Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (52 page)

Joseph, two yards away from legal safety, hurled
himself with a wild scream headlong at the curb.  He arrived on
hands and knees, but under his own power.

"K-hurses!" said Eugene.  "Foiled
again."

'Twas true!  Dr. Fairfax Grinder's lean bristled
upper lip drew back over his strong yellow teeth.  He jammed on
his brakes, and lifted his car round with a complete revolution of
his long arms. Then he roared away through scattering traffic, in a
greasy blue cloud of gasoline and burnt rubber.

Joe Zamschnick frantically wiped his gleaming bald
head with a silk handkerchief and called loudly on the public to bear
witness.

"What's the matter with him?" said George
Graves, disappointed. "He usually goes up on the sidewalk after
them if he can't get them on the street."

On the other side of the street, attracting no more
than a languid stare from the loafing natives, the Honorable William
Jennings Bryan paused benevolently before the windows of the H.
Martin Grimes Bookstore, allowing the frisking breeze to toy
pleasantly with his famous locks.  The tangles of Neaera's hair.

The Commoner stared carefully at the window display
which included several copies of Before Adam, by Jack London. 
Then he entered, and selected a dozen views of Altamont and the
surrounding hills.

"He may come here to live," said George
Graves.  "Dr. Doak's offered to give him a house and lot in
Doak Park."

"Why?" said Eugene.

"Because the advertising will be worth a lot to
the town," said George Graves.

A little before them, that undaunted daughter of
desires, Miss Elizabeth Scragg, emerged from Woolworth's Five and Ten
Cent Store, and turned up toward the Square.  Smiling, she
acknowledged the ponderous salute of Big Jeff White, the giant
half-owner of the Whitstone hotel, whose fortunes had begun when he
had refused to return to his old comrade, Dickson Reese, the
embezzling cashier, ninety thousand dollars of entrusted loot. 
Dog eat dog.  Thief catch thief.  It is not growing like a
tree, in bulk doth make man better be.

His six-and-a-half-foot shadow flitted slowly before
them.  He passed, in creaking number twelves, a massive
smooth-jowled man with a great paunch girdled in a wide belt.

Across the street again, before the windows of the
Van W. Yeats Shoe Company, the Reverend J. Brooks Gall, Amherst
('61), and as loyal a Deke as ever breathed, but looking only sixty
of his seventy-three years, paused in his brisk walk, and engaged in
sprightly monologue, three of his fellow Boy Scouts--the Messrs.
Lewis Monk, seventeen, Bruce Rogers, thirteen, and Malcolm Hodges,
fourteen.  None knew as well as he the heart of a boy.  He,
too, it seems, had once been one himself.  Thus, as one bright
anecdote succeeded, or suggested, a half-dozen others, they smiled
dutifully, with attentive respect, below the lifted barrier of his
bristly white mustache, into the gleaming rhyme of his false teeth.
And, with rough but affectionate camaraderie, he would pause from
time to time to say:  "Old Male!" or "Old Bruce!"
gripping firmly his listener's arm, shaking him gently. 
Pallidly, on restless feet, they smiled, plotting escape with
slant-eyed stealth.

Mr. Buse, the Oriental rug merchant, came around the
corner below them from Liberty Street.  His broad dark face was
wreathed in Persian smiles.  I met a traveller from an antique
land.

In the Bijou Cafe for Ladies and Gents, Mike, the
counter man, leaned his hairy arms upon the marble slab, and bent his
wrinkled inch of brow upon a week-old copy of Atlantis.  Fride
Chicken To-day with Sweet Potatos.  Hail to thee, blithe spirit,
bird thou never wert.  A solitary fly darted swiftly about the
greasy cover of a glass humidor, under which a leathery quarter of
mince pie lay weltering.  Spring had come.

Meanwhile, having completed twice their parade up and
down the street from the Square to the post-office, the Misses
Christine Ball, Viola Powell, Aline Rollins, and Dorothy Hazzard were
accosted outside Wood's Drug Store by Tom French, seventeen, Roy
Duncan, nineteen, and Carl Jones, eighteen.

"Where do you think you're going?" said Tom
French, insolently.

