Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (93 page)

Eugene stood up in the
car and waved his long arm in a gesture of farewell.

"Good-bye," he
cried.  "Good-bye."

The old man stood up with
a quiet salute of parting, slow, calm, eloquently tender.

Then, even while Eugene
stood looking back upon the street, the car roared up across the lip
of the hill, and drove steeply down into the hot parched countryside
below.  But as the lost world faded from his sight, Eugene gave
a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the elfin door had
closed behind him, and that he would never come back again.
 
 

He saw the vast rich body
of the hills, lush with billowing greenery, ripe-bosomed, dappled by
far-floating cloud-shadows.  But it was, he knew, the end.
 
Far-forested, the horn-note wound. 
He was wild with the hunger for release: the vast champaign of earth
stretched out for him its limitless seduction.
 
It
was the end, the end.  It was the beginning of the voyage,
thequest of new lands.

Gant was dead.  Gant
was living, death-in-life.  In his big back room at Eliza's he
waited death, lost and broken in a semi-life of petulant memory. 
He hung to life by a decayed filament, a corpse lit by infrequent
flares of consciousness.  The sudden death whose menace they had
faced so long that it had lost its meaning, had never come to him. 
It had come where they had least expected it--to Ben.  And the
conviction which Eugene had had at Ben's death, more than a year and
a half before, was now a materialized certainty.  The great wild
pattern of the family had been broken forever.  The partial
discipline that had held them together had been destroyed by the
death of their brother: the nightmare of waste and loss had destroyed
their hope.  With an insane fatalism they had surrendered to the
savage chaos of life.

Except for Eliza. 
She was sixty, sound of body and mind, triumphantly healthy. 
She still ran Dixieland, but she had given up the boarders for
roomers, and most of the duties of management she intrusted to an old
maid who lived in the house.  Eliza devoted most of her time to
real estate.

She had, during the past
year, got final control of Gant's property.  She had begun to
sell it immediately and ruthlessly, over his indifferent mutter of
protest.  She had sold the old house on Woodson Street for
$7,000--a good enough price, she had said, considering the
neighborhood.  But, stark, bare, and raw, stripped of its
girdling vines, annex now to a quack's sanitarium for "nervous
diseases," the rich labor of their life was gone. In this, more
than in anything else, Eugene saw the final  disintegration of
his family.

Eliza had also sold a
wild tract of mountain farmland for $6,000, fifty acres on the
Reynoldsville road for $15,000, and several smaller pieces. 
Finally she had sold Gant's shop upon the Square for $25,000 to a
syndicate of real estate people who were going to erect on the site
the town's first "skyscraper."  With this money as
capital, she began to "trade," buying, selling, laying down
options, in an intricate and bewildering web.

"Dixieland"
itself had become enormously valuable.  The street which she had
foreseen years before had been cut through behind her boundaries: she
lacked thirty feet of meeting the golden highway, but she had bought
the intervening strip, paying without complaint a stiff price. 
Since then she had refused, with a puckered smile, an offer of
$100,000 for her property.

She was obsessed. 
She talked real estate unendingly.  She spent half her time
talking to real estate men; they hovered about the house like
flesh-flies.  She drove off with them several times a day to
look at property.  As her land investments grew in amount and
number, she became insanely niggardly in personal expenditure. She
would fret loudly if a light was kept burning in the house, saying
that ruin and poverty faced her.  She seldom ate unless the food
was given to her; she went about the house holding a cup of weak
coffee and a crust of bread.  A stingy careless breakfast was
the only meal to which Luke and Eugene could look forward with any
certainty: with angry guffaw and chortle, they ate, wedged in the
little pantry--the dining-room had been turned over to the roomers.

