RE Gants!" she said with a
bitter emphasis.

"There was always
some excuse for papa," said the sailor.  "He's had a
lot to put up with."  All his convictions in family affairs
had been previously signed with her approval.

"I wish you'd tell
her that.  With all his moping into books, he's no better than
we are.  If he thinks he's going to lord it over me, he's
mistaken."

"I'd like to see him
try it when I'm around," said Luke grimly.

The boy was doing a
multiple penance--he had committed his first great wrong in being at
once so remote from them and so near to them.  His present
trouble was aggravated by the cross-complication of Eliza's thrusts
at his father, and the latent but constantly awakening antagonism of
mother and daughter.  In addition, he bore directly Eliza's
nagging and carping attack.  All this he was prepared for--it
was the weather of his mother's nature (she was as fond of him as of
any of them, he thought), and the hostility of Helen and Luke was
something implacable, unconscious, fundamental, that grew out of the
structure of their lives.  He was of them, he was recognizably
marked, but he was not with them, nor like them. He had been baffled
for years by the passionate enigma of their dislike--their tenders of
warmth and affection, when they came, were strange to him: he
accepted them gratefully and with a surprise he did not wholly
conceal.  Otherwise, he had grown into a shell of sullenness and
quiet: he spoke little in the house.