Chapter One
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is
strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom
into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills
that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry
of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an
angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance
which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted:
subtract us into nakedness and night again, and
you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years
ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the
desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a
mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a
Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went
unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty
thousand years. The minute-winning days, like
flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a
window on all time.
This is a moment:
An Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he
later changed to Gant (a concession probably to
Yankee phonetics), having come to Baltimore from
Bristol in 1837 on a sailing vessel, soon let
the profits of a public house which he had
purchased roll down his improvident gullet. He
wandered westward into Pennsylvania, eking out a
dangerous living by matching fighting cocks
against the champions of country barnyards, and
often escaping after a night spent in a village
jail, with his champion dead on the field of
battle, without the clink of a coin in his
pocket, and sometimes with the print of a
farmer’s big knuckles on his reckless face. But
he always escaped, and coming at length among
the Dutch at harvest time he was so touched by
the plenty of their land that he cast out his
anchors there. Within a year he married a rugged
young widow with a tidy farm who like all the
other Dutch had been charmed by his air of
travel, and his grandiose speech, particularly
when he did Hamlet in the manner of the great
Edmund Kean. Every one said he should have been
an actor.
The Englishman begot children – a daughter and
four sons – lived easily and carelessly and
bore patiently the weight of his wife’s harsh
but honest tongue. The years passed, his bright
somewhat staring eyes grew dull and bagged, the
tall Englishman walked with a gouty shuffle: one
morning when she came to nag him out of sleep
she found him dead of an apoplexy. He left five
children, a mortgage and – in his strange dark
eyes which now stared bright and open – something
that had not died: a passionate and
obscure hunger for voyages.
So, with this legacy, we leave this Englishman
and are concerned hereafter with the heir to
whom he bequeathed it, his second son, a boy
named Oliver. How this boy stood by the roadside
near his mother’s farm, and saw the dusty Rebels
march past on their way to Gettysburg, how his
cold eyes darkened when he heard the great name
of Virginia, and how the year the war had ended,
when he was still fifteen, he had walked along a
street in Baltimore, and seen within a little
shop smooth granite slabs of death, carved lambs
and cherubim, and an angel poised upon cold
phthisic feet, with a smile of soft stone idiocy
– this is a longer tale. But I know that his
cold and shallow eyes had darkened with the
obscure and passionate hunger that had lived in
a dead man’s eyes, and that had led from
Fenchurch Street past Philadelphia. As the boy
looked at the big angel with the carved stipe of
lilystalk, a cold and nameless excitement
possessed him. The long fingers of his big hands
closed. He felt that he wanted, more than
anything in the world, to carve delicately with
a chisel. He wanted to wreak something dark and
unspeakable in him into cold stone. He wanted to
carve an angel’s head.
Oliver entered the shop and asked a big bearded
man with a wooden mallet for a job. He became
the stone cutter’s apprentice. He worked in that
dusty yard five years. He became a stone cutter.
When his apprenticeship was over he had become a
man.
He never found it. He never learned to carve an
angel’s head. The dove, the lamb, the smooth
joined marble hands of death, and letters fair
and fine – but not the angel. And of all the
years of waste and loss – the riotous years in
Baltimore, of work and savage drunkenness, and
the theatre of Booth and Salvini, which had a
disastrous effect upon the stone cutter, who
memorized each accent of the noble rant, and
strode muttering through the streets, with rapid
gestures of the enormous talking hands – these
are blind steps and gropings of our exile, the
painting of our hunger as, remembering
speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten
language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a
stone, a leaf, a door. Where? When?
He never found it, and he reeled down across the
continent into the Reconstruction South – a
strange wild form of six feet four with cold
uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a
rolling tide of rhetoric, a preposterous and
comic invective, as formalized as classical
epithet, which he used seriously, but with a
faint uneasy grin around the corners of his thin
wailing mouth.
He set up business in Sydney, the little capital
city of one of the middle Southern states, lived
soberly and industriously under the attentive
eye of a folk still raw with defeat and
hostility and finally, his good name founded and
admission won, he married a gaunt tubercular
spin-stress, ten years his elder, but with a
nest egg and an unshakable will to matrimony.
