Look Homeward, Angel Read Online

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"Well, not altogether," said Mr. Leonard.  "Some of them," he conceded.

. . . fortasse requiris.  Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

"Who was she?" said Tom Davis.

"Oh, it was the custom in those days," said Mr. Leonard carelessly. "Like Dante and Beatrice.  It was a way the poet had of paying a compliment."

The serpent whispered.  There was a distillation of wild exultancy in his blood.  The rags of obedience, servility, reverential awe dropped in a belt around him.

"She was a man's wife!" he said loudly.  "That's who she was."

Awful stillness.

"Why--here--who told you that?" said Mr. Leonard, bewildered, but considering matrimony a wild and possibly dangerous myth.  "Who told you, boy?"

"What was she, then?" said Tom Davis pointedly.

"Why--not exactly," Mr. Leonard murmured, rubbing his chin.

"She was a Bad Woman," said Eugene.  Then, most desperately, he added:  "She was a Little Chippie."

"Pap" Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply.

"What's that, what's that, what's that?" cried Mr. Leonard rapidly when he could speak.  Fury boiled up in him.  He sprang from his chair.  "What did you say, boy?"

But he thought of Margaret and looked down, with a sudden sense of palsy, into the white ruination of boy-face.  Too far beyond.  He sat down again, shaken.

--Whose foulest cry was shafted with his passion, whose greatest music flowered out of filth--
 

     "Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam
      Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea es."
 

"You should be more careful of your talk, Eugene," said Mr. Leonard gently.

"See here!" he exclaimed suddenly, turning with violence to his book.  "This is getting no work done.  Come on, now!" he said heartily, spitting upon his intellectual hands.  "You rascals you!" he said, noting Tom Davis' grin.  "I know what you're after?you want to take up the whole period."

Tom Davis' hearty laughter boomed out, mingling with his own whine.

"All right, Tom," said Mr. Leonard briskly, "page 43, section 6, line 15.  Begin at that point."

At this moment the bell rang and Tom Davis' laughter filled the room.
 
 

Nevertheless, in charted lanes of custom, he gave competent instruction.  He would perhaps have had difficulty in constructing a page of Latin prose and verse with which he had not become literally familiar by years of repetition.  In Greek, certainly, his deficiency would have been even more marked, but he would have known a second aorist or an optative in the dark (if he had ever met it before).  There were two final years of precious Greek: they read the Anabasis.

"What's the good of all this stuff?" said Tom Davis argumentatively.

Mr. Leonard was on sure ground here.  He understood the value of the classics.

"It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer Things.  It gives him the foundations of a liberal education.  It trains his mind."

"What good's it going to do him when he goes to work?" said "Pap" Rheinhart.  "It's not going to teach him how to grow more corn."

"Well--I'm not so sure of that," said Mr. Leonard with a protesting laugh.  "I think it does."

"Pap" Rheinhart looked at him with a comical cock of the head.  He had a wry neck, which gave his humorous kindly face a sidelong expression of quizzical maturity.

He had a gruff voice; he was full of rough kindly humor, and chewed tobacco constantly.  His father was wealthy.  He lived on a big farm in the Cove, ran a dairy and had a foundry in the town.  They were unpretending people--German stock.

"Pshaw, Mr. Leonard," said "Pap" Rheinhart.  "Are you going to talk Latin to your farmhands?"

"Egibus wantibus a peckibus of cornibus," said Tom Davis with sounding laughter.  Mr. Leonard laughed with abstracted appreciation.  The joke was his own.

"It trains the mind to grapple with problems of all sorts," he said.

"According to what you say," said Tom Davis, "a man who has studied Greek makes a better plumber than one who hasn't."

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head smartly, "you know, I believe he does."  He joined, pleased, with their pleasant laughter, a loose slobbering giggle.

