Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
He was a well grown and muscular young fellow of nineteen years, but too sensitive to all the taboos of brotherhood to be prepared for the attack Steve made on him. Steve drove at him viciously, smashing drunkenly at his face with both hands. He was driven gasping and blinded across the kitchen.
Wrong forever on the throne.
Somewhere, through fear and fury, Eugene heard Ben's voice humming unconcernedly, and the slow picked tune on the piano.
"Ben!" he screamed, dancing about and grasping a hammer.
Ben entered like a cat. Luke was bleeding warmly from the nose.
"Come on, come on, you big bastard," said Steve, exalted by his success, throwing himself into a fancy boxing posture. "I'll take you on now. You haven't got a chance, Ben," he continued, with elaborate pity. "You haven't got a chance, boy. I'll tear your head off with what I know."
Ben scowled quietly at him for a moment while he pranced softly about, proposing his fists in Police Gazette attitudes. Then, exploding suddenly in maniacal anger, the quiet one sprang upon the amateur pugilist with one bound, and flattened him with a single blow of his fist. Steve's head bounced upon the floor in a most comforting fashion. Eugene gave a loud shriek of ecstasy and danced about, insane with joy, while Ben, making little snarling noises in his throat, leaped on his brother's prostrate body and thumped his bruised skull upon the boards. There was a beautiful thoroughness about his wakened anger--it never made inquiries till later.
"Good old Ben," screamed Eugene, howling with insane laughter. "Good old Ben."
Eliza, who had been calling out loudly for help, the police, and the interference of the general public, now succeeded, with Luke's assistance, in checking Ben's assault, and pulling him up from his dazed victim. She wept bitterly, her heart laden with pain and sadness, while Luke, forgetful of his bloody nose, sorrowful and full of shame only because brother had struck brother, assisted Steve to his feet and brushed him off.
A terrible shame started up in each of them--they were unable to meet one another's gaze. Ben's thin face was very white; he trembled violently and, catching sight of Steve's bleared eyes for a moment, he made a retching noise in his throat, went over to the sink, and drank a glass of cold water.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand," Eliza wept.
Helen came in from town with a bag of warm bread and cakes.
"What's the matter?" she said, noting at once all that had happened.
"I don't know," said Eliza, her face working, shaking her head for several moments before she spoke. "It seems that the judgment of God is against us. There's been nothing but misery all my life. All I want is a little peace." She wept softly, wiping her weak bleared eyes with the back of her hand.
"Well, forget about it," said Helen quietly. Her voice was casual, weary, sad. "How do you feel, Steve?" she asked.
"I wouldn't make any trouble for any one, Helen," he said, with a maudlin whimper. "No! No!" he continued in a brooding voice. "They've never given Steve a chance. They're all down on him. They jumped on me, Helen. My own brothers jumped on me, sick as I am, and beat me up. It's all right. I'm going away somewhere and try to forget. Stevie doesn't hold any grudge against any one. He's not built that way. Give me your hand, buddy," he said, turning to Ben with nauseous sentimentality and extending his yellow fingers, "I'm willing to shake your hand. You hit me to-night, but Steve's willing to forget."
"Oh my God," said Ben, grasping his stomach. He leaned weakly across the sink and drank another glass of water.
"No. No." Steve began again. "Stevie isn't built--"
He would have continued indefinitely in this strain, but Helen checked him with weary finality.
"Well, forget about it," she said, "all of you. Life's too short."
Life was. At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion, antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with sad tranquillity. They were like men who, driving forward desperately at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their footprints stretching interminably away across the waste land of the desert; or I should say, they were like those who have been mad, and who will be mad again, but who see themselves for a moment quietly, sanely, at morning, looking with sad untroubled eyes into a mirror.
Their faces were sad. There was great age in them. They felt suddenly the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless nihilism of life.
Margaret came in fearfully. Her eyes were red, her broad German face white and tearful. A group of excited boarders whispered in the hall.
"I'll lose them all now," Eliza fretted. "The last time three left. Over twenty dollars a week and money so hard to get. I don't know what's to become of us all." She wept again.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Helen impatiently. "Forget about the boarders once in a while."
Steve sank stupidly into a chair by the long table. From time to time he muttered sentimentally to himself. Luke, his face sensitive, hurt, ashamed around his mouth, stood by him attentively, spoke gently to him, and brought him a glass of water.
