Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe Page 4

  The sight of him drew Gant instantly from his lethargy: he remembered the dissolved partnership; the familiar attitude of Will Pentland, as he stood before the fire, evoked all the markings he so heartily loathed in the clan--its pert complacency, its incessant punning, its success.

  "Mountain Grills!" he roared. "Mountain Grills! The lowest of the low! The vilest of the vile!"

  "Mr. Gant! Mr. Gant!" pleaded Jannadeau.

  "What's the matter with you, W. O.?" asked Will Pentland, looking up innocently from his fingers. "Had something to eat that didn't agree with you?"--he winked pertly at Duncan, and went back to his fingers.

  "Your miserable old father," howled Gant, "was horsewhipped on the public square for not paying his debts." This was a purely imaginative insult, which had secured itself as truth, however, in Gant's mind, as had so many other stock epithets, because it gave him heart-cockle satisfaction.

  "Horsewhipped upon his public square, was he?" Will winked again, unable to resist the opening. "They kept it mighty quiet, didn't they?" But behind the intense good-humored posture of his face, his eyes were hard. He pursed his lips meditatively as he worked upon his fingers.

  "But I'll tell you something about him, W. O.," he continued after a moment, with calm but boding judiciousness. "He let his wife die a natural death in her own bed. He didn't try to kill her."

  "No, by God!" Gant rejoined. "He let her starve to death. If the old woman ever got a square meal in her life she got it under my roof. There's one thing sure: she could have gone to Hell and back, twice over, before she got it from old Tom Pentland, or any of his sons."

  Will Pentland closed his blunt knife and put it in his pocket.

  "Old Major Pentland never did an honest day's work in his life," Gant yelled, as a happy afterthought.

  "Come now, Mr. Gant!" said Duncan reproachfully.

  "Hush! Hush!" whispered the girl fiercely, coming before him closely with the soup. She thrust a smoking ladle at his mouth, but he turned his head away to hurl another insult. She slapped him sharply across the mouth.

  "You DRINK this!" she whispered. And grinning meekly as his eyes rested upon her, he began to swallow soup.

  Will Pentland looked at the girl attentively for a moment, then glanced at Duncan and Jannadeau with a nod and wink. Without saying another word, he left the room, and mounted the stairs. His sister lay quietly extended on her back.

  "How do you feel, Eliza?" The room was heavy with the rich odor of mellowing pears; an unaccustomed fire of pine sticks burned in the grate: he took up his place before it, and began to pare his nails.

  "Nobody knows--nobody knows," she began, bursting quickly into a rapid flow of tears, "what I've been through." She wiped her eyes in a moment on a corner of the coverlid: her broad powerful nose, founded redly on her white face, was like flame.

  "What you got good to eat?" he said, winking at her with a comic gluttony.

  "There are some pears in there on the shelf, Will. I put them there last week to mellow."

  He went into the big closet and returned in a moment with a large yellow pear; he came back to the hearth and opened the smaller blade of his knife.

  "I'll vow, Will," she said quietly after a moment. "I've had all I can put up with. I don't know what's got into him. But you can bet your bottom dollar I won't stand much more of it. I know how to shift for myself," she said, nodding her head smartly. He recognized the tone.

  He almost forgot himself: "See here, Eliza," he began, "if you were thinking of building somewhere, I"--but he recovered himself in time--"I'll make you the best price you can get on the material," he concluded. He thrust a slice of pear quickly into his mouth.

  She pursed her mouth rapidly for some moments.

  "No," she said. "I'm not ready for that yet, Will. I'll let you know." The loose wood-coals crumbled on the hearth.

  "I'll let you know," she said again. He clasped his knife and thrust it in a trousers pocket.

  "Good night, Eliza," he said. "I reckon Pett will be in to see you. I'll tell her you're all right."

  He went down the stairs quietly, and let himself out through the front door. As he descended the tall veranda steps, Duncan and Jannadeau came quietly down the yard from the sitting-room.

