Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (88 page)

The sailor, looking,
said:

"That b-b-b-boy sure
suffered."  Suddenly, turning his face away into his hand,
he sobbed briefly and painfully, his confused stammering life drawn
out of its sprawl into a moment of hard grief.

Eugene wept, not because
he saw Ben there, but because Ben had gone, and because he remembered
all the tumult and the pain.

"It is over now,"
said Horse Hines gently.  "He is at peace."

"By God, Mr. Hines,"
said the sailor earnestly, as he wiped his eyes on his jacket, "that
was one g-g-great boy."

Horse Hines looked raptly
at the cold strange face.

"A fine boy,"
he murmured as his fish-eye fell tenderly on his work.  "And
I have tried to do him justice."

They were silent for a
moment, looking.

"You've d-d-done a
fine job," said the sailor.  "I've got to hand it to
you.  What do you say, 'Gene?"

"Yes," said
Eugene, in a small choking voice.  "Yes."

"He's a b-b-b-bit
p-p-p-pale, don't you think?" the sailor stammered, barely
conscious of what he was saying.

"Just a moment!"
said Horse Hines quickly, lifting a finger. Briskly he took a stick
of rouge from his pocket, stepped forward, and deftly, swiftly,
sketched upon the dead gray cheeks a ghastly rose-hued mockery of
life and health.

"There!" he
said, with deep satisfaction; and, rouge-stick in hand, head
critically cocked, like a painter before his canvas, he stepped back
into the terrible staring prison of their horror.

"There are artists,
boys, in every profession," Horse Hines continued in a moment,
with quiet pride, "and though I do say it myself, Luke, I'm
proud of my work on this job.  Look at him!" he exclaimed
with sudden energy, and a bit of color in his gray face. "Did
you ever see anything more natural in your life?"

Eugene turned upon the
man a grim and purple stare, noting with pity, with a sort of
tenderness, as the dogs of laughter tugged at his straining throat
the earnestness and pride in the long horse-face.

"Look at it!"
said Horse Hines again in slow wonder.  "I'll never beat
that again!  Not if I live to be a million!  That's art,
boys!"

A slow strangling gurgle
escaped from Eugene's screwed lips.  The sailor looked quickly
at him, with a crazy suppressed smile.

"What's the matter?"
he said warningly.  "Don't, fool!"  His grin
broke loose.

Eugene staggered across
the floor and collapsed upon a chair, roaring with laughter while his
long arms flapped helplessly at his sides.

"Scuse!" he
gasped.  "Don't mean to--A-r-rt!  Yes!  Yes! 
That's it!" he screamed, and he beat his knuckles in a crazy
tattoo upon the polished floor.  He slid gently off the chair,
slowly unbuttoning his vest, and with a languid hand loosening his
necktie.  A faint gurgle came from his weary throat, his head
lolled around on the floor languidly, tears coursed down his swollen
features.

"What's wrong with
you?  Are you c-c-c-crazy?" said the sailor, all a-grin.

Horse Hines bent
sympathetically and assisted the boy to his feet.

"It's the strain,"
he said knowingly to the sailor.  "The pore fellow has
become hysterical."
 
 

37
 

So, to Ben dead was given
more care, more time, more money than had ever been given to Ben
living.  His burial was a final gesture of irony and futility:
an effort to compensate carrion death for the unpaid wage of
life--love and mercy.  He had a grand funeral.  All the
Pentlands sent wreaths, and came with their separate clans, bringing
along with their hastily assumed funeral manners a smell of recent
business.  Will Pentland talked with the men about politics, the
war, and trade conditions, paring his nails thoughtfully, pursing his
lips and nodding in his curiously reflective way, and occasionally
punning with a birdy wink.  His pleased self-laughter was mixed
with Henry's loud guffaw.  Pett, older, kinder, gentler than
Eugene had ever seen her, moved about with a rustling of gray silk,
and a relaxed bitterness.  And Jim was there, with his wife,
whose name Eugene forgot, and his four bright hefty daughters, whose
names he confused, but who had all been to college and done well, and
his son, who had been to a Presbyterian college, and had been
expelled for advocating free love and socialism while editor of the
college paper.  Now he played the violin, and loved music, and
helped his father with the business: he was an effeminate and mincing
young man, but of the breed.  And there was Thaddeus Pentland,
Will's bookkeeper, the youngest and poorest of the three.  He
was a man past fifty, with a pleasant red face, brown mustaches, and
a gentle placid manner.  He was full of puns and pleased
good-nature, save when he quoted from Karl Marx and Eugene Debs. 
He was a Socialist, and had once received eight votes for Congress. 
He was there with his garrulous wife (whom Helen called
Jibber-Jibber) and his two daughters, languid good-looking blondes of
twenty and twenty-four.
 