"Give him a cup of coffee, mama," Helen cried irritably. "For heaven's sake, you might do a little for him."
"Why here, here," said Eliza, rushing awkwardly to the gas range and lighting a burner. "I never thought--I'll have some in a minute."
Margaret sat in a chair on the other side of the disorderly table, leaning her face in her hand and weeping. Her tears dredged little gulches through the thick compost of rouge and powder with which she coated her rough skin.
"Cheer up, honey," said Helen, beginning to laugh. "Christmas is coming." She patted the broad German back comfortingly.
Ben opened the torn screen door and stepped out on the back porch. It was a cool night in the rich month of August; the sky was deeply pricked with great stars. He lighted a cigarette, holding the match with white trembling fingers. There were faint sounds from summer porches, the laughter of women, a distant throb of music at a dance. Eugene went and stood beside him: he looked up at him with wonder, exultancy, and with sadness. He prodded him half with fear, half with joy.
Ben snarled softly at him, made a sudden motion to strike him, but stopped. A swift light flickered across his mouth. He smoked.
Steve went away with the German woman to Indiana, where, at first, came news of opulence, fatness, ease, and furs (with photographs), later of brawls with her honest brothers, and talk of divorce, reunion and renascence. He gravitated between the two poles of his support, Margaret and Eliza, returning to Altamont every summer for a period of drugs and drunkenness that ended in a family fight, jail, and a hospital cure.
"Hell commences," howled Gant, "as soon as he comes home. He's a curse and a care, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. Woman, you have given birth to a monster who will not rest until he has done me to death, fearful, cruel, and accursed reprobate that he is!"
But Eliza wrote her oldest son regularly, enclosed sums of money from time to time, and revived her hopes incessantly, against nature, against reason, against the structure of life. She did not dare to come openly to his defense, to reveal frankly the place he held in her heart's core, but she would produce each letter in which he spoke boastfully of his successes, or announced his monthly resurrection, and read them to an unmoved family. They were florid, foolish letters, full of quotation marks and written in a large fancy hand. She was proud and pleased at all their extravagances; his flowery illiteracy was another proof to her of his superior intelligence.
Dear Mama:
Yours of the 11th to hand and must say I was glad to know you were in "the land of the living" again as I had begun to feel it was a "long time between drinks" since your last. ("I tell you what," said Eliza, looking up and sniggering with pleasure, "he's no fool." Helen, with a smile that was half ribald, half annoyed, about her big mo
uth, made a face at Luke, and lifted her eyes patiently upward to God as Eliza continued. Gant leaned forward tensely with his head craned upward, listening carefully with a faint grin of pleasure.) Well, mama, since I last wrote you things have been coming my way and it now looks as if the "Prodigal Son" will come home some day in his own private car. ("Hey, what's that?" said Gant, and she read it again for him. He wet his thumb and looked about with a pleased grin. "Wh-wh-what's the matter?" asked Luke. "Has he b-b-bought the railroad?" Helen laughed hoarsely. "I'm from Missouri," she said.) It took me a long time to get started, mama, but things were breaking against me and all that little Stevie has ever asked from any one in this "vale of tears" is a fair chance. (Helen laughed her ironical husky falsetto. "All that little S-S-Stevie has ever asked," said Luke, reddening with annoyance, "is the whole g-g-g-goddam world with a few gold mines thrown in.") But now that I'm on my feet at last, mama, I'm going to show the world that I haven't forgotten those who stood by me in my "hour of need," and that the best friend a man ever had is his mother. ("Where's the shovel?" said Ben, snickering quietly.)
'That boy writes a good letter," said Gant appreciatively. "I'm damned if he's not the smartest one of the lot when he wants to be."
"Yes," said Luke angrily, "he's so smart that you'll b-b-believe any fairy tale he wants to tell you. B-b-b-but the one who's stuck by you through thick and thin gets no c-c-credit at all." He glanced meaningly at Helen. "It's a d-d-damn shame."
"Forget about it," she said wearily.
"Well," said Eliza thoughtfully, holding the letter in her folded hands and gazing away, "perhaps he's going to turn over a new leaf now. You never know." Lost in pleased revery she looked into vacancy, pursing her lips.
