Look Homeward, Angel Page 13

  "It's nobody's business but my own. By God, I'm not asking any of you for anything," he said, sullenly and irritably, when Eliza pressed him curiously. He had a deep scowling affection for them all: he never forgot their birthdays, he always placed where they might find it, some gift, small, inexpensive, selected with the most discriminating taste. When, with their fervent over-emphasis, they went through long ecstasies of admiration, embroidering their thanks with florid decorations, he would jerk his head sideways to some imaginary listener, laughing softly and irritably, as he said:

  "Oh for God's sake! Listen to this, won't you!"

  Perhaps, as pigeon-toed, well creased, brushed, white-collared, Ben loped through the streets, or prowled softly and restlessly about the house, his dark angel wept, but no one else saw, and no one knew. He was a stranger, and as he sought through the house, he was always aprowl to find some entrance into life, some secret undiscovered door--a stone, a leaf,--that might admit him into light and fellowship. His passion for home was fundamental, in that jangled and clamorous household his sullen and contained quiet was like some soothing opiate on their nerves: with quiet authority, white-handed skill, he sought about repairing old scars, joining with delicate carpentry old broken things, prying quietly about a short-circuited wire, a defective socket.

  "That boy's a born electrical engineer," said Gant. "I've a good notion to send him off to school." And he would paint a romantic picture of the prosperity of Mr. Charles Liddell, the Major's worthy son, who earned thousands by his electrical wizardry, and supported his father. And he would reproach them bitterly, as he dwelt on his own merit and the worthlessness of his sons:

  "Other men's sons support their fathers in their old age--not mine! Not mine! Ah Lord--it will be a bitter day for me when I have to depend on one of mine. Tarkinton told me the other day that Rafe has given him five dollars a week for his food ever since he was sixteen. Do you think I could look for such treatment from one of mine? Do you? Not until Hell freezes over--and not then!" And he would refer to the hardships of his own youth, cast out, so he said, to earn his living, at an age which varied, according to his temper, at from six to eleven years, contrasting his poverty to the luxury in which his own children wallowed.

  "No one ever did anything for me," he howled. "But everything's been done for you. And what gratitude do I get from you? Do you ever think of the old man who slaves up there in his cold shop in order to give you food and shelter? Do you? Ingratitude, more fierce than brutish beasts!" Remorseful food stuck vengefully in Eugene's throat.

  Eugene was initiated to the ethics of success. It was not enough that a man work, though work was fundamental; it was even more important that he make money--a great deal if he was to be a great success--but at least enough to "support himself." This was for both Gant and Eliza the base of worth. Of so and so, they might say:

  "He's not worth powder enough to kill him. He's never been able to support himself," to which Eliza, but not Gant, might add:

  "He hasn't a stick of property to his name." This crowned him with infamy.

  In the fresh sweet mornings of Spring now, Eugene was howled out of bed at six-thirty by his father, descended to the cool garden, and there, assisted by Gant, filled small strawberry baskets with great crinkled lettuces, radishes, plums, and green apples?somewhat later, with cherries. With these packed in a great hamper, he would peddle his wares through the neighborhood, selling them easily and delightfully, in a world of fragrant morning cookery, at five or ten cents a basket. He would return home gleefully with empty hamper in time for breakfast: he liked the work, the smell of gardens, of fresh wet vegetables; he loved the romantic structure of the earth which filled his pocket with chinking coins.

  He was permitted to keep the money of his sales, although Eliza was annoyingly insistent that he should not squander it, but open a bank account with it with which, one day, he might establish himself in business, or buy a good piece of property. And she bought him a little bank, into which his reluctant fingers dropped a portion of his earnings, and from which he got a certain dreary satisfaction from time to time by shaking it close to his ear and dwelling hungrily on all the purchasable delight that was locked away from him in the small heavy bullion-clinking vault. There was a key, but Eliza kept it.

  But, as the months passed, and the sturdy child's body of his infancy lengthened rapidly to some interior chemical expansion, and he became fragile, thin, pallid, but remarkably tall for his age, Eliza began to say: "That boy's big enough to do a little work."

  Every Thursday afternoon now during the school months, and thence until Saturday, he was sent out upon the streets to sell The Saturday Evening Post, of which Luke held the local agency. Eugene hated the work with a deadly sweltering hatred; he watched the approach of Thursday with sick horror.

