Thomas Wolfe, page 63
They were silent for a moment, looking.
“You’ve d-d-done a fine job,” said the sailor. “I’ve got to hand it to you. What do you say, ’Gene?”
“Yes,” said Eugene, in a small choking voice. “Yes.”
“He’s a b-b-b-bit p-p-p-pale, don’t you think?” the sailor stammered, barely conscious of what he was saying.
“Just a moment!” said Horse Hines quickly, lifting a finger. Briskly he took a stick of rouge from his pocket, stepped forward, and deftly, swiftly, sketched upon the dead gray cheeks a ghastly rose-hued mockery of life and health.
“There!” he said, with deep satisfaction; and, rouge-stick in hand, head critically cocked, like a painter before his canvas, he stepped back into the terrible staring prison of their horror.
“There are artists, boys, in every profession,” Horse Hines continued in a moment, with quiet pride, “and though I do say it myself, Luke, I’m proud of my work on this job. Look at him!” he exclaimed with sudden energy, and a bit of color in his gray face. “Did you ever see anything more natural in your life?”
Eugene turned upon the man a grim and purple stare, noting with pity, with a sort of tenderness, as the dogs of laughter tugged at his straining throat the earnestness and pride in the long horse-face.
“Look at it!” said Horse Hines again in slow wonder. “I’ll never beat that again! Not if I live to be a million! That’s art, boys!”
A slow strangling gurgle escaped from Eugene’s screwed lips. The sailor looked quickly at him, with a crazy suppressed smile.
“What’s the matter?” he said warningly. “Don’t, fool!” His grin broke loose.
Eugene staggered across the floor and collapsed upon a chair, roaring with laughter while his long arms flapped helplessly at his sides.
“Scuse!” he gasped. “Don’t mean to—A-r-rt! Yes! Yes! That’s it!” he screamed, and he beat his knuckles in a crazy tattoo upon the polished floor. He slid gently off the chair, slowly unbuttoning his vest, and with a languid hand loosening his necktie. A faint gurgle came from his weary throat, his head lolled around on the floor languidly, tears coursed down his swollen features.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you c-c-c-crazy?” said the sailor, all a-grin.
Horse Hines bent sympathetically and assisted the boy to his feet.
“It’s the strain,” he said knowingly to the sailor. “The pore fellow has become hysterical.”
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37
So, to Ben dead was given more care, more time, more money than had ever been given to Ben living. His burial was a final gesture of irony and futility: an effort to compensate carrion death for the unpaid wage of life—love and mercy. He had a grand funeral. All the Pentlands sent wreaths, and came with their separate clans, bringing along with their hastily assumed funeral manners a smell of recent business. Will Pentland talked with the men about politics, the war, and trade conditions, paring his nails thoughtfully, pursing his lips and nodding in his curiously reflective way, and occasionally punning with a birdy wink. His pleased self-laughter was mixed with Henry’s loud guffaw. Pett, older, kinder, gentler than Eugene had ever seen her, moved about with a rustling of gray silk, and a relaxed bitterness. And Jim was there, with his wife, whose name Eugene forgot, and his four bright hefty daughters, whose names he confused, but who had all been to college and done well, and his son, who had been to a Presbyterian college, and had been expelled for advocating free love and socialism while editor of the college paper. Now he played the violin, and loved music, and helped his father with the business: he was an effeminate and mincing young man, but of the breed. And there was Thaddeus Pentland, Will’s bookkeeper, the youngest and poorest of the three. He was a man past fifty, with a pleasant red face, brown mustaches, and a gentle placid manner. He was full of puns and pleased good-nature, save when he quoted from Karl Marx and Eugene Debs. He was a Socialist, and had once received eight votes for Congress. He was there with his garrulous wife (whom Helen called Jibber-Jibber) and his two daughters, languid good-looking blondes of twenty and twenty-four.