Gayly, brightly, in unison, they answered:

"Hey--ee!"

"Hay's seven dollars a ton," said Roy
Duncan, and immediately burst into a high cackle of laughter, in
which all the others joined, merrily.

"You craz-ee!" said Viola Powell tenderly. 
Tell me, ye merchants' daughters, did ye see another creature fair
and wise as she.

"Mr. Duncan," said Tom French, turning his
proud ominous face upon his best friend, "I want you to meet a
friend of mine, Miss Rollins."

"I think I've met this man somewhere before,"
said Aline Rollins. Another Splendor on his mouth alit.

"Yes," said Roy Duncan, "I go there
often."

His small tight freckled impish face creased again by
his high cackle.  All I could never be.  They moved into
the store, where drouthy neibors neibors meet, through the idling
group of fountain gallants.

Mr. Henry Sorrell (It Can Be Done), and Mr. John T.
Howland (We Sell Lots and Lots of Lots), emerged, beyond Arthur N.
Wright's, jeweller, from the gloomy dusk of the Gruner Building. 
Each looked into the sub-divisions of the other's heart; their eyes
kept the great Vision of the guarded mount as swiftly they turned
into Church Street where Sorrell's Hudson was parked.

White-vested, a trifle paunchy, with large broad
feet, a shaven moon of red face, and abundant taffy-colored hair, the
Reverend John Smallwood, pastor of the First Baptist Church, walked
heavily up the street, greeting his parishioners warmly, and hoping
to see his Pilot face to face.  Instead, however, he encountered
the Honorable William Jennings Bryan, who was coming slowly out of
the bookstore.  The two close friends greeted each other
affectionately, and, with a firm friendly laying on of hands, gave
each to each the Christian aid of a benevolent exorcism.

"Just the man I was looking for," said
Brother Smallwood.  In silence, slowly, they shook hands for
several seconds.  Silence was pleased.

"That," observed the Commoner with grave
humor, "is what I thought the Great American People said to me
on three occasions."  It was a favorite jest--ripe with
wisdom, mellowed by the years, yet, withal, so characteristic of the
man.  The deep furrows of his mouth widened in a smile. 
Our master--famous, calm, and dead.

Passed, on catspaw rubber tread, from the long dark
bookstore, Professor L. B. Dunn, principal of Graded School No. 3,
Montgomery Avenue.  He smiled coldly at them with a gimlet
narrowing of his spectacled eyes.  The tell-tale cover of The
New Republic peeked from his pocket.  Clamped under his lean and
freckled arm were new library copies of The Great Illusion, by Norman
Angell, and The Ancient Grudge, by Owen Wister.  A lifelong
advocate of a union of the two great English-speaking (sic) nations,
making together irresistibly for peace, truth, and righteousness in a
benevolent but firm authority over the less responsible elements of
civilization, he passed, the Catholic man, pleasantly dedicated to
the brave adventuring of minds and the salvaging of mankind. 
Ah, yes!

"And how are you and the Good Woman enjoying
your sojourn in the Land of the Sky?" said the Reverend John
Smallwood.

"Our only regret," said the Commoner, "is
that our visit here must be measured by days and not by months. 
Nay, by years."

Mr. Richard Gorman, twenty-six, city reporter of The
Citizen, strode rapidly up the street, with proud cold news-nose
lifted. His complacent smile, hard-lipped, loosened into servility.

"Ah, there, Dick," said John Smallwood,
clasping his hand affectionately, and squeezing his arm.  "Just
the man I was looking for.  Do you know Mr. Bryan?"

"As fellow newspaper men," said the
Commoner, "Dick and I have been close friends for--how many
years is it, my boy?"

"Three, I think, sir," said Mr. Gorman,
blushing prettily.

"I wish you could have been here, Dick,"
said the Reverend Smallwood, "to hear what Mr. Bryan was saying
about us.  The good people of this town would be mighty proud to
hear it."

"I'd like another statement from you before you
go, Mr. Bryan," said Richard Gorman.  "There's a story
going the rounds that you may make your home with us in the future."

