You Can't Go Home Again (15 page)

Through this recital George and Margaret had stood transfixed, a look of horror on their faces, but Mrs. Flood did not notice them. She stood now looking down at Amelia’s tombstone, her lips puckered thoughtfully, and after a little while she said:

“I don’t know
when
I’ve thought of Amelia and John Webber—both of ‘em dead and in their graves through all these years. She lies here, and he’s all alone in his own lot over there on the other side of town, and that old trouble that they had seems very far away. You know,” she said, looking up and speaking with a tone of deep conviction, “I believe that they have joined each other and are reconciled and happy. I believe I’ll meet them some day in a Higher Sphere, along with all my other friends—all happy, and all leading a new life.”

She was silent for a moment, and then, with a movement of strong decision, she turned away and looked out towards the town, where the lights were now burning hard and bright and steady in the dusk.

“Come, now!” she cried briskly and cheerfully. “It’s time we were goin’ home! It’s gettin’ dark!”

The three of them walked in silence down the slope towards the waiting car. As they came up to it and were about to get in, Mrs. Flood stopped and laid her hand on George’s shoulder in a warm and easy gesture.

“Young man,” she said, “I’ve been a long time livin’ on this earth, and as the fellow says, the world do move! You’ve got your life ahead of you, and lots to learn and many things to do—but let me tell you somethin’, boy!” and all at once she looked at him in a straight and deadly fashion. “Go out and see the world and get your fill of wanderin’,” she cried, “and then come back and tell me if you’ve found a better place than home! I’ve seen great changes in my time, and I’ll see more before I die. There are great things yet in store for us—great progress, great inventions—it will all come true. Perhaps I’ll not live to see it, but you will! We’ve got a fine town here, and fine people to make it go—and we’re not done yet. I’ve seen it all grow up out of a country village—and some day we will have a great city here.”

She waited an instant as if she expected him to answer and corroborate her judgment, and when he merely nodded to show that he had heard her, she took it for agreement and went on:

“Your Aunt Maw always hoped that you’d come home again. And you
will!
” she said. “There’s no better or more beautiful place on earth than in these mountains—and some day you’ll come home again to stay.”

7. Boom Town

During the week that followed Aunt Maw’s funeral George renewed his acquaintance with his home town, and it was a disconcerting experience. The sleepy little mountain village in which he had grown up—for it had been hardly more than that then—was now changed almost beyond recognition. The very streets that he had known so well, and had remembered through the years in their familiar aspect of early-afternoon emptiness and drowsy lethargy, were now foaming with life, crowded with expensive traffic, filled with new faces he had never seen before. Occasionally he saw somebody that he knew, and in the strangeness of it all they seemed to him like lights shining in the darkness of a lonely coast.

But what he noticed chiefly—and once he observed it he began watching for it, and it was always there—was the look on the people’s faces. It puzzled him, and frightened him, and when he tried to find a word to describe it, the only thing he could think of was—madness. The nervous, excited glitter in the eyes seemed to belong to nothing else but madness. The faces of natives and strangers alike appeared to be animated by some secret and unholy glee. And their bodies, as they darted, dodged, and thrust their way along, seemed to have a kind of leaping energy as if some powerful drug was driving them on. They gave him the impression of an entire population that was drunk—drunk with an intoxication which never made them weary, dead, or sodden, and which never wore of, but which incited them constantly to new efforts of leaping and thrusting exuberance.

The people he had known all his life cried out to him along the streets, seizing his hand and shaking it, and saying: “Hi, there, boy! Glad to see you home again! Going to be with us for a while now? Good! I’ll be seeing you! I’ve got to go on now—got to meet a fellow down the street to sign some papers! Good to see you, boy!” Then, having uttered this tempestuous greeting without a pause and without the loss of a stride, pulling and dragging him along with them ‘as they wrung his hand, they vanished.

On all sides he heard talk, talk, talk—terrific and incessant. And the tumult of voices was united in variations of a single chorus—speculation and real estate. People were gathered in earnestly chattering groups before the drug-stores, before the post office, before the Court House and the City Hall. They hurried along the pavements talking together with passionate absorption, bestowing half-abstracted nods of greeting from time to time on passing acquaintances.

