by Thomas Wolfe
"She's no better than a regular little chippie--eh?"
"Ha-ha-ha-ha," she laughed mockingly. "Don't you wish you knew?"
His age bore certain fruits, emoluments of service. When she came home in the evening with one of her friends, she presented the girl with jocose eagerness to his embrace. And, crying out paternally, "Why, bless her heart! Come kiss the old man," he planted bristling mustache kisses on their white throats, their soft lips, grasping the firm meat of one arm tenderly with his good hand and cradling them gently. They shrieked with throaty giggle-twiddles of pleasure because it tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-TICKLED so.
"Ooh! Mr. Gant! Whah-whah-whah!"
"Your father's such a nice man," they said. "Such lovely manners."
Helen's eyes fed fiercely on them. She laughed with husky-harsh excitement.
"Hah-ha-ha! He likes that, doesn't he? It's too bad, old boy, isn't it? No more monkey business."
He talked with Jannadeau, while his fugitive eyes roved over the east end of the Square. Before the shop the comely matrons of the town came up from the market. From time to time they smiled, seeing him, and he bowed sweepingly. Such lovely manners.
"The King of England," he observed, "is only a figurehead. He doesn't begin to have the power of the President of the United States."
"His power is severely li-MIT-ed," said Jannadeau gutturally, "by custom but not by statute. In actua-LITY he is still one of the most powerful monarchs in the world." His thick black fingers probed carefully into the viscera of a watch.
"The late King Edward for all his faults," said Gant, wetting his thumb, "was a smart man. This fellow they've got now is a nonentity and a nincompoop." He grinned faintly, craftily, with pleasure at the big words, glancing slily at the Swiss to see if they had told.
His uneasy eyes followed carefully the stylish carriage of "Queen" Elizabeth's well clad figure as she went down by the shop. She smiled pleasantly, and for a moment turned her candid stare upon smooth marble slabs of death, carved lambs and cherubim. Gant bowed elaborately.
"Good-evening, madam," he said.
She disappeared. In a moment she came back decisively and mounted the broad steps. He watched her approach with quickened pulses. Twelve years.
"How's the madam?" he said gallantly. "Elizabeth, I was just telling Jannadeau you were the most stylish woman in town."
"Well, that's mighty sweet of you, Mr. Gant," she said in her cool poised voice. "You've always got a word for every one."
She gave a bright pleasant nod to Jannadeau, who swung his huge scowling head ponderously around and muttered at her.
"Why, Elizabeth," said Gant, "you haven't changed an inch in fifteen years. I don't believe you're a day older."
She was thirty-eight and pleasantly aware of it.
"Oh, yes," she said laughing. "You're only saying that to make me feel good. I'm no chicken any more."
She had a pale clear skin, pleasantly freckled, carrot-colored hair, and a thin mouth live with humor. Her figure was trim and strong--no longer young. She had a great deal of energy, distinction, and elegance in her manner.
"How are all the girls, Elizabeth?" he asked kindly.
Her face grew sad. She began to pull her gloves off.
"That's what I came to see you about," she said. "I lost one of them last week."
"Yes," said Gant gravely, "I was sorry to hear of that."
"She was the best girl I had," said Elizabeth. "I'd have done anything in the world for her. We did everything we could," she added. "I've no regrets on that score. I had a doctor and two trained nurses by her all the time."
She opened her black leather handbag, thrust her gloves into it, and pulling out a small bluebordered handkerchief, began to weep quietly.
"Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh," said Gant, shaking his head. "Too bad, too bad, too bad. Come back to my office," he said. They went back and sat down. Elizabeth dried her eyes.
"What was her name?" he asked.
"We called her Lily--her full name was Lillian Reed."
"Why, I knew that girl," he exclaimed. "I spoke to her not over two weeks ago."
"Yes," said Elizabeth, "she went like that--one hemorrhage right after another, down here." She tapped her abdomen. "Nobody ever knew she was sick until last Wednesday. Friday she was gone." She wept again.
"T-t-t-t-t-t," he clucked regretfully. "Too bad, too bad. She was pretty as a picture."
"I couldn't have loved her more, Mr. Gant," said Elizabeth, "if she had been my own daughter."
"How old was she?" he asked.
"Twenty-two," said Elizabeth, beginning to weep again.
"What a pity! What a pity!" he agreed. "Did she have any people?"
"No one who would do anything for her," Elizabeth said. "Her mother died when she was thirteen--she was born out here on the Beetree Fork--and her father," she added indignantly, "is a mean old bastard who's never done anything for her or any one else. He didn't even come to her funeral."
"He will be punished," said Gant darkly.
"As sure as there's a God in heaven," Elizabeth agreed, "he'll get what's coming to him in hell. The old bastard!" she continued virtuously, "I hope he rots!"
"You can depend upon it," he said grimly. "He will. Ah, Lord." He was silent a moment while he shook his head with slow regret.
"A pity, a pity," he muttered. "So young." He had the moment of triumph all men have when they hear some one has died. A moment, too, of grisly fear. Sixty-four.
"I couldn't have loved her more," said Elizabeth, "if she'd been one of my own. A young girl like that, with all her life before her."
"It's pretty sad when you come to think of it," he said. "By God, it is."
"And she was such a fine girl, Mr. Gant," said Elizabeth, weeping softly. "She had such a bright future before her. She had more opportunities than I ever had, and I suppose you know"--she spoke modestly--"what I've done."
"Why," he exclaimed, startled, "you're a rich woman, Elizabeth--damned if I don't believe you are. You own property all over town."
"I wouldn't say that," she answered, "but I've got enough to live on without ever doing another lick of work. I've had to work hard all my life. From now on I don't intend to turn my hand over."
She regarded him with a shy pleased smile, and touched a coil of her fine hair with a small competent hand. He looked at her attentively, noting with pleasure her firm uncorseted hips, moulded compactly into her tailored suit, and her cocked comely legs tapering to graceful feet, shod in neat little slippers of tan. She was firm, strong, washed, and elegant--a faint scent of lilac hovered over her: he looked at her candid eyes, lucently gray, and saw that she was quite a great lady.
"By God, Elizabeth," he said, "you're a fine-looking woman."
"I've had a good life," she said. "I've taken care of myself."
They had always known each other--since first they met. They had no excuses, no questions, no replies. The world fell away from them. In the silence they heard the pulsing slap of the fountain, the high laughter of bawdry in the Square. He took a book of models from the desk, and began to turn its slick pages. They showed modest blocks of Georgia marble and Vermont granite.
"I don't want any of those," she said impatiently. "I've already made up my mind. I know what I want."
He looked up surprised. "What is it?"
"I want the angel out front."
His face was shocked and unwilling. He gnawed the corner of his thin lip. No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked. But it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy.
In his rages, Gant sometimes directed vast climaxes of abuse at the angel. "Fiend
out of Hell!" he roared. "You have impoverished me, you have ruined me, you have cursed my declining years, and now you will crush me to death, fearful, awful, and unnatural monster that you are."
But sometimes when he was drunk he fell weeping on his knees before it, called it Cynthia, and entreated its love, forgiveness, and blessing for its sinful but repentant boy. There was laughter from the Square.
"What's the matter?" said Elizabeth. "Don't you want to sell it?"
"It will cost you a good deal, Elizabeth," he said evasively.
"I don't care," she answered, positively. "I've got the money. How much do you want?"
He was silent, thinking for a moment of the place where the angel stood. He knew he had nothing to cover or obliterate that place--it left a barren crater in his heart.
"All right," he said. "You can have it for what I paid for it--$420."
She took a thick sheaf of banknotes from her purse and counted the money out for him. He pushed it back.
"No. Pay me when the job's finished and it has been set up. You want some sort of inscription, don't you?"
"Yes. There's her full name, age, place of birth, and so on," she said, giving him a scrawled envelope. "I want some poetry, too--something that suits a young girl taken off like this."
He pulled his tattered little book of inscriptions from a pigeonhole, and thumbed its pages, reading her a quatrain here and there. To each she shook her head. Finally, he said:
"How's this one, Elizabeth?" He read:
She went away in beauty's flower,
Before her youth was spent;
Ere life and love had lived their hour
God called her, and she went.
Yet whispers Faith upon the wind:
No grief to her was given.
She left YOUR love and went to find
A greater one in heaven.
"Oh, that's lovely--lovely," she said. "I want that one."
"Yes," he agreed, "I think that's the best one."
In the musty cool smell of his little office they got up. Her gallant figure reached his shoulder. She buttoned her kid gloves over the small pink haunch of her palms and glanced about her. His battered sofa filled one wall, the line of his long body was printed in the leather. She looked up at him. His face was sad and grave. They remembered.
"It's been a long time, Elizabeth," he said.
They walked slowly to the front through aisled marbles. Sentinelled just beyond the wooden doors, the angel leered vacantly down. Jannadeau drew his great head turtlewise a little further into the protective hunch of his burly shoulders. They went out on to the porch.
The moon stood already, like its own phantom, in the clear washed skies of evening. A little boy with an empty paper-delivery bag swung lithely by, his freckled nostrils dilating pleasantly with hunger and the fancied smell of supper. He passed, and for a moment, as they stood at the porch edge, all life seemed frozen in a picture: the firemen and Fagg Sluder had seen Gant, whispered, and were now looking toward him; a policeman, at the high side-porch of the Police Court, leaned on the rail and stared; at the near edge of the central grass-plot below the fountain, a farmer bent for water at a bubbling jet, rose dripping, and stared; from the Tax Collector's office, City Hall, upstairs, Yancey, huge, meaty, shirtsleeved, stared. And in that second the slow pulse of the fountain was suspended, life was held, like an arrested gesture, in photographic abeyance, and Gant felt himself alone move deathward in a world of seemings as, in 1910, a man might find himself again in a picture taken on the grounds of the Chicago Fair, when he was thirty and his mustache black, and, noting the bustled ladies and the derbied men fixed in the second's pullulation, remember the dead instant, seek beyond the borders for what was there (he knew); or as a veteran who finds himself upon his elbow near Ulysses Grant, before the march, in pictures of the Civil War, and sees a dead man on a horse; or I should say, like some completed Don, who finds himself again before a tent in Scotland in his youth, and notes a cricket-bat long lost and long forgotten, the face of a poet who has died, and young men and the tutor as they looked that Long Vacation when they read nine hours a day for "Greats."
Where now? Where after? Where then?
20
Gant, during these years in which Helen and Luke, the two for whom he felt the deepest affection, were absent a large part of the time, lived a splintered existence at home and at Eliza's. He feared and hated a lonely life, but habit was deeply rooted in him, and he was unwilling to exchange the well-used comfort of his own home for the bald wintriness of Eliza's. She did not want him. She fed him willingly enough, but his tirades and his nightly sojourns, both longer and more frequent now that his daughter was absent, annoyed her more than they ever had before.
"You have a place of your own," she cried fretfully. "Why don't you stay in it? I don't want you around making trouble."
"Send him on," he moaned bitterly. "Send him on. Over the stones rattle his bones, he's only a beggar that nobody owns. Ah, Lord! The old drayhorse has had its day. Its race is run. Kick him out: the old cripple can no longer provide them with victuals, and they will throw him on the junkheap, unnatural and degenerate monsters that they are."
But he remained at Dixieland as long as there was any one to listen to him, and to the bleak little group of winter boarders he brought magic. They fed hungrily on all the dramatic gusto with which, lunging back and forth in the big rocker, before the blazing parlor fire, he told and retold the legends of his experience, taking, before their charmed eyes, an incident that had touched him romantically, and embellishing, weaving and building it up. A whole mythology grew up as, goggle-eyed, they listened:
General Fitzhugh Lee, who had reined up before the farmer boy and asked for a drink of water, now tossed off an oaken bucketful, questioned him closely concerning the best roads into Gettysburg, asked if he had seen detachments of the enemy, wrote his name down in a small book, and went off saying to his staff: "That boy will make his mark. It is impossible to defeat an enemy which breeds boys like that."
The Indians, whom he had passed amicably as he rode out into the New Mexican desert on a burro, seeking the ancient fort, now spurred after him with fell intent and wild scalping whoops. He rode furiously through muttering redskin villages, and found the protection of two cattlemen in the nick of time. The thief who had entered his room at dead of night in New Orleans, and picked up his clothes, and whom he had fought desperately upon the floor, he now pursued naked for seventeen blocks (not five) down Canal Street.
He went several times a week to the moving-picture shows, taking Eugene, and sitting, bent forward in hunched absorption, through two full performances. They came out at ten-thirty or eleven o'clock, on cold ringing pavements, into a world frozen bare?a dead city of closed shops, dressed windows, milliners' and clothiers' models posturing with waxen gaiety at congealed silence.
On the Square the slackened fountain dropped a fat spire of freezing water into its thickening rim of ice. In summer, a tall spire blown in blue sheets of spray. When they turned it down it wilted--that was like a fountain, too. No wind blew.
His eyes fixed on the clean concrete walk, Gant strode on, muttering dramatically, composing a narrative of the picture. The cold steel of new sewing-machines glinted in dim light. The Singer building. Tallest in the world. The stitching hum of Eliza's machine. Needle through your finger before you know it. He winced. They passed the Sluder Building at the corner of the Square and turned left. Gets over $700 a month in office-rent from this alone. The window on the corner was filled with rubber syringes and thermos bottles. Drink Coca Cola. They say he stole the formula from old mountain woman. $50,000,000 now. Rats in the vats. Dope at Wood's better. Too weak here. He had recently acquired a taste for the beverage and drank four or five glasses a day.
D. Stern had his old shack on that corner twenty years before Fagg bought it. Belonged to Paston estate. Could have bought it for a song. Rich man now. D. moved to North Main now. The Jew's rich. Fortune o
ut of winnies. They're hot, they're hot. In a broken pot. If I had a little time I'd make a little rhyme. Thirteen kids--she had one every year. As broad as she's long. They all get fat. Every one works. Sons pay father board. None of mine, I can assure you. The Jews get there.
The hunchback--what did they call him? One of Nature's Cruel Jests. Ah, Lord! What's become of old John Bunny? I used to like his pictures. Oh yes. Dead.
That pure look they have, at the end, when he kisses her, mused Eugene. Later--A Warmer Clime. Her long lashes curled down over her wet eyes, she was unable to meet his gaze. The sweet lips trembled with desire as, clasping her in a grip of steel, he bent down over her yielding body and planted hungry kisses on her mouth. When the purple canopy of dawn had been reft asunder by the rays of the invading sun. The Stranger. It wouldn't do to say the next morning. They have a thick coat of yellow paint all over their face. Meanwhile, in Old England. I wonder what they say to each other. They're a pretty tough lot, I suppose.
A swift thrust of conviction left him unperturbed. The other was better.
He thought of the Stranger. Steel-gray eyes. A steady face. An eighth of a second faster on the draw than any one else. Two-gun Bill Hart. Anderson of the Essanay. Strong quiet men.
He clapped his hand against his buttock with a sharp smack and shot the murderous forefinger at an ashcan, a lamp-post, and a barber-pole, with a snapping wrist. Gant, startled in composition, gave him a quick uneasy look. They walked on.
Came a day when Spring put forth her blossoms on the earth again. No, no--not that. Then all grew dark. Picture of a lily trampled on the earth. That means he bigged her. Art. Filled her with thee a baby fair. You can't go away now. Why? Because--because--her eyes dropped shyly, a slow flush mantled her cheek. He stared at her blankly for a moment, then his puzzled gaze--(O good!)--fell to the tiny object she was fingering nervously, with dawning comprehension. Blushing rosily, she tried to conceal the little jacket behind her. Grace! A great light broke on him! Do you mean it? She went to him with a cry, half laugh, half sob, and buried her burning face in his neck. You silly boy. Of course I mean it (you bastard!). The little dance girl. Smiling with wet lechery and manipulating his moist rope of cigar, Faro Jim shuffled a pack of cards slowly and fixed on her his vulturesque eye. A knife in his shiny boots, a small derringer and three aces up his ruffled sleeve, and suave murder in his heart. But the cold gray eyes of the Stranger missed nothing. Imperturbably he drank his Scotch, wheeled from the mirror with barking Colt just one-sixth of a second before the gambler could fire. Faro coughed and slid forward slowly upon the floor.