When questioned by a Citizen reporter, Mr. Bryan
refused either to confirm or deny the rumor:

"I may have a statement to make later," he
observed with a significant smile, "but at present I must
content myself by saying that if I could have chosen the place of my
birth, I could not have found a fairer spot than this wonderland of
nature."

Earthly Paradise, thinks Commoner.

"I have travelled far in my day," continued
the man who had been chosen three times by a great Party to contend
for the highest honor within the gift of the people.  "I
have gone from the woods of Maine to the wave-washed sands of
Florida, from Hatteras to Halifax, and from the summits of the
Rockies to where Missouri rolls her turgid flood, but I have seen few
spots that equal, and none that surpass, the beauty of this mountain
Eden."

The reporter made notes rapidly.

The years of his glory washed back to him upon the
rolling tides of rhetoric--the great lost days of the first crusade
when the money barons trembled beneath the shadow of the Cross of
Gold, and Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! burned through the land like a
comet.  Ere I was old.  1896.  Ah, woeful ere, which
tells me youth's no longer here.

Foresees Dawn of New Era.

When pressed more closely by the reporter as to his
future plans, Mr. Bryan replied:

"My schedule is completely filled, for months to
come, with speaking engagements that will take me from one end of the
country to the other, in the fight I am making for the reduction of
the vast armaments that form the chief obstacle to the reign of peace
on earth, good-will to men.  After that, who knows?" he
said, flashing his famous smile.  "Perhaps I shall come
back to this beautiful region, and take up my life among my good
friends here as one who, having fought the good fight, deserves to
spend the declining years of his life not only within sight, but
within the actual boundaries, of the happy land of Canaan."

Asked if he could predict with any certainty the date
of his proposed retirement, the Commoner answered characteristically
with the following beautiful quotation from Longfellow:
 

    
"When the war-drum
throbbed no longer,
     
And
the battle-flags were furled
     
In the Parliament of man,
     
The Federation of the world."
 

The magic cell of music--the electric piano in the
shallow tiled lobby of Altamont's favorite cinema, the Ajax, stopped
playing with firm, tinny abruptness, hummed ominously for a moment,
and without warning commenced anew.  It's a long way to
Tipperary.  The world shook with the stamp of marching men.

Miss Margaret Blanchard and Mrs. C. M. McReady, the
druggist's drugged wife who, by the white pitted fabric of her skin,
and the wide bright somnolence of her eyes, on honey-dew had fed too
often, came out of the theatre and turned down toward Wood's
pharmacy.

To-day:  Maurice Costello and Edith M. Storey in
Throw Out the Lifeline, a Vitagraph Release.

Goggling, his great idiot's head lolling on his
scrawny neck, wearing the wide-rimmed straw hat that covered him
winter and summer, Willie Goff, the pencil merchant, jerked past,
with inward lunges of his crippled right foot.  The fingers of
his withered arm pointed stiffly toward himself, beckoning to him,
and touching him as he walked with stiff jerking taps, in a terrible
parody of vanity.  A gaudy handkerchief with blue, yellow and
crimson patterns hung in a riotous blot from his breast-pocket over
his neatly belted gray Norfolk jacket, a wide loose collar of silk
barred with red and orange stripes flowered across his narrow
shoulders.  In his lapel a huge red carnation.  His thin
face, beneath the jutting globular head, grinned constantly, glutting
his features with wide, lapping, receding, returning, idiot smiles.
For should he live a thousand years, he never will be out of humor.
He burred ecstatically at the passers-by, who grinned fondly at him,
and continued down to Wood's where he was greeted with loud cheers
and laughter by a group of young men who loitered at the fountain's
end.  They gathered around him boisterously, pounding his back
and drawing him up to the fountain.  Pleased, he looked at them
warmly, gratefully.  He was touched and happy.

"What're you having, Willie?" said Mr.
Tobias Pottle.

"Give me a dope," said Willie Goff to the
grinning jerker, "a dope and lime."

Pudge Carr, the politician's son, laughed
hilariously.  "Want a dope and lime, do you, Willie?"
he said, and struck him heavily on the back.  His thick stupid
face composed itself.

"Have a cigarette, Willie," he said,
offering the package to Willie Goff.

"What's yours?" said the jerker to Toby
Pottle.