Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (16 page)

Behind a wooden partition was his ware-room, layered
with stonedust--coarse wooden trestles on which he carved
inscriptions, stacked tool-shelves filled with chisels, drills,
mallets, a pedalled emery wheel which Eugene worked furiously for
hours, exulting in its mounting roar, piled sandstone bases, a small
heat-blasted cast-iron stove, loose piled coal and wood.

Between the workroom and the ware-room, on the left
as one entered, was Gant's office, a small room, deep in the dust of
twenty years, with an old-fashioned desk, sheaves of banded dirty
papers, a leather sofa, a smaller desk layered with round and square
samples of marble and granite.  The sloping market Square,
pocketed obliquely off the public Square, and filled with the wagons
of draymen and county peddlers, and on the lower side on a few Poor
White houses and on the warehouse and office of Will Pentland.

Eugene would find his father, leaning perilously on
Jannadeau's dirty glass showcase, or on the creaking little fence
that marked him off, talking politics, war, death, and famine,
denouncing the Democrats, with references to the bad weather,
taxation, and soup-kitchens that attended their administration, and
eulogizing all the acts, utterances, and policies of Theodore
Roosevelt.  Jannadeau, guttural, judiciously reasonable,
statistically argumentative, would consult, in all disputed areas,
his library--a greasy edition of the World Almanac, three years old,
saying, triumphantly, after a moment of dirty thumbing: 
"Ah--just as I thought: the muni-CIP-al taxation of Milwaukee
under De-MO-cratic administration in 1905 was $2.25 the hundred, the
lowest it had been in years.  I cannot ima-GINE why the total
revenue is not given."  And he would argue with animation,
picking his nose with his blunt black fingers, his broad yellow face
breaking into flaccid creases, as he laughed gutturally at Gant's
unreason.

"And you may mark my words," proceeded
Gant, as if he had never been interrupted, and had heard no
dissenting judgment, "if they get in again we'll have
soup-kitchens, the banks will go to the wall, and your guts will
grease your backbone before another winter's over."

Or, he would find his father in the workroom, bending
over a trestle, using the heavy wooden mallet with delicate care, as
he guided the chisel through the mazes of an inscription.  He
never wore work-clothes; he worked dressed in well brushed garments
of heavy black, his coat removed, and a long striped apron covering
all his front.  As Eugene saw him, he felt that this was no
common craftsman, but a master, picking up his tools briefly for a
chef-d'oeuvre.

"He is better at this than any one in all the
world," Eugene thought, and his dark vision burned in him for a
moment, as he thought that his father's work would never, as men
reckon years, be extinguished, but that when that great skeleton lay
powdered in earth, in many a tangled undergrowth, in the rank
wilderness of forgotten churchyards, these letters would endure.

And he thought with pity of all the grocers and
brewers and clothiers who had come and gone, with their perishable
work a forgotten excrement, or a rotted fabric; or of plumbers, like
Max's father, whose work rusted under ground, or of painters, like
Harry's, whose work scaled with the seasons, or was obliterated with
newer brighter paint; and the high horror of death and oblivion, the
decomposition of life, memory, desire, in the huge burial-ground of
the earth stormed through his heart.  He mourned for all the men
who had gone because they had not scored their name upon a rock,
blasted their mark upon a cliff, sought out the most imperishable
objects of the world and graven there some token, some emblem that
utterly they might not be forgotten.

Again, Eugene would find Gant moving with bent
strides across the depth of the building, tearing madly along between
the sentinel marbles that aisled the ware-room, muttering, with hands
gripped behind him, with ominous ebb and flow.  Eugene waited. 
Presently, when he had shuttled thus across his shop some eighty
times, he would leap, with a furious howl, to his front door,
storming out upon the porch, and delivering his Jeremiad to the
offending draymen:

"You are the lowest of the low, the vilest of
the vile.  You lousy good-for-nothing bums: you have brought me
to the verge of starvation, you have frightened away the little
business that might have put bread in my mouth, and kept the wolf
from my door.  By God, I hate you, for you stink a mile off. 
You low degenerates, you accursed reprobates; you would steal the
pennies from a dead man's eyes, as you have from mine, fearful,
awful, and bloodthirsty mountain grills that you are!"

