Look Homeward, Angel Read online

  "Did he come down to-night?" asked Ben.

  "Yes," said Harry Tugman, "and he got out again. I told him to take his little tail upstairs."

  "Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben. "What did he say?"

  "He said, 'I'M the editor! I'm the editor of this paper!' 'I don't give a good goddam,' I said, 'if you're the President's snotrag. If you want any paper to-day keep out of the pressroom.' And believe me, he went!"

  In cool blue-pearl darkness they rounded the end of the Post Office and cut diagonally across the street to Uneeda Lunch No. 3. It was a small beanery, twelve feet wide, wedged in between an optician's and a Greek shoe parlor.

  Within, Dr. Hugh McGuire sat on a stool patiently impaling kidney beans, one at a time, upon the prongs of his fork. A strong odor of corn whisky soaked the air about him. His thick skilful butcher's hands, hairy on the backs, gripped the fork numbly. His heavy-jowled face was blotted by large brown patches. He turned round and stared owlishly as Ben entered, fixing the wavering glare of his bulbous red eyes finally upon him.

  "Hello, son," he said in his barking kindly voice, "what can I do for you?"

  "Oh, for God's sake," said Ben laughing contemptuously, and jerking his head toward Tugman. "Listen to this, won't you?"

  They sat down at the lower end. At this moment, Horse Hines, the undertaker, entered, producing, although he was not a thin man, the effect of a skeleton clad in a black frock coat. His long lantern mouth split horsily in a professional smile displaying big horse teeth in his white heavily starched face.

  "Gentlemen, gentlemen," he said for no apparent reason, rubbing his lean hands briskly as if it was cold. His palm-flesh rattled together like old bones.

  Coker, the Lung Shark, who had not ceased to regard McGuire's bean-hunt with sardonic interest, now took the long cigar out of his devil's head and held it between his stained fingers as he tapped his companion.

  "Let's get out," he grinned quietly, nodding toward Horse Hines. "It will look bad if we're seen together here."

  "Good morning, Ben," said Horse Hines, sitting down below him. "Are all the folks well?" he added, softly.

  Sideways Ben looked at him scowling, then jerked his head back to the counterman, with a fast bitter flicker of his lips.

  "Doctor," said Harry Tugman with servile medicine-man respect, "what do you charge to operate?"

  "Operate what?" McGuire barked presently, having pronged a kidney bean.

  "Why--appendicitis," said Harry Tugman, for it was all he could think of.

  "Three hundred dollars when we go into the belly," said McGuire. He coughed chokingly to the side.

  "You're drowning in your own secretions," said Coker with his yellow grin. "Like Old Lady Sladen."

  "My God!" said Harry Tugman, thinking jealously of lost news. "When did she go?"

  "To-night," said Coker.

  "God, I'm sorry to hear that," said Harry Tugman, greatly relieved.

  "I've just finished laying the old lady out," said Horse Hines gently. "A bundle of skin and bones." He sighed regretfully, and for a moment his boiled eye moistened.

  Ben turned his scowling head around with an expression of nausea.

  "Joe," said Horse Hines with merry professionalism, "give me a mug of that embalming fluid." He thrust his horsehead indicatively at the coffee urn.

  "Oh, for God's sake," Ben muttered in terms of loathing. "Do you ever wash your damned hands before you come in here?" he burst out irritably.

  Ben was twenty. Men did not think of his age.

  "Would you like some cold pork, son?" said Coker, with his yellow malicious grin.

  Ben made a retching noise in his throat, and put his hand upon his stomach.

  "What's the matter, Ben?" Harry Tugman laughed heavily and struck him on the back.

  Ben got off the stool, took his coffee mug and the piece of tanned mince pie he had ordered, and moved to the other side of Harry Tugman. Every one laughed. Then he jerked his head toward McGuire with a quick frown.

  "By God, Tug," he said. "They've got us cornered."

  "Listen to him," said McGuire to Coker. "A chip off the old block, isn't he? I brought that boy into the world, saw him through typhoid, got the old man over seven hundred drunks, and I've been called eighteen different kinds of son of a bitch for my pains ever since. But let one of 'em get a belly ache," he added proudly, "and you'll see how quick they come running to me. Isn't that right, Ben?" he said, turning to him.

