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Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
Thomas Wolfe
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
A Story of the Buried Life
Thomas Wolfe
"Then, as all my soules bee,
Emparadis'd in you, (in whom alone
I understand, and grow and see,)
The rafters of my body, bone
Being still with you, the Muscle, Sinew, and Veine,
Which tile this house, will come againe."
TO THE READER
This is a first book, and in it the author has written of
experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of
the fabric of his life.
If any reader, therefore, should say that
the book is "autobiographical" the writer has no answer for him: it
seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical--
that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than "Gulliver's
Travels" cannot easily be imagined.
This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom
the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages.
To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand
already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of
spirit, and that the writer's main concern was to give fulness,
life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was
Now that it is to be published, he would insist that
this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man's portrait
But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives--all that is
ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it.
If the writer has
used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all
men must, what none can keep from using.
Fiction is not fact, but
fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged
and charged with purpose.
Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would
turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a
novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single
figure in his novel.
This is not the whole method but the writer
believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written
from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.
LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL
. . . a stone, a leaf, of a stone, a leaf, a door.
And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile.
In her dark womb we did not
know our mother' from the prison of her flesh have we come
into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother?
Which of us has looked into his
father's heart?
Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this
most weary unbright cinder, lost!
Remembering speechlessly we seek
the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a
stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
A destiny that leads the English to the Dut
but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into
the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the
cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark
miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into
nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four
thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin
of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by
a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse went unhung.
moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.
The minute-winning
days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window
on all time.
This is a moment:
An Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he later changed to Gant
(a concession probably to Yankee phonetics), having come to
Baltimore from Bristol in 1837 on a sailing vessel, soon let the
profits of a public house which he had purchased roll down his
improvident gullet.
He wandered westward into Pennsylvania, eking
out a dangerous living by matching fighting cocks against the
champions of country barnyards, and often escaping after a night
spent in a village jail, with his champion dead on the field of
battle, without the clink of a coin in his pocket, and sometimes
with the print of a farmer's big knuckles on his reckless face.
But he always escaped, and coming at length among the Dutch at
harvest time he was so touched by the plenty of their land that he
cast out his anchors there.
Within a year he married a rugged
young widow with a tidy farm who like all the other Dutch had
been charmed by his air of travel, and his grandiose speech,
particularly when he did Hamlet in the manner of the great Edmund
Every one said he should have been an actor.
The Englishman begot children--a daughter and four sons--lived
easily and carelessly, and bore patiently the weight of his wife's
harsh but honest tongue.
The years passed, his bright somewhat
staring eyes grew dull and bagged, the tall Englishman walked with
a gouty shuffle: one morning when she came to nag him out of sleep
she found him dead of an apoplexy.
He left five children, a
mortgage and--in his strange dark eyes which now stared bright and
open--something that had not died: a passionate and obscure hunger
for voyages.
So, with this legacy, we leave this Englishman and are concerned
hereafter with the heir to whom he bequeathed it, his second son, a
boy named Oliver.
How this boy stood by the roadside near his
mother's farm, and saw the dusty Rebels march past on their way to
Gettysburg, how his cold eyes darkened when he heard the great name
of Virginia, and how the year the war had ended, when he was still
fifteen, he had walked along a street in Baltimore, and seen within
a little shop smooth granite slabs of death, carved lambs and
cherubim, and an angel poised upon cold phthisic feet, with a smile
of soft stone idiocy--this is a longer tale.
But I know that his
cold and shallow eyes had darkened with the obscure and passionate
hunger that had lived in a dead man's eyes, and that had led from
Fenchurch Street past Philadelphia.
As the boy looked at the big
angel with the carved stipe of lilystalk, a cold and nameless
excitement possessed him.
The long fingers of his big hands
He felt that he wanted, more than anything in the world,
to carve delicately with a chisel.
He wanted to wreak something
dark and unspeakable in him into cold stone.
He wanted to carve an
angel's head.
Oliver entered the shop and asked a big bearded man with a wooden
mallet for a job.
He became the stone cutter's apprentice.
worked in that dusty yard five years.
He became a stone cutter.
When his apprenticeship was over he had become a man.
He never found it.
He never learned to carve an angel's head.
dove, the lamb, the smooth joined marble hands of death, and
letters fair and fine--but not the angel.
And of all the years of
waste and loss--the riotous years in Baltimore, of work and savage
drunkenness, and the theatre of Booth and Salvini, which had a
disastrous effect upon the stone cutter, who memorized each accent
of the noble rant, and strode muttering through the streets, with
rapid gestures of the enormous talking hands--these are blind steps
and gropings of our exile, the painting of our hunger as,
remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the
lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door.
He never found it, and he reeled down across the continent into the
Reconstruction South--a strange wild form of six feet four with
cold uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling tide of
rhetoric, a preposterous and comic invective, as formalized as
classical epithet, which he used seriously, but with a faint uneasy
grin around the corners of his thin wailing mouth.
He set up business in Sydney, the little capital city of one of the
middle Southern states, lived soberly and industriously under the
attentive eye of a folk still raw with defeat and hostility, and
finally, his good name founded and admission won, he married a
gaunt tubercular spinstress, ten years his elder, but with a nest
egg and an unshakable will to matrimony.