Within eighteen months he was a howling maniac
again, his little business went smash while his
foot stayed on the polished rail, and Cynthia,
his wife – whose life, the natives said, he had
not helped to prolong – died suddenly one night
after a hemorrhage.
So, all was gone again – Cynthia, the shop, the
hard-bought praise of soberness, the angel’s
head – he walked through the streets at dark,
yelling his pentameter curse at Rebel ways, and
all their indolence; but sick with fear and loss
and penitence, he wilted under the town’s
reproving stare, becoming convinced, as the
flesh wasted on his own gaunt frame, that
Cynthia’s scourge was doing vengeance now on
him.
He was only past thirty, but he looked much
older. His face was yellow and sunken; the waxen
blade of his nose looked like a beak. He had
long brown mustaches that hung straight down
mournfully.
His tremendous bouts of drinking had wrecked his
health. He was thin as a rail and had a cough.
He thought of Cynthia now, in the lonely and
hostile town, and he became afraid. He thought
he had tuberculosis and that he was going to
die.
So, alone and lost again, having found neither
order nor establishment in the world, and with
the earth cut away from his feet, Oliver resumed
his aimless drift along the continent. He turned
westward toward the great fortress of the hills,
knowing that behind them his evil fame would not
be known, and hoping that he might find in them
isolation, a new life, and recovered health.
The eyes of the gaunt spectre darkened again, as
they had in his youth.
All day, under a wet gray sky of October, Oliver
rode westward across the mighty state. As he
stared mournfully out the window at the great
raw land so sparsely tilled by the futile and
occasional little farms, which seemed to have
made only little grubbing patches in the
wilderness, his heart went cold and leaden in
him. He thought of the great barns of
Pennsylvania, the ripe bending of golden grain,
the plenty, the order, the clean thrift of the
people. And he thought of how he had set out to
get order and position for himself, and of the
rioting confusion of his life, the blot and blur
of years, and the red waste of his youth.
By God! he thought. I’m getting old! Why here?
The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped
through his brain. Suddenly, he saw that his
life had been channelled by a series of
accidents: a mad Rebel singing of Armageddon,
the sound of a bugle on the road, the mule-hoofs
of the army, the silly white face of an angel in
a dusty shop, a slut’s pert wiggle of her hams
as she passed by. He had reeled out of warmth
and plenty into this barren land: as he stared
out the window and saw the fallow unworked
earth, the great raw lift of the Piedmont, the
muddy red clay roads, and the slattern people
gaping at the stations – a lean farmer gangling
above his reins, a dawdling negro, a gap-toothed
yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby – the
strangeness of destiny stabbed him with
fear. How came he here from the clean Dutch
thrift of his youth into this vast lost earth of
rickets?
The train rattled on over the reeking earth.
Rain fell steadily. A brakeman came draftily
into the dirty plush coach and emptied a scuttle
of coal into the big stove at the end. High
empty laughter shook a group of yokels sprawled
on two turned seats. The bell tolled mournfully
above the clacking wheels. There was a droning
interminable wait at a junction-town near the
foot-hills. Then the train moved on again across
the vast rolling earth.
Dusk came. The huge bulk of the hills was
foggily emergent. Small smoky lights went up in
the hillside shacks. The train crawled dizzily
across high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of
water. Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of
smoke, toy cabins stuck to bank and gulch and
hillside. The train toiled sinuously up among
gouged red cuts with slow labor. As darkness
came, Oliver descended at the little town of Old
Stockade where the rails ended. The last great
wall of the hills lay stark above him. As he
left the dreary little station and stared into
the greasy lamplight of a country store, Oliver
felt that he was crawling, like a great beast,
into the circle of those enormous hills to die.
The next morning he resumed his journey by
coach. His destination was the little town of
Altamont, twenty-four miles away beyond the rim
of the great outer wall of the hills. As the
horses strained slowly up the mountain road
Oliver’s spirit lifted a little. It was a
gray-golden day in late October, bright and
windy. There was a sharp bite and sparkle in the
mountain air: the range soared above him, close,
immense, clean, and barren. The trees rose gaunt
and stark: they were almost leafless. The sky
was full of windy white rags of cloud; a thick
blade of mist washed slowly around the rampart
of a mountain.