He would tear back into the shop muttering, to return
almost at once, with a strained pretense at calmness, which ended in
a howl:

"Now I want to tell you: I give you fair warning
once and for all. If I find you on my steps again, I'll put you all
in jail."

They would disperse sheepishly to their wagons,
flicking their whips aimlessly along the pavements.

"By God, somethin's sure upset the ole man."

An hour later, like heavy buzzing flies, they would
drift back settling from nowhere on the broad steps.

As he emerged from the shop into the Square, they
would greet him cheerfully, with a certain affection.

"'Day, Mr. Gant."

"Good day, boys," he would answer kindly,
absently.  And he would be away with his gaunt devouring
strides.

As Eugene entered, if Gant were busy on a stone, he
would say gruffly, "Hello, son," and continue with his
work, until he had polished the surface of the marble with pumice and
water.  Then he would take off his apron, put on his coat, and
say, to the dawdling, expectant boy:  "Come on.  I
guess you're thirsty."

And they would go across the Square to the cool depth
of the drugstore, stand before the onyx splendor of the fountain,
under the revolving wooden fans, and drink chill gaseous beverages,
limeade so cold it made the head ache, or foaming ice-cream soda,
which returned in sharp delicious belches down his tender nostrils.

Eugene, richer by twenty-five cents, would leave Gant
then, and spend the remainder of the day in the library on the
Square.  He read now rapidly and easily; he read romantic and
adventurous novels, with a tearing hunger.  At home he devoured
Luke's piled shelves of five-cent novels: he was deep in the weekly
adventures of Young Wild West, fantasied in bed at night of virtuous
and heroic relations with the beautiful Arietta, followed Nick
Carter, through all the mazes of metropolitan crime, Frank
Merriwell's athletic triumphs, Fred Fearnot, and the interminable
victories of The Liberty Boys of '76 over the hated Redcoats.

He cared not so much for love at first as he did for
material success: the straw figures of women in boys' books,
something with hair, dancing eyes, and virtuous opinions, impeccably
good and vacant, satisfied him completely: they were the guerdon of
heroism, something to be freed from villainy on the nick by a blow or
a shot, and to be enjoyed along with a fat income.

At the library he ravaged the shelves of boys' books,
going unweariedly through all the infinite monotony of the
Algers?Pluck and Luck, Sink or Swim, Grit, Jack's Ward, Jed the
Poor-house Boy--and dozens more.  He gloated over the fat
money-getting of these books (a motif in boys' books that has never
been sufficiently recognized); all of the devices of fortune, the
loose rail, the signalled train, the rich reward for heroism; or the
full wallet found and restored to its owner; or the value of the
supposedly worthless bonds; or the discovery of a rich patron in the
city, sunk so deeply into his desires that he was never after able to
quench them.

And all the details of money--the value of the estate
usurped by the scoundrelly guardian and his caddish son, he feasted
upon, reckoning up the amount of income, if it were not given, or if
it were, dividing the annual sum into monthly and weekly portions,
and dreaming on its purchasing power.  His desires were not
modest?no fortune under $250,000 satisfied him: the income of
$100,000 at six per cent would pinch one, he felt, from lavishness;
and if the reward of virtue was only twenty thousand dollars, he felt
bitter chagrin, reckoning life insecure, and comfort a present
warmth.

He built up a constant exchange of books among his
companions, borrowing and lending in an intricate web, from Max
Isaacs, from "Nosey" Schmidt, the butcher's son, who had
all the rich adventures of the Rover Boys; he ransacked Gant's
shelves at home, reading translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey at
the same time as Diamond Dick, Buffalo Bill, and the Algers, and for
the same reason; then, as the first years waned and the erotic
gropings became more intelligible, he turned passionately to all
romantic legendry, looking for women in whom blood ran hotly, whose
breath was honey, and whose soft touch a spurting train of fire.