He was on trodden ground.  They engaged him in long debates: as he ate his lunch, he waved a hot biscuit around, persuasive, sweetly reasonable, exhaustively minute in an effort to prove the connection of Greek and groceries.  The great wind of Athens had touched him not at all.  Of the delicate and sensuous intelligence of the Greeks, their feminine grace, the constructive power and subtlety of their intelligence, the instability of their character, and the structure, restraint and perfection of their forms, he said nothing.

He had caught a glimpse, in an American college, of the great structure of the most architectural of languages: he felt the sculptural perfection of such a word as [Greek word], but his opinions smelled of chalk, the classroom, and a very bad lamp--Greek was good because it was ancient, classic, and academic.  The smell of the East, the dark tide of the Orient that flowed below, touched the lives of poet and soldier, with something perverse, evil, luxurious, was as far from his life as Lesbos.  He was simply the mouthpiece of a formula of which he was assured without having a genuine belief.

[Greek phrase]
 

The mathematics and history teacher was John Dorsey's sister Amy. She was a powerful woman, five feet ten inches tall, who weighed 185 pounds.  She had very thick black hair, straight and oily, and very black eyes, giving a heavy sensuousness to her face.  Her thick forearms were fleeced with light down.  She was not fat, but she corsetted tightly, her powerful arms and heavy shoulders bulging through the cool white of her shirtwaists.  In warm weather she perspired abundantly: her waists were stained below the arm-pits with big spreading blots of sweat; in the winter, as she warmed herself by the fire, she had about her the exciting odor of chalk, and the strong good smell of a healthy animal.  Eugene, passing down the wind-swept back porch one day in winter, looked in on her room just as her tiny niece opened the door to come out. She sat before a dancing coal-fire, after her bath, drawing on her stockings.  Fascinated, he stared at her broad red shoulders, her big body steaming cleanly like a beast.

She liked the fire and the radiance of warmth: sleepily alert she sat by the stove, with her legs spread, sucking in the heat, her large earth strength more heavily sensuous than her brother's. Stroked by the slow heat-tingle she smiled slowly with indifferent affection on all the boys.  No men came to see her: like a pool she was thirsty for lips.  She sought no one.  With lazy cat-warmth she smiled on all the world.

She was a good teacher of mathematics: number to her was innate. Lazily she took their tablets, worked answers lazily, smiling good-naturedly with contempt.  Behind her, at a desk, Durand Jarvis moaned passionately to Eugene, and writhed erotically, gripping the leaf of his desk fiercely.

Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at the end of the second year--cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with blood, seventy-three years old.  They said he was forty-nine?sickness made him look old.  He was a tall man, six feet three, with long straight mustaches, waxen and emaciated as a mandarin.  He painted pictures--impressionist blobs--sheep on a gorsey hill, fishboats at the piers, with a warm red jumble of brick buildings in the background.

Old Gloucester Town, Marblehead, Cape Cod Folks, Captains Courageous--the rich salty names came reeking up with a smell of tarred rope, dry codheads rotting in the sun, rocking dories knee-deep in gutted fish, the strong loin-smell of the sea in harbors, and the quiet brooding vacancy of a seaman's face, sign of his marriage with ocean.  How look the seas at dawn in Spring?  The cold gulls sleep upon the wind.  But rose the skies.

They saw the waxen mandarin walk shakily three times up and down the road.  It was Spring, there was a south wind high in the big trees.  He wavered along on a stick, planted before him with a blue phthisic hand.  His eyes were blue and pale as if he had been drowned.

He had begotten two children by Sheba--girls.  They were exotic tender blossoms, all black and milky white, as strange and lovely as Spring.  The boys groped curiously.

"He must be a better man than he looks yet," said Tom Davis.  "The little 'un's only two or three years old."

"He's not as old as he looks," said Eugene.  "He looks old because he's been sick.  He's only forty-nine."

"How do you know?" said Tom Davis.

"Miss Amy says so," said Eugene innocently.

"Pap" Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene and carried his quid deftly on the end of his tongue to the other cheek.

"Forty-nine!" he said, "you'd better see a doctor, boy.  He's as old as God."

"That's what she said," Eugene insisted doggedly.

