Thomas Wolfe, page 4
And he screamed a sermon of profanity and woven invective:—
“Little did I reck,” he began, getting at once into the swing of preposterous rhetoric which he used half furiously, half comically, “little did I reck the day I first saw her eighteen bitter years ago, when she came wriggling around the corner at me like a snake on her belly—[a stock epithet which from repetition was now heart-balm to him]—little did I reck that—that—that it would come to this,” he finished lamely. He waited quietly, in the heavy silence, for some answer, knowing that she lay in her white-faced calm behind the door, and filled with the old choking fury because he knew she would not answer.
“Are you there? I say, are you there, woman?” he howled, barking his big knuckles in a furious bombardment.
There was nothing but the white living silence.
“Ah me! Ah me!” he sighed with strong self-pity, then burst into forced snuffling sobs, which furnished a running accompaniment to his denunciation. “Merciful God!” he wept, “it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s croo-el. What have I ever done that God should punish me like this in my old age?”
There was no answer.
“Cynthia! Cynthia!” he howled suddenly, invoking the memory of his first wife, the gaunt tubercular spinstress whose life, it was said, his conduct had done nothing to prolong, but whom he was fond of supplicating now, realizing the hurt, the anger he caused to Eliza by doing so. “Cynthia! O Cynthia! Look down upon me in my hour of need! Give me succour! Give me aid! Protect me against this fiend out of Hell!”
And he continued, weeping in heavy snuffling burlesque: “O-boo-hoo-hoo! Come down and save me, I beg of you, I entreat you, I implore you, or I perish.”
Silence answered.
“Ingratitude, more fierce than brutish beasts,” Gant resumed, getting off on another track, fruitful with mixed and mangled quotation. “You will be punished, as sure as there’s a just God in heaven. You will all be punished. Kick the old man, strike him, throw him out on the street: he’s no good any more. He’s no longer able to provide for the family—send him over the hill to the poorhouse. That’s where he belongs. Rattle his bones over the stones. Honor thy father that thy days may be long. Ah, Lord!
“‘Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through;
See what a rent the envious Casca made;
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed;
And, as he plucked his cursèd steel away,
Mark how the blood of Cæsar followed it—’”
“Jeemy,” said Mrs. Duncan at this moment to her husband, “ye’d better go over. He’s loose agin, an’ she’s wi’ chile.”
The Scotchman thrust back his chair, moved strongly out of the ordered ritual of his life, and the warm fragrance of new-baked bread.
At the gate, outside Gant’s, he found patient Jannadeau, fetched down by Ben. They spoke matter-of-factly, and hastened up the steps as they heard a crash upstairs, and a woman’s cry. Eliza, in only her night-dress, opened the door:
“Come quick!” she whispered. “Come quick!”
“By God, I’ll kill her,” Gant screamed, plunging down the stairs at greater peril to his own life than to any other. “I’ll kill her now, and put an end to my misery.”
He had a heavy poker in his hand. The two men seized him; the burly jeweller took the poker from his hand with quiet strength.
“He cut his head on the bed-rail, mama,” said Steve descending. It was true: Gant bled.
“Go for your Uncle Will, son. Quick!” He was off like a hound.
“I think he meant it that time,” she whispered.
Duncan shut the door against the gaping line of neighbors beyond the gate.
“Ye’ll be gettin’ a cheel like that, Mrs. Gant.”
“Keep him away from me! Keep him away!” she cried out strongly.
“Aye, I will that!” he answered in quiet Scotch.
She turned to go up the stairs, but on the second step she fell heavily to her knees. The country nurse, returning from the bathroom, in which she had locked herself, ran to her aid. She went up slowly then between the woman and Grover. Outside Ben dropped nimbly from the low eave on to the lily beds: Seth Tarkinton, clinging to fence wires, shouted greetings.
Gant went off docilely, somewhat dazed, between his two guardians: as his huge limbs sprawled brokenly in his rocker, they undressed him. Helen had already been busy in the kitchen for some time: she appeared now with boiling soup.
Gant’s dead eyes lit with recognition as he saw her.
“Why baby,” he roared, making a vast maudlin circle with his arms, “how are you?” She put the soup down; he swept her thin body crushingly against him, brushing her cheek and neck with his stiff-bristled mustache, breathing upon her the foul rank odor of rye whisky.
“Oh, he’s cut himself!” the little girl thought she was going to cry.
“Look what they did to me, baby,” he pointed to his wound and whimpered.
Will Pentland, true son of that clan who forgot one another never, and who saw one another only in times of death, pestilence, and terror, came in.
“Good evening, Mr. Pentland,” said Duncan.
“Jus’ tolable,” he said, with his bird-like nod and wink, taking in both men good-naturedly. He stood in front of the fire, paring meditatively at his blunt nails with a dull knife. It was his familiar gesture when in company: no one, he felt, could see what you thought about anything, if you pared your nails.
The sight of him drew Gant instantly from his lethargy: he remembered the dissolved partnership; the familiar attitude of Will Pentland, as he stood before the fire, evoked all the markings he so heartily loathed in the clan—its pert complacency, its incessant punning, its success.
“Mountain Grills!” he roared. “Mountain Grills! The lowest of the low! The vilest of the vile!”
“Mr. Gant! Mr. Gant!” pleaded Jannadeau.
“What’s the matter with you, W.O.?” asked Will Pentland, looking up innocently from his fingers. “Had something to eat that didn’t agree with you?”—he winked pertly at Duncan, and went back to his fingers.
“Your miserable old father,” howled Gant, “was horsewhipped on the public square for not paying his debts.” This was a purely imaginative insult, which had secured itself as truth, however, in Gant’s mind, as had so many other stock epithets, because it gave him heart-cockle satisfaction.
“Horsewhipped upon his public square, was he?” Will winked again, unable to resist the opening. “They kept it mighty quiet, didn’t they?” But behind the intense good-humored posture of his face, his eyes were hard. He pursed his lips meditatively as he worked upon his fingers.
“But I’ll tell you something about him, W. O.,” he continued after a moment, with calm but boding judiciousness. “He let his wife die a natural death in her own bed. He didn’t try to kill her.”
“No, by God!” Gant rejoined. “He let her starve to death. If the old woman ever got a square meal in her life she got it under my roof. There’s one thing sure: she could have gone to Hell and back, twice over, before she got it from old Tom Pentland, or any of his sons.”
Will Pentland closed his blunt knife and put it in his pocket.
“Old Major Pentland never did an honest day’s work in his life,” Gant yelled, as a happy afterthought.
“Come now, Mr. Gant!” said Duncan reproachfully.
“Hush! Hush!” whispered the girl fiercely, coming before him closely with the soup. She thrust a smoking ladle at his mouth, but he turned his head away to hurl another insult. She slapped him sharply across the mouth.
“You drink this!” she whispered. And grinning meekly as his eyes rested upon her, he began to swallow soup.
Will Pentland looked at the girl attentively for a moment, then glanced at Duncan and Jannadeau with a nod and wink. Without saying another word, he left the room, and mounted the stairs. His sister lay quietly extended on her back.
“How do you feel, Eliza?” The room was heavy with the rich odor of mellowing pears; an unaccustomed fire of pine sticks burned in the grate: he took up his place before it, and began to pare his nails.
“Nobody knows—nobody knows,” she began, bursting quickly into a rapid flow of tears, “what I’ve been through.” She wiped her eyes in a moment on a corner of the coverlid: her broad powerful nose, founded redly on her white face, was like flame.
“What you got good to eat?” he said, winking at her with a comic gluttony.
“There are some pears in there on the shelf, Will. I put them there last week to mellow.”
He went into the big closet and returned in a moment with a large yellow pear; he came back to the hearth and opened the smaller blade of his knife.
“I’ll vow, Will,” she said quietly after a moment. “I’ve had all I can put up with. I don’t know what’s got into him. But you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t stand much more of it. I know how to shift for myself,” she said, nodding her head smartly. He recognized the tone.
He almost forgot himself: “See her, Eliza,” he began, “if you were thinking of building somewhere, I”—but he recovered himself in time—“I’ll make you the best price you can get on the material,” he concluded. He thrust a slice of pear quickly into his mouth.
She pursed her mouth rapidly for some moments.
“No,” she said. “I’m not ready for that yet, Will. I’ll let you know.” The loose wood-coals crumbled on the hearth.
“I’ll let you know,” she said again. He clasped his knife and thrust it in a trousers pocket.
“Good night, Eliza,” he said. “I reckon Pett will be in to see you. I’ll tell her you’re all right.”
He went down the stairs quietly, and let himself out through the front door. As he descended the tall veranda steps, Duncan and Jannadeau came quietly down the yard from the sitting-room.
“How’s W. O.?” he asked.
“Ah, he’ll be all right now,” said Duncan cheerfully. “He’s fast asleep.”
“The sleep of the righteous?” asked Will Pentland with a wink.
The Swiss resented the implied jeer at his Titan. “It is a gread bitty,” began Jannadeau in a low guttural voice, “that Mr. Gant drinks. With his mind he could go far. When he’s sober a finer man doesn’t live.”
“When he’s sober?” said Will, winking at him in the dark. “What about when he’s asleep.”
“He’s all right the minute Helen gets hold of him,” Mr. Duncan remarked in his rich voice. “It’s wonderful what that little girl can do to him.”
“Ah, I tell you!” Jannadeau laughed with guttural pleasure. “That little girl knows her daddy in and out.”
The child sat in the big chair by the waning sitting-room fire: she read until the flames had died to coals—then quietly she shovelled ashes on them. Gant, fathoms deep in slumber, lay on the smooth leather sofa against the wall. She had wrapped him well in a blanket; now she put a pillow on a chair and placed his feet on it. He was rank with whisky stench; the window rattled as he snored.
Thus, drowned in oblivion, ran his night; he slept when the great pangs of birth began in Eliza at two o’clock; slept through all the patient pain and care of doctor, nurse, and wife.
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4
The baby was, to reverse an epigram, an unconscionable time in getting born; but when Gant finally awoke just after ten o’clock next morning, whimpering from tangled nerves, and the quivering shame of dim remembrance, he heard, as he drank the hot coffee Helen brought to him, a loud, long lungy cry above.
“Oh, my God, my God,” he groaned. And he pointed toward the sound. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
“I haven’t seen it yet, papa,” Helen answered. “They won’t let us in. But Doctor Cardiac came out and told us if we were good he might bring us a little boy.”
There was a terrific clatter on the tin roof, the scolding country voice of the nurse: Steve dropped like a cat from the porch roof to the lily bed outside Gant’s window.
“Steve, you damned scoundrel,” roared the manor-lord with a momentary return to health, “what in the name of Jesus are you doing?”
The boy was gone over the fence.
“I seen it! I seen it!” his voice came streaking back.
“I seen it too!” screamed Grover, racing through the room and out again in simple exultancy.
“If I catch you younguns on this roof agin,” yelled the country nurse aloft, “I’ll take your hide off you.”
Gant had been momentarily cheered when he heard that his latest heir was a male; but he walked the length of the room now, making endless plaint.
“Oh my God, my God! Did this have to be put upon me in my old age? Another mouth to feed! It’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s croo-el,” and he began to weep affectedly. Then, realizing presently that no one was near enough to be touched by his sorrow, he paused suddenly and precipitated himself toward the door, crossing the dining-room, and, going up the hall, making loud lament:
“Eliza! My wife! Oh, baby, say that you forgive me!” He went up the stairs, sobbing laboriously.
“Don’t you let him in here!” cried the object of this prayer sharply with quite remarkable energy.
“Tell him he can’t come in now,” said Cardiac, in his dry voice, to the nurse, staring intently at the scales. “We’ve nothing but milk to drink, anyway,” he added.
Gant was outside.
“Eliza, my wife! Be merciful, I beg of you. If I had known——”
“Yes,” said the country nurse opening the door rudely, “if the dog hadn’t stopped to lift his leg he’d a-caught the rabbit! You get away from here!” And she slammed it violently in his face.
He went downstairs with hang-dog head, but he grinned slyly as he thought of the nurse’s answer. He wet his big thumb quickly on his tongue.