Within eighteen months he
was a howling maniac again, his little business went smash while
his foot stayed on the polished rail, and Cynthia, his wife--whose
life, the natives said, he had not helped to prolong--died suddenly
one night after a hemorrhage.
So, all was gone again--Cynthia, the shop, the hard-bought praise
of soberness, the angel's head--he walked through the streets at
dark, yelling his pentameter curse at Rebel ways, and all their
but sick with fear and loss and penitence, he wilted
under the town's reproving stare, becoming convinced, as the flesh
wasted on his own gaunt frame, that Cynthia's scourge was doing
vengeance now on him.
He was only past thirty, but he looked much older.
His face was
the waxen blade of his nose looked like a beak.
He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down mournfully.
His tremendous bouts of drinking had wrecked his health.
thin as a rail and had a cough.
He thought of Cynthia now, in the
lonely and hostile town, and he became afraid.
He thought he had
tuberculosis and that he was going to die.
So, alone and lost again, having found neither order nor
establishment in the world, and with the earth cut away from his
feet, Oliver resumed his aimless drift along the continent.
turned westward toward the great fortress of the hills, knowing
that behind them his evil fame would not be known, and hoping that
he might find in them isolation, a new life, and recovered health.
The eyes of the gaunt spectre darkened again, as they had in his
All day, under a wet gray sky of October, Oliver rode westward
across the mighty state.
As he stared mournfully out the window at
the great raw land so sparsely tilled by the futile and occasional
little farms, which seemed to have made only little grubbing
patches in the wilderness, his heart went cold and leaden in him.
He thought of the great barns of Pennsylvania, the ripe bending of
golden grain, the plenty, the order, the clean thrift of the
And he thought of how he had set out to get order and
position for himself, and of the rioting confusion of his life, the
blot and blur of years, and the red waste of his youth.
By God! he thought.
I'm getting old!
The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped through his brain.
Suddenly, he saw that his life had been channelled by a series of
accidents: a mad Rebel singing of Armageddon, the sound of a bugle
on the road, the mule-hoofs of the army, the silly white face of an
angel in a dusty shop, a slut's pert wiggle of her hams as she
passed by.
He had reeled out of warmth and plenty into this barren
land: as he stared out the window and saw the fallow unworked
earth, the great raw lift of the Piedmont, the muddy red clay
roads, and the slattern people gaping at the stations--a lean
farmer gangling above his reins, a dawdling negro, a gap-toothed
yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby--the strangeness of
destiny stabbed him with fear.
How came he here from the clean
Dutch thrift of his youth into this vast lost earth of rickets?
The train rattled on over the reeking earth.
Rain fell steadily.
A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach and emptied a
scuttle of coal into the big stove at the end.
High empty laughter
shook a group of yokels sprawled on two turned seats.
tolled mournfully above the clacking wheels.
There was a droning
interminable wait at a junction-town near the foot-hills.
train moved on again across the vast rolling earth.
Dusk came.
The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent.
smoky lights went up in the hillside shacks.
The train crawled
dizzily across high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of water.
Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of smoke, toy cabins stuck to
bank and gulch and hillside.
The train toiled sinuously up among
gouged red cuts with slow labor.
As darkness came, Oliver
descended at the little town of Old Stockade where the rails ended.
The last great wall of the hills lay stark above him.
As he left
the dreary little station and stared into the greasy lamplight of a
country store, Oliver felt that he was crawling, like a great
beast, into the circle of those enormous hills to die.
The next morning he resumed his journey by coach.
His destination
was the little town of Altamont, twenty-four miles away beyond the
rim of the great outer wall of the hills.
As the horses strained
slowly up the mountain road Oliver's spirit lifted a little.
was a gray-golden day in late October, bright and windy.
a sharp bite and sparkle in the mountain air: the range soared
above him, close, immense, clean, and barren.
The trees rose gaunt
and stark: they were almost leafless.
The sky was full of windy
a thick blade of mist washed slowly around the
rampart of a mountain.
Below him a mountain stream foamed down its rocky bed, and he could
see little dots of men laying the track that would coil across the
hill toward Altamont.
Then the sweating team lipped the gulch of
the mountain, and, among soaring and lordly ranges that melted away
in purple mist, they began the slow descent toward the high plateau
on which the town of Altamont was built.
In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed in their
enormous cup, he found sprawled out on its hundred hills and
hollows a town of four thousand people.
There were new lands.
His heart lifted.
This town of Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary
It had been a convenient stopping-off place for cattledrovers
and farmers in their swing eastward from Tennessee into South
And, for several decades before the Civil War, it had
enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from Charleston
and the plantations of the hot South.
When Oliver first came to it
it had begun to get some reputation not only as a summer resort,
but as a sanitarium for tuberculars.
Several rich men from the
North had established hunting lodges in the hills, and one of them
had bought huge areas of mountain land and, with an army of
imported architects, carpenters and masons, was planning the
greatest country estate in America--something in limestone, with
pitched slate roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three rooms.
was modelled on the chateau at Blois.
There was also a vast new
hotel, a sumptuous wooden barn, rambling comfortably upon the
summit of a commanding hill.
But most of the population was still native, recruited from the
hill and country people in the surrounding districts.
Scotch-Irish mountaineers, rugged, provincial, intelligent, and
industrious.
Oliver had about twelve hundred dollars saved from the wreckage of
Cynthia's estate.
During the winter he rented a little shack at
one edge of the town's public square, acquired a small stock of
marbles, and set up business.