There they
were, in all their glory--that strange rich clan, with its fantastic
mixture of success and impracticality, its hard monied sense, its
visionary fanaticism.  There they were, in their astonishing
contradictions: the business man who had no business method, and yet
had made his million dollars; the frantic antagonist of Capital who
had given the loyal service of a lifetime to the thing he denounced;
the wastrel son, with the bull vitality of the athlete, a great
laugh, animal charm--no more; the musician son, a college rebel,
intelligent, fanatic, with a good head for figures; insane
miserliness for oneself, lavish expenditure for one's children.

There they were, each
with the familiar marking of the clan?broad nose, full lips, deep
flat cheeks, deliberate pursed mouths, flat drawling voices, flat
complacent laughter.  There they were, with their enormous
vitality, their tainted blood, their meaty health, their sanity,
their insanity, their humor, their superstition, their meanness,
their generosity, their fanatic idealism, their unyielding
materialism.  There they were, smelling of the earth and
Parnassus--that strange clan which met only at weddings or funerals,
but which was forever true to itself, indissoluble and forever apart,
with its melancholia, its madness, its mirth: more enduring than
life, more strong than death.

And as Eugene looked, he
felt again the nightmare horror of destiny: he was of them--there was
no escape.  Their lust, their weakness, their sensuality, their
fanaticism, their strength, their rich taint, were rooted in the
marrow of his bones.

But Ben, with the thin
gray face (he thought) was not a part of them.  Their mark was
nowhere on him.

And among them, sick and
old, leaning upon his cane, moved Gant, the alien, the stranger. 
He was lost and sorrowful, but sometimes, with a flash of his old
rhetoric, he spoke of his grief and the death of his son.

The women filled the
house with their moaning.  Eliza wept almost constantly; Helen
by fits, in loose hysterical collapse.  And all the other women
wept with gusto, comforting Eliza and her daughter, falling into one
another's arms, wailing with keen hunger.  And the men stood
sadly about, dressed in their good clothes, wondering when it would
be over.  Ben lay in the parlor, bedded in his expensive
coffin.  The room was heavy with the incense of the funeral
bowers.

Presently the Scotch
minister arrived: his decent soul lay above all the loud posturings
of grief like a bolt of hard clean wool. He began the service for the
dead in a dry nasal voice, remote, monotonous, cold, and passionate.

Then, marshalled by Horse
Hines, the pallbearers, young men from the paper and the town, who
had known the dead man best, moved slowly out, gripping the
coffin-handles with their nicotined fingers.  In proper
sequence, the mourners followed, lengthening out in closed victorias
that exhaled their funeral scent of stale air and old leather.

To Eugene came again the
old ghoul fantasy of a corpse and cold pork, the smell of the dead
and hamburger steak--the glozed corruption of Christian burial, the
obscene pomps, the perfumed carrion.  Slightly nauseated, he
took his seat with Eliza in the carriage, and tried to think of
supper.

The procession moved off
briskly to the smooth trotting pull of the velvet rumps.  The
mourning women peered out of the closed carriages at the gaping
town.  They wept behind their heavy veils, and looked to see if
the town was watching.  Behind the world's great mask of grief,
the eyes of the mourners shone through with a terrible and indecent
hunger, an unnameable lust.
 
