Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (2 page)

The next morning he resumed his journey by coach. 
His destination was the little town of Altamont, twenty-four miles
away beyond the rim of the great outer wall of the hills.  As
the horses strained slowly up the mountain road Oliver's spirit
lifted a little.  It was a gray-golden day in late October,
bright and windy.  There was a sharp bite and sparkle in the
mountain air: the range soared above him, close, immense, clean, and
barren.  The trees rose gaunt and stark: they were almost
leafless.  The sky was full of windy white rags of cloud; a
thick blade of mist washed slowly around the rampart of a mountain.

Below him a mountain stream foamed down its rocky
bed, and he could see little dots of men laying the track that would
coil across the hill toward Altamont.  Then the sweating team
lipped the gulch of the mountain, and, among soaring and lordly
ranges that melted away in purple mist, they began the slow descent
toward the high plateau on which the town of Altamont was built.

In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed
in their enormous cup, he found sprawled out on its hundred hills and
hollows a town of four thousand people.

There were new lands.  His heart lifted.
 
 

This town of Altamont had been settled soon after the
Revolutionary War.  It had been a convenient stopping-off place
for cattledrovers and farmers in their swing eastward from Tennessee
into South Carolina.  And, for several decades before the Civil
War, it had enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from
Charleston and the plantations of the hot South.  When Oliver
first came to it it had begun to get some reputation not only as a
summer resort, but as a sanitarium for tuberculars.  Several
rich men from the North had established hunting lodges in the hills,
and one of them had bought huge areas of mountain land and, with an
army of imported architects, carpenters and masons, was planning the
greatest country estate in America--something in limestone, with
pitched slate roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three rooms.  It
was modelled on the chateau at Blois.  There was also a vast new
hotel, a sumptuous wooden barn, rambling comfortably upon the summit
of a commanding hill.

But most of the population was still native,
recruited from the hill and country people in the surrounding
districts.  They were Scotch-Irish mountaineers, rugged,
provincial, intelligent, and industrious.

Oliver had about twelve hundred dollars saved from
the wreckage of Cynthia's estate.  During the winter he rented a
little shack at one edge of the town's public square, acquired a
small stock of marbles, and set up business.  But he had little
to do at first save to think of the prospect of his death. 
During the bitter and lonely winter, while he thought he was dying,
the gaunt scarecrow Yankee that flapped muttering through the streets
became an object of familiar gossip to the townspeople.  All the
people at his boarding-house knew that at night he walked his room
with great caged strides, and that a long low moan that seemed wrung
from his bowels quivered incessantly on his thin lips.  But he
spoke to no one about it.
 
And then
the marvellous hill Spring came, green-golden, with brief spurting
winds, the magic and fragrance of the blossoms, warm gusts of
balsam.  The great wound in Oliver began to heal.  His
voice was heard in the land once more, there were purple flashes of
the old rhetoric, the ghost of the old eagerness.

One day in April, as with fresh awakened senses, he
stood before his shop, watching the flurry of life in the square,
Oliver heard behind him the voice of a man who was passing.  And
that voice, flat, drawling, complacent, touched with sudden light a
picture that had lain dead in him for twenty years.

"Hit's a comin'!  Accordin' to my figgers
hit's due June 11, 1886."

Oliver turned and saw retreating the burly persuasive
figure of the prophet he had last seen vanishing down the dusty road
that led to Gettysburg and Armageddon.

"Who is that?" he asked a man.

The man looked and grinned.

"That's Bacchus Pentland," he said. 
"He's quite a character.There are a lot of his folks around
here."

Oliver wet his great thumb briefly.  Then, with
a grin, he said:

"Has Armageddon come yet?"

"He's expecting it any day now," said the
man.
 
 

Then Oliver met Eliza.  He lay one afternoon in
Spring upon the smooth leather sofa of his little office, listening
to the bright piping noises in the Square.  A restoring peace
brooded over his great extended body.  He thought of the loamy
black earth with its sudden young light of flowers, of the beaded
chill of beer, and of the plumtree's dropping blossoms.  Then he
heard the brisk heel-taps of a woman coming down among the marbles,
and he got hastily to his feet.  He was drawing on his well
brushed coat of heavy black just as she entered.

