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

lot, and hung in a dense
fabric, upon his trellises, roping his domain twice around. 
They climbed the porch end of the house and framed the upper windows
in thick bowers.  And the flowers grew in rioting glory in his
yard--the velvet-leaved nasturtium, slashed with a hundred tawny
dyes, the rose, the snowball, the redcupped tulip, and the lily. 
The honeysuckle drooped its heavy mass upon the fence; wherever his
great hands touched the earth it grew fruitful for him.
    For him the house was the picture of his soul, the
garment of his will.  But for Eliza it was a piece of property,
whose value she shrewdly appraised, a beginning for her hoard. 
Like all the older children of Major Pentland she had, since her
twentieth year, begun the slow accretion of land: from the savings of
her small wage as teacher and book-agent, she had already purchased
one or two pieces of earth.  On one of these, a small lot at the
edge of the public square, she persuaded him to build a shop. 
This he did with his own hands, and the labor of two negro men: it
was a two-story shack of brick, with wide wooden steps, leading down
to the square from a marble porch.  Upon this porch, flanking
the wooden doors, he placed some marbles; by the door, he put the
heavy simpering figure of an angel.
    But Eliza was not content with his trade: there was
no money in death.  People, she thought, died too slowly. 
And she foresaw that her brother Will, who had begun at fifteen as
helper in a lumber yard, and was now the owner of a tiny business,
was destined to become a rich man.  So she persuaded Gant to go
into partnership with Will Pentland: at the end of a year, however,
his patience broke, his tortured egotism leaped from its restraint,
he howled that Will, whose business hours were spent chiefly in
figuring upon a dirty envelope with a stub of a pencil, paring
reflectively his stubby nails, or punning endlessly with a birdlike
wink and nod, would ruin them all.  Will therefore quietly
bought out his partner's interest, and moved on toward the
accumulation of a fortune, while Oliver returned to isolation and his
grimy angels.
    The strange figure of Oliver Gant cast its famous
shadow through the town.  Men heard at night and morning the
great formula of his curse to Eliza.  They saw him plunge to
house and shop, they saw him bent above his marbles, they saw him
mould in his great hands--with curse, and howl, with passionate
devotion--the rich texture of his home.  They laughed at his
wild excess of speech, of feeling, and of gesture.  They were
silent before the maniac fury of his sprees, which occurred almost
punctually every two months, and lasted two or three days.  They
picked him foul and witless from the cobbles, and brought him
home--the banker, the policeman, and a burly devoted Swiss named
Jannadeau, a grimy jeweller who rented a small fenced space among
Gant's tombstones.  And always they handled him with tender
care, feeling something strange and proud and glorious lost in that
drunken ruin of Babel.  He was a stranger to them: no one--not
even Eliza--ever called him by his first name. He was--and remained
thereafter--"Mister" Gant.
    And what Eliza endured in pain and fear and glory no
one knew.  He breathed over them all his hot lion-breath of
desire and fury: when he was drunk, her white pursed face, and all
the slow octopal movements of her temper, stirred him to red
madness.  She was at such times in real danger from his assault:
she had to lock herself away from him.  For from the first,
deeper than love, deeper than hate, as deep as the unfleshed bones of
life, an obscure and final warfare was being waged between them. 
Eliza wept or was silent to his curse, nagged briefly in retort to
his rhetoric, gave like a punched pillow to his lunging drive--and
slowly, implacably had her way.  Year by year, above his howl of
protest, he did not know how, they gathered in small bits of earth,
paid the hated taxes, and put the money