“Merciful God!” he said, and grinned. Then he set up his caged lament.
“I think this will do,” said Cardiac, holding up something red, shiny, and puckered by its heels, and smacking it briskly on its rump, to liven it a bit.
The heir apparent had, as a matter of fact, made his debut completely equipped with all appurtenances, dependences, screws, cocks, faucets, hooks, eyes, nails, considered necessary for completeness of appearance, harmony of parts, and unity of effect in this most energetic, driving, and competitive world. He was the complete male in miniature, the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all ages, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of the budding Golden Age and, what’s more, Fortune and her Fairies, not content with well-nigh smothering him with these blessings of time and family, saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with glory.
“Well, what are you going to call it?” inquired Dr. Cardiac, referring thus, with shocking and medical coarseness, to this most royal imp.
Eliza was better tuned to cosmic vibrations. With a full, if inexact, sense of what portended, she gave to Luck’s Lad the title of Eugene, a name which, beautifully, means “well born,” but which, as any one will be able to testify, does not mean, has never meant, “well bred.”
This chosen incandescence, to whom a name had already been given, and from whose centre most of the events in this chronicle must be seen, was borne in, as we have said, upon the very spear-head of history. But perhaps, reader, you have already thought of that? You haven’t? Then let us refresh your historical memory.
By 1900, Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler had almost finished saying the things they were reported as saying, and that Eugene was destined to hear, twenty years later; most of the Great Victorians had died before the bombardment began; William McKinley was up for a second term, the crew of the Spanish navy had returned home in a tugboat.
Abroad, grim old Britain had sent her ultimatum to the South Africans in 1899; Lord Roberts (“Little Bobs,” as he was known affectionately to his men) was appointed commander-in-chief after several British reverses; the Transvaal Republic was annexed to Great Britain in September 1900, and formally annexed in the month of Eugene’s birth. There was a Peace Conference two years later.
Meanwhile, what was going on in Japan? I will tell you: the first parliament met in 1891, there was a war with China in 1894–95, Formosa was ceded in 1895. Moreover, Warren Hastings had been impeached and tried; Pope Sixtus the Fifth had come and gone; Dalmatia had been subdued by Tiberius; Belisarius had been blinded by Justinian; the wedding and funeral ceremonies of Wilhelmina Charlotte Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach and King George the Second had been solemnized, while those of Berengaria of Navarre to King Richard the First were hardly more than a distant memory; Diocletian, Charles the Fifth, and Victor Amadeus of Sardinia, had all abdicated their thrones; Henry James Pye, Poet Laureate of England, was with his fathers; Cassiodorus, Quintilian, Juvenal, Lucretius, Martial, and Albert the Bear of Brandenburg had answered the last great roll-call; the battles of Antietam, Smolensko, Drumclog, Inkerman, Marengo, Cawnpore, Killiecrankie, Sluys, Actium, Lepanto, Tewkesbury, Brandywine, Hohenlinden, Salamis, and the Wilderness had been fought both by land and by sea; Hippias had been expelled from Athens by the Alcæmonidæ and the Lacedæmonians; Simonides, Menander, Strabo, Moschus, and Pindar had closed their earthly accounts; the beatified Eusebius, Athanasius, and Chrysostom had gone to their celestial niches; Menkaura had built the Third Pyramid; Aspalta had led victorious armies; the remote Bermudas, Malta, and the Windward Isles had been colonized. In addition, the Spanish Armada had been defeated; President Abraham Lincoln assassinated, and the Halifax Fisheries Award had given $5,500,000 to Britain for twelve-year fishing privileges. Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.
Such was the state of history when Eugene entered the theatre of human events in 1900.
We would give willingly some more extended account of the world his life touched during the first few years, showing, in all its perspectives and implications, the meaning of life as seen from the floor, or from the crib, but these impressions are suppressed when they might be told, not through any fault of intelligence, but through lack of muscular control, the powers of articulation, and because of the recurring waves of loneliness, weariness, depression, aberration, and utter blankness which war against the order in a man’s mind until he is three or four years old.
