Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
She had to speak these things to Helen. There was a strange defiant communion between them. They laughed or were bitter together.
"Why, of course," said Helen, impatiently, "I've known it all along." But she looked beyond the door curiously, her big gold-laced teeth half-shown in her open mouth, the child look of belief, wonder, skepticism, and hurt innocency in her big highboned face.
"Do you suppose he really does? Oh surely not mama. She's old enough to be his mother."
Across Eliza's white puckered face, thoughtful and reproving, a sly smile broke. She rubbed her finger under the broad wings of her nose to conceal it, and snickered.
"I tell you what!" she said. "He's a chip off the old block. His father over again," she whispered. "It's in the blood."
Helen laughed huskily, picking vaguely at her chin, and gazing out across the weedy garden.
"Poor old Ben!" she said, and her eyes, she did not know why, were sheeted with tears. "Well, 'Fatty's' a lady. I like her--I don't care who knows it," she added defiantly. "It's their business anyway. They're quiet about it. You've got to say that much for them."
She was silent a moment.
"Women are crazy about him," she said. "They like the quiet ones, don't they? He's a gentleman."
Eliza shook her head portentously for several moments.
"What do you think!" she whispered, and shook her pursed lips again. "Always ten years older at least."
"Poor old Ben!" Helen said again.
"The quiet one, the sad one. I tell you what!" Eliza shook her head, unable to speak. Her eyes too were wet.
They thought of sons and lovers: they drew closer in their communion, they drank the cup of their twin slavery as they thought of the Gant men who would always know hunger, the strangers on the land, the unknown farers who had lost their way. O lost!
The hands of women were hungry for his crisp hair. When they came to the paper office to insert advertisements they asked for him. Frowning gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet crossed, reading, in a somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had written. His thin hairy wrists slatted leanly against his starched white cuffs, his strong nervous fingers, ivoried by nicotine, smoothed out the crumples. Scowling intently, he bent his fine head, erasing, arranging. Emphatic lady-fingers twitched. "How's that?" Answers vague-voiced, eyes tangled in crisp hair. "Oh, much better, thank you."
Wanted: frowning boy-man head for understanding fingers of mature and sympathetic woman. Unhappily married. Address Mrs. B. J. X., Box 74. Eight cents a word for one insertion. "Oh, [tenderly] thank you, Ben."
"Ben," said Jack Eaton, the advertising manager, thrusting his plump face into the city editor's office, "one of your harem's out there. She wanted to murder me when I tried to take it. See if she's got a friend."
"Oh, listen to this, won't you?" Ben snickered fiercely to the City Editor. "You missed your calling, Eaton. What you want is the endman's job with Honeyboy Evans."
Scowling, he cast the cigarette from his ivory hand, and loped out into the office. Eaton remained a moment to laugh with the City Editor. O rare Ben Gant!
Sometimes, returning late at night to Woodson Street, in the crowded summer season, he slept with Eugene in the front room upstairs where they had all been born. Propped high on pillows in the old cream-colored bed, painted gaily at head and foot with round medals of clustering fruit, he read aloud in a quiet puzzled voice, fumbling over pronunciation, the baseball stories of Ring Lardner. "You know me, Al." Just outside the windows the flat veranda roof was still warm from its daytime exhalations of tar-calked tin. Rich cob-webbed grapes hung in packed clusters among the broad leaves. "I didn't raise my boy to be a southpaw. I've a good mind to give Gleason a sock in the eye."
Ben read painfully, pausing a moment later to snicker. Thus, like a child, he groped intently at all meanings, with scowling studiousness. Women liked to see him scowl and study so. He was sudden only in anger, and in his quick communications with his angel.
22
Toward the beginning of Eugene's fourteenth year, when he had been a student at Leonard's for two years, Ben got work for him as a paper carrier. Eliza grumbled at the boy's laziness. She complained that she could get him to do little or nothing for her. In fact, he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of boarding-house routine. Her demands on him were not heavy, but they were frequent and unexpected. He was depressed at the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure of all daily labor. If she had given him position, the daily responsibility of an ordered task, he could have fulfilled it with zeal. But her own method was much too random: she wanted to keep him on tap for an occasional errand, and he did not have her interest.
