by Thomas Wolfe
There was no sound now in the crowded room of the Triple Y. Men stood petrified. The face of Bad Bill and the two Mexicans had turned a dirty gray. Finally, the sheriff spoke, turning with awe from the still figure on the sawdust floor.
"By God, stranger!" he ejaculated, "I never knew the man lived who could beat Faro to the draw. What's yore name?"
"In the fam'ly Bible back home, pardner," the Stranger drawled, "it's Eugene Gant, but folks out here generally calls me The Dixie Ghost."
There was a slow gasp of wonder from the crowd.
"Gawd!" some one whispered. "It's the Ghost!"
As the Ghost turned coolly back to finish his interrupted drink, he found himself face to face with the little dancing girl. Twosmoking globes of brine welled from the pellucid depths of her pure eyes and fell with a hot splash on his bronzed hand.
"How can I ever thank you!" she cried. "You have saved me from a fate far worse than death."
But the Ghost, who had faced death many times without a flicker of a lash, was unable to face something he saw now in a pair of bigbrown eyes. He took off his sombrero and twisted it shyly in his big hands.
"Why, that's all right, ma'am," he gulped awkwardly. "Glad to be of service to a lady any time."
By this time the two bartenders had thrown a table-cloth over Faro Bill, carried the limp body into the back room, and returned to their positions behind the bar. The crowd clustered about in little groups, laughing and talking excitedly, and in a moment, as the pianist began to hammer out a tune on the battered piano, broke into the measures of a waltz.
In the wild West of those days, passions were primitive, vengeance sudden, and retribution immediate.
Two dimples sentinelled a platoon of milk-white teeth.
"Won't you dance with me, Mr. Ghost?" she coaxed.
Thoughtfully he pondered on love's mystery. Pure but passionate. Appearances against her, 'tis true. The foul breath of slander. She worked in a bawdy-house but her heart was clean. Outside of that, what can one say against her? He thought pleasantly of murder. With child's eyes he regarded his extinct enemies. Men died violently but cleanly, in the movies. Bang-bang. Good-by, boys, I'm through. Through the head or heart--a clean hole, no blood. He had kept innocency. Do their guts or their brains come spilling out? Currant jelly where a face was, the chin shot off. Or down there that other--His arm beat the air like a wing: he writhed. If you lose that? Done, die. He clutched his throat in his anguish.
They bent down eastward along Academy Street, having turned right from the little caudal appendage that gave on the northeastern corner of the Square. The boy's mind flamed with bright streaming images, sharp as gems, mutable as chameleons. His life was the shadow of a shadow, a play within a play. He became the hero-actor-star, the lord of the cinema, and the lover of a beautiful movie-queen, as heroic as his postures, with a superior actuality for every make-believe. He was the Ghost and he who played the Ghost, the cause that minted legend into fact.
He was those heroes whom he admired, and the victor, in beauty, nobility, and sterling worth, over those whom he despised because they always triumphed and were forever good and pretty and beloved of women. He was chosen and beloved of a bevy of internationally renowned beauties, vampires and pure sweet girls alike, with fruity blondes in the lead, all contesting for his favors, and some of the least scrupulous resorting to underhand practices in order to win him. Their pure eyes turned up to him in everlasting close-ups: he feasted virtuously upon their proffered lips and, conflict over, murder sanctified, and virtue crowned, walked away with his siren into the convenient blaze of a constantly setting sun.
With burning sidelong face he looked quickly up at Gant, twisting his convulsive neck.
Across the street, a calcium glare from the corner light bathed coldly the new brick facade of the Orpheum Theatre. All This Week Gus Nolan and His Georgia Peaches. Also the Piedmont Comedy Four and Miss Bobbie Dukane.
The theatre was dark, the second show was over. They stared curiously across the street at the posters. In this cold silence where were the Peaches? At the Athens now, upon the Square. They always went there after. Gant looked at his watch. 11:12. Big Bill Messier outside swinging his club and watching them. On the counter stools a dozen bucks and ogling rakehells. I've got a car outside. Dalliance under difficulties. Later, the Genevieve on Liberty Street. They all stay there. Whisperings. Footfalls. Raided.
Girls from good families, some of them, I suppose, Gant thought.
Opposite the Baptist Church a hearse was drawn up before Gorham's Undertaking Parlors. A light burned dimly through the ferns. Who can that be? he wondered. Miss Annie Patton critically ill. She's past eighty. Some lunger from New York. A little Jew with a peaked face. Some one all the time. Await alike th' inevitable hour. Ah, Lord!
With loss of hunger, he thought of undertaking and undertakers, and in particular of Mr. Gorham. He was a man with blond hair and white eyebrows.
Waited to marry her when that rich young Cuban died, so they could take honeymoon to Havana.
They turned down Spring Street by the Baptist Church. This is really like a city of the dead, Eugene thought. The town, rimmed with frost, lay frozen below the stars in a cataleptic trance. The animacy of life hung in abeyance. Nothing grew old, nothing decayed, nothing died. It was triumph over time. If a great demon snapped his fingers and stopped all life in the world for an instant that should be a hundred years, who would know the difference? Every man a Sleeping Beauty. If you're waking call me early, call me early, mother dear.