  "Oh, listen to this!" said Ben, laughing irritably and burying his peaked face in his coffee mug. His bitter savor filled the place with life, with tenderness, with beauty. They looked on him with drunken, kindly eyes--at his gray scornful face and the lonely demon flicker of his smile.

  "And I tell you something else," said McGuire, ponderously wheeling around on Coker, "if one of them's got to be cut open, see who gets the job. What about it, Ben?" he asked.

  "By God, if you ever cut me open, McGuire," said Ben, "I'm going to be damned sure you can walk straight before you do."

  "Come on, Hugh," said Coker, prodding McGuire under his shoulder. "Stop chasing those beans around the plate. Crawl off or fall off that damned stool--I don't care which."

  McGuire, drunkenly lost in revery, stared witlessly down at his bean plate and sighed.

  "Come on, you damned fool," said Coker, getting up, "you've got to operate in forty-five minutes."

  "Oh, for God's sake," said Ben, lifting his face from the stained mug, "who's the victim? I'll send flowers."

  ". . . all of us sooner or later," McGuire mumbled puffily through his puff-lips. "Rich and poor alike. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Doesn't matter . . . doesn't matter at all."

  "In heaven's name," Ben burst out irritably to Coker. "Are you going to let him operate like that? Why don't you shoot them instead?"

  Coker plucked the cigar from his long malarial grinning face:

  "Why, he's just getting hot, son," said he.

  Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hill-flanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.

  At the curb now, young Dr. Jefferson Spaugh brought his Buick roadster to a halt, and got out, foppishly drawing off his gloves and flicking the silk lapels of his dinner jacket. His face, whisky-red, was highboned and handsome; his mouth was straightlipped, cruel, and sensual. An inherited aura of mountain-cornfield sweat hung scentlessly but telepathically about him; he was a smartened-up mountaineer with country-club and University of Pennsylvania glossings. Four years in Philly change a man.

  Thrusting his gloves carelessly into his coat, he entered. McGuire slid bearishly off his stool and gazed him into focus. Then he made beckoning round-arm gestures with his fat hands.

  "Look at it, will you," he said. "Does any one know what it is?"

  "It's Percy," said Coker. "You know Percy Van der Gould, don't you?"

  "I've been dancing all night at the Hilliards," said Spaugh elegantly. "Damn! These new patent-leather pumps have ruined my feet." He sat upon a stool, and elegantly displayed his large country feet, indecently broad and angular in the shoes.

  "What's he been doing?" said McGuire doubtfully, turning to Coker for enlightenment.

  "He's been dancing all night at the Hilliards," said Coker in a mincing voice.

  McGuire shielded his bloated face coyly with his hand.

  "O crush me!" he said, "I'm a grape! Dancing at the Hilliards, were you, you damned Mountain Grill. You've been on a Poon-Tang Picnic in Niggertown. You can't load that bunk on us."

  Bull-lunged, their laughter filled the nacreous dawn.

  "Patent-leather pumps!" said McGuire. "Hurt his feet. By God, Coker, the first time he came to town ten years ago he'd never been curried above the knees. They had to throw him down to put shoes on him."

  Ben laughed thinly to the Angel.

  "A couple of slices of butt
ered toast, if you please, not too brown," said Spaugh delicately to the counterman.

  "A mess of hog chitlings and sorghum, you mean, you bastard. You were brought up on salt pork and cornbread."

  "We're getting too low and coarse for him, Hugh," said Coker. "Now that he's got drunk with some of the best families, he's in great demand socially. He's so highly thought of that he's become the official midwife to all pregnant virgins."

  "Yes," said McGuire, "he's their friend. He helps them out. He not only helps them out, he helps them in again."

  "What's wrong with that?" said Spaugh. "We ought to keep it in the family, oughtn't we?"

  Their laughter howled out into the tender dawn.

  "This conversation is getting too rough for me," said Horse Hines banteringly as he got off his stool.

  "Shake hands with Coker before you go, Horse," said McGuire. "He's the best friend you've ever had. You ought to give him royalties."

  The light that filled the world now was soft and otherworldly like the light that fills the sea-floors of Catalina where the great fish swim. Flatfootedly, with kidney-aching back, Patrolman Leslie Roberts all unbuttoned slouched through the submarine pearl light and paused, gently agitating his club behind him, as he turned his hollow liverish face toward the open door.

