Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (10 page)

With her desperate sadness she encysted herself
within her house and her family, reclaimed that life she had been
ready to renounce, lived laborious days and tried to drink, in toil,
oblivion.  But the dark lost face gleamed like a sudden and
impalpable faun within the thickets of memory: she thought of the
mark on his brown neck and wept.
 
During
the grim winter the shadows lifted slowly.  Gant brought back
the roaring fires, the groaning succulent table, the lavish and
explosive ritual of the daily life.  The old gusto surged back
in their lives.

And, as the winter waned, the interspersed darkness
in Eugene's brain was lifted slowly, days, weeks, months began to
emerge in consecutive brightness; his mind came from the confusion of
the Fair: life opened practically.

Secure and conscious now in the guarded and
sufficient strength of home, he lay with well-lined belly before the
roasting vitality of the fire, poring insatiably over great volumes
in the bookcase, exulting in the musty odor of the leaves, and in the
pungent smell of their hot hides.  The books he delighted in
most were three huge calf-skin volumes called Ridpath's History of
the World.  Their numberless pages were illustrated with
hundreds of drawings, engravings, wood-cuts: he followed the
progression of the centuries pictorially before he could read. 
The pictures of battle delighted him most of all.  Exulting in
the howl of the beaten wind about the house, the thunder of great
trees, he committed himself to the dark storm, releasing the mad
devil's hunger all men have in them, which lusts for darkness, the
wind, and incalculable speed.  The past unrolled to him in
separate and enormous visions; he built unending legends upon the
pictures of the kings of Egypt, charioted swiftly by soaring horses,
and something infinitely old and recollective seemed to awaken in him
as he looked on fabulous monsters, the twined beards and huge
beast-bodies of Assyrian kings, the walls of Babylon.  His brain
swarmed with pictures--Cyrus directing the charge, the spear-forest
of the Macedonian phalanx, the splintered oars, the numberless huddle
of the ships at Salamis, the feasts of Alexander, the terrific melee
of the knights, the shattered lances, the axe and the sword, the
massed pikemen, the beleaguered walls, the scaling ladders heavy with
climbing men hurled backward, the Swiss who flung his body on the
lances, the press of horse and foot, the gloomy forests of Gaul and
César conquests. Gant sat farther away, behind him, swinging
violently back and forth in a stout rocker, spitting clean and
powerful spurts of tobacco-juice over his son's head into the hissing
fire.

Or again, Gant would read to him with sonorous and
florid rhetoric passages from Shakespeare, among which he heard most
often Marc Antony's funeral oration, Hamlet's soliloquy, the banquet
scene in Macbeth, and the scene between Desdemona and Othello before
he strangles her.  Or, he would recite or read poetry, for which
he had a capacious and retentive memory.  His favorites were: 
"O why should the spirit of mortal be proud" ("Lincoln's
favorite poem," he was fond of saying); "'We are lost,' the
captain shouted, As he staggered down the stairs"; "I
remember, I remember, the house where I was born"; "Ninety
and nine with their captain, Rode on the enemy's track, Rode in the
gray light of morning, Nine of the ninety came back"; "The
boy stood on the burning deck"; and "Half a league, half a
league, half a league onward."

Sometimes he would get Helen to recite "Still
sits the schoolhouse by the road, a ragged beggar sunning; Around it
still the sumachs grow, and blackberry vines are running."

And when she had told how grasses had been growing
over the girl's head for forty years, and how the gray-haired man had
found in life's harsh school how few hated to go above him, because,
you see, they love him, Gant would sigh heavily, and say with a shake
of his head:

"Ah me!  There was never a truer word
spoken than that."

The family was at the very core and ripeness of its
life together. Gant lavished upon it his abuse, his affection, and
his prodigal provisioning.  They came to look forward eagerly to
his entrance, for he brought with him the great gusto of living, of
ritual.  They would watch him in the evening as he turned the
corner below with eager strides, follow carefully the processional of
his movements from the time he flung his provisions upon the kitchen
table to the re-kindling of his fire, with which he was always at
odds when he entered, and on to which he poured wood, coal and
kerosene lavishly.  This done, he would remove his coat and wash
himself at the basin vigorously, rubbing his great hands across his
shaven, tough-bearded face with the cleansing and male sound of
sandpaper. Then he would thrust his body against the door jamb and
scratch his back energetically by moving it violently to and fro. 
This done, he would empty another half can of kerosene on the howling
flame, lunging savagely at it, and muttering to himself.

Then, biting off a good hunk of powerful apple
tobacco, which lay ready for his use on the mantel, he would pace
back and forth across his room fiercely, oblivious of his grinning
family who followed these ceremonies with exultant excitement, as he
composed his tirade.  Finally, he would burst in on Eliza in the
kitchen, plunging to the heart of denunciation with a mad howl.

His turbulent and undisciplined rhetoric had
acquired, by the regular convention of its usage, something of the
movement and directness of classical epithet: his similes were
preposterous, created really in a spirit of vulgar mirth, and the
great comic intelligence that was in the family--down to the
youngest?was shaken daily by it.  The children grew to await his
return in the evening with a kind of exhilaration.  Indeed,
Eliza herself, healing slowly and painfully her great hurt, got a
certain stimulation from it; but there was still in her a fear of the
periods of drunkenness, and latently, a stubborn and unforgiving
recollection of the past.

But, during that winter, as death, assaulted by the
quick and healing gaiety of children, those absolute little gods of
the moment, lifted itself slowly out of their hearts, something like
hopefulness returned to her.  They were a life unto
themselves?how lonely they were they did not know, but they were
known to every one and friended by almost no one.  Their status
was singular?if  they could have been distinguished by caste,
they would probably have been called middle-class, but the Duncans,
the Tarkintons, all their neighbors, and all their acquaintances
throughout the town, never drew in to them, never came into the
strange rich color of their lives, because they had twisted the
design of all orderly life, because there was in them a mad,
original, disturbing quality which they did not suspect.  And
companionship with the elect--those like the Hilliards--was equally
impossible, even if they had had the gift or the desire for it. 
But they hadn't.

Gant was a great man, and not a singular one, because
singularity does not hold life in unyielding devotion to it.

As he stormed through the house, unleashing his
gathered bolts, the children followed him joyously, shrieking
exultantly as he told Eliza he had first seen her "wriggling
around the corner like a snake on her belly," or, as coming in
from freezing weather he had charged her and all the Pentlands with
malevolent domination of the elements.

"We will freeze," he yelled, "we will
freeze in this hellish, damnable, cruel and God-forsaken climate. 
Does Brother Will care? Does Brother Jim care?  Did the Old Hog,
your miserable old father, care?  Merciful God!  I have
fallen into the hands of fiends incarnate, more savage, more cruel,
more abominable than the beasts of the field.  Hellhounds that
they are, they will sit by and gloat at my agony until I am done to
death."

He paced rapidly about the adjacent wash-room for a
moment, muttering to himself, while grinning Luke stood watchfully
near.

"But they can eat!" he shouted, plunging
suddenly at the kitchen door.  "They can eat--when some one
else will feed them.  I shall never forget the Old Hog as long
as I live.  Cr-unch, Cr-unch,Cr-unch,"--they were all
exploded with laughter as his face assumed an expression of insane
gluttony, and as he continued, in a slow, whining voice intended to
represent the speech of the late Major: "'Eliza, if you don't
mind I'll have some more of that chicken,' when the old scoundrel had
shovelled it down his throat so fast we had to carry him away from
the table."

As his denunciation reached some high extravagance
the boys would squeal with laughter, and Gant, inwardly tickled,
would glance around slyly with a faint grin bending the corners of
his thin mouth.  Eliza herself would laugh shortly, and then
exclaim roughly:  "Get out of here!  I've had enough
of your goings-on for one night."

Sometimes, on these occasions, his good humor grew so
victorious that he would attempt clumsily to fondle her, putting one
arm stiffly around her waist, while she bridled, became confused, and
half-attempted to escape, saying:  "Get away!  Get
away from me! It's too late for that now."  Her white
embarrassed smile was at once painful and comic: tears pressed
closely behind it.  At these rare, unnatural exhibitions of
affection, the children laughed with constraint, fidgeted restlessly,
and said:  "Aw, papa, don't."

Eugene, when he first noticed an occurrence of this
sort, was getting on to his fifth year: shame gathered in him in
tangled clots, aching in his throat; he twisted his neck about
convulsively, smiling desperately as he did later when he saw poor 
buffoons or mawkish scenes in the theatre.  And he was never
after able to see them touch each other with affection, without the
same inchoate and choking humiliation: they were so used to the
curse, the clamor, and the roughness, that any variation into
tenderness came as a cruel affectation.

But as the slow months, gummed with sorrow, dropped
more clearly, the powerful germinal instinct for property and freedom
began to reawaken in Eliza, and the ancient submerged struggle
between their natures began again.  The children were growing
up--Eugene had found playmates--Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs. 
Her sex was a fading coal.

Season by season, there began again the old strife of
ownership and taxes.  Returning home, with the tax-collector's
report in his hand, Gant would be genuinely frantic with rage.

"In the name of God, Woman, what are we coming
to?  Before another year we'll all go to the poorhouse. 
Ah, Lord!  I see very well where it will all end.  I'll go
to the wall, every penny we've got will go into the pockets of those
accursed swindlers, and the rest will come under the sheriff's
hammer.  I curse the day I was ever fool enough to buy the first
stick.  Mark my words, we'll be living in soup-kitchens before
this fearful, this awful, this hellish and damnable winter is
finished."

She would purse her lips thoughtfully as she went
over the list, while he looked at her with a face of strained agony.

"Yes, it does look pretty bad," she would
remark.  And then:  "It's a pity you didn't listen to
me last summer, Mr. Gant, when we had a chance of trading in that
worthless old Owenby place for those two houses on Carter Street. 
We could have been getting forty dollars a month rent on them ever
since."

"I never want to own another foot of land as
long as I live," he yelled.  "It's kept me a poor man
all my life, and when I die they'll have to give me six feet of earth
in Pauper's Field."  And he would grow broodingly
philosophic, speaking of the vanity of human effort, the last
resting-place in earth of rich and poor, the significant fact that we
could "take none of it with us," ending perhaps with "Ah
me!  It all comes to the same in the end, anyway."

Or, he would quote a few stanzas of Gray's Elegy,
using that encyclopé of stock melancholy with rather indefinite
application:
 

    
"--Await alike th'
inevitable hour,
     
The
paths of glory lead but to the grave."
 

But Eliza sat grimly on what they had.

Gant, for all his hatred of land ownership, was proud
of living under his own shelter, and indeed proud in the possession
of anything that was sanctified by his usage, and that gave him
comfort.  He would have liked ready and unencumbered
affluence?the possession of huge sums of money in the bank and in his
pocket, the freedom to travel grandly, to go before the world
spaciously.  He liked to carry large sums of money in his
pocket, a practice of which Eliza disapproved, and for which she
reprimanded him frequently.  Once or twice, when he was drunk,
he had been robbed: he would brandish a roll of bills about under the
stimulation of whisky, and dispense large sums to his children--ten,
twenty, fifty dollars to each, with maudlin injunctions to "take
it all!  Take it all, God damn it!"  But next day he
was equally assiduous in his demands for its return: Helen usually
collected it from the sometimes unwilling fingers of the boys. 
She would give it to him next day.  She was fifteen or sixteen
years old, and almost six feet high: a tall thin girl, with large
hands and feet, big-boned, generous features, behind which the
hysteria of constant excitement lurked.

The bond between the girl and her father grew
stronger every day: she was nervous, intense, irritable, and abusive
as he was.  She adored him.  He had begun to suspect that
this devotion, and his own response to it, was a cause more and more
of annoyance to Eliza, and he was inclined to exaggerate and
emphasize it, particularly when he was drunk, when his furious
distaste for his wife, his obscene complaint against her, was crudely
balanced by his maudlin docility to the girl.