Look Homeward, Angel Read Online

When he was fourteen, he was summoned by the school principal to his little office, to take a thrashing for truancy and insubordination.  But the spirit of acquiescence was not in him: he snatched the rod from the man's hand, broke it, smote him solidly in the eye, and dropped gleefully eighteen feet to the ground.

This was one of the best things he ever did: his conduct in other directions was less fortunate.  Very early, as his truancy mounted,and after he had been expelled, and as his life hardened rapidly in a defiant viciousness, the antagonism between the boy and Gant grew open and bitter.  Gant recognized perhaps most of his son's vices as his own: there was little, however, of his redeeming quality. Steve had a piece of tough suet where his heart should have been.

Of them all, he had had very much the worst of it.  Since his childhood he had been the witness of his father's wildest debauches.  He had not forgotten.  Also, as the oldest, he was left to shift for himself while Eliza's attention focussed on her younger children.  She was feeding Eugene at her breast long after Steve had taken his first two dollars to the ladies of Eagle
Crescent.

He was inwardly sore at the abuse Gant heaped on him; he was not insensitive to his faults, but to be called a "good-for-nothing bum," "a worthless degenerate," "a pool-room loafer," hardened his outward manner of swagger defiance.  Cheaply and flashily dressed, with peg-top yellow shoes, flaring striped trousers, and a broad-brimmed straw hat with a colored band, he would walk down the avenue with a preposterous lurch, and a smile of strained assurance on his face, saluting with servile cordiality all who would notice him.  And if a man of property greeted him, his lacerated but overgrown vanity would seize the crumb, and he would boast pitifully at home:  "They all know Little Stevie!  He's got the respect of all the big men in this town, all right, all right!Every one has a good word for Little Stevie except his own people. Do you know what J. T. Collins said to me to-day?"

"What say?  Who's that?  Who's that?" asked Eliza with comic rapidity, looking up from her darning.

"J. T. Collins--that's who!  He's only worth about two hundred thousand.  'Steve,' he said, just like that, 'if I had your brains'"--He would continue in this way with moody self-satisfaction, painting a picture of future success when all who scorned him now would flock to his standard.

"Oh, yes," said he, "they'll all be mighty anxious then to shake Little Stevie's hand."

Gant, in a fury, gave him a hard beating when he had been expelled from school.  He had never forgotten.  Finally, he was told to go to work and support himself: he found desultory employment as a soda-jerker, or as delivery boy for a morning paper.  Once, with a crony, Gus Moody, son of a foundry-man, he had gone off to see the world.  Grimy from vagabondage they had crawled off a freight-train at Knoxville, Tennessee, spent their little money on food, and in a brothel, and returned, two days later, coal-black but boastful of their exploit.

"I'll vow," Eliza fretted, "I don't know what's to become of that boy."  It was the tragic flaw of her temperament to get to the vital point too late: she pursed her lips thoughtfully, wandered off in another direction, and wept when misfortune came.  She always waited.  Moreover, in her deepest heart, she had an affection for her oldest son, which, if it was not greater, was at least different in kind from what she bore for the others.  His glib boastfulness, his pitiable brag, pleased her: they were to her indications of his "smartness," and she often infuriated her two studious girls by praising them.  Thus, looking at a specimen of his handwriting, she would say:

"There's one thing sure: he writes a better hand than any of the rest of you, for all your schooling."

Steve had early tasted the joys of the bottle, stealing, during the days when he was a young attendant of his father's debauch, a furtive swallow from the strong rank whisky in a half-filled flask: the taste nauseated him, but the experience made good boasting for his fellows.

At fifteen, he had found, while smoking cigarettes with Gus Moody, in a neighbor's barn, a bottle wrapped in an oats sack by the worthy citizen, against the too sharp examination of his wife. When the man had come for secret potation some time later, and found his bottle half-empty, he had grimly dosed the remainder with Croton oil: the two boys were nauseously sick for several days.

One day, Steve forged a check on his father.  It was some days before Gant discovered it: the amount was only three dollars, but his anger was bitter.  In a pronouncement at home, delivered loudly enough to publish the boy's offense to the neighborhood, he spoke of the penitentiary, of letting him go to jail, of being disgraced in his old age--a period of his life at which he had not yet arrived, but which he used to his advantage in times of strife.

He paid the check, of course, but another name--that of "forger"--was added to the vocabulary of his abuse.  Steve sneaked in and out of the house, eating his meals alone for several days.  When he met his father little was said by either: behind the hard angry glaze of their eyes, they both looked depthlessly into each other; they knew that they could withhold nothing from each other, that the same sores festered in each, the same hungers and desires, the same crawling appetites polluted their blood.  And knowing this, something in each of them turned away in grievous shame.

Gant added this to his tirades against Eliza; all that was bad in the boy his mother had given him.

"Mountain Blood!  Mountain Blood!" he yelled.  "He's Greeley Pentland all over again.  Mark my words," he continued, after striding feverishly about the house, muttering to himself and bursting finally into the kitchen, "mark my words, he'll wind up in the penitentiary."

And, her nose reddened by the spitting grease, she would purse her lips, saying little, save, when goaded, to make some return calculated to infuriate and antagonize him.

