Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (4 page)

As she lay in her bed, a great star burned across her
vision in the western quarter of the sky; she fancied it was climbing
heaven slowly.  And although she could not have said toward what
pinnacle her life was moving, she saw in the future freedom that she
had never known, possession and power and wealth, the desire for
which was mixed inextinguishably with the current of her blood. 
Thinking of this in the dark, she pursed her lips with thoughtful
satisfaction, unhumorously seeing herself at work in the carnival,
taking away quite easily from the hands of folly what it had never
known how to keep.

"I'll get it!" she thought, "I'll get
it.  Will has it!  Jim has it.  And I'm smarter than
they are."  And with regret, tinctured with pain and
bitterness, she thought of Gant:

"Pshaw!  If I hadn't kept after him he
wouldn't have a stick to call his own to-day.  What little we
have got I've had to fight for; we wouldn't have a roof over our
heads; we'd spend the rest of our lives in a rented house"--which
was to her the final ignominy of shiftless and improvident people.

And she resumed:  "The money he squanders
every year in licker would buy a good lot: we could be well-to-do
people now if we'd started at the very beginning.  But he's
always hated the very idea of owning anything: couldn't bear it, he
told me once, since he lost his money in that trade in Sydney. 
If I'd been there, you can bet your bottom dollar there'd been no
loss.  Or, it'd be on the other side," she added grimly.

And lying there while the winds of early autumn swept
down from the Southern hills, filling the black air with dropping
leaves, and making, in intermittent rushes, a remote sad thunder in
great trees, she thought of the stranger who had come to live in her,
and of that other stranger, author of so much woe, who had lived with
her for almost twenty years.  And thinking of Gant, she felt
again an inchoate aching wonder, recalling the savage strife between
them, and the great submerged struggle beneath, founded upon the
hatred and the love of property, in which she did not doubt of her
victory, but which baffled her, foiled her.

"I'll vow!" she whispered.  "I'll
vow!  I never saw such a man!"

Gant, faced with the loss of sensuous delight,
knowing the time had come when all his Rabelaisian excess in eating,
drinking, and loving must come under the halter, knew of no gain that
could compensate him for the loss of libertinism; he felt, too, the
sharp ache of regret, feeling that he had possessed powers, had
wasted chances, such as his partnership with Will Pentland, that
might have given him position and wealth.  He knew that the
century had gone in which the best part of his life had passed; he
felt, more than ever, the strangeness and loneliness of our little
adventure upon the earth: he thought of his childhood on the Dutch
farm, the Baltimore days, the aimless drift down the continent, the
appalling fixation of his whole life upon a series of accidents. 
The enormous tragedy of accident hung like a gray cloud over his
life. He saw more clearly than ever that he was a stranger in a
strange land among people who would always be alien to him. 
Strangest of all, he thought, was this union, by which he had
begotten children, created a life dependent on him, with a woman so
remote from all he understood.

He did not know whether the year 1900 marked for him
a beginning or an ending; but with the familiar weakness of the
sensualist, he resolved to make it an ending, burning the spent fire
in him down to a guttering flame.  In the first half of the
month of January, still penitently true to the New Year's
reformation, he begot a child: by Spring, when it was evident that
Eliza was again pregnant, he had hurled himself into an orgy to which
even a notable four months' drunk in 1896 could offer no precedent. 
Day after day he became maniacally drunk, until he fixed himself in a
state of constant insanity: in May she sent him off again to a
sanitarium at Piedmont to take the "cure," which consisted
simply in feeding him plainly and cheaply, and keeping him away from
alcohol for six weeks, a regime which contributed no more ravenously
to his hunger than it did to his thirst.  He returned, outwardly
chastened, but inwardly a raging furnace, toward the end of June: the
day before he came back, Eliza, obviously big with child, her white
face compactly set, walked sturdily into each of the town's fourteen
saloons, calling up the proprietor or the barman behind his counter,
and speaking clearly and loudly in the sodden company of bar
clientry:

"See here: I just came in to tell you that Mr.
Gant is coming back to-morrow, and I want you all to know that if I
hear of any of you selling him a drink, I'll put you in the
penitentiary."

