Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (3 page)

Major Thomas Pentland was the father of a numerous
family of which Eliza was the only surviving girl.  A younger
sister had died a few years before of a disease which the family
identified sorrowfully as "poor Jane's scrofula." 
There were six boys:  Henry, the oldest, was now thirty, Will
was twenty-six, Jim was twenty-two, and Thaddeus, Elmer and Greeley
were, in the order named, eighteen, fifteen, and eleven.  Eliza
was twenty-four.

The four oldest children, Henry, Will, Eliza, and
Jim, had passed their childhood in the years following the war. 
The poverty and privation of these years had been so terrible that
none of them ever spoke of it now, but the bitter steel had sheared
into their hearts, leaving scars that would not heal.

The effect of these years upon the oldest children
was to develop in them an insane niggardliness, an insatiate love of
property, and a desire to escape from the Major's household as
quickly as possible.
 
 

"Father," Eliza had said with ladylike
dignity, as she led Oliver for the first time into the sitting-room
of the cottage, "I want you to meet Mr. Gant."

Major Pentland rose slowly from his rocker by the
fire, folded a large knife, and put the apple he had been peeling on
the mantel. Bacchus looked up benevolently from a whittled stick, and
Will, glancing up from his stubby nails which he was paring as usual,
greeted the visitor with a birdlike nod and wink.  The men
amused themselves constantly with pocket knives.

Major Pentland advanced slowly toward Gant.  He
was a stocky fleshyman in the middle fifties, with a ruddy face, a
patriarchal beard, and the thick complacent features of his tribe.

"It's W. O. Gant, isn't it?" he asked in a
drawling unctuous voice.

"Yes," said Oliver, "that's right."

"From what Eliza's been telling me about you,"
said the Major, giving the signal to his audience, "I was going
to say it ought to be L. E. Gant."

The room sounded with the fat pleased laughter of the
Pentlands.

"Whew!" cried Eliza, putting her hand to
the wing of her broad nose.  "I'll vow, father!  You
ought to be ashamed of yourself."

Gant grinned with a thin false painting of mirth.

The miserable old scoundrel, he thought.  He's
had that one bottled up for a week.

"You've met Will before," said Eliza.

"Both before and aft," said Will with a
smart wink.

When their laughter had died down, Eliza said: 
"And this--as the fellow says--is Uncle Bacchus."
 
"Yes, sir," said Bacchus beaming, "as
large as life an' twice as sassy."

"They call him Back-us everywhere else,"
said Will, including them all in a brisk wink, "but here in the
family we call him Behind-us."

"I suppose," said Major Pentland
deliberately, "that you've served on a great many juries?"

"No," said Oliver, determined to endure the
worst now with a frozen grin.  "Why?"

"Because," said the Major looking around
again, "I thought you were a fellow who'd done a lot of
COURTIN'."

Then, amid their laughter, the door opened, and
several of the others came in--Eliza's mother, a plain worn
Scotchwoman, and Jim, a ruddy porcine young fellow, his father's
beardless twin, and Thaddeus, mild, ruddy, brown of hair and eye,
bovine, and finally Greeley, the youngest, a boy with lapping idiot
grins, full of strange squealing noises at which they laughed. 
He was eleven, degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but his white moist
hands could draw from a violin music that had in it something
unearthly and untaught.

And as they sat there in the hot little room with its
warm odor of mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the
hills, there was a roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the
bare boughs clashed.  And as they peeled, or pared, or whittled,
their talk slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they
drawled monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and
of men but newly lain in the earth.  And as their talk wore on,
and Gant heard the spectre moan of the wind, he was entombed in loss
and darkness, and his soul plunged downward in the pit of night, for
he saw that he must die a stranger--that all, all but these
triumphant Pentlands, who banqueted on death--must die.

And like a man who is perishing in the polar night,
he thought of the rich meadows of his youth: the corn, the plum tree,
and ripe grain.  Why here?  O lost!
 
