Look Homeward, Angel Read online

  Sometimes the heavy paunch-bellied Federal judge, sometimes an attorney, a banker would take him home, bidding him to perform for their wives, the members of their families, giving him twenty-five cents when he was done, and dismissing him. "What do you think of that!" they said.

  His first and nearest sales made, in the town, he would make the long circle on the hills and in the woods along the outskirts, visiting the tubercular sanitariums, selling the magazines easily and quickly--"like hot cakes" as Luke had it--to doctors and nurses, to white unshaven, sensitive-faced Jews, to the wisp of a rake, spitting his rotten lungs into a cup, to good-looking young women who coughed slightly from time to time, but who smiled at him from their chairs, and let their warm soft hands touch his slightly as they paid him.

  Once, at a hillside sanitarium, two young New York Jews had taken him to the room of one of them, closed the door behind him, andassaulted him, tumbling him on the bed, while one drew forth a pocket knife and informed him he was going to perform a caponizing operation on him. They were two young men bored with the hills, the town, the deadly regime of their treatment, and it occurred to him years later that they had concocted the business, days ahead, in their dull lives, living for the excitement and terror they would arouse in him. His response was more violent than they had bargained for: he went mad with fear, screamed, and fought insanely. They were weak as cats, he squirmed out of their grasp and off the bed cuffing and clawing tigerishly, striking and kicking them with blind and mounting rage. He was released by a nurse who unlocked the door and led him out into the sunlight, the two young consumptives, exhausted and frightened, remaining in their room. He was nauseated by fear and by the impacts of his fists on their leprous bodies.

  But the little mound of nickels and dimes and quarters chinked pleasantly in his pockets: leg-weary and exhausted he would stand before a gleaming fountain burying his hot face in an iced drink. Sometimes conscience-tortured, he would steal an hour away from the weary streets and go into the library for a period of enchantment and oblivion: he was often discovered by his watchful and bustling brother, who drove him out to his labor again, taunting and spurring him into activity.

  "Wake up! You're not in Fairyland. Go after them."

  Eugene's face was of no use to him as a mask: it was a dark pool in which every pebble of thought and feeling left its circle?his shame, his distaste for his employment was obvious, although he tried to conceal it: he was accused of false pride, told that he was "afraid of a little honest work," and reminded of the rich benefits he had received from his big-hearted parents.

  He turned desperately to Ben. Sometimes Ben, loping along the streets of the town, met him, hot, tired, dirty, wearing his loaded canvas bag, scowled fiercely at him, upbraided him for his unkempt appearance, and took him into a lunch-room for something to eat--rich foaming milk, fat steaming kidney-beans, thick apple-pie.

  Both Ben and Eugene were by nature aristocrats. Eugene had just begun to feel his social status--or rather his lack of one; Ben had felt it for years. The feeling at bottom might have resolved itself simply into a desire for the companionship of elegant and lovely women: neither was able, nor would have dared, to confess this, and Eugene was unable to confess that he was susceptible to the social snub, or the pain of caste inferiority: any suggestion that the companionship of elegant people was preferable to the fellowship of a world of Tarkintons, and its blousy daughters, would have been hailed with heavy ridicule by the family, as another indication of false and undemocratic pride. He would have been called "Mr. Vanderbilt" or "the Prince of Wales."

  Ben, however, was not to be intimidated by their cant, or deceived by their twaddle. He saw them with bitter clarity, answered their pretensions with soft mocking laughter, and a brief nod upwards and to the side of the companion to whom he communicated all his contemptuous observation--his dark satiric angel: "Oh, my God! Listen to that, won't you?"

  There was behind his scowling quiet eyes, something strange and fierce and unequivocal that frightened them: besides, he had secured for himself the kind of freedom they valued most?the economic freedom--and he spoke as he felt, answering their virtuous reproof with fierce quiet scorn.

  One day, he stood, smelling of nicotine, before the fire, scowling darkly at Eugene who, grubby and tousled, had slung his heavy bag over his shoulder, and was preparing to depart.

  "Come here, you little bum," he said. "When did you wash your hands last?" Scowling fiercely, he made a sudden motion as if to strike the boy, but he finished instead by re-tying, with his hard delicate hands, his tie.

  "In God's name, mama," he burst out irritably to Eliza, "haven't you got a clean shirt to give him? You know, he ought to have one every month or so."

  "What do you mean? What do you mean?" said Eliza with comic rapidity, looking up from a basket of socks she was darning. "I gave him that one last Tuesday."

  "You little thug!" he growled, looking at Eugene with a fierce pain in his eyes. "Mama, for heaven's sake, why don't you send him to the barber's to get that lousy hair cut off? By God, I'll pay for it, if you don't want to spend the money."

  She pursed her lips angrily and continued to darn. Eugene looked at him dumbly, gratefully. After Eugene had gone, the quiet one smoked moodily for a time, drawing the fragrant smoke in long gulps down into his thin lungs. Eliza, recollective and hurt at what had been said, worked on.

  "What are you trying to do with your kid, mama?" he said in a hard quiet voice, after a silence. "Do you want to make a tramp out of him?"

