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

that remained into more
land.  Over the wife, over the mother, the woman of property,
who was like a man, walked slowly forth.
    In eleven years she bore him nine children of whom
six lived.  The first, a girl, died in her twentieth month, of
infant cholera; two more died at birth.  The others outlived the
grim and casual littering.  The oldest, a boy, was born in
1885.  He was given the name of Steve.  The second, born
fifteen months later, was a girl--Daisy.  The next, likewise a
girl--Helen--came three years later. Then, in 1892, came
twins--boys--to whom Gant, always with a zest for politics, gave the
names of Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison.  And the last,
Luke, was born two years later, in 1894.
    Twice, during this period, at intervals of five
years, Gant's periodic spree lengthened into an unbroken drunkenness
that lasted for weeks.  He was caught, drowning in the tides of
his thirst. Each time Eliza sent him away to take a cure for
alcoholism at Richmond.  Once, Eliza and four of her children
were sick at the same time with typhoid fever.  But during a
weary convalescence she pursed her lips grimly and took them off to
Florida.
    Eliza came through stolidly to victory.  As she
marched down these enormous years of love and loss, stained with the
rich dyes of pain and pride and death, and with the great wild flare
of his alien and passionate life, her limbs faltered in the grip of
ruin, but she came on, through sickness and emaciation, to victorious
strength. She knew there had been glory in it: insensate and cruel as
he had often been, she remembered the enormous beating color of his
life, and the lost and stricken thing in him which he would never
find. And fear and a speechless pity rose in her when at times she
saw the small uneasy eyes grow still and darken with the foiled and
groping hunger of old frustration.  O lost!
 
 
    3
 
    In the great processional of the years through which
the history of the Gants was evolving, few years had borne a heavier
weight of pain, terror, and wretchedness, and none was destined to
bring with it more conclusive events than that year which marked the
beginning of the twentieth century.  For Gant and his wife, the
year 1900, in which one day they found themselves, after growing to
maturity in another century--a transition which must have given,
wherever it has happened, a brief but poignant loneliness to
thousands of imaginative people--had coincidences, too striking to be
unnoticed, with other boundaries in their lives.
    In that year Gant passed his fiftieth birthday: he
knew he was half as old as the century that had died, and that men do
not often live as long as centuries.  And in that year, too,
Eliza, big with the last child she would ever have, went over the
final hedge of terror and desperation and, in the opulent darkness of
the summer night, as she lay flat in her bed with her hands upon her
swollen belly, she began to design her life for the years when she
would cease to be a mother.
    In the already opening gulf on whose separate shores
their lives were founded, she was beginning to look, with the
infinite composure, the tremendous patience which waits through half
a lifetime for an event, not so much with certain foresight, as with
a prophetic, brooding instinct.  This quality, this almost
Buddhistic complacency which, rooted in the fundamental structure of
her life, she could neither suppress nor conceal, was the quality he
could least understand, that infuriated him most.  He was fifty:
he had a tragic consciousness of time--he saw the passionate fulness
of his life upon the wane, and he cast about him like a senseless and
infuriate beast.  She had perhaps a greater reason for quietude
than he, for she had come on from the cruel openings of her life,
through disease, physical weakness, poverty, the constant imminence
of death and misery: she had lost her first child, and brought the
others safely through each succeeding plague; and now, at