 
 

2
 

Oliver married Eliza in May.  After their
wedding trip to Philadelphia, they returned to the house he had built
for her on Woodson Street.  With his great hands he had laid the
foundations, burrowed out deep musty cellars in the earth, and
sheeted the tall sides over with smooth trowellings of warm brown
plaster.  He had very little money, but his strange house grew
to the rich modelling of his fantasy: when he had finished he had
something which leaned to the slope of his narrow uphill yard,
something with a high embracing porch in front, and warm rooms where
one stepped up and down to the tackings of his whim.  He built
his house close to the quiet hilly street; he bedded the loamy soil
with flowers; he laid the short walk to the high veranda steps with
great square sheets of colored marble; he put a fence of spiked iron
between his house and the world.

Then, in the cool long glade of yard that stretched
four hundred feet behind the house he planted trees and grape vines. 
And whatever he touched in that rich fortress of his soul sprang into
golden life: as the years passed, the fruit trees--the peach, the
plum, the cherry, the apple--grew great and bent beneath their
clusters.  His grape vines thickened into brawny ropes of brown
and coiled down the high wire fences of his lot, and hung in a dense
fabric, upon his trellises, roping his domain twice around. 
They climbed the porch end of the house and framed the upper windows
in thick bowers.  And the flowers grew in rioting glory in his
yard--the velvet-leaved nasturtium, slashed with a hundred tawny
dyes, the rose, the snowball, the redcupped tulip, and the lily. 
The honeysuckle drooped its heavy mass upon the fence; wherever his
great hands touched the earth it grew fruitful for him.

For him the house was the picture of his soul, the
garment of his will.  But for Eliza it was a piece of property,
whose value she shrewdly appraised, a beginning for her hoard. 
Like all the older children of Major Pentland she had, since her
twentieth year, begun the slow accretion of land: from the savings of
her small wage as teacher and book-agent, she had already purchased
one or two pieces of earth.  On one of these, a small lot at the
edge of the public square, she persuaded him to build a shop. 
This he did with his own hands, and the labor of two negro men: it
was a two-story shack of brick, with wide wooden steps, leading down
to the square from a marble porch.  Upon this porch, flanking
the wooden doors, he placed some marbles; by the door, he put the
heavy simpering figure of an angel.

But Eliza was not content with his trade: there was
no money in death.  People, she thought, died too slowly. 
And she foresaw that her brother Will, who had begun at fifteen as
helper in a lumber yard, and was now the owner of a tiny business,
was destined to become a rich man.  So she persuaded Gant to go
into partnership with Will Pentland: at the end of a year, however,
his patience broke, his tortured egotism leaped from its restraint,
he howled that Will, whose business hours were spent chiefly in
figuring upon a dirty envelope with a stub of a pencil, paring
reflectively his stubby nails, or punning endlessly with a birdlike
wink and nod, would ruin them all.  Will therefore quietly
bought out his partner's interest, and moved on toward the
accumulation of a fortune, while Oliver returned to isolation and his
grimy angels.

The strange figure of Oliver Gant cast its famous
shadow through the town.  Men heard at night and morning the
great formula of his curse to Eliza.  They saw him plunge to
house and shop, they saw him bent above his marbles, they saw him
mould in his great hands--with curse, and howl, with passionate
devotion--the rich texture of his home.  They laughed at his
wild excess of speech, of feeling, and of gesture.  They were
silent before the maniac fury of his sprees, which occurred almost
punctually every two months, and lasted two or three days.  They
picked him foul and witless from the cobbles, and brought him
home--the banker, the policeman, and a burly devoted Swiss named
Jannadeau, a grimy jeweller who rented a small fenced space among
Gant's tombstones.  And always they handled him with tender
care, feeling something strange and proud and glorious lost in that
drunken ruin of Babel.  He was a stranger to them: no one--not
even Eliza--ever called him by his first name. He was--and remained
thereafter--"Mister" Gant.

