Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe Read Online Free PDF Page A

forty-two,
her last child stirring in her womb, she had a conviction, enforced
by her Scotch superstition, and the blind vanity of her family, which
saw extinction for others but not for itself, that she was being
shaped to a purpose.
    As she lay in her bed, a great star burned across her
vision in the western quarter of the sky; she fancied it was climbing
heaven slowly.  And although she could not have said toward what
pinnacle her life was moving, she saw in the future freedom that she
had never known, possession and power and wealth, the desire for
which was mixed inextinguishably with the current of her blood. 
Thinking of this in the dark, she pursed her lips with thoughtful
satisfaction, unhumorously seeing herself at work in the carnival,
taking away quite easily from the hands of folly what it had never
known how to keep.
    "I'll get it!" she thought, "I'll get
it.  Will has it!  Jim has it.  And I'm smarter than
they are."  And with regret, tinctured with pain and
bitterness, she thought of Gant:
    "Pshaw!  If I hadn't kept after him he
wouldn't have a stick to call his own to-day.  What little we
have got I've had to fight for; we wouldn't have a roof over our
heads; we'd spend the rest of our lives in a rented house"--which
was to her the final ignominy of shiftless and improvident people.
    And she resumed:  "The money he squanders
every year in licker would buy a good lot: we could be well-to-do
people now if we'd started at the very beginning.  But he's
always hated the very idea of owning anything: couldn't bear it, he
told me once, since he lost his money in that trade in Sydney. 
If I'd been there, you can bet your bottom dollar there'd been no
loss.  Or, it'd be on the other side," she added grimly.
    And lying there while the winds of early autumn swept
down from the Southern hills, filling the black air with dropping
leaves, and making, in intermittent rushes, a remote sad thunder in
great trees, she thought of the stranger who had come to live in her,
and of that other stranger, author of so much woe, who had lived with
her for almost twenty years.  And thinking of Gant, she felt
again an inchoate aching wonder, recalling the savage strife between
them, and the great submerged struggle beneath, founded upon the
hatred and the love of property, in which she did not doubt of her
victory, but which baffled her, foiled her.
    "I'll vow!" she whispered.  "I'll
vow!  I never saw such a man!"
    Gant, faced with the loss of sensuous delight,
knowing the time had come when all his Rabelaisian excess in eating,
drinking, and loving must come under the halter, knew of no gain that
could compensate him for the loss of libertinism; he felt, too, the
sharp ache of regret, feeling that he had possessed powers, had
wasted chances, such as his partnership with Will Pentland, that
might have given him position and wealth.  He knew that the
century had gone in which the best part of his life had passed; he
felt, more than ever, the strangeness and loneliness of our little
adventure upon the earth: he thought of his childhood on the Dutch
farm, the Baltimore days, the aimless drift down the continent, the
appalling fixation of his whole life upon a series of accidents. 
The enormous tragedy of accident hung like a gray cloud over his
life. He saw more clearly than ever that he was a stranger in a
strange land among people who would always be alien to him. 
Strangest of all, he thought, was this union, by which he had
begotten children, created a life dependent on him, with a woman so
remote from all he understood.
    He did not know whether the year 1900 marked for him
a beginning or an ending; but with the familiar weakness of the
sensualist, he resolved to make it an ending, burning the spent fire
in him down to a guttering flame.  In the first half of the
month of January, still penitently true to the New Year's
reformation, he begot a child: by Spring, when it was evident that
Eliza was again pregnant, he had