Thomas Wolfe, page 14
“You’ll remember the old man, then,” he would say. “Ah, Lord! You never miss the water till the well goes dry,” noting with keen pleasure the inward convulsion of the childish throat, the winking eyes, the tense constricted face.
“I’ll vow, Mr. Gant,” Eliza bridled, also pleased, “you oughtn’t to do that to the child.”
Or, he would speak sadly of “Little Jimmy,” a legless little boy whom he had often pointed out to Eugene, who lived across the river from Riverside, the amusement park, and around whom he had woven a pathetic fable of poverty and orphanage which was desperately real now to his son. When Eugene was six, Gant had promised him carelessly a pony for Christmas, without any intention of fulfilling his promise. As Christmas neared he had begun to speak touchingly of “Little Jimmy,” of the countless advantages of Eugene’s lot and, after a mighty struggle, the boy had renounced the pony, in a scrawled message to Elfland, in favor of the cripple. Eugene never forgot: even when he had reached manhood the deception of “Little Jimmy” returned to him, without rancor, without ugliness, only with pain for all the blind waste, the stupid perjury, the thoughtless dishonor, the crippling dull deceit.
Luke parroted all of his father’s sermons, but earnestly and witlessly, without Gant’s humor, without his chicanery, only with his sentimentality. He lived in a world of symbols, large, crude, and gaudily painted, labelled “Father,” “Mother,” “Home,” “Family,” “Generosity,” “Honor,” “Unselfishness,” made of sugar and molasses, and gummed glutinously with tear-shaped syrup.
“He’s one good boy,” the neighbors said.
“He’s the cutest thing,” said the ladies, who were charmed by his stutter, his wit, his good nature, his devout attendance on them.
“That boy’s a hustler. He’ll make his mark,” said all the men in town.
And it was as the smiling hustler that he wanted to be known. He read piously all the circulars the Curtis Publishing Company sent to its agents: he posed himself in the various descriptive attitudes that were supposed to promote business—the proper manner of “approach,” the most persuasive manner of drawing the journal from the bag, the animated description of its contents, in which he was supposed to be steeped as a result of his faithful reading—“the good salesman,” the circulars said, “should know in and out the article he is selling”—a knowledge that Luke avoided, but which he replaced with eloquent invention of his own.
The literal digestion of these instructions resulted in one of the most fantastical exhibitions of print-vending ever seen: fortified by his own unlimited cheek, and by the pious axioms of the exhortations that “the good salesman will never take no for his answer,” that he should “stick to his prospect” even if rebuffed, that he should “try to get the customer’s psychology,” the boy would fall into step with an unsuspecting pedestrian, open the broad sheets of The Post under the man’s nose, and in a torrential harangue, sown thickly with stuttering speech, buffoonery, and ingratiation, delivered so rapidly that the man could neither accept nor reject the magazine, hound him before a grinning public down the length of a street, backing him defensively into a wall, and taking from the victim’s eager fingers the five-cent coin that purchased his freedom.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” he would begin in a sonorous voice, dropping wide-leggedly into the “prospect’s” stride. “This week’s edition of The Saturday Evening Post, five cents, only a nickel, p-p-p-purchased weekly by t-t-two million readers. In this week’s issue you have eighty-six pages of f-f-fact and fiction, to say n-n-nothing of the advertisements. If you c-c-c-can’t read you’ll get m-m-more than your money’s worth out of the p-p-pictures. On page 13 this week, we have a very fine article, by I-I-I-Isaac F. Marcosson, the f-f-f-famous traveller and writer on politics; on page 29, you have a story by Irvin S. Cobb, the g-g-g-greatest living humorist, and a new story of the prize-ring by J-J-Jack London. If you b-b-bought it in a book, it’d c-c-cost you a d-d-dollar-and-a-half.”
He had, besides these chance victims, an extensive clientry among the townsfolk. Swinging briskly and cheerily down the street, full of greetings and glib repartee, he would accost each of the grinning men by a new title, in a rich stammering tenor voice:
“Colonel, how are you! Major—here you are, a week’s reading hot off the press. Captain, how’s the boy?”