But he had little to do at first
save to think of the prospect of his death.
During the bitter and
lonely winter, while he thought he was dying, the gaunt scarecrow
Yankee that flapped muttering through the streets became an object
of familiar gossip to the townspeople.
All the people at his
boarding-house knew that at night he walked his room with great
caged strides, and that a long low moan that seemed wrung from his
bowels quivered incessantly on his thin lips.
But he spoke to no
one about it.
And then the marvellous hill Spring came, green-golden, with brief
spurting winds, the magic and fragrance of the blossoms, warm gusts
of balsam.
The great wound in Oliver began to heal.
His voice was
heard in the land once more, there were purple flashes of the old
rhetoric, the ghost of the old eagerness.
One day in April, as with fresh awakened senses, he stood before
his shop, watching the flurry of life in the square, Oliver heard
behind him the voice of a man who was passing.
And that voice,
flat, drawling, complacent, touched with sudden light a picture
that had lain dead in him for twenty years.
"Hit's a comin'!
Accordin' to my figgers hit's due June 11, 1886."
Oliver turned and saw retreating the burly persuasive figure of the
prophet he had last seen vanishing down the dusty road that led to
Gettysburg and Armageddon.
"Who is that?" he asked a man.
The man looked and grinned.
"That's Bacchus Pentland," he said.
"He's quite a character.
There are a lot of his folks around here."
Oliver wet his great thumb briefly.
Then, with a grin, he said:
"Has Armageddon come yet?"
"He's expecting it any day now," said the man.
Then Oliver met Eliza.
He lay one afternoon in Spring upon the
smooth leather sofa of his little office, listening to the bright
piping noises in the Square.
A restoring peace brooded over his
great extended body.
He thought of the loamy black earth with its
sudden young light of flowers, of the beaded chill of beer, and of
the plumtree's dropping blossoms.
Then he heard the brisk heel-
taps of a woman coming down among the marbles, and he got hastily
to his feet.
He was drawing on his well brushed coat of heavy
black just as she entered.
"I tell you what," said Eliza, pursing her lips in reproachful
banter, "I wish I was a man and had nothing to do but lie around
all day on a good easy sofa."
"Good afternoon, madam," said Oliver with a flourishing bow.
"Yes," he said, as a faint sly grin bent the corners of his thin
mouth, "I reckon you've caught me taking my constitutional.
matter of fact I very rarely lie down in the daytime, but I've been
in bad health for the last year now, and I'm not able to do the
work I used to."
He his face drooped in an expression of
hangdog dejection.
"Ah, Lord!
I don't know what's to become of
"Pshaw!" said Eliza briskly and contemptuously.
"There's nothing
wrong with you in my opinion.
You're a big strapping fellow, in
the prime of life.
Half of it's only imagination.
Most of the
time we think we're sick it's all in the mind.
I remember three
years ago I was teaching school in Hominy Township when I was taken
down with pneumonia.
Nobody ever expected to see me come out of it
alive but I go I well remember one day I was
sitting down--as the fellow says, I reckon I was convalescin'; the
reason I remember is Old Doctor Fletcher had just been and when he
went out I saw him shake his head at my cousin Sally.
'Why Eliza,
what on earth,' she said, just as soon as he had gone, 'he tells me
you're spitting up blood
you've got
consumption as sure as you live.'
'Pshaw,' I said.
I remember I
laughed just as big as you please, determined to make a big joke of
I just thought to myself, I'm not going to give into it,
I' 'I don't believe a word of it' (I said),"
she nodded her head smartly at him, and pursed her lips, "'and
besides, Sally' (I said) 'we've all got to go some time, and
there's no use worrying about what's going to happen.
It may come
tomorrow, or it may come later, but it's bound to come to all in
the end'."
"Ah Lord!" said Oliver, shaking his head sadly.
"You bit the nail
on the head that time.
A truer word was never spoken."
Merciful God! he thought, with an anguished inner grin.
is this to keep up?
But she's a pippin as sure as you're born.
looked appreciatively at her trim erect figure, noting her milky
white skin, her black-brown eyes, with their quaint child's stare,
and her jet black hair drawn back tightly from her high white
She had a curious trick of pursing her lips reflectively
she liked to take her time, and came to the point
after interminable divagations down all the lane-ends of memory and
overtone, feasting upon the golden pageant of all she had ever
said, done, felt, thought, seen, or replied, with egocentric
Then, while he looked, she ceased speaking abruptly, put
her neat gloved hand to her chin, and stared off with a thoughtful
pursed mouth.
"Well," she said after a moment, "if you're getting your health
back and spend a good part of your time lying around you ought to
have something to occupy your mind."
She opened a leather
portmanteau she was carrying and produced a visiting card and two
fat volumes.
"My name," she said portentously, with slow emphasis,
"is Eliza Pentland, and I represent the Larkin Publishing Company."
She spoke the words proudly, with dignified gusto.
Merciful God!
A book agent! thought Gant.
"We are offering," said Eliza, opening a huge yellow book with a
fancy design of spears and flags and laurel wreaths, "a book of
poems called Gems of Verse for Hearth and Fireside as well as
Larkin's Domestic Doctor and Book of Household Remedies, giving
directions for the cure and prevention of over five hundred
diseases."
"Well," said Gant, with a faint grin, wetting his big thumb
briefly, "I ought to find one that I've got out of that."