  "How's W. O.?" he asked.

  "Ah, he'll be all right now," said Duncan cheerfully. "He's fast asleep."

  "The sleep of the righteous?" asked Will Pentland with a wink.

  The Swiss resented the implied jeer at his Titan. "It is a gread bitty," began Jannadeau in a low guttural voice, "that Mr. Gant drinks. With his mind he could go far. When he's sober a finer man doesn't live."

  "When he's sober?" said Will, winking at him in the dark. "What about when he's asleep."

  "He's all right the minute Helen gets hold of him," Mr. Duncan remarked in his rich voice. "It's wonderful what that little girl can do to him."

  "Ah, I tell you!" Jannadeau laughed with guttural pleasure. "That little girl knows her daddy in and out."

  The child sat in the big chair by the waning sitting-room fire: she read until the flames had died to coals--then quietly she shovelled ashes on them. Gant, fathoms deep in slumber, lay on the smooth leather sofa against the wall. She had wrapped him well in a blanket; now she put a pillow on a chair and placed his feet on it. He was rank with whisky stench; the window rattled as he snored.

  Thus, drowned in oblivion, ran his night; he slept when the great pangs of birth began in Eliza at two o'clock; slept through all the patient pain and care of doctor, nurse, and wife.

  4

  The baby was, to reverse an epigram, an unconscionable time in getting born; but when Gant finally awoke just after ten o'clock next morning, whimpering from tangled nerves, and the quivering shame of dim remembrance, he heard, as he drank the hot coffee Helen brought to him, a loud, long lungy cry above.

  "Oh, my God, my God," he groaned. And he pointed toward the sound. "Is it a boy or a girl?"

  "I haven't seen it yet, papa," Helen answered. "They won't let usin. But Doctor Cardiac came out and told us if we were good he might bring us a little boy."

  There was a terrific clatter on the tin roof, the scolding countryvoice of the nurse: Steve dropped like a cat from the porch roof to the lily bed outside Gant's window.

  "Steve, you damned scoundrel," roared the manor-lord with a momentary return to health, "what in the name of Jesus are you doing?"

  The boy was gone over the fence.

  "I seen it! I seen it!" his voice came streaking back.

  "I seen it too!" screamed Grover, racing through the room and out again in simple exultancy.

  "If I catch you younguns on this roof agin," yelled the country nurse aloft, "I'll take your hide off you."

  Gant had been momentarily cheered when he heard that his latest heir was a male; but he walked the length of the room now, making endless plaint.

  "Oh my God, my God! Did this have to be put upon me in my old age? Another mouth to feed! It's fearful, it's awful, it's croo-el,"and he began to weep affectedly. Then, realizing presently that noone was near enough to be touched by his sorrow, he paused suddenly and precipitated himself toward the door, crossing the dining-room, and, going up the hall, making loud lament:

  "Eliza! My wife! Oh, baby, say that you forgive me!" He went up the stairs, sobbing laboriously.

  "Don't you let him in here!" cried the object of this prayersharply with quite remarkable energy.

  "Tell him he can't come in now," said Cardiac, in his dry voice, tothe nurse, staring intently at the scales. "We've nothing but milk to drink, anyway," he added.

  Gant was outside.

  "Eliza, my wife! Be merciful, I beg of you. If I had known--"

  "Yes," said the country nurse opening the door rudely, "if the dog hadn't stopped to lift his leg he'd a-caught the rabbit! You get away from here!" And she slammed it violently in his face.

  He went downstairs with hang-dog head, but he grinned slyly as hethought of the nurse's answer.
He wet his big thumb quickly on his tongue.

  "Merciful God!" he said, and grinned. Then he set up his caged lament.

  "I think this will do," said Cardiac, holding up something red, shiny, and puckered by its heels, and smacking it briskly on its rump, to liven it a bit.