“How are you, son?”
“Couldn’t be better, General—slick as a puppy’s belly!”
And they would roar with wheezing, red-faced, Southern laughter:
“By God, he’s a good ’un. Here, son, give me one of the damn things. I don’t want it, but I’ll buy it just to hear you talk.”
He was full of pungent and racy vulgarity: he had, more than any of the family, a Rabelaisian earthiness that surged in him with limitless energy, charging his tongue with unpremeditated comparisons, Gargantuan metaphors. Finally, he wet the bed every night in spite of Eliza’s fretting complaints: it was the final touch of his stuttering, whistling, cheerful, vital, and comic personality—he was Luke, the unique, Luke, the incomparable: he was, in spite of his garrulous and fidgeting nervousness, an intensely likable person—and he really had in him a bottomless well of affection. He wanted bounteous praise for his acts, but he had a deep, genuine kindliness and tenderness.
Every week, on Thursday, in Gant’s dusty little office, he would gather the grinning cluster of small boys who bought The Post from him, and harangue them before he sent them out on their duties:
“Well, have you thought of what you’re going to tell them yet? You know you can’t sit around on your little tails and expect them to look you up. Have you got a spiel worked out yet? How do you approach ’em, eh?” he said, turning fiercely to a stricken small boy. “Speak up, speak up, G-G-G-God-damn it—don’t s-s-stand there looking at me. Haw!” he said, laughing with sudden wild idiocy, “look at that face, won’t you?”
Gant surveyed the proceedings from afar with Jannadeau, grinning.
“All right, Christopher Columbus,” continued Luke, goodhumoredly, “What do you tell ’em, son?”
The boy cleared his throat timidly: “Mister, do you want to buy a copy of The Saturday Evening Post?”
“Oh, twah-twah,” said Luke, with mincing delicacy, as the boys sniggered, “sweet twah-twah! Do you expect them to buy with a spiel like that? My God, where are your brains? Sail into them. Tackle them, and don’t take no for an answer. Don’t ask them if they want to buy. Dive into them: ‘Here you are, sir—hot off the press.’ Jesus Christ,” he yelled, looking at the distant court-house clock with sudden fidget, “we should have been out an hour ago. Come on—don’t stand there: here are your papers. How many do you want, you little Kike?”—for he had several Jews in his employ: they worshipped him and he was very fond of them—he liked their warmth, richness, humor.
“Twenty.”
“Twenty!” he yelled. “You little loafer—you’ll t-t-take fifty. G-g-go on, you c-c-can sell ’em all this afternoon. By G-G-God, papa,” he said, pointing to the Jews, as Gant entered the office, “it l-l-looks like the Last S-S-Supper, don’t it? All right!” he said, smacking across the buttocks a small boy who had bent for his quota. “Don’t stick it in my face.” They shrieked with laughter. “Dive in to them now. Don’t let ’em get away from you.” And, laughing and excited, he would send them out into the streets.
To this kind of employment and this method of exploitation Eugene was now initiated. He loathed the work with a deadly, an inexplicable loathing. But something in him festered deeply at the idea of disposing of his wares by the process of making such a wretched little nuisance of himself that riddance was purchased only at the price of the magazine. He writhed with shame and humiliation, but he stuck desperately to his task, a queer curly-headed passionate little creature, who raced along by the side of an astonished captive, pouring out of his dark eager face a hurricane of language. And men, fascinated somehow by this strange eloquence from a little boy, bought.
Sometimes the heavy paunch-bellied Federal judge, sometimes an attorney, a banker would take him home, bidding him to perform for their wives, the members of their families, giving him twenty-five cents when he was done, and dismissing him. “What do you think of that!” they said.
