Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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just as big as you please, determined to make a big joke of it all; I just thought to myself, I’m not going to give into it, I’ll fool them all yet; ‘I don’t believe a word of it’ (I said),” she nodded her head smartly at him, and pursed her lips, “‘and besides, Sally’ (I said) ‘we’ve all got to go some time, and there’s no use worrying about what’s going to happen. It may come tomorrow, or it may come later, but it’s bound to come to all in the end’.”
“Ah Lord!” said Oliver, shaking his head sadly. “You bit the nail on the head that time. A truer word was never spoken.”
Merciful God! he thought, with an anguished inner grin. How long is this to keep up? But she’s a pippin as sure as you’re born. He looked appreciatively at her trim erect figure, noting her milky white skin, her black-brown eyes, with their quaint child’s stare, and her jet black hair drawn back tightly from her high white forehead. She had a curious trick of pursing her lips reflectively before she spoke; she liked to take her time, and came to the point after interminable divagations down all the lane-ends of memory and overtone, feasting upon the golden pageant of all she had ever said, done, felt, thought, seen, or replied, with egocentric delight. Then, while he looked, she ceased speaking abruptly, put her neat gloved hand to her chin, and stared off with a thoughtful pursed mouth.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “if you’re getting your health back and spend a good part of your time lying around you ought to have something to occupy your mind.” She opened a leather portmanteau she was carrying and produced a visiting card and two fat volumes. “My name,” she said portentously, with slow emphasis, “is Eliza Pentland, and I represent the Larkin Publishing Company.”
She spoke the words proudly, with dignified gusto. Merciful God! A book agent! thought Gant.
“We are offering,” said Eliza, opening a huge yellow book with a fancy design of spears and flags and laurel wreaths, “a book of poems called Gems of Verse for Hearth and Fireside as well as Larkin’s Domestic Doctor and Book of Household Remedies, giving directions for the cure and prevention of over five hundred diseases.”
“Well,” said Gant, with a faint grin, wetting his big thumb briefly, “I ought to find one that I’ve got out of that.”
“Why, yes,” said Eliza, nodding smartly, “as the fellow says, you can read poetry for the good of your soul and Larkin for the good of your body.”
“I like poetry,” said Gant, thumbing over the pages, and pausing with interest at the section marked Songs of the Spur and Sabre. “In my boyhood I could recite it by the hour.”
He bought the books. Eliza packed her samples, and stood up looking sharply and curiously about the dusty little shop.
“Doing any business?” she said.
“Very little,” said Oliver sadly. “Hardly enough to keep body and soul together. I’m a stranger in a strange land.”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza cheerfully. “You ought to get out and meet more people. You need something to take your mind off yourself. If I were you, I’d pitch right in and take an interest in the town’s progress. We’ve got everything here it takes to make a big town — scenery, climate, and natural resources, and we all ought to work together. If I had a few thousand dollars I know what I’d do,”— she winked smartly at him, and began to speak with a curiously masculine gesture of the hand — forefinger extended, fist loosely clenched. “Do you see this corner here — the one you’re on? It’ll double in value in the next few years. Now, here!” she gestured before her with the loose masculine gesture. “They’re going to run a street through there some day as sure as you live. And when they do —” she pursed her lips reflectively, “that property is going to be worth money.”
She continued to talk about property with a strange meditative hunger. The town seemed to be an enormous blueprint to her: her head was stuffed uncannily with figures and estimates — who owned a lot, who sold it, the sale-price, the real value, the future value, first and second mortgages, and so on. When she had finished, Oliver said with the emphasis of strong aversion, thinking of Sydney:
“I hope I never own another piece of property as long as I live — save a house to live in. It is nothing but a curse and a care, and the tax-collector gets it all in the end.”
Eliza looked at him with a startled expression, as if he had uttered a damnable heresy.
“Why, say! That’s no way to talk!” she said. “You want to lay something by for a rainy day, don’t you?”
“I’m having my rainy day now,” he said gloomily. “All the property I need is eight feet of earth to be buried in.”
Then, talking more cheerfully, he walked with her to the door of the shop, and watched her as she marched primly away across the square, holding her skirts at the curbs with ladylike nicety. Then he turned back among his marbles again with a stirring in him of a joy he thought he had lost forever.
The Pentland family, of which Eliza was a member, was one of the strangest tribes that ever came out of the hills. It had no clear title to the name of Pentland: a Scotch–Englishman of that name, who was a mining engineer, the grandfather of the present head of the family, had come into the hills after the Revolution, looking for copper, and lived there for several years, begetting several children by one of the pioneer women. When he disappeared the woman took for herself and her children the name of Pentland.
The present chieftain of the tribe was Eliza’s father, the brother of the prophet Bacchus, Major Thomas Pentland. Another brother had been killed during the Seven Days. Major Pentland’s military title was honestly if inconspicuously earned. While Bacchus, who never rose above the rank of Corporal, was blistering his hard hands at Shiloh, the Major, as commander of two companies of Home Volunteers, was guarding the stronghold of the native hills. This stronghold was never threatened until the closing days of the war, when the Volunteers, ambuscaded behind convenient trees and rocks, fired three volleys into a detachment of Sherman’s stragglers, and quietly dispersed to the defense of their attendant wives and children.
The Pentland family was as old as any in the community, but it had always been poor, and had made few pretenses to gentility. By marriage, and by intermarriage among its own kinsmen, it could boast of some connection with the great, of some insanity, and a modicum of idiocy. But because of its obvious superiority, in intelligence and fibre, to most of the mountain people it held a position of solid respect among them.
The Pentlands bore a strong clan-marking. Like most rich personalities in strange families their powerful group-stamp became more impressive because of their differences. They had broad powerful noses, with fleshy deeply scalloped wings, sensual mouths, extraordinarily mixed of delicacy and coarseness, which in the process of thinking they convolved with astonishing flexibility, broad intelligent foreheads, and deep flat cheeks, a trifle hollowed. The men were generally ruddy of face, and their typical stature was meaty, strong, and of middling height, although it varied into gangling cadaverousness.
Major Thomas Pentland was the father of a numerous family of which Eliza was the only surviving girl. A younger sister had died a few years before of a disease which the family identified sorrowfully as “poor Jane’s scrofula.” There were six boys: Henry, the oldest, was now thirty, Will was twenty-six, Jim was twenty-two, and Thaddeus, Elmer and Greeley were, in the order named, eighteen, fifteen, and eleven. Eliza was twenty-four.
The four oldest children, Henry, Will, Eliza, and Jim, had passed their childhood in the years following the war. The poverty and privation of these years had been so terrible that none of them ever spoke of it now, but the bitter steel had sheared into their hearts, leaving scars that would not heal.
The effect of these years upon the oldest children was to develop in them an insane niggardliness, an insatiate love of property, and a desire to escape from the Major’s household as quickly as possible.
“Father,” Eliza had said with ladylike dignity, as she led Oliver for the first time into the sitting-room of the cottage, “I want you to meet Mr. Gant.”