Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (57 page)

"I see it!  I see it!  The knife! 
The knife! . . .  Do you see its shadow? . . .  There! 
There!  There!"

With Boothian gusto he recoiled, pointing to
invulnerable nothings.

"Do you see him standing there in the shadows? 
So you've come at last to take the old man with you? . . . 
There he stands--the Grim Reaper--as I always knew he would. 
Jesus, have mercy on my soul!"
 
 

Gant lay in a long cot in the Urological Institute at
Johns Hopkins.  Every day a cheerful little man came briskly in
and looked at his chart.  He talked happily and went away. 
He was one of the greatest surgeons in the country.

"Don't worry," said the nurse
encouragingly, "the mortality's only four per cent.  It
used to be thirty.  He's reduced it."

Gant groaned, and slipped his big hand into his
daughter's vital grasp.

"Don't worry, old boy!" she said, "you're
going to be as good as you ever were, after this."

She fed him with her life, her hope, her love. 
He was almost tranquil when they wheeled him in to his operation.

But the little gray-haired man looked, shook his head
regretfully, and trimmed deftly.

"All right!" he said, four minutes later,
to his assistant.  "Close the wound."

Gant was dying of cancer.
 
 

Gant sat in a wheeled chair upon the high fifth-floor
veranda, looking out through bright October air at the city spread
far into the haze before him.  He looked very clean, almost
fragile.  A faint grin of happiness and relief hovered about his
thin mouth. He smoked a long cigar, with fresh-awakened senses.

"There," he said pointing, "is where I
spent part of my boyhood. Old Jeff Streeter's hotel stood about
there," he pointed.

"Dig down!" said Helen, grinning.

Gant thought of the years between, and the vexed
pattern of fate. His life seemed strange to him.

"We'll go to see all those places when you get
out of here. They're going to let you out of here, day after
to-morrow.  Did you know that?  Did you know you're almost
well?" she cried with a big smile.

"I'm going to be a well man after this,"
said Gant.  "I feel twenty years younger!"

"Poor old papa!" she said.  "Poor
old papa!"

Her eyes were wet.  She put her big hands on his
face, and drew his head against her.
 
 

27
 

My Shakespeare, rise!  He rose.  The bard
rose throughout the length and breadth of his brave new world. 
He was not for an age, but for all time.  Then, too, his
tercentenary happened only once--at the end of three hundred years. 
It was observed piously from Maryland to Oregon.  Eighty-one
members of the House of Representatives, when asked by literate
journalists for their favorite lines, replied instantly with a
quotation from Polonius: "This above all: to thine own self be
true."  The Swan was played, and pageanted, and essayed in
every schoolhouse in the land.

Eugene tore the Chandos portrait from the pages of
the Independent and nailed it to the calcimined wall of the
backroom.  Then, still full of the great echoing paean of Ben
Jonson's, he scrawled below it in large trembling letters:  "My
Shakespeare, rise!"  The large plump face--"as damned
silly a head as ever I looked at"--stared baldly at him with
goggle eyes, the goatee pointed ripe with hayseed vanity.  But,
lit by the presence, Eugene plunged back into the essay littered
across his table.

He was discovered.  In an unwise absence, he
left the Bard upon the wall.  When he returned, Ben and Helen
had read his scrawl. Thereafter, he was called poetically to table,
to the telephone, to go an errand.

"My Shakespeare, rise!"

With red resentful face, he rose.

"Will My Shakespeare pass the biscuit?" or,
"Could I trouble My Shakespeare for the butter?" said Ben,
scowling at him.

"My Shakespeare!  My Shakespeare!  Do
you want another piece of pie?" said Helen.  Then, full of
penitent laughter, she added: "That's a shame!  We oughtn't
to treat the poor kid like that." Laughing, she plucked at her
large straight chin, gazing out the window, and laughing
absently--penitently, laughing.