"I hope so!" said Helen wearily. "You've got to show me."
Privately: "You see how it is, don't you?" she said to Luke, mounting to hysteria. "Do I get any credit? Do I? I can work my fingers to the bone for them, but do I get so much as Go to Hell for my trouble? Do I?"
In these years Helen went off into the South with Pearl Hines, the saddlemaker's daughter. They sang together at moving-picture theatres in country towns. They were booked from a theatrical office in Atlanta.
Pearl Hines was a heavily built girl with a meaty face and negroid lips. She was jolly and vital. She sang ragtime and nigger songs with a natural passion, swinging her hips and shaking her breasts erotically.
"Here comes my da-dad-dy now
O pop, O pop, O-o pop."
They earned as much as $100 a week sometimes. They played in towns like Waycross, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
They brought with them the great armor of innocency. They were eager and decent girls. Occasionally the village men made cautious explorative insults, relying on the superstition that lives in small towns concerning "show girls." But generally they were well treated.
For them, these ventures into new lands were eager with promise. The vacant idiot laughter, the ribald enthusiasm with which South Carolina or Georgia countrymen, filling a theatre with the strong smell of clay and sweat, greeted Pearl's songs, left them unwounded, pleased, eager. They were excited to know that they were members of the profession; they bought Variety regularly, they saw themselves finally a celebrated high-salaried team on "big time" in great cities. Pearl was to "put over" the popular songs, to introduce the rag melodies with the vital rhythm of her dynamic meatiness, Helen was to give operatic dignity to the programme. In a respectful hush, bathed in a pink spot, she sang ditties of higher quality--Tosti's "Goodbye," "The End of a Perfect Day," and "The Rosary." She had a big, full, somewhat metallic voice: she had received training from her Aunt Louise, the splendid blonde who had lived in Altamont for several years after her separation from Elmer Pentland. Louise gave music lessons and enjoyed her waning youth with handsome young men. She was one of the ripe, rich, dangerous women that Helen liked. She had a little girl and went away to New York with the child when tongues grew fanged.
But she said: "Helen, that voice ought to be trained for grand opera."
Helen had not forgotten. She fantasied of France and Italy: the big crude glare of what she called "a career in opera," the florid music, the tiered galleries winking with gems, the torrential applause directed toward the full-blooded, dominant all-shadowing songsters struck up great anthems in her. It was a scene, she thought, in which she was meant to shine. And as the team of Gant and Hines (The Dixie Melody Twins) moved on their jagged circuit through the South, this desire, bright, fierce, and formless, seemed, in some way, to be nearer realization.
She wrote home frequently, usually to Gant. Her letters beat like great pulses; they were filled with the excitement of new cities, presentiments of abundant life. In every town they met "lovely people"--everywhere, in fact, good wives and mothers, and nice young men, were attracted hospitably to these two decent, happy, exciting girls. There was a vast decency, an enormous clean vitality about Helen that subjugated good people and defeated bad ones. She held under her dominion a score of young men?masculine, red-faced, hard-drinking and shy. Her relation to them was maternal and magistral, they came to listen and to be ruled; they adored her, but few of them tried to kiss her.
Eugene was puzzled and frightened by these lamb-like lions. Among men, they were fierce, bold, and combative; with her, awkward and timorous. One of them, a city surveyor, lean, highboned, alcoholic, was constantly involved in police-court brawls; another, a railroad detective, a large fair young man, split the skulls of negroes when he was drunk, shot several men, and was himself finally killed in a Tennessee gun-fight.
She never lacked for friends and protectors wherever she went. Occasionally, Pearl's happy and vital sensuality, the innocent
gusto with which she implored
"Some sweet old daddy
Come make a fuss over me."
drew on village rakedom to false conjectures. Unpleasant men with wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial drink of corn whisky, call them "girley," and suggest a hotel room or a motorcar as a meeting-place. When this happened, Pearl was stricken into silence; helpless and abashed, she appealed to Helen.
And she, her large loose mouth tense and wounded at the corners, her eyes a little brighter, would answer:
"I don't know what you mean by that remark. I guess you've made a mistake about us." This did not fail to exact stammering apologies and excuses.