Gant was fed and cared
for by Helen.  She moved back and forth in ceaseless fret
between Eliza's house and Hugh Barton's, in constant rhythms of wild
energy and depletion, anger, hysteria, weariness and indifference. 
She had had no children and, it seemed, would have none.  For
this reason, she had long periods of brooding morbidity, during which
she drugged herself with nibbling potations of patent tonics,
medicines with a high alcoholic content, home-made wines, and corn
whiskey.  Her large eyes grew lustreless and dull, her big mouth
had a strain of hysteria about it, she would pluck at her long chin
and burst suddenly into tears.  She talked restlessly,
fretfully, incessantly, wasting and losing herself in a net of
snarled nerves, in endless gossip, incoherent garrulity about the
townsfolk, the neighbors, disease, doctors, hospitals, death.

The deliberate calm of
Hugh Barton sometimes goaded her to a frenzy.  He would sit at
night, oblivious of her tirade, gravely chewing his long cigar,
absorbed in his charts, or in a late issue of System or of The
American Magazine.  This power of losing himself in solitary
absorption would madden her.  She did not know what she wanted,
but his silence before her exasperated indictment of life drove her
to frenzy.  She would rush at him with a sob of rage, knock the
magazine from his hands, and seize his thinning hair in the grip of
her long fingers.

"You answer when I
speak!" she cried, panting with hysteria.  "I'm not
going to sit here, night after night, while you sit buried in a
story.  The idea!  The idea!"  She burst into
tears.  "I might as well have married a dummy."

"Well, I'm willing
to talk to you," he protested sourly, "but nothing I say to
you seems to suit you.  What do you want me to say?"

It seemed, indeed, when
she was in this temper, that she could not be pleased.  She was
annoyed and irritable if people agreed carefully with all her
utterances; she was annoyed equally by their disagreement and by
their silence.  A remark about the weather, the most studiously
uncontroversial opinion, aroused her annoyance.

Sometimes at night she
would weep hysterically upon her pillow, and turn fiercely upon her
mate.

"Leave me!  Go
away!  Get out!  I hate you!"
 
He
would rise obediently and go downstairs, but before he reached the
living-room she would call fearfully after him, asking him to return.

She lavished kisses and
abuse on him by turns: the mothering tenderness, in which she was
drowning for want of a child, she poured out on a dirty little
mongrel dog which had trotted in from the streets one night,
half-dead from starvation.  He was a snarling little brute with
a rough black-and-white pelt, and an ugly lift of teeth for every one
but his master and mistress, but he had grown waddling-fat upon
choice meats and livers; he slept warmly on a velvet cushion and rode
out with them, snarling at passers-by.  She smothered the little
cur with slaps and kisses, devoured him with baby-talk, and hated any
one who disliked his mongrel viciousness.  But most of her time,
her love, her blazing energy, she gave to the care of her father. 
Her feeling toward Eliza was more bitter than ever: it was one of
constant chaffering irritability, mounting at times to hatred. 
She would rail against her mother for hours:

"I believe she's
gone crazy.  Don't you think so?  Sometimes I think we
ought to get guardians appointed and keep her under custody.  Do
you know that I buy almost every bite of food that goes into that
house?  Do you?  If it weren't for me, she'd let him die
right under her eyes.  Don't you know she would?  She's got
so stingy she won't even buy food for herself.  Why, good
heavens!" she burst out in strong exasperation.  "It's
not my place to do those things.  He's her husband, not mine! 
Do you think it's right?  Do you?"  And she would
almost weep with rage.

And she would burst out
on Eliza, thus:  "Mama, in God's name!  Are you going
to let that poor old man in there die for lack of proper care? 
Can't you ever get it into your head that papa's a sick man? He's got
to have good food and decent treatment."

And Eliza, confused and
disturbed, would answer:  "Why, child! What on earth do you
mean?  I took him in a big bowl of vegetable soup myself, for
his lunch: he ate it all up without stopping. 'Why, pshaw!  Mr.
Gant,' I said (just to cheer him up), 'I don't believe there can be
much wrong with any one with an appetite like that.  Why, say,'
I said . . ."

"Oh, for heaven's
sake!" cried Helen furiously.  "Papa's a sick man. 
Aren't you ever going to understand that?  Surely Ben's death
should have taught us something," her voice ended in a scream of
exasperation.