And what Eliza endured in pain and fear and glory no
one knew.  He breathed over them all his hot lion-breath of
desire and fury: when he was drunk, her white pursed face, and all
the slow octopal movements of her temper, stirred him to red
madness.  She was at such times in real danger from his assault:
she had to lock herself away from him.  For from the first,
deeper than love, deeper than hate, as deep as the unfleshed bones of
life, an obscure and final warfare was being waged between them. 
Eliza wept or was silent to his curse, nagged briefly in retort to
his rhetoric, gave like a punched pillow to his lunging drive--and
slowly, implacably had her way.  Year by year, above his howl of
protest, he did not know how, they gathered in small bits of earth,
paid the hated taxes, and put the money that remained into more
land.  Over the wife, over the mother, the woman of property,
who was like a man, walked slowly forth.

In eleven years she bore him nine children of whom
six lived.  The first, a girl, died in her twentieth month, of
infant cholera; two more died at birth.  The others outlived the
grim and casual littering.  The oldest, a boy, was born in
1885.  He was given the name of Steve.  The second, born
fifteen months later, was a girl--Daisy.  The next, likewise a
girl--Helen--came three years later. Then, in 1892, came
twins--boys--to whom Gant, always with a zest for politics, gave the
names of Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison.  And the last,
Luke, was born two years later, in 1894.

Twice, during this period, at intervals of five
years, Gant's periodic spree lengthened into an unbroken drunkenness
that lasted for weeks.  He was caught, drowning in the tides of
his thirst. Each time Eliza sent him away to take a cure for
alcoholism at Richmond.  Once, Eliza and four of her children
were sick at the same time with typhoid fever.  But during a
weary convalescence she pursed her lips grimly and took them off to
Florida.

Eliza came through stolidly to victory.  As she
marched down these enormous years of love and loss, stained with the
rich dyes of pain and pride and death, and with the great wild flare
of his alien and passionate life, her limbs faltered in the grip of
ruin, but she came on, through sickness and emaciation, to victorious
strength. She knew there had been glory in it: insensate and cruel as
he had often been, she remembered the enormous beating color of his
life, and the lost and stricken thing in him which he would never
find. And fear and a speechless pity rose in her when at times she
saw the small uneasy eyes grow still and darken with the foiled and
groping hunger of old frustration.  O lost!
 
 

3
 

In the great processional of the years through which
the history of the Gants was evolving, few years had borne a heavier
weight of pain, terror, and wretchedness, and none was destined to
bring with it more conclusive events than that year which marked the
beginning of the twentieth century.  For Gant and his wife, the
year 1900, in which one day they found themselves, after growing to
maturity in another century--a transition which must have given,
wherever it has happened, a brief but poignant loneliness to
thousands of imaginative people--had coincidences, too striking to be
unnoticed, with other boundaries in their lives.

In that year Gant passed his fiftieth birthday: he
knew he was half as old as the century that had died, and that men do
not often live as long as centuries.  And in that year, too,
Eliza, big with the last child she would ever have, went over the
final hedge of terror and desperation and, in the opulent darkness of
the summer night, as she lay flat in her bed with her hands upon her
swollen belly, she began to design her life for the years when she
would cease to be a mother.

In the already opening gulf on whose separate shores
their lives were founded, she was beginning to look, with the
infinite composure, the tremendous patience which waits through half
a lifetime for an event, not so much with certain foresight, as with
a prophetic, brooding instinct.  This quality, this almost
Buddhistic complacency which, rooted in the fundamental structure of
her life, she could neither suppress nor conceal, was the quality he
could least understand, that infuriated him most.  He was fifty:
he had a tragic consciousness of time--he saw the passionate fulness
of his life upon the wane, and he cast about him like a senseless and
infuriate beast.  She had perhaps a greater reason for quietude
than he, for she had come on from the cruel openings of her life,
through disease, physical weakness, poverty, the constant imminence
of death and misery: she had lost her first child, and brought the
others safely through each succeeding plague; and now, at forty-two,
her last child stirring in her womb, she had a conviction, enforced
by her Scotch superstition, and the blind vanity of her family, which
saw extinction for others but not for itself, that she was being
shaped to a purpose.