  The heir apparent had, as a matter of fact, made his debut completely equipped with all appurtenances, dependences, screws, cocks, faucets, hooks, eyes, nails, considered necessary for completeness of appearance, harmony of parts, and unity of effectin this most energetic, driving, and competitive world. He was thecomplete male in miniature, the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all ages, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of the budding GoldenAge and, what's more, Fortune and her Fairies, not content with well-nigh smothering him with these blessings of time and family saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with glory.

  "Well, what are you going to call it?" inquired Dr. Cardiac, referring thus, with shocking and medical coarseness, to this most royal imp.

  Eliza was better tuned to cosmic vibrations. With a full, if inexact, sense of what portended, she gave to Luck's Lad the title of Eugene, a name which, beautifully, means "well born," but which, as any one will be able to testify, does not mean, has never meant, "well bred."

  This chosen incandescence, to whom a name had already been given, and from whose centre most of the events in this chronicle must be seen, was borne in, as we have said, upon the very spear-head of history. But perhaps, reader, you have already thought of that? You HAVEN'T? Then let us refresh your historical memory.

  By 1900, Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler had almost finished saying the things they were reported as saying, and that Eugene was destined to hear, twenty years later; most of the GreatVictorians had died before the bombardment began; William McKinley was up for a second term, the crew of the Spanish navy had returnedhome in a tugboat.

  Abroad, grim old Britain had sent her ultimatum to the South Africans in 1899; Lord Roberts ("Little Bobs," as he was known affectionately to his men) was appointed commander-in-chief after several British reverses; the Transvaal Republic was annexed to Great Britain in September 1900, and formally annexed in the month of Eugene's birth. There was a Peace Conference two years later.

  Meanwhile, what was going on in Japan? I will tell you: the firstparliament met in 1891, there was a war with China in 1894-95, Formosa was ceded in 1895. Moreover, Warren Hastings had been impeached and tried; Pope Sixtus the Fifth had come and gone; Dalmatia had been subdued by Tiberius; Belisarius had been blinded by Justinian; the wedding and funeral ceremonies of Wilhelmina Charlotte Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach and King George the Second had been solemnized, while those of Berengaria of Navarre to King Richard the First were hardly more than a distant memory; Diocletian, Charles the Fifth, and Victor Amadeus of Sardinia, had all abdicated their thrones; Henry James Pye, Poet Laureate of England, was with his fathers; Cassiodorus, Quintilian, Juvenal, Lucretius, Martial, and Albert the Bear of Brandenburg had answered the last great roll-call; the battles of Antietam, Smolensko, Drumclog, Inkerman, Marengo, Cawnpore, Killiecrankie, Sluys, Actium, Lepanto, Tewkesbury, Brandywine, Hohenlinden, Salamis, and the Wilderness had been fought both by land and by sea; Hippias had been expelled from Athens by the AlCésaré and the Lacedé Simonides, Menander, Strabo, Moschus, and Pindar had closed their earthly accounts; the beatified Eusebius, Athanasius, and Chrysostom had gone to their celestial niches; Menkaura had built the Third Pyramid; Aspalta had led victorious armies; the remote Bermudas, Malta, and the Windward Isles had been colonized. In addition, the Spanish Armada had been defeated; President Abraham Lincoln assassinated, and the Halifax Fisheries Award had given $5,500,000 to Britain for twelve-year fishing privileges. Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.

  Such was the state of history when Eugene entered the theatre of human events in 1900.

  We would give willingly some more extended account of the world his life touched during the first few years, showing, in all its perspectives and implications, the meaning of life as seen from the floor, or from the crib, but these impressions are suppressed when they might be told, not through any fault of intelligence, but through lack of muscular control, the powers of articulation,and because of the recurring waves of loneliness, weariness,depression, aberration, and utter blankness which war against the order in a man's mind until he is three or four years old.

