Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (44 page)

Swirling around the marked man in wild elves' dance,
they sang with piping empty violence:
 

    
"We are some fond
mother's treasure,
     
Men
and women of to-morrow,
     
For
a moment's empty pleasure
     
Would you give us lifelong sorrow?

     
Think of sisters,
wives, and mothers,
     
Of
helpless babes in some low slum,
     
Think not of yourself, but others,
     
Vote against the Demon Rum."
 

Eugene shuddered, and looked up at Gant's white
emblem with coy pride.  They walked happily by unhappy
alcoholics, deltaed in foaming eddies of innocence, and smiling
murderously down at some fond mother's treasure.

If they were mine I'd warm their little tails, they
thought--privately.

Outside the corrugated walls of the warehouse, Gant
paused for a moment to acknowledge the fervent congratulation of a
group of ladies from the First Baptist Church: Mrs. Tarkinton, Mrs.
Fagg Sluder, Mrs. C. M. McDonnel, and Mrs. W. H. (Pert) Pentland,
who, heavily powdered, trailed her long skirt of gray silk with a
musty rustle, and sneered elegantly down over her whaleboned collar. 
She was very fond of Gant.

"Where's Will?" he asked.

"Feathering the pockets of the licker interests,
when he ought to be down here doing the Lord's Work," she
replied with Christian bitterness.  "Nobody but you knows
what I've had to put up with, Mr. Gant.  You've had to put up
with the queer Pentland streak, in your own home," she added
with lucid significance.

He shook his head regretfully, and stared sorrowfully
at the gutter.

"Ah, Lord, Pett!  We've been through the
mill--both of us."

A smell of drying roots and sassafras twisted a sharp
spiral from the warehouse into the thin slits of his nostrils.

"When the time comes to speak up for the right,"
Pett announced to several of the ladies, "you'll always find
Will Gant ready to do his part."

With far-seeing statesmanship he looked westward
toward Pisgah.

"Licker," he said, "is a curse and a
care.  It has caused the sufferings of untold millions--"

"Amen, Amen," Mrs. Tarkinton chanted
softly, swaying her wide hips rhythmically.

"--it has brought poverty, disease, and
suffering to hundreds of thousands of homes, broken the hearts of
wives and mothers, and taken bread from the mouths of little orphaned
children."

"Amen, brother."

"It has been," Gant began, but at this
moment his uneasy eye lighted upon the broad red face of Tim O'Doyle
and the fierce whiskered whiskiness of Major Ambrose Nethersole, two
prominent publicans, who were standing near the entrance not six feet
away and listening attentively.

"Go on!" Major Nethersole urged, with the
deep chest notes of a bullfrog.  "Go on, W. O., but for
God's sake, don't belch!"

"Begod!" said Tim O'Doyle, wiping a tiny
rill of tobacco juice from the thick simian corner of his mouth,
"I've seen him start for the door and step through the windey. 
When we see him coming we hire two extra bottle openers.  He
used to give the barman a bonus to get up early."

"Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of
you," said Gant scathingly.  "They are the lowest of
the low, the whisky-besotted dregs of humanity, who deserve to bear
not even the name of men, so far have they retrograded backwards."

With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he
departed into the warehouse.

"By God!" said Ambrose Nethersole
approvingly.  "It takes W. O. to tie a knot in the tail of
the English language.  It always did."
 
 

But within two months he moaned bitterly his unwetted
thirst.  For several years he ordered, from time to time, the
alloted quota?a gallon of whisky every two weeks--from Baltimore. 
It was the day of the blind tiger.  The town was mined thickly
with them.  Bad rye and moonshine corn were the prevailing
beverages.  He grew old, he was sick, he still drank.

A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the
parched gulley of desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery. 
He made pretty young summer widows at Dixieland presents of money,
underwear, and silk stockings, which he drew on over their shapely
legs in the dusty gloom of his little office.  Smiling with
imperturbable tenderness, Mrs. Selborne thrust out her heavy legs
slowly to swell with warm ripe smack his gift of flowered green-silk
garters.Wetting his thumb with sly thin aftersmile, he told.