"I tell you what," said Eliza, pursing her
lips in reproachful banter, "I wish I was a man and had nothing
to do but lie around all day on a good easy sofa."

"Good afternoon, madam," said Oliver with a
flourishing bow. "Yes," he said, as a faint sly grin bent
the corners of his thin mouth, "I reckon you've caught me taking
my constitutional.  As a  matter of fact I very rarely lie
down in the daytime, but I've been in bad health for the last year
now, and I'm not able to do the work I used to."

He was silent a moment; his face drooped in an
expression of hangdog dejection.  "Ah, Lord!  I don't
know what's to become of me!"

"Pshaw!" said Eliza briskly and
contemptuously.  "There's nothing wrong with you in my
opinion.  You're a big strapping fellow, in the prime of life. 
Half of it's only imagination.  Most of the time we think we're
sick it's all in the mind.  I remember three years ago I was
teaching school in Hominy Township when I was taken down with
pneumonia.  Nobody ever expected to see me come out of it alive
but I got through it somehow; I well remember one day I was sitting
down--as the fellow says, I reckon I was convalescin'; the reason I
remember is Old Doctor Fletcher had just been and when he went out I
saw him shake his head at my cousin Sally.  'Why Eliza, what on
earth,' she said, just as soon as he had gone, 'he tells me you're
spitting up blood every time you cough; you've got consumption as
sure as you live.'  'Pshaw,' I said.  I remember I laughed
just as big as you please, determined to make a big joke of it all; I
just thought to myself, I'm not going to give into it, I'll fool them
all yet; 'I don't believe a word of it' (I said)," she nodded
her head smartly at him, and pursed her lips, "'and besides,
Sally' (I said) 'we've all got to go some time, and there's no use
worrying about what's going to happen.  It may come tomorrow, or
it may come later, but it's bound to come to all in the end'."

"Ah Lord!" said Oliver, shaking his head
sadly.  "You bit the nail on the head that time.  A
truer word was never spoken."

Merciful God! he thought, with an anguished inner
grin.  How long is this to keep up?  But she's a pippin as
sure as you're born.  He looked appreciatively at her trim erect
figure, noting her milky white skin, her black-brown eyes, with their
quaint child's stare, and her jet black hair drawn back tightly from
her high white forehead.  She had a curious trick of pursing her
lips reflectively before she spoke; she liked to take her time, and
came to the point after interminable divagations down all the
lane-ends of memory and overtone, feasting upon the golden pageant of
all she had ever said, done, felt, thought, seen, or replied, with
egocentric delight.  Then, while he looked, she ceased speaking
abruptly, put her neat gloved hand to her chin, and stared off with a
thoughtful pursed mouth.

"Well," she said after a moment, "if
you're getting your health back and spend a good part of your time
lying around you ought to have something to occupy your mind." 
She opened a leather portmanteau she was carrying and produced a
visiting card and two fat volumes.  "My name," she
said portentously, with slow emphasis, "is Eliza Pentland, and I
represent the Larkin Publishing Company."

She spoke the words proudly, with dignified gusto. 
Merciful God! A book agent! thought Gant.

"We are offering," said Eliza, opening a
huge yellow book with a fancy design of spears and flags and laurel
wreaths, "a book of poems called Gems of Verse for Hearth and
Fireside as well as Larkin's Domestic Doctor and Book of Household
Remedies, giving directions for the cure and prevention of over five
hundred diseases."

"Well," said Gant, with a faint grin,
wetting his big thumb briefly, "I ought to find one that I've
got out of that."

"Why, yes," said Eliza, nodding smartly,
"as the fellow says, youcan read poetry for the good of your
soul and Larkin for the good of your body."

"I like poetry," said Gant, thumbing over
the pages, and pausing with interest at the section marked Songs of
the Spur and Sabre. "In my boyhood I could recite it by the
hour."