She was painfully innocent, temperamentally incapable of wholly believing the worst about any one. She lived in the excitement of rumor and suggestion: it never seemed to her actually possible that the fast young women who excited her had, in the phrase she used, "gone the limit." She was skilled in gossip, and greedily attentive to it, but of the complex nastiness of village life she had little actual knowledge. Thus, with Pearl Hines, she walked confidently and joyously over volcanic crust, scenting only the odor of freedom, change, and adventure.
But this partnership came to an end. The intention of Pearl Hines' life was direct and certain. She wanted to get married, she had always wanted to get married before she was twenty-five. For Helen, the singing partnership, the exploration of new lands, had been a gesture toward freedom, an instinctive groping toward a centre of life and purpose to which she could fasten her energy, a blind hunger for variety, beauty, and independence. She did not know what she wanted to do with her life; it was probable that she would never control even partially her destiny: she would be controlled, when the time came, by the great necessity that lived in her. That necessity was to enslave and to serve.
For two or three years Helen and Pearl supported themselves by these tours, leaving Altamont during its dull winter lassitude, and returning to it in Spring, or in Summer, with money enough to suffice them until their next season.
Pearl juggled carefully with the proposals of several young men during this period. She had the warmest affection for a ball-player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont team. He was a tough
handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down in a frenzy of despair during the course of a game, and rushing belligerently at the umpire. She liked his hard assurance, his rapid twang, his tanned lean body.
But she was in love with no one--she would never be--and caution told her that the life-risk on bush-league ball-players was very great. She married finally a young man from Jersey City, heavy of hand, hoof, and voice, who owned a young but flourishing truck and livery business.
Thus, the partnership of the Dixie Melody Twins was dissolved. Helen, left alone, turned away from the drear monotony of the small towns to the gaiety, the variety, and the slaking fulfilment of her desires, which she hoped somehow to find in the cities.
She missed Luke terribly. Without him she felt incomplete, unarmored. He had been enrolled in the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta for two years. He was taking the course in electrical engineering, the whole direction of his life had been thus shaped by Gant's eulogies, years before, of the young electrical expert, Liddell. He was failing in his work--his mind had never been forced to the discipline of study. All purpose with him was broken by a thousand impulses: his brain stammered as did his tongue, and as he turned impatiently and irritably to the logarithm tables, he muttered the number of the page in idiot repetition, keeping up a constant wild vibration of his leg upon the ball of his foot.
His great commercial talent was salesmanship; he had superlatively that quality that American actors and men of business call "personality"--a wild energy, a Rabelaisian vulgarity, a sensory instinct for rapid and swinging repartee, and a hypnotic power of speech, torrential, meaningless, mad, and evangelical. He could sell anything because, in the jargon of salesmen, he could sell himself; and there was a fortune in him in the fantastic elasticity of American business, the club of all the queer trades, of wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he could have chanted the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from their coats, doing every one, everything, and finally himself. He was not an electrical engineer--he was electrical energy. He had no gift for study--he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with it desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus and the mechanical sciences.
Wrong forever on the throne.
Somewhere, through fear and fury, Eugene heard Ben's voice humming unconcernedly, and the slow picked tune on the piano.
"Ben!" he screamed, dancing about and grasping a hammer.
Ben entered like a cat. Luke was bleeding warmly from the nose.
"Come on, come on, you big bastard," said Steve, exalted by his success, throwing himself into a fancy boxing posture. "I'll take you on now. You haven't got a chance, Ben," he continued, with elaborate pity. "You haven't got a chance, boy. I'll tear your head off with what I know."
Ben scowled quietly at him for a moment while he pranced softly about, proposing his fists in Police Gazette attitudes. Then, exploding suddenly in maniacal anger, the quiet one sprang upon the amateur pugilist with one bound, and flattened him with a single blow of his fist. Steve's head bounced upon the floor in a most comforting fashion. Eugene gave a loud shriek of ecstasy and danced about, insane with joy, while Ben, making little snarling noises in his throat, leaped on his brother's prostrate body and thumped his bruised skull upon the boards. There was a beautiful thoroughness about his wakened anger--it never made inquiries till later.
"Good old Ben," screamed Eugene, howling with insane laughter. "Good old Ben."