"Well, maybe if he hadn't been sent to every dive in town to pull his daddy out, he would turn out better."

"You lie, Woman!  By God, you lie!" he thundered magnificently but illogically.
 
 

Gant drank less: save for a terrifying spree every six or eight weeks, which bound them all in fear for two or three days, Eliza had little to complain of on this score.  But her enormous patience was wearing very thin because of the daily cycle of abuse.  They slept now in separate rooms upstairs: he rose at six or six-thirty, dressed and went down to build the fires.  As he kindled a blaze in the range, and a roaring fire in the sitting-room, he muttered constantly to himself, with an occasional oratorical rise and fall of his voice.  In this way he composed and polished the flood of his invective: when the demands of fluency and emphasis had been satisfied he would appear suddenly before her in the kitchen, and deliver himself without preliminary, as the grocer's negro entered with pork chops or a thick steak:

"Woman, would you have had a roof to shelter you to-day if it  hadn't been for me?  Could you have depended on your worthless old father, Tom Pentland, to give you one?  Would Brother Will, or Brother Jim give you one?  Did you ever hear of them giving any one anything?  Did you ever hear of them caring for anything but their own miserable hides?  DID you?  Would any of them give a starving beggar a crust of bread?  By God, no!  Not even if he ran a bakery shop!  Ah me!  'Twas a bitter day for me when I first came into this accursed country: little did I know what it would lead to. Mountain Grills!  Mountain Grills!" and the tide would reach its height.

At times, when she tried to reply to his attack, she would burst easily into tears.  This pleased him: he liked to see her cry.  But usually she made an occasional nagging retort: deep down, between their blind antagonistic souls, an ugly and desperate war was being waged.  Yet, had he known to what lengths these daily assaults might drive her, he would have been astounded: they were part of the deep and feverish discontent of his spirit, the rooted instinct to have an object for his abuse.

Moreover, his own feeling for order was so great that he had a passionate aversion for what was slovenly, disorderly, diffuse.  He was goaded to actual fury at times when he saw how carefully she saved bits of old string, empty cans and bottles, paper, trash of every description: the mania for acquisition, as yet an undeveloped madness in Eliza, enraged him.

"In God's name!" he would cry with genuine anger.  "In God's name! Why don't you get rid of some of this junk?"  And he would move destructively toward it.

"No you don't, Mr. Gant!" she would answer sharply.  "You never know when those things will come in handy."

It was, perhaps, a reversal of custom that the deep-hungering spirit of quest belonged to the one with the greatest love of order, the most pious regard for ritual, who wove into a pattern even his daily tirades of abuse, and that the sprawling blot of chaos, animated by one all-mastering desire for possession, belonged to the practical, the daily person.

Gant had the passion of the true wanderer, of him who wanders from a fixed point.  He needed the order and the dependence of a home--he was intensely a family man: their clustered warmth and strength about him was life.  After his punctual morning tirade at Eliza, he went about the rousing of the slumbering children.  Comically, he could not endure feeling, in the morning, that he was the only one awake and about.

His waking cry, delivered by formula, with huge comic gruffness from the foot of the stairs, took this form:

"Steve!  Ben!  Grover!  Luke!  You damned scoundrels: get up!  In God's name, what will become of you!  You'll never amount to anything as long as you live."

He would continue to roar at them from below as if they were wakefully attentive above.

"When I was your age, I had milked four cows, done all the chores, and walked eight miles through the snow by this time."

Indeed, when he described his early schooling, he furnished a landscape that was constantly three feet deep in snow, and frozen hard.  He seemed never to have attended school save under polar conditions.
 
And fifteen minutes later, he would roar again:  "You'll never amount to anything, you good-for-nothing bums!  If one side of the wall caved in, you'd roll over to the other."

Presently now there would be the rapid thud of feet upstairs, and one by one they would descend, rushing naked into the sitting-room with their clothing bundled in their arms.  Before his roaring fire they would dress.

By breakfast, save for sporadic laments, Gant was in something approaching good humor.  They fed hugely: he stoked their plates for them with great slabs of fried steak, grits fried in egg, hot biscuits, jam, fried apples.  He departed for his shop about the time the boys, their throats still convulsively swallowing hot food and coffee, rushed from the house at the warning signal of the mellow-tolling final nine-o'clock school bell.

He returned for lunch--dinner, as they called it--briefly garrulous with the morning's news; in the evening, as the family gathered in again, he returned, built his great fire, and launched his supreme invective, a ceremony which required a half hour in composition, and another three-quarters, with repetition and additions, in delivery.  They dined then quite happily.

So passed the winter.  Eugene was three; they bought him alphabet books, and animal pictures, with rhymed fables below.  Gant read them to him indefatigably: in six weeks he knew them all by memory.

Through the late winter and spring he performed numberless times for the neighbors: holding the book in his hands he pretended to read what he knew by heart.  Gant was delighted: he abetted the deception.  Every one thought it extraordinary that a child should read so young.

In the Spring Gant began to drink again; his thirst withered, however, in two or three weeks, and shamefacedly he took up the routine of his life.  But Eliza was preparing for a change.

