Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel E-Book
Thomas Wolfe
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel," readers are immersed in Wolfe's rich tapestry of semi-autobiographical narratives that explore profound themes of nostalgia, identity, and the American experience. The literary style is characterized by its lyrical prose, vivid imagery, and introspective depth, drawing readers into the lives of his characters as they grapple with the passage of time and the relentless pull of their origins. Wolfe's work exemplifies the modernist movement, challenging conventional narrative structures while inviting readers to reflect on their own emotional landscapes. Thomas Wolfe, a Southern writer born in Asheville, North Carolina, draws heavily from his own tumultuous youth and the complexities of familial bonds, which profoundly influenced his narrative choices. His keen observations of the world around him, coupled with his desire to explore the human condition, laid the groundwork for the ambitious thematic aspirations seen in these novels. Wolfe's background and experiences infuse his writing with authenticity, allowing readers to connect deeply with the existential queries he poses. This collection is a compelling journey for readers who appreciate lyrical storytelling intertwined with philosophical musings. It is particularly recommended for those who seek to understand the transformative power of place and memory in shaping human experiences. Wolfe's masterful narratives resonate deeply, making this book an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in American literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel
Table of Contents
Introduction
Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel gathers three landmark novels that define the scope and ambition of Wolfe’s art. Rather than presenting a complete works or a uniform trilogy, this collection offers a focused arc of his major long fiction, tracing the emergence of an American writer whose imagination sought to encompass family, place, nation, and time. Read together, these books illuminate the evolution of Wolfe’s themes, methods, and voice, inviting readers to experience his expansive vision as a continuous engagement with memory, identity, and the restless energies of twentieth-century life.
The purpose of this volume is to present, in one sustained immersion, the essential narrative journey that begins in youth, extends into restless departure, and returns to the problem of home. Look Homeward, Angel initiates the story of a gifted young southerner coming of age; Of Time and the River carries that striving spirit across regions and oceans; You Can't Go Home Again reflects upon the consequences of creating art from one’s origins. The collection emphasizes continuity of concern rather than strict seriality, framing Wolfe’s work as a roman-fleuve of American experience in which the artist’s search mirrors a nation in motion.
This collection comprises novels. Each is a full-length work of fiction characterized by autobiographical inflection and large, intricate canvases. While Wolfe wrote in multiple forms across his career, the texts included here are long-form narratives that blend Bildungsroman elements with the sweep of social and historical observation. Readers will encounter literary fiction that leans toward the lyrical and the epic, privileging interiority, landscape, and the rhythms of memory. The focus remains squarely on the novel as Wolfe’s principal medium for exploring character, home, ambition, and the passage of time, as he develops a sustained imaginative universe across distinct books.
Across these novels, a set of unifying themes emerges with striking consistency. Wolfe’s pages revolve around the tensions between roots and flight, belonging and estrangement, remembrance and becoming. Home is at once sanctuary and constraint; time is both a balm and an irresistible current. The ambition to make art intersects with the demands of family, region, and history, generating urgency and conflict. Each work studies the shaping force of place—the American South, the northern city, and the wider world—while probing the difficult blessing of memory. Taken together, the novels ask how a self can be forged without losing the past.
Stylistically, Wolfe is renowned for a rhapsodic, capacious prose that seeks amplitude: long, flowing sentences; rich catalogues; and intense evocations of seasons, streets, and faces. His narrative voice embraces shifts in scale—from the intimate cadences of family rooms to grand panoramas of travel and city life. He integrates lyric passage with narrative propulsion, assembling mosaics of impression and recollection that accumulate into a powerful emotional current. This signature breadth serves his central questions about time and identity, as the language itself seems to reach toward totality, attempting to contain a life and an era within the embrace of a single sensibility.
The enduring significance of these works lies in their fusion of personal narrative with the broader American story. Wolfe’s novels stand at a vital junction of modernism and the national tradition, marrying introspective intensity to an expansive, Whitman-like reach across the continent’s spaces and peoples. They confront mobility, ambition, and dislocation as defining features of twentieth-century experience, while preserving a powerful sense of regional specificity. Their influence persists not only for their stylistic boldness but for their insistent inquiry into what it means to come from somewhere, to seek elsewhere, and to reconcile the two without falsifying either truth.