  "Here's your patient," said Coker softly, "the Constipated Cop."

  Aloud, with great cordiality, they all said: "How are you, Les?"

  "Oh, tolable, tolable," said the policeman mournfully. As draggled as his mustaches, he passed on, hocking into the gutter a slimy gob of phlegm.

  "Well, good morning, gentlemen," said Horse Hines, making to go.

  "Remember what I told you, Horse. Be good to Coker, your best friend." McGuire jerked a thumb toward Coker.

  Beneath his thin joviality Horse Hines was hurt.

  "I do remember," said the undertaker gravely. "We are both members of honorable professions: in the hour of death when the storm-tossed ship puts into its haven of rest, we are the trustees of the Almighty."

  "Why, Horse!" Coker exclaimed, "this is eloquence!"

  "The sacred rites of closing the eyes, of composing the limbs, and of preparing for burial the lifeless repository of the departed soul is our holy mission; it is for us, the living, to pour balm upon the broken heart of Grief, to soothe the widow's ache, to brush away the orphan's tears; it is for us, the living, to highly resolve that--"

  "--Government of the people, for the people, and by the people," said Hugh McGuire.

  "Yes, Horse," said Coker, "you are right. I'm touched. And what's more, we do it all for nothing. At least," he added virtuously, "I never charge for soothing the widow's ache."

  "What about embalming the broken heart of Grief?" asked McGuire.

  "I said BALM," Horse Hines remarked coldly.

  "Stay, Horse," said Harry Tugman, who had listened with great interest, "didn't you make a speech with all that in it last summer at the Undertakers' Convention?"

  "What's true then is true now," said Horse Hines bitterly, as he left the place.

  "Jesus!" said Harry Tugman, "we've got him good and sore. I thought I'd bust a gut, doc, when you pulled that one about embalming the broken heart of Grief."

  At this moment Dr. Ravenel brought his Hudson to a halt across the street before the Post Office, and walked over rapidly, drawing his gauntlets off. He was bareheaded; his silver aristocratic hair was thinly rumpled; his surgical gray eyes probed restlessly below the thick lenses of his spectacles. He had a famous, calm, deeply concerned face, shaven, ashen, lean, lit gravely now and then by humor.

  "Oh Christ!" said Coker. "Here comes Teacher!"

  "Good morning, Hugh," he said as he entered. "Are you going into training again for the bughouse?"

  "Look who's here!" McGuire roared hospitably. "Dead-eye Dick, the literary sawbones, whose private collection of gallstones is the finest in the world. When d'jew get back, son?"

  "Just in time, it seems," said Ravenel, holding a cigarette cleanly between his long surgical fingers. He looked at his watch. "I believe you have a little engagement at the Ravenel hospital in about half an hour. Is that right?"

  "By God, Dick, you're always right," McGuire yelled enthusiastically. "What'd you tell 'em up there, boy?"

  "I told them," said Dick Ravenel, whose affection was like a flower that grew behind a wall, "that the best surgeon in America when he was sober was a lousy bum named Hugh McGuire who was always drunk."

  "Now wait, wait. Hold on a minute!" said McGuire, holding up his thick hand. "I protest, Dick. You meant well, son, but you got that mixed up. You mean the best surgeon in America when he's not sober."

  "Did you read one of your papers?" said Coker.

  "Yes," said Dick Ravenel. "I read one on carcinoma of the liver."

  "How about one on pyorrhea of the toe-nails?" said McGuire. "Did you read that one?"

  Harry Tugman laughed heavily, not wholly knowing why. McGuire belched into the silence loudly and was witlessly adrift for a moment.

  "Literature, literature, Dick," he returned portentously. "It's been the ruin of many a good surgeon. You read too much, Dick. Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. You know too much. The letter killeth the spirit, you know. Me--Dick, did you ever know me to take anything out that I didn't put back? Anyway, don't I always leave 'em something to go on with? I'm no scholar, Dick. I've never had your advantages. I'm a self-made butcher. I'm a carpenter, Dick. I'm an interior decorator. I'm a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller. I'm a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I'm a practical man. I take out their works, spit upon them, trim off the dirty edges, and send them on their way again. I economize, Dick; I throw away everything I can't use, and use everything I throw away. Who made the Pope a tailbone from his knuckle? Who made the dog howl? Aha--that's why the governor looks so young. We are filled up with useless machinery, Dick. Efficiency, economy, power! Have you a Little Fairy in your Home? You haven't! Then let the Gold Dust Twins do the work! Ask Ben--he knows!"