There they were, in all their glory—that strange rich clan, with its fantastic mixture of success and impracticality, its hard monied sense, its visionary fanaticism. There they were, in their astonishing contradictions: the business man who had no business method, and yet had made his million dollars; the frantic antagonist of Capital who had given the loyal service of a lifetime to the thing he denounced; the wastrel son, with the bull vitality of the athlete, a great laugh, animal charm—no more; the musician son, a college rebel, intelligent, fanatic, with a good head for figures; insane miserliness for oneself, lavish expenditure for one’s children.
There they were, each with the familiar marking of the clan—broad nose, full lips, deep flat cheeks, deliberate pursed mouths, flat drawling voices, flat complacent laughter. There they were, with their enormous vitality, their tainted blood, their meaty health, their sanity, their insanity, their humor, their superstition, their meanness, their generosity, their fanatic idealism, their unyielding materialism. There they were, smelling of the earth and Parnassus—that strange clan which met only at weddings or funerals, but which was forever true to itself, indissoluble and forever apart, with its melancholia, its madness, its mirth: more enduring than life, more strong than death.
And as Eugene looked, he felt again the nightmare horror of destiny: he was of them—there was no escape. Their lust, their weakness, their sensuality, their fanaticism, their strength, their rich taint, were rooted in the marrow of his bones.
But Ben, with the thin gray face (he thought) was not a part of them. Their mark was nowhere on him.
And among them, sick and old, leaning upon his cane, moved Gant, the alien, the stranger. He was lost and sorrowful, but sometimes, with a flash of his old rhetoric, he spoke of his grief and the death of his son.
The women filled the house with their moaning. Eliza wept almost constantly; Helen by fits, in loose hysterical collapse. And all the other women wept with gusto, comforting Eliza and her daughter, falling into one another’s arms, wailing with keen hunger. And the men stood sadly about, dressed in their good clothes, wondering when it would be over. Ben lay in the parlor, bedded in his expensive coffin. The room was heavy with the incense of the funeral flowers.
Presently the Scotch minister arrived: his decent soul lay above all the loud posturings of grief like a bolt of hard clean wool. He began the service for the dead in a dry nasal voice, remote, monotonous, cold, and passionate.
Then, marshalled by Horse Hines, the pallbearers, young men from the paper and the town, who had known the dead man best, moved slowly out, gripping the coffin-handles with their nicotined fingers. In proper sequence, the mourners followed, lengthening out in closed victorias that exhaled their funeral scent of stale air and old leather.
To Eugene came again the old ghoul fantasy of a corpse and cold pork, the smell of the dead and hamburger steak—the glozed corruption of Christian burial, the obscene pomps, the perfumed carrion. Slightly nauseated, he took his seat with Eliza in the carriage, and tried to think of supper.
The procession moved off briskly to the smooth trotting pull of the velvet rumps. The mourning women peered out of the closed carriages at the gaping town. They wept behind their heavy veils, and looked to see if the town was watching. Behind the world’s great mask of grief, the eyes of the mourners shone through with a terrible and indecent hunger, an unnameable lust.
It was raw October weather—gray and wet. The service had been short, as a precaution against the pestilence which was everywhere. The funeral entered the cemetery. It was a pleasant place, on a hill. There was a good view of the town. As the hearse drove up, two men who had been digging the grave, moved off. The women moaned loudly when they saw the raw open ditch.
Slowly the coffin was lowered onto the bands that crossed the grave.
Again Eugene heard the nasal drone of the Presbyterian minister. The boy’s mind fumbled at little things. Horse Hines bent ceremoniously, with a starched crackle of shirt, to throw his handful of dirt into the grave. “Ashes to ashes—” He reeled and would have fallen in if Gilbert Gant had not held him. He had been drinking. “I am the resurrection and the life—” Helen wept constantly, harshly and bitterly. “He that believeth in me—” The sobs of the women rose to sharp screams as the coffin slid down upon the bands into the earth.
Then the mourners got back into their carriages and were driven briskly away. There was a fast indecent hurry about their escape. The long barbarism of burial was at an end. As they drove away, Eugene peered back through the little glass in the carriage. The two grave-diggers were already returning to their work. He watched until the first shovel of dirt had been thrown into the grave. He saw the raw new graves, the sere long grasses, noted how quickly the mourning wreaths had wilted. Then he looked at the wet gray sky. He hoped it would not rain that night.
