Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe Read Online Free

tribe.
    "It's W. O. Gant, isn't it?" he asked in a
drawling unctuous voice.
    "Yes," said Oliver, "that's right."
    "From what Eliza's been telling me about you,"
said the Major, giving the signal to his audience, "I was going
to say it ought to be L. E. Gant."
    The room sounded with the fat pleased laughter of the
Pentlands.
    "Whew!" cried Eliza, putting her hand to
the wing of her broad nose.  "I'll vow, father!  You
ought to be ashamed of yourself."
    Gant grinned with a thin false painting of mirth.
    The miserable old scoundrel, he thought.  He's
had that one bottled up for a week.
    "You've met Will before," said Eliza.
    "Both before and aft," said Will with a
smart wink.
    When their laughter had died down, Eliza said: 
"And this--as the fellow says--is Uncle Bacchus."
 
"Yes, sir," said Bacchus beaming, "as
large as life an' twice as sassy."
    "They call him Back-us everywhere else,"
said Will, including them all in a brisk wink, "but here in the
family we call him Behind-us."
    "I suppose," said Major Pentland
deliberately, "that you've served on a great many juries?"
    "No," said Oliver, determined to endure the
worst now with a frozen grin.  "Why?"
    "Because," said the Major looking around
again, "I thought you were a fellow who'd done a lot of
COURTIN'."
    Then, amid their laughter, the door opened, and
several of the others came in--Eliza's mother, a plain worn
Scotchwoman, and Jim, a ruddy porcine young fellow, his father's
beardless twin, and Thaddeus, mild, ruddy, brown of hair and eye,
bovine, and finally Greeley, the youngest, a boy with lapping idiot
grins, full of strange squealing noises at which they laughed. 
He was eleven, degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but his white moist
hands could draw from a violin music that had in it something
unearthly and untaught.
    And as they sat there in the hot little room with its
warm odor of mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the
hills, there was a roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the
bare boughs clashed.  And as they peeled, or pared, or whittled,
their talk slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they
drawled monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and
of men but newly lain in the earth.  And as their talk wore on,
and Gant heard the spectre moan of the wind, he was entombed in loss
and darkness, and his soul plunged downward in the pit of night, for
he saw that he must die a stranger--that all, all but these
triumphant Pentlands, who banqueted on death--must die.
    And like a man who is perishing in the polar night,
he thought of the rich meadows of his youth: the corn, the plum tree,
and ripe grain.  Why here?  O lost!
 
 
 
    2
 
    Oliver married Eliza in May.  After their
wedding trip to Philadelphia, they returned to the house he had built
for her on Woodson Street.  With his great hands he had laid the
foundations, burrowed out deep musty cellars in the earth, and
sheeted the tall sides over with smooth trowellings of warm brown
plaster.  He had very little money, but his strange house grew
to the rich modelling of his fantasy: when he had finished he had
something which leaned to the slope of his narrow uphill yard,
something with a high embracing porch in front, and warm rooms where
one stepped up and down to the tackings of his whim.  He built
his house close to the quiet hilly street; he bedded the loamy soil
with flowers; he laid the short walk to the high veranda steps with
great square sheets of colored marble; he put a fence of spiked iron
between his house and the world.
    Then, in the cool long glade of yard that stretched
four hundred feet behind the house he planted trees and grape vines. 
And whatever he touched in that rich fortress of his soul sprang into
golden life: as the years passed, the fruit trees--the peach, the
plum, the cherry, the apple--grew great and bent beneath their
clusters.  His grape vines thickened into brawny ropes of brown
and coiled down the high wire fences of his