  "O my God!" laughed Ben thinly, "listen to that, won't you?"

  Two doors below, directly before the Post Office, Pete Mascari rolled upward with corrugated thunder the shutters of his fruit shop. The pearl light fell coolly upon the fruity architecture, on the pyramided masonry of spit-bright wine-saps, the thin sharp yellow of the Florida oranges, the purple Tokays, sawdust-bedded. There was a stale fruity odor from the shop of ripening bananas, crated apples, and the acrid tang of powder; the windows are filled with Roman candles, crossed rockets, pinwheels, squat green Happy Hooligans, and multilating Jack Johnsons, red cannoncrackers, and tiny acrid packets of crackling spattering firecrackers. Light fell a moment on the ashen corpsiness of his face and on the liquid Sicilian poison of his eyes.

  "Don' pincha da grape. Pinch da banan'!"

  A street-car, toy-green with new Spring paint, went squareward.

  "Dick," said McGuire more soberly, "take the job, if you like."

  Ravenel shook his head.

  "I'll stand by," said he. "I won't operate. I'm afraid of one like this. It's your job, drunk or sober."

  "Removing a tumor from a woman, ain't you?" said Coker.

  "No," said Dick Ravenel, "removing a woman from a tumor."

  "Bet you it weighs fifty pounds, if it weighs an ounce," said McGuire with sudden professional interest.

  Dick Ravenel winced ever so slightly. A cool spurt of young wind, clean as a kid, flowed by him. McGuire's meaty shoulders recoiled burlily as if from the cold shock of water. He seemed to waken.

  "I'd like a bath," he said to Dick Ravenel, "and a shave." He rubbed his hand across his blotched hairy face.

  "You can use my room, Hugh, at the hotel," said Jeff Spaugh, looking at Ravenel somewhat eagerly.

  "I'll use the hospital," he said.

  "You'll just have time," said Ravenel.

  "In God's name, let's get a start on," he cried impatiently.

  "Did you s
ee Kelly do this one at Hopkins?" asked McGuire.

  "Yes," said Dick Ravenel, "after a very long prayer. That's to give power to his elbow. The patient died."

  "Damn the prayers!" said McGuire. "They won't do much good to this one. She called me a low-down lickered-up whisky-drinking bastard last night: if she still feels like that she'll get well."

  "These mountain women take a lot of killing," said Jeff Spaugh sagely.

  "Do you want to come along?" McGuire asked Coker.

  "No, thanks. I'm getting some sleep," he answered. "The old girl took a hell of a time. I thought she'd never get through dying."

  They started to go.

  "Ben," said McGuire, with a return to his former manner, "tell the Old Man I'll beat hell out of him if he doesn't give Helen a rest. Is he staying sober?"

  "In heaven's name, McGuire, how should I know?" Ben burst out irritably. "Do you think that's all I've got to do--watching your licker-heads?"

  "That's a great girl, boy," said McGuire sentimentally. "One in a million."

  "Hugh, for God's sake, come on," cried Dick Ravenel.

  The four medical men went out into the pearl light. The town emerged from the lilac darkness with a washed renascent cleanliness. All the world seemed as young as Spring. McGuire walked across to Ravenel's car, and sank comfortably with a sense of invigoration into the cool leathers. Jeff Spaugh plunged off violently with a ripping explosion of his engine and a cavalier wave of his hand.

  Admiringly Harry Tugman's face turned to the slumped burly figure of Hugh McGuire.

  "By God!" he boasted, "I bet he does the damnedest piece of operating you ever heard of."

  "Why, hell," said the counterman loyally, "he ain't worth a damn until he's got a quart of corn licker under his belt. Give him a few drinks and he'll cut off your damned head and put it on again without your knowing it."

  As Jeff Spaugh roared off Harry Tugman said jealously: "Look at that bastard. Mr. Vanderbilt. He thinks he's hell, don't he? A big pile of bull. Ben, do you reckon he was really out at the Hilliards to-night?"

  "Oh for God's sake," said Ben irritably, "how the hell should I know! What difference does it make?" he added furiously.