A grass widow, forty-nine, with piled hair of dyed
henna, corseted breasts and hips architecturally protuberant in a
sharp diagonal, meaty mottled arms, and a gulched face of leaden
flaccidity puttied up brightly with cosmetics, rented the upstairs of
Woodson Street while Helen was absent.

"She looks like an adventuress, hey?" said
Gant hopefully.

She had a son.  He was fourteen, with a round
olive face, a soft white body, and thin legs.  He bit his nails
intently.  His hair and eyes were dark, his face full of sad
stealth.  He was wise and made himself unobtrusively scarce at
proper times.

Gant came home earlier.  The widow rocked
brightly on the porch. He bowed sweepingly, calling her Madam. 
Coy-kittenish, she talked down at him, slogged against the creaking
stair rail.  She leered cosily at him.  She came and went
freely through his sitting-room, where he now slept.  One
evening, just after he had entered, she came in from the bathroom,
scented lightly with the best soap, and beefily moulded into a
flame-red kimono.

A handsome woman yet, he thought.  Good evening,
madam.

He got up from his rocker, put aside the crackling
sheets of the evening paper (Republican), and undipped his
steel-rimmed glasses from the great blade of his nose.

She came over with sprightly gait to the empty
hearth, clasping her wrapper tightly with veinous hands.

Swiftly, with a gay leer, she opened the garment,
disclosing her thin legs, silkshod, and her lumpy hips, gaudily
clothed in ruffled drawers of blue silk.

"Aren't they pretty?" she twittered
invitingly but obscurely. Then, as he took an eager stride forward,
she skipped away like a ponderous maenad soliciting Bacchic pursuit.

"A pair of pippins," he agreed,
inclusively.

After this, she prepared breakfast for him. 
From Dixieland, Eliza surveyed them with a bitter eye.  He had
no talent for concealment. His visits morning and evening were
briefer, his tongue more
benevolent.

"I know what you're up to down there," she
said.  "You needn't think I don't."

He grinned sheepishly and wet his thumb.  Her
mouth worked silently at attempted speech for a moment.  She
speared a frying steak and flipped it over on its raw back, smiling
vengefully in a mounting column of greasy blue vapor.  He poked
her clumsily with his stiff fingers; she shrieked a protest mixed of
anger and amusement, and moved awkwardly out of his reach with
bridling gait.

"Get away!  I don't want you round me! 
It's too late for that." She laughed with nagging mockery.

"Don't you wish you could, though?  I'll
vow!" she continued, kneading her lips for several seconds in an
effort to speak.  "I'd be ashamed.  Every one's
laughing at you behind your back."

"You lie!  By God, you lie!" he
thundered magnificently, touched. Hammer-hurling Thor.

But he tired very quickly of his new love.  He
was weary, and frightened by his depletion.  For a time he gave
the widow small sums of money, and forgot the rent.  He
transferred to her his storming abuse, muttered ominously to himself
in long aisle-pacings at his shop, when he saw that he had lost the
ancient freedom of his house and saddled himself with a tyrannous
hag.  One evening he returned insanely drunk, routed her out of
her chamber and pursued her unfrocked, untoothed, unputtied, with a
fluttering length of kimono in her palsied hand, driving her finally
into the yard beneath the big cherry tree, which he circled, howling,
making frantic lunges for her as she twittered with fear, casting
splintered glances all over the listening neighborhood as she put on
the crumpled wrapper, hid partially the indecent jigging of her
breasts, and implored succor.  It did not come.

"You bitch!" he screamed.  "I'll
kill you.  You have drunk my heart's-blood, you have driven me
to the brink of destruction, and you gloat upon my misery, listening
with fiendish delight to my death-rattle, bloody and unnatural
monster that you are."