It was 1904; there was in preparation a great world's exposition at Saint Louis: it was to be the visual history of civilization, bigger, better, and greater than anything of its kind ever known before.  Many of the Altamont people intended to go: Eliza was fascinated at the prospect of combining travel with profit.

"Do you know what?" she began thoughtfully one night, as she laid down the paper, "I've a good notion to pack up and go."

"Go?  Go where?"

"To Saint Louis," she answered.  "Why, say--if things work out all right, we might simply pull out and settle down there."  She knew that the suggestion of a total disruption of the established life, a voyage to new lands, a new quest of fortune fascinated him.  It had been talked of years before when he had broken his partnership with Will Pentland.

"What do you intend to do out there?  How are the children going to get along?"

"Why, sir," she began smugly, pursing her lips thoughtfully, and smiling cunningly, "I'll simply get me a good big house and drum up a trade among the Altamont people who are going."

"Merciful God, Mrs. Gant!" he howled tragically, "you surely wouldn't do a thing like that.  I beg you not to."

"Why, pshaw, Mr. Gant, don't be such a fool.  There's nothing wrong in keeping boarders.  Some of the most respectable people in this town do it."  She knew what a tender thing his pride was: he could not bear to be thought incapable of the support of his family?one of his most frequent boasts was that he was "a good provider." Further, the residence of any one under his roof not of his blood and bone sowed the air about with menace, breached his castle walls.  Finally, he had a particular revulsion against lodgers: to earn one's living by accepting the contempt, the scorn, and the money of what he called "cheap boarders" was an almost unendurableignominy.

She knew this but she could not understand his feeling.  Not merely to possess property, but to draw income from it was part of the religion of her family, and she surpassed them all by her willingness to rent out a part of her home.  She alone, in fact, of all the Pentlands was willing to relinquish the little moated castle of home; the particular secrecy and privacy of their walls she alone did not seem to value greatly.  And she was the only one of them that wore a skirt.

Eugene had been fed from her breast until he was more than three years old: during the winter he was weaned.  Something in her stopped; something began.

She had her way finally.  Sometimes she would talk to Gant thoughtfully and persuasively about the World's Fair venture. Sometimes, during his evening tirades, she would snap back at him using the project as a threat.  Just what was to be achieved she did not know.  But she felt it was a beginning for her.  And she had her way finally.

Gant succumbed to the lure of new lands.  He was to remain at home: if all went well he would come out later.  The prospect, too, of release for a time excited him.  Something of the old thrill of youth touched him.  He was left behind, but the world lurked full of unseen shadows for a lonely man.  Daisy was in her last year at school: she stayed with him.  But it cost him more than a pang or two to see Helen go.  She was almost fourteen.

In early April, Eliza departed, bearing her excited brood about her, and carrying Eugene in her arms.  He was bewildered at this rapid commotion, but he was electric with curiosity and activity.

The Tarkintons and Duncans streamed in: there were tears and kisses.  Mrs. Tarkinton regarded her with some awe.  The whole neighborhood was a bit bewildered at this latest turn.

"Well, well--you never can tell," said Eliza, smiling tearfully and enjoying the sensation she had provided.  "If things go well we may settle down out there."

"You'll come back," said Mrs. Tarkinton with cheerful loyalty. "There's no place like Altamont."

They went to the station in the street-car: Ben and Grover gleefully sat together, guarding a big luncheon hamper.  Helen clutched nervously a bundle of packages.  Eliza glanced sharply at her long straight legs and thought of the half-fare.

"Say," she began, laughing indefinitely behind her hand, and nudging Gant, "she'll have to scrooch up, won't she?  They'll think you're mighty big to be under twelve," she went on, addressing the girl directly.

Helen stirred nervously.

"We shouldn't have done that," Gant muttered.

"Pshaw!" said Eliza.  "No one will ever notice her."

He saw them into the train, disposed comfortably by the solicitous Pullman porter.

"Keep your eye on them, George," he said, and gave the man a coin. Eliza eyed it jealously.

He kissed them all roughly with his mustache, but he patted his little girl's bony shoulders with his great hand, and hugged her to him.  Something stabbed sharply in Eliza.

They had an awkward moment.  The strangeness, the absurdity of the whole project, and the monstrous fumbling of all life, held them speechless.

"Well," he began, "I reckon you know what you're doing."

"Well, I tell you," she said, pursing her lips, and looking out the window, "you don't know what may come out of this."

He was vaguely appeased.  The train jerked, and moved off slowly. He kissed her clumsily.

"Let me know as soon as you get there," he said, and he strode swiftly down the aisle.

"Good-by, good-by," cried Eliza, waving Eugene's small hand at the long figure on the platform.  "Children," she said, "wave good-by to your papa."  They all crowded to the window.  Eliza wept.
 
 

Eugene watched the sun wane and redden on a rocky river, and on the painted rocks of Tennessee gorges: the enchanted river wound into his child's mind forever.  Years later, it was to be remembered in dreams tenanted with elvish and mysterious beauty.  Stilled in great wonder, he went to sleep to the rhythmical pounding of the heavy wheels.

They lived in a white house on the corner.  There was a small plot of lawn in front, and a narrow strip on the side next to the pavement.  He realized vaguely that it was far from the great central web and roar of the city--he thought he heard some one say four or five miles.  Where was the river?