His first and nearest sales made, in the town, he would make the long circle on the hills and in the woods along the outskirts, visiting the tubercular sanitariums, selling the magazines easily and quickly—“like hot cakes” as Luke had it—to doctors and nurses, to white unshaven, sensitive-faced Jews, to the wisp of a rake, spitting his rotten lungs into a cup, to good-looking young women who coughed slightly from time to time, but who smiled at him from their chairs, and let their warm soft hands touch his slightly as they paid him.
Once, at a hillside sanitarium, two young New York Jews had taken him to the room of one of them, closed the door behind him, and assaulted him, tumbling him on the bed, while one drew forth a pocket knife and informed him he was going to perform a caponizing operation on him. They were two young men bored with the hills, the town, the deadly regime of their treatment, and it occurred to him years later that they had concocted the business, days ahead, in their dull lives, living for the excitement and terror they would arouse in him. His response was more violent than they had bargained for: he went mad with fear, screamed, and fought insanely. They were weak as cats, he squirmed out of their grasp and off the bed cuffing and clawing tigerishly, striking and kicking them with blind and mounting rage. He was released by a nurse who unlocked the door and led him out into the sunlight, the two young consumptives, exhausted and frightened, remaining in their room. He was nauseated by fear and by the impacts of his fists on their leprous bodies.
But the little mound of nickels and dimes and quarters chinked pleasantly in his pockets: leg-weary and exhausted he would stand before a gleaming fountain burying his hot face in an iced drink. Sometimes conscience-tortured, he would steal an hour away from the weary streets and go into the library for a period of enchantment and oblivion: he was often discovered by his watchful and bustling brother, who drove him out to his labor again, taunting and spurring him into activity.
“Wake up! You’re not in Fairyland. Go after them.”
Eugene’s face was of no use to him as a mask: it was a dark pool in which every pebble of thought and feeling left its circle—his shame, his distaste for his employment was obvious, although he tried to conceal it: he was accused of false pride, told that he was “afraid of a little honest work,” and reminded of the rich benefits he had received from his big-hearted parents.
He turned desperately to Ben. Sometimes Ben, loping along the streets of the town, met him, hot, tired, dirty, wearing his loaded canvas bag, scowled fiercely at him, upbraided him for his unkempt appearance, and took him into a lunch-room for something to eat—rich foaming milk, fat steaming kidney-beans, thick apple-pie.
Both Ben and Eugene were by nature aristocrats. Eugene had just begun to feel his social status—or rather his lack of one; Ben had felt it for years. The feeling at bottom might have resolved itself simply into a desire for the companionship of elegant and lovely women: neither was able, nor would have dared, to confess this, and Eugene was unable to confess that he was susceptible to the social snub, or the pain of caste inferiority: any suggestion that the companionship of elegant people was preferable to the fellowship of a world of Tarkintons, and its blousy daughters, would have been hailed with heavy ridicule by the family, as another indication of false and undemocratic pride. He would have been called “Mr. Vanderbilt” or “the Prince of Wales.”
Ben, however, was not to be intimidated by their cant, or deceived by their twaddle. He saw them with bitter clarity, answered their pretensions with soft mocking laughter, and a brief nod upwards and to the side to the companion to whom he communicated all his contemptuous observation—his dark satiric angel: “Oh, my God! Listen to that, won’t you?”
There was behind his scowling quiet eyes, something strange and fierce and unequivocal that frightened them: besides, he had secured for himself the kind of freedom they valued most—the economic freedom—and he spoke as he felt, answering their virtuous reproof with fierce quiet scorn.
One day, he stood, smelling of nicotine, before the fire, scowling darkly at Eugene who, grubby and tousled, had slung his heavy bag over his shoulder, and was preparing to depart.
“Come here, you little bum,” he said. “When did you wash your hands last?” Scowling fiercely, he made a sudden motion as if to strike the boy, but he finished instead by re-tying, with his hard delicate hands, his tie.
“In God’s name, mama,” he burst out irritably to Eliza, “haven’t you got a clean shirt to give him? You know, he ought to have one every month or so.”
“What do you mean? What do you mean?” said Eliza with comic rapidity, looking up from a basket of socks she was darning. “I gave him that one last Tuesday.”