  "What do you mean? What do you mean?"

  "Do you think it's right to send him out on the streets with every little thug in town?"

  "Why, I don't know what you're talking about, boy," she said impatiently. "It's no disgrace for a boy to do a little honest work, and no one thinks so."

  "Oh, my God," he said to the dark angel. "Listen to that!"

  Eliza pursed her lips without speaking for a time.

  "Pride goeth before a fall," she said after a moment. "Pride goeth before a fall."

  "I can't see that that makes much difference to us," said he. "We've got no place to fall to."

  "I consider myself as good as any one," she said, with dignity. "I hold my head up with any one I meet."

  "Oh, my God," Ben said to his angel. "You don't meet any one. I don't notice any of your fine brothers or their wives coming to see you."

  This was true, and it hurt. She pursed her lips.

  "No, mama," he continued after a moment's pause, "you and the Old Man have never given a damn what we've done so long as you thought you might save a nickel by it."

  "Why, I don't know what you're talking about, boy," she answered. "You talk as if you thought we were Rich Folks. Beggars can't be choosers."

  "Oh, my God," he laughed bitterly. "You and the Old Man like to make out you're paupers, but you've a sock full of money."

  "I don't know what you mean," she said angrily.

  "No," he said, with his frequent negative beginning, after a moody silence, "there are people in this town without a fifth what we've got who get twice as much out of it. The rest of us have never had anything, but I don't want to see the kid made into a little tramp."

  There was a long silence. She darned bitterly, pursing her lips frequently, hovering between quiet and tears.

  "I never thought," she began after a long pause, her mouth tremulous with a bitter hurt smile, "that I should live to hear such talk from a son of mine. You had better watch out," she hinted darkly, "a day of reckoning cometh. As sure as you live, as sure as you live. You will be repaid threefold for your unnatural," her voice sank to a tearful whisper, "your UNNATURAL conduct!" She wept easily.

  "Oh, my God," answered Ben, turning his lean, gray, bitter, bumpy face up toward his listening angel. "Listen to that, won't you?"

  11

  Eliza saw Altamont not as so many hills, buildings, people: she saw it in the pattern of a gigantic blueprint. She knew the history of every piece of v
aluable property--who bought it, who sold it, who owned it in 1893, and what it was now worth. She watched the tides of traffic cannily; she knew by what corners the largest number of people passed in a day or an hour; she was sensitive to every growing-pain of the young town, gauging from year to year its growth in any direction, and deducing the probable direction of its future expansion. She judged distances critically, saw at once where the beaten route to an important centre was stupidly circuitous, and looking in a straight line through houses and lots, she said:

  "There'll be a street through here some day."

  Her vision of land and population was clear, crude, focal?there was nothing technical about it: it was extaordinary for its direct intensity. Her instinct was to buy cheaply where people would come; to keep out of pockets and culs de sac, to buy on a street that moved toward a centre, and that could be given extension.

  Thus, she began to think of Dixieland. It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middle-class street of small homes and boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young deep-bodied maples: there was a sloping depth of one hundred and ninety feet, a frontage of one hundred and twenty. And Eliza, looking toward the town, said: "They'll put a street behind there some day."

  In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of Dixieland: its back end was built high off the ground on wet columns of rotting brick. Its big rooms were heated by a small furnace which sent up, when charged with fire, a hot dry enervation to the rooms of the first floor, and a gaseous but chill radiation to those upstairs.

  The place was for sale. Its owner was a middle-aged horse-faced gentleman whose name was the Reverend Wellington Hodge: he had begun life favorably in Altamont as a Methodist minister, but had run foul of trouble when he began to do double service to the Lord God of Hosts and John Barleycorn--his evangelical career came to an abrupt ending one winter's night when the streets were dumb with falling snow. Wellington, clad only in his winter heavies, made a wild sortie from Dixieland at two in the morning, announcing the kingdom of God and the banishment of the devil, in a mad marathon through the streets that landed him panting but victorious in front of the Post Office. Since then, with the assistance of his wife, he had eked out a hard living at the boarding-house. Now, he was spent, disgraced, and weary of the town.

  Besides, the sheltering walls of Dixieland inspired him with horror--he felt that the malign influence of the house had governed his own disintegration. He was a sensitive man, and his promenades about his estate were checked by inhibited places: the cornice of the long girdling porch where a lodger had hanged himself one day at dawn, the spot in the hall where the consumptive had collapsed in a hemorrhage, the room where the old man cut his throat. He wanted to return to his home, a land of fast horses, wind-bent grass, and good whisky--Kentucky. He was ready to sell Dixieland.

  Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully, went to town by way of Spring Street more and more often.

  "That's going to be a good piece of property some day," she said to Gant.

  He made no complaint. He felt suddenly the futility of opposing an implacable, an inexorable desire.

  "Do you want it?" he said.

  She pursed her lips several times: "It's a good buy," she said.

  "You'll never regret it as long as you live, W. O.," said Dick Gudger, the agent.

  "It's her house, Dick," said Gant wearily. "Make out the papers in her name."

  She looked at him.

  "I never want to own another piece of property as long as I live," said Gant. "It's a curse and a care, and the tax-collector gets all you have in the end."