Look Homeward, Angel (1929) establishes the foundation: a young man grows up in a southern mountain town, discovering both the sustaining and the confining force of family and place. It is a coming-of-age novel that studies how memory forms the self, how hometown intimacies become the raw material of longing and artistry. The book’s evocation of early years—its streets and houses, its cadences of speech, its fragile alliances and fierce loyalties—announces Wolfe’s lifelong preoccupation with origins. It introduces his method of building a comprehensive world out of sensuous detail and restless introspection, inaugurating the quest that the later novels expand.
Of Time and the River (1935) carries that quest outward, following a talented youth as he leaves home for study, work, and wanderings that test and enlarge his sense of destiny. The novel’s title signals its governing metaphor: time as a ceaseless current bearing the self through places, people, and vocations. Here Wolfe develops his panoramic mode—train platforms, city avenues, and transatlantic passages figure as thresholds in a long apprenticeship. The book examines ambition’s double edge, the exhilaration of becoming and the ache of departure, while amplifying Wolfe’s orchestral prose and deepening his exploration of national and personal transformation.
You Can't Go Home Again (1940) turns the artist’s gaze back toward the origin that has become, through writing, a public matter. Centering on a novelist who confronts the consequences of transforming life into art, the book reflects on recognition, misunderstanding, and the difficulty of return after change has altered both the writer and the world. Its canvas encompasses a country in transition and a consciousness testing its responsibilities to truth and community. Without resolving the paradox, the novel measures the cost of telling one’s story and the necessity of doing so, extending Wolfe’s meditation on memory, identity, and place.
These novels also possess a rich publication context that informs their reading. Look Homeward, Angel appeared in 1929 and introduced Wolfe’s expansive approach. Of Time and the River followed in 1935, extending the earlier work’s concerns with renewed scope. You Can't Go Home Again was published posthumously in 1940, assembled from Wolfe’s manuscripts after his death in 1938 by editor Edward Aswell. That history underscores the vitality and abundance of Wolfe’s late writing, while reminding readers that the later novel represents a curated shape drawn from a larger body of material, yet firmly continuous with the vision established in the earlier books.
Although the protagonists’ names differ across the sequence, the continuity is thematic and tonal. Each novel asks what it means to make a life from one’s beginnings without being imprisoned by them. The titles themselves form a conversation: a first look homeward; a recognition that time bears us onward; an acknowledgment that return is never simple. The books chart variations on the artist’s formation, leaving room for ambiguity and change. Together they propose that American identity is an unfolding process—a negotiation among memory, movement, and imagination—that requires both fidelity to one’s sources and the courage to travel beyond them.
Readers may approach this collection chronologically or follow their curiosity about particular phases of Wolfe’s inquiry. In any order, the novels reward slow attention to cadence, atmosphere, and accumulation, as meaning often arises from patterns rather than plot alone. The scope is vast but intimate, the settings wide yet anchored in the textures of ordinary life. As a whole, the collection offers an immersion in a singular voice wrestling with time, home, and the making of art. It invites a renewed encounter with works that continue to speak to anyone who has left, returned, remembered, and tried to name what endures.
Author Biography
Thomas Wolfe was an American novelist of the interwar era, whose expansive, lyrical prose and autobiographical ambition made him a singular voice in twentieth‑century literature. Writing primarily in the late 1920s and 1930s, he pursued the idea that a single life might contain the vastness of a country’s experience. His major books, published in rapid succession and often from immense manuscripts, blended memory, observation, and a Whitmanesque cataloguing of streets, trains, and voices. Celebrated for intensity and breadth, criticized at times for excess, Wolfe nevertheless helped define the modern American Bildungsroman and gave lasting shape to the myth of searching for home.
Born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, Wolfe absorbed the language and rhythms of the Southern mountains that recur throughout his work. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he wrote and staged plays with the campus dramatic movement, gaining early experience in dialogue, scene, and the practical demands of performance. He continued his training at Harvard, studying playwriting in the famed 47 Workshop, where disciplined revision met a romantic urge toward amplitude. Exposure to nineteenth‑century American writers, European modernists, and the craft ethos of workshop pedagogy formed a matrix of influences that would later inform his novelistic methods.
Relocating to New York in the 1920s, Wolfe supported himself by teaching while continuing to write. Early ambitions in the theater yielded few productions, but the sheer scale of his material began to outgrow the stage. He turned to fiction, drafting an enormous manuscript that captured his coming‑of‑age and the changing textures of American life. The editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons recognized the promise in the sprawling pages and worked closely with Wolfe to shape a publishable book without extinguishing its fervor. The collaboration marked a turning point, pairing exuberant talent with professional editorial discipline.