Eliza, who had been calling out loudly for help, the police, and the interference of the general public, now succeeded, with Luke's assistance, in checking Ben's assault, and pulling him up from his dazed victim. She wept bitterly, her heart laden with pain and sadness, while Luke, forgetful of his bloody nose, sorrowful and full of shame only because brother had struck brother, assisted Steve to his feet and brushed him off.
A terrible shame started up in each of them--they were unable to meet one another's gaze. Ben's thin face was very white; he trembled violently and, catching sight of Steve's bleared eyes for a moment, he made a retching noise in his throat, went over to the sink, and drank a glass of cold water.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand," Eliza wept.
Helen came in from town with a bag of warm bread and cakes.
"What's the matter?" she said, noting at once all that had happened.
"I don't know," said Eliza, her face working, shaking her head for several moments before she spoke. "It seems that the judgment of God is against us. There's been nothing but misery all my life. All I want is a little peace." She wept softly, wiping her weak bleared eyes with the back of her hand.
"Well, forget about it," said Helen quietly. Her voice was casual, weary, sad. "How do you feel, Steve?" she asked.
"I wouldn't make any trouble for any one, Helen," he said, with a maudlin whimper. "No! No!" he continued in a brooding voice. "They've never given Steve a chance. They're all down on him. They jumped on me, Helen. My own brothers jumped on me, sick as I am, and beat me up. It's all right. I'm going away somewhere and try to forget. Stevie doesn't hold any grudge against any one. He's not built that way. Give me your hand, buddy," he said, turning to Ben with nauseous sentimentality and extending his yellow fingers, "I'm willing to shake your hand. You hit me to-night, but Steve's willing to forget."
"Oh my God," said Ben, grasping his stomach. He leaned weakly across the sink and drank another glass of water.
"No. No." Steve began again. "Stevie isn't built--"
He would have continued indefinitely in this strain, but Helen checked him with weary finality.
"Well, forget about it," she said, "all of you. Life's too short."
Life was. At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion, antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with sad tranquillity. They were like men who, driving forward desperately at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their footprints stretching interminably away across the waste land of the desert; or I should say, they were like those who have been mad, and who will be mad again, but who see themselves for a moment quietly, sanely, at morning, looking with sad untroubled eyes into a mirror.
Their faces were sad. There was great age in them. They felt suddenly the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless nihilism of life.
Margaret came in fearfully. Her eyes were red, her broad German face white and tearful. A group of excited boarders whispered in the hall.
"I'll lose them all now," Eliza fretted. "The last time three left. Over twenty dollars a week and money so hard to get. I don't know what's to become of us all." She wept again.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Helen impatiently. "Forget about the boarders once in a while."
Steve sank stupidly into a chair by the long table. From time to time he muttered sentimentally to himself. Luke, his face sensitive, hurt, ashamed around his mouth, stood by him attentively, spoke gently to him, and brought him a glass of water.
"Give him a cup of coffee, mama," Helen cried irritably. "For heaven's sake, you might do a little for him."
"Why here, here," said Eliza, rushing awkwardly to the gas range and lighting a burner. "I never thought--I'll have some in a minute."
Margaret sat in a chair on the other side of the disorderly table, leaning her face in her hand and weeping. Her tears dredged little gulches through the thick compost of rouge and powder with which she coated her rough skin.
"Cheer up, honey," said Helen, beginning to laugh. "Christmas is coming." She patted the broad German back comfortingly.
Ben opened the torn screen door and stepped out on the back porch. It was a cool night in the rich month of August; the sky was deeply pricked with great stars. He lighted a cigarette, holding the match with white trembling fingers. There were faint sounds from summer porches, the laughter of women, a distant throb of music at a dance. Eugene went and stood beside him: he looked up at him with wonder, exultancy, and with sadness. He prodded him half with fear, half with joy.
Ben snarled softly at him, made a sudden motion to strike him, but stopped. A swift light flickered across his mouth. He smoked.
Steve went away with the German woman to Indiana, where, at first, came news of opulence, fatness, ease, and furs (with photographs), later of brawls with her honest brothers, and talk of divorce, reunion and renascence. He gravitated between the two poles of his support, Margaret and Eliza, returning to Altamont every summer for a period of drugs and drunkenness that ended in a family fight, jail, and a hospital cure.
"Hell commences," howled Gant, "as soon as he comes home. He's a curse and a care, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. Woman, you have given birth to a monster who will not rest until he has done me to death, fearful, cruel, and accursed reprobate that he is!"