Below him a mountain stream foamed down its
rocky bed, and he could see little dots of men
laying the track that would coil across the hill
toward Altamont. Then the sweating team lipped
the gulch of the mountain, and, among soaring
and lordly ranges that melted away in purple
mist, they began the slow descent toward the
high plateau on which the town of Altamont was
built.
In the haunting eternity of these mountains,
rimmed in their enormous cup, he found sprawled
out on its hundred hills and hollows a town of
four thousand people.
There were new lands. His heart lifted.
This town of Altamont had been settled soon
after the Revolutionary War. It had been a
convenient stopping-off place for cattledrovers
and farmers in their swing eastward from
Tennessee into South Carolina. And, for several
decades before the Civil War, it had enjoyed the
summer patronage of fashionable people from
Charleston and the plantations of the hot South.
When Oliver first came to it it had begun to get
some reputation not only as a summer resort, but
as a sanitarium for tuberculars. Several rich
men from the North had established hunting
lodges in the hills, and one of them had bought
huge areas of mountain land and, with an army of
imported architects, carpenters and masons, was
planning the greatest country estate in America
– something in limestone, with pitched slate
roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three rooms.
It was modelled on the chateau at Blois. There
was also a vast new hotel, a sumptuous wooden
barn, rambling comfortably upon the summit of a
commanding hill.
But most of the population was still native,
recruited from the hill and country people in
the surrounding districts. They were
Scotch-Irish mountaineers, rugged, provincial,
intelligent, and industrious.
Oliver had about twelve hundred dollars saved
from the wreckage of Cynthia’s estate. During
the winter he rented a little shack at one edge
of the town’s public square, acquired a small
stock of marbles, and set up business. But he
had little to do at first save to think of the
prospect of his death. During the bitter and
lonely winter, while he thought he was dying,
the gaunt scarecrow Yankee that flapped
muttering through the streets became an object
of familiar gossip to the townspeople. All the
people at his boarding-house knew that at night
he walked his room with great caged strides, and
that a long low moan that seemed wrung from his
bowels quivered incessantly on his thin lips.
But he spoke to no one about it.
And then the marvellous hill Spring came,
green-golden, with brief spurting winds, the
magic and fragrance of the blossoms, warm gusts
of balsam. The great wound in Oliver began to
heal. His voice was heard in the land once more,
there were purple flashes of the old rhetoric,
the ghost of the old eagerness.
One day in April, as with fresh awakened senses,
he stood before his shop, watching the flurry of
life in the square, Oliver heard behind him the
voice of a man who was passing. And that voice,
flat, drawling, complacent, touched with sudden
light a picture that had lain dead in him for
twenty years.
“Hit’s a comin’! Accordin’ to my figgers hit’s
due June 11, 1886.”
Oliver turned and saw retreating the burly
persuasive figure of the prophet he had last
seen vanishing down the dusty road that led to
Gettysburg and Armageddon.
“Who is that?” he asked a man.
The man looked and grinned.
“That’s Bacchus Pentland,” he said. “He’s quite
a character. There are a lot of his folks around
here.”
Oliver wet his great thumb briefly. Then, with a
thin grin, he said:
“Has Armageddon come yet?”
“He’s expecting it any day now,” said the man.
Then Oliver met Eliza. He lay one afternoon in
Spring upon the smooth leather sofa of his
little office, listening to the bright piping
noises in the Square. A restoring peace brooded
over his great extended body. He thought of the
loamy black earth with its sudden young light of
flowers, of the beaded chill of beer, and of the
plumtree’s dropping blossoms. Then he heard the
brisk heel-taps of a woman coming down among the
marbles, and he got hastily to his feet. He was
drawing on his well brushed coat of heavy black
just as she entered.
“I tell you what,” said Eliza, pursing her lips
in reproachful banter, “I wish I was a man and
had nothing to do but lie around all day on a
good easy sofa.”
“Good afternoon, madam,” said Oliver with a
flourishing bow. “Yes,” he said, as a faint sly
grin bent the corners of his thin mouth, “I
reckon you’ve caught me taking my
constitutional. As a matter of fact I very
rarely lie down in the daytime, but I’ve been in
bad health for the last year now, and I’m not
able to do the work I used to.”
Continues…
Excerpted from Look Homeward, Angel
by Thomas Wolfe
Copyright © 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Scribner
Copyright © 1929
Charles Scribner’s Sons
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-684-84221-1