The threat, they knew, was preposterous, but the
white judicial face, the thoughtful pursing of the lips, and the
right hand, which she held loosely clenched, like a man's, with the
forefinger extended, emphasizing her proclamation with a calm, but
somehow powerful gesture, froze them with a terror no amount of
fierce excoriation could have produced.  They received her
announcement in beery stupefaction, muttering at most a startled
agreement as she walked out.

"By God," said a mountaineer, sending a
brown inaccurate stream toward a cuspidor, "she'll do it, too. 
That woman means business."

"Hell!" said Tim O'Donnel, thrusting his
simian face comically above his counter, "I wouldn't give W.O. a
drink now if it was fifteen cents a quart and we was alone in a
privy.  Is she gone yet?"

There was vast whisky laughter.

"Who is she?" some one asked.

"She's Will Pentland's sister."

"By God, she'll do it then," cried several;
and the place trembled again with their laughter.

Will Pentland was in Loughran's when she entered. 
She did not greet him.  When she had gone he turned to a man
near him, prefacing his remark with a birdlike nod and wink: 
"Bet you can't do that," he said.

Gant, when he returned, and was publicly refused at a
bar, was wild with rage and humiliation.  He got whisky very
easily, of course, by sending a drayman from his steps, or some
negro, in for it; but, in spite of the notoriety of his conduct,
which had, he knew, become a classic myth for the children of the
town, he shrank at each new advertisement of his behaviour; he
became, year by year, more, rather than less, sensitive to it, and
his shame, his quivering humiliation on mornings after, product of
rasped pride and jangled nerves, was pitiable.  He felt bitterly
that Eliza had with deliberate malice publicly degraded him: he
screamed denunciation and abuse at her on his return home.

All through the summer Eliza walked with white boding
placidity through horror--she had by now the hunger for it, waiting
with terrible quiet the return of fear at night.  Angered by her
pregnancy, Gant went almost daily to Elizabeth's house in Eagle
Crescent, whence he was delivered nightly by a band of exhausted and
terrified prostitutes into the care of his son Steve, his oldest
child, by now pertly free with nearly all the women in the district,
who fondled him with good-natured vulgarity, laughed heartily at his
glib innuendoes, and suffered him, even, to slap them smartly on
their rumps, making for him roughly as he skipped nimbly away.

"Son," said Elizabeth, shaking Gant's
waggling head vigorously, "don't you carry on, when you grow up,
like the old rooster here. But he's a nice old boy when he wants to
be," she continued, kissing the bald spot on his head, and
deftly slipping into the boy's hand the wallet Gant had, in a torrent
of generosity, given to her.  She was scrupulously honest.

The boy was usually accompanied on these errands by
Jannadeau and Tom Flack, a negro hack-man, who waited in patient
constraint outside the latticed door of the brothel until the
advancing tumult within announced that Gant had been enticed to
depart.  And he would go, either struggling clumsily and
screaming eloquent abuse at his suppliant captors, or jovially
acquiescent, bellowing a wanton song of his youth along the latticed
crescent, and through the supper-silent highways of the town.
 

    
"Up in that back room,
boys,
     
Up in
THAT back room,
     
All
among the fleas and bugs,
     
I
pit-tee your sad doom."
 

Home, he would be cajoled up the tall veranda stairs,
enticed into his bed; or, resisting all compulsion, he would seek out
his wife, shut usually in her room, howling taunts at her, and
accusations of unchastity, since there festered in him dark
suspicion, fruit of his age, his wasting energy.  Timid Daisy,
pale from fright, would have fled to the neighboring arms of Sudie
Isaacs, or to the Tarkintons; Helen, aged ten, even then his delight,
would master him, feeding spoonfuls of scalding soup into his mouth,
and slapping him sharply with her small hand when he became
recalcitrant.

