Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe Read Online Free PDF

hurled himself into an orgy to which
even a notable four months' drunk in 1896 could offer no precedent. 
Day after day he became maniacally drunk, until he fixed himself in a
state of constant insanity: in May she sent him off again to a
sanitarium at Piedmont to take the "cure," which consisted
simply in feeding him plainly and cheaply, and keeping him away from
alcohol for six weeks, a regime which contributed no more ravenously
to his hunger than it did to his thirst.  He returned, outwardly
chastened, but inwardly a raging furnace, toward the end of June: the
day before he came back, Eliza, obviously big with child, her white
face compactly set, walked sturdily into each of the town's fourteen
saloons, calling up the proprietor or the barman behind his counter,
and speaking clearly and loudly in the sodden company of bar
clientry:
    "See here: I just came in to tell you that Mr.
Gant is coming back to-morrow, and I want you all to know that if I
hear of any of you selling him a drink, I'll put you in the
penitentiary."
    The threat, they knew, was preposterous, but the
white judicial face, the thoughtful pursing of the lips, and the
right hand, which she held loosely clenched, like a man's, with the
forefinger extended, emphasizing her proclamation with a calm, but
somehow powerful gesture, froze them with a terror no amount of
fierce excoriation could have produced.  They received her
announcement in beery stupefaction, muttering at most a startled
agreement as she walked out.
    "By God," said a mountaineer, sending a
brown inaccurate stream toward a cuspidor, "she'll do it, too. 
That woman means business."
    "Hell!" said Tim O'Donnel, thrusting his
simian face comically above his counter, "I wouldn't give W.O. a
drink now if it was fifteen cents a quart and we was alone in a
privy.  Is she gone yet?"
    There was vast whisky laughter.
    "Who is she?" some one asked.
    "She's Will Pentland's sister."
    "By God, she'll do it then," cried several;
and the place trembled again with their laughter.
    Will Pentland was in Loughran's when she entered. 
She did not greet him.  When she had gone he turned to a man
near him, prefacing his remark with a birdlike nod and wink: 
"Bet you can't do that," he said.
    Gant, when he returned, and was publicly refused at a
bar, was wild with rage and humiliation.  He got whisky very
easily, of course, by sending a drayman from his steps, or some
negro, in for it; but, in spite of the notoriety of his conduct,
which had, he knew, become a classic myth for the children of the
town, he shrank at each new advertisement of his behaviour; he
became, year by year, more, rather than less, sensitive to it, and
his shame, his quivering humiliation on mornings after, product of
rasped pride and jangled nerves, was pitiable.  He felt bitterly
that Eliza had with deliberate malice publicly degraded him: he
screamed denunciation and abuse at her on his return home.
    All through the summer Eliza walked with white boding
placidity through horror--she had by now the hunger for it, waiting
with terrible quiet the return of fear at night.  Angered by her
pregnancy, Gant went almost daily to Elizabeth's house in Eagle
Crescent, whence he was delivered nightly by a band of exhausted and
terrified prostitutes into the care of his son Steve, his oldest
child, by now pertly free with nearly all the women in the district,
who fondled him with good-natured vulgarity, laughed heartily at his
glib innuendoes, and suffered him, even, to slap them smartly on
their rumps, making for him roughly as he skipped nimbly away.
    "Son," said Elizabeth, shaking Gant's
waggling head vigorously, "don't you carry on, when you grow up,
like the old rooster here. But he's a nice old boy when he wants to
be," she continued, kissing the bald spot on his head, and
deftly slipping into the boy's hand the wallet Gant had, in a torrent
of generosity, given to her.  She was scrupulously honest.
    The boy was usually accompanied on these