"Why, yes," said Eliza, nodding smartly, "as the fellow says, you
can read poetry for the good of your soul and Larkin for the good
of your body."
"I like poetry," said Gant, thumbing over the pages, and pausing
with interest at the section marked Songs of the Spur and Sabre.
"In my boyhood I could recite it by the hour."
He bought the books.
Eliza packed her samples, and stood up
looking sharply and curiously about the dusty little shop.
"Doing any business?" she said.
"Very little," said Oliver sadly.
"Hardly enough to keep body and
soul together.
I'm a stranger in a strange land."
"Pshaw!" said Eliza cheerfully.
"You ought to get out and meet
more people.
You need something to take your mind off yourself.
If I were you, I'd pitch right in and take an interest in the
town's progress.
We've got everything here it takes to make a big
town--scenery, climate, and natural resources, and we all ought to
work together.
If I had a few thousand dollars I know what I'd
do,"--she winked smartly at him, and began to speak with a
curiously masculine gesture of the hand--forefinger extended, fist
loosely clenched.
"Do you see this corner here--the one you're on?
It'll double in value in the next few years.
Now, here!" she
gestured before her with the loose masculine gesture.
going to run a street through there some day as sure as you live.
And when they do--" she pursed her lips reflectively, "that
property is going to be worth money."
She continued to talk about property with a strange meditative
The town seemed to be an enormous blueprint to her: her
head was stuffed uncannily with figures and estimates--who owned a
lot, who sold it, the sale-price, the real value, the future value,
first and second mortgages, and so on.
When she had finished,
Oliver said with the emphasis of strong aversion, thinking of
"I hope I never own another piece of property as long as I live--
save a house to live in.
It is nothing but a curse and a care, and
the tax-collector gets it all in the end."
Eliza looked at him with a startled expression, as if he had
uttered a damnable heresy.
"Why, say!
That's no way to talk!" she said.
"You want to lay
something by for a rainy day, don't you?"
"I'm having my rainy day now," he said gloomily.
"All the property
I need is eight feet of earth to be buried in."
Then, talking more cheerfully, he walked with her to the door of
the shop, and watched her as she marched primly away across the
square, holding her skirts at the curbs with ladylike nicety.
he turned back among his marbles again with a stirring in him of a
joy he thought he had lost forever.
The Pentland family, of which Eliza was a member, was one of the
strangest tribes that ever came out of the hills.
It had no clear
title to the name of Pentland: a Scotch-Englishman of that name,
who was a mining engineer, the grandfather of the present head of
the family, had come into the hills after the Revolution, looking
for copper, and lived there for several years, begetting several
children by one of the pioneer women.
When he disappeared the
woman took for herself and her children the name of Pentland.
The present chieftain of the tribe was Eliza's father, the brother
of the prophet Bacchus, Major Thomas Pentland.
Another brother had
been killed during the Seven Days.
Major Pentland's military title
was honestly if inconspicuously earned.
While Bacchus, who never
rose above the rank of Corporal, was blistering his hard hands at
Shiloh, the Major, as commander of two companies of Home
Volunteers, was guarding the stronghold of the native hills.
stronghold was never threatened until the closing days of the war,
when the Volunteers, ambuscaded behind convenient trees and rocks,
fired three volleys into a detachment of Sherman's stragglers, and
quietly dispersed to the defense of their attendant wives and
The Pentland family was as old as any in the community, but it had
always been poor, and had made few pretenses to gentility.
marriage, and by intermarriage among its own kinsmen, it could
boast of some connection with the great, of some insanity, and a
modicum of idiocy.
But because of its obvious superiority, in
intelligence and fibre, to most of the mountain people it held a
position of solid respect among them.
The Pentlands bore a strong clan-marking.
Like most rich
personalities in strange families their powerful group-stamp became
more impressive because of their differences.
They had broad
powerful noses, with fleshy deeply scalloped wings, sensual mouths,
extraordinarily mixed of delicacy and coarseness, which in the
process of thinking they convolved with astonishing flexibility,
broad intelligent foreheads, and deep flat cheeks, a trifle
The men were generally ruddy of face, and their typical
stature was meaty, strong, and of middling height, although it
varied into gangling cadaverousness.
Major Thomas Pentland was the father of a numerous family of which
Eliza was the only surviving girl.
A younger sister had died a few
years before of a disease which the family identified sorrowfully
as "poor Jane's scrofula."
There were six boys:
Henry, the
oldest, was now thirty, Will was twenty-six, Jim was twenty-two,
and Thaddeus, Elmer and Greeley were, in the order named, eighteen,
fifteen, and eleven.
Eliza was twenty-four.
The four oldest children, Henry, Will, Eliza, and Jim, had passed
their childhood in the years following the war.
The poverty and
privation of these years had been so terrible that none of them
ever spoke of it now, but the bitter steel had sheared into their
hearts, leaving scars that would not heal.
The effect of these years upon the oldest children was to develop
in them an insane niggardliness, an insatiate love of property, and
a desire to escape from the Major's household as quickly as
"Father," Eliza had said with ladylike dignity, as she led Oliver
for the first time into the sitting-room of the cottage, "I want
you to meet Mr. Gant."
Major Pentland rose slowly from his rocker by the fire, folded a
large knife, and put the apple he had been peeling on the mantel.
