Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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 Münchener 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, a valiant 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 cursed and 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 for more. 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,