Gant was a spectre in
waxen yellow.  His disease, which had thrust out its branches to
all parts of his body, gave him an appearance of almost transparent
delicacy.  His mind was sunken out of life in a dim shadowland:
he listened wearily and indifferently to all the brawling clamor
around him, crying out and weeping when he felt pain, cold, or
hunger, smiling when he was comfortable and at ease. He was taken
back to Baltimore two or three times a year now for radium
treatments: he had a brief flare of vitality and ease after each
visit, but every one knew his relief would be only temporary. His
body was a rotten fabric which had thus far miraculously held
together.

Meanwhile, Eliza talked
incessantly about real estate, bought, sold and traded.  About
her own ventures she was insanely secretive; she would smile craftily
when questioned about them, wink in a knowing fashion, and make a
bantering noise in her throat.

"I'm not telling all
I know," she said.

This goaded her
daughter's bitter curiosity almost past endurance, for, despite her
angry mockery, the mania for property had bitten into her and Hugh
Barton as well: secretly they respected Eliza's shrewdness and got
her advice on property into which he was putting all his surplus
earnings.  But when Eliza refused to reveal her own investments,
the girl would cry out in a baffled hysteria:

"She has no right to
do that!  Don't you know she hasn't?  It's papa's property
just as much as hers, you know.  If she should die now, that
estate would be in a terrible mess.  No one knows what she's
done: how much she's bought and sold.  I don't think she knows
herself.  She keeps her notes and papers hidden away in little
drawers and boxes."

Her distrust and fear had
been so great that, much to Eliza's annoyance, she had persuaded
Gant, a year or two before, to make a will: he had left $5,000 to
each of his five children, and the remainder of his property and
money to his wife.  And, as the summer advanced, she again
persuaded him to appoint as executors the two people in whose honesty
she had the greatest trust: Hugh Barton and Luke Gant.

To Luke, who, since his
discharge from the navy, had been salesman, in the mountain district,
for electrical farm-lighting plants, she said:

"We're the ones
who've always had the interests of the family at heart, and we've had
nothing for it.  We've been the generous ones, but Eugene and
Steve will get it all in the end.  'Gene's had everything: we've
had nothing.  Now he's talking of going to Harvard.  Had
you heard about that?"

"His m-m-m-majesty!"
said Luke ironically.  "Who's going to p-p-p-pay the
bills?"

Thus, as the summer
waned, over the slow horror of Gant's death was waged this ugly
warfare of greed and hatred.  Steve came in from Indiana; within
four days he was insane from whiskey and veronal. He began to follow
Eugene around the house, backing him ominously into corners, seizing
him belligerently by the arm, as he breathed upon him his foul yellow
stench, and spoke to him with maudlin challenge.
 
"I've never had your chance.  Every one
was down on Stevie.  If he'd had the chance some folks have,
he'd be right up there with the Big Boys now.  And at that, he's
got more brains than a lot of people I know who've been to college. 
You get that, don't you?"

He thrust his pustulate
face, foul and snarling, close to Eugene's.

"Get away, Steve! 
Get away!" the boy muttered.  He tried to move, but his
brother blocked him.  "I tell you to get away, you swine!"
he screamed suddenly, and he struck the evil face away from him.

Then, as Steve sprawled
dazed and witless on the floor, Luke sprang upon him with stammering
curse, and, past reason, began to drag him up and down.  And
Eugene sprang upon Luke to stop him, and all three stammered and
cursed and begged and accused, while the roomers huddled at the door,
and Eliza wept, calling for help, and Daisy, who was up from the
South with her children, wrung her plump hands, moaning "Oh,
they'll kill him!  They'll kill him.  Have mercy on me and
my poor little children, I beg of you."

Then the shame, the
disgust, the maudlin grievance, the weeping women, the excited men.

"You m-m-m-miserable
degenerate!" cried Luke.  "You c-c-came home because
you thought p-p-p-papa would die and leave you a little money. 
You d-d-don't deserve a penny!"