But--"his art was universal.  He saw life
clearly and he saw it whole.  He was an intellectual ocean whose
waves touched every shore of thought.  He was all things in one:
lawyer, merchant, soldier, doctor, statesman.  Men of science
have been amazed by the depth of his learning.  In The Merchant
of Venice, he deals with the most technical questions of law with the
skill of an attorney. In King Lear, he boldly prescribes sleep as a
remedy for Lear's insanity.  'Sleep that knits up the ravell'd
sleave of care.' Thus, he has foreseen the latest researches of
modern science by almost three centuries.  In his sympathetic
and well-rounded sense of characterization, he laughs with, not at,
his characters."

Eugene won the medal--bronze or of some other
material even more enduring.  The Bard's profile murkily
indented.  W. S.  1616-1916. A long and useful life.
 
 

The machinery of the pageant was beautiful and
simple.  Its author--Dr. George B. Rockham, at one time, it was
whispered, a trouper with the Ben Greet players--had seen to that. 
All the words had been written by Dr. George B. Rockham, and all the
words, accordingly, had been written for Dr. George B. Rockham. 
Dr. George B. Rockham was the Voice of History.  The innocent
children of Altamont's schools were the mute illustrations of that
voice.

Eugene was Prince Hal.  The day before the
pageant his costume arrived from Philadelphia.  At John Dorsey
Leonard's direction he put it on.  Then he came out sheepishly
before John Dorsey on the school veranda, fingering his tin sword and
looking somewhat doubtfully at his pink silk hose which came three
quarters up his skinny shanks, and left exposed, below his doublet, a
six-inch hiatus of raw thigh.

John Dorsey Leonard looked gravely.

"Here, boy," he said.  "Let me
see!"

He pulled strongly at the top of the deficient hose,
with no result save to open up large runs in them.  Then John
Dorsey Leonard began to laugh.  He slid helplessly down upon the
porch rail, and bent over, palsied with silent laughter, from which a
high whine, full of spittle, presently emerged.

"O-oh my Lord!" he gasped.  "Egscuse
me!" he panted, seeing the boy's angry face.  "It's
the funniest thing I ever--" at this moment his voice died of
paralysis.

"I'll fix you," said Miss Amy.  "I've
got just the thing for you."

She gave him a full baggy clown's suit, of green
linen.  It was a relic of a Hallowe'en party; its wide folds
were gartered about his ankles.

He turned a distressed, puzzled face toward Miss Amy.

"That's not right, is it?" he asked. 
"He never wore anything like this, did he?"

Miss Amy looked.  Her deep bosom heaved with
full contralto laughter.

"Yes, that's right!  That's fine!" she
yelled.  "He was like that, anyway.  No one will ever
notice, boy."  She collapsed heavily into a wicker chair
which widened with a protesting creak.

"Oh, Lord!" she groaned, wet-cheeked. 
"I don't believe I ever saw--"
 
 

The pageant was performed on the embowered lawns of
the Manor House.  Dr. George B. Rockham stood in a green
hollow--a natural amphitheatre.  His audience sat on the turf of
the encircling banks.  As the phantom cavalcade of poetry and
the drama wound down to him, Dr. George B. Rockham disposed of each
character neatly in descriptive pentameter verse.  He was
dressed in the fashion of the Restoration--a period he coveted
because it understood the charms of muscular calves.  His heavy
legs bulged knottily below a coy fringe of drawer-ruffles.

Eugene stood waiting on the road above, behind an
obscuring wall of trees.  It was rich young May.  "Doc"
Hines (Falstaff) waited beside him.  His small tough face
grinned apishly over garments stuffed with yards of wadding. 
Grinning, he smote himself upon his swollen paunch: the blow left a
dropsical depression.

He turned, with a comical squint, on Eugene:

"Hal," said he, "you're a hell of a
looking prince."

"You're no beauty, Jack," said Eugene.

Behind him, Julius Arthur (Macbeth), drew his sword
with a flourish.

"I challenge you, Hal," said he.

In the young shimmering light their tin swords
clashed rapidly. Twittered with young bird-laughter, on bank and
saddle sprawled, all of the Bard's personé  Julius Arthur
thrust swiftly, was warded, then, with loose grin, buried his brand
suddenly in "Doc" Hines' receiving paunch.  The
company of the immortal shrieked happily.

Miss Ida Nelson, the assistant director, rushed
angrily among them.

