Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (5 page)

Silence answered.

"Ingratitude, more fierce than brutish beasts,"
Gant resumed, getting off on another track, fruitful with mixed and
mangled quotation.  "You will be punished, as sure as
there's a just God in heaven.  You will all be punished. 
Kick the old man, strike him, throw him out on the street: he's no
good any more.  He's no longer able to provide for the
family--send him over the hill to the poorhouse.  That's where
he belongs.  Rattle his bones over the stones.  Honor thy
father that thy days may be long.  Ah, Lord!
 

    
"'Look, in this place
ran Cassius' dagger through;
      
See what a rent the envious Casca made;
      
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed;
      
And, as he
plucked his curséd steel away,
      
Mark how the blood of César followed it--'"
 

"Jeemy," said Mrs. Duncan at this moment to
her husband, "ye'd better go over.  He's loose agin, an'
she's wi' chile."

The Scotchman thrust back his chair, moved strongly
out of the ordered ritual of his life, and the warm fragrance of
new-baked bread.

At the gate, outside Gant's, he found patient
Jannadeau, fetched down by Ben.  They spoke matter-of-factly,
and hastened up the steps as they heard a crash upstairs, and a
woman's cry.  Eliza, in only her night-dress, opened the door.

"Come quick!" she whispered.  "Come
quick!"

"By God, I'll kill her," Gant screamed,
plunging down the stairs at greater peril to his own life than to any
other.  "I'll kill her now, and put an end to my misery."

He had a heavy poker in his hand.  The two men
seized him; the burly jeweller took the poker from his hand with
quiet strength. "He cut his head on the bed-rail, mama,"
said Steve descending.  It was true: Gant bled.

"Go for your Uncle Will, son.  Quick!" 
He was off like a hound.

"I think he meant it that time," she
whispered.

Duncan shut the door against the gaping line of
neighbors beyond the gate.

"Ye'll be gettin' a cheel like that, Mrs. Gant."

"Keep him away from me!  Keep him away!"
she cried out strongly.

"Aye, I will that!" he answered in quiet
Scotch.

She turned to go up the stairs, but on the second
step she fell heavily to her knees.  The country nurse,
returning from the bathroom, in which she had locked herself, ran to
her aid.  She went up slowly then between the woman and Grover. 
Outside Ben dropped nimbly from the low eave on to the lily beds:
Seth Tarkinton, clinging to fence wires, shouted greetings.

Gant went off docilely, somewhat dazed, between his
two guardians: as his huge limbs sprawled brokenly in his rocker,
they undressed him.  Helen had already been busy in the kitchen
for some time: she appeared now with boiling soup.

Gant's dead eyes lit with recognition as he saw her.

"Why baby," he roared, making a vast
maudlin circle with his arms, "how are you?"  She put
the soup down; he swept her thin body crushingly against him,
brushing her cheek and neck with his stiff-bristled mustache,
breathing upon her the foul rank odor of rye whisky.

"Oh, he's cut himself!"  The little
girl thought she was going to cry.

"Look what they did to me, baby," he
pointed to his wound and whimpered.

Will Pentland, true son of that clan who forgot one
another never, and who saw one another only in times of death,
pestilence, and terror, came in.

"Good evening, Mr. Pentland," said Duncan.

"Jus' tolable," he said, with his bird-like
nod and wink, taking in both men good-naturedly.  He stood in
front of the fire, paring meditatively at his blunt nails with a dull
knife.  It was his familiar gesture when in company: no one, he
felt, could see what you thought about anything, if you pared your
nails.

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.