But Eliza wrote her oldest son regularly, enclosed sums of money from time to time, and revived her hopes incessantly, against nature, against reason, against the structure of life. She did not dare to come openly to his defense, to reveal frankly the place he held in her heart's core, but she would produce each letter in which he spoke boastfully of his successes, or announced his monthly resurrection, and read them to an unmoved family. They were florid, foolish letters, full of quotation marks and written in a large fancy hand. She was proud and pleased at all their extravagances; his flowery illiteracy was another proof to her of his superior intelligence.
Dear Mama:
Yours of the 11th to hand and must say I was glad to know you were in "the land of the living" again as I had begun to feel it was a "long time between drinks" since your last. ("I tell you what," said Eliza, looking up and sniggering with pleasure, "he's no fool." Helen, with a smile that was half ribald, half annoyed, about her big mo
'That boy writes a good letter," said Gant appreciatively. "I'm damned if he's not the smartest one of the lot when he wants to be."
"Yes," said Luke angrily, "he's so smart that you'll b-b-believe any fairy tale he wants to tell you. B-b-b-but the one who's stuck by you through thick and thin gets no c-c-credit at all." He glanced meaningly at Helen. "It's a d-d-damn shame."
"Forget about it," she said wearily.
"Well," said Eliza thoughtfully, holding the letter in her folded hands and gazing away, "perhaps he's going to turn over a new leaf now. You never know." Lost in pleased revery she looked into vacancy, pursing her lips.
"I hope so!" said Helen wearily. "You've got to show me."
Privately: "You see how it is, don't you?" she said to Luke, mounting to hysteria. "Do I get any credit? Do I? I can work my fingers to the bone for them, but do I get so much as Go to Hell for my trouble? Do I?"
In these years Helen went off into the South with Pearl Hines, the saddlemaker's daughter. They sang together at moving-picture theatres in country towns. They were booked from a theatrical office in Atlanta.
Pearl Hines was a heavily built girl with a meaty face and negroid lips. She was jolly and vital. She sang ragtime and nigger songs with a natural passion, swinging her hips and shaking her breasts erotically.
"Here comes my da-dad-dy now
O pop, O pop, O-o pop."
They earned as much as $100 a week sometimes. They played in towns like Waycross, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
They brought with them the great armor of innocency. They were eager and decent girls. Occasionally the village men made cautious explorative insults, relying on the superstition that lives in small towns concerning "show girls." But generally they were well treated.
For them, these ventures into new lands were eager with promise. The vacant idiot laughter, the ribald enthusiasm with which South Carolina or Georgia countrymen, filling a theatre with the strong smell of clay and sweat, greeted Pearl's songs, left them unwounded, pleased, eager. They were excited to know that they were members of the profession; they bought Variety regularly, they saw themselves finally a celebrated high-salaried team on "big time" in great cities. Pearl was to "put over" the popular songs, to introduce the rag melodies with the vital rhythm of her dynamic meatiness, Helen was to give operatic dignity to the programme. In a respectful hush, bathed in a pink spot, she sang ditties of higher quality--Tosti's "Goodbye," "The End of a Perfect Day," and "The Rosary." She had a big, full, somewhat metallic voice: she had received training from her Aunt Louise, the splendid blonde who had lived in Altamont for several years after her separation from Elmer Pentland. Louise gave music lessons and enjoyed her waning youth with handsome young men. She was one of the ripe, rich, dangerous women that Helen liked. She had a little girl and went away to New York with the child when tongues grew fanged.
But she said: "Helen, that voice ought to be trained for grand opera."
Helen had not forgotten. She fantasied of France and Italy: the big crude glare of what she called "a career in opera," the florid music, the tiered galleries winking with gems, the torrential applause directed toward the full-blooded, dominant all-shadowing songsters struck up great anthems in her. It was a scene, she thought, in which she was meant to shine. And as the team of Gant and Hines (The Dixie Melody Twins) moved on their jagged circuit through the South, this desire, bright, fierce, and formless, seemed, in some way, to be nearer realization.