Two little boys, twins, with straight very blond heads, and thin, mean faces, raced up and down the sidewalk before the house incessantly on tricycles.  They wore white sailor-suits, with blue collars, and he hated them very much.  He felt vaguely that their father was a bad man who had fallen down an elevator shaft, breaking his legs.

The house had a back yard, completely enclosed by a red board fence.  At the end was a red barn.  Years later, Steve, returning home, said:  "That section's all built up out there now."  Where?

One day in the hot barren back yard, two cots and mattresses had been set up for airing.  He lay upon one luxuriously, breathing the hot mattress, and drawing his small legs up lazily.  Luke lay upon the other.  They were eating peaches.

A fly grew sticky on Eugene's peach.  He swallowed it.  Luke howled with laughter.

"Swallowed a fly!  Swallowed a fly!"

He grew violently sick, vomited, and was unable to eat for some time.  He wondered why he had swallowed the fly when he had seen it all the time.

The summer came down blazing hot.  Gant arrived for a few days, bringing Daisy with him.  One night they drank beer at the Delmar Gardens.  In the hot air, at a little table, he gazed thirstily at the beaded foaming stein: he would thrust his face, he thought, in that chill foam and drink deep of happiness.  Eliza gave him a taste; they all shrieked at his bitter surprised face.

Years later he remembered Gant, his mustache flecked with foam, quaffing mightily at the glass: the magnificent gusto, the beautiful thirst inspired in him the desire for emulation, and he wondered if all beer were bitter, if there were not a period of initiation into the pleasures of this great beverage.

Faces from the old half-forgotten world floated in from time to time.  Some of the Altamont people came and stayed at Eliza's house.  One day, with sudden recollective horror he looked up into the brutal shaven face of Jim Lyda.  He was the Altamont sheriff; he lived at the foot of the hill below Gant.  Once, when Eugene was past two, Eliza had gone to Piedmont as witness in a trial.  She was away two days; he was left in care of Mrs. Lyda.  He had never forgotten Lyda's playful cruelty the first night.

Now, one day, this monster appeared again, by devilish sleight, and Eugene looked up into the heavy evil of his face.  Eugene saw Eliza standing near Jim; and as the terror in the small face grew, Jim made as if to put his hand violently upon her.  At his cry of rage and fear, they both laughed: for a blind moment or two Eugene for the first time hated her: he was mad, impotent with jealousy and fear.

At night the boys, Steve, Ben, and Grover, who had been sent out at once to seek employment by Eliza, returned from the Fair Grounds, chattering with the lively excitement of the day's bustle. Sniggering furtively, they talked suggestively about the Hoochy-Koochy: Eugene understood it was a dance.  Steve hummed a monotonous, suggestive tune, and writhed sensually.  They sang a song; the plaintive distant music haunted him.  He learned it:
 

     "Meet me in Saint--Lou--iss, loo--ee,
      Meet me at the Fair,
      If you see the boys and girlies,
      Tell them I'll be there.
      We will dance the Hoochy-Koochy--"
 

and so on.

Sometimes, lying on a sunny quilt, Eugene grew conscious of a gentle peering face, a soft caressing voice, unlike any of the others in kind and quality, a tender olive skin, black hair, sloeblack eyes, exquisite, rather sad, kindliness.  He nuzzled his soft face next to Eugene's, fondled and embraced him.  On his brown neck he was birth-marked with a raspberry: Eugene touched it again and again with wonder.  This was Grover--the gentlest and saddest of the boys.

Eliza sometimes allowed them to take him on excursions.  Once, they made a voyage on a river steamer: he went below and from the side-openings looked closely upon the powerful yellow snake, coiling slowly and resistlessly past.

The boys worked on the Fair Grounds.  They were call-boys at a place called the Inside Inn.  The name charmed him: it flashed constantly through his brain.  Sometimes his sisters, sometimes Eliza, sometimes the boys pulled him through the milling jungle of noise and figures, past the rich opulence and variety of the life of the Fair.  He was drugged in fantasy as they passed the East India tea-house, and as he saw tall turbaned men who walked about within and caught for the first time, so that he never forgot, the slow incense of the East.  Once in a huge building roaring with sound, he was rooted before a mighty locomotive, the greatest monster he had ever seen, whose wheels spun terrifically in grooves, whose blazing furnaces, raining hot red coals into the pit beneath, were fed incessantly by two grimed fire-painted stokers. The scene burned in his brain like some huge splendor out of Hell: he was appalled and fascinated by it.

Again, he stood at the edge of the slow, terrific orbit of the Ferris Wheel, reeled down the blaring confusion of the midway, felt his staggering mind converge helplessly into all the mad phantasmagoria of the carnival; he heard Luke's wild story of the snake-eater, and shrieked in agony when they threatened to take him in.

