A Note to Browsers and Newbies Considering Joining This Board

[Burning Petard]

Sometimes I am cordial. Some times I am not. Mostly depends on if I see the post as stupid. (Ignorance s is curable, stupidity is not) and my own bullschitt detection meter no doubt needs frequent re-calibration.

Does that make me a Harpo? Possibly. But I like the Marx Brothers and Harpo never offended anybody by anything he said.

Maybe that makes me a schizophrenic. But that is ok too. Please note the subtitle of this forum. One is supposed to argue.

snailgate

[Methuselah]

Snailgate, look at your PMs.

[Methuselah]

Snailgate, PMs are slow. My latest doesn't show up in my PMs yet. I'll let you know when it shows up in my PM list. You can try your PM list, it may have gotten to you.

[BoSoxGal]

Snailgate, PMs are slow. My latest doesn't show up in my PMs yet. I'll let you know when it shows up in my PM list. You can try your PM list, it may have gotten to you.

Did you check your outbox? Sent PMs stay in the outbox until they’ve been read by the recipient.

[BoSoxGal]

Maybe the board works fine and you’re just struggling with a new format?

Maybe try reading (and posting?) for a while about ongoing topics - or new topics you’d like to start - before fixating on all that is ‘wrong’ with the software and membership of the board?

I would honestly like to welcome you; the active participant pool on this board has shrunk far too much in the last handful of years and especially in these isolating times, an ongoing conversation among friends one can drop into at whim is a cherished thing. More friends are a cherished thing, even annoying ones. But everything in moderation, please!

[TPFKA@W]

Hiya Fool! How are things?

[Methuselah]

Thanks for the Info on PMs, BFG. I'll add that to my Newbies post. Other comments to you coming by PM. Thuse

[Methuselah]

I’m going to stop posting Newbie stuff here because this thread is too long, and has messages to me that are off-topic. I will start new sections based on the FAQ section. If you have any comments on these new sections please post them here, to avoid confusing Newbies. I’ll integrate your comments into the newer files.

[BoSoxGal]

Do you have an engineering background by any chance?

[Methuselah]

Yes, BSG. Do you?

[BoSoxGal]

I’ve known a number of engineers. They are in general a particular kind of thinker and communicator.

[dales]

Anal-retentive?

[Joe Guy]

You just might be an engineer if you have no life and you can prove it mathematically.

[Econoline]

Do you have an engineering background by any chance?

Yes, BSG. Do you?

I’ve known a number of engineers. They are in general a particular kind of thinker and communicator.

I just noticed an ad for this t-shirt online:

Do you want the link, 'thuse?

[Methuselah]

Engineers don't need links.

[Bicycle Bill]

Although a true engineer would have devised an adjustable diversion/control gate upstream to manage the water flow to the paddlewheel and better control the rotating speed of the spit assembly.

-"BB"-

[Methuselah]

In a prior post ( Nov 17, 2020 10:36 am) the two components of the user base here were named “Cordials” and “Harpies”. The second name caused controversy, so it has been dropped. A different set I propose is “Geezers” and “Fight Clubbers”. I’ll drop the usual long definitions of these terms, with the observation that the first word is not effective for attracting Newbies, my announced goal here. Can someone suggest a better term?

[Scooter]

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL



PART ONE


. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door.
And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not
know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come
into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his
father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this
most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek
the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a
stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

[Scooter]

1


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 cut-purse 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 spinstress, 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 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."

He was silent a moment; his face drooped in an expression of
hangdog dejection. "Ah, Lord! I don't know what's to become of
me!"

"Pshaw!" said Eliza briskly and contemptuously. "There's nothing
wrong with you in my opinion. You're a big strapping fellow, in
the prime of life. Half of it's only imagination. Most of the
time we think we're sick it's all in the mind. I remember three
years ago I was teaching school in Hominy Township when I was taken
down with pneumonia. Nobody ever expected to see me come out of it
alive but I got through it somehow; I well remember one day I was
sitting down--as the fellow says, I reckon I was convalescin'; the
reason I remember is Old Doctor Fletcher had just been and when he
went out I saw him shake his head at my cousin Sally. 'Why Eliza,
what on earth,' she said, just as soon as he had gone, 'he tells me
you're spitting up blood every time you cough; you've got
consumption as sure as you live.' 'Pshaw,' I said. I remember I
laughed 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."

Major Pentland rose slowly from his rocker by the fire, folded a
large knife, and put the apple he had been peeling on the mantel.
Bacchus looked up benevolently from a whittled stick, and Will,
glancing up from his stubby nails which he was paring as usual,
greeted the visitor with a birdlike nod and wink. The men amused
themselves constantly with pocket knives.

Major Pentland advanced slowly toward Gant. He was a stocky fleshy
man in the middle fifties, with a ruddy face, a patriarchal beard,
and the thick complacent features of his 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!

