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

errands by
Jannadeau and Tom Flack, a negro hack-man, who waited in patient
constraint outside the latticed door of the brothel until the
advancing tumult within announced that Gant had been enticed to
depart.  And he would go, either struggling clumsily and
screaming eloquent abuse at his suppliant captors, or jovially
acquiescent, bellowing a wanton song of his youth along the latticed
crescent, and through the supper-silent highways of the town.
 
         "Up in that back room,
boys,
      Up in
THAT back room,
      All
among the fleas and bugs,
      I
pit-tee your sad doom."
 
    Home, he would be cajoled up the tall veranda stairs,
enticed into his bed; or, resisting all compulsion, he would seek out
his wife, shut usually in her room, howling taunts at her, and
accusations of unchastity, since there festered in him dark
suspicion, fruit of his age, his wasting energy.  Timid Daisy,
pale from fright, would have fled to the neighboring arms of Sudie
Isaacs, or to the Tarkintons; Helen, aged ten, even then his delight,
would master him, feeding spoonfuls of scalding soup into his mouth,
and slapping him sharply with her small hand when he became
recalcitrant.
    "You DRINK this!  You better!"
    He was enormously pleased: they were both strung on
the same wires.
    Again, he was beyond all reason.  Extravagantly
mad, he built roaring fires in his sitting-room, drenching the
leaping fire with a can of oil; spitting exultantly into the
answering roar, and striking up, until he was exhausted, a profane
chant, set to a few recurrent bars of music, which ran, for forty
minutes, somewhat like this:
 
         "O-ho--Goddam,
      Goddam, Goddam,
      O-ho--Goddam,
      Goddam--Goddam."
 
    --adopting usually the measure by which clock-chimes
strike out the hour.
    And outside, strung like apes along the wide wires of
the fence, Sandy and Fergus Duncan, Seth Tarkinton, sometimes Ben and
Grover themselves, joining in the glee of their friends, kept up an
answering chant:
 
         "Old man Gant
      Came home drunk!
      Old man Gant
      Came home drunk!"
 
    Daisy, from a neighbor's sanctuary, wept in shame and
fear.  But Helen, small thin fury, held on relentlessly:
presently he would subside into a chair, and receive hot soup and
stinging slaps with a grin.  Upstairs Eliza lay, white-faced and
watchfully.
    So ran the summer by.  The last grapes hung in
dried and rotten clusters to the vines; the wind roared distantly;
September ended.
    One night the dry doctor, Cardiac, said:  "I
think we'll be through with this before to-morrow evening." 
He departed, leaving in the house a middle-aged country woman. 
She was a hard-handed practical nurse.
    At eight o'clock Gant returned alone.  The boy
Steve had stayed at home for ready dispatch at Eliza's need; for the
moment the attention was shifted from the master.
    His great voice below, chanting obscenities, carried
across the neighborhood: as she heard the sudden wild roar of flame
up the chimney, shaking the house in its flight, she called Steve to
her side, tensely:  "Son, he'll burn us all up!" she
whispered.
    They heard a chair fall heavily below, his curse;
they heard his heavy reeling stride across the dining-room and up the
hall; they heard the sagging creak of the stair-rail as his body
swung against it.
    "He's coming!" she whispered.  "He's
coming!  Lock the door, son!"
    The boy locked the door.
    "Are you there?" Gant roared, pounding the
flimsy door heavily with his great fist.  "Miss Eliza: are
you there?" howling at her the ironical title by which he
addressed her at moments like this.
    And he screamed a sermon of profanity and woven
invective:--
    "Little did I reck," he began, getting at
once into the swing of preposterous rhetoric which he used half
furiously, half comically, "little did I reck the day I first
saw her eighteen bitter years ago, when she came wriggling around the
corner at me