He tried to see life and movement behind the walls, and failed. He and Gant were all that lived. For a house betrays nothing: there may be murder behind its very quiet face. He thought that Troy should be like this--perfect, undecayed as the day when Hector died. Only they burned it. To find old cities as they were, unruined--the picture charmed him. The Lost Atlantis. Ville d'Ys. The old lost towns, seasunken. Great vacant ways, unrusted, echoed under his lonely feet; he haunted vast arcades, he pierced the atrium, his shoes rang on the temple flags.
Or to be, he lusciously meditated, left alone with a group of pretty women in a town whence all the other people had fled from some terror of plague, earthquake, volcano, or other menace to which he, quite happily, was immune. Lolling his tongue delicately, he saw himself loafing sybaritically through first-class confectioners' and grocers' shops, gorging like an anaconda on imported dainties: exquisite small fish from Russia, France, and Sardinia; coal-black hams from England; ripe olives, brandied peaches, and liqueur chocolates. He would loot old cellars for fat Burgundies, crack the gold necks of earth-chilled bottles of Pol Roger against the wall, and slake his noonday thirst at the spouting bung of a great butt of Mé dunkels. When his linen was soiled he would outfit himself anew with silk underwear and the finest shirtings; he would have a new hat every day in the week and new suits whenever he pleased.
He would occupy a new house every day, and sleep in a different bed every night, selecting the most luxurious residence ultimately for permanent occupancy, and bringing together in it the richest treasures of every notable library in the city. Finally, when he wanted a woman from the small group that remained and that spent its time in weaving new enticements for him, he would summons her by ringing out the number he had given her on the Court House bell.
He wanted opulent solitude. His dark vision burned on kingdoms under the sea, on windy castle crags, and on the deep elf kingdoms at the earth's core. He groped for the doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone. And no birds sing.
More practically, he saw for himself great mansions in the ground, grottoes buried in the deep heart of a hill, vast chambers of brown earth, sumptuously appointed with his bee-like plunder. Cool hidden cisterns would bring him air; from a peephole in the hillside he could look down on a winding road and see armed men seeking for him, or hear their thwarted gropings overhead. He would pull fat fish from subterranean pools,
his great earth cellars would be stocked with old wine, he could loot the world of its treasures, including the handsomest women, and never be caught.
King Solomon's mines. She. Proserpine. Ali Baba. Orpheus and Eurydice. Naked came I from my mother's womb. Naked shall I return. Let the mothering womb of earth engulf me. Naked, avaliant wisp of man, in vast brown limbs engulfed.
They neared the corner above Eliza's. For the first time the boy noted that their pace had quickened, and that he had almost broken into a trot in order to keep up with Gant's awkward plunging strides.
His father was moaning softly with long quivering exhalations of breath, and he had one hand clasped over his pain. The boy spluttered idiotically with laughter. Gant turned a glance full of reproach and physical torture upon him.
"Oh-h-h-h-h! Merciful God," he whined, "it's hurting me."
Abruptly, Eugene was touched with pity. For the first time he saw plainly that great Gant had grown old. The sallow face had yellowed and lost its sinew. The thin mouth was petulant. The chemistry of decay had left its mark.
No, there was no return after this. Eugene saw now that Gant was dying very slowly. The vast resiliency, the illimitable power of former times had vanished. The big frame was breaking up before him like a beached ship. Gant was sick. He was old.
He had a disease that is very common among old men who have lived carelessly and lustily--enlargement of the prostate gland. It was not often in itself a fatal disease--it was more often one of the flags of age and death, but it was ugly and uncomfortable. It was generally treated successfully by surgery--the operation was not desperate. But Gant hated and feared the knife: he listened eagerly to all persuasions against it.
He had no gift for philosophy. He could not view with amusement and detachment the death of the senses, the waning of desire, the waxing of physical impotence. He fed hungrily, lewdly, on all news of seduction: his amusement had in it the eyes of eagerness, the hot breath of desire. He was incapable of the pleasant irony by which the philosophic spirit mocks that folly it is no longer able to enjoy.
Gant was incapable of resignation. He had the most burning of all lusts--the lust of memory, the ravenous hunger of the will which tries to waken what is dead. He had reached the time of life when he read the papers greedily for news of death. As friends and acquaintances died he shook his head with the melancholy hypocrisy of old men, saying: "They're all going, one by one. Ah, Lord! The old man will be the next." But he did not believe it. Death was still for the others, not for himself.
He grew old very rapidly. He began to die before their eyes?a quick age, and a slow death, impotent, disintegrating, horrible because his life had been so much identified with physical excess--huge drinking, huge eating, huge rioting debauchery. It was fantastic and terrible to see the great body waste. They began to watch the progress of his disease with something of the horror with which one watches the movements of a dog with a broken leg, before he is destroyed--a horror greater than that one feels when a man has a similar hurt, because a man may live without legs. A dog is all included in his hide.
His wild bombast was tempered now by senile petulance. He cursedand whined by intervals. At the dead of night he would rise, full of pain and terror, blaspheming vilely against his God at one moment, and frantically entreating forgiveness at the next. Through all this tirade ran the high quivering exhalation of physical pain--actual and undeniable.