“You little thug!” he growled, looking at Eugene with a fierce pain in his eyes. “Mama, for heaven’s sake, why don’t you send him to the barber’s and get that lousy hair cut off? By God, I’ll pay for it, if you don’t want to spend the money.”
She pursed her lips angrily and continued to darn. Eugene looked at him dumbly, gratefully. After Eugene had gone, the quiet one smoked moodily for a time, drawing the fragrant smoke in long gulps down into his thin lungs. Eliza, recollective and hurt at what had been said, worked on.
“What are you trying to do with your kid, mama?” he said in a hard quiet voice, after a silence. “Do you want to make a tramp out of him?”
“What do you mean? What do you mean?”
“Do you think it’s right to send him out on the streets with every little thug in town?”
“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” she said impatiently. “It’s no disgrace for a boy to do a little honest work, and no one thinks so.”
“Oh, my God,” he said to the dark angel. “Listen to that!”
Eliza pursed her lips without speaking for a time.
“Pride goeth before a fall,” she said after a moment. “Pride goeth before a fall.”
“I can’t see that that makes much difference to us,” said he. “We’ve got no place to fall to.”
“I consider myself as good as any one,” she said, with dignity. “I hold my head up with any one I meet.”
“Oh, my God,” Ben said to his angel. “You don’t meet any one. I don’t notice any of your fine brothers or their wives coming to see you.”
This was true, and it hurt. She pursed her lips.
“No mama,” he continued after a moment’s pause, “you and the Old Man have never given a damn what we’ve done so long as you thought you might save a nickel by it.”
“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” she answered. “You talk as if you thought we were Rich Folks. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Oh, my God,” he laughed bitterly. “You and the Old Man like to make out you’re paupers, but you’ve a sock full of money.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said angrily.
“No,” he said, with his frequent negative beginning, after a moody silence, “there are people in this town without a fifth what we’ve got who get twice as much out of it. The rest of us have never had anything, but I don’t want to see the kid made into a little tramp.”
There was a long silence. She darned bitterly, pursing her lips frequently, hovering between quiet and tears.
“I never thought,” she began after a long pause, her mouth tremulous with a bitter hurt smile, “that I should live to hear such talk from a son of mine. You had better watch out,” she hinted darkly, “a day of reckoning cometh. As sure as you live, as sure as you live. You will be repaid threefold for your unnatural,” her voice sank to a tearful whisper, “your unnatural conduct!” She wept easily.
“Oh, my God,” answered Ben, turning his lean, gray, bitter, bumpy face up toward his listening angel. “Listen to that, won’t you?”
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11
Eliza saw Altamont not as so many hills, buildings, people: she saw it in the pattern of a gigantic blueprint. She knew the history of every piece of valuable property—who bought it, who sold it, who owned it in 1893, and what it was now worth. She watched the tides of traffic cannily; she knew by what corners the largest number of people passed in a day or an hour; she was sensitive to every growing-pain of the young town, gauging from year to year its growth in any direction, and deducing the probable direction of its future expansion. She judged distances critically, saw at once where the beaten route to an important centre was stupidly circuitous, and looking in a straight line through houses and lots, she said:
“There’ll be a street through here some day.”
Her vision of land and population was clear, crude, focal—there was nothing technical about it: it was extraordinary for its direct intensity. Her instinct was to buy cheaply where people would come; to keep out of pockets and culs de sac, to buy on a street that moved toward a centre, and that could be given extension.
Thus, she began to think of Dixieland. It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middleclass street of small homes and boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young deep-bodied maples: there was a sloping depth of one hundred and ninety feet, a frontage of one hundred and twenty. And Eliza, looking toward the town, said: “They’ll put a street behind there some day.”
In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of Dixieland: its back end was built high off the ground on wet columns of rotting brick. Its big rooms were heated by a small furnace which sent up, when charged with fire, a hot dry enervation to the rooms of the first floor, and a gaseous but chill radiation to those upstairs.