Dixieland was the heart of her life. It owned her. It appalled him. When she sent him to the grocer's for bread, he felt wearily that the bread would be eaten by strangers, that nothing out of the effort of their lives grew younger, better, or more beautiful, that all was erased in a daily wash of sewage. She sent him forth in the rank thicket of her garden to hoe out the swarming weeds that clustered about her vegetables, which flourished, as did all the earth, under her careless touch. He knew, as he chopped down in a weary frenzy, that the weeds would grow again in the hot sun-stench, that her vegetables--weeded or not--would grow fat and be fed to her boarders, and that her life, hers alone, would endure to something. As he looked at her, he felt the weariness and horror of time: all but her must die in a smothering Sargasso. Thus, flailing the clotted earth drunkenly, he would be brought to suddenly by her piercing scream from the high back porch, and realize that he had destroyed totally a row of young bladed corn.
"Why, what on earth, boy!" she fretted angrily, peering down at him through a shelving confusion of wash-tubs, limp drying stockings, empty milk-bottles, murky and unwashed, and rusty lard-buckets. "I'll vow!" she said, turning to Mr. Baskett, the Hattiesburg cotton merchant, who grinned down malarially through his scraggly mustaches, "what am I going to do with him? He's chopped down every stock of corn in the row."
"Yes," Mr. Baskett said, peering over, "and missed every weed. Boy," he added judicially, "you need two months on a farm."
The bread that I fetch will be eaten by strangers. I carry coal and split up wood for fires to warm them. Smoke. Fuimas fumus. All of our life goes up in smoke. There is no structure, no creation in it, not even the smoky structure of dreams. Come lower, angel; whisper in our ears. We are passing away in smoke and there is nothing to-day but weariness to pay for yesterday's toil. How may we save ourselves?
He was given the Niggertown route--the hardest and least profitable of all. He was paid two cents a copy for weekly deliveries, given ten per cent of his weekly collections, and ten cents for every new subscription. Thus, he was able to earn four or five dollars a week. His thin undeveloped body drank sleep with insatiable thirst, but it was now necessary for him to get up at half-past three in the morning with darkness and silence making an unreal humming in his drugged ears.
Strange aerial music came fluting out of darkness, or over his slow-wakening senses swept the great waves of symphonic orchestration. Fiend-voices, beautiful and sleep-loud, called down through darkness and light, developing the thread of ancient memory.
Staggering blindly in the whitewashed glare, his eyes, sleep-corded opened slowly as he was born anew, umbilically cut, from darkness.
Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness. Waken, phantom, O into us. Try, try, O try the way. Open the wall of light. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O lost. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O whisper-tongued laughter. Eugene! Eugene! Here, O here, Eugene. Here, Eugene. The way is here, Eugene. Have you forgotten? The leaf, the rock, the wall of light. Lift up the rock, Eugene, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door. Return, return.
A voice, sleep-strange and loud, forever far-near, spoke.
Eugene!
Spoke, ceased, continued without speaking, to speak. In him spoke. Where darkness, son, is light. Try, boy, the word you know remember. In th
Far-forested, a horn-note wound. Sea-forested, water-far, the grotted coral sea-far horn-note. The pillioned ladies witch-faced in bottle-green robes saddle-swinging. Merwomen unsealed and lovely in sea-floor colonnades. The hidden land below the rock. The flitting wood-girls growing into bark. Far-faint, as he wakened, they besought him with lessening whir. Then deeper song, fiend-throated, wind-shod. Brother, O brother! They shot down the brink of darkness, gone on the wind like bullets. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
He dressed and descended the stairs gently to the back porch. The cool air, charged with blue starlight, shocked his body into wakefulness, but as he walked townward up the silent streets, the strange ringing in his ears persisted. He listened like his own ghost, to his footsteps, heard from afar the winking flicker of the street-lamps, saw, from sea-sunk eyes, the town.