"You DRINK this!  You better!"

He was enormously pleased: they were both strung on
the same wires.

Again, he was beyond all reason.  Extravagantly
mad, he built roaring fires in his sitting-room, drenching the
leaping fire with a can of oil; spitting exultantly into the
answering roar, and striking up, until he was exhausted, a profane
chant, set to a few recurrent bars of music, which ran, for forty
minutes, somewhat like this:
 

    
"O-ho--Goddam,
     
Goddam, Goddam,
     
O-ho--Goddam,
     
Goddam--Goddam."
 

--adopting usually the measure by which clock-chimes
strike out the hour.

And outside, strung like apes along the wide wires of
the fence, Sandy and Fergus Duncan, Seth Tarkinton, sometimes Ben and
Grover themselves, joining in the glee of their friends, kept up an
answering chant:
 

    
"Old man Gant
     
Came home drunk!
     
Old man Gant
     
Came home drunk!"
 

Daisy, from a neighbor's sanctuary, wept in shame and
fear.  But Helen, small thin fury, held on relentlessly:
presently he would subside into a chair, and receive hot soup and
stinging slaps with a grin.  Upstairs Eliza lay, white-faced and
watchfully.

So ran the summer by.  The last grapes hung in
dried and rotten clusters to the vines; the wind roared distantly;
September ended.

One night the dry doctor, Cardiac, said:  "I
think we'll be through with this before to-morrow evening." 
He departed, leaving in the house a middle-aged country woman. 
She was a hard-handed practical nurse.

At eight o'clock Gant returned alone.  The boy
Steve had stayed at home for ready dispatch at Eliza's need; for the
moment the attention was shifted from the master.

His great voice below, chanting obscenities, carried
across the neighborhood: as she heard the sudden wild roar of flame
up the chimney, shaking the house in its flight, she called Steve to
her side, tensely:  "Son, he'll burn us all up!" she
whispered.

They heard a chair fall heavily below, his curse;
they heard his heavy reeling stride across the dining-room and up the
hall; they heard the sagging creak of the stair-rail as his body
swung against it.

"He's coming!" she whispered.  "He's
coming!  Lock the door, son!"

The boy locked the door.

"Are you there?" Gant roared, pounding the
flimsy door heavily with his great fist.  "Miss Eliza: are
you there?" howling at her the ironical title by which he
addressed her at moments like this.

And he screamed a sermon of profanity and woven
invective:--

"Little did I reck," he began, getting at
once into the swing of preposterous rhetoric which he used half
furiously, half comically, "little did I reck the day I first
saw her eighteen bitter years ago, when she came wriggling around the
corner at me like a snake on her belly--[a stock epithet which from
repetition was now heart-balm to him]--little did I reck
that--that--that it would come to this," he finished lamely. 
He waited quietly, in the heavy silence, for some answer, knowing
that she lay in her white-faced calm behind the door, and filled with
the old choking fury because he knew she would not answer.

"Are you there?  I say, are you there,
woman?" he howled, barking his big knuckles in a furious
bombardment.

There was nothing but the white living silence.

"Ah me!  Ah me!" he sighed with strong
self-pity, then burst into forced snuffling sobs, which furnished a
running accompaniment to his denunciation.  "Merciful God!"
he wept, "it's fearful, it's awful, it's croo-el.  What
have I ever done that God should punish me like this in my old age?"

There was no answer.

"Cynthia!  Cynthia!" he howled
suddenly, invoking the memory of his first wife, the gaunt tubercular
spinstress whose life, it was said, his conduct had done nothing to
prolong, but whom he was fond of supplicating now, realizing the
hurt, the anger he caused to Eliza by doing so.  "Cynthia! 
O Cynthia!  Look down upon me in my hour of need!  Give me
succour!  Give me aid!  Protect me against this fiend out
of Hell!"

And he continued, weeping in heavy snuffling
burlesque:  "O-boo-hoo-hoo!  Come down and save me, I
beg of you, I entreat you, I implore you, or I perish."