  Luke had been the agent since his twelfth year: his reputation for salesmanship was sown through the town; he came with wide grin, exuberant vitality, wagging and witty tongue, hurling all his bursting energy into an insane extra version. He lived absolutely in event: there was in him no secret place, nothing withheld and guarded--he had an instinctive horror of all loneliness. He wanted above all else to be esteemed and liked by the world, and the need for the affection and esteem of his family was desperately essential. The fulsome praise, the heartiness of hand and tongue, the liberal display of sentiment were as the breath of life to him: he was overwhelmingly insistent in the payment of drinks at the fountain, the bringer-home of packed ice-cream for Eliza, and of cigars to Gant and, as Gant gave publication to his generosity, the boy's need for it increased--he built up an image of himself as the Good Fellow, witty, unselfish, laughed at but liked by all--as Big-Hearted Unselfish Luke. And this was the opinion people had of him.

  Many times in the years that followed, when Eugene's pockets were empty, Luke thrust a coin roughly and impatiently in them, but, hard as the younger boy's need might be, there was always an awkward scene--painful, embarrassed protestations, a distressful confusion because Eugene, having accurately and intuitively gauged his brother's hunger for gratitude and esteem, felt sharply that he was yielding up his independence to a bludgeoning desire.

  He had never felt the slightest shame at Ben's bounty: his enormously sensitized perception had told him long since that he might get the curse of annoyance, the cuff of anger, from his brother, but that past indulgences would not be brandished over him, and that even the thought of having bestowed gifts would give Ben inward shame. In this, he was like Ben: the thought of a gift he made, with its self-congratulatory implications, made him writhe.

  Thus, before he was ten, Eugene's brooding spirit was nettled in the complexity of truth and seeming. He could find no words, no answers to the puzzles that baffled and maddened him: he found himself loathing that which bore the stamp of virtue, sick with weariness and horror at what was considered noble. He was hurled, at eight years, against the torturing paradox of the ungenerous-generous, the selfish-unselfish, the noble-base, and unable to fathom or define those deep springs of desire in the human spirit that seek public gratification by virtuous pretension, he was made wretched by the conviction of his own sinfulness.

  There was in him a savage honesty, which exercised an uncontrollable domination over him when his heart or head were deeply involved. Thus, at the funeral of some remote kinsman, or of some acquaintance of the family, for whom he had never acquired any considerable affection, he would grow bitterly shamefast if, while listening to the solemn drone of the minister, or the sorrowful chanting of the singers, he felt his face had assumed an expression of unfelt and counterfeited grief: as a consequence he would shift about matter-of-factly, cross his legs, gaze indifferently at the ceiling, or look out of the window with a smile, until he was conscious his conduct had attracted the attention of people, and that they were looking on him with disfavor. Then, he felt a certain grim satisfaction as if, although having lost esteem, he had recorded his life.

  But Luke flourished hardily
in all the absurd mummery of the village: he gave heaping weight to every simulation of affection, grief, pity, good-will, and modesty--there was no excess that he did not underscore heavily, and the world's dull eye read him kindly.

  He spun himself outward with ceaseless exuberance: he was genuinely and whole-heartedly involved. There was in him no toilsome web that might have checked him, no balancing or restraining weight?he had enormous energy, hungry gregariousness, the passion to pool his life.

  In the family, where a simple brutal tag was enough for the appraisal of all fine consciences, Ben went simply as "the quiet one," Luke as the generous and unselfish one, Eugene as the "scholar." It served. The generous one, who had never in all his life had the power to fasten his mind upon the pages of a book, or the logic of number, for an hour together, resented, as he see-sawed comically from one leg to another, stammering quaintly, whistling for the word that stuck in his throat, the brooding abstraction of the youngest.

  "Come on, this is no time for day-dreaming," he would stammer ironically. "The early bird catches the worm--it's time we went out on the street."

  And although his reference to day-dreams was only part of the axiomatic mosaic of his speech, Eugene was startled and confused, feeling that his secret world, so fearfully guarded, had been revealed to ridicule. And the older boy, too, smarting from his own dismal performances at school, convinced himself that the deep inward turning of the spirit, the brooding retreat into the secret place, which he recognized in the mysterious hypnotic power of language over Eugene, was not only a species of indolence, for the only work he recognized was that which strained at weight or sweated in the facile waggery of the tongue, but that it was moreover the indulgence of a "selfish" family-forgetting spirit. He was determined to occupy alone the throne of goodness.