It was over. The carriages split away from the procession. The men dropped off in the town at the newspaper office, the pharmacy, the cigar-store. The women went home. No more. No more.
Night came, the bare swept streets, the gaunt winds. Helen lay before a fire in Hugh Barton’s house. She had a bottle of chloroform liniment in her hand. She brooded morbidly into the fire, reliving the death a hundred times, weeping bitterly and becoming calm again.
“When I think of it, I hate her. I shall never forget. And did you hear her? Did you? Already she’s begun to pretend how much he loved her. But you can’t fool me! I know! He wouldn’t have her around. You saw that, didn’t you? He kept calling for me. I was the only one he’d let come near him. You know that, don’t you?”
“You’re the one who always has to be the goat,” said Hugh Barton sourly. “I’m getting tired of it. That’s what has worn you out. If they don’t leave you alone, I’m going to take you away from here.”
Then he went back to his charts and pamphlets, frowning importantly over a cigar, and scrawling figures on an old envelope with a stub of pencil gripped between his fingers.
She has him trained, too, Eugene thought.
Then, hearing the sharp whine of the wind, she wept again.
“Poor old Ben,” she said. “I can’t bear to think of him out there to-night.”
She was silent for a moment, staring at the fire.
“After this, I’m through,” she said. “They can get along for themselves. Hugh and I have a right to our own lives. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” said Eugene. I’m merely the chorus, he thought.
“Papa’s not going to die,” she went on. “I’ve nursed him like a slave for six years, and he’ll be here when I’m gone. Every one was expecting papa to die, but it was Ben who went. You never can tell. After this, I’m through.”
Her voice had a note of exasperation in it. They all felt the grim trickery of Death, which had come in by the cellar while they waited at the window.
“Papa has no right to expect it of me!” she burst out resentfully. “He’s had his life. He’s an old man. We have a right to ours as well as any one. Good heavens! Can’t they realize that! I’m married to Hugh Barton! I’m his wife!”
Are you? thought Eugene. Are you?
But Eliza sat before the fire at Dixieland with hands folded, reliving a past of tenderness and love that never had been. And as the wind howled in the bleak street, and Eliza wove a thousand fables of that lost and bitter spirit, the bright and stricken thing in the boy twisted about in horror, looking for escape from the house of death. No more! No more! (it said). You are alone now. You are lost. Go find yourself, lost boy, beyond the hills.
This little bright and stricken thing stood up on Eugene’s heart and talked into his mouth.
O but I can’t go now, said Eugene to it. (Why not? it whispered.) Because her face is so white, and her forehead is so broad and high, with the black hair drawn back from it, and when she sat there at the bed she looked like a little child. I can’t go now and leave her here alone. (She is alone, it said, and so are you.) And when she purses up her mouth and stares, so grave and thoughtful, she is like a little child. (You are alone now, it said. You must escape, or you will die.) It is all like death: she fed me at her breast, I slept in the same bed with her, she took me on her trips. All of that is over now, and each time it was like a death. (And like a life, it said to him. Each time that you die, you will be born again. And you will die a hundred times before you become a man.) I can’t! I can’t! Not now—later, more slowly. (No. Now, it said.) I am afraid. I have nowhere to go. (You must find the place, it said.) I am lost. (You must hunt for yourself, it said.) I am alone. Where are you? (You must find me, it said.)
Then, as the bright thing twisted about in him, Eugene heard the whine of the bleak wind about the house that he must leave, and the voice of Eliza calling up from the past the beautiful lost things that never happened.
“—and I said, ‘Why, what on earth, boy, you want to dress up warm around your neck or you’ll catch your death of cold.’”
Eugene caught at his throat and plunged for the door.
“Here, boy! Where are you going?” said Eliza, looking up quickly.
“I’ve got to go,” he said in a choking voice. “I’ve got to get away from here.”
Then he saw the fear in her eyes, and the grave troubled child’s stare. He rushed to where she sat and grasped her hand. She held him tightly and laid her face against his arm.
“Don’t go yet,” she said. “You’ve all your life ahead of you. Stay with me just a day or two.”
“Yes, mama,” he said, falling to his knees. “Yes, mama.” He hugged her to him frantically. “Yes, mama. God bless you, mama. It’s all right, mama. It’s all right.”
Eliza wept bitterly.
“I’m an old woman,” she said, “and one by one I’ve lost you all. He’s dead now, and I never got to know him. O son, don’t leave me yet. You’re the only one that’s left: you were my baby. Don’t go! Don’t go.” She laid her white face against his sleeve.
It is not hard to go (he thought). But when can we forget?
It was October and the leaves were quaking. Dusk was beginning. The sun had gone, the western ranges faded in chill purple mist, but the western sky still burned with ragged bands of orange. It was October.
Eugene walked swiftly along the sinuous paved curves of Rutledge Road. There was a smell of fog and supper in the air: a warm moist blur at window-panes, and the pungent sizzle of cookery. There were mist-far voices, and a smell of burning leaves, and a warm yellow blur of lights.
He turned into an unpaved road by the big wooden sanitarium. He heard the rich kitchen laughter of the negroes, the larded sizzle of food, the dry veranda coughing of the lungers.
He walked briskly along the lumpy road, with a dry scuffling of leaves. The air was a chill dusky pearl: above him a few pale stars were out. The town and the house were behind him. There was a singing in the great hill-pines.
Two women came down the road and passed him. He saw that they were country women. They were dressed rustily in black, and one of them was weeping. He thought of the men who had been laid in the earth that day, and of all the women who wept. Will they come again? he wondered.
When he came to the gate of the cemetery he found it open. He went in quickly and walked swiftly up the winding road that curved around the crest of the hill. The grasses were dry and sere; a wilted wreath of laurel lay upon a grave. As he approached the family plot, his pulse quickened a little. Some one was moving slowly, deliberately, in among the grave-stones. But as he came up he saw that it was Mrs. Pert.
“Good-evening, Mrs. Pert,” said Eugene.
“Who is it?” she asked, peering murkily. She came to him with her grave unsteady step.
“It’s ’Gene,” he said.
“Oh, is it Old ’Gene?” she said. “How are you, ’Gene?”
“Pretty well,” he said. He stood awkwardly, chilled, not knowing how to continue. It was getting dark. There were long lonely preludes to winter in the splendid pines, and a whistling of wind in the long grasses. Below them, in the gulch, night had come. There was a negro settlement there—Stumptown, it was called. The rich voices of Africa wailed up to them their jungle dirge.
But in the distance, away on their level and above, on other hills, they saw the town. Slowly, in twinkling nests, the lights of the town went up, and there were frost-far voices, and music, and the laughter of a girl.
“This is a nice place,” said Eugene. “You get a nice view of the town from here.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pert. “And Old Ben’s got the nicest place of all. You get a better view right here than anywhere else. I’ve been here before in the daytime.” In a moment she went on. “Old Ben will turn into lovely flowers. Roses, I think.”
“No,” said Eugene, “dandelions—and big flowers with a lot of thorns on them.”
She stood looking about fuzzily for a moment, with the blurred gentle smile on her lips.
“It is getting dark, Mrs. Pert,” said Eugene hesitantly. “Are you out here alone?”
“Alone? I’ve got Old ’Gene and Old Ben here, haven’t I?” she said.
“Maybe we’d better go back, Mrs. Pert?” he said. “It’s going to turn cold to-night. I’ll go with you.”
“Fatty can go by herself,” she said with dignity. “Don’t worry, ’Gene. I’ll leave you alone.”
“That’s all right,” said Eugene, confused. “We both came for the same reason, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pert. “Who’ll be coming here this time next year, I wonder? Will Old ’Gene come back then?”
“No,” said Eugene. “No, Mrs. Pert. I shall never come here again.”
“Nor I, ’Gene,” she said. “When do you go back to school?”
“To-morrow,” he said.
“Then Fatty will have to say good-bye,” she said reproachfully. “I’m going away too.”
“Where are you going?” he asked, surprised.