She wrote home frequently, usually to Gant. Her letters beat like great pulses; they were filled with the excitement of new cities, presentiments of abundant life. In every town they met "lovely people"--everywhere, in fact, good wives and mothers, and nice young men, were attracted hospitably to these two decent, happy, exciting girls. There was a vast decency, an enormous clean vitality about Helen that subjugated good people and defeated bad ones. She held under her dominion a score of young men?masculine, red-faced, hard-drinking and shy. Her relation to them was maternal and magistral, they came to listen and to be ruled; they adored her, but few of them tried to kiss her.
Eugene was puzzled and frightened by these lamb-like lions. Among men, they were fierce, bold, and combative; with her, awkward and timorous. One of them, a city surveyor, lean, highboned, alcoholic, was constantly involved in police-court brawls; another, a railroad detective, a large fair young man, split the skulls of negroes when he was drunk, shot several men, and was himself finally killed in a Tennessee gun-fight.
She never lacked for friends and protectors wherever she went. Occasionally, Pearl's happy and vital sensuality, the innocent
gusto with which she implored
"Some sweet old daddy
Come make a fuss over me."
drew on village rakedom to false conjectures. Unpleasant men with wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial drink of corn whisky, call them "girley," and suggest a hotel room or a motorcar as a meeting-place. When this happened, Pearl was stricken into silence; helpless and abashed, she appealed to Helen.
And she, her large loose mouth tense and wounded at the corners, her eyes a little brighter, would answer:
"I don't know what you mean by that remark. I guess you've made a mistake about us." This did not fail to exact stammering apologies and excuses.
She was painfully innocent, temperamentally incapable of wholly believing the worst about any one. She lived in the excitement of rumor and suggestion: it never seemed to her actually possible that the fast young women who excited her had, in the phrase she used, "gone the limit." She was skilled in gossip, and greedily attentive to it, but of the complex nastiness of village life she had little actual knowledge. Thus, with Pearl Hines, she walked confidently and joyously over volcanic crust, scenting only the odor of freedom, change, and adventure.
But this partnership came to an end. The intention of Pearl Hines' life was direct and certain. She wanted to get married, she had always wanted to get married before she was twenty-five. For Helen, the singing partnership, the exploration of new lands, had been a gesture toward freedom, an instinctive groping toward a centre of life and purpose to which she could fasten her energy, a blind hunger for variety, beauty, and independence. She did not know what she wanted to do with her life; it was probable that she would never control even partially her destiny: she would be controlled, when the time came, by the great necessity that lived in her. That necessity was to enslave and to serve.
For two or three years Helen and Pearl supported themselves by these tours, leaving Altamont during its dull winter lassitude, and returning to it in Spring, or in Summer, with money enough to suffice them until their next season.
Pearl juggled carefully with the proposals of several young men during this period. She had the warmest affection for a ball-player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont team. He was a tough
But she was in love with no one--she would never be--and caution told her that the life-risk on bush-league ball-players was very great. She married finally a young man from Jersey City, heavy of hand, hoof, and voice, who owned a young but flourishing truck and livery business.
Thus, the partnership of the Dixie Melody Twins was dissolved. Helen, left alone, turned away from the drear monotony of the small towns to the gaiety, the variety, and the slaking fulfilment of her desires, which she hoped somehow to find in the cities.
She missed Luke terribly. Without him she felt incomplete, unarmored. He had been enrolled in the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta for two years. He was taking the course in electrical engineering, the whole direction of his life had been thus shaped by Gant's eulogies, years before, of the young electrical expert, Liddell. He was failing in his work--his mind had never been forced to the discipline of study. All purpose with him was broken by a thousand impulses: his brain stammered as did his tongue, and as he turned impatiently and irritably to the logarithm tables, he muttered the number of the page in idiot repetition, keeping up a constant wild vibration of his leg upon the ball of his foot.
His great commercial talent was salesmanship; he had superlatively that quality that American actors and men of business call "personality"--a wild energy, a Rabelaisian vulgarity, a sensory instinct for rapid and swinging repartee, and a hypnotic power of speech, torrential, meaningless, mad, and evangelical. He could sell anything because, in the jargon of salesmen, he could sell himself; and there was a fortune in him in the fantastic elasticity of American business, the club of all the queer trades, of wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he could have chanted the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from their coats, doing every one, everything, and finally himself. He was not an electrical engineer--he was electrical energy. He had no gift for study--he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with it desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus and the mechanical sciences.