The real estate men were everywhere. Their motors and buses roared through the streets of the town and out into the country, carrying crowds of prospective clients. One could see them on the porches of houses unfolding blueprints and prospectuses as they shouted enticements and promises of sudden wealth into the ears of deaf old women. Everyone was fair game for them—the lame, the halt, and the blind, Civil War veterans or their decrepit pensioned widows, as well as high school boys and girls, negro truck drivers, soda jerkers, elevator boys, and bootblacks.

Everyone bought real estate; and everyone was “a real estate man” either in name or practice. The barbers, the lawyers, the grocers, the butchers, the builders, the clothiers—all were engaged now in this single interest and obsession. And there seemed to be only one rule, universal and infallible—to buy, always to buy, to pay whatever price was asked, and to sell again within two days at any price one chose to fix. It was fantastic. Along all the streets in town the ownership of the land was constantly changing; and when the supply of streets was exhausted, new streets were feverishly created in the surrounding wilderness; and even before these streets were paved or a house had been built upon them, the land was being sold, and then resold, by the acre, by the lot, by the foot, for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A spirit of drunken waste and wild destructiveness was everywhere apparent. The fairest places in the town were being mutilated at untold cost. In the centre of town there had been a beautiful green opulent with rich lawns and lordly trees, with beds of flowers and banks of honeysuckle, and on top of it there had been an immense, rambling, old wooden hotel. From its windows one could look out upon the vast panorama of mountain ranges in the smoky distance.

George could remember its wide porches and comfortable rockers, its innumerable eaves and gables, its labyrinth of wings and corridors, its great parlours and their thick red carpets, and the lobby with its old red leather chairs, hollowed and shaped by the backs of men, and its smell of tobacco and its iced tinkle of tall drinks. It had a splendid dining-room filled with laughter and quiet voices, where expert negroes in white jackets bent and scraped and chuckled over the jokes of the rich men from the North as with prayerful grace they served them delicious foods out of old silver dishes. George could remember, too, the smiles and the tender beauty of the rich men’s wives and daughters. As a boy he had been touched with the unutterable mystery of all these things, for these wealthy travellers had come great distances and had somehow brought with them an evocation of the whole golden and unvisited world, with its fabulous cities and its promise of glory, fame, and love.

It had been one of the pleasantest places in the town, but now it was gone. An army of men and shovels had advanced upon this beautiful green hill and had levelled it down to an ugly flat of clay, and had paved it with a desolate horror of white concrete, and had built stores and garages and office buildings and parking spaces—all raw and new—and were now putting up a new hotel beneath the very spot where the old one had stood. It was to be a structure of sixteen storeys, of steel and concrete and pressed brick. It was being stamped out of the same mould, as if by some gigantic biscuit-cutter of hotels, that had produced a thousand others like it all over the country. And, to give a sumptuous—if spurious—distinction to its patterned uniformity, it was to be called The Libya-Ritz.

One day George ran into Sam Pennock, a boyhood friend and a classmate at Pine Rock College. Sam came down the busy street swiftly at his anxious, lunging stride, and immediately, without a word of greeting, he broke hoarsely into the abrupt and fragmentary manner of speaking that had always been characteristic of him, but that now seemed more feverish than ever:

“When did you get here?...How long are you going to stay?...What do you think of the way things look here?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he demanded with brusque, challenging, and almost impatient scornfulness: “Well, what do you intend to do—be a two-thousand-dollar-a-year school-teacher all your life?”

The contemptuous tone, with its implication of superiority—an implication he had noticed before in the attitude of these people, big with their inflated sense of wealth and achievement—stung George to retort sharply:

“There are worse things than teaching school! Being a paper millionaire is one of them! As for the two thousand dollars a year, you really get it, Sam! It’s not real estate money, it’s money you can spend. You can buy a ham sandwich with it.”

Sam laughed. “You’re right!” he said. “I don’t blame you. It’s the truth!” He began to shake his head slowly. “Lord, Lord!” he said. “They’ve all gone clean out of their heads here…Never saw anything like it in my life…Why, they’re all crazy-as a loon!” he exclaimed. “You can’t talk to them…You can’t reason with them…They won’t listen to you…They’re getting prices for property here that you couldn’t get’ in New York.”