He bought the books.  Eliza packed her samples,
and stood up looking sharply and curiously about the dusty little
shop.

"Doing any business?" she said.

"Very little," said Oliver sadly. 
"Hardly enough to keep body and soul together.  I'm a
stranger in a strange land."

"Pshaw!" said Eliza cheerfully.  "You
ought to get out and meet more people.  You need something to
take your mind off yourself. If I were you, I'd pitch right in and
take an interest in the town's progress.  We've got everything
here it takes to make a big town--scenery, climate, and natural
resources, and we all ought to work together.  If I had a few
thousand dollars I know what I'd do,"--she winked smartly at
him, and began to speak with a curiously masculine gesture of the
hand--forefinger extended, fist loosely clenched.  "Do you
see this corner here--the one you're on? It'll double in value in the
next few years.  Now, here!" she gestured before her with
the loose masculine gesture.  "They're going to run a
street through there some day as sure as you live. And when they
do--" she pursed her lips reflectively, "that property is
going to be worth money."

She continued to talk about property with a strange
meditative hunger.  The town seemed to be an enormous blueprint
to her: her head was stuffed uncannily with figures and
estimates--who owned a lot, who sold it, the sale-price, the real
value, the future value, first and second mortgages, and so on. 
When she had finished, Oliver said with the emphasis of strong
aversion, thinking of Sydney:

"I hope I never own another piece of property as
long as I live--save a house to live in.  It is nothing but a
curse and a care, and the tax-collector gets it all in the end."

Eliza looked at him with a startled expression, as if
he had uttered a damnable heresy.

"Why, say!  That's no way to talk!"
she said.  "You want to lay something by for a rainy day,
don't you?"

"I'm having my rainy day now," he said
gloomily.  "All the property I need is eight feet of earth
to be buried in."

Then, talking more cheerfully, he walked with her to
the door of the shop, and watched her as she marched primly away
across the square, holding her skirts at the curbs with ladylike
nicety.  Then he turned back among his marbles again with a
stirring in him of a joy he thought he had lost forever.
 
 

The Pentland family, of which Eliza was a member, was
one of the strangest tribes that ever came out of the hills.  It
had no clear title to the name of Pentland: a Scotch-Englishman of
that name, who was a mining engineer, the grandfather of the present
head of the family, had come into the hills after the Revolution,
looking for copper, and lived there for several years, begetting
several children by one of the pioneer women.  When he
disappeared the woman took for herself and her children the name of
Pentland.

The present chieftain of the tribe was Eliza's
father, the brother of the prophet Bacchus, Major Thomas Pentland. 
Another brother had been killed during the Seven Days.  Major
Pentland's military title was honestly if inconspicuously earned. 
While Bacchus, who never rose above the rank of Corporal, was
blistering his hard hands at Shiloh, the Major, as commander of two
companies of Home Volunteers, was guarding the stronghold of the
native hills.  This stronghold was never threatened until the
closing days of the war, when the Volunteers, ambuscaded behind
convenient trees and rocks, fired three volleys into a detachment of
Sherman's stragglers, and quietly dispersed to the defense of their
attendant wives and children.

The Pentland family was as old as any in the
community, but it had always been poor, and had made few pretenses to
gentility.  By marriage, and by intermarriage among its own
kinsmen, it could boast of some connection with the great, of some
insanity, and a modicum of idiocy.  But because of its obvious
superiority, in intelligence and fibre, to most of the mountain
people it held a position of solid respect among them.

The Pentlands bore a strong clan-marking.  Like
most rich personalities in strange families their powerful
group-stamp became more impressive because of their differences. 
They had broad powerful noses, with fleshy deeply scalloped wings,
sensual mouths, extraordinarily mixed of delicacy and coarseness,
which in the process of thinking they convolved with astonishing
flexibility, broad intelligent foreheads, and deep flat cheeks, a
trifle hollowed.  The men were generally ruddy of face, and
their typical stature was meaty, strong, and of middling height,
although it varied into gangling cadaverousness.