  Thus, Eugene gathered vaguely but poignantly, that other boys of his age were not only self-supporting, but had for years kept their decrepit parents in luxury by their earnings as electrical engineers, presidents of banks, or members of Congress. There was, in fact, no excess of suggestion that Gant did not use upon his youngest son--he had felt, long since, the vibration to every tremor of feeling of the million-noted little instrument, and it pleased him to see the child wince, gulp, tortured with remorse. Thus, while he piled high with succulent meat the boy's platter, he would say sentimentally:

  "I tell you what: there are not many boys who have what you have. What's going to become of you when your old father's dead and gone?" And he would paint a ghastly picture of himself lying cold in death, lowered forever into the damp rot of the earth, buried, forgotten--an event which, he hinted sorrowfully, was not remote.

  "You'll remember the old man, then," he would say. "Ah, Lord! You never miss the water till the well goes dry," noting with keen pleasure the inward convulsion of the childish throat, the winking eyes, the tense constricted face.

  "I'll vow, Mr. Gant," Eliza bridled, also pleased, "you oughtn't to do that to the child."

  Or, he would speak sadly of "Little Jimmy," a legless little boy whom he had often pointed out to Eugene, who lived across the river from Riverside, the amusement park, and around whom he had woven a pathetic fable of poverty and orphanage which was desperately real now to his son. When Eugene was six, Gant had promised him carelessly a pony for Christmas, without any intention of fulfilling his promise. As Christmas neared he had begun to speak touchingly of "Little Jimmy," of the countless advantages of Eugene's lot and, after a mighty struggle, the boy had renounced the pony, in a scrawled message to Elfland, in favor of the cripple. Eugene never forgot: even when he had reached manhood the deception of "Little Jimmy" returned to him, without rancor, without ugliness, only with pain for all the blind waste, the stupid perjury, the thoughtless dishonor, the crippling dull deceit.

  Luke parroted all of his father's sermons, but earnestly and witlessly, without Gant's humor, without his chicanery, only with his sentimentality. He lived in a world of symbols, large, crude, and gaudily painted, labelled "Father," "Mother," "Home," "Family," "Generosity," "Honor," "Unselfishness," made of sugar and molasses, and gummed glutinously with tear-shaped syrup.

  "He's one good boy," the neighbors said.

  "He's the cutest thing," said the ladies, who were charmed by his stutter, his wit, his good nature, his devout attendance on them.

  "That boy's a hustler. He'll make his mark," said all the men in town.

  And it was as the smiling hustler that he wanted to be known. He read piously all the circulars the Curtis Publishing Company sent to its agents: he posed himself in the various descriptive attitudes that were supposed to promote business--the proper manner of "approach," the most persuasive manner of drawing the journal from the bag, the animated description of its contents, in which he was supposed to be steeped as a result of his faithful reading--"the good salesman," the circulars said, "should know in and out the article he is selling"--a knowledge that Luke avoided, but which he replaced with eloquent invention of his own.

  The literal digestion of these instructions resulted in one of the most fantastical exhibitions of print-vending ever seen: fortified by his own unlimited cheek, and by the pious axioms of the exhortations that "the good salesman will never take no for his answer," that he should "stick to his prospect" even if rebuffed, that he should "try to get the customer's psychology," the boy would fall into step with an unsuspecting pedestrian, open the broad sheets of The Post under the man's nose, and in a torrential harangue, sown thickly with stuttering speech, buffoonery, and ingratiation, delivered so rapidly that the man could neither accept nor reject the magazine, hound him before a grinning public down the length of a street, backing him defensively into a wall, and taking from the victim's eager fingers the five-cent coin that purchased his freedom.