“Are they
getting
it?”

“Well,” he said, with a falsetto laugh, “they get the first five hundred dollars…You pay the next five hundred thousand on time.”

“How much time?”

“God!” he said. “I don’t know…All you want, I reckon…For ever!...It doesn’t matter…You sell it next day for a million.”

“On time?”

“That’s it!” he cried, laughing. “You make half a million just like that.”

“On time?”

“You’ve got it!” said Sam. “On time…God! Crazy, crazy, crazy,” he kept laughing and shaking his head. “That’s the way they make it.”

“Are you making it, too?”

At once his manner became feverishly earnest: “Why, it’s the damnedest thing you ever heard of!” he said. “I’m raking it in hand over fist!...Made three hundred thousand dollars in the last two months…Why, it’s the truth!...Made a trade yesterday and turned round and sold the lot again not two hours later…Fifty thousand dollars just like that!” he snapped his fingers. “Does your uncle want to sell that house on Locust Street where your Aunt Maw lived?...Have you talked to him about it?...Would he consider an offer?”

“I suppose so, if he gets enough.”

“How much does be want?” he demanded impatiently. “Would he take a hundred thousand?”

“Could you get it for him?”

“I could get it within twenty-four hours,” he said. “I know a man who’d snap it up in five minutes…I tell you what I’ll do, Monk, if you persuade him to sell—I’ll split the commission with you…I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”

“All right, Sam, it’s a go. Could you let me have fifty cents on account?”

“Do you think he’ll sell?” he asked eagerly.

“Really, I don’t know, but I doubt it. That place was my grandfather’s. It’s been in the family a long time. I imagine he’ll want to keep it.”

“Keep it! What’s the sense in keeping it?...Now’s the time when things are at the peak. He’ll never get a better offer!”

“I know, but he’s expecting to strike oil out in the backyard any time now,” said George with a laugh.

At this moment there was a disturbance among the tides of traffic in the street. A magnificent car detached itself from the stream of humbler vehicles and moved in swiftly to the kerb, where it came to a smooth stop—a glitter of nickel, glass, and burnished steel. From it a gaudily attired creature stepped down to the pavement with an air of princely indolence, tucked a light Malacca cane carelessly under its right armpit, and slowly and fastidiously withdrew from its nicotined fingers a pair of lemon-coloured gloves, at the same time saying to the liveried chauffeur:

“You may go, James. Call for me again in hal-luf an houah!” The creature’s face was thin and sunken. Its complexion was a deathly sallow—all except the nose, which was bulbous and glowed a brilliant red, showing an intricate network of enlarged purple veins. Its toothless jaws were equipped with such an enormous set of glittering false teeth that the lips could not cover them, and they grinned at the world with the prognathous bleakness of a skeleton. The whole figure, although heavy and shambling, had the tottering appearance which suggested a stupendous debauchery. It moved forward with its false, bleak grin, leaning heavily upon the stick, and suddenly George recognised that native ruin which had been known to him since childhood as Tim Wagner.

J. Timothy Wagner—the “J” was a recent and completely arbitrary addition of his own, appropriated, no doubt, to fit his ideas of personal grandeur, and to match the eminent position in the town’s affairs to which he had belatedly risen—was the black sheep of one of the old, established families in the community. At the time George Webber was a boy, Tim Wagner had been for so long the product of complete disillusion that there was no longer any vestige of respect attached to him.

He had been pre-eminently the town sot. His title to this office was unquestioned. In this capacity he was even held in a kind of affection. His exploits were notorious, the subjects of a hundred stories. One night, for example, the loafers in McCormack’s pharmacy had seen Tim swallow something and then shudder convulsively. This process was repeated several times, until the curiosity of the loafers was aroused. They began to observe him furtively but closely, and in a few minutes Tim thrust out his hand slyly, fumbled round in the gold-fish bowl, and withdrew his hand with a wriggling little shape between his fingers. Then the quick swallow and the convulsive shudder were repeated.