  Eliza pursed her lips and nodded.

  She bought the place for seventy-five hundred dollars. She had enough money to make the first payment of fifteen hundred. The balance was to be paid in installments of fifteen hundred dollars a year. This she knew she had to pay chiefly from the earnings of the house.

  In the young autumn when the maples were still full and green, and the migratory swallows filled secretly the trees with clamor, and swooped of an evening in a black whirlwind down, drifting at its funnel end, like dead leaves, into their chosen chimney, Eliza moved into Dixieland. There was clangor, excitement, vast curiosity in the family about the purchase, but no clear conception of what had really happened. Gant and Eliza, although each felt dumbly that they had come to a decisive boundary in their lives, talked vaguely about their plans, spoke of Dixieland evasively as "a good investment," said nothing clearly. In fact, they felt their approaching separation instinctively: Eliza's life was moving by a half-blind but inevitable gravitation toward the centre of its desire--the exact meaning of her venture she would have been unable to define, but she had a deep conviction that the groping urge which had led her so blindly into death and misery at Saint Louis had now impelled her in the right direction. Her life was on the rails.

  And however vaguely, confusedly, and casually they approached this complete disruption of their life together, the rooting up of their clamorous home, when the hour of departures came, the elements resolved themselves immutably and without hesitation.

  Eliza took Eugene with her. He was the last tie that bound her to all the weary life of breast and cradle; he still slept with her of nights; she was like some swimmer who ventures out into a dark and desperate sea, not wholly trusting to her strength and destiny, but with a slender cord bound to her which stretches still to land.

  With scarcely a word spoken, as if it had been known anciently and forever, Helen stayed with Gant.

  The time for Daisy's marriage was growing near: she had been sought by a tall middle-aged shaven life-insurance agent, who wore spats, collars of immaculate starchiness five inches in height, who spoke with an unctuous and insane croon, chortling gently in his throat from time to time for no reason at all. His name was Mr. McKissem, and she had screwed up enough courage, after an arduous siege, to refuse him, upon the private grounds of insanity.

  She had promised herself to a young South Carolinian, who was connected rather vaguely with the grocery trade. His hair was parted in the middle of his low forehead, his voice was soft, drawling, amiable, his manner hearty and insistent, his habits large and generous. He brought Gant cigars on his visits, the boys large boxes of assorted candies. Every one felt that he had favorable prospects.

  As for the others--Ben and Luke only--they were left floating in limbo; for Steve, since his eighteenth year, had spent most of his life away from home, existing for months by semi-vagabondage, scrappy employment, and small forgeries upon his father, in New Orleans, Jacksonville, Memphis, and reappearing to his depressed family after long intervals by telegraphing that he was desperately sick or, through the intermediacy of a crony who borrowed the title of "doctor" for the occasion, that he was dying, and would come home in a box if he was not sent for in the emaciated flesh.

  Thus, before he was eight, Eugene gained another roof and lost forever the tumultuous, unhappy, warm centre of his home. He had from day to day no clear idea where the day's food, shelter, lodging was to come from, although he was reasonably sure it would be given: he ate wherever he happened to hang his hat, either at Gant's or at his mother's; occasionally, although infrequently, he slept with Luke in the sloping, alcoved, gabled back room, rude with calcimine, with the high drafty steps that slanted to the kitchen porch, with the odor of old stacked books in packing-cases, with the sweet orchard scents. There were two beds; he exulted in his unaccustomed occupancy of an entire mattress, dreaming of the day of manlike privacy. But Eliza did not allow this often: he was riven into her flesh.

  Forgetful of him during the day's press, she summoned him at night over the telephone, demanding his return, and upbraiding Helen for keeping him. There was a bitter submerged struggle o
ver him between Eliza and her daughter: absorbed in the management of Dixieland for days, she would suddenly remember his absence from meals, and call for him angrily across the phone.

  "Good heavens, mama," Helen would answer irritably. "He's your child, not mine. I'm not going to see him starve."

  "What do you mean? What do you mean? He ran off while dinner was on the table. I've got a good meal fixed for him here. H-m! A GOOD meal."

  Helen put her hand over the mouthpiece, making a face at him as he stood catlike and sniggering by, burlesquing the Pentland manner, tone, mouthing.

  "H-m! Why, law me, child, yes--it's GOOD soup."

  He was convulsed silently.

  And then aloud: "Well, it's your own lookout, not mine. If he doesn't want to stay up there, I can't help it."

  When he returned to Dixieland, Eliza would question him with bitter working lips; she would prick at his hot pride in an effort to keep him by her.

  "What do you mean by running off to your papa's like that? If I were you, I'd have too much pride for that. I'd be a-sha-a-med!" Her face worked with a bitter hurt smile. "Helen can't be bothered with you. She doesn't want you around."

  But the powerful charm of Gant's house, of its tacked and added whimsy, its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its great gummed trees, its roaring internal seclusiveness, the blistered varnish, the hot calfskin, the comfort and abundance, seduced him easily away from the great chill tomb of Dixieland, particularly in winter, since Eliza was most sparing of coal.