And in this pillage of the loaded shelves, he found
himself wedged firmly into the grotesque pattern of Protestant
fiction which yields the rewards of Dionysus to the loyal disciples
of John Calvin, panting and praying in a breath, guarding the
plumtree with the altar fires, outdoing the pagan harlot with the
sanctified hussy.

Aye, thought he, he would have his cake and eat it
too--but it would be a wedding-cake.  He was devout in his
desire to be a good man; he would bestow the accolade of his love
upon nothing but a Virgin; he would marry himself to none but a Pure
Woman.  This, he saw from the books, would cause no renunciation
of delight, for the good women were physically the most attractive.

He had learned unknowingly what the exquisite
voluptuary finds, after weary toil, much later--that no condition of
life is so favorable to his enjoyment as that one which is rigidly
conventionalized.  He had all the passionate fidelity of a child
to the laws of the community: all the filtered deposit of Sunday
Morning Presbyterianism had its effect.

He entombed himself in the flesh of a thousand
fictional heroes, giving his favorites extension in life beyond their
books, carrying their banners into the gray places of actuality,
seeing himself now as the militant young clergyman, arrayed, in his
war on slum conditions, against all the moneyed hostility of his
fashionable church, aided in his hour of greatest travail by the
lovely daughter of the millionaire tenement owner, and winning
finally a victory for God, the poor, and himself.
 
 

. . . They stood silently a moment in the vast
deserted nave of Saint Thomas'.  Far in the depth of the vast
church Old Michael's slender hands pressed softly on the organ-keys. 
The last rays of the setting sun poured in a golden shaft down
through the western windows, falling for a moment, in a cloud of
glory, as if in benediction, on Mainwaring's tired face.

"I am going," he said presently.

"Going?" she whispered.  "Where?"

The organ music deepened.

"Out there," he gestured briefly to the
West.  "Out there?among His people."

"Going?"  She could not conceal the
tremor of her voice.  "Going? Alone?"

He smiled sadly.  The sun had set.  The
gathering darkness hid the suspicious moisture in his gray eyes.

"Yes, alone," he said.  "Did not
One greater than I go out alone some nineteen centuries ago?"

"Alone?  Alone?"  A sob rose in
her throat and choked her.

"But before I go," he said, after a moment,
in a voice which he strove in vain to render steady, "I want to
tell you--"  He paused for a moment, struggling for mastery
of his feelings.

"Yes?" she whispered.

"--That I shall never forget you, little girl,
as long as I live. Never."  He turned abruptly to depart.

"No, not alone!  You shall not go alone!"
she stopped him with a sudden cry.

He whirled as if he had been shot.

"What do you mean?  What do you mean?"
he cried hoarsely.

"Oh, can't you see!  Can't you see!" 
She threw out her little hands imploringly, and her voice broke.

"Grace!  Grace!  Dear heaven, do you
mean it!"

"You silly man!  Oh, you dear blind foolish
boy!  Haven't you known for ages--since the day I first heard
you preach at the Murphy Street settlement?"

He crushed her to him in a fierce embrace; her
slender body yielded to his touch as he bent over her; and her round
arms stole softly across his broad shoulders, around his neck,
drawing his dark head to her as he planted hungry kisses on her
closed eyes, the column of her throat, the parted petal of her fresh
young lips.

"Forever," he answered solemnly.  "So
help me God."

The organ music swelled now into a triumphant pé
filling with its exultant melody that vast darkness of the church. 
And as Old Michael cast his heart into the music, the tears flowed
unrestrained across his withered cheeks, but smilingly happily
through his tears, as dimly through his old eyes he saw the two young
figures enacting again the age-old tale of youth and love, he
murmured,

"I am the resurrection and the life, Alpha and
Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end" . . .