"Why, of course she said it!" "Pap" Rheinhart replied.  "You don't think they're going to let it out, do you?  When they're running a school here."

"Son, you must be simple!" said Jack Candler who had not thought of it up to now.

"Hell, you're their Pet.  They know you'll believe whatever they tell you," said Julius Arthur.  "Pap" Rheinhart looked at him searchingly, then shook his head as if a cure was impossible.  They laughed at his faith.

"Well, if he's so old," said Eugene, "why did old Lady Lattimer marry him?"

"Why, because she couldn't get any one else, of course," said "Pap" Rheinhart, impatient at this obtuseness.

"Do you suppose she has had to keep him up?" said Tom Davis curiously.  Silently they wondered.  And Eugene, as he saw the two lovely children fall like petals from their mother's heavy breast, as he saw the waxen artist faltering his last steps to death, and heard Sheba's strong voice leveling a conversation at its beginning, expanding in violent burlesque all of her opinions, was bewildered again before the unsearchable riddle--out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth, a flower.

His faith was above conviction.  Disillusion had come so often that it had awakened in him a strain of bitter suspicion, an occasional mockery, virulent, coarse, cruel, and subtle, which was all the more scalding because of his own pain.  Unknowingly, he had begun to build up in himself a vast mythology for which he cared all the more deeply because he realized its untruth.  Brokenly, obscurely, he was beginning to feel that it was not truth that men live for--the creative men--but for falsehood.  At times his devouring, unsated brain seemed to be beyond his governance: it was a frightful bird whose beak was in his heart, whose talons tore unceasingly at his bowels.  And this unsleeping demon wheeled, plunged, revolved about an object, returning suddenly, after it had flown away, with victorious malice, leaving stripped, mean, and common all that he had clothed with wonder.

But he saw hopefully that he never learned--that what remained was the tinsel and the gold.  He was so bitter with his tongue because his heart believed so much.

The merciless brain lay coiled and alert like a snake: it saw every gesture, every quick glance above his head, the shoddy scaffolding of all reception.  But these people existed for him in a worldremote from human error.  He opened one window of his heart to Margaret, together they entered the sacred grove of poetry; but all dark desire, the dream of fair forms, and all the misery, drunkenness, and disorder of his life at home he kept fearfully shut.  He was afraid they would hear.  Desperately he wondered how many of the boys had heard of it.  And all the facts that levelled Margaret down to life, that plunged her in the defiling stream of life, were as unreal and horrible as a nightmare.

That she had been near death from tuberculosis, that the violent and garrulous Sheba had married an old man, who had begotten two children and was now about to die, that the whole little family, powerful in cohesive fidelity, were nursing their great sores in privacy, building up before the sharp eyes and rattling tongues of young boys a barrier of flimsy pretense and evasion, numbed him with a sense of unreality.

Eugene believed in the glory and the gold.

He lived more at Dixieland now.  He had been more closely bound to Eliza since he began at Leonard's.  Gant, Helen, and Luke were scornful of the private school.  The children were resentful of it--a little jealous.  And their temper was barbed now with a new sting.  They would say:

"You've ruined him completely since you sent him to a private school."  Or, "He's too good to soil his hands now that he's quit the public school."

Eliza herself kept him sufficiently reminded of his obligation. She spoke often of the effort she had to make to pay the tuition fee, and of her poverty.  She said, he must work hard, and help her all he could in his spare hours.  He should also help her through the summer and "drum up trade" among the arriving tourists at the station.

"For God's sake!  What's the matter with you?" Luke jeered. "You're not ashamed of a little honest work, are you?"

This way, sir, for Dixieland.  Mrs. Eliza E. Gant, proprietor. Just A Whisper Off The Square, Captain.  All the comforts of the Modern Jail.  Biscuits and home-made pies just like mother should have made but didn't.

That boy's a hustler.

At the end of Eugene's first year at Leonard's, Eliza told John Dorsey she could no longer afford to pay the tuition.  He conferred with Margaret and, returning, agreed to take the boy for half price.