"Sh!" she hissed loudly.  "Sh-h!" 
She was very angry.  She had spent the afternoon hissing loudly.

Swinging gently in her side-saddle, Rosalind, on
horseback, a ripe little beauty from the convent, smiled warmly at
him.  Looking, he forgot.

Below them, on the road, the crowded press loosened
slowly, broke off in minute fragments, and disappeared into the
hidden gulch of Dr. George Rockham's receiving voice.  With fat
hammy sonority he welcomed them.

But he had not come to Shakespeare.  The pageant
had opened with the Voices of Past and Present--voices a trifle out
of harmony with the tenor of event--but necessary to the commercial
success of the enterprise.  These voices now moved voicelessly
past?four frightened sales-ladies from Schwartzberg's, clad decently
in cheese-cloth and sandals, who came by bearing the banner of their
concern.  Or, as the doctor's more eloquent iambics had it:
 

    
"Fair Commerce, sister
of the arts, thou, too,
     
Shalt take thy lawful place upon our stage."
 

They came and passed:  Ginsberg's--"the
glass of fashion and the mould of form"; Bradley the
Grocer--"when first Pomona held her fruity horn"; The Buick
Agency--"the chariots of Oxus and of Ind."

Came, passed--like pageantry of mist on an autumnal
stream.

Behind them, serried ranks of cherubim, the
marshalled legions of Altamont's Sunday schools, each in white
arrayed and clutching grimly in tiny hands two thousand tiny flags of
freedom, God's small angels, and surely there for God knows what
far-off event, began to move into the hollow.  Their teachers
nursed them gently into action, with tapping feet and palms.

"One, two, THREE, four.  One, two, THREE,
four.  Quickly, children!"

A hidden orchestra, musical in the trees, greeted
them, as they approached, with holy strains: the Baptists, with the
simple  doctrine of "It's the Old-time Religion"; the
Methodists, with "I'll Be Waiting at the River"; the
Presbyterians, with "Rock of Ages," the Episcopalians, with
"Jesus, Lover of My Soul"; and rising to lyrical climactic
passion, the little Jews, with the nobly marching music of "Onward,
Christian Soldiers."

They passed without laughter.  There was a
pause.

"Well, thank God for that!" said Ralph
Rolls coarsely in a solemn quiet.  The Bard's strewn host
laughed, rustled noisily into line.

"Sh-h!  Sh-h!" hissed Miss Ida Nelson.

"What the hell does she think she is?" said
Julius Arthur, "a steam valve?"

Eugene looked attentively at the shapely legs of the
page, Viola.

"Wow!" said Ralph Rolls, with his
accustomed audibility.  "Look who's here!"

She looked on them all with a pert impartial smile. 
But she never told her love.

Miss Ida Nelson caught the doctor's stealthy sign. 
Carefully, in slow twos, she fed them down to him.

The Moor of Venice (Mr. George Graves), turned his
broad back upon their jibes, and lurched down with sullen-sheepish
grin, unable to conceal the massive embarrassment of his calves.

"Tell him who you are, Villa," said Doc
Hines.  "You look like Jack Johnson."

The town, in its first white shirting of Spring, sat
on the turfy banks, and looked down gravely upon the bosky little
comedy of errors; the encircling mountains, and the gods thereon,
looked down upon the slightly larger theatre of the town; and,
figuratively, from mountains that looked down on mountains, the last
stronghold of philosophy, the author of this chronicle looked down on
everything.

"Here we go, Hal," said Doc Hines, nudging
Eugene.

"Give 'em hell, son," said Julius Arthur. 
"You're dressed for the part."

"He looks it, you mean," said Ralph Rolls. 
"Boy, you'll knock 'em dead," he added with an indecent
laugh.

They descended into the hollow, accompanied by a low
but growing titter of amazement from the audience.  Before them,
the doctor had just disposed of Desdemona, who parted with a graceful
obeisance. He was now engaged on Othello, who stood, bullish and shy,
till his ordeal should finish.  In a moment, he strode away, and
the doctor turned to Falstaff, reading the man by his padded belly,
briskly, with relief: