Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (39 page)

But she said:  "Helen, that voice ought to
be trained for grand opera."

Helen had not forgotten.  She fantasied of
France and Italy: the big crude glare of what she called "a
career in opera," the florid music, the tiered galleries winking
with gems, the torrential applause directed toward the full-blooded,
dominant all-shadowing songsters struck up great anthems in her. 
It was a scene, she thought, in which she was meant to shine. 
And as the team of Gant  and Hines (The Dixie Melody Twins)
moved on their jagged circuit through the South, this desire, bright,
fierce, and formless, seemed, in some way, to be nearer realization.

She wrote home frequently, usually to Gant.  Her
letters beat like great pulses; they were filled with the excitement
of new cities, presentiments of abundant life.  In every town
they met "lovely people"--everywhere, in fact, good wives
and mothers, and nice young men, were attracted hospitably to these
two decent, happy, exciting girls.  There was a vast decency, an
enormous clean vitality about Helen that subjugated good people and
defeated bad ones.  She held under her dominion a score of young
men?masculine, red-faced, hard-drinking and shy.  Her relation
to them was maternal and magistral, they came to listen and to be
ruled; they adored her, but few of them tried to kiss her.

Eugene was puzzled and frightened by these lamb-like
lions.  Among men, they were fierce, bold, and combative; with
her, awkward and timorous.  One of them, a city surveyor, lean,
highboned, alcoholic, was constantly involved in police-court brawls;
another, a railroad detective, a large fair young man, split the
skulls of negroes when he was drunk, shot several men, and was
himself finally killed in a Tennessee gun-fight.

She never lacked for friends and protectors wherever
she went. Occasionally, Pearl's happy and vital sensuality, the
innocent
gusto with which she implored
 

    
"Some sweet old daddy
     
Come make a fuss over
me."
 

drew on village rakedom to false conjectures. 
Unpleasant men with wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial
drink of corn whisky, call them "girley," and suggest a
hotel room or a motorcar as a meeting-place.  When this
happened, Pearl was stricken into silence; helpless and abashed, she
appealed to Helen.

And she, her large loose mouth tense and wounded at
the corners, her eyes a little brighter, would answer:

"I don't know what you mean by that remark. 
I guess you've made a mistake about us."  This did not fail
to exact stammering apologies and excuses.

She was painfully innocent, temperamentally incapable
of wholly believing the worst about any one.  She lived in the
excitement of rumor and suggestion: it never seemed to her actually
possible that the fast young women who excited her had, in the phrase
she used, "gone the limit."  She was skilled in
gossip, and greedily attentive to it, but of the complex nastiness of
village life she had little actual knowledge.  Thus, with Pearl
Hines, she walked confidently and joyously over volcanic crust,
scenting only the odor of freedom, change, and adventure.

But this partnership came to an end.  The
intention of Pearl Hines' life was direct and certain.  She
wanted to get married, she had always wanted to get married before
she was twenty-five.  For Helen, the singing partnership, the
exploration of new lands, had been a gesture toward freedom, an
instinctive groping toward a centre of life and purpose to which she
could fasten her energy, a blind hunger for variety, beauty, and
independence.  She did not know what she wanted to do with her
life; it was probable that she would never control even partially her
destiny: she would be controlled, when the time came, by the great
necessity that lived in her.  That necessity was to enslave and
to serve.

For two or three years Helen and Pearl supported
themselves by these tours, leaving Altamont during its dull winter
lassitude, and returning to it in Spring, or in Summer, with money
enough to suffice them until their next season.

Pearl juggled carefully with the proposals of several
young men during this period.  She had the warmest affection for
a ball-player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont team. 
He was a tough handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down
in a frenzy of despair during the course of a game, and rushing
belligerently at the umpire.  She liked his hard assurance, his
rapid twang, his tanned lean body.

But she was in love with no one--she would never
be--and caution told her that the life-risk on bush-league
ball-players was very great.  She married finally a young man
from Jersey City, heavy of hand, hoof, and voice, who owned a young
but flourishing truck and livery business.
 
 

Thus, the partnership of the Dixie Melody Twins was
dissolved. Helen, left alone, turned away from the drear monotony of
the small towns to the gaiety, the variety, and the slaking
fulfilment of her desires, which she hoped somehow to find in the
cities.

She missed Luke terribly.  Without him she felt
incomplete, unarmored.  He had been enrolled in the Georgia
School of Technology in Atlanta for two years.  He was taking
the course in electrical engineering, the whole direction of his life
had been thus shaped by Gant's eulogies, years before, of the young
electrical expert, Liddell.  He was failing in his work--his
mind had never been forced to the discipline of study.  All
purpose with him was broken by a thousand impulses: his brain
stammered as did his tongue, and as he turned impatiently and
irritably to the logarithm tables, he muttered the number of the page
in idiot repetition, keeping up a constant wild vibration of his leg
upon the ball of his foot.

His great commercial talent was salesmanship; he had
superlatively that quality that American actors and men of business
call "personality"--a wild energy, a Rabelaisian vulgarity,
a sensory instinct for rapid and swinging repartee, and a hypnotic
power of speech, torrential, meaningless, mad, and evangelical. 
He could sell anything because, in the jargon of salesmen, he could
sell himself; and there was a fortune in him in the fantastic
elasticity of American business, the club of all the queer trades, of
wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he could have chanted
the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from their coats, doing
every one, everything, and finally himself.  He was not an
electrical engineer--he was electrical energy.  He had no gift
for study--he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with
it desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus
and the mechanical sciences.

Enormous humor flowed from him like crude light. 
Men who had never known him seethed with strange internal laughter
when they saw him, and roared helplessly when he began to speak. 
Yet, his physical beauty was astonishing.  His head was like
that of a wild angel--coils and whorls of living golden hair flashed
from his head, his features were regular, generous, and masculine,
illuminated by the strange inner smile of idiot ecstasy.

His broad mouth, even when stammering irritably or
when nervousness clouded his face, was always cocked for
laughter?unearthly, exultant, idiot laughter.  There was in him
demonic exuberance, a wild intelligence that did not come from the
brain.  Eager for praise, for public esteem, and expert in
ingratiation, this demon  possessed him utterly at the most
unexpected moments, in the most decorous surroundings, when he was
himself doing all in his power to preserve the good opinion in which
he was held.

Thus, listening to an old lady of the church, who
with all her power of persuasion and earnestness was unfolding the
dogmas of Presbyterianism to him, he would lean forward in an
attitude of exaggerated respectfulness and attention, one broad hand
clinched about his knee, while he murmured gentle agreement to what
she said:

"Yes? . . .  Ye-e-es? . . . 
Ye-e-e-es? . . .  Ye-e-es? . . .  Is that right? . . . 
Ye-e-es?"

Suddenly the demonic force would burst in him. 
Insanely tickled at the cadences of his agreement, the earnest
placidity and oblivion of the old woman, and the extravagant pretense
of the whole situation, his face flooded with wild exultancy, he
would croon in a fat luscious bawdily suggestive voice:

"Y-ah-s? . . .  Y-a-h-s? . . . 
Y-a-h-s? . . .  Y-ah-s?"

And when at length too late she became aware of this
drowning flood of demonic nonsense, and paused, turning an abrupt
startled face to him, he would burst into a wild
"Whah-whah-whah-whah" of laughter, beyond all reason, with
strange throat noises, tickling her roughly in the ribs.

Often Eliza, in the midst of long, minutely
replenished reminiscence, would grow conscious, while she was
purse-lipped in revery, of this annihilating mockery, would slap at
his hand angrily as he gooched her, and shake a pursed piqued face at
him, saying, with a heavy scorn that set him off into fresh
"whah-whahs":  "I'll declare, boy!  You act
like a regular idiot," and then shaking her head sadly, with
elaborate pity:  "I'd be ash-a-amed!  A-sha-a-med."

His quality was extraordinary; he had something that
was a great deal better than most intelligence; he saw the world in
burlesque, and his occasional answer to its sham, hypocrisy, and
intrigue was the idiot devastation of "whah-whah!" 
But he did not possess his demon; it possessed him from time to
time.  If it had possessed him wholly, constantly, his life
would have prevailed with astonishing honesty and precision. 
But when he reflected, he was a child?with all the hypocrisy,
sentimentality and dishonest pretense of a child.

His face was a church in which beauty and humor were
married?the strange and the familiar were at one in him.  Men,
looking at Luke, felt a start of recognition as if they saw something
of which they had never heard, but which they had known forever.

Once or twice, during the Winter and Spring, while
she was touring with Pearl Hines, Helen got into Atlanta to see him. 
In Spring they attended the week of Grand Opera.  He would find
employment for one night as a spearman in Aé and pass the doorman
for the remainder of the week with the assurance that he was "a
member of the company--Lukio Gantio."
 
 

His large feet spread tightly out in sandals; behind
the shingreaves his awkward calves were spined thickly with hair; a
thick screw of hair writhed under the edge of his tin helmet, as he
loafed in the wings, leaning comically on his spear, his face lit
with exultancy.

Caruso, waiting his entrance, regarded him from time
to time with a wide Wop smile.

"Wotta you call yourself, eh?" asked
Caruso, approaching and looking him over.

"W-w-w-why," he said, "d-don't you
know one of your s-s-s-soldiers when you see him?"

"You're one hell of a soldier," said
Caruso.

"Whah-whah-whah!" Luke answered.  With
difficulty he restrained his prodding fingers.
 
 

In the summer now he returned to Altamont, finding
employment with a firm of land-auctioneers, and assisting them at the
sale of a tract or a parcel of lots.  He moved about above the
crowd in the bed of a wagon, exhorting them to bid, with his hand at
the side of his mouth, in a harangue compounded of frenzy, passionate
solicitation, and bawdry.  The work intoxicated him.  With
wide grins of expectancy they crowded round the spokes.  In a
high throaty tenor he called to them:

"Step right up, gentlemen, lot number 17, in
beautiful Homewood?we furnish the wood, you furnish the home. 
Now gentlemen, this handsome building-site has a depth of 179 feet,
leaving plenty of room for garden and backhouse (grow your own corn
cobs in beautiful Homewood) with a frontage of 114 feet on a
magnificent new macadam road."

"Where is the road?" some one shouted.

"On the blueprint, of course, Colonel. 
You've got it all in black and white.  Now, gentlemen, the
opportunity of your lives is kicking you in the pants.  Are you
men of vision?  Think what Ford, Edison, Napoleon Bonaparte, and
Julius Caesar would do.  Obey that impulse.  You can't
lose.  The town is coming this way.  Listen carefully. 
Do you hear it?  Swell.  The new courthouse will be built
on yonder hill, the undertaker and the village bakery will occupy
handsome edifices of pressed brick just above you.  Oyez, oyez,
oyez.  What am I offered?  What am I offered?  Own
your own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannonshot of all
railway, automobile, and airplane connections.  Running water
abounds within a Washingtonian stone's throw and in all the pipes. 
Our caravans meet all trains.  Gentlemen, here's your chance to
make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources--gold,
silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large
quantities below the roots of all the trees."

"What about the bushes, Luke?" yelled Mr.
Halloran, the dairy-lunch magnate.

"Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes,"
Luke answered amid general tumult.  "All right, Major. 
You with the face.  What am I offered?  What am I offered?"

When there was no sale, he greeted incoming tourists
at the station-curbing with eloquent invitations to Dixieland, rich,
persuasive, dominant above all the soliciting babel of the
car-drivers, negro hotel-porters, and boarding-house husbands.