There sounded in his heart a solemn music. It filled the earth, the air, the universe; it was not loud, but it was omnipresent, and it spoke to him of death and darkness, and of the focal march of all who lived or had lived, converging on a plain. The world was filled with silent marching men: no word was spoken, but in the heart of each there was a common knowledge, the word that all men knew and had forgotten, the lost key opening the prison gates, the lane-end into heaven, and as the music soared and filled him, he cried: "I will remember. When I come to the place, I shall know."
Hot bands of light streamed murkily from the doors and windows of the office. From the press-room downstairs there was an ascending roar as the big press mounted to its capacity. As he entered the office and drank in the warm tides of steel and ink that soaked the air, he awoke suddenly, his light-drugged limbs solidifying with a quick shock, as would some aerial spirit, whose floating body corporealizes the instant it touches earth. The carriers, waiting in a boisterous line, filed up to the circulation manager's desk, depositing their collections, cold handfuls of greasy coin. Seated beneath a green-shaded light, he ran swiftly down their books, totalling up their figures and counting nickels, dimes, and pennies into little spooned trays of a drawer. Then he gave to each a scrawled order for his morning quota.
They ran downstairs, eager as whippets to be off, brandishing their slips at a sullen counter whose black fingers galloped accurately across the stiff ridges of a great sheaf. He allowed them two "extras." If the carrier was not scrupulous, he increased his number of spare copies by keeping on his book the names of a half-dozen discontinued subscribers. These surplus copies were always good for coffee and pie with the lunchman, or as tribute to a favorite policeman, fireman, or motorman.
In the press-pit Harry Tugman loafed under their stare comfortably, a fat trickle of cigarette smoke coiling from his nostrils. He glanced over the press with professional carelessness, displaying his powerful chest with its thick bush, which lay a dark blot under his sweat-wet under-shirt. An assistant pressman climbed nimbly among roaring pistons and cylinders, an oil-can and a bunch of waste in his hand. A broad river of white paper rushed constantly up from the cylinder and leaped into a mangling chaos of machinery whence it emerged a second later, cut, printed, folded and stacked, sliding along a board with a hundred others in a fattening sheaf.
Machine-magic! Why not men, like that? Doctor, surgeon, poet, priest--stacked, folded, printed.
Harry Tugman cast away his wet fragment of cigarette with a luxurious grimace. The carriers eyed him reverently. Once he had knocked a sub-pressman down for sitting in his chair. He was Boss. He got $55 a week. If he was not pleased he could get work at any time on the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Louisville Courier Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, the Knoxville Sentinel, the Norfolk Pilot. He could travel.
In a moment more they were out on the streets, hobbling along rapidly under the accustomed weight of the crammed canvas bags.
He was most desperately afraid of failure. He listened with constricted face to Eliza's admonition.
"Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Make them think you are somebody!"
He had little confidence in himself; he recoiled in advance from the humiliation of dismissal. He feared the sabre-cut of language, and before his own pride he drew back and was afraid.
For three mornings he accompanied the retiring carrier, gathering his mind to focal intensity while he tried to memorize each stereotyped movement of the delivery, tracing again and again the labyrinthine web of Niggertown, wreaking his plan out among the sprawled chaos of clay and slime, making incandescent those houses to which a paper was delivered, and forgetting the others. Years later, alone in darkness, when he had forgotten the twisted anarchy of that pattern, he still remembered a corner where he left his bag while he climbed a spur of hill, a bank down which he clambered to three rotting shacks, a high porched house into which accurately he shot his folded block of news.
The retiring carrier was a robust country boy of seventeen who had been given better employment at the paper office. His name was Jennings Ware. He was tough, good-humored, a little cynical, and he smoked a great many cigarettes. He was clothed in vitality and comfort. He taught his pupil when and where to expect the prying face of "Foxy," how to escape discovery under the lunchroom counter, and how to fold a paper and throw it with the speed and accuracy of a ball.