She kept the tree deftly between them and, when his
attention was diverted for a moment to the flood of anathema, tore
off on fear-quick feet, streetward to the haven of the Tarkintons'
house.  As she rested there, in Mrs. Tarkinton's consolatory
arms, weeping hysterically and dredging gullies in her poor painted
face, they heard his chaotic footsteps blundering within his house,
the heavy crash of furniture, and his fierce curses when he fell.

"He'll kill himself!  He'll kill himself!"
she cried.  "He doesn't know what he's doing.  Oh, my
God!" she wept.  "I've never been talked to that way
by any man in my life!"
 
Gant
fell heavily within his house.  There was silence.  She
rose fearfully.

"He's not a bad man," she whispered.
 
 

One morning in early summer, after Helen had
returned, Eugene was wakened by scuffling feet and excited cries
along the small boardwalk that skirted the house on its upper side
and led to the playhouse, a musty little structure of pine with a
single big room, which he could almost touch from the sloping roof
that flowed about his gabled backroom window.  The playhouse was
another of the strange extravagancies of Gantian fancy: it had been
built for the children when they were young.  It had been for
many years closed, it was a retreat of delight; its imprisoned air,
stale and cool, was scented permanently with old pine boards, cased
books, and dusty magazines.

For some weeks now it had been occupied by Mrs.
Selborne's South Carolina cook, Annie, a plump comely negress of
thirty-five, with a rich coppery skin.  The woman had come into
the mountains for the summer: she was a good cook and expected work
at hotels or boarding-houses.  Helen engaged her for five
dollars a week.  It was an act of pride.

That morning, Gant had wakened earlier and stared at
his ceiling thoughtfully.  He had risen, dressed, and wearing
his leather slippers, walked softly back, along the boards, to the
playhouse. Helen was roused by Annie's loud protests.  Tingling
with premonition she came down stairs, and found Gant wringing his
hands and moaning as he walked up and down the washroom. 
Through the open doors she heard the negress complaining loudly to
herself as she banged out drawers and slammed her belongings
together.

"I ain't used to no such goins-on.  I'se a
married woman, I is.  I ain't goin' to say in dis house anothah
minnit."

Helen turned furiously upon Gant and shook him.

"You rotten old thing, you!" she cried. 
"How dare you!"

"Merciful God!" he whined, stamping his
foot like a child, and pacing up and down.  "Why did this
have to come upon me in my old age!"  He began to sniffle
affectedly.  "Boo-hoo-hoo!  O Jesus, it's fearful,
it's awful, it's cruel that you should put this affliction on me." 
His contempt for reason was Parnassian.  He accused God for
exposing him; he wept because he had been caught.

Helen rushed out to the playhouse and with large
gesture and hearty entreaty strove to appease outraged Annie.

"Come on, Annie," she coaxed.  "I'll
give you a dollar a week more if you stay.  Forget about it!"

"No'm," said Annie stubbornly.  "I
cain't stay heah any longer. I'se afraid of dat man."

Gant paused in his distracted pacing from time to
time long enough to cock an eager ear.  At each iteration of
Annie's firm refusals, he fetched out a deep groan and took up his
lament again.

Luke, who had descended, had fidgeted about in a
nervous prance from one large bare foot to another.  Now he went
to the door and looked out, bursting suddenly into a large Whah-Whah
as he caught sight of the sullen respectability of the negress'
expression. Helen came back into the house with an angry perturbed
face.

"She'll tell this all over town," she
announced.

Gant moaned in lengthy exhalations.  Eugene,
shocked at first, and frightened, flung madly across the kitchen
linoleum in twisting leaps, falling catlike on his bare soles. 
He squealed ecstatically at Ben who loped in scowling, and began to
snicker in short contemptuous fragments.

"And of course she'll tell Mrs. Selborne all
about it, as soon as she goes back to Henderson," Helen
continued.

"O my God!" Gant whined, "why was this
put on me--"

"O gotohell!  Gotohell!" she said
comically, her wrath loosened suddenly by a ribald and exasperated
smile.  They howled.

"I shall dy-ee."

Eugene choked in faint hiccoughs and began to slide
gently down the kitchen-washroom door jamb.