LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL. Thomas Wolfe
the base of worth. Of so and so, they might say:
“He’s not worth powder enough to kill him. He’s never been able to support himself,” to which Eliza, but not Gant, might add:
“He hasn’t a stick of property to his name.” This crowned him with infamy.
In the fresh sweet mornings of Spring now, Eugene was howled out of bed at six-thirty by his father, descended to the cool garden, and there, assisted by Gant, filled small strawberry baskets with great crinkled lettuces, radishes, plums, and green apples — somewhat later, with cherries. With these packed in a great hamper, he would peddle his wares through the neighborhood, selling them easily and delightfully, in a world of fragrant morning cookery, at five or ten cents a basket. He would return home gleefully with empty hamper in time for breakfast: he liked the work, the smell of gardens, of fresh wet vegetables; he loved the romantic structure of the earth which filled his pocket with chinking coins.
He was permitted to keep the money of his sales, although Eliza was annoyingly insistent that he should not squander it, but open a bank account with it with which, one day, he might establish himself in business, or buy a good piece of property. And she bought him a little bank, into which his reluctant fingers dropped a portion of his earnings, and from which he got a certain dreary satisfaction from time to time by shaking it close to his ear and dwelling hungrily on all the purchasable delight that was locked away from him in the small heavy bullion-clinking vault. There was a key, but Eliza kept it.
But, as the months passed, and the sturdy child’s body of his infancy lengthened rapidly to some interior chemical expansion, and he became fragile, thin, pallid, but remarkably tall for his age, Eliza began to say: “That boy’s big enough to do a little work.”
Every Thursday afternoon now during the school months, and thence until Saturday, he was sent out upon the streets to sell The Saturday Evening Post, of which Luke held the local agency. Eugene hated the work with a deadly sweltering hatred; he watched the approach of Thursday with sick horror.
Luke had been the agent since his twelfth year: his reputation for salesmanship was sown through the town; he came with wide grin, exuberant vitality, wagging and witty tongue, hurling all his bursting energy into an insane extraversion. He lived absolutely in event: there was in him no secret place, nothing withheld and guarded — he had an instinctive horror of all loneliness. He wanted above all else to be esteemed and liked by the world, and the need for the affection and esteem of his family was desperately essential. The fulsome praise, the heartiness of hand and tongue, the liberal display of sentiment were as the breath of life to him: he was overwhelmingly insistent in the payment of drinks at the fountain, the bringer-home of packed ice-cream for Eliza, and of cigars to Gant and, as Gant gave publication to his generosity, the boy’s need for it increased — he built up an image of himself as the Good Fellow, witty, unselfish, laughed at but liked by all — as Big–Hearted Unselfish Luke. And this was the opinion people had of him.
Many times in the years that followed, when Eugene’s pockets were empty, Luke thrust a coin roughly and impatiently in them, but, hard as the younger boy’s need might be, there was always an awkward scene — painful, embarrassed protestations, a distressful confusion because Eugene, having accurately and intuitively gauged his brother’s hunger for gratitude and esteem, felt sharply that he was yielding up his independence to a bludgeoning desire.
He had never felt the slightest shame at Ben’s bounty: his enormously sensitized perception had told him long since that he might get the curse of annoyance, the cuff of anger, from his brother, but that past indulgences would not be brandished over him, and that even the thought of having bestowed gifts would give Ben inward shame. In this, he was like Ben: the thought of a gift he made, with its self-congratulatory implications, made him writhe.
Thus, before he was ten, Eugene’s brooding spirit was nettled in the complexity of truth and seeming. He could find no words, no answers to the puzzles that baffled and maddened him: he found himself loathing that which bore the stamp of virtue, sick with weariness and horror at what was considered noble. He was hurled, at eight years, against the torturing paradox of the ungenerous-generous, the selfish-unselfish, the noble-base, and unable to fathom or define those deep springs of desire in the human spirit that seek public gratification by virtuous pretension, he was made wretched by the conviction of his own sinfulness.
There was in him a savage honesty, which exercised an uncontrollable domination over him when his heart or head were deeply involved. Thus, at the funeral of some remote kinsman, or of some acquaintance of the family, for whom he had never acquired any considerable affection, he would grow bitterly shamefast if, while listening to the solemn drone of the minister, or the sorrowful chanting of the singers, he felt his face had assumed an expression of unfelt and counterfeited grief: as a consequence he would shift about matter-of-factly, cross his legs, gaze indifferently at the ceiling, or look out of the window with a smile, until he was conscious his conduct had attracted the attention of people, and that they were looking on him with disfavor. Then, he felt a certain grim satisfaction as if, although having lost esteem, he had recorded his life.
But Luke flourished hardily in all the absurd mummery of the village: he gave heaping weight to every simulation of affection, grief, pity, good-will, and modesty — there was no excess that he did not underscore heavily, and the world’s dull eye read him kindly.
He spun himself outward with ceaseless exuberance: he was genuinely and whole-heartedly involved. There was in him no toilsome web that might have checked him, no balancing or restraining weight — he had enormous energy, hungry gregariousness, the passion to pool his life.
In the family, where a simple brutal tag was enough for the appraisal of all fine consciences, Ben went simply as “the quiet one,” Luke as the generous and unselfish one, Eugene as the “scholar.” It served. The generous one, who had never in all his life had the power to fasten his mind upon the pages of a book, or the logic of number, for an hour together, resented, as he see-sawed comically from one leg to another, stammering quaintly, whistling for the word that stuck in his throat, the brooding abstraction of the youngest.
“Come on, this is no time for day-dreaming,” he would stammer ironically. “The early bird catches the worm — it’s time we went out on the street.”
And although his reference to day-dreams was only part of the axiomatic mosaic of his speech, Eugene was startled and confused, feeling that his secret world, so fearfully guarded, had been revealed to ridicule. And the older boy, too, smarting from his own dismal performances at school, convinced himself that the deep inward turning of the spirit, the brooding retreat into the secret place, which he recognized in the mysterious hypnotic power of language over Eugene, was not only a species of indolence, for the only work he recognized was that which strained at weight or sweated in the facile waggery of the tongue, but that it was moreover the indulgence of a “selfish” family-forgetting spirit. He was determined to occupy alone the throne of goodness.
Thus, Eugene gathered vaguely but poignantly, that other boys of his age were not only self-supporting, but had for years kept their decrepit parents in luxury by their earnings as electrical engineers, presidents of banks, or members of Congress. There was, in fact, no excess of suggestion that Gant did not use upon his youngest son — he had felt, long since, the vibration to every tremor of feeling of the million-noted little instrument, and it pleased him to see the child wince, gulp, tortured with remorse. Thus, while he piled high with succulent meat the boy’s platter, he would say sentimentally:
“I tell you what: there are not many boys who have what you have. What’s going to become of you when your old father’s dead and gone?” And he would paint a ghastly picture of himself lying cold in death, lowered forever into the damp rot of the earth, buried, forgotten — an event which, he hinted sorrowfully, was not remote.
“You’ll remember the old man, then,” he would say. “Ah, 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,