  Lying darkly in his crib, washed, powdered, and fed, he thought quietly of many things before he dropped off to sleep?the interminable sleep that obliterated time for him, and that gave him a sense of having missed forever a day of sparkling life. At these moments, he was heartsick with weary horror as he thought of the discomfort, weakness, dumbness, the infinite misunderstanding he would have to endure before he gained even physical freedom. He grew sick as he thought of the weary distance before him, the lack of co-ordination of the centres of control, the undisciplined and rowdy bladder, the helpless exhibition he was forced to give in the company of his sniggering, pawing brothers and sisters, dried, cleaned, revolved before them.

  He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his mind was caught in a net because he had no words to work with. He had not even names for the objects around him: he probably defined them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some mangling of the speech that roared about him, to which he listened intently day after day, realizing that his first escape must come through language. He indicated as quickly as he could his ravenous hunger for pictures and print: sometimes they brought him great books profusely illustrated, and he bribed them desperately by cooing, shrieking with delight, making extravagant faces, and doing all the other things they understood in him. He wondered savagely how they would feel if they knew what he really thought: at other times he had to laugh at them and at their whole preposterous comedy of errors as they pranced around for his amusement, waggled their heads at him, tickled him roughly, making him squeal violently against his will. The situation was at once profoundly annoying and comic: as he sat in the middle of the floor and watched them enter, seeing the face of each transformed by a foolish leer, and hearing their voices become absurd and sentimental whenever they addressed him, speaking to him words which he did not yet understand, but which he saw they were mangling in the preposterous hope of rendering intelligible that which has been previously mutilated, he had to laugh at the fools, in spite of his vexation.

  And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.

  He saw that the great figures that came and went about him, the huge leering heads that bent hideously into his crib, the great voices that rolled incoherently above him, had for one another not much greater understanding than they had for him: that even their speech, their entire fluidity and ease of movement were but meagre communicants of their thought or feeling, and served often not to promote understanding, but to deepen and widen strife, bitterness, and prejudice.

  His brain went black with terror. He saw himself an inarticulate stranger, an amusing little clown, to be dandled and nursed by these enormous and remote figures. He had been sent from one mystery
into another: somewhere within or without his consciousness he heard a great bell ringing faintly, as if it sounded undersea,and as he listened, the ghost of memory walked through his mind, and for a moment he felt that he had almost recovered what he had lost.

  Sometimes, pulling himself abreast the high walls of his crib, he glanced down dizzily at the patterns of the carpet far below; the world swam in and out of his mind like a tide, now printing its whole sharp picture for an instant, again ebbing out dimly and sleepily, while he pieced the puzzle of sensation together bit by bit, seeing only the dancing fire-sheen on the poker, hearing then the elfin clucking of the sun-warm hens, somewhere beyond in a distant and enchanted world. Again, he heard their morning-wakeful crowing dear and loud, suddenly becoming a substantial and alert citizen of life; or, going and coming in alternate waves of fantasy and fact, he heard the loud, faery thunder of Daisy's parlor music. Years later, he heard it again, a door opened in his brain: she told him it was Paderewski's "Minuet."

  His crib was a great woven basket, well mattressed and pillowed within; as he grew stronger, he was able to perform extraordinary acrobatics in it, tumbling, making a hoop of his body, and drawing himself easily and strongly erect: with patient effort he could worm over the side on to the floor. There, he would crawl on the vast design of the carpet, his eyes intent upon great wooden blocks piled chaotically on the floor. They had belonged to his brother Luke: all the letters of the alphabet, in bright multi-colored carving, were engraved upon them.

  Holding them clumsily in his tiny hands, he studied for hours the symbols of speech, knowing that he had here the stones of the temple of language, and striving desperately to find the key that would draw order and intelligence from this anarchy. Great voices soared far above him, vast shapes came and went, lifting him to dizzy heights, depositing him with exhaustless strength. The bell rang under the sea.