Bacchus looked up benevolently from a whittled stick, and Will,
glancing up from his stubby nails which he was paring as usual,
greeted the visitor with a birdlike nod and wink.
The men amused
themselves constantly with pocket knives.
Major Pentland advanced slowly toward Gant.
He was a stocky fleshy
man in the middle fifties, with a ruddy face, a patriarchal beard,
and the thick complacent features of his tribe.
"It's W. O. Gant, isn't it?" he asked in a drawling unctuous voice.
"Yes," said Oliver, "that's right."
"From what Eliza's been telling me about you," said the Major,
giving the signal to his audience, "I was going to say it ought to
be L. E. Gant."
The room sounded with the fat pleased laughter of the Pentlands.
"Whew!" cried Eliza, putting her hand to the wing of her broad
"I'll vow, father!
You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
Gant grinned with a thin false painting of mirth.
The miserable old scoundrel, he thought.
He's had that one bottled
up for a week.
"You've met Will before," said Eliza.
"Both before and aft," said Will with a smart wink.
When their laughter had died down, Eliza said:
"And this--as the
fellow says--is Uncle Bacchus."
"Yes, sir," said Bacchus beaming, "as large as life an' twice as
"They call him Back-us everywhere else," said Will, including them
all in a brisk wink, "but here in the family we call him Behind-
"I suppose," said Major Pentland deliberately, "that you've served
on a great many juries?"
"No," said Oliver, determined to endure the worst now with a frozen
"Because," said the Major looking around again, "I thought you were
a fellow who'd done a lot of COURTIN'."
Then, amid their laughter, the door opened, and several of the
others came in--Eliza's mother, a plain worn Scotchwoman, and Jim,
a ruddy porcine young fellow, his father's beardless twin, and
Thaddeus, mild, ruddy, brown of hair and eye, bovine, and finally
Greeley, the youngest, a boy with lapping idiot grins, full of
strange squealing noises at which they laughed.
He was eleven,
degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but his white moist hands could draw
from a violin music that had in it something unearthly and
And as they sat there in the hot little room with its warm odor of
mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the hills, there
was a roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the bare boughs
And as they peeled, or pared, or whittled, their talk
slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they drawled
monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and of men
but newly lain in the earth.
And as their talk wore on, and Gant
heard the spectre moan of the wind, he was entombed in loss and
darkness, and his soul plunged downward in the pit of night, for he
saw that he must die a stranger--that all, all but these triumphant
Pentlands, who banqueted on death--must die.
And like a man who is perishing in the polar night, he thought of
the rich meadows of his youth: the corn, the plum tree, and ripe
Oliver married Eliza in May.
After their wedding trip to
Philadelphia, they returned to the house he had built for her on
Woodson Street.
With his great hands he had laid the foundations,
burrowed out deep musty cellars in the earth, and sheeted the tall
sides over with smooth trowellings of warm brown plaster.
very little money, but his strange house grew to the rich modelling
of his fantasy: when he had finished he had something which leaned
to the slope of his narrow uphill yard, something with a high
embracing porch in front, and warm rooms where one stepped up and
down to the tackings of his whim.
He built his house close to the
he bedded the loa he laid
the short walk to the high veranda steps with great square sheets
he put a fence of spiked iron between his house
and the world.
Then, in the cool long glade of yard that stretched four hundred
feet behind the house he planted trees and grape vines.
whatever he touched in that rich fortress of his soul sprang into
golden life: as the years passed, the fruit trees--the peach, the
plum, the cherry, the apple--grew great and bent beneath their
His grape vines thickened into brawny ropes of brown and
coiled down the high wire fences of his lot, and hung in a dense
fabric, upon his trellises, roping his domain twice around.
climbed the porch end of the house and framed the upper windows in
thick bowers.
And the flowers grew in rioting glory in his yard--
the velvet-leaved nasturtium, slashed with a hundred tawny dyes,
the rose, the snowball, the redcupped tulip, and the lily.
honeysuckle drooped its heavy wherever his
great hands touched the earth it grew fruitful for him.
For him the house was the picture of his soul, the garment of his
But for Eliza it was a piece of property, whose value she
shrewdly appraised, a beginning for her hoard.
Like all the older
children of Major Pentland she had, since her twentieth year, begun
the slow accretion of land: from the savings of her small wage as
teacher and book-agent, she had already purchased one or two pieces
On one of these, a small lot at the edge of the public
square, she persuaded him to build a shop.
This he did with his
own hands, and the labor of two negro men: it was a two-story shack
of brick, with wide wooden steps, leading down to the square from a
marble porch.
Upon this porch, flanking the wooden doors, he
by the door, he put the heavy simpering figure
of an angel.
But Eliza was not content with his trade: there was no money in
People, she thought, died too slowly.
And she foresaw that
her brother Will, who had begun at fifteen as helper in a lumber
yard, and was now the owner of a tiny business, was destined to
become a rich man.
So she persuaded Gant to go into partnership
with Will Pentland: at the end of a year, however, his patience
broke, his tortured egotism leaped from its restraint, he howled
that Will, whose business hours were spent chiefly in figuring upon
a dirty envelope with a stub of a pencil, paring reflectively his
stubby nails, or punning endlessly with a birdlike wink and nod,
would ruin them all.
Will therefore quietly bought out his
partner's interest, and moved on toward the accumulation of a
fortune, while Oliver returned to isolation and his grimy angels.
The strange figure of Oliver Gant cast its famous shadow through
Men heard at night and morning the great formula of his
curse to Eliza.
They saw him plunge to house and shop, they saw
him bent above his marbles, they saw him mould in his great hands--
with curse, and howl, with passionate devotion--the rich texture of
They laughed at his wild excess of speech, of feeling,
and of gesture.
They were silent before the maniac fury of his
sprees, which occurred almost punctually every two months, and
lasted two or three days.
They picked him foul and witless from
the cobbles, and brought him home--the banker, the policeman, and a
burly devoted Swiss named Jannadeau, a grimy jeweller who rented a
small fenced space among Gant's tombstones.
And always they
handled him with tender care, feeling something strange and proud
and glorious lost in that drunken ruin of Babel.
He was a stranger
to them: no one--not even Eliza--ever called him by his first name.
He was--and remained thereafter--"Mister" Gant.
And what Eliza endured in pain and fear and glory no one knew.
breathed over them all his hot lion-breath of desire and fury: when
he was drunk, her white pursed face, and all the slow octopal
movements of her temper, stirred him to red madness.
She was at
such times in real danger from his assault: she had to lock herself
away from him.
For from the first, deeper than love, deeper than
hate, as deep as the unfleshed bones of life, an obscure and final
warfare was being waged between them.
Eliza wept or was silent to
his curse, nagged briefly in retort to his rhetoric, gave like a
punched pillow to his lunging drive--and slowly, implacably had her
Year by year, above his howl of protest, he did not know how,
they gathered in small bits of earth, paid the hated taxes, and put
the money that remained into more land.
Over the wife, over the
mother, the woman of property, who was like a man, walked slowly
In eleven years she bore him nine children of whom six lived.
first, a girl, died in her twentieth month, two
more died at birth.
The others outlived the grim and casual
littering.
The oldest, a boy, was born in 1885.
He was given the
name of Steve.
The second, born fifteen months later, was a girl--
The next, likewise a girl--Helen--came three years later.
Then, in 1892, came twins--boys--to whom Gant, always with a zest
for politics, gave the names of Grover Cleveland and Benjamin
And the last, Luke, was born two years later, in 1894.
Twice, during this period, at intervals of five years, Gant's
periodic spree lengthened into an unbroken drunkenness that lasted
for weeks.
He was caught, drowning in the tides of his thirst.
Each time Eliza sent him away to take a cure for alcoholism at
Once, Eliza and four of her children were sick at the
same time with typhoid fever.
But during a weary convalescence she
pursed her lips grimly and took them off to Florida.
Eliza came through stolidly to victory.
As she marched down these
enormous years of love and loss, stained with the rich dyes of pain
and pride and death, and with the great wild flare of his alien and
passionate life, her limbs faltered in the grip of ruin, but she
came on, through sickness and emaciation, to victorious strength.
She knew there had been glory in it: insensate and cruel as he had
often been, she remembered the enormous beating color of his life,
and the lost and stricken thing in him which he would never find.
And fear and a speechless pity rose in her when at times she saw
the small uneasy eyes grow still and darken with the foiled and
groping hunger of old frustration.
In the great processional of the years through which the history of
the Gants was evolving, few years had borne a heavier weight of
pain, terror, and wretchedness, and none was destined to bring with
it more conclusive events than that year which marked the beginning
of the twentieth century.
For Gant and his wife, the year 1900, in
which one day they found themselves, after growing to maturity in
another century--a transition which must have given, wherever it
has happened, a brief but poignant loneliness to thousands of
imaginative people--had coincidences, too striking to be unnoticed,
with other boundaries in their lives.
In that year Gant passed his fiftieth birthday: he knew he was half
as old as the century that had died, and that men do not often live
as long as centuries.
And in that year, too, Eliza, big with the
last child she would ever have, went over the final hedge of terror
and desperation and, in the opulent darkness of the summer night,
as she lay flat in her bed with her hands upon her swollen belly,
she began to design her life for the years when she would cease to
be a mother.
In the already opening gulf on whose separate shores their lives
were founded, she was beginning to look, with the infinite
composure, the tremendous patience which waits through half a
lifetime for an event, not so much with certain foresight, as with
a prophetic, brooding instinct.
This quality, this almost
Buddhistic complacency which, rooted in the fundamental structure
of her life, she could neither suppress nor conceal, was the
quality he could least understand, that infuriated him most.
was fifty: he had a tragic consciousness of time--he saw the
passionate fulness of his life upon the wane, and he cast about him
like a senseless and infuriate beast.
She had perhaps a greater
reason for quietude than he, for she had come on from the cruel
openings of her life, through disease, physical weakness, poverty,
the constant imminence of death and misery: she had lost her first
child, and brought the others safely through each succeeding
and now, at forty-two, her last child stirring in her womb,
she had a conviction, enforced by her Scotch superstition, and the
blind vanity of her family, which saw extinction for others but not
for itself, that she was being shaped to a purpose.
As she lay in her bed, a great star burned across her vision in the
wester she fancied it was climbing heaven
And although she could not have said toward what pinnacle
her life was moving, she saw in the future freedom that she had
never known, possession and power and wealth, the desire for which
was mixed inextinguishably with the current of her blood.
of this in the dark, she pursed her lips with thoughtful
satisfaction, unhumorously seeing herself at work in the carnival,
taking away quite easily from the hands of folly what it had never
known how to keep.
"I'll get it!" she thought, "I'll get it.
Will has it!
And I'm smarter than they are."
And with regret, tinctured
with pain and bitterness, she thought of Gant:
If I hadn't kept after him he wouldn't have a stick to
call his own to-day.
What little we have got I've had to fight
we wouldn't have a we'd spend the rest of
our lives in a rented house"--which was to her the final ignominy
of shiftless and improvident people.
And she resumed:
"The money he squanders every year in licker
would buy a good lot: we could be well-to-do people now if we'd
started at the very beginning.
But he's always hated the very idea
of owning anything: couldn't bear it, he told me once, since he
lost his money in that trade in Sydney.
If I'd been there, you can
bet your bottom dollar there'd been no loss.
Or, it'd be on the
other side," she added grimly.
And lying there while the winds of early autumn swept down from the
Southern hills, filling the black air with dropping leaves, and
making, in intermittent rushes, a remote sad thunder in great
trees, she thought of the stranger who had come to live in her, and
of that other stranger, author of so much woe, who had lived with
her for almost twenty years.
And thinking of Gant, she felt again
an inchoate aching wonder, recalling the savage strife between
them, and the great submerged struggle beneath, founded upon the
hatred and the love of property, in which she did not doubt of her
victory, but which baffled her, foiled her.
"I'll vow!" she whispered.
"I'll vow!
I never saw such a man!"
Gant, faced with the loss of sensuous delight, knowing the time had
come when all his Rabelaisian excess in eating, drinking, and
loving must come under the halter, knew of no gain that could
compensate him for the he felt, too, the sharp
ache of regret, feeling that he had possessed powers, had wasted
chances, such as his partnership with Will Pentland, that might
have given him position and wealth.
He knew that the century had
gone in which the best part of he felt, more
than ever, the strangeness and loneliness of our little adventure
upon the earth: he thought of his childhood on the Dutch farm, the
Baltimore days, the aimless drift down the continent, the appalling
fixation of his whole life upon a series of accidents.
enormous tragedy of accident hung like a gray cloud over his life.
He saw more clearly than ever that he was a stranger in a strange
land among people who would always be alien to him.
Strangest of
all, he thought, was this union, by which he had begotten children,
created a life dependent on him, with a woman so remote from all he
understood.
He did not know whether the year 1900 marked for him a beginning or
but with the familiar weakness of the sensualist, he
resolved to make it an ending, burning the spent fire in him down
to a guttering flame.
In the first half of the month of January,
still penitently true to the New Year's reformation, he begot a
child: by Spring, when it was evident that Eliza was again
pregnant, he had hurled himself into an orgy to which even a
notable four months' drunk in 1896 could offer no precedent.
after day he became maniacally drunk, until he fixed himself in a
state of constant insanity: in May she sent him off again to a
sanitarium at Piedmont to take the "cure," which consisted simply
in feeding him plainly and cheaply, and keeping him away from
alcohol for six weeks, a regime which contributed no more
ravenously to his hunger than it did to his thirst.
He returned,
outwardly chastened, but inwardly a raging furnace, toward the end
of June: the day before he came back, Eliza, obviously big with
child, her white face compactly set, walked sturdily into each of
the town's fourteen saloons, calling up the proprietor or the bar-
man behind his counter, and speaking clearly and loudly in the
sodden company of bar clientry:
"See here: I just came in to tell you that Mr. Gant is coming back
to-morrow, and I want you all to know that if I hear of any of you
selling him a drink, I'll put you in the penitentiary."
The threat, they knew, was preposterous, but the white judicial
face, the thoughtful pursing of the lips, and the right hand, which
she held loosely clenched, like a man's, with the forefinger
extended, emphasizing her proclamation with a calm, but somehow
powerful gesture, froze them with a terror no amount of fierce
excoriation could have produced.
They received her announcement in
beery stupefaction, muttering at most a startled agreement as she
walked out.
"By God," said a mountaineer, sending a brown inaccurate stream
toward a cuspidor, "she'll do it, too.
That woman means business."
"Hell!" said Tim O'Donnel, thrusting his simian face comically
above his counter, "I wouldn't give W.O. a drink now if it was
fifteen cents a quart and we was alone in a privy.
Is she gone
There was vast whisky laughter.
"Who is she?" some one asked.
"She's Will Pentland's sister."
"By God, she'll do it then," and the place trembled
again with their laughter.
Will Pentland was in Loughran's when she entered.
She did not
greet him.
When she had gone he turned to a man near him,
prefacing his remark with a birdlike nod and wink:
"Bet you can't
do that," he said.
Gant, when he returned, and was publicly refused at a bar, was wild
with rage and humiliation.
He got whisky very easily, of course,
by sending a drayman from his steps, or some negro, but,
in spite of the notoriety of his conduct, which had, he knew,
become a classic myth for the children of the town, he shrank at
each new advertisem he became, year by year,
more, rather than less, sensitive to it, and his shame, his
quivering humiliation on mornings after, product of rasped pride
and jangled nerves, was pitiable.
He felt bitterly that Eliza had
with deliberate malice publicly degraded him: he screamed
denunciation and abuse at her on his return home.
All through the summer Eliza walked with white boding placidity
through horror--she had by now the hunger for it, waiting with
terrible quiet the return of fear at night.
Angered by her
pregnancy, Gant went almost daily to Elizabeth's house in Eagle
Crescent, whence he was delivered nightly by a band of exhausted
and terrified prostitutes into the care of his son Steve, his
oldest child, by now pertly free with nearly all the women in the
district, who fondled him with good-natured vulgarity, laughed
heartily at his glib innuendoes, and suffered him, even, to slap
them smartly on their rumps, making for him roughly as he skipped
nimbly away.
"Son," said Elizabeth, shaking Gant's waggling head vigorously,
"don't you carry on, when you grow up, like the old rooster here.
But he's a nice old boy when he wants to be," she continued,
kissing the bald spot on his head, and deftly slipping into the
boy's hand the wallet Gant had, in a torrent of generosity, given
She was scrupulously honest.
The boy was usually accompanied on these errands by Jannadeau and
Tom Flack, a negro hack-man, who waited in patient constraint
outside the latticed door of the brothel until the advancing tumult
within announced that Gant had been enticed to depart.
would go, either struggling clumsily and screaming eloquent abuse
at his suppliant captors, or jovially acquiescent, bellowing a
wanton song of his youth along the latticed crescent, and through
the supper-silent highways of the town.
"Up in that back room, boys,
Up in THAT back room,
All among the fleas and bugs,
I pit-tee your sad doom."
Home, he would be cajoled up the tall veranda stairs, enticed into
or, resisting all compulsion, he would seek out his wife,
shut usually in her room, howling taunts at her, and accusations of
unchastity, since there festered in him dark suspicion, fruit of
his age, his wasting energy.
Timid Daisy, pale from fright, would
have fled to the neighboring arms of Sudie Isaacs, or to the
T Helen, aged ten, even then his delight, would master
him, feeding spoonfuls of scalding soup into his mouth, and slapping
him sharply with her small hand when he became recalcitrant.
"You DRINK this!
You better!"
He was enormously pleased: they were both strung on the same wires.
Again, he was beyond all reason.
Extravagantly mad, he built
roaring fires in his sitting-room, drenching the leaping fire with
spitting exultantly into the answering roar, and
striking up, until he was exhausted, a profane chant, set to a few
recurrent bars of music, which ran, for forty minutes, somewhat
like this:
"O-ho--Goddam,
Goddam, Goddam,
O-ho--Goddam,
Goddam--Goddam."
--adopting usually the measure by which clock-chimes strike out the
And outside, strung like apes along the wide wires of the fence,
Sandy and Fergus Duncan, Seth Tarkinton, sometimes Ben and Grover
themselves, joining in the glee of their friends, kept up an
answering chant:
"Old man Gant
Came home drunk!
Old man Gant
Came home drunk!"
Daisy, from a neighbor's sanctuary, wept in shame and fear.
Helen, small thin fury, held on relentlessly: presently he would
subside into a chair, and receive hot soup and stinging slaps with
Upstairs Eliza lay, white-faced and watchfully.
So ran the summer by.
The last grapes hung in dried and rotten
c the w September ended.
One night the dry doctor, Cardiac, said:
"I think we'll be through
with this before to-morrow evening."
He departed, leaving in the
house a middle-aged country woman.
She was a hard-handed practical
At eight o'clock Gant returned alone.
The boy Steve had stayed at
home for ready dispatch at Eliza' for the moment the
attention was shifted from the master.
His great voice below, chanting obscenities, carried across the
neighborhood: as she heard the sudden wild roar of flame up the
chimney, shaking the house in its flight, she called Steve to her
side, tensely:
"Son, he'll burn us all up!" she whispered.
They heard a chair fall heavily below, they heard his
heavy reeling stride across the dining- they
heard the sagging creak of the stair-rail as his body swung against
"He's coming!" she whispered.
"He's coming!
Lock the door, son!"
The boy locked the door.
"Are you there?" Gant roared, pounding the flimsy door heavily with
his great fist.
"Miss Eliza: are you there?" howling at her the
ironical title by which he addressed her at moments like this.
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!" 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!" 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.
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:
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
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
Honor thy father that thy days may be long.
"'Look, in this place ran Cassius'
See what a rent the envious C
Through this the well-beloved B
And, as he plucked his curs鑔 steel away,
Mark how the blood of C鎠ar 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
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.
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.
burly jeweller took the poker from his hand with quiet strength.
"He cut his head on the bed-rail, mama," said Steve descending.
was true: Gant bled.
"Go for your Uncle Will, son.
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
"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.
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
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?"
S 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
"Oh, he's cut himself!"
The little girl thought she was going to
"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 d 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
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
"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
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.
old woman ever got a square meal in her life she got it under my
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!" 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.
saying another word, he left the room, and mounted the stairs.
sister lay quietly extended on her back.
"How do you feel, Eliza?"
The room was heavy with the rich odor of
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
"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
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.
recognized the tone.
He almost forgot himself:
"See here, 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
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
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
"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
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.
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.
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
now she put a pillow on a chair and placed his feet on it.
He was ran the window rattled as he snored.
Thus, drowned in oblivion, he slept when the great
pangs of birth began in Eliza at two o' slept through all the
patient pain and care of doctor, nurse, and wife.
The baby was, to reverse an epigram, an unconscionable time in
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
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
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
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:
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!
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
"Merciful God!" he said, and grinned.
Then he set up his caged
"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
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, most of the Great
Victorians had died before t 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}