[Scooter]

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 lot, and hung in a dense
fabric, upon his trellises, roping his domain twice around. They
climbed the porch end of the house and framed the upper windows in
thick bowers. And the flowers grew in rioting glory in his yard--
the velvet-leaved nasturtium, slashed with a hundred tawny dyes,
the rose, the snowball, the redcupped tulip, and the lily. The
honeysuckle drooped its heavy mass upon the fence; wherever his
great hands touched the earth it grew fruitful for him.

For him the house was the picture of his soul, the garment of his
will. But for Eliza it was a piece of property, whose value she
shrewdly appraised, a beginning for her hoard. Like all the older
children of Major Pentland she had, since her twentieth year, begun
the slow accretion of land: from the savings of her small wage as
teacher and book-agent, she had already purchased one or two pieces
of earth. On one of these, a small lot at the edge of the public
square, she persuaded him to build a shop. This he did with his
own hands, and the labor of two negro men: it was a two-story shack
of brick, with wide wooden steps, leading down to the square from a
marble porch. Upon this porch, flanking the wooden doors, he
placed some marbles; by the door, he put the heavy simpering figure
of an angel.

But Eliza was not content with his trade: there was no money in
death. People, she thought, died too slowly. And she foresaw that
her brother Will, who had begun at fifteen as helper in a lumber
yard, and was now the owner of a tiny business, was destined to
become a rich man. So she persuaded Gant to go into partnership
with Will Pentland: at the end of a year, however, his patience
broke, his tortured egotism leaped from its restraint, he howled
that Will, whose business hours were spent chiefly in figuring upon
a dirty envelope with a stub of a pencil, paring reflectively his
stubby nails, or punning endlessly with a birdlike wink and nod,
would ruin them all. Will therefore quietly bought out his
partner's interest, and moved on toward the accumulation of a
fortune, while Oliver returned to isolation and his grimy angels.

The strange figure of Oliver Gant cast its famous shadow through
the town. Men heard at night and morning the great formula of his
curse to Eliza. They saw him plunge to house and shop, they saw
him bent above his marbles, they saw him mould in his great hands--
with curse, and howl, with passionate devotion--the rich texture of
his home. They laughed at his wild excess of speech, of feeling,
and of gesture. They were silent before the maniac fury of his
sprees, which occurred almost punctually every two months, and
lasted two or three days. They picked him foul and witless from
the cobbles, and brought him home--the banker, the policeman, and a
burly devoted Swiss named Jannadeau, a grimy jeweller who rented a
small fenced space among Gant's tombstones. And always they
handled him with tender care, feeling something strange and proud
and glorious lost in that drunken ruin of Babel. He was a stranger
to them: no one--not even Eliza--ever called him by his first name.
He was--and remained thereafter--"Mister" Gant.

And what Eliza endured in pain and fear and glory no one knew. He
breathed over them all his hot lion-breath of desire and fury: when
he was drunk, her white pursed face, and all the slow octopal
movements of her temper, stirred him to red madness. She was at
such times in real danger from his assault: she had to lock herself
away from him. For from the first, deeper than love, deeper than
hate, as deep as the unfleshed bones of life, an obscure and final
warfare was being waged between them. Eliza wept or was silent to
his curse, nagged briefly in retort to his rhetoric, gave like a
punched pillow to his lunging drive--and slowly, implacably had her
way. Year by year, above his howl of protest, he did not know how,
they gathered in small bits of earth, paid the hated taxes, and put
the money that remained into more land. Over the wife, over the
mother, the woman of property, who was like a man, walked slowly
forth.

In eleven years she bore him nine children of whom six lived. The
first, a girl, died in her twentieth month, of infant cholera; two
more died at birth. The others outlived the grim and casual
littering. The oldest, a boy, was born in 1885. He was given the
name of Steve. The second, born fifteen months later, was a girl--
Daisy. The next, likewise a girl--Helen--came three years later.
Then, in 1892, came twins--boys--to whom Gant, always with a zest
for politics, gave the names of Grover Cleveland and Benjamin
Harrison. And the last, Luke, was born two years later, in 1894.

Twice, during this period, at intervals of five years, Gant's
periodic spree lengthened into an unbroken drunkenness that lasted
for weeks. He was caught, drowning in the tides of his thirst.
Each time Eliza sent him away to take a cure for alcoholism at
Richmond. Once, Eliza and four of her children were sick at the
same time with typhoid fever. But during a weary convalescence she
pursed her lips grimly and took them off to Florida.

Eliza came through stolidly to victory. As she marched down these
enormous years of love and loss, stained with the rich dyes of pain
and pride and death, and with the great wild flare of his alien and
passionate life, her limbs faltered in the grip of ruin, but she
came on, through sickness and emaciation, to victorious strength.
She knew there had been glory in it: insensate and cruel as he had
often been, she remembered the enormous beating color of his life,
and the lost and stricken thing in him which he would never find.
And fear and a speechless pity rose in her when at times she saw
the small uneasy eyes grow still and darken with the foiled and
groping hunger of old frustration. O lost!