"He can help you drum up new prospects," said Eliza.

"Yes," Leonard agreed, "that's the very thing."
 
 

Ben bought a new pair of shoes.  They were tan.  He paid six dollars for them.  He always bought good things.  But they burnt the soles of his feet.  In a scowling rage he loped to his room and took them off.

"Goddam it!" he yelled, and hurled them at the wall.  Eliza came to the door.

"You'll never have a penny, boy, as long as you waste money the way you do.  I tell you what, it's pretty bad when you think of it." She shook her head sadly with puckered mouth.

"O for God's sake!" he growled.  "Listen to this!  By God, you never hear me asking any one for anything, do you?" he burst out in a rage.

She took the shoes and gave them to Eugene.

"It would be a pity to throw away a good pair of shoes," she said. "Try 'em on, boy."

He tried them on.  His feet were already bigger than Ben's.  He walked about carefully and painfully a few steps.

"How do they feel?" asked Eliza.

"All right, I guess," he said doubtfully.  "They're a little tight."

He liked their clean strength, the good smell of leather.  They were the best shoes he had ever had.

Ben entered the kitchen.

"You little brute!" he said.  "You've a foot like a mule." Scowling, he knelt and touched the straining leather at the toes. Eugene winced.

"Mama, for God's sake," Ben cried out irritably, "don't make the kid wear them if they're too small.  I'll buy him a pair myself if you're too stingy to spend the money."

"Why, what's wrong with these?" said Eliza.  She pressed them with her fingers.  "Why, pshaw!" she said.  "There's nothing wrong with them.  All shoes are a little tight at first.  It won't hurt him a bit."

But he had to give up at the end of six weeks.  The hard leather did not stretch, his feet hurt more every day.  He limped about more and more painfully until he planted each step woodenly as if he were walking on blocks.  His feet were numb and dead, sore on the palms.  One day, in a rage, Ben flung him down and took them off.  It was several days before he began to walk with ease again. But his toes that had grown through boyhood straight and strong were pressed into a pulp, the bones gnarled, bent and twisted, the nails thick and dead.

"It does seem a pity to throw those good shoes away," sighed Eliza.
 
 

But she had strange fits of generosity.  He didn't understand.

A girl came down to Altamont from the west.  She was from Sevier, a mountain town, she said.  She had a big brown body, and black hair and eyes of a Cherokee Indian.

"Mark my words," said Gant.  "That girl's got Cherokee blood in her somewhere."

She took a room, and for days rocked back and forth in a chair before the parlor fire.  She was shy, frightened, a little sullen--her manners were country and decorous.  She never spoke unless she was spoken to.

Sometimes she was sick and stayed in bed.  Eliza took her food then, and was extremely kind to her.

Day after day the girl rocked back and forth, all through the stormy autumn.  Eugene could hear her large feet as rhythmically they hit the floor, ceaselessly propelling the rocker.  Her name was Mrs. Morgan.

One day as he laid large crackling lumps upon the piled glowing mass of coals, Eliza entered the room.  Mrs. Morgan rocked away stolidly.  Eliza stood by the fire for a moment, pursing her lips reflectively, and folding her hands quietly upon her stomach.  She looked out the window at the stormy sky, the swept windy bareness of the street.

"I tell you what," she said, "it looks like a hard winter for the poor folks."

"Yes'm," said Mrs. Morgan sullenly.  She kept on rocking.

Eliza was silent a moment longer.

"Where's your husband?" she asked presently.

"In Sevier," Mrs. Morgan said.  "He's a railroad man."

"What's that, what's that?" said Eliza quickly, comically.  "A railroad man, you say?" she inquired sharply.

"Yes'm."

"Well, it looks mighty funny to me he hasn't been in to see you," said Eliza, with enormous accusing tranquillity.  "I'd call it a pretty poor sort of man who'd act like that."

Mrs. Morgan said nothing.  Her tar-black eyes glittered in fireflame.

"Have you got any money?" said Eliza.

"No'm," said Mrs.