In the fresh pre-natal morning they began their route, walking down the steep hill of Valley Street into tropical sleep, past the stabled torpor of black sleepers, past all the illicit loves, the casual and innumerable adulteries of Niggertown. As the stiff block of paper thudded sharply on the flimsy porch of a shack, or smacked the loose boarding of a door, they were answered by a long sullen moan of discontent. They sniggered.
"Check this one off," said Jennings Ware, "if you can't collect next time. She owes for six weeks now."
"This one," he said, flipping a paper quietly on a door mat, "is good pay. They're good niggers. You'll get your money every Wednesday."
"There's a High Yaller in here," he said, hurling the paper against the door with a whizzing smack and smiling, as a young full-meated woman's yell of indignation answered, a thin devil's grin. "You can have that if you want it."
A wan smile of fear struggled across Eugene's mouth. Jennings Ware looked at him shrewdly, but did not press him. Jennings Ware was a good-hearted boy.
"She's a pretty good old girl," he said. "You've got a right to a few dead-heads. Take it out in trade."
They walked on down the dark unpaved street, folding papers rapidly during the intervals between delivery.
"It's a hell of a route," said Jennings Ware. "When it rains it's terrible. You'll go into mud up to your knees. And you can't collect from half the bastards." He hurled a paper viciously.
"But, oh man," he said, after a moment. "If you want Jelly Roll you've come to the right place. I ain't kidding you!"
"With--with niggers?" Eugene whispered, moistening his dry lips.
Jennings Ware turned his red satirical face on him.
"You don't see any Society Belles around here, do you?" he said.
"Are niggers good?" Eugene asked in a small dry voice.
"Boy!" The word blew out of Jennings Ware's mouth like an explosion. He was silent a moment.
"There ain't nothing better," he said.
At first, the canvas strap of the paper-bag bit cruelly across his slender shoulders. He strained against the galling weight that pulled him earthwards. The first weeks were like a warring nightmare: day after day he fought his way up to liberation. He knew all the sorrow of those who carry weight; he knew, morning by morning, the aerial ecstasy of release. As his load lightened with the progress of his route, his leaning shoulder rose with winged buoyancy, his straining limbs grew light: at the end of his labor his flesh, touched sensuously by fatigue, bounded lightly from the earth. He was Mercury chained by fardels, Ariel bent beneath a pack: freed, his wingshod feet trod brightness. He sailed in air. The rapier stars glinted upon h
Within a month a thick hummock of muscle hardened on his shoulder: he bent jubilantly into his work. He had now no fear of failure. His heart lifted like a proud crested cock. He had been dropped among others without favor, and he surpassed them. He was a lord of darkness; he exulted in the lonely sufficiency of his work. He walked into the sprawled chaos of the settlement, the rifleman of news for sleeping men. His fast hands blocked the crackling sheet, he swung his lean arm like a whip. He saw the pale stars drown, and ragged light break open on the hills. Alone, the only man alive, he began the day for men, as he walked by the shuttered windows and heard the long denned snore of the tropics. He walked amid this close thick sleep, hearing again the ghostly ring of his own feet, and the vast orchestral music of darkness. As the gray tide of morning surged westward he awoke.
And Eugene watched the slow fusion of the seasons; he saw the royal processional of the months; he saw the summer light eat like a river into dark; he saw dark triumph once again; and he saw the minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death.
In summer, full day had come before he finished: he walked home in a world of wakenings. The first cars were grouped on the Square as he passed, their new green paint giving them the pleasant appearance of fresh toys. The huge battered cans of the milkmen glinted cleanly in the sun. Light fell hopefuly upon the swarthy greasiness of George Chakales, nightman of the Athens Cafe. The Hellenic Dawn. And in Uneeda No. 1, upon the Square, Eugene sat, washing an egg-sandwich down with long swallows of pungent coffee, stooled in a friendly company of motormen, policemen, chauffeurs, plasterers, and masons. It was very pleasant, he felt, to complete one's work when all the world was beginning theirs. He went home under singing trees of birds.