Once Daisy, yielding to the furtive cat-cruelty below her mild placidity, took him with her through the insane horrors of the scenic railway; they plunged bottomlessly from light into roaring blackness, and as his first yell ceased with a slackening of the car, rolled gently into a monstrous lighted gloom peopled with huge painted grotesques, the red maws of fiendish heads, the cunning appearances of death, nightmare, and madness.  His unprepared mind was unrooted by insane fear: the car rolled downward from one lighted cavern to another, and as his heart withered to a pea, he heard from the people about him loud gusty laughter, in which his sister joined.  His mind, just emerging from the unreal wilderness of childish fancy, gave way completely in this Fair, and he was paralyzed by the conviction, which often returned to him in later years, that his life was a fabulous nightmare and that, by cunning and conspirate artifice, he had surrendered all his hope, belief, and confidence to the lewd torture of demons masked in human flesh. Half-sensible, and purple with gasping terror, he came out finally into the warm and practical sunlight.

His last remembrance of the Fair came from a night in early autumn:with Daisy again he sat upon the driver's seat of a motor bus, listening for the first time to the wonder of its labored chugging, as they rolled, through ploughing sheets of rain, around the gleaming roads, and by the Cascades, pouring their water down before a white building jewelled with ten thousand lights.

The summer had passed.  There was the rustling of autumn winds, a whispering breath of departed revelry: carnival was almost done.

And now the house grew very still: he saw his mother very little, he did not leave the house, he was in the care of his sisters, and he was constantly admonished to silence.

One day Gant came back a second time.  Grover was down with typhoid.

"He said he ate a pear at the Fair grounds," Eliza repeated the story for the hundredth time.  "He came home and complained of feeling sick.  I put my hand on his head and he was burning up. 'Why, child,' I said, 'what on earth--?'"

Her black eyes brightened in her white face: she was afraid.  She pursed her lips and spoke hopefully.
 
"Hello, son," said Gant, casually entering the room; his heart shrivelled as he saw the boy.

Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully after each visit the doctor made; she seized every spare crumb of encouragement and magnified it, but her heart was sick.  Then one night, tearing away the mask suddenly, she came swiftly from the boy's room.

"Mr. Gant," she said in a whisper, pursing her lips.  She shook her white face at him silently as if unable to speak.  Then, rapidly, she concluded:  "He's gone, he's gone, he's gone!"

Eugene was deep in midnight slumber.  Some one shook him, loosening him slowly from his drowsiness.  Presently he found himself in the arms of Helen, who sat on the bed holding him, her morbid stricken little face fastened on him.  She spoke to him distinctly and slowly in a subdued voice, charged somehow with a terrible eagerness:

"Do you want to see Grover?" she whispered.  "He's on the cooling board."

He wondered what a cooling board was; the house was full of menace. She bore him out into the dimly lighted hall, and carried him to the rooms at the front of the house.  Behind the door he heard low voices.  Quietly she opened it; the light blazed brightly on the bed.  Eugene looked, horror swarmed like poison through his blood. Behind the little wasted shell that lay there he remembered suddenly the warm brown face, the soft eyes, that once had peered down at him: like one who has been mad, and suddenly recovers reason, he remembered that forgotten face he had not seen in weeks, that strange bright loneliness that would not return.  O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Eliza sat heavily on a chair, her face bent sideways on her rested hand.  She was weeping, her face contorted by the comical and ugly grimace that is far more terrible than any quiet beatitude of sorrow.  Gant comforted her awkwardly but, looking at the boy from time to time, he went out into the hall and cast his arms forth in agony, in bewilderment.

The undertakers put the body in a basket and took it away.

"He was just twelve years and twenty days old," said Eliza over and over, and this fact seemed to trouble her more than any other.

"You children go and get some sleep now," she commanded suddenly and, as she spoke, her eye fell on Ben who stood puzzled and scowling, gazing in with his curious old-man's look.  She thought of the severance of the twins; they had entered life within twenty minutes of each other; her heart was gripped with pity at the thought of the boy's loneliness.  She wept anew.  The children went to bed.  For some time Eliza and Gant continued to sit alone in the room.  Gant leaned his face in his powerful hands.  "The best boy I had," he muttered.  "By God, he was the best of the lot."

And in the ticking silence they recalled him, and in the heart of each was fear and remorse, because he had been a quiet boy, and there were many, and he had gone unnoticed.

"I'll never be able to forget his birthmark," Eliza whispered, "Never, never."

Then presently each thought of the other; they felt suddenly the horror and strangeness of their surroundings.  They thought of the vine-wound house in the distant mountains, of the roaring fires, the tumult, the cursing, the pain, of their blind and tangled lives, and of blundering destiny which brought them here now in this distant place, with death, after the carnival's close.

Eliza wondered why she had come: she sought back through the hot and desperate mazes for the answer:

"If I had known," she began presently, "if I had known how it would turn out--"

"Never mind," he said, and he stroked her awkwardly.  "By God!" he added dumbly after a moment.  "It's pretty strange when you come to think about it."
 
 

And as they sat there more quietly now, swarming pity rose in them--not for themselves, but for each other, and for the waste, the confusion, the groping accident of life.

Gant thought briefly of his four and fifty years, his vanished youth, his diminishing strength, the ugliness and badness of so much of it; and he had the very quiet despair of a man who knows the forged chain may not be unlinked, the threaded design unwound, the done undone.

"If I had known.  If I had known," said Eliza.  And then:  "I'm sorry."  But he knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself, or even for the boy whom idiot chance had thrust in the way of pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first time, upon the inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth.  O lost.