It was
raw October weather--gray and wet.  The service had been short,
as a precaution against the pestilence which was everywhere. The
funeral entered the cemetery.  It was a pleasant place, on a
hill.  There was a good view of the town.  As the hearse
drove up, two men who had been digging the grave, moved off. 
The women moaned loudly when they saw the raw open ditch.

Slowly the coffin was
lowered onto the bands that crossed the grave.

Again Eugene heard the
nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The boy's mind fumbled at
little things.  Horse Hines bent ceremoniously, with a starched
crackle of shirt, to throw his handful of dirt into the grave. 
"Ashes to ashes--"  He reeled and would have fallen in
if Gilbert Gant had not held him.  He had been drinking. 
"I am the resurrection and the life--"  Helen wept
constantly, harshly and bitterly.  "He that believeth in
me--"  The sobs of the women rose to sharp screams as the
coffin slid down upon the bands into the earth.

Then the mourners got
back into their carriages and were driven briskly away.  There
was a fast indecent hurry about their escape. The long barbarism of
burial was at an end.  As they drove away, Eugene peered back
through the little glass in the carriage.  The two grave-diggers
were already returning to their work.  He watched until the
first shovel of dirt had been thrown into the grave.  He saw the
raw new graves, the sere long grasses, noted how quickly the mourning
wreaths had wilted.  Then he looked at the wet gray sky. 
He hoped it would not rain that night.

It was over.  The
carriages split away from the procession.  The men dropped off
in the town at the newspaper office, the pharmacy, the cigar-store. 
The women went home.  No more.  No more.

Night came, the bare
swept streets, the gaunt winds.  Helen lay before a fire in Hugh
Barton's home.  She had a bottle of chloroform liniment in her
hand.  She brooded morbidly into the fire, reliving the death a
hundred times, weeping bitterly and becoming calm again.
 
"When I think of it, I hate her.  I shall
never forget.  And did you hear her?  Did you? 
Already she's begun to pretend how much he loved her.  But you
can't fool me!  I know!  He wouldn't have her around. 
You saw that, didn't you?  He kept calling for me.  I was
the only one he'd let come near him.  You know that, don't you?"

"You're the one who
always has to be the goat," said Hugh Barton sourly.  "I'm
getting tired of it.  That's what has worn you out. If they
don't leave you alone, I'm going to take you away from here."

Then he went back to his
charts and pamphlets, frowning importantly over a cigar, and
scrawling figures on an old envelope with a stub of pencil gripped
between his fingers.

She has him trained, too,
Eugene thought.

Then, hearing the sharp
whine of the wind, she wept again.

"Poor old Ben,"
she said.  "I can't bear to think of him out there
to-night."

She was silent for a
moment, staring at the fire.

"After this, I'm
through," she said.  "They can get along for
themselves.  Hugh and I have a right to our own lives. 
Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said
Eugene.  I'm merely the chorus, he thought.

"Papa's not going to
die," she went on.  "I've nursed him like a slave for
six years, and he'll be here when I'm gone.  Every one was
expecting papa to die, but it was Ben who went.  You never can
tell.  After this, I'm through."

Her voice had a note of
exasperation in it.  They all felt the grim trickery of Death,
which had come in by the cellar while they waited at the window.

"Papa has no right
to expect it of me!" she burst out resentfully. "He's had
his life.  He's an old man.  We have a right to ours as
well as any one.  Good heavens!  Can't they realize that! 
I'm married to Hugh Barton!  I'm HIS wife!"

Are you? thought Eugene. 
Are you?

But Eliza sat before the
fire at Dixieland with hands folded, reliving a past of tenderness
and love that never had been.  And as the wind howled in the
bleak street, and Eliza wove a thousand fables of that lost and
bitter spirit, the bright and stricken thing in the boy twisted about
in horror, looking for escape from the house of death.  No
more!  No more! (it said).  You are alone now.  You
are lost.  Go find yourself, lost boy, beyond the hills.

This little bright and
stricken thing stood up on Eugene's heart and talked into his mouth.