The result was Look Homeward, Angel, published in the late 1920s, a novel whose protagonist’s journey echoed the author’s own. Its sensuous descriptions and sweeping cadences announced a new voice, while its frank portraiture stirred controversy in his hometown. Reviewers praised the vitality and emotional reach, even as some questioned its excesses and autobiographical candor. The book established Wolfe as a major American writer and set the template for his methods: large‑scale narrative, intensely remembered detail, and a restless hunger to encompass the fullness of place and time. It also introduced an enduring tension between personal material and public consequence.
Of Time and the River followed in the mid‑1930s, extending the earlier story into a broader meditation on education, travel, and artistic formation. Its publication cemented Wolfe’s national reputation and deepened debate about his capacious style. He produced short fiction collected in From Death to Morning and reflected on his own process in The Story of a Novel, explaining how raw experience, notebooks, and memory fed manuscripts of unwieldy size. Constant movement—across cities and continents—fueled the writing, as did his fascination with the rise of modern America. Critics alternately hailed his ambition and urged restraint; both responses shadowed his career.
Professional strains led Wolfe to leave Scribner’s for Harper & Brothers in the late 1930s. Before he could complete new projects, he fell gravely ill and died in 1938, still in his thirties. From the vast drafts he left behind, editor Edward Aswell prepared The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, published after his death, along with the later volume The Hills Beyond. These books broadened his portrait of Americans in motion—artists, lovers, migrants—and gave readers further evidence of his appetite for totality. They also sharpened questions about authorship, editing, and the shaping of a posthumous oeuvre.
Wolfe’s legacy endures in the modern American novel’s confidence that a single consciousness can sweep across regions, decades, and social strata. His work is read for the music of its sentences, its evocation of youth and longing, and its panoramic treatment of the South and the nation at large. Later novelists, notably Jack Kerouac, acknowledged his example in marrying autobiography to propulsion and scale. Scholars continue to reassess the edited and restored texts, while general readers find in his books an abiding tension between yearning for home and the urge to depart. His achievement remains expansive, restless, and unmistakably his.
Historical Context
Thomas Wolfe’s three major novels—Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), and You Can’t Go Home Again (published posthumously in 1940)—emerged from, and chronicle, the vast social transformations of the United States between 1900 and 1940. Born on 3 October 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina, Wolfe mapped the journey from provincial southern town to New York’s cosmopolitan streets and onward to Europe. His protagonists, thinly veiled self-portraits, traverse public events and private reckonings shaped by war, migration, boom and bust, and modernist upheavals. Written across the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, the works register the era’s ambitions, dislocations, and the restless search for identity in a changing republic.
Wolfe’s foundational milieu was Asheville in the southern Appalachians, a railroad-linked resort town reshaped by tourism, the Biltmore legacy, and the booster spirit of the Progressive Era. The city stood within Jim Crow North Carolina, where segregation structured daily life and public institutions. His father, W. O. Wolfe, worked as a stonecutter; his mother, Julia, ran boardinghouses—two occupations that grounded Wolfe’s lifelong fascination with artisanship and transience. The late 19th-century railroad expansion and early 20th-century streetcar lines connected mountain towns to national circuits of commerce and culture, while evangelical churches, courthouse squares, and schoolhouses provided the civic architecture of small-town ambition and conflict that echoes through his fiction.
The educational reforms of the Progressive Era shaped Wolfe’s early trajectory. He entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a teenager in 1916 and graduated in 1920, participating in the Carolina Playmakers, a pioneering folk-drama movement founded in 1918. These experiences brought him into contact with new performance practices and regional storytelling. From 1920 to 1923 he studied with George Pierce Baker at Harvard’s 47 Workshop, the most influential incubator of American playwriting, where writers learned dramaturgy, staging, and revision. Wolfe’s thwarted ambitions for the stage—much of his early work was unproduced—pushed him toward the capacious form of the novel, which could contain the scale he sought.
Wolfe’s rise coincided with American literary modernism’s consolidation in the 1920s, when experimentation met mass readership. In New York he found editors and magazines eager for ambitious voices. At Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins—also editor to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—recognized Wolfe’s talent and advocated for his sprawling manuscripts. The period’s magazines, from Scribner’s Magazine to The New Republic, elevated fiction and essays into national conversation. The postwar appetite for new forms, layered time, and interior consciousness encouraged Wolfe’s expansive, Whitman-inflected cadences even as modernist peers pursued compression. The result was a distinct countercurrent within modernism: amplitude rather than austerity, accumulation rather than omission.
The metropolis provided Wolfe with a crucible of voices and vistas. He taught at New York University’s Washington Square College in the 1920s, lived around Greenwich Village, and moved among theater professionals, publishers, and immigrants. His long affair with Aline Bernstein, a prominent stage designer, connected him to backstage labor, studio craft, and Jewish-American cultural life. New York’s polyglot neighborhoods, elevated trains, tenements, and hotel lobbies offered compressed parables of American mobility. The city’s periodicals amplified his reach; his story Only the Dead Know Brooklyn appeared in The New Yorker in 1935. A crowded island of ambition and anonymity, Manhattan became the measure against which provincial origins and national myths were tested.
Wolfe was a transatlantic traveler during the interwar years, sailing to Europe in 1924 and spending extended periods abroad in 1924–1926 and again in 1931–1932. He frequented London, Paris, and especially German cities such as Berlin and Munich, absorbing Weimar’s café culture, theaters, and publishing houses. The classical heritage of Goethe and the cathedrals of France coexisted for him with the modern spectacle of train stations and ports. After Adolf Hitler’s rise in 1933, the tightening of censorship and anti-Semitic decrees reshaped the literary market. Wolfe’s books were banned in Nazi Germany by 1936, and he condemned the regime in his 1937 essay I Have a Thing to Tell You, published in The New Republic.
World War I’s domestic footprint and the influenza pandemic of 1918 marked the formation of Wolfe’s generation, even though he was too young for combat. Military camps dotted the American South after U.S. entry into the war in April 1917, and returning soldiers brought disillusion and cosmopolitan habits to small towns. The Spanish influenza swept through Asheville and university communities, collapsing distinctions between public celebration and private grief. These twin shocks—mobilization and mortality—intensified questions of fate and time that Wolfe’s characters wrestle with as they pass from childhood to urban adulthood, across classrooms and train compartments, in search of meaning amid an altered social landscape.
Prohibition (1920–1933) and the Jazz Age transformed leisure and social codes during Wolfe’s ascent. Speakeasies, dance halls, and Broadway revues flourished alongside the growth of radio networks and the film industry. The Harlem Renaissance redefined American letters and music, while nativist politics resurged in the 1920s with immigration restrictions (Emergency Quota Act, 1921; Immigration Act, 1924) and the second Ku Klux Klan. Consumer credit and advertising remade middle-class aspirations, and real estate booms reshaped skylines from Miami to Manhattan. Wolfe’s narratives register this collision of spectacle and anxiety, where new freedoms, ethnic tensions, and accelerated communication complicate inherited manners and provincial certainties for characters moving between regions and classes.
The Great Depression reoriented American lives and letters after the stock market crash of October 1929. Breadlines, bank failures, and foreclosures challenged the optimism of the 1920s, while Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from 1933 sought relief, recovery, and reform. Cultural programs such as the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project (established 1935) encouraged documentary realism and vernacular voices. Trains, rooming houses, and itinerant labor became emblematic of national restlessness. Wolfe traveled widely by rail, observing landscapes of prosperity and collapse, and embedded the era’s economic grief into the background hum of ambition and exile, as characters contemplate whether the nation’s magnitude can redeem personal loss.
Wolfe’s work belongs to the Southern literary renaissance that, between the world wars, interrogated region and modernity. He differed from agrarian traditionalists who published I’ll Take My Stand (1930) and from William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha elaborations by embracing an American scale that refused tight geographies. Sherwood Anderson’s influence—a frank attention to small-town desire—can be felt, yet Wolfe’s surge of syntax and catalogic impulse bears Whitman’s stamp. By the mid-1930s, debates about regionalism versus national identity framed reviews of his books, as critics weighed whether the autobiographical roman-fleuve could carry documentary truth and lyrical excess without collapsing, and whether a southern perspective could encompass the nation’s plurality.
The editorial history of Wolfe’s novels is inseparable from their context. At Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins shaped the vast manuscript O Lost into Look Homeward, Angel (1929), establishing Wolfe as a major new voice. Of Time and the River (1935), also edited by Perkins, continued his epic design and became a bestseller. Tensions over control and scope led Wolfe to depart Scribner’s in 1937 for Harper & Brothers. After Wolfe’s death in 1938, editor Edward C. Aswell assembled The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) from drafts and notebooks. This passage between houses mirrors the era’s commercial pressures and legal cautions governing ambitious fiction.
American libel law and local sensitivities shaped how Wolfe transmuted life into art. In the South, small communities recognized themselves in roman-à-clef portraits, prompting controversy after publication and affecting the author’s return visits. Publishers’ lawyers scrutinized names, settings, and resemblances, pressing for alterations and composite figures. Hence the recurring practice of renaming people and places—Asheville as Altamont, for example—while preserving recognizable social textures. Abroad, regimes hostile to dissent banned books outright. These legal and political constraints affected structure and voice, guiding the balance between testimonial candor and protective disguise in manuscripts that chronicle family dynasties, civic pride, and the sorrows of migration and ambition.
Mobility is a central historical fact in Wolfe’s world. Railroads, bus lines, and steamships linked farm towns to industrial centers and America to Europe, turning stations and docks into theaters of reunion and departure. The great depots of the 1910s and 1920s, the Pullman car economy, and boardinghouses along main streets created temporary communities of strangers. Early highways and automobiles expanded itineraries yet preserved the rhythm of waystations and hotel lobbies. Wolfe made these infrastructures—and the workers who kept them running—into the scaffolding of an American pilgrimage, where the nation’s sheer distances, rivers, and mountain passes become metaphors for memory, longing, and the unfinished work of self-making.
Racial and ethnic dynamics underwrite the social stage of Wolfe’s novels. Jim Crow laws in North Carolina structured public space and labor hierarchies, while the Great Migration carried Black southerners toward northern cities and factory jobs. In New York, Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Eastern European communities remade neighborhoods and professions, including the theater world in which Aline Bernstein worked. Anti-Semitism grew globally and domestically in the 1930s; Wolfe’s 1937 denunciation of Nazi persecution signaled a cosmopolitan conscience tested by travel. Black service workers, Pullman porters, and domestic staff, often at the periphery of white protagonists’ lives, nevertheless anchor the economic and moral realities of the period.
Changing gender norms form another historical throughline. The 19th Amendment (1920) expanded women’s political presence, while professional fields—publishing, theater, design—saw increasing female leadership. Wolfe’s long relationship with Aline Bernstein, a married and older stage designer, unfolded within a bohemian New York that challenged Victorian proprieties. Yet the boardinghouse economies of southern towns continued to rely on maternal authority and unpaid family labor. Divorce and alimony laws, differing by state, complicated relationships across class lines. These shifting conditions color depictions of desire, vocation, and domestic conflict, as characters navigate the aging of parents, the constraints of marriage, and the lure of independence in crowded urban rooms.
Illness and mortality punctuate the era’s private histories. Tuberculosis sanatoria dotted the Appalachian region, and the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic scarred communities and families. Public health modernized; hospitals expanded; yet sudden fevers and untreated infections could still end young lives. Thomas Wolfe himself fell gravely ill in summer 1938 while traveling in the Pacific Northwest, underwent surgery, and died on 15 September 1938 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. His final letter to Maxwell Perkins hinted at reconciliations and future plans. The starkness of premature death—set against technological change and promise—intensifies the urgency with which the novels pursue memory, time, and the elusive coherence of experience.
By 1940, Wolfe’s reputation was both contested and secure. Critics debated his excess and brilliance; readers embraced his amplitude. Book-of-the-month clubs, libraries, and newspaper syndication broadened his audience, even as European translations faced bans in authoritarian states. The phrase you can’t go home again passed quickly into common speech, capturing the century’s sense of irrevocable change. Positioned among contemporaries such as Faulkner and Fitzgerald, Wolfe offered a democratic epic of motion and remembrance. With Europe already at war in 1939 and the United States on the brink of entry, the posthumous publication of You Can’t Go Home Again in 1940 sealed his legacy as a voice of American becoming.
Synopsis (Selection)
Look Homeward, Angel
A Bildungsroman tracing Eugene Gant’s youth in the fictional Southern town of Altamont, his turbulent family life, and his awakening intellectual and artistic ambitions. The novel captures his struggle between the pull of home and the urge to forge an independent life.
Of Time and the River
A sprawling sequel that follows Eugene Gant into adulthood as he pursues education, travel, and a literary vocation in the North and Europe. It maps his restless search for artistic identity against the broader currents of American and expatriate experience.
You Can't Go Home Again
Centered on novelist George Webber, it examines the backlash to his book about his hometown and his subsequent quest for meaning across Depression‑era America and Europe. The narrative explores memory, disillusionment, and the limits of returning to one’s past.
Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel
Look Homeward, Angel
To the Reader
This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is “autobiographical” the writer has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical — that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than “Gulliver’s Travels” cannot easily be imagined.
This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer’s main concern was to give fulness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man’s portrait here.
But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives — all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.
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.
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!
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.