  "Yes, sir. Yes, sir," he would begin in a sonorous voice, dropping wide-leggedly into the "prospect's" stride. "This week's edition of The Saturday Evening Post, five cents, only a nickel, p-p-p-purchased weekly by t-t-two million readers. In this week's issue you have eighty-six pages of f-f-fact and fiction, to say n-n-nothing of the advertisements. If you c-c-c-can't read you'll get m-m-more than your money's worth out of the p-p-pictures. On page 13 this week, we have a very fine article, by I-I-I-Isaac F. Marcosson, the f-f-f-famous traveller and writer on politics; on page 29, you have a story by Irvin S. Cobb, the g-g-g-greatest living humorist, and a new story of the prize-ring by J-J-Jack London. If you b-b-bought it in a book, it'd c-c-cost you a d-d-dollar-and-a-half."

  He had, besides these chance victims, an extensive clientry among the townsfolk. Swinging briskly and cheerily down the street, full of greetings and glib repartee, he would accost each of the grinning men by a new title, in a rich stammering tenor voice:

  "Colonel, how are you! Major--here you are, a week's reading hot off the press. Captain, how's the boy?"

  "How are you, son?"

  "Couldn't be better, General--slick as a puppy's belly!"

  And they would roar with wheezing, red-faced, Southern laughter:

  "By God, he's a good 'un. Here, son, give me one of the damn things. I don't want it, but I'll buy it just to hear you talk."

  He was full of pungent and racy vulgarity: he had, more than any of the family, a Rabelaisian earthiness that surged in him with limitless energy, charging his tongue with unpremeditated comparisons, Gargantuan metaphors. Finally, he wet the bed every night in spite of Eliza's fretting complaints: it was the final touch of his stuttering, whistling, cheerful, vital, and comic personality--he was Luke, the unique, Luke, the incomparable: he was, in spite of his garrulous and fidgeting nervousness, an intensely likable person--and he really had in him a bottomless well of affection. He wanted bounteous praise for his acts, but he had a deep, genuine kindliness and tenderness.

  Every week, on Thursday, in Gant's dusty little office, he would gather the grinning cluster of small boys who bought The Post from him, and harangue them before he sent them out on their duties:

  "Well,
have you thought of what you're going to tell them yet? You know you can't sit around on your little tails and expect them to look you up. Have you got a spiel worked out yet? How do you approach 'em, eh?" he said, turning fiercely to a stricken small boy. "Speak up, speak up, G-G-G-God-damn it--don't s-s-stand there looking at me. Haw!" he said, laughing with sudden wild idiocy, "look at that face, won't you?"

  Gant surveyed the proceedings from afar with Jannadeau, grinning.

  "All right, Christopher Columbus," continued Luke, good-humoredly. "What do you tell 'em, son?"

  The boy cleared his throat timidly: "Mister, do you want to buy a copy of The Saturday Evening Post?"

  "Oh, twah-twah," said Luke, with mincing delicacy, as the boys sniggered, "sweet twah-twah! Do you expect them to buy with a spiel like that? My God, where are your brains? Sail into them. Tackle them, and don't take no for an answer. Don't ask them if they WANT to buy. Dive into them: 'Here you are, sir--hot off the press.' Jesus Christ," he yelled, looking at the distant court-house clock with sudden fidget, "we should have been out an hour ago. Come on--don't stand there: here are your papers. How many do you want, you little Kike?"--for he had several Jews in his employ: they worshipped him and he was very fond of them--he liked their warmth, richness, humor.

  "Twenty."

  "Twenty!" he yelled. "You little loafer--you'll t-t-take fifty. G-g-go on, you c-c-can sell 'em this afternoon. By G-G-God, papa," he said, pointing to the Jews, as Gant entered the office, "it l-l-looks like the Last S-S-Supper, don't it? All right!" he said, smacking across the buttocks a small boy who had bent for his quota. "Don't stick it in my face." They shrieked with laughter. "Dive in to them now. Don't let 'em get away from you." And, laughing and excited, he would send them out into the streets.

  To this land of employment and this method of exploitation Eugene was now initiated. He loathed the work with a deadly, an inexplicable loathing. But something in him festered deeply at the idea of disposing of his wares by the process of making such a wretched little nuisance of himself that riddance was purchased only at the price of the magazine. He writhed with shame and humiliation, but he stuck desperately to his task, a queer curly-headed passionate little creature, who raced along by the side of an astonished captive, pouring out of his dark eager face a hurricane of language. And men, fascinated somehow by this strange eloquence from a little boy, bought.