They went home immediately.  At every station Gant and Eliza made restless expeditions to the baggage-car.  It was gray autumnal November: the mountain forests were quilted with dry brown leaves. They blew about the streets of Altamont, they were deep in lane and gutter, they scampered dryly along before the wind.

The car ground noisily around the curve at the hill-top.  The Gants descended: the body had already been sent on from the station.  As Eliza came slowly down the hill, Mrs. Tarkinton ran from her house sobbing.  Her eldest daughter had died a month before.  The two women gave loud cries as they saw each other, and rushed together.

In Gant's parlor, the coffin had already been placed on trestles, the neighbors, funeral-faced and whispering, were assembled to greet them.  That was all.
 
 

6
 

The death of Grover gave Eliza the most terrible wound of her life: her courage was snapped, her slow but powerful adventure toward freedom was abruptly stopped.  Her flesh seemed to turn rotten when she thought of the distant city and the Fair: she was appalled before the hidden adversary who had struck her down.

With her desperate sadness she encysted herself within her house and her family, reclaimed that life she had been ready to renounce, lived laborious days and tried to drink, in toil, oblivion.  But the dark lost face gleamed like a sudden and impalpable faun within the thickets of memory: she thought of the mark on his brown neck and wept.
 
During the grim winter the shadows lifted slowly.  Gant brought back the roaring fires, the groaning succulent table, the lavish and explosive ritual of the daily life.  The old gusto surged back in their lives.

And, as the winter waned, the interspersed darkness in Eugene's brain was lifted slowly, days, weeks, months began to emerge in consecutive brightness; his mind came from the confusion of the Fair: life opened practically.

Secure and conscious now in the guarded and sufficient strength of home, he lay with well-lined belly before the roasting vitality of the fire, poring insatiably over great volumes in the bookcase, exulting in the musty odor of the leaves, and in the pungent smell of their hot hides.  The books he delighted in most were three huge calf-skin volumes called Ridpath's History of the World.  Their numberless pages were illustrated with hundreds of drawings, engravings, wood-cuts: he followed the progression of the centuries pictorially before he could read.  The pictures of battle delighted him most of all.  Exulting in the howl of the beaten wind about the house, the thunder of great trees, he committed himself to the dark storm, releasing the mad devil's hunger all men have in them, which lusts for darkness, the wind, and incalculable speed.  The past unrolled to him in separate and enormous visions; he built unending legends upon the pictures of the kings of Egypt, charioted swiftly by soaring horses, and something infinitely old and recollective seemed to awaken in him as he looked on fabulous monsters, the twined beards and huge beast-bodies of Assyrian kings, the walls of Babylon.  His brain swarmed with pictures--Cyrus directing the charge, the spear-forest of the Macedonian phalanx, the splintered oars, the numberless huddle of the ships at Salamis, the feasts of Alexander, the terrific melee of the knights, the shattered lances, the axe and the sword, the massed pikemen, the beleaguered walls, the scaling ladders heavy with climbing men hurled backward, the Swiss who flung his body on the lances, the press of horse and foot, the gloomy forests of Gaul and César conquests. Gant sat farther away, behind him, swinging violently back and forth in a stout rocker, spitting clean and powerful spurts of tobacco-juice over his son's head into the hissing fire.

Or again, Gant would read to him with sonorous and florid rhetoric passages from Shakespeare, among which he heard most often Marc Antony's funeral oration, Hamlet's soliloquy, the banquet scene in Macbeth, and the scene between Desdemona and Othello before he strangles her.  Or, he would recite or read poetry, for which he had a capacious and retentive memory.  His favorites were:  "O why should the spirit of mortal be proud" ("Lincoln's favorite poem," he was fond of saying); "'We are lost,' the captain shouted, As he staggered down the stairs"; "I remember, I remember, the house where I was born"; "Ninety and nine with their captain, Rode on the enemy's track, Rode in the gray light of morning, Nine of the ninety came back"; "The boy stood on the burning deck"; and "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward."

Sometimes he would get Helen to recite "Still sits the schoolhouse by the road, a ragged beggar sunning; Around it still the sumachs grow, and blackberry vines are running."

And when she had told how grasses had been growing over the girl's head for forty years, and how the gray-haired man had found in life's harsh school how few hated to go above him, because, you see, they love him, Gant would sigh heavily, and say with a shake of his head:

"Ah me!  There was never a truer word spoken than that."

The family was at the very core and ripeness of its life together. Gant lavished upon it his abuse, his affection, and his prodigal provisioning.  They came to look forward eagerly to his entrance, for he brought with him the great gusto of living, of ritual.  They would watch him in the evening as he turned the corner below with eager strides, follow carefully the processional of his movements from the time he flung his provisions upon the kitchen table to the re-kindling of his fire, with which he was always at odds when he entered, and on to which he poured wood, coal and kerosene lavishly.  This done, he would remove his coat and wash himself at the basin vigorously, rubbing his great hands across his shaven, tough-bearded face with the cleansing and male sound of sandpaper. Then he would thrust his body against the door jamb and scratch his back energetically by moving it violently to and fro.  This done, he would empty another half can of kerosene on the howling flame, lunging savagely at it, and muttering to himself.

