Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
Lord! You never miss the water till the well goes dry,” noting with keen pleasure the inward convulsion of the childish throat, the winking eyes, the tense constricted face.
“I’ll vow, Mr. Gant,” Eliza bridled, also pleased, “you oughtn’t to do that to the child.”
Or, he would speak sadly of “Little Jimmy,” a legless little boy whom he had often pointed out to Eugene, who lived across the river from Riverside, the amusement park, and around whom he had woven a pathetic fable of poverty and orphanage which was desperately real now to his son. When Eugene was six, Gant had promised him carelessly a pony for Christmas, without any intention of fulfilling his promise. As Christmas neared he had begun to speak touchingly of “Little Jimmy,” of the countless advantages of Eugene’s lot and, after a mighty struggle, the boy had renounced the pony, in a scrawled message to Elfland, in favor of the cripple. Eugene never forgot: even when he had reached manhood the deception of “Little Jimmy” returned to him, without rancor, without ugliness, only with pain for all the blind waste, the stupid perjury, the thoughtless dishonor, the crippling dull deceit.
Luke parroted all of his father’s sermons, but earnestly and witlessly, without Gant’s humor, without his chicanery, only with his sentimentality. He lived in a world of symbols, large, crude, and gaudily painted, labelled “Father,” “Mother,” “Home,” “Family,” “Generosity,” “Honor,” “Unselfishness,” made of sugar and molasses, and gummed glutinously with tear-shaped syrup.
“He’s one good boy,” the neighbors said.
“He’s the cutest thing,” said the ladies, who were charmed by his stutter, his wit, his good nature, his devout attendance on them.
“That boy’s a hustler. He’ll make his mark,” said all the men in town.
And it was as the smiling hustler that he wanted to be known. He read piously all the circulars the Curtis Publishing Company sent to its agents: he posed himself in the various descriptive attitudes that were supposed to promote business — the proper manner of “approach,” the most persuasive manner of drawing the journal from the bag, the animated description of its contents, in which he was supposed to be steeped as a result of his faithful reading — “the good salesman,” the circulars said, “should know in and out the article he is selling”— a knowledge that Luke avoided, but which he replaced with eloquent invention of his own.
The literal digestion of these instructions resulted in one of the most fantastical exhibitions of print-vending ever seen: fortified by his own unlimited cheek, and by the pious axioms of the exhortations that “the good salesman will never take no for his answer,” that he should “stick to his prospect” even if rebuffed, that he should “try to get the customer’s psychology,” the boy would fall into step with an unsuspecting pedestrian, open the broad sheets of The Post under the man’s nose, and in a torrential harangue, sown thickly with stuttering speech, buffoonery, and ingratiation, delivered so rapidly that the man could neither accept nor reject the magazine, hound him before a grinning public down the length of a street, backing him defensively into a wall, and taking from the victim’s eager fingers the five-cent coin that purchased his freedom.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” he would begin in a sonorous voice, dropping wide-leggedly into the “prospect’s” stride. “This week’s edition of The Saturday Evening Post, five cents, only a nickel, p-p-p-purchased weekly by t-t-two million readers. In this week’s issue you have eighty-six pages of f-f-fact and fiction, to say n-n-nothing of the advertisements. If you c-c-c-can’t read you’ll get m-m-more than your money’s worth out of the p-p-pictures. On page 13 this week, we have a very fine article, by I-I-I-Isaac F. Marcosson, the f-f-f-famous traveller and writer on politics; on page 29, you have a story by Irvin S. Cobb, the g-g-g-greatest living humorist, and a new story of the prize-ring by J-J-Jack London. If you b-b-bought it in a book, it’d c-c-cost you a d-d-dollar-and-a-half.”
He had, besides these chance victims, an extensive clientry among the townsfolk. Swinging briskly and cheerily down the street, full of greetings and glib repartee, he would accost each of the grinning men by a new title, in a rich stammering tenor voice:
“Colonel, how are you! Major — here you are, a week’s reading hot off the press. Captain, how’s the boy?”
“How are you, son?”
“Couldn’t be better, General — slick as a puppy’s belly!”
And they would roar with wheezing, red-faced, Southern laughter:
“By God, he’s a good ’un. Here, son, give me one of the damn things. I don’t want it, but I’ll buy it just to hear you talk.”
He was full of pungent and racy vulgarity: he had, more than any of the family, a Rabelaisian earthiness that surged in him with limitless energy, charging his tongue with unpremeditated comparisons, Gargantuan metaphors. Finally, he wet the bed every night in spite of Eliza’s fretting complaints: it was the final touch of his stuttering, whistling, cheerful, vital, and comic personality — he was Luke, the unique, Luke, the incomparable: he was, in spite of his garrulous and fidgeting nervousness, an intensely likable person — and he really had in him a bottomless well of affection. He wanted bounteous praise for his acts, but he had a deep, genuine kindliness and tenderness.
Every week, on Thursday, in Gant’s dusty little office, he would gather the grinning cluster of small boys who bought The Post from him, and harangue them before he sent them out on their duties:
“Well, have you thought of what you’re going to tell them yet? You know you can’t sit around on your little tails and expect them to look you up. Have you got a spiel worked out yet? How do you approach ’em, eh?” he said, turning fiercely to a stricken small boy. “Speak up, speak up, G-G-G-God-damn it — don’t s-s-stand there looking at me. Haw!” he said, laughing with sudden wild idiocy, “look at that face, won’t you?”
Gant surveyed the proceedings from afar with Jannadeau, grinning.
“All right, Christopher Columbus,” continued Luke, good-humoredly. “What do you tell ’em, son?”
The boy cleared his throat timidly: “Mister, do you want to buy a copy of The Saturday Evening Post?”
“Oh, twah-twah,” said Luke, with mincing delicacy, as the boys sniggered, “sweet twah-twah! Do you expect them to buy with a spiel like that? My God, where are your brains? Sail into them. Tackle them, and don’t take no for an answer. Don’t ask them if they WANT to buy. Dive into them: ‘Here you are, sir — hot off the press.’ Jesus Christ,” he yelled, looking at the distant court-house clock with sudden fidget, “we should have been out an hour ago. Come on — don’t stand there: here are your papers. How many do you want, you little Kike?”— for he had several Jews in his employ: they worshipped him and he was very fond of them — he liked their warmth, richness, humor.
“Twenty.”
“Twenty!” he yelled. “You little loafer — you’ll t-t-take fifty. G-g-go on, you c-c-can sell ’em this afternoon. By G-G-God, papa,” he said, pointing to the Jews, as Gant entered the office, “it l-l-looks like the Last S-S-Supper, don’t it? All right!” he said, smacking across the buttocks a small boy who had bent for his quota. “Don’t stick it in my face.” They shrieked with laughter. “Dive in to them now. Don’t let ’em get away from you.” And, laughing and excited, he would send them out into the streets.
To this land of employment and this method of exploitation Eugene was now initiated. He loathed the work with a deadly, an inexplicable loathing. But something in him festered deeply at the idea of disposing of his wares by the process of making such a wretched little nuisance of himself that riddance was purchased only at the price of the magazine. He writhed with shame and humiliation, but he stuck desperately to his task, a queer curly-headed passionate little creature, who raced along by the side of an astonished captive, pouring out of his dark eager face a hurricane of language. And men, fascinated somehow by this strange eloquence from a little boy, bought.
Sometimes the heavy paunch-bellied Federal