His quality was extraordinary; he had something that was a great deal better than most intelligence; he saw the world in burlesque, and his occasional answer to its sham, hypocrisy, and intrigue was the idiot devastation of “whah-whah!” But he did not possess his demon; it possessed him from time to time. If it had possessed him wholly, constantly, his life would have prevailed with astonishing honesty and precision. But when he reflected, he was a child — with all the hypocrisy, sentimentality and dishonest pretense of a child.
His face was a church in which beauty and humor were married — the strange and the familiar were at one in him. Men, looking at Luke, felt a start of recognition as if they saw something of which they had never heard, but which they had known forever.
Once or twice, during the Winter and Spring, while she was touring with Pearl Hines, Helen got into Atlanta to see him. In Spring they attended the week of Grand Opera. He would find employment for one night as a spearman in Aïda and pass the doorman for the remainder of the week with the assurance that he was “a member of the company — Lukio Gantio.”
His large feet spread tightly out in sandals; behind the shingreaves his awkward calves were spined thickly with hair; a thick screw of hair writhed under the edge of his tin helmet, as he loafed in the wings, leaning comically on his spear, his face lit with exultancy.
Caruso, waiting his entrance, regarded him from time to time with a wide Wop smile.
“Wotta you call yourself, eh?” asked Caruso, approaching and looking him over.
“W-w-w-why,” he said, “d-don’t you know one of your s-s-s-soldiers when you see him?”
“You’re one hell of a soldier,” said Caruso.
“Whah-whah-whah!” Luke answered. With difficulty he restrained his prodding fingers.
In the summer now he returned to Altamont, finding employment with a firm of land-auctioneers, and assisting them at the sale of a tract or a parcel of lots. He moved about above the crowd in the bed of a wagon, exhorting them to bid, with his hand at the side of his mouth, in a harangue compounded of frenzy, passionate solicitation, and bawdry. The work intoxicated him. With wide grins of expectancy they crowded round the spokes. In a high throaty tenor he called to them:
“Step right up, gentlemen, lot number 17, in beautiful Homewood — we furnish the wood, you furnish the home. Now gentlemen, this handsome building-site has a depth of 179 feet, leaving plenty of room for garden and backhouse (grow your own corn cobs in beautiful Homewood) with a frontage of 114 feet on a magnificent new macadam road.”
“Where is the road?” some one shouted.
“On the blueprint, of course, Colonel. You’ve got it all in black and white. Now, gentlemen, the opportunity of your lives is kicking you in the pants. Are you men of vision? Think what Ford, Edison, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Julius Caesar would do. Obey that impulse. You can’t lose. The town is coming this way. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? Swell. The new courthouse will be built on yonder hill, the undertaker and the village bakery will occupy handsome edifices of pressed brick just above you. Oyez, oyez, oyez. What am I offered? What am I offered? Own your own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannonshot of all railway, automobile, and airplane connections. Running water abounds within a Washingtonian stone’s throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all trains. Gentlemen, here’s your chance to make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources — gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the trees.”
“What about the bushes, Luke?” yelled Mr. Halloran, the dairy-lunch magnate.
“Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes,” Luke answered amid general tumult. “All right, Major. You with the face. What am I offered? What am I offered?”
When there was no sale, he greeted incoming tourists at the station-curbing with eloquent invitations to Dixieland, rich, persuasive, dominant above all the soliciting babel of the car-drivers, negro hotel-porters, and boarding-house husbands.
“I’ll give you a dollar apiece for every one you drum up,” said Eliza.
“O that’s all right.” O modestly. Generously.
“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” said Gant.
A fine boy. As she cooled from her labors in the summer night, he brought her little boxes of ice-cream from town.
He was a hustler: he sold patent washboards, trick potato-peelers, and powdered cockroach-poison from house to house. To the negroes he sold hair-oil guaranteed to straighten kinky hair, and religious lithographs, peopled with flying angels, white and black, and volant cherubs, black and white, sailing about the knees of an impartial and crucified Saviour, and subtitled “God Loves Them Both.”
They sold like hot cakes.
Otherwise, he drove Gant’s car — a 1913 five-passenger Ford, purchase of an inspired hour of madness, occupant now of half Gant’s conversation, object of abuse, boast, and anathema. It was before every one owned a car. Gant was awed and terrified by his rash act, exalted at the splendor of his chariot, appalled at its expense. Each bill for gasoline, repairs, or equipment brought a howl of anguish from him; a puncture, a breakdown, a minor disorder caused him to circle about in maddened strides, cursing, praying, weeping.
“I’ve never had a moment’s peace since I bought it,” he howled. “Accursed and bloody monster that it is, it will not be content until it has sucked out my life-blood, sold the roof over my head, and sent me out to the pauper’s grave to perish. Merciful God,” he wept, “it’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s cruel that I should be afflicted thus in my old age.” Turning to his constrained and apologetic son abruptly, he said: “How much is the bill? Hey?” His eyes roved wildly in his head.
“D-d-d-don’t get excited, papa,” Luke answered soothingly, teetering from foot to foot, “it’s only $8.92.”
“Jesus God!” Gant screamed. “I’m ruined.” Sobbing in loud burlesque sniffles, he began his caged pacing.
But it was pleasant at dusk or in the cool summer nights, with Eliza or one of his daughters beside him, and a fragrant weed between his pallid lips, to hinge his long body into the back seat, and ride out into the fragrant countryside, or through the long dark streets of town. At the approach of another car he cried out in loud alarm, by turns cursing and entreating his son to caution. Luke drove nervously, erratically, wildly — his stammering impatient hands and knees communicated their uneven fidget to the flivver. He cursed irritably, plunged in exacerbated fury at the brake, and burst out in an annoyed “tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh,” when the car stalled.
As the hour grew late, and the streets silent, his madness swelled in him. Lipping the rim of a long hill street, tree-arched and leafy and shelving in even terraces, he would burst suddenly into insane laughter, bend over the wheel, and pull the throttle open, his idiot “whah-whahs” filling the darkness as Gant screamed curses at him. Down through the night they tore at murderous speed, the boy laughing at curse and prayer alike as they shot past the blind menace of street-crossings.
“You Goddamned scoundrel!” Gant yelled. “Stop, you mountain grill, or I’ll put you in jail.”
“Whah-whah.”— His laughter soared to a crazy falsetto.
Daisy, arrived for a few weeks of summer coolness, quite blue with terror, would clutch the most recent of her annual arrivals to her breast, melodramatically, and moan:
“I beg of you, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my innocent motherless babes —”
“Whah-whah-whah!”
“He’s a fiend out of hell,” cried Gant, beginning to weep. “Cruel and criminal monster that he is, he will batter our brains out against a tree, before he’s done.” They whizzed with a perilous swerve by a car that, with a startled screech of its brakes, balked at the corner like a