Then, biting off a good hunk of powerful apple tobacco, which lay ready for his use on the mantel, he would pace back and forth across his room fiercely, oblivious of his grinning family who followed these ceremonies with exultant excitement, as he composed his tirade.  Finally, he would burst in on Eliza in the kitchen, plunging to the heart of denunciation with a mad howl.

His turbulent and undisciplined rhetoric had acquired, by the regular convention of its usage, something of the movement and directness of classical epithet: his similes were preposterous, created really in a spirit of vulgar mirth, and the great comic intelligence that was in the family--down to the youngest?was shaken daily by it.  The children grew to await his return in the evening with a kind of exhilaration.  Indeed, Eliza herself, healing slowly and painfully her great hurt, got a certain stimulation from it; but there was still in her a fear of the periods of drunkenness, and latently, a stubborn and unforgiving recollection of the past.

But, during that winter, as death, assaulted by the quick and healing gaiety of children, those absolute little gods of the moment, lifted itself slowly out of their hearts, something like hopefulness returned to her.  They were a life unto themselves?how lonely they were they did not know, but they were known to every one and friended by almost no one.  Their status was singular?if  they could have been distinguished by caste, they would probably have been called middle-class, but the Duncans, the Tarkintons, all their neighbors, and all their acquaintances throughout the town, never drew in to them, never came into the strange rich color of their lives, because they had twisted the design of all orderly life, because there was in them a mad, original, disturbing quality which they did not suspect.  And companionship with the elect--those like the Hilliards--was equally impossible, even if they had had the gift or the desire for it.  But they hadn't.

Gant was a great man, and not a singular one, because singularity does not hold life in unyielding devotion to it.

As he stormed through the house, unleashing his gathered bolts, the children followed him joyously, shrieking exultantly as he told Eliza he had first seen her "wriggling around the corner like a snake on her belly," or, as coming in from freezing weather he had charged her and all the Pentlands with malevolent domination of the elements.

"We will freeze," he yelled, "we will freeze in this hellish, damnable, cruel and God-forsaken climate.  Does Brother Will care? Does Brother Jim care?  Did the Old Hog, your miserable old father, care?  Merciful God!  I have fallen into the hands of fiends incarnate, more savage, more cruel, more abominable than the beasts of the field.  Hellhounds that they are, they will sit by and gloat at my agony until I am done to death."

He paced rapidly about the adjacent wash-room for a moment, muttering to himself, while grinning Luke stood watchfully near.

"But they can eat!" he shouted, plunging suddenly at the kitchen door.  "They can eat--when some one else will feed them.  I shall never forget the Old Hog as long as I live.  Cr-unch, Cr-unch,Cr-unch,"--they were all exploded with laughter as his face assumed an expression of insane gluttony, and as he continued, in a slow, whining voice intended to represent the speech of the late Major: "'Eliza, if you don't mind I'll have some more of that chicken,' when the old scoundrel had shovelled it down his throat so fast we had to carry him away from the table."

As his denunciation reached some high extravagance the boys would squeal with laughter, and Gant, inwardly tickled, would glance around slyly with a faint grin bending the corners of his thin mouth.  Eliza herself would laugh shortly, and then exclaim roughly:  "Get out of here!  I've had enough of your goings-on for one night."

Sometimes, on these occasions, his good humor grew so victorious that he would attempt clumsily to fondle her, putting one arm stiffly around her waist, while she bridled, became confused, and half-attempted to escape, saying:  "Get away!  Get away from me! It's too late for that now."  Her white embarrassed smile was at once painful and comic: tears pressed closely behind it.  At these rare, unnatural exhibitions of affection, the children laughed with constraint, fidgeted restlessly, and said:  "Aw, papa, don't."

Eugene, when he first noticed an occurrence of this sort, was getting on to his fifth year: shame gathered in him in tangled clots, aching in his throat; he twisted his neck about convulsively, smiling desperately as he did later when he saw poor  buffoons or mawkish scenes in the theatre.  And he was never after able to see them touch each other with affection, without the same inchoate and choking humiliation: they were so used to the curse, the clamor, and the roughness, that any variation into tenderness came as a cruel affectation.

But as the slow months, gummed with sorrow, dropped more clearly, the powerful germinal instinct for property and freedom began to reawaken in Eliza, and the ancient submerged struggle between their natures began again.  The children were growing up--Eugene had found playmates--Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs.  Her sex was a fading coal.

Season by season, there began again the old strife of ownership and taxes.  Returning home, with the tax-collector's report in his hand, Gant would be genuinely frantic with rage.

"In the name of God, Woman, what are we coming to?  Before another year we'll all go to the poorhouse.  Ah, Lord!  I see very well where it will all end.  I'll go to the wall, every penny we've got will go into the pockets of those accursed swindlers, and the rest will come under the sheriff's hammer.  I curse the day I was ever fool enough to buy the first stick.  Mark my words, we'll be living in soup-kitchens before this fearful, this awful, this hellish and damnable winter is finished."

She would purse her lips thoughtfully as she went over the list, while he looked at her with a face of strained agony.

"Yes, it does look pretty bad," she would remark.  And then:  "It's a pity you didn't listen to me last summer, Mr. Gant, when we had a chance of trading in that worthless old Owenby place for those two houses on Carter Street.  We could have been getting forty dollars a month rent on them ever since."

"I never want to own another foot of land as long as I live," he yelled.  "It's kept me a poor man all my life, and when I die they'll have to give me six feet of earth in Pauper's Field."  And he would grow broodingly philosophic, speaking of the vanity of human effort, the last resting-place in earth of rich and poor, the significant fact that we could "take none of it with us," ending perhaps with "Ah me!  It all comes to the same in the end, anyway."

Or, he would quote a few stanzas of Gray's Elegy, using that encyclopé of stock melancholy with rather indefinite
application:
 

     "--Await alike th' inevitable hour,
      The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
 

But Eliza sat grimly on what they had.

Gant, for all his hatred of land ownership, was proud of living under his own shelter, and indeed proud in the possession of anything that was sanctified by his usage, and that gave him comfort.  He would have liked ready and unencumbered affluence?the possession of huge sums of money in the bank and in his pocket, the freedom to travel grandly, to go before the world spaciously.  He liked to carry large sums of money in his pocket, a practice of which Eliza disapproved, and for which she reprimanded him frequently.  Once or twice, when he was drunk, he had been robbed: he would brandish a roll of bills about under the stimulation of whisky, and dispense large sums to his children--ten, twenty, fifty dollars to each, with maudlin injunctions to "take it all!  Take it all, God damn it!"  But next day he was equally assiduous in his demands for its return: Helen usually collected it from the sometimes unwilling fingers of the boys.  She would give it to him next day.  She was fifteen or sixteen years old, and almost six feet high: a tall thin girl, with large hands and feet, big-boned, generous features, behind which the hysteria of constant excitement lurked.

The bond between the girl and her father grew stronger every day: she was nervous, intense, irritable, and abusive as he was.  She adored him.  He had begun to suspect that this devotion, and his own response to it, was a cause more and more of annoyance to Eliza, and he was inclined to exaggerate and emphasize it, particularly when he was drunk, when his furious distaste for his wife, his obscene complaint against her, was crudely balanced by his maudlin docility to the girl.

And Eliza's hurt was deeper because she knew that just at this time, when her slightest movement goaded him, did what was most rawly essential in him reveal itself.  She was forced to keep out of his way, lock herself in her room, while her young daughter victoriously subdued him.

The friction between Helen and Eliza was often acute: they spoke sharply and curtly to each other, and were painfully aware of the other's presence in cramped quarters.  And, in addition to the unspoken rivalry over Gant, the girl was in the same way, equally, rasped by the temperamental difference of Eliza--driven to fury at times by her slow, mouth-pursing speech, her placidity, the intonations of her voice, the deep abiding patience of her nature.

They fed stupendously.  Eugene began to observe the food and the seasons.  In the autumn, they barrelled huge frosty apples in the cellar.  Gant bought whole hogs from the butcher, returning home early to salt them, wearing a long work-apron, and rolling his sleeves half up his lean hairy arms.  Smoked bacons hung in the pantry, the great bins were full of flour, the dark recessed shelves groaned with preserved cherries, peaches, plums, quinces, apples, pears.  All that he touched waxed in rich pungent life: his Spring gardens, wrought in the black wet earth below the fruit trees, flourished in huge crinkled lettuces that wrenched cleanly from the loamy soil with small black clots stuck to their crisp stocks; fat red radishes; heavy tomatoes.  The rich plums lay bursted on the grass; his huge cherry trees oozed with heavy gum jewels; his apple trees bent with thick green clusters.  The earth was spermy for him like a big woman.

Spring was full of cool dewy mornings, spurting winds, and storms of intoxicating blossoms, and in this enchantment Eugene first felt the mixed lonely ache and promise of the seasons.

In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee.  Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam.  At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima-beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits--cherries, pears, peaches.  At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.

For the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts four heavy turkeys were bought and fattened for weeks: Eugene fed them with cans of shelled corn several times a day, but he could not bear to be present at their executions, because by that time their cheerful excited gobbles made echoes in his heart.  Eliza baked for weeks in advance: the whole energy of the family focussed upon the great ritual of the feast.  A day or two before, the auxiliary dainties arrived in piled grocer's boxes--the magic of strange foods and fruits was added to familiar fare: there were glossed sticky dates, cold rich figs, cramped belly to belly in small boxes, dusty raisins, mixed nuts--the almond, pecan, the meaty nigger-toe, the walnut, sacks of assorted candies, piles of yellow Florida oranges, tangerines, sharp, acrid, nostalgic odors.

Seated before a roast or a fowl, Gant began a heavy clangor on his steel and carving knife, distributing thereafter Gargantuan portions to each plate.  Eugene feasted from a high chair by his father's side, filled his distending belly until it was drum-tight, and was permitted to stop eating by his watchful sire only when his stomach was impregnable to the heavy prod of Gant's big finger.

"There's a soft place there," he would roar, and he would cover the scoured plate of his infant son with another heavy slab of beef. That their machinery withstood this hammer-handed treatment was a tribute to their vitality and Eliza's cookery.

Gant ate ravenously and without caution.  He was immoderately fond of fish, and he invariably choked upon a bone while eating it.