"Oh-h-h-h! I curse the day I was born! . . . I curse the day I was given life by that bloodthirsty Monster up above . . . Oh-h-h-h-h! Jesus! I beg of you. I know I've been bad. Forgive me. Have mercy and pity upon me! Give me another chance, in Jesus' name . . . Oh-h-h-h-h!"
Eugene had moments of furious anger because of these demonstrations. He was angry that Gant, having eaten his cake, now howled because he had stomach-ache and at the same time begged formore. Bitterly he reflected that his father's life had devoured whatever had served it, and that few men had had more sensuous enjoyment, or had been more ruthless in their demands on others. He found these exhibitions, these wild denunciations and cowardly grovellings in propitiation of a God none of them paid any attention to in health, ugly and abominable. The constant meditation of both Gant and Eliza on the death of others, their morbid raking of the news for items announcing the death of some person known to them, their weird absorption with the death of some toothless hag who, galled by bedsores, at length found release after her eightieth year, while fire, famine, and slaughter in other parts of the world passed unnoticed by them, their extravagant superstition over what was local and unimportant, seeing the intervention of God in the death of a peasant, and the suspension of divine law and natural order in their own, filled him with choking fury.
But Eliza was in splendid condition now to ponder upon the death of others. Her health was perfect. She was in her middle-fifties: she had grown triumphantly stronger after the diseases of the middle years. White, compact, a great deal heavier now than she had ever been, she performed daily tasks of drudgery in the maintenance of Dixieland, that would have floored a strong negro. She hardly ever got to bed before two o'clock in the morning, and was up again before seven.
She admitted her health grudgingly. She made the most of every ache, and she infuriated Gant by meeting every complaint with a corresponding account of her own disorders. When badgered by Helen because of her supposed neglect of the sick man or when the concentration of attention upon the invalid piqued her jealousy, she smiled with white tremulous bitterness, hinting darkly:
"He may not be the first to go. I had a premonition--I don't know what else you'd call it--the other day. I tell you what--it may not be long now--" Her eyes bleared with pity--shaking her puckered mouth, she wept at her own funeral.
"Good heavens, mama!" Helen burst out furiously. "There's nothing wrong with you. Papa's a sick man! Don't you realize that?"
She didn't.
"Pshaw!" she said. "There's nothing much wrong with him. McGuire told me two men out of three have it after they're fifty."
His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of hatred against her crescent health. It made him mad to see her stand so strong. Murderous impotent, baffled--a maniacal anger against her groped for an outlet in him, sometimes exploding in a wild inchoate scream.
He yielded weakly to invalidism, he became tyrannous of attention, jealous of service. Her indifference to his health maddened him, created a morbid hunger for pity and tears. At times he got insanely drunk and tried to frighten her by feigning death, one time so successfully that Ben, bending over his rigid form in the hallway, was whitened with conviction.
"I can't feel his heart, mama," he said, with a nervous whicker of his lips.
"Well," she said, picking her language with deliberate choosiness, "the pitcher went to the well once too often. I knew it would happen sooner or later."
Through a slotted eye he glared murderously at her. Judicially, with placid folded hands, she studied him. Her calm eye caught the slow movement of a stealthy inhalation.
"You get his purse, son, and any papers he may have," she directed. "I'll call the undertaker."
With an infuriate scream the dead awakened.
"I thought that would bring you to," she said complacently.
He scrambled to his feet.
"You hell-hound!" he yelled. "You would drink my heart's blood. You are without mercy and without pity--inhuman and bloody monster that you are."
"Some day," Eliza observed, "you'll cry wolf-wolf once too often."
He went three times a week to Cardiac's office for treatment. The dry doctor had grown old; behind his dusty restraint, the prim authority of his manner, there was a deepening well of senile bawdry. He had a comfortable fortune, he cared little for his dwindling practice. He was still a brilliant bacteriologist: he spent hours over slides etched in flowering patterns of bacilli, and he was sought after by diseased prostitutes, to whom he rendered competent service.
He dissuaded the Gants from surgery. He
was jealously absorbed in the treatment of Gant's disease, scoffed at operations, and insisted he could give adequate relief by manipulation of the affected parts and the use of the catheter.
The two men became devoted friends. The doctor gave up entire mornings to the treatment of Gant's disease. The consulting-room was filled with their sly laughter while scrofulous mountaineers glared dully at the pages of Life in the antechamber. As Gant sprawled out voluptuously on the table after his masseur had finished his work, he listened appreciatively to the secrets of light women, or to tidbits from books of pseudoscientific pornography, of which the doctor had a large number.
"You say," he demanded eagerly, "that the monks petitioned the archbishop?"
"Yes," said the doctor. "They suffered during the hot weather. He wrote 'granted' across the petition. Here's a photograph of the document." He held the book open in his clean parched fingers.
"Merciful God!" said Gant, staring. "I suppose it's pretty bad in those hot countries."
He licked his thumb, smiling lewdly to himself. The late Oscar Wilde, for instance.
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