Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (24 page)

"I hope you always have something to use them
on," said Will, flensing his hand, and winking at Joe Gambell.

Eugene remembered weeks of frantic preparation, dress
fittings, rehearsals, the hysteria of Daisy, who stared at her nails
until they went blue, and the final splendor of the last two days?the
arriving gifts, the house, unnaturally cheerful with rich carpets and
flowers, the perilous moment when their lives joined, the big packed
dining-room, the droning interminable Scotch voice of the
Presbyterian minister, the mounting triumph of the music when the
grocery clerk got his bride.  Later, the confusion, the
greetings, the hysteria of the women.  Daisy sobbing
uncontrollably in the arms of a distant cousin, Beth Pentland, who
had come up with her hearty red husband, the owner of a chain of
small groceries in a South Carolina town, bringing gifts and a giant
watermelon, andwhose own grief was enhanced by the discovery, after
the wedding, that the dress she had worked on weeks in advance she
had put on, in her frenzy, wrong side out.

Thus Daisy passed more or less definitely out of
Eugene's life, although he was to see her briefly on visits, but with
decreasing frequency, in the years that followed.  The grocery
clerk was making the one daring gesture of his life: he was breaking
away from the cotton town, in which all the years of his life had
been passed, and from the long lazy hours of grocery clerks, the
languorous gossip of lank cotton farmers and townsmen, to which he
had been used.  He had found employment as a commercial
traveller for a food products company: his headquarters was to be in
Augusta, Georgia, but he was to travel into the far South.

This rooting up of his life, this adventure into new
lands, the effort to improve his fortune and his state, was his
wedding gift to his wife--a bold one, but imperilled already by
distrust, fear, and his peasant suspicion of new scenes, new faces,
new departures, of any life that differed from that of his village.

"There's no place like Henderson," said he,
with complacent and annoying fidelity, referring to that haven of
enervation, red clay, ignorance, slander, and superstition, in whose
effluent rays he had been reared.

But he went to Augusta, and began his new life with
Daisy in a lodging house.  She was twenty-one, a slender,
blushing girl who played the piano beautifully, accurately,
academically, with a rippling touch, and no imagination.  Eugene
could never remember her very well.

In the early autumn after her marriage, Gant made the
journey to Augusta, taking Eugene with him.  The inner
excitement of both was intense; the hot wait at the sleepy junction
of Spartanburg, the ride in the dilapidated day coaches of the branch
line that ran to Augusta, the hot baked autumnal land, rolling
piedmont and pine woods, every detail of the landscape they drank in
with thirsty adventurous eyes.  Gant's roving spirit was parched
for lack of travel: for Eugene, Saint Louis was a faint unreality,
but there burned in him a vision of the opulent South, stranger even
than his passionate winter nostalgia for the snow-bound North, which
the drifted but short-lived snows in Altamont, the seizure of the
unaccustomed moment for sledding and skating on the steep hills
awakened in him with a Northern desire, a desire for the dark, the
storm, the winds that roar across the earth and the triumphant
comfort of warm walls which only a Southerner perhaps can know.

And he saw the town of Augusta first not in the drab
hues of reality, but as one who bursts a window into the faery
pageant of the world, as one who has lived in prison, and finds life
and the earth in rosy dawn, as one who has lived in all the fabulous
imagery of books, and finds in a journey only an extension and
verification of it--so did he see Augusta, with the fresh washed eyes
of a child, with glory, with enchantment.

They were gone two weeks.  He remembered chiefly
the brown stains of the recent flood, which had flowed through the
town and inundated its lower floors, the broad main street, the
odorous and gleaming drugstore, scented to him with all the spices of
his fancy, the hills and fields of Aiken, in South Carolina, where
he  sought vainly for John D. Rockefeller, a legendary prince
who, he heard, went there for sport, marvelling that two States could
join imperceptibly, without visible markings, and the cotton gin
where he saw the great press mash the huge raw bales cleanly into
tight bundles half their former size.

Once, some children on the street had taunted him
because of his long hair, and he had fallen into a cursing fury;
once, in a rage at some quarrel with his sister, he set off on a
world adventure, walking furiously for hours down a country road by
the river and cotton fields, captured finally by Gant who sought for
him in a hired rig.

They went to the theatre: it was one of the first
plays he had seen.  The play was a biblical one, founded on the
story of Saul and Jonathan, and he whispered to Gant from scene to
scene the trend of coming events--a precocity which pleased his
father mightily, and to which he referred for months.

Just before they came home, Joe Gambell, in a fit of
concocted petulance, resigned his position, and announced that he was
returning to Henderson.  His adventure had
lasted three months.
 
 

13
 

In the years that followed, up to his eleventh or
twelfth year when he could no longer travel on half fares, Eugene
voyaged year by year into the rich mysterious South.  Eliza,
who, during her first winter at Dixieland, had been stricken by
severe attacks of rheumatism, induced partly by kidney trouble, which
caused her flesh to swell puffily, and which was diagnosed by the
doctor as Blight's Disease, began to make extensive, although
economical, voyages into Florida and Arkansas in search of health
and, rather vaguely, in search of wealth.

She always spoke hopefully of the possibility of
opening a boarding-house at some tropical winter resort, during the
seasons there and in Altamont.  In winter now, she rented
Dixieland for a few months, sometimes for a year, although she really
had no intention of allowing the place to slip through her fingers
during the profitable summer season: usually, she let the place go,
more or less deliberately, to some unscrupulous adventuress of
lodging houses, good for a month's or two months' rent, but incapable
of the sustained effort that would support it for a longer time. 
On her return from her journey, with rents in arrears, or with some
other violation of the contract as an entering wedge, Eliza would
surge triumphantly into battle, making a forced entrance with police,
plain-clothes men, warrants, summonses, writs, injunctions, and all
the other artillery of legal warfare, possessing herself forcibly,
and with vindictive pleasure, of her property.

But she turned always into the South--the North for
her was a land which she threatened often to explore, but which
secretly she held in suspicion: there was in her no deep animosity
because of an old war, her feeling was rather one of fear, distrust,
alienation?the "Yankee" to whom she humorously referred was
foreign and remote. So, she turned always into the South, the South
that burned like Dark Helen in Eugene's blood, and she always took
him with her. They still slept together.

His feeling for the South was not so much historic as
it was of the core and desire of dark romanticism--that unlimited and
inexplicable drunkenness, the magnetism of some men's blood that
takes them into the heart of the heat, and beyond that, into the
polar and emerald cold of the South as swiftly as it took the heart
of that incomparable romanticist who wrote The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, beyond which there is nothing.  And this desire of his
was unquestionably enhanced by all he had read and visioned, by the
romantic halo that his school history cast over the section, by the
whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to
live in "mansions," and slavery was a benevolent
institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn
largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy
dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, all men
chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger,
death-mocking cavaliers.  Years later, when he could no longer
think of the barren spiritual wilderness, the hostile and murderous
intrenchment against all new life--when their cheap mythology, their
legend of the charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of
their lives, the quaint sweetness of their drawl, made him
writhe--when he could think of no return to their life and its
swarming superstition without weariness and horror, so great was his
fear of the legend, his fear of their antagonism, that he still
pretended the most fanatic devotion to them, excusing his Northern
residence on grounds of necessity rather than desire.

Finally, it occurred to him that these people had
given him nothing, that neither their love not their hatred could
injure him, that he owed them nothing, and he determined that he
would say so, and repay their insolence with a curse.  And he
did.
 
 

So did his boundaries stretch into enchantment--into
fabulous and solitary wonder broken only by Eliza's stingy
practicality, by her lack of magnificence in a magnificent world, by
the meals of sweet rolls and milk and butter in an untidy room, by
the shoe boxes of luncheon carried on the trains and opened in the
diner, after a lengthy inspection of the menu had led to the ordering
of coffee, by the interminable quarrels over price and charges in
almost every place they went, by her commands to him to "scrooch
up" when the conductor came through for the tickets, for he was
a tall lank boy, and his half-fare age might be called to question.

She took him to Florida in the late winter following
Gant's return from Augusta: they went to Tampa first, and, a few days
later, to Saint Petersburg.  He plowed through the loose deep
sand of the streets, fished interminably with jolly old men at the
end of the long pier, devoured a chest full of dime novels that he
found in the rooms she had rented in a private house.  They left
abruptly, after a terrific quarrel with the old Cracker who ran the
place, who thought himself tricked out of the best part of a season's
rent, and hurried off to South Carolina on receipt of a hysterical
message from Daisy which bade her mother to "come at once." 
They arrived in the dingy little town, which was sticky with wet
clay, and clammy with rain, in late March: Daisy's first child, a
boy, had been born the day before.  Eliza, annoyed at what she
considered the useless disruption of her holiday, quarrelled bitterly
with her daughter a day or two after her arrival, and departed for
Altamont with the declaration, which Daisy ironically applauded, that
she would never return again.  But she did.

The following winter she went to New Orleans at the
season of the Mardi Gras, taking her youngest with her.  Eugene
remembered the huge cisterns for rain-water, in the back yard of Aunt
Mary's house, the heavy window-rattling thunder of Mary's snores at
night, and the vast pageantry of carnival on Canal Street: the
storied floats, the smiling beauties, the marching troops, the masks
grotesque and fantastical.  And once more he saw ships at anchor
at the foot of Canal Street; and their tall keels looked over on the
street behind the sea walls; and in the cemeteries all the graves
were raised above the ground "because," said Oll, Gant's
nephew, "the water rots 'em."

And he remembered the smells of the French market,
the heavy fragrance of the coffee he drank there, and the foreign
Sunday gaiety of the city's life--the theatres open, the sound of
hammer and saw, the gay festivity of crowds.  He visited the
Boyles, old guests at Dixieland, who lived in the old French quarter,
sleeping at night with Frank Boyle in a vast dark room lighted dimly
with tapers: they had as cook an ancient negress who spoke only
French, and who returned from the Market early in the morning bearing
a huge basket loaded with vegetables, tropical fruits, fowls, meats.
She cooked strange delicious food that he had never tasted
before--heavy gumbo, garnished steaks, sauced fowls.

And he looked upon the huge yellow snake of the
river, dreaming of its distant shores, the myriad estuaries lush with
tropical growth that fed it, all the romantic life of plantation and
canefields that fringed it, of moonlight, of dancing darkies on the
levee, of slow lights on the gilded river boat, and the perfumed
flesh of black-haired women, musical wraiths below the phantom
drooping trees.

They had but shortly returned from Mardi Gras when,
one howling night in winter, as he lay asleep at Gant's, the house
was wakened by his father's terrible cries.  Gant had been
drinking heavily, day after fearful day.  Eugene had been sent
in the afternoons to his shop to fetch him home, and at sundown, with
Jannadeau's aid, had brought him, behind the negro's spavined horse,
roaring drunk to his house.  There followed the usual routine of
soup-feeding, undressing, and holding him in check until Doctor
McGuire arrived, thrust his needle deeply into Gant's stringy arm,
left sleeping-powders, and departed.  The girl was exhausted:
Gant himself had ravaged his strength, and had been brought down by
two or three painful attacks of rheumatism.

Now, he awoke in the dark, possessed by his terror
and agony, for the whole right side of his body was paralyzed by such
pain as he did not know existed.  He cursed and supplicated God
alternately in his pain and terror.  For days doctor and nurse
strove with him, hoping that the leaping inflammation would not
strike at his heart. He was gnarled, twisted, and bent with a savage
attack of inflammatory rheumatism.  As soon as he had recovered
sufficiently to travel, he departed, under Helen's care, for Hot
Springs. Almost savagely, she drove all other assistance from him,
devoting every minute of the day to his care: they were gone six
weeks--occasionally post-cards and letters describing a life of
hotels, mineral baths, sickness and lameness, and the sport of the
blooded rich, came to add new colors to Eugene's horizon: when they
returned Gant was able again to walk, the rheumatism had been boiled
from his limbs, but his right hand, gnarled and stiff, was
permanently crippled.  He was never again able to close it, and
there was something